The Brain Tee Vee

News; Media; Bullshit.

    I close my eyes and I see the world. I see the snow skipping across the wind, blowing through my ribs and the air pockets that lie waiting to be cracked just below my knuckles. I see the clouds fading to mist above the frozen mountain tops; Himalayas, Alps standing tough and sturdy against this cutting wind. I see curving roads that wind past forgotten houses and dilapidated sheds and shooting over the rushing bubbles of the creeks with bridges made of concrete and crude metal. I see the sharks slicing through thick pressures of heavy ocean water, their tails like stinging whips of powerful force. I see the walls being built and the worn bronze statues ripped to the ground. Barbed wire and jagged nails; frightened voices screaming and the thunderous clap of bullets on the loose, followed closely by a deafening, self-defeating silence.

    I open my eyes,  and I see you.

    Watching the news. I’ve seen these things before.
   
    “Three climbers froze while hiking in the Himalayas this morning…” Grabbing at sharp, cold rocks, they were; fighting for life. Their fingers snapping and knuckles popping, the wind blew the snow in their faces and sent them into a maddening freezer of sorts. Two more in the Alps, she says?  Tisk tisk.
    It will be days before they thaw.
   
    “The body of a woman who has been missing for two and a half months has been found under Morgan’s Creek Bridge today…”  Kidnapped, she was. Left under a bridge to rot even more. How was she not found sooner?
    “It has been determined that her body was buried in an abandoned house further down Morgan Road, but was exhumed and dumped under the bridge as a way for the suspect to avoid police...”
    Ah, I see now. Three children, she had. Hopefully they will have a closed casket service for her; with beautiful roses and lilies and things.
   
    “Yet another shark attack was reported off the coast of  Australia today after several have taken the lives of…” 12 people. Dead from shark teeth. I had a cousin once, well… third cousin, I was told. He lived down on the coast of Florida with his mom, and he liked to swim at the beach almost every day. One day, he went out to swim, and never came back. I was told there was no shark, but there could have been all the same.
    At least they found that woman’s body under the bridge. They didn’t even have a body at his funeral. An empty casket; how stupid is that?

    They’re showing footage now, from some brave camera man who’s shaking around quite a lot. They’re putting up a wall at the Mexican border, so none of them can come through illegally. Some of them are trying to climb up the wall and are getting caught in the barbed wire. Some hang limp, tangled in the jagged wire, that bang of bullets having ripped through their backs a few minutes earlier. I don’t understand why they’re taping it; it’s quite obscene.
    The footage switches to a rally of some sort, where the people are tearing down a bronze statue of some important man I don’t care to remember. He leads us, I’m told, but some people don’t believe that, it seems. Bullets ring out over here too, and people are screaming and dodging and running each other over as the statue leans under its mighty weight.
    A man appears, the important man in the flesh, eyebrows arched at the sight of the scene. The camera zooms as these men in black suits close in around him, guns pointed toward the crowd. Everything goes silent as he steps toward the rallied people, no one bothering to move. This is the most suspenseful T.V. show I’ve ever watched.
    BANG! It’s so loud, we both jerk in our chairs. He’s on the T.V., lens in an extremely close zoom, clutching his stomach, lying on the ground. A massive pool of blood seeps out from under him as the military fires round after round into the crowd of people. The anchor comes back and she’s quite flustered about this one.
    You look at me with your jaw dropped wide.
    “You look too surprised,” I say to you as you stare at me with those big, old, blue eyes.
   
    I get up and take the remote from your clammy hand. “Let’s see what else is on.”

Reviews

[Katie B]

You had some great imagery in this pieces, especially with the opening paragraph. Interesting and intriguing story. Thanks for the submission to my contest.

[Emcee Blood-stained Car..]

The opening paragraph was awesomely dark. All of it's images, the snow, the wind, the mountain tops, concrete, bridges and barbed wire all reminded me of a television with no reception, just black and grey and white dots to infinity - the same desensitized meaningless images over and over again.

