Intake Pipes, Elections

I found out about Aidan’s death from the mutual of a mutual, who still subscribed to Aidan’s podcast. That’s life—we were raised on green pastures in Kentucky and aged out of each other’s orbit into different realms of life. Lifestyle changes and obscure politics. It’s stupid, but that’s the only way I can rationalize the uncomfortable feeling somewhere at the bottom of my throat, before my neck technically becomes my torso—a little snotball of emotion suspended in space. Jesus, it feels awful to reminisce. It feels terrible to be cringe.

*

I believed in the end of the world and Aidan believed in a better one. Regardless, he was my closest friend growing up. When I had sex with his sister, he didn’t even resent me for it. Once, in middle school, some Carhartt-wearing-tractor-kid called him a faggot in homeroom. In a small town, specifically a Southern one, a sizable portion of your grade school class is comprised of 12-year-old boys who look like 42-year-old farmers. The Carhartt-kids are bigger than the average child in seventh grade, smoke more cigarettes than the average freshman college student, and, generally, like to call things how they are. Aidan looked like a fag, and, by the time we were upperclassmen in high school, had come out as one. I didn’t care about that, back then—I still don’t, I guess. Aidan was my clanmate on Halo 3, and he knew how to quickscope well enough, and his parents had good internet, and he had good intentions when we played doubles. So, I did the moral thing and stuck up for him: I picked up my metal chair in homeroom and caved it into the back of Carhartt’s head. This led to a huge drama, with everyone thinking I liked to fuck Aidan in the ass or whatever, or why else would I have defended him? It wasn’t like that—it never was. We were friends. That’s just what friendship is—a pathetic, earnest, and often fruitless display of loyalty.

We never spoke about what I did after that, but we became better friends. In high school, I started following an online blog dedicated to Nietzschean philosophy (specifically, the concept of the body containing more wisdom than any deep contemplations) and as a result, started to perform a rigorous routine of pull-ups, bench-press maxing, chin-ups, squats, everything. Creatine became part of my daily meals. I ate raw meat, long before there were controversial political articles online about the benefits of it. I still played video games with Aidan, although we didn’t have the same classes. We spoke almost entirely over headsets—by then, Call of Duty was the new meta-videogame. In-game, our clan-tags—four letters all players were able to display prior to their usernames, shown in any online multiplayer lobby—were just ‘F4G5.’

By junior year, I’ll be honest, I was fucking built. I started seeing a girl named Sara who played varsity soccer. This meant she had a gigantic ass, which probably skewed her BMI towards the overweight category. To clarify, I didn’t believe in the Body Mass Index—it seemed to classify anyone who was slightly muscular as obese. Aidan hated her. Over voice chat, he’d explain that according to recent sociological studies from Bloomington University, soccer playing women in their teens had, generally, 6 more partners by age 16 than other, non-large ass teenage women. It was clear to me that he was upset, but I could never tell if it was from an emotional hole of jealousy or just plain loneliness. We still played Call of Duty together, but our clan-tags had changed to different inside jokes, not just a leetspeak display for ‘fags.’

Towards the end of junior year, we both had our driver’s permits. We were technically, according to the state of Kentucky, allowed to drive with one passenger each in our cars. I only drove around with Aidan, who refused to ride with Sara, or Sara, who thought Aidan was weird, so it was fine. When I picked up Aidan, it was always this whole thing. His parents were the most annoying people in town—both relatively rich, both involved in county politics, both outspoken Facebook and Town Hall Meeting liberals. Aidan’s dad was named Jim and he wore J. Crew button-ups in neutral colors, sometimes pinstripes in a psychotic way. His mother was named Jean and she wore bright mod dresses, like a character in Mad Men–they looked so tight like she’d be beheaded if she unzipped the back. Whenever I rolled up in a shitty 2004 Ford Taurus, they’d ask every detail of where we intended to go. Aidan would say, “to look at our beautiful state.” That’s what we agreed on besides video games being better than the real world. I’d drive Aidan past the interstate exits and fast-food chains, deep into the county, to Greenbrier Lake, an artificial lake created by a fish population control dam.

