Things You Should Not See

At the gym, of all places, I happened to glance at one of the HD displays and I believed that I had entered a PKD Moment of sickening impact. I was running on the treadmill and the juxtaposition of what I saw with what I was doing delivered a blow to my guts. I thought it would be a PKD moment--but it was worse.

Someone's idea of a gorgeous woman riding a mechanical bull while eating a F**k You W**res Pray To The Motherf***ing Gods of Morbid Ob*s*ty For Only Six D***ars Burger showed me Things. I lost sight of the images on the screen because I had entered the false PKD Moment. Here is what I saw while the ad played against the retina of my consciousness, attempting to rape me with its jackhammer-subtle evasion of all things real:

I saw Testosterone (it was yellow, in my vision) and Righteousness and perhaps a glimpse of God. I saw soldiers who lost their legs in Iraq, mothers who lost their sons and themselves. I saw soldiers whose lives were lost (the lucky ones) in Vietnam, and soldiers in the Persian Gulf, and in Cambodia, and in Lebanon, and in Somalia. I saw sores and boils and anthrax (I saw this). I saw a man raping a five year-old girl, but that was just an apéritif; I saw a mother who severed the arms of her ten-month-old daughter and let her bleed to death; I saw the tumor that may or may not lurk inside this woman's cranium, and I felt the texture of that tumor, as though pressed up against my face, my tongue, my gums. I saw a porn star suffering from rectal prolapse, from a little too much extreme anal fisting, but the woman smiled at me and said she didn't mind; let it all hang out, she told me.

And I realized this was the same woman who, in another ad, inserted her fist into her mouth to demonstrate the oral capacity and appetite required for Obliteration.

I hope you don't see these things the next time you glance up at this or similar ads. And if you do, drop me a line, and we can grab some burgers and talk about it.