I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

“Well, there’s certainly nothing weird or suspicious about that. So, why don’t you just rent a car and drive yourself?” “No driver’s license. I used to have one, but the government took it away. They said, ‘You’re too good of a driver, it’s making the other drivers look bad, you’re hurting their self-esteem.’”

Instead of answering, Malort pulled out his phone and pointed the camera at the scene, acting like he had an important job to do. Generally, if you can project enough confidence and purpose, all the uncertain nerds of the world will just part like the Red Sea.

“Instead of just saying what you’d prefer, you off-load the choice to someone or something else. Instead of ‘I don’t want to hang out with you,’ it’s ‘I have work that night’ or ‘I’m not feeling well.’ Nothing is ever expressed as your own needs and wants, so you never have to defend your choices or own the consequences later. I used to do it all the time.”

The casual announcement that he was taking a ten-day trip on zero notice was like hearing a churchgoing grandmother offhandedly state that she’d emptied her savings to get plastic surgery and join an Eastern European burlesque troupe. It’s either a breakdown or a scam, but life-ruining either way.

“Twenty-two bombs,” said Ether, “to clear a way for 40 through the Bristol Mountains. Boom, boom, boom, boom. That’s what’s unique about humans. We see a mountain range in our way and we’re like, ‘Absolutely not.’” “We’re like termites, only if termites could blow up the planet.”

He was pissed at himself for letting the box get out of the city, but what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

She’d spent her entire adult life having her ears blasted by a clarion cry repeated in a thousand different forms, alternating the same two lines: “Something must be done.” “Nothing can be done.”

You mentioned at least four hobbies you were already buying the supplies for.” This was true, but it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies.

I think that should be a basic human right, don’t you? To denounce your past? Even if there are records of it online, you should be able to say, ‘I’m sorry and I’ve grown,’ and everyone should judge you based on how you act from then on. If somebody goes mining into your past for stuff to bring you down or embarrass you, they should be treated like the bad guy.” “But you know that’s not how it works, right?” “Oh, trust me. I know.” “Because people are going to preserve that version of you, from the part of your life when they felt the most superior to you.”

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

I mean, that’s the whole point—once they settled on a truth, everything else could be reframed to fit. If their dog had died, they’d have probably blamed it on aliens. That’s just how the brain works: It wants to shape everything into a narrative. Once you realize that, the whole world starts to make more sense. Or less sense.”

But then she’d seen Abbott, who looked so pale that he seemed at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and had the vibe of a man embarrassed to be caught in the act of existing.

And what I couldn’t get over is that this technology was supposed to broaden everybody’s horizons, you can communicate with people all over the world now, at any time. But for me, the world got smaller. I neglected everything else in my life—my family, my business, my health, everything else just went away in the name of arguing with these total strangers about the lives of other total strangers. I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom.”

The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

“I’m talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I’m talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human’s chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they’ve ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It’s been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks. And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being ‘on fire.’ I think that’s a bizarre mass delusion and that there’s a very specific reason for it: we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people.

If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of timing, we’re fucking lottery winners! Only we know the pleasure of a climate-controlled room, a daily hot shower, of cheap and delicious food and drink, of comfortable shoes and a dazzling ocean of entertainment so vast that we get stressed out trying to keep up. Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost. And then there’s all the little conveniences we instantly took for granted. The ability to read a review of a product you’re buying only goes back to Amazon; before that, for all of history, you were just shopping blind. And think about Wikipedia; the guy who invented that deserves a Nobel Prize—it’s one of the great inventions in history, and the fact that it’s free to use is insane. They didn’t even have that in Star Trek!”

“Well,” said Abbott, “that’s a weird question because I don’t think any groups, even hate groups, consider themselves hate groups, so if I was a member of one, I wouldn’t say I was. So when I say I’m not a member of a hate group, I can only say it with confidence because I’m not a member of any group, of any type.” Ether glared at him. “Why can’t you just say no?”

This was a type of claustrophobia that Key had never felt before, probably because she had never spent time at the bottom of a Chuck-E.-Cheese ball pit.