A LOVE FEST, 6TH OF JANUARY

It’s January 6th and Washington D.C. is postcard beautiful. The cherry trees bloom somehow even in the midst of winter. The statue of Abraham Lincoln smiles down from atop his giant porcelain throne. The Washington Monument stands a little taller and straighter and girthier. And throngs of smiling, happy people - millions of them - have gathered together. 

It’s a love fest! Actually, that’s exactly how you would describe it too: a love fest. 

Everyone congregates on the National Mall. Music plays - good music; rock music and country music; YMCA music. Children frolic about, unguarded and unconcerned. Folks carry red solo cups, and whenever anyone asks what’s in them, you all wink and nod at one another and say it’s “iced tea.”

You’re sporting a foam red cowboy hat that you don’t recognize, but maybe you bought it on your way downtown? Everyone around you wears their best America-branded apparel - t-shirts with witty remarks about Joe Biden, flag capes to drape over the shoulders, cheap plastic novelty glasses that spell out the year 2021.

Everyone is so attractive and happy and you can feel yourself falling in love - platonically and heteroerotically - as though this was the first time you ever felt those feelings before in your life. Hell, maybe it is? You can’t remember a time before when you felt happier.

You give yourself up to the sea of patriots surging through the streets of the nation’s capitol, floating along like a happy little leaf on waves of positivity. Before too long, your newfound brethren carry their picnic baskets and lawn chairs and AR-15s through the metal detectors into the Ellipse. The President is going to speak, and you want to hear what he has to say.

But first, you listen to a rousing rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American,” sung by the man himself, Lee Greenwood, and you can’t recall a better version of this song. You don’t remember Lee Greenwood being this good at music, neither singing nor playing guitar! 

In fact, for a brief second, you think that maybe you don’t remember liking Lee Greenwood at all - you can’t name a single other song he’s ever done - but then that thought leaves your mind as quickly as it came. No: what you’re witnessing is amazing and wholesome and you like it.

After two encores for Mr. Greenwood, including a cover of September by Earth, Wind and Fire (except sung by Lee and with all references of September 21st changed to January 6th), a buzz goes through the audience.

The President is about to speak!

The motorcade arrives. The entourage exits. You see a commotion near the backstage entrance. Before too long, he climbs the steps and struts out onto the stage. 

He is beautiful. 

His skin glows, just like sunlight shining through a jug of Hi-C, Orange Lavaburst flavor. His hair is immaculate and does not move with the wind. His fingers are normal sized and the backs of his hands are uniformly colored like normal, healthy human skin.

He opens his mouth and tells you that he loves you. He tells you that everything is going to be okay. He tells you that in four years he’ll come back, much like Jesus, to fix all of the RIGGING and the HOAXING and the NATION KILLING. He says many beautiful and wonderful things - nobody has ever heard more wonderful things in the history of man - because it’s a love fest. Remember how this is a love fest? 

Honestly, you can’t even remember what brought everybody here in the first place other than all the love. That’s what this is all about, right? The love?

That’s when you see a beach ball batted into the air not too far away from you. The colors are red, white and blue and you can’t think of a better image than a plastic ball full of hot air, bedecked in our national colors and held up by the fingers of a billion adoring fans desperately trying to keep it afloat. Except you notice that the blue is actually black.

It’s a red and white and black beach ball, and isn’t that funny? Mere seconds ago you could have sworn it was blue. Now the ball floats down towards your head, so you tap it back up into the air and just as your finger touches the soft plastic membrane you hear a FRRRRRZZZZZZZ sound out of nowhere.

Someone is trying to bash in a window with a stanchion. 

Someone else batters a police officer with a flag pole.

Someone carries a homemade guillotine. Others carry homemade gallows.

People growl and gnash their teeth and surge against a line of officers. The police try to turn back a literal horde, decked out in patriotic t-shirts and dark winter coats and some are wearing balaklavas and body armor - where did the body armor come from?

Confederate flags in the halls of Congress. Papers strewn everywhere. Feet on ancient desks. Shots ringing out.

And now you’re watching it - not there, not in D.C., but from a couch. You recognize that it’s your ratty old couch. You remember buying it from Living Spaces. You were hoping to replace it with something nicer because it was getting worn down but then the pandemic happened - oh damn, remember the pandemic? - and holy shit that’s right, everything has been a godawful mess ever since. 

