Wisdom can find you when you least expect it. As I was leaving the bathroom in City Bar one evening, I saw above me an apercu of most scintillating illumination, nestled between black and purple Sharpie curlicues on one of the ceiling beams: “Love is Fake.”
A bomb detonated in my head. I thought: Yes. Right. Absolutely. How long I had been benighted! How long I had toiled uselessly! Some enlightened soul, in all due beneficence, perspicacity and magisterial generosity, had taken it upon himself (or herself! I will not distinguish!) to scribe on that blank surface (where it is easily found but with difficulty sought) a truth that dismantled, as it were, the planks to that erroneous raft Maya barring me from the embrace of the abyssal sea.
“Go row your own boat, Schopenhauer,” I thought. “I belong to the ocean now.”
Yet, while I was floating in this immensity, as I was dipping into the abyss, I saw the flotsam of that bark still floating nearby. True, I had been liberated into the roiling sea, but there were still these artifacts, these edifices. I was reminded of what else was fake in life, which roused my ire. The list is extensive, but what follows is a short catalogue of other things that are fake, and why I’m discontent in their falsity.
Leatherette
A “leather substitute,” made by covering PVC-cased fabric in plastic, leatherette has a variety of uses, from binding books to car seats to lingerie even. The fact it is fake is not the only reason it displeases my expanded, oceanic sense. No. I am displeased because when I think of leathery things—of books and car seats and so on—I think of real leather. Do you understand? It is not the same! Would you bind the Necronomicon in Leatherette? Hell no!
I reject you, leatherette, and all your lies!
Jackalopes
The falsity of the jackalope, a hybrid between a jackrabbit and an antelope, who feeds on whiskey and can be milked, who breeds in electrical storms and speaks in human tongues, saddens me more than anything else. This is the stuff of legend! Woe to whoever made the veil of reality and neglected to embroider a few jackalopes on it!
It follows, of course, that I also reject the dahu, the skvader and the accursed wolpertinger. Lies, all lies! I find no consolation in their nonexistence.
Death in The Movies
I understand it cannot be done. I understand all movie deaths are by necessity fake. But c’mon! It was easy enough to rationalize (as I had done, before my explosive epiphany) that death in, say, theater, couldn’t be done. I had seen enough of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” to understand that. After all, it’s theater. They can barely maintain verisimilitude as it is, especially if their budget is tight! Paper mache trees do not fly. Unless it’s Samuel Beckett.
But movies! Alas, movies! Couldn’t you try harder? I get we’ve come a long way from the off-screen assaults in, say, “Witness For The Prosecution” or the use of red paint for blood, like in “El Topo,” but even at its most feverish pitch, even at its most gory, the death in movies does not approach the death in life!
Skyler
I’ll be brief on this one, since it should be (on the whole) obvious.
Skyler, you’re so fake. Fake, fake, fake. And you know it too. You faker. Fake faker. With your pomade and your bleached hair and those leatherette boots you claim to wear “ironically.” And that jackalope head you keep mounted in your bathroom! What does that even mean? Where’s the symbolism in that? Skyler, I reject your fakery!
There are many more grievances to be uttered. But for the time being, I’ll continue to float idly, with the supreme knowledge that everything is fake, least of all love.
Is love as fake as the bathroom stalls at City Bar would like you to believe? Were you one of the many who thought jackalopes were actually real? Send all your teary-eyed responses to Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