The last time I drove Aidan to Greenbrier, sometime during our senior year, we sat in my car looking out over the lake, surrounded by mountains. We watched geese fly in from over the valley dips, an old man on a fishing boat catching nothing, bass sporadically spitting air bubbles in the flat water. The worst part about friendships is that you can’t tell when the last memory happens—the event that becomes nostalgia and not just a cool thing like when you tell a new friend about an old friend. This was our final moment together that, to most people, wouldn’t be future Friendsgivings or happenstance encounters at college bars. Here, against the backdrop of the dogwoods losing their leaves and the old fisherman putting on a flannel on the other coast, we finalized what we meant to one another. Aidan showed me scars on his wrists, then pulled his cargo shorts up to show me scars on his thighs, and he told me he has felt sad his entire life. He explained how all those injuries were from forever ago, before he came to accept me as a friend, before he felt fine in a town where he usually felt pain. The fisherman across the lake had, by now, taken his boat out into the middle of the water. I looked over at the dam and wondered how many fish got caught in the intake pipe.

Aidan told me the greatest moments of his life were spent in video game lobbies, saying racist slurs or talking about dumb shit from school. He said he liked men, but never loved anyone here, so that’s why he needed to leave. “Next year,” he said, “I’m moving to New York. I got into Columbia, for writing. They gave me a scholarship because I’m technically diverse: I suck dick and I’m from rural America. Also, so that your ego stays at a reasonable level: I’m not gay for you. Remember that,” he said. I nodded awkwardly. It was the first time we had spoken this intimately. It felt like we were together in some spaceship, far away from Earth, close to some distant wormhole that would, if the ship drifted close enough, make us spaghetti versions of ourselves—then, we’d travel back through time’s fabric, back to sometime way before now: a less emotional era in life.

The following week, Sara left me because she was going to college somewhere for Marine Biology, and obviously, nowhere in Kentucky offered Marine Biology. We ended things pretty amicably. When I told Aidan, he offered to buy me Cracker Barrel, so we went on a Friday and slammed the Friday Fish Fry. I told him I wanted to cry about her but felt like it’d be too gay, which he agreed with, so I didn’t. Instead, we went over to his house, and played through all the Halo campaigns on split-screen.

*

Aidan moved to New York right after graduation. He didn’t wait for fall—his parents already gave him money for an apartment somewhere in the Upper West Side and told him to ‘experience it all.’ So he did, and we hardly spoke at all that summer.

I landed a job at the Nestle factory down the street from my mom’s house and began to study hot pocket quality control. My official job title was “Production Facility Quality Assurance Specialist,” which was, to me, the longest and cruelest insult I can think of. I was still jacked, and, by then, the Nietzsche aesthetic blog had been swept up in some Neoclassical Revivalist Movement—I wasn’t super into the political stuff those guys mused about—I just wanted to keep up with any new workout routines or cultural energy about being muscular. Regardless, like those anti-opiate programs they pushed us in high school always said, you get caught up in a scene and you change. I’m not sure if I changed for the better or worse. The blog started linking to forums for like-minded guys. I found that they too, felt aimless, bored, unsuccessful, robbed; mainly angry, sometimes sad.

That summer, it quickly occurred to me I was left behind. I wasn’t a drinker or smoker. I had dodged, up to the age of 19, the opioid epidemic that took out seemingly half my other old friends. I still worked out, mainly with a pull-up bar in my bedroom and some kettlebells. I was healthy, sure—but I knew I was missing out on profound youthful life experiences, mainly college experiences. I wasn’t dumb, just poor. I spent too much time online the past few years and never figured out how to apply for a student loan. And anyway, I didn’t need college. A factory job would make me enough money—it worked for my mom and it’d work for me. Also, college sounded lame. I looked at a class reading list for a History major at the University of Kentucky and it was all written by Yale or Northwestern professors from the past thirty years. Every book’s title was formatted the same: [The Rise of X: Seeing Y through an X Perspective]. It felt revisionist.

