Illustrated by Kyle Fletcher, then written by Michael Kiser

We have jobs because we’re afraid.

When I sit in a theater and experience something profoundly good, so qualitatively divine, I want it to change my life forever. I want it to consume my visual field and never let go. Never show me the edges of its reality. There should be no bezel on truth. 

Similarly, when I close my eyes and focus my vision on the insides of my own eyelids, I see a red/black machine. My body’s constant chemistry is exposed. Blood vessels channel my heated rhythm over my eyeballs like a dark Aurora Borealis, sparking and smothering colors shooting from all directions. 

But none of that vision is actually there. There’s no source in the world for the phosphorescence we see when we force our eyes closed during a wakeful state. What happens, according to scientific studies, is that the brain panics from lack of visual input, and begins making it all up. It’s pretty terrible at this of course — it’s not like dreaming where we play back actual experiences. What’s happening here is that the brain is producing flashes and colors like sonar in a pitch-black world. There must be something there to see, it thinks. And so, with enough forced deprivation, my brain fills the void. 

Sitting in a theater, the soft glow of a red exit sign at the periphery, and the intense visual experience of a film being pumped into my view, I feel similarly self-referential and submerged. Ghosts of my own brain begin to float past my eyes. 

And whenever I leave a theater, filled with physical and mental reverberations, I begin to panic. I see the threshold of the doorway, the street, the inevitable walk home in the dark past cafes and cars and dogs being walked, and I panic. I want to stay in the somnambulist state of film watching forever. I want to never stop the firing of non-deliberate visual signals and watch them explode in personal epiphany. I want to continue being manipulated. I want to continue like a line so long that it nearly snaps of its own extended weight. I want to live forever in passively-produced phosphorescence 

But eventually I arrive back home, in my own apartment, surrounded by my actual things, and my actual cats, and my actual state. Actuality is heartbreaking. 

And the diagnosis begins. Why do I not have more beautiful experiences in my life? Why am I not more discerning? Why don’t I watch more documentaries? 

The brain fires on its own throughout the night as I close my eyes and wait. I forget that it’s my own heart racing, my own thoughts clanging against each other like so many electrified objects in a pinball machine. The score rises, the game chimes with relentless energy and reward for the unwitting smashing together of pseudo-insight after pseudo-insight. This is not dreaming. This is the brain playing a film against the backdrop of my own eyelids. Non-conceptual mental images spark like flares in my periphery but lead me nowhere. This is the insomnia of artistic influence. 

Eventually the sun rises like the house lights after a show, exposing the uncomfortable arrangement of folded-over pillows, blankets kicked in every direction, jeans thrown over the chair at the foot of the bed. It’s not a shaming light. The sun arrives to absolve me from an impossible journey, to give me leave from a self-created chasm between one life and another. It puts an end to the show I created for myself out of a desire to never let go of a new and profound influence. This is the empathy of day.

And so I got to work. That’s the deal. If you don’t make it to the other side, you go to work. And of course, as you might suspect, the game is rigged.