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

by Jason Pargin

It told a fairly simple story of a loner hiding from and/or rooting for the apocalypse.

But nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job.

It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men. The really unpopular part of Key’s theory, the one that had caused a lot of colleagues to stop talking to her in the hallway, was that the smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

Key believed the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women, though this was the kind of thing that, again, never got a great reaction when said around the office.

It was a land of pissed-off underdogs who couldn’t be governed, simple folk who were polite and generous but with no desire to ever again feel a boot on their neck. They knew what freedom really meant, that liberty produces risk and pain the way a motor produces exhaust, that the spirit of America means not just accepting that fact but amplifying it so that it can be heard coming from six blocks away. Or that’s how things used to be, anyway.

To Key’s left was a glassed-in display of a wealthy aging man’s Emotional Support Cars.