The first Telegram chat I entered was titled “Human Resources Destruction Department.” Someone posted the link on the forums, complaining that the forums had been overtaken by psyops, that it had become a honeypot for disaffected guys like me. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, but I clicked the link anyway, and after that, I felt like Moses halfway through his Exodus—putting faith in something unknowable and hoping something bigger could stop the cascades. The way only God could save us from an abyss. Telegram was safer, this was true. The app was based in Dubai, designed by Russians, and administered out of the United Kingdom. Also, to my knowledge, their American subsidiary, Telegram LLP, does not disclose any of their office locations for fear of undue influence from United States investigation agencies. It feels absurd to explain. The first few messages I saw in the chat were from accounts with usernames like “cocklifting1488” or “uberbensch.” It was small talk. They talked about their diets, primarily raw. They talked about new video games and made fun of each other’s tastes. They talked about women who hurt them and made crude jokes. One guy’s profile picture was a smiling sun wearing sunglasses lounging on an 80’s Miami color scheme, synthpop beach, the sky looking bright neon purple. The smiling sun would post quotes from philosophers, like those old motivational posters, just as earnest before they became memes. It felt good. It felt like a community.

Every now and then it would get political. A few guys would get angry about their office jobs and talk about Ted Kaczynski. They’d mention office banter that bored them to murder-suicide plotting: “Monica talks about a Tinder date almost every week. Peter recommends a new Netflix show and explains too long and I can’t finish my lunch. Dakota explains the intricacies of my work being over-budget.” Another anonymous account would share a pipe bomb diagram and call the angry guys a bunch of pussies. It’d generally die down, and to my knowledge, none of them ever really did anything too crazy. This was before the Major Election, before people started to meet up in real life, and before there was any major movement really happening. Most of the time, to me, it just felt like distraught individuals saying online what they couldn’t say out loud. It made sense. People need an outlet for their personal tragedies or they really do bomb child daycare centers. I rarely posted myself, and when I did it was in response to health-adjacent discussions. Still, I kept reading and empathizing. It was all I had, back then.

When Aidan’s semester started, he began playing video games with me on weekends when he wasn’t out doing ketamine somewhere near Chinatown or on dates with guys from Williamsburg. His stories were hard to track, but he seemed to be living his life in a way that Kentucky couldn’t offer. He declared English as a major and started reading books I’d never heard of, but we’d talk about it all the same over voice chat. I’d Google authors or movements he mentioned while we waited for new Team Deathmatch sessions to start, and I’d try to keep the conversation going. Sure, at times we’d slam into one another, like brothers fighting over a TV remote. I’d disagree with one of his hyper-analytical positions on poor whites or some other way-too-personal-topic and he’d say blacks or gays had it worse. He’d bring up the homeless near the Bronx and I’d ask him how he could care about that, when everyone we knew from high school is getting high on percocets. I didn’t know it then, because I assumed time just changed people you love, but love itself will stay. In reality, time disappoints you. People will let you down. Your friends will move on. Your suffering will be forgotten, amid everyone else’s. I think, in whatever this new Hellworld is, your tragedies become competitions. I don’t care if it’s the wrong thing to say.

*

After just a few weeks into September, our disagreements became debates, and our debates became arguments. The Major Election was two months away and our past, this big reservoir for nostalgia which I held close to my chest, started drying up in front of me. It’s melodramatic, but everything has to be now–otherwise, you get lost in the shallow swamps, the petty social dynamics. Or play video games where you can kill everyone. I don’t know.

At work, I’d gotten a promotion to “Senior Production Facility Quality Assurance Specialist.” This meant that I could take lunches that lasted the entire state-mandated thirty minutes and nobody could bitch me out for it. In the break room, I’d sit with a few people from high school and some middle-aged people who made me profoundly sad. A guy who used to be in my welding class, Robert, was my lunch friend. I was physically larger than him but felt intellectually like an ant. He would watch the news about the election and say things like “Dumb as hell retards,” or “I’d rather use that ballot for my ass after Taco Bell.” He always ate a country ham sandwich with mayonnaise lathered on it like a thick layer of sunscreen. I was in multiple Telegrams by now, some that seemed to be populated by much more opinionated guys, ones heavily interested in the Election. The health stuff got sidelined and admittedly, I started to get a little radicalized. In the break room television, the heads on screen looked too clean for me. I took care of my appearance, absolutely, but in a natural way. In the media, in the coverage of candidates, the people looked uncanny. They looked like they came out of a tube of paste and molded in a start-up office. Like wax figures. One day, Robert stopped appearing in the break room, so I asked a manager. He told me Robert got laid off for being late three times. Someone else mentioned that he got a job at Wal-Mart.

