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A kid vanished in a “west” supermarket. A market maze with no apparent resolution. Night fell. Machines hummed. Workers were indifferent to his presence. Passers by mistook him for one of their own. He found a home among aisles.
His friend searched for him. He found him nesting in the shampoo aisle. “I’m staying,” he declared. “Everything’s here. Food, beds, clothes. Friends like me. We play, we live. We have quality TV. No need for the outside”
The friend fretted. “Our grandfather is looking for you!”, he said. “Have you forgotten?”. But the sad truth was that he had. His hair was provocatively, insultingly silky.
Outside, their old lives remained the same. Granted they had less shampoos, but enough to get by. They had dignity, but not glory. Nothing ever happened, and people resented that fact.
Witty ads had gotten the best of them all, inner and outer dwellers. As for the kid? He became a voluntary captive in a gilded cage, where he befriended the shelf re-stockers and counted time by how often Tina was called to aisle 4. Life was abundant in goods. Why leave?
“But West,” his friend whispered. “Where is the soul?”
Here. Watch.
They sat in front of wall stacked top to bottom with wide-screen TVs showing CCTV footage of the parking lot, where a mob gathered. “Something is happening, finally” said the pre-teen. The malcontents on the TV looked vicious and unhinged. But the kids were not afraid. They munched on extra sweet vanilla soy-milk and skittles. That was their Eucharist, their final supper.
There and then, their transformation became complete, in a multicoloured inverted mass. They became transfixed by their impending destruction, and they could not avert their eyes. They bit off the apple and fuck, they wanted more. “It’s just like the ads” he blurted, unhinged, as he leaned back in his fisherman’s chair and took a sip of vanilla-flavoured soy-milk.
The soul that was lacking would now be revealed. Though the supermarket was “without a soul”, and had been since its foundation by Irish-American entrepreneur McCauley Caulkin (no relation to the celebrated Home Alone actor) in the early part of the last century. Being “without soul” was its unique brand of spirituality, one which kept it profitable through out the decades. A “not there yet but almost” theology, that worked in anticipation of some kind of final event that would…reveal the meaning of this whole rather luxurious charade.
People kept coming back in anticipation, year after year. And every time they returned, they spent, spent and spent. Well, there was no turning back now; their own season finale was at the gates. They were giddy for their own end. They’d be their own sacrifice.
The mob on Cirrus TV bore a thirst for being, like a lover who is a bit too passionate and voracious, and who is on the verge of going from passion to possession and then, naturally, into cannibalism, as anthropology so finely illustrates for us. They were not just violent, they were horny. They envied the shampoos of the supermarket dwellers and somehow their retribution was a form of hate-fucking; or hate-fucking was just a substitute for violent retribution. Whichever way you want to skin the cat, they wanted both. And as they should; it was truly unjust how silky their fucking hair was. Unbearably fuckable. The aisle-dwellers had it coming, and boy were they eager to get it.
Those who say homosexuality is a vice of decaying civilisations have never experienced the climatic, anti-heroic unbridled lust of an enemy devourer making you its bride, consuming you entirely. The universal end-goal of the sexual revolution was taking place before the eyes of the children. Here’s why this is a good thing:
The mob entered. It skipped the shampoo aisle and ran straight to the TV wall.
The 60’’ TVs showed the ruthless de-membering of the two children by the mob in full 8K resolution, retina-screen HD true-color display. The reds really popped. Violent, gruesome and spectacular. Their hair glistened amidst splatters of blood and skittles in slow-motion.
They were mauled, torn asunder, broken apart with all sorts of power-tools. A glorious moment of television, the ritual we’ve all been waiting for; the breaking of the fourth wall and the end of an era. The kids rejoiced in their self-destruction, as they became what they were promised they’d be in every TV show and every video-game: the heroes of their own journeys. First person. Ecstatic. Fully immersive, interactive dyonisian frenzy. The Degenetron 3000 couldn’t compare. The crowd overtook them and they rejoiced in the public, open, unbounded aspect of the lynching.
A modicum of self-awareness remained in them through the mauling. As they died, a final idea went through their minds, in the span of just a few seconds. “How solemn I must look right now…” they thought, as they did their best to imitate the solemn, suffering faces of catholic saints in the pain of their martyrdom.
That conspicuous look of joyful suffering, when piety turns into a vice, where anxiety and histeria finally meet its energetic release in the body. Finally, they were good. And finally, they can enjoy looking as if they are. As heroes with a number of faces (or fragments thereof) that approached 1000 in number, they could only think of the onlookers. The crowd. The disembodied eyes, gazing at them, seeing. They offered their souls to that unearthly gaze. Which naturally was high-resolution, slow-motion, cinematic and hyperrealistic.
They wanted to be seen: by streaming audiences, by History, by Historians, by readers. They wanted to inspire, to be heroes. Mutilation was not only dignifying, it was glorious. As the knives penetrated them to oblivion, no screams of agony were reported - only a barely distinguishable, almost obscene moan. It was cringe; accidental, sure, but it made even the frenzied mob feel a bit too dirty for comfort. It robbed them of their killing pleasure.
It is as if the children had, then and there, discovered puberty, bursting moistly out of both their pants and skulls; at the tip of a 12.99€ Carpenter’s 9’’ Axe from an East-German white-label equivalent of a HomeDepot with poor graphic designed packaging. Although the package designers used Helvetica to describe the hammer’s length in about 6 different languages, some of which had Cyrillic characters and others weird signs on top of certain consonants, the recently-inaugurated teenagers died a pleasurable death (albeit ignorant to contemporary graphic design lore).
Once there were no more kids, the g(o)ods instantly became less interesting to the mob. Truth is, there was always enough shampoo to go around, although now the shelves weren’t being re-stocked any more. But it was never about that shampoo, was it?
The mob never ended up going home either, as there was nowhere to go back to. They didn’t have shampoo or shelter there. That pained them. As sobriety returned in the next days, they came to regret their frenzy, like we all do when we are hungover. “I’m never drinking again” they might have said if their frenzy had been alcoholic.
As they cleaned the aisles of blood spills, they became the new dwellers in the ruins of the supermarket. And slowly they began to look at the kids in a different light. They, and their silky hair, persisted in their memory.
It was on their bones that this new, more responsible, more moderate peace was built. They agreed to go into a mob-like frenzy never again. And they began to create elaborate rituals, with the few bags of skittles that remained. They’d ritually ingest them (and only them, since the soy-milk went bad after a few months) every few weeks at the checkout desk in memory of the kids.
The one cashier that somehow didn’t run or wasn’t killed in the riot became highly respected, since he had known the boys in life, and the strategic purveyor of the holy ointment of shampoo.
The whole event was distastefully portrayed as a myth of a saintly desert-wandering mob, whose Lord provided them with skittles to sugar-rush them into reaching a promised land, where they’d sublimate their jealousy towards the silk-haired by drinking their soy-milk, and eventually become silk-haired themselves (or what they imagined by this term, which had become forgotten in the thinking sands of time). Years went by, decades, centuries, and the descendants of the new aisle-dwelling elite continued washing their hair. And it became silky. Violently silky.
But now, we were pretty much all aisle-dwellers, and nobody had heard of coupons, and nobody wanted to check-out.
Editor’s note: If you enjoy Dark Renaissance Radio and want to keep us producing events, art and media, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. New podcasts coming soon.