Fiction: Atvar Flashes You

Hello, boys and girls. Today I will be starting a new segment. You see, as I've said, I'm an obsessive writer, and I expend most of my energy working on fiction. From here on out, I will be posting occasional snippets of my work to the Accounts. For your enjoyment, of course, all...erm...one of you... In any case, here it is.

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The story of John J.'s life came out to mixed reviews. The most positive called it an “unspectacular if admirable endeavor which minimally achieves its purpose” - whatever that meant. Most critics, however, were not nearly as kind. One of their number wrote: “That any person could have the audacity to call what this man experienced a life simply astonishes me.”

It wasn't that John J. had been deviant or otherwise abhorrent in any way – at least no more so than any other human male since the advent of the internet – quite the contrary. John J. himself was actually surprised and distressed to learn that most people didn't like his life very much.

Of all the controversy that his life stirred up (some critics faulted his “excessive contentment” and found his propensity for happiness “dull and contrived”; others appreciated his “sunny optimism” but chided him for “going absolutely nowhere with it”) the one part that no one complained about was his birth. The father was an alcoholic and the family hovered just above the mire of abject poverty. Who didn't love an underdog story?

And after that, as the poet said, the dark. John J.'s childhood games were “far too cutesy,” his friends were “insipid, cookie-cutter human beings, half-baked and mass-produced,” and his first crush on little Jessica Parker was “sickeningly saccharine with a dash of deranged stalker thrown in for good measure.” John J.'s attackers demanded to know if he had orchestrated his life in such a way (which one Amazon.com reviewer labeled “more mindless than a daytime soap and even dumber than Seinfeld”) as to insinuate himself with the middle classes and pose as an “everyman.” His defenders, when they could be found, pointed out that John J. was middle class and thus had no need whatsoever to pretend.

The review of his life in the New York Times further questioned the veracity of John J.'s claim to have learned the English language at only nine months, but witnesses were eventually secured who could verify it. The controversies and doubts filled page seven, which is as close to the front page of that publication as John J. ever got. The apology and official retraction came in the form of a couple of lines of fine print crudely inserted between the Classifieds and the Obituaries.

John J.'s adolescence received much the same treatment. Although some critics found his chaste high school years “sweet and refreshing,” most hammered him for being “a caricature of Victorian morality that doesn't see the joke.” These same people deemed John J.'s first pseudo-intimacy with a woman at the age of twenty-three “utterly ludicrous.”

Virtually no reviewer could find a single redeeming quality in John J.'s wife – to John J.'s deep dismay – who, as it happened, was only the second woman with whom he had been intimate, and the question resounded across the internet: “how the fuck could anyone want to bone this woman?” John J. lost much sleep over this.

The birth of his first child was universally agreed to be moving, but, when the second one was born, people said that it “seems like John J. is just rehashing old material in an obvious ploy to artificially manipulate the emotions of the public and conceal the directionless floundering that permeates every moment of his life.”

Even his graduation from law school summa cum laude only elicited yawns. All he did was sit out in the sun for a number of hours, step up to the podium, receive his diploma, and leave with a rather nasty sunburn. He wasn't the valedictorian, and the person who was seemed incapable of delivering anything more than platitudes. One review labeled this an “unsatisfying and predictable conclusion to a meandering arc.”

They found his sometime use of pornography “sordid,” though it was hardly any spicier than a mild taco. They called him a hypocrite for committing tax fraud while lecturing his daughters on the importance of honesty. They laughed (or cringed) at the haiku and bits of free verse he sometimes wrote in the evenings when he'd had a couple glasses of wine. They hated his life for its emotionally discordant tones; they hated that it was a dissonant thematic mess; they hated its defiance of all laws of convention and its failure to take any clear direction after breaking them. But the thing they hated most of all was that it had no detectable rhythm, no conscious pacing, no sense of dramatic control. It was, in a word, crap. The sheer volume of slow creatures copulating to which the critics compared it (sloths, slugs, turtles, barnacles, pollen-bearing plants, etc.) would have filled a small book on its own.

Jack Steward of the Tetra-Weekly Show even devoted one relatively experimental segment to John J. The comedian-cum-cultural icon simply sat at his desk for a full minute, absolutely silent, staring at the camera, while drool and flecks of foam accumulated at the corners of his mouth. When that minute was up, he blinked, frowned in a his trademark depressing way, and said, “Now I know what it's like to be John J.” Before anyone had time to respond, Steward pulled out a gun and mimed committing suicide. It was his highest rated show of the month.

The most eminent of professional critics, Reginald Eggbert, putting the capstone on general public opinion, ended his review thus: “Unless you are personally invested in Mr. J., there is nothing emotionally gripping about his existence at all. It just sits there, sort of like a still life, except you get to watch the fungus and the mold and the maggots all have their way with it for nigh on half a century. And all the while, the man who supposedly owns it sits and stares blithely at what is, by the end, a big bowl of festering rot. Fungus soup. Decay soufflé. You would think people would have the modesty not to put their petty failures on display to be publicly humiliated. You would think that, but then you would be wrong. I shudder to think of what kind of person will be born tomorrow.” He gave John J.'s life one and a half stars.

After the popular critics had their crack at John J., it was the academics' turn. The deconstructionists hardly even bothered to acknowledge John J.'s life, dismissing it as “so obviously meaningless that it hardly merits a sustained analysis.” Other scholarly types were impressed that, for once, the descendants of Derrida made sense.

