A MODERN
by Greg Gerke
if I have to tell you about myself, you can’t like really know me. see, my life is in pictures which are in my accounts. my followers know me better than my parents, even if they didn’t watch me grow up. they see me everyday, my followers. they see all the changes I’m going through and the absolute fucking fun I’m having every day of my life. god, my life is so fun. and I even get to take pictures and videos of it any time I want. and after I send it out, a few seconds later, every one can see me and what I just did—what is going on in my life. that is so awesome and like so so annoying too, especially since when I was just a baby, people had to like take their phone out of the wall and dial in to the net, and could really only read things, because the pictures took so long to load. jesus, I feel sorry for people whose only experience of the net was that cause they had to die. like all my grandparents—like they died and they couldn’t live to see how awesome things would become and how fast, with me being able to chat with people in Changhai, and like see how cool their granddaughter became and to see all the followers she had—I would have edited out the butt shots so they would only see my happy christian face.
I mean like, because I have this cush job working at Japanwear in sales, I can buy really holla clothes with the mad money I make. so I go into my bathroom because the light is better with the sun thing above and I take selfies of all my new clothes and then I send it out to everyone, it goes everywhere and get hundreds of likes and comments in minutes. and after I come home from the gym in my neon Japanwear suit, I stick out my butt, which does really grow with those glute exercises and squattings, and I get even more checks, thumbs, smiles, awesomes, and messages. totally fucking rad. I never knew life could be like this or at least I didn’t think it could be so awesome-like like. then I figured, given who I was, it would be at least a little awesome. I mean, I got along with people in pre-k and k and then I made a lot of friends in regular school. the teachers were really impressed by that. If I saw some idiot about to hurt themselves, I took over. I was like tiger mother, watching out for all those kids who like didn’t understand that fire burns or that you don’t staple you’re earlobe, it like hurts. my fourth grade teacher, Miss Crane, told me I was going to be the next Van Gogh and I was like, Yes! even though I didn’t know who Van Gogh was and I think I still get him mixed up with Picasso, cause even though Picasso was italian and Van Gogh was french, they like both lived in France. holla-fucking Confucious. I mean like can’t you just make up your mind and maybe live where people speak you’re language. but I didn’t really want to continue in painting, maybe some day I’ll change my mind and get in a gallery. but for now Japanwear is totally it, cause we get fed all this super interesting food and it’s all comped. I don’t even have to have food in my apartment, though on the weekends it’s a downer cause there’s just some old creamer in there, but, I mean, I don’t want to even touch it cause there could be bed bugs in that sucker. but I eat out on the weekend anyway. I don’t want to use my stove cause the pilot light is like, out, and I don’t like trying to light that stuff. my super won’t come and do it. he thinks I want to cook for him or make his thing happy or something, and he keeps pointing to the ring on his finger and I’m like, dude, I’m not trying to go down on you, I just want my stove to work, like what if my mother visited and she wanted to heat up oatmeal. god, it’s not my fault you don’t speak English. I mean, Japanwear is from japan, but like they are in america and so the people in the office speak in english. maybe he should get a little app to teach him some since whenever I see him he’s looking at his phone.
the strange thing is I don’t need men in my life. strange, but like true. they kind of always want my attention, but I need to show myself to many people, not just one. I can’t be reigned in like so many other women my age and beyond. they have their boyfriends or girlfriends, but they complain about them all the time: what they don’t do, what they don’t say—I mean, come on, it just gets sickening, like have some positivist feeling. then you just waist half your time calling people and trying to solve the problem of you’re suffering. then the other half of the time, you spend with the person and your miserable. things go well between people when you don’t hear from them—they are content, then they don’t need anybody. like, I have my whole life to worry about that. now, besides Japanwear, I have my photos to manage, then my daily dose at the gym, then fun with friends—the kind that don’t complain too much about their squeezes and enjoy what I’m doing with my life.
Image: Second Life
About the Author:
Greg Gerke’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Kenyon Review Online, Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, LIT, Film Quarterly, and others. He lives in Brooklyn.