The rest of it trickled smoothly to an all too real ending, as whoever was being spoken to finally encountered an unfamiliar image on the TV, which the properly bleak final line implies will soon be easily internalized as a norm, just like all the previous ones. Sad and true.

[Brian]

Excellent... reminds me a little of Don DeLillo in a way. You are both a good writer and a good thinker... a combination exceedingly rare.

[Simon Holmes]

Very nice. A kind of detuned response to 24 hour media. The bad guy from The World Is Not Enough would be proud.

[Shaun Hardy]

Ok, I want to be up front� I am reading this piece for the third time now and as I have journeyed with it, I have really hit the perfect time to review. Oddly, I am listening to a cd by Clutch as I had read it the third time and am now starting my review. Let me tell you, this piece flows SO WELL with �The Elephant Riders� by Clutch!

Anyways� The news, the media, the blah! We as a society are becoming weird (I�m not weird, just the rest of the country is). We are lead by leaders who preach fear and try their hardest to keep us in that mode. They also preach that violence is bad and this is also something we should fear. Yet on a daily basis we are force fed violence on TV, the internet and every other available venue of media. It�s crazy because they want to talk about protecting us and yet we have images, horrific at that too, burned into our minds constantly.

I mean, do we really need to know that Virginia Tech D****e-Bag-of-a-b***h shooter�s life story? Oh boohoo, he was picked on. I don�t know about you, but heck I was picked on and I didn�t feel the urge to do something ignorant like that. It�s life, it�s part of growing. You get picked on and then you turn around and you either ignore, moving on, or you pick on someone else when you�re big enough. I was never big enough. I learned though, I analyzed those people who felt the need. I laughed! I look back and see some of them on myspace and laugh even harder, seeing that they never did anything with their life. It�s great to be cool back then but what does being cool get you now? How about an excuse to never leave that small tiny hick town we all thought was the world back then.

So� that was supposed to make a point but I think I completely left it out. Oh yeah, that�s what I was getting at. The media seemingly glorified that shooter, pretty much like they do to every other school shooter. What�s the message that is always put out � �if you pick on me, I�m going to shoot you and all your friends.� So, are we sure that we want to continue putting this message out for everyone to see every day on the news? It�s providing this false sense of hope and escape to everyone and anyone who feels like life isn�t fair.

You touch on this point very nicely, pointing out that the news is filled with death, war and separatism. I feel like those monkeys in �28 Days Later�, the ones who are being forced to watch all the violence on TV, only to turn around and become SUPER MONKEYS and eating, slapping and raping the thieves (ok, so maybe it didn�t happen exactly like but think of how cool it would be see a crazy monkey totally taking it to some thief�s man-gina and then biting him and giving him a weird disease that makes him want to go and eat the biceps of the egotistical, self-conceited metro-sexuals and then ripping their $80 shirts� oh that�d be so cool, they should make that a new reality show and call it, �Monkey Consumption�)

Oh, back on topic again. Correct me if I�m wrong but having people seeing something over and over, really takes the affect away and it all becomes �normal�. I mean, look at them Europeans� they get sex on their TV�s and what�s the result? You have a whole country of French men who are smoother than Paris Hilton�s choochoo. When was the last time you heard of a French man going into a school or university and shooting people?

You know though, that would never work here because they politicians and leaders of this supposedly �free country� could never figure out how to bring the fear out when it comes to sex. You take the fear away, the leaders lose their power hold over the people. You introduce sex and they no longer have complete control � look at the hippies� I mean, open sex partners and free love, holy crap! That right there enabled the hippies to be one of the strongest bunch of individuals our country has ever seen. They accomplished so much and why? Because the politicians and leaders couldn�t instill any fear in them, for all the hippies were too busy with the free love, open sex and well� the drugs (plus the music was so awesome back then).

I was really fascinated with how you presented this piece. You threw everything out there, basically showing the reader all the pieces of the puzzle but then you started placing all the pieces in their spot, revealing a picture in the end that can be appreciated.

Once again, you have written something that creates additional thoughts and carries the reader further into your work. I believe I explained last time that this is a great thing. Definitely keep it up. You have me hooked as a reader.