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All images © Isabel Rock 2015
| by Isabel Rock | October 21, 2015 |
‘You’ve got your Facebook face on.’
‘What?’
‘Your Facebook face, the one you get when you’re looking at Facebook.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And your Facebook ears,’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got your Facebook ears on, the ones you get when you’re looking at Facebook and you don’t listen to anything I say.’
‘Yeah.’
I grab her phone and throw it in the river.
‘GOODBYE FOREVER!’ I shout triumphantly.
‘What did you do that for, you idiot?’
‘I’m freeing you from the shackles of technology so you can start to live your life again and make deep connections with real human beings.’
‘But I don’t want to be free. I like my phone, I pay good money each month so that I can be in touch with people.’
We go to a café. Conversation is a bit slow. She is really annoyed at me about the phone. I stare into my coffee and imagine drowning in a hot black sea.
I pay with a banknote folded into a shirt. I learnt how to do it on holiday when I was young, and I thought it was the most amazing thing. I still think so.
‘What’s this?’ asks the cashier.
‘It’s a paper shirt for the mountain men of Black Diamond Mountain,’ I say, ‘I make them for them so they don’t have to go naked. They are incredibly lazy and just like to lie around drinking tea all day, so they don’t have the industry to make their own clothes. I also make them tiny socks out of spider webs.’
‘Hmmmm,’ says the cashier without a smile as she slowly unfolds it.
My girlfriend rolls her eyes and sighs, ‘Black Diamond Mountain again.’
We stand outside the café deciding what to do.
‘I’m going to TK Maxx,’ says my girlfriend.
‘I’ll call you later.’
‘No you won’t, I don’t have a phone now.’
‘Well, don’t let it hold you back. This is the first day of the rest of your life,’ I tell her.
‘You’re a little asshole,’ she replies and walks off.
I was just trying to help and that’s all the thanks I get.
At that moment a paper aeroplane sails towards me. I snatch it out of the air and unfold it.
It says: Evrybdy nakd laser rbbit com snd hlp, JB.
I realise it is from Jolly Bob of the Black Diamond Mountain. They don’t use punctuation on the mountain and sometimes skip letters as everybody is too lazy to write properly.
On holiday with my parents, aged 15 in a cottage in the country, I had no friends and nothing to do. I used to entertain myself by staring at the sky. I would lie in the overgrown garden every day while my parents had sex upstairs in the house. One day a huge mountain emerged from the clouds. I could see tiny people on it. I shouted up to them and asked what they were doing. Jolly Bob explained to me that this was Black Diamond Mountain and they were the Mountain Men. The men there are supposed to mine the black diamonds, but they don’t really like to work. They just like to lie around naked playing games, listening to music, drinking tea and dancing. The more naked they are, the more fun they have, and the less they want to work. Soon any pretence at productivity is abandoned and they devote themselves to enjoyment. The only danger is that the giant laser eyed rabbit will come and laser them all to death for not working.
I spent hours talking to Jolly Bob and learning the ways of the Mountain Men. It was him who taught me how to make paper shirts, to sing mountain songs, and play their special version of chess. He also saved me from an awful holiday with my parents, and I swore that if I could ever repay him I would.
I scribble a note on the back of the paper telling Bob I will send help as soon as I can. I fold the paper back into a plane and throw it into the air where it soars towards the clouds.
I go to the cashpoint and empty my account. £50. That is five mountain men saved from nudity. Not enough to stop the naked revellers and save them all from a terrible massacre.
I see my girlfriend coming out of TK Maxx with a yoga mat.
I wave at her and shout, ‘I can’t stop, I have to save the Mountain Men.’
She makes a funny face and looks the other way. I can make up with her later. Right now I have more urgent matters to deal with. The survival of a whole civilisation depends on me.
Time to think.
I go trumpeting round the park. I call it trumpeting and not jogging as every step I take lets out a fart. To hide my embarrassment from other park enjoyers I wear a pair of headphones and pretend I am listening to classical jazz music as I run. They are not plugged in, I just tuck the end into an empty matchbox in my pocket so that it has an iPod like bulge.