The realists loved John J.'s “simple earnestness.” They said this made him more relatable, and they used phrases like “common clay” and “salt of the earth” a lot. Not all of the realists were quite as impressed with his lack of aesthetic taste, however. One English grad student following in the realist tradition wrote on his blog, “His [John J.'s] capacity for interior decorating sort of reminds you of Weyoun and the Vorta. lol hai guyz, wut iz blew?”

Meanwhile, the New Critics tried desperately to detach something from John J.'s life which they could criticize, but this proved futile and they ended by instead pretending they'd never heard of him.

A very minute number of (neo-)modernists tried to carry John J.'s banner. They found his life a “brilliant piece of existence, worthy of a foremost spot in the history of man” and lamented, melodramatically and at length, the ignorance and smallness of the masses. This severely confused some of the Marxists, who wanted to defend John J.'s life as instructive of the contemporary class struggle (since John J. was a graduate of Columbia Law School devoting most of his time to the poor and thus had much contact with the waste of the capitalist system), but they didn't want to associate themselves with anything that could be linked to elitism. Fortunately for them, the modernists' contention rested on the idea that John J. was living a conventional life to achieve an unconventional effect, and this idea would ultimately not hold water. They were convinced that John J. was a very ironic human being and was being boring, as it were, sarcastically. The postmodernists, (to the public indistinct from the modernists in every way except for their vehement disagreement) disagreed.

The modernists pointed to a key event on day 8,830 of John J.'s life where he had come home and fixed himself a tuna and cucumber sandwich. Not a tuna sandwich with pickle, a tuna sandwich with cucumber. He had done this just to see what the difference was. They found this an exceedingly inspired move on his part, at once an acerbic criticism both of the concept of normalcy and of the shallow, timid “individualism” of contemporary American society. They lauded his subtlety and extolled his wit.

The Marxists, on the other hand, found this episode very distressing because all of John J. 's pickles were imported luxury pickles. The postmodernists argued that there was a religio-socio-politico-economic backlash against pickles and the cucumber represented nothing more than John J.'s acceptance of postcolonial realities. The New Critics sharply rebuked the postmodernists for turning to “outside” explanations for the cucumber, the realists rejoiced in the cucumber and its wonderful "naturalness," and even the psychoanalytic schools got in on things by asking if the cucumber was really just a cucumber. This outraged the feminists, who rebuked John J. on various grounds, few of them having anything to do with vegetables or even meals – strictly and non-euphemistically speaking – at all.

While the Marxists and the modernists and the postmodernists and the New Critics and the realists and the psychoanalysts and the feminists all badgered each other over the cucumber, a very bored assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington took the time to write a short article, the thesis of which was that John J.'s life was not at all ironic and the cucumber episode was both inane and irrelevant. It was universally acclaimed, and the anti-John J. crowd rejoiced. Amid the triumphant crowing of the postmodernists (whose position on John J.'s significance nobody could say for certain, not even themselves) the modernists quickly abandoned him.

John J. would have been much more upset by all this if the academics had had an audience large enough to require more than a single sack of potatoes to feed.

Thus, by the time all the reviews were in – and they arrived in a noticeably swift manner – the critics had achieved a consensus: John J. was a second-rate publicist and a twelfth-rate human being. All of this was, of course, emotionally devastating. When he had finished crying copious if bland tears of disappointment, John J. vowed to get a better life.

The critics never reviewed John J.’s tears, though. They never took any significant interest in anything about him once they had handed in their assignments early, never worried much about how specific their criticisms were or what would happen to the content of their complaints after the editors had their way with the criticisms’ form.

For John J., none of the details of the critics’ scheduling mattered. What did matter was fixing his life. There were, however, a few difficulties inherent in pursuing that course of action. The first was that, though John J. had always craved recognition, he liked his life as it was. He liked his legal practice which was devoted to aiding the disadvantaged. He liked his wife and the lazily harmonious love they had shared for twenty-seven years. He also liked his two young daughters. Yet people found his lawyering boring, his wife more boring, his daughters more boring still, and he the most boring of all for being content with it. One wit remarked: “You can't even call John J. the King of Mediocrity, because 'king' implies someone exceptional.” John J.'s mediocrity was not greater in quality than that of other people, it was simply more all-encompassing. It wasn't a ranking, the wit argued, it was a condition – like impetigo.

John J. pondered how best to go about crafting his new life. He considered modeling it on certain conventional genres such as horror, adventure, and lesbian erotica. Still, John J. kept coming back to what it seemed most people wanted. He was convinced that, although he was not spectacular, he could at least become a spectacle. It was the only way his life could ever be well-received.

After much thought, John J. decided on a plan. He knew what he had to do, and he threw himself into it with a passion. So the story goes, anyway. It’s somewhat difficult to reconstruct a precise chronology of events, but certain evidence, both documentary and anecdotal, does remain.

There is, for instance, a complaint on file which refers to strange auditory and olfactory emanations originating from John J.’s home. This complaint was lodged between seven and ten months after the last review of John J.’s life hit the stands. A local marriage counselor also claims to have seen John J. and Mrs. J. for several sessions, though he says the couple were going nowhere (because, try as they might to develop genuine issues, being content simply came more easily to them). Several doctors remember keeping John J. in the hospital for a few weeks after some kind of traumatic accident. John J. was even, apparently, charged several times with public indecency. There are also a few receipts from Home Depot; Marcus’s Tequila, Gin, and Ammo; and Jack’s Big Barn of Firestarting Supplies.

Sadly, no one quite knows how all this fits together. You see, no one is sure how or even if John J. did change his life, because no one paid him another ounce of attention, and he died some years later in destitution.