The Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

Poor John J. Roscoe, he's really going through it. His weeping takes on various speeds and intensities, a bit like the wind rattling the window outside, he thinks in a moment of absurd and punishingly pretentious lucidity. He had been at a vague-ly-defined social event but half an hour before, feet awkwardly scuffling on bare concrete, conversation with strangers and "friends" alike ebbing and flowing like the tide in a kiddie pool.

Poor Roscoe, he thinks in the intolerably self-pitying third per-son, nobody likes him. His head thunks comedically down on his desk in an action aimed at self-harm, dramatic defeatism, and withdrawal from the world.

Alone in his tiny room and his stuffy The Ramones t-shirt, Roscoe is, at this moment, a bit like Sisyphus in Titian's painting of the same name. While most depictions have the transgressor king rolling the boulder in front of him, Titian renders the great weight on his back, where, we may note, he can't see it. Roscoe's and ps feel the edged of tha his udi, ts seen is unbearabl in there he can't doesn't know what it is.

He can't see it.

He can't answer why.

Roscoe's fingers scrape across little bits and pieces, the concave divots of loneliness, the long ridges of virginity, the needley spikes of rejection (blood on one of them's still wet), smooth, round domes of potential-not-yet-realized-and-maybe-never-re-alized, along his spine he feels the calcified, blisterlike bumps of ghostly responsibility and damnit! he should be writing this down—

You see, he's been throwing bits and pieces of a novel together, trying to put a new spin on bourgeois self-hatred, nothing concrete yet, no, no, but something's in the works—

But he'll never do it- And there it is again, the self-denial, a shot at pity— That too! An attempt at banal self-awareness!— All circling around a drain to an unknown destination... Why does he want this bullshit to begin with...

And then it doesn't hit him so much as fall on him.

One of the key revelations of 20th-Century Heideggerian Existentialist Continental-Critical Late-19th-Century-Post-Ide-alist-Anti-Positivist philosophy lan arrow points to this word, drawn crudely down from What abt Freud???? in the top mar-gin] was that the rational self does not determine motivation, but instead a complex of advertisers (cultural, commercial, religious, parental figures [another arrow from Freud???? leads here], and cultural artifacts determines outlook in life beyond the view or control of the ""subject"'.

Roscoe scrawls this fervently in a small blue notebook that had been untouched since last semester, but will later modify such a pedestrian ("small potatoes", as he will later write it) outlook.

But what does persist is a sense of, and look, these are his words, not mine, getting-fucked-over. Stricken with an illness of history. That he must rise to the occasion and fight back against the gods.

Roscoe spends the whole flight back to Wichita "getting his griev on", as he puts it in his head, piling up grievances against his poor, poor unconscious.

He's spent the whole three hours just stewing, real double-double-toil-and-trouble: in go some careerism carrots, hearts of ambition artichokes, selfishness saffron, a pinch of paternalism parsley, squeeze out some oedipal edamame from their hairy shells, commodity-fetishism cabbage, obsessive-compulsive... something... ugh, he's abandoning this stupid metaphor and turning his music back on, trying to drown out the overwhelming ambient-plane-noise and let him zero in on pure, hot griev.

Roscoe's been a neurotic for six years, shuffling around his mortal coil attached to various obsessions of achievements and statuses he knows will not make him happy. This much is obvious.

But everywhere he now sees those responsible... the teachers who praised him a little too much... the classmates who flaunted their sexual achievements... the grandparents who always asked about college... and, of course, the women who said no, but thinking that makes him feel like a misogynist — this doesn't stop him from thinking it, of course, but that's because of those TV shows where the male character is the victim, yes...

They land, they do the whole parade of waiting, from inside the plane to baggage claim, to inside his mother's car as they leave the Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport, heading East on US-400, and he then has the guts to ask,

"Where was that place I went to when I was like two? Like the daycare?" "Your daycare? Gosh... 'Place for Tots', I think, or

'Way for To-' no-no, it was 'Place for Tots, yes."

"Ok." with an ambivalence he hope signals mild acknowledg-ment.

"Why do you ask?" in an emphatically surprised tone.

"Oh, just wondering, cause in a literature class this one short story brought up the, uh, bearing that childcare has on kids, and it was like set in the Great Depression so sending off your kid wasn't great, you know?"