When the Major Election was only a month away, it’s like everyone in America decided they wanted to eat hot pockets. It made sense, logically. Hot pockets are quick to prepare, easy to hold in your hands, and are a varied food item with many genres. It was easy to watch updates on whatever new sensationalist thing a politician said during the workday while eating a philly cheesesteak hot pocket. It was also easy to immediately switch to chicken broccoli and cheddar hot pockets during an important debate. Also, in my opinion, the double cheeseburger hot pockets were probably good to carry to political rallies, as they offered a large amount of carbohydrates for energy. I wasn’t sure if this was the actual reason that I started working 80-hour weeks or not. I was coping, I guess. Working on the production line became a nightmare—I was used to my daily routine of manual labor, then working out, then meal prepping, then gaming, then bitching on Telegram from bed, then sleeping, then beginning again. I started falling asleep on the production line because I got a little too depressed, like everyone does sometimes, so my hours were docked to 70. The next week I fell asleep again so my hours were docked to 60. The third week I fell asleep again, so they just fired me.

Since I lived with my mom, I just started gaming and lived off my pathetic savings. The best part of being stagnant—of being nobody, of existing passively, of just working and gaming—was that you could fail and it wouldn’t destroy you. It’d just make you feel a little worse. In my Telegram group messages, the guys started to get really excited. The consensus amongst everyone was that the redpilled candidate was going to win. The Telegram Candidate believed in bringing us back to when things were happier and he reminded us that our failures weren’t faults of our own but the faults of institutions. I liked that about him. It seemed like the rest of the world, including Aidan, disagreed. Ultimately, I didn’t really care that much, but I was happy that everyone else I knew was happy—except for Aidan. Sometime in mid-October, Aidan was playing like shit during our duo Call of Duty rounds and I got annoyed. When nobody notices your general accomplishments when you’re a modern guy—which, I guess, to me, was that I could do a decent number of pull-ups and I had great luck at the town Applebee’s with the waitresses—your win-loss ratio from online video games starts to matter more than it probably should. Maybe it was my fault for having a moment of insecurity. Somehow, the Major Election became our discourse. Aidan claimed that Telegram Candidate wasn’t representative of anyone, was a megalomaniac chasing the next title, the ultimate title—that he didn’t really care. I claimed that Substitute Teacher candidate (who I called Substitute Teacher candidate due to the fact I could never remember his name, that his campaign staff generally talked over him, that he lost out to anyone memorable on his own other ticket) only cared about the most obvious things to care about: groups that the news liked to cover. I told Aidan there was suffering all around.

“Do you not remember anything?” he said.

And I said I did. I brought up the lake. I brought up Carhartt Kid. I brought up everything I could remember.

“Then why care about yourself so much, when things are easy for you there?”

And then I lost it, because these issues, these manufactured arguments, these primal yells, they become so personal. I said, “You’re just some faggot who moved away because he was a coward!” I meant it, then. I think I still might. I hate him for moving. That’s just what anger is. It’s honesty getting swept in with an impulse–like losing your footing in a stream.

It was the last time we spoke. He left the Team Deathmatch lobby, deleted me off his Xbox Live friends list, and—based on my iMessages sending as normal texts—blocked my number too. He never came home after that or visited during the holidays, to my knowledge, or at least his parents just never mentioned it if he did. That was it. It ended right there, when the trees dropped their leaves and the pumpkin patches collected their yearly revenue. It was only after, while filling up gas one day on the way to put in an application, that I really understood how stupid it was to lose someone so fast. I stared at a shallow puddle of fuel until the autofill handle clicked back to let me know that the gas was over pouring.

*

By the time Aidan died, as I mentioned before, he had started some podcast about the results of the election. Telegram Candidate won, so everyone Aidan knew lost, including himself. I guess he didn’t know me anymore by that point. His life changed faster than I could keep up with, since my Telegram circles continued to be feedback looped on only the successes of the new administration. His podcast really took off within a few years. From what I could understand from the shit talking in my Telegram and general social media posts, he had essentially garnered a political following. I tuned in once. He spoke on the homeless situation in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago, racial problems in the Midwest, or new LGBT-adjacent movements for the trans community and other people I had never encountered in my entire life. I guess a lot of young people felt the same and he made a shitloadof money in Patreon donations. He bought a little townhouse in Brooklyn, according to a guy I knew online, and a little loft in Los Angeles too. I wanted to hate him, since he left me and Kentucky behind and since I didn’t agree with him, but I couldn’t.

