Sunday, 2 January 2022
The Vandal
Hamish Linklater
Comic Boy, a teen. The Boy is talking to a middle aged woman who has just
bought him some beer. She has also bought a bag of Doritos.
BOY: (He eats a chip.) You know what I like with Cool Ranch, any Dorito really, as
opposed to like, I don’t know, regular tortilla chip? The flavour dust that gets stuck
to your fingers when you bite your chip. See? With Cool Ranch it’s like, a blue and
gold flavour dust. It’s not really the colour of ranch dressing. Maybe it’s a metaphor:
“Cool Ranch” . . . But then look at this: so like, you lick it off, the flavour dust,
(He licks his fingers.)
Voila. But then when you go for the next chip, your fingers are like wet and sticky,
(He eats another chip.)
so more flavour dust sticks to your fingers, so you lick em again, and your fingers
get wetter and stickier, so there’s gonna be more flavor dust, there’s gonna be more
licking, and eventually it’ll just like coat your fingers, your tongue and lips get all
coated too, and who knows eventually if the licking is actually cleaning your fingers,
or just shellacking on more layers of pasty flavor dust. It’s a negative feed back
cycle. And the chip, the start of the whole thing, is like beside the point. Do you
think that’s a metaphor? Is, like, the chip our Life, the flavor dust our dreams, the
fingers reality, they moosh together, and then your mouth is like death?
(He licks his fingers.)
Or maybe the chip is your heart, the flavor dust is love, the fingers are heartbreak,
and then time just gobbles them up?
(He bites a chip.)
Wait, no, what if the chip is the soul, the flavor dust is magic, the fingers what you
do with your soul, and the mouth Deep Space . . . or Oblivion, or whatever that
massive thing is which doesn’t even know the world exists or we exist or that
existence exists, that Vastness which is deafeningly neutral, neither good nor bad,
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Sunday, 2 January 2022
just there, just true, just bigger than thoughts can think, and eyes can see, and
mouths can say, and when you think about God, who no one should really think
about, look what happened to Job who was a good guy, and always tried to be
good, and God said, “You think you know me? You think you know what I want?”
And then he bent Job over and fucked him so hard Job was like, “Ok! I get it, I get
it,” and God was like, “What? What do you get?” and Job was like, “I get that I
don’t get it, I won’t get it, I can’t get it, I get that there is nothing to get, there is only
God, and He can fuck you up the ass whenever he wants to!” and God came in Job
and blew out Job’s brains and humankind has never thought of God, or conceived
of the enormity of God since, because the part of our brains that could was blown
away that day; that God, the real God, who we don’t dare know the omniscience of,
the omnipotence of, the plan, the rules of, that God, if He does exist, is only a blue
flavor dust speck in the mouth of the True Vastness. We do not matter. More likely
we are anti-matter. More likely it’s not a metaphor. Most likely it’s just a Cool Ranch
Dorito.