An "mmm" of acknowledgment. Then, "Why, do you think I sent you off to a cruel Dickensian orphanage?!" dramatically, again.

No wonder John Roscoe's such a drama queen.

—

Here is what he needs to know.

Place for Tots has been in operation since 2002, and was actually founded, says its website, as a receptacle for the children of mothers rendered single by the War on Terror (be they "single" permanently or temporarily) but expanded its operations to service the broader Brookhollow/Eastborough area by 2005, when Roscoe was "accepted" into it.

This provides Roscoe's first concrete clue off of his daycare hunch. His preoccupation with getting accepted into things (high schools, colleges, clubs, between women's legs, a thought he immediately and viscerally regrets) must have been begun by this daycare's usage of the term!

The services they offer is another clue: the primary emphasis is on "Teaching children to excel in reading and creativity, and in helping them adjust to the ever-changing world of technology." Excel in reading, eh? No wonder he forced himself to read Anna Karenina at 14, which he remembers precisely none of but must surely have given him some suicidal inclination, given the fate of the titular character....

Furthermore, what was that bit on technology? Technology, hmm, that's the issue, isn't it, what with the snap-chats he wasn't involved in, the self-contained group chats, the hidden dialogues outside of school where he had dared not tread....

Though the primary issue is, of course, the all-knowing algorithm that supplies him the 30-seconds-of-self-pity heroin doses he shoots up on those long nights, and surely they're feeding these kids' every move into those algorithms, that's why they're so responsive, maybe they've even given them brain implants, but come on that's a ridiculous thought let's be sensible here...

One final sign, an indication of the origin of his discontents:

"Place for Tots works closely with local nursery and Kindergarten schools to ensure your child is well-prepared for the new and exciting school environment." This is concrete proof, an admission of guilt, that there is a conspiracy at work, no? You get the kid early, defenseless, then ship them in a cardboard box all the way up the Chain of Being from kindergarten to grad school...

Here is what he does. He calls Place for Tots claiming to be one "Tyrone Singletop,” a writer for his high school student newspaper, who's writing a piece on local businesses and wants to get the low-down on Place for Tots... but AAARRRGHH they want to meet virtually! (See what he means by the issue of technology?) He swiftly adds that Place for Tots is the most anticipated establishment-to-be-surveyed, that they want photos inside the place for the second page of the physical newspaper they still print for some reason, and that he's been put in charge...

OK Kool, will be there 1:00 pm Wednesday... what? Oh, no, we got on break early, and yes, of course, I won't take photos of the kids, don't worry about it...He arrives precisely on time (that's another thing they conditioned into him... and how diabolical indeed, for they conditioned everyone else to always be late!) with a camera pilfered from his father's office.

Oh yes, yes, great to meet you, oh I've been accepted into Draagekreik College, oh it's a very small school in Washington state, very low acceptance rate though, oh ok here's the entrance...

Clean linoleum flooring with a multicolored rug on it. Bog-stan-dard plastic enclosures (surely mirroring the land enclosures in 18th Century England, which forced the peasants out of the countryside into the cities, leading to the Industrial Revolution!) with blocks and dolls/action figures put away in tidy boxes. Not a child in sight.

Roscoe goes about, snapping pictures, trying to see if he can get in one covert second to feel for hidden levers by the TV or the blanket pile, but They're keeping his eyes glued on them. Hmm, maybe he should go talk—

Then he sees it. A door he swears wasn't there before. It's got a colorful pattern plastered over it, but with industrial steel plating around its edges. He knows he has to get in there. "Oh, this is the maintenance room, right?"

They're surprised, shocked even, and start babbling how he must be seeing things. He'd just made an innocuous statement, why are they so quick to hide it?

"Oh, sorry, was just some wallpaper, not sure why I thought it was a door-" WHAM! He kicks down the door, crashing into the room like a neurotic action hero.

He knew it, he fucking knew it.

