Primordial: An Abstraction

4

Some of my roommates are academics, researchers and critics with revoked Ph.D.s. Others are regular college students. Primarily freshmen.

The freshmen are afraid of their peers. They aren’t afraid of the former Ph.D.s and attempt to bully us. For the most part they succeed.

The freshmen think they can drink. The ex-Ph.D.s think they can drink.

They can’t drink like me.

Drunk, I slam a bottle of Grey Goose into somebody’s elapsed face.

It isn’t an attempt to assert power. Somebody merely inflected their essence.

Nobody touches me after that. And when they speak to me, they never eyeball me. This may be a result of my artless aggression, social fallout from the extinction of culture, or a combination thereof. More and more, we lose the ability to interact with each other in person. Idle pleasantries become titanic hurdles.

It doesn’t matter. I snap.

And I adapt.

From this point onwards, I incite fear and trembling in my roommates with the flair and enmity of a dystopian overlord.

There can be no other way.

As I often inform my students at the beginning of dense lectures: “The only things that move are the cold, wary eyes of the train.”