The Quadrangularity, Part 1
We now live in a world straight from Huxley, a Boxed New World.
My old friend Monte Williams, who showed up in June with “Content for Jason” and returned this month with “Publish or Perish,” is back with the first in what he promises is a series in his singular mad scientist comic way.
by Monte Williams
A year ago Zoom®, Meetup®, GoToMeeting®, Teams® and their kin were platforms unknown to billions. Now they serve as the world’s preferred mode of transit, a way to get somewhere, and the user experience is not unlike Greyhound®, traveling from point A to point B with plenty of stops along the way and hours of sitting, occasionally interrupted by standing, then back to sitting, sitting, all the passengers occupying columns and rows, subjected to visual domination by varieties of quadrangles. The rows are orderly and right-angled, the seats are boxed, human-holding crates with right-angled knees and hips, the windows are rectangles, the bus itself a giant hurtling quadrangle. Across our nation and around the world for most of the day and seven days a week in extreme cases, Zoom and friends stuff billions of quadrangles into our brains. Always quadrangles. Have your Zoom meetings ever been arranged in the graceful curve of a swan’s neck or the random splatter of a Jackson Pollack? No, it’s rectangle after rectangle, square after square.
I am naturally averse to the same quadrangles that are accepted, even enjoyed by others. But isn’t that a sign of my own well-adjusted spatial wiring? My brain is the product of every earlier generation of human brains, so I ask you: Does your brain tell you that quadrangles have existed for fifty thousand years in some sort of natural form, crystalline fractures notwithstanding? Big-ass squares and rectangles simply don’t occur in nature. Remember that the monoliths in 2001 were quadrangles, and where the hell did they come from? There’s more going on in your brain than you might think. Your synapses may be writhing and recoiling and you don’t even know it. I pray you heed well the warnings contained in my most recent journal entries!
8:34 a.m. TUES
Today I’m fourth over from the left, that’s counting left to right, then down one-two-three. Twenty minutes in and I’m already experiencing visual re-ordering. This meeting is so big it resembles an overhead drone shot of a manicured cemetery, or a security camera trained on symmetrically arranged sleeping newborns. This arrangement is in no way permanent, I’ll be relocated at the beginning of my next meeting at 1:30. That’s how it strikes me…relocation. Sitting here, I’m convinced that Right Angle Overexposure (RAO) exists, in part because we inhabit these grids of constancy, but the truth is the quadrangles we occupy will change, sometimes several times per session, giving rise to feelings of impermanence and dislocation. We now live in a world straight from Huxley, a Boxed New World. I have named this existence. I call it The Quadrangularity. Oh wait, I mean I call it The Quadrangularity®.
11:16 p.m. TUES
Every day my wife and I, also my adult children, my colleagues and co-workers…we are all on a Zoom-style platform, every day and willingly. My latest visual re-order: The grimy grinding gate goes up, a whistle shrieks and we all climb into the same giant battered coal tram, banging our lunch pails on the word emblazoned on the tram’s sooty side panel, JOIN, then like the miners of old we creak forward, slanting down into the dark tunnel, it won’t take long, less than a minute, but still enough time to plaster down some rogue hair or add an eye-popping prop, maybe bounce some additional light on a hipster book or irrelevant diploma, then we grab our picks and shovels, enter through our assigned portals and magically appear inside the glow of The Quadrangularity.
2:40 a.m. WED
I hate The Quadrangularity the way Winston Smith hates Big Brother. The Quadrangularity is tenacious, pervasive, overwhelming. It has entwined millions upon millions and it’s having its way with us wretches. The Quadrangularity has forced me to commit acts I never imagined I was capable of, for instance describing in graphic detail to my own children what The Hollywood Squares® was. I’ve moved as much furniture as a beefcake Mayflower® employee just to please The Quadrangularity, once moving a vanity out of sheer vanity. The landscape in which I exist is orderly and reassuring, row upon row, like Levittown or the drive from Iowa City to Ames. But inside each quadrangle? Hieronymus Bosch, cruel, detached and delivered in tiny detail. Who among us hasn’t watched in horror as The Quadrangularity, for reasons only It can know, freezes and tortures us. I’ve watched my ageless and surprisingly chipper face become a motionless death mask, immobile while my brain is yet sentient, Poe’s greatest fear. When it happens to us we scream into our inanimate devices, we shriek that we still exist, our ideas still have worth! But the other Quadrangularitites see only our somber, unchanging features, and that’s if we’re lucky. If Q (as it will soon be called) cares to, then Q will freeze our faces into some grotesquery, a half-completed oafish smile, an interrupted chew of jerky, a tongue scalded with microwaved coffee, half-mast unfocused eyes straight from the opium dens. But Q is not so much mockery as manipulation. Q entices us, encourages us to dress our sets and now, sadly, many in Ameriqa (q as in Q) have purchased greenscreens and key lights and wireless mic mixers. To my enduring shame, I was among the first. But the rewards! Oh, the gifts the loving and enfolding Q bestows upon us! It qocoons us in the gossamer of our pre-pandemic lives, and what qould be better?
5:22 a.m. WED
It’s come to me! I know now what my next move must be, but I’m uncertain what the risks are. Two stories come to mind, Poe’s MS Found In A Bottle and Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, both dealing with personal annihilation. The authors don’t regret one bit informing you that there’s no way out. Whether you’re on a ship falling into an Antarctic whirlpool or a 1950s suburban dweller disintegrating into the microcosmos, no way out. Or is there? In the face of Q’s unrelenting conformity, maybe the goal is not to conform. Maybe the strategy is not to be anonymous, rather be noticeable, maybe even obnoxious. Q watches everything and I have been assuming Q relies on the Quadrangularitites to submit to calm and embrace hours-long civility, to nurture tranquil vibes within each little q, all that tranquility adding up to Q. I assumed Q wanted us to nod in group agreement, so many heads pumping up and down the grid looks like an oilfield.
7:57 a.m. WED
I have questions but as I have written earlier, I also have a plan with undetermined risks, and I’m going through with it. The stakes are too high. I’m going to do everything I can to understand and exist within Q. I’m going to use props, a self-pull dolly, a greenscreen, sound effects, careful scripting and hopefully a craft food services truck, all to answer a simple question, one I can’t yet answer. Is Q benevolent? A few hours ago, I hated Q. But now, like Winston Smith, have I won the battle with myself? Do I love Q? And will Q know if I do?
Next time in The Quadrangularity
My opening move—Risking quadrangular annihilation and the loss of a paying client, I cleverly rig my greenscreen during an active Zoom call to offer a direct challenge to the Great and Powerful Q
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