The room is not particularly menacing-looking, set up like a standard office, cubicles and all. But in each cubicle is a small treadmill and a screen, with a small child crawling (but in most cases, walking, jesus these kids can't be more than six months old) with headphones strapped onto their little malleable ears pumping god-knows-what into their malleable brains. Well, actually Roscoe does know what, it's Mr. Beast! That entrepre-neurial-altruistic industrialist scourge of the platform, this time he's giving 100 people 100 days to crash the stock market or something, and the kids are glassy-eyed or even laughing god-damnit, they're laughing, but it's a shrill, hollow laugh, shuddering through their tiny bodies like sobs. Even worse, Roscoe soon sees, are the cubicles without baby-treadmills. Seated at desks, held upright by straps, are slightly older kids writing, and they're — no, surely not! — applying to college! filling out activities and— yes, yes that's the CommonApp, right there! There is not an adult in sight. It's computer-run, Roscoe realizes, and it'll probably try to lock the place down soon.

Without further delay, he whips off his backpack and transforms it into a wheeled canvas cart fitted out with gyroscopic controls and torsion bar suspension to stabilize movement, and he's going around scooping up the kids, tearing off their headphones and piling them in the cart. Some of them start to cry, of course, but he cried all the time when he was a kid and he survived.

He's halfway through the sixteen or so children kept in the room when They come in. They're suburbanites, though, more skilled in Instagram filters than dealing with Roscoe's American Muscle, and after some vague action-movie stuff he's cruising back into the main room, sixteen liberated children in tow.

Roscoe piles them into his 2017 Toyota Tacoma, yes yes some of them do have to go in the bed but he's prepared for this they've got little thoroughly secured play-boxes, and besides he's only keeping the older kids there and each of them's got a little Dostoevsky to read, it's fine. And off he goes, gunning it West, into the sunset.

It's a while before he starts to cry, but oh boy, it's a real torrent, he's barely lucid enough to pull over on the side of the road and just lose it, man. He'd planned on starting a commune out on the plains, maybe even try to apply for statehood if they get the ball rolling, but now it all feels so impossible, everything's impossible. Just because the future is an open plain doesn't mean anything can grow there. He sees it now, a cracked, dry landscape, soil sucked dry by wind and time and Sin, the Hereditary Sin of his Fathers who carved up the land amidst farms, factories, banks, and universities. Here, he knows, is only death, his death, and he has never felt it closer. It is at this moment he realizes he has died before.

You see, Mr. Roscoe was not the first Midwesterner to liberate a conditioning-plant and start a wild commune on the plains.

A certain Isaac Bindin, born in De Moines, Iowa, January 22, 1935, completely lost it at Harvard and tore down an Infantile De-Communizing camp in his hometown, tried living nomadi-cally with the kids for a few years but they all ended up getting jobs at Boeing and Northrop anyways. Poor Bindin didn't end up living too mindfully and, on June 28, 2004, when he fell too far behind on the cosmic treadmill of samsara, he just got sucked underneath like a cartoon character and popped back up the other side as a newly-born John Jackson Roscoe.

Funny thing is, in the time between moving on from the kids and biting the dirt himself ("returning to ashes" as Roscoe will eventually recall it on paper), Bindin got in a few novels, and if one takes every letter from his four works, they can be rearranged like the Hebrew characters of the Torah into Jack Roscoe's short story corpus...

Roscoe thought he could've just baptized these kids in backcountry Lethe-water and wash their Original Sin from them.

Unfortunately, it's a little too late for that. These kids, although some've only barely grown in their teeth, have gorged themselves on algorithmic pomegranates, and are bound for eternity to that particular underworld.

Thing is, though, Roscoe never realized that the underworld, as the Greeks conceived it, is a vast space, populated with rivers of fire and forgetfulness, great Edenic fields, pits of deepest black, and the prison-dens of Titans long sleeping, but always on-the-verge-of-waking... Titans that you can hear if you press your ear to the ground at the base of the right tree, slow, lumbering things, like the sun in the sky...

How did Roscoe fare in the end? Well, it's too early to call. I, for one, had a pretty decent experience with him.

I was at Place for Tots, you see, enrolled at the ripe old age of six months, and taken out into the Plains - and he certainly got more stable as time went on, and had one hell of a literary out-put, probably his past life vomiting up Temurah-ized words onto that damn typewriter he would so obnoxiously use.

And now here I sit, crafting a writing sample to put on my Middle School application because they won't let you into 6th Grade without one. And before you ask, the prompt did say, among other things, to "Use allusions and extensive figurative language to color your story. Employ an unconventional style or genre and make definitive statements on the condition of modernity, but only vaguely."

And my good-for-nothing parents won't pay for GPT-9.

Sex Septem