I get half way round the park when I am struck by a terrible pain in my stomach. It feels like I am either going to pass out or shit myself. There is only one solution. I don’t like to use the world as my personal toilet but if you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. I take a quick look around for the nearest bush and any other people. I think about the time I had to have a poo on a litter covered beach in Africa. And that time on a log near my parents house. I have mixed feelings about having a poo in a public place. In some ways it’s very liberating, a return to nature, but when it’s in a park in the middle of a city or a place inhabited by people, I feel ashamed that I am not a functioning member of society.
Wiping my bum on a leaf, I stand up. I take a doggy poop bag out of my pocket and scoop up my poop. I put the bag in my pocket and jog on. I run past two dogs sniffing each others bums and then the idea hits me.
I rush home and start up a company called Eat Love Poo. I make a website with pictures of hot girls and give people the choice of whose poo they would like to purchase. You can see what they had for dinner and even request that they eat something special like sweetcorn, or swallow a piece of bubblegum or lego. What they do with the poo is of course their business: eat it, worship it or dress it up and care for it, that’s their choice.
It’s not really the sexy ladies’ poo, of course. Sometimes it’s mine; sometimes it’s dog poop from my street or the park. I don’t feel bad about lying though. The whole Internet is a scam. People expect to be scammed on the Internet.
Eat Love Poo is a great success and the money starts rolling in. The area around my house is completely poo free. I have become a local hero and people smile at me in the street. I even develop an app for dog owners so that they can tag their dog poo on google maps, and I cycle down on my bike and collect it. I am a vigilante poo warrior.
I take all the money out of my bank account, and it sits in huge piles on my kitchen table. I need to fold it into shirts, but it looks like too much work for one person. I think about my girlfriend and realise that I have not seen her since that day I threw her phone in the river. I remember her smile and how we used to laugh and play ‘Hipster or Hobo’. When she wasn’t on Facebook we had the best time together.
I go round to her house and post a note through the door saying that I miss her and would like to meet up. I get a note through my door saying that she would like to see me and to meet her in a café.
I go to the café and wait for her but she never turns up. I go round to her house again and sit on her doorstep. Three days later she walks down the street.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,’ I say indignantly.
‘Oh, um, I was busy.’
‘With what?’
‘Oh nothing.’
‘No tell me, I want to know. What were you doing?’
‘Well, um, I was stuck between the exit doors in Lidl.’
‘You what!?’
‘I thought I would just pop in and get a couple of things before they closed on Saturday night, but the security guard was standing by the entry and not letting any more people in. I thought I would sneak in the exit – once you’re in they have to wait until you’ve done your shopping and paid so I waited till a lady came out of the exit door and I went in. It’s got those electric doors, the ones which open when you go near them, but I was too late to get through the second door, and they must have locked the outside door at that moment because I couldn’t go back out either.’
‘So then what happened?’
‘Nothing. All the staff and security guards went home out of the back door and didn’t see me. It was closed on Sunday and it was a public holiday, so I had to wait until Tuesday morning to get out.’
‘So what did you do? Did you have to pee?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Did you have to poo?’
‘I’m not saying.’
‘You had a poo in Lidl! You should have called someone, like the fire brigade or put a Facebook update that you’re stuck in the Lidl exit doors, and could the manager please come and let you out.’
‘Yeah, well, I didn’t have a phone.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing. I couldn’t do anything, I just looked out of the window and up at the sky. It was fine actually. It was quite an interesting experience. I saw Black Diamond Mountain, there’s a whole other world up there.’
‘That’s amazing! So they didn’t get lasered to death yet?’
‘No. I never saw so many naked men. They REALLY like dancing!’
‘Oh, yes, they do. But if they are all naked and dancing that means the Rabbit Apocalypse is coming! Come on, we’ve got an important job to do.’
We hurry back to my house and start folding all the money into paper shirts.
‘Why do they have to have shirts made out of money?’ asks my girlfriend.
‘Money is the Mountain Men equivalent of silk. It just feels really good on their skin. They wont wear anything else.’
We fold and fold and fold. We put all the shirts into my recyclable shopping bags and head to the multi storey car park. On the roof we swing the bags round our heads like warriors. They swing faster and faster.
‘NOW!’ I shout.
The shirts are released into the air in a huge swarm. We watch as they fly away over the city. I take my girlfriend’s hand and we go and make out in the elevator on the way down.
__________
Isabel Rock was born under a lucky star in a field of lavender, Isabel Rock spends her days drawing magical pictures to spread smiles in the world.
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