Ultimately, the election didn’t necessarily change my life. I ended up landing a job as “Inventory Shrink Security Specialist” at Wal-Mart, after finally walking in to buy groceries during one of Robert’s shifts. He landed me the job after forcibly recommending me to his manager—the position was essentially that of a muscular, intimidating man who worked as a petty theft deterrent at store exits. I didn’t have authority to really touch people or fight them or restrain them, I just checked their receipts as they exited if they looked slightly sketchy or drugged out. The intention, I think, was that would-be thieves would not want to get into an argument with me and would then just pretend they forgot to checkout whatever item they were stealing. I still worked out, and sure, I still kept up with any new discourse online. I deleted Telegram, though, after the second Major Election. It just felt bad for my brain.

Aidan died almost nine years after our last conversation. I moved on: had a girlfriend who worked as a speech therapist and paid the majority of our bills. I had a gaming desktop for the first time in my life so I stopped caring about the new Xbox. I even had some new hobbies besides working out, like fishing. When I got the Instagram message about his death, I wondered if it was something terrible like suicide or a tragic accident. I sort of hoped for it, in a romantic way. Instead, our mutual told me that he had apparently overdosed, a bad batch, fentanyl-laced ketamine bump while he was on a live-recording tour in Missouri. One of his co-hosts, some black- LARPing white kid from Manhattan, had recorded him on Instagram live with the caption, “muddafucka be sleepin,” and then had to delete it the next day after they realized he had actually just been dead.

I didn’t get to go to his funeral. On his podcast’s Patreon, you had to donate $50 a month to be invited to “major life events, including, but not limited to, birthday celebrations, marriages, and even funerals!” I thought it was a joke, but then, after reaching out to his parents—who passionately defended his wishes—I realized it was being taken literally. The funeral happened on a workday, so I had to take my only day of bereavement leave. The $5 tier meant I got to join the Discord server where his funeral would be livestreamed, so I signed up the day before. In the chat, a bunch of accounts posted obscure inside jokes, crying emojis that looked like T_T, and different variations of his name preceded by RIP. I realized that I had stood on a river delta for the rest of Aidan’s life, looking away while he flooded out into the world. It felt like I had missed out on something important. I tuned out after his mom spoke about the unpredictable tragedy, closed my laptop, and went to work out.

*

I stopped reading much after high school—felt pointless. There were people over Telegram expressing more tragedy than I could feel from reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I’ll admit that I was self-pitying myself, too. Even when talking to Aidan, about his love-life failures in a big city or his seemingly deep hatred for his hometown: it felt more real than some Greek statue above a motivational quote on self-improvement. To contradict everything I just said, one of the more quoted Schopenhauer pieces says that loss teaches us most about worth and I think it’s the only old intellectual one-sentence drop I agree with.

Sometimes, I’ll put my phone on airplane mode and drive out to Greenbrier. Since the first Major Election, they actually moved the dam further up the river due to flooding issues. There’s an uncomfortable yellow and barren field between the old coastlines. The geese fly by the flatlands and look confused before realizing their endgame is just a few hundred feet north. It’s so stupid and it probably doesn’t mean anything. When they drained the lake, the wildlife department gathered the catfish and bass, mainly due to the fishing revenue that could be produced at the new lake. There’s a fence around it and I can’t enter unless I pay $10 for a daily fishing fee. I don’t know if the new Greenbrier is as pretty as it used to be or if Aidan would recognize it or if he’d care that it’s different now. From what the town newspaper said, the wildlife officers left behind the bluegills and carp for an opposing reason, because they suck to fish, they take up space, and they taste like shit. I have a new car, this 2015 Ford Fusion with a rear-view camera I’m still trying to figure out how to refinance. I’m proud of it even though I can’t afford it. Often, when I’m staring at the dead grass, I’ll try to project myself back into a Halo 3 lobby and I’ll pretend I’m being spaghettified back into the past.

I still play video games and I still workout. I even check the Neoclassicist Revisionist—or, I guess, now, they call them Neoclassicist Reactionaries—forums once every few months to see if anyone’s come up with new ways to look more like Michelangelo’s David. I stopped watching the news and started to focus more on my girlfriend, who I think actually loves me. Wal-Mart is a shit job, but it pays me enough. Still, I’ll laugh every now and then, when I think about our old clan-tags.