You realize that you’re watching everything unfold on your laptop, a living nightmare livestreamed by none other than the very people crawling through the Capitol Building, attacking and hunting and chasing. It’s violent and messy and frightening and dispiriting and embarrassing and it’s happening in real time and you hear someone shouting SHIT SHIT SHIT…. 

And you hear the FRRRRRZZZZZZ again.

You’re in a room. You’re sweaty. You’re strapped up to some sort of machine. There are two dudes - they look like they’re in their mid-twenties - and they’re fumbling with the machine and pointing at some sort of display.

“I don’t know,” says one. “It looked normal. I don’t know what happened. It was all normal.”

“Bro, does this look normal?” shouts the other. “They said this was going to go smoothly. Reprogramming my ass. I’m not getting paid enough for this.”

“What do we do? Do we waterboard them or…?”

“I can call my dad,” offers the second. “Maybe he can get us more money. I should have taken that internship at Goldman Sachs.”

“I’m talking about the person,” says the first as he gestures towards you.

You get a better look at the machine - there are a series of tubes snaking around - it looks like some sort of tannish brown sludge flows through the tubes - some lights blinking, flashing red? 

Your brain can’t comprehend other than to know that something is seriously wrong. You don’t know what to do. You’re not sure where you are, or even when you are. So you do the thing that human beings do in situations like this and you start screaming.

And the bros are so surprised that they start screaming.

Now you’re all screaming.

And then an older guy bursts into the room - he’s fifty but he’s trying to look thirty and even though you can only get a quick glimpse of his face you can tell right away that he’s had some work done to his face - and he starts swearing and he shouts at the guys “What the hell is going on?!”

They start apologizing to him - you think they just called him ‘Churg’ but that can’t be right. They blame one another and they blame the machine and they blame the fact that they only got three hours of training and a gift certificate to Steak ‘N Shake. 

‘Churg’ screams at them. They scream again. You’re still screaming - you haven’t stopped screaming except to take the occasional frantic breath.

All of the screaming causes the monkey to scream - oh yeah, there’s a monkey trapped in a cage on the other side of the room. It looks like he has a colander on his head. He’s grasping a pair of bran muffins in his clenched monkey fists, shaking them about with a feral fury.

‘Churg’ hollers, “You’re upsetting the monkey!” as he barrels across the room to the cage.

“What are you doing to me?!” you cry out, your vocal chords raw from all of the commotion. You ask, but you know that whatever they’d say back to you would probably be a lie. So you try ripping off the devices and the electrodes and unhooking the weird tubes with the sludge that feeds into a collar around your neck. You shout, “Let me out, let me go, let me go home to my couch.”

‘Churg’ has a syringe and he sticks it into your thigh and you thrash and thrash but you can feel your limbs get heavy; everything gets heavy. And ‘Churg’ is saying “Forget” to you over and over and over and over.

And it’s black. And it gets quiet.

You think you can hear things? Like, soft murmurs, almost like echoes? Someone calling someone “piggy?” Someone bragging about how well he did on his cognitive tests? How he made America “hot” again? Someone claiming we’ll “run” Venezuela?

You must be in some sort of liminal space where nothing makes sense and everything is happening all at one and each thing that happens is nonsensical but also somehow predestined. It’s like a random number generator but you already know each number as it’s generated and every number is bad. And you’re out of it for so long that you start to think that maybe this is just your life now. Maybe this is where you live, in this weird powerless vacuum of inane, raving madness?

But then your eyes flit open. 

You’re back at the Ellipse again. You must have passed out. 

Your head is resting in the lap of Steven Miller.

And Mike Pence is there. And Roger Stone too, wearing a rakish grin. On stage, Lee Greenwood sings a cover of “Summer of ‘69” with Kid Rock, except it’s about January 6th now.

Steven Miller looks at you tenderly. He takes the foam cowboy hat off of your head to brush your hair back. He tries to pull his thin lips into a reassuring smile, and while you can’t say he pulled it off successfully you can at least appreciate the attempt.

He tells you that you fainted. You must have been dehydrated. It’s okay. It’s normal. People faint when they hear him speak. It can be a lot - too much masculine energy, some might say, for some people. Just relax. Everything is exactly as it should be. This is a love fest.

And you’re comforted. Or you would be, if you hadn’t noticed that each of Steven Millers’ teeth have each been filed to a point.

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Love you, -Nat