Wren

Taken out of context, the situation was certainly bizarre. Gregg was taking loads of antihistamines, passing out every four hours because of the sedation, and in-between writing out meaningless laws by hand into thin, college-ruled notebooks. He lived in a bat-shit apartment complex, built (he thought) directly inside a pre-existing condition.

One of his friends, sitting on the couch, picked up the notebook. “What is this?”

“It’s my activist law,” Gregg said. “That one dictates the personal effect of friendships on activists. You wouldn’t understand it. Feel free to open up the notebook. No, get that look off your face. I think you’re being unfair with your tossing of it aside. Please, pick the notebook from the floor and hand it to me.”

“Why?” asked Bart.

“I’ve just had a sudden inspiration. This apartment complex is full of people who understand nothing about their world or friends. Hand it over, while I make the fixes.”

His friend, Bart, watched Gregg add to the notebook.

He wrote down “misunderstanding quotient” in subsection b of “typical social situations requiring fixes”, in the place of “hazards of friendships” as defined by the same terms: estimated confusion, calculated between one and eight (the average number of misunderstood factors,) divided by number of times the relationship had gone downhill. He thought he needed an example, so inserted: a misunderstanding quotient greater than one confirms all suspicion of idiocy. A situation of one friend being an idiot and the other being a genius will require assessment and fixes as defined by social action in misunderstanding neighborhoods, subsection a.

“So I’m the idiot?” Bart asked.

“No. The amendment isn’t clear enough,” Gregg said to his friend, who covered his face. “I’ll mention in coda that the misunderstanding quotient will determine how well people understand the brilliance of their friends. The activist can then determine to use ‘social action in misunderstanding neighborhoods’, or ‘social action in relatively cognitive neighborhoods’. Those two are in different notebooks.”

Gregg made the final changes, and faced his guest. “I mean, you barely even know me.”

“I’ve been your best friend for thirteen years, Gregg,” Bart said.

“And how much do we understand each other, really? Would you please not put your jacket on. Bart, I’m dying here. Bart!”

Bart quietly made his exit out the door.

After a quick nap on the spotty couch, Gregg wouldn’t allow himself to obsess over his friendships, and fixed a microwavable sandwich.

Gregg wasn’t sure if the baking soda was actually transforming his food’s taste to be blander. Was it the hydroxyzine antihistamine making him hungry, like a stoned law professor in the lounge who rescues the fridge from overfilling? The convenience store pre-cooked burgers and chicken sandwiches were just empty calories he ate out of laziness with mayonnaise. His misunderstanding quotient was probably greater than one, which meant the people around him were more confused than they actually were sane. He thought of including the term “danger to selves,” perhaps in the social action guide.

The laws were a total guideline for activist behavior. He couldn’t allot any monies to groups or individuals, but he could damn well define what they would do with the monies they did or didn’t have. Gregg was an expert in activism. Most activism was illegal, so laws were a natural way to diagnose the essential flaws of activism, namely danger and confusion. In fact, confusion was a variable in most charts for activists. Confusion was the zeitgeist of activism: the activists will confuse other wholly odd-thinking individuals in their charade of promising change. He fixed his coda to say “social action in confused communities”, and got rather excited about the name of this next law and skipped ahead to begin working on it. He napped first, and then started.

Social Action in Confused Communities

Taken to killing themselves or hurting one another emotionally, sexually, or, more rarely these days, physically (due to punishment, see: justice for violent people,) “social action” may be required in communities full of persons in danger of themselves.

Social action: the liberal behavior of helping a less privileged person or group of persons.

Confused communities will have a misunderstanding quotient greater than one.

That was all for now. ‘What if people actually began following my laws?’ he thought, and then drifted to sleep on a couch upholstered for not a magistrate, but a sort of less-important page.

Gregg was the fool. His friends knew his condition would limit response to social cues (and this had nothing to do with his activism: his friends thought activism to be a waste of time), but they never expected him to deteriorate to this level. The messianic way in which he bothered others by going out of his way to fill out government forms for them and top off their glasses with water got on their nerves.

His condition was characterized by “irrational consignment of mental and physical resources,” or, as one of his mates bluntly said, thinking far too much and doing far too little.

Eventually they ended his pleas for attention by telling Gregg he was probably being monitored by the government for sheer lunacy, and that seemed to placate him although his physical activity actually decreased from the resulting depression. It wasn’t a depression based on the unfortunate circumstance of being spied upon. He couldn’t maintain his mood while constantly entertaining his “guests” as he actually referred to the real-or-not government agents watching him. His friends thought it rather sad. They friends spent very little time with him.

His current obsession with “activism law,” which everyone understood to be fabricated completely, was particularly ironic because of Gregg’s lack of social relevance. A prep school ex-junkie, he appealed to the sensibilities of the one per-cent, or the richest top hundredth of the population, who perhaps felt pity on account of his addiction. The rest of the population thought of him as a leech or a wren, hawking above them as he either rescued or psychoanalyzed them depending on his interests at the time.

He talked in his sleep. It was difficult for the microphone to pick up his latest thoughts . . .

Bothered-by, or, literally, imprisoned with... --or taken out of context within. . . --or without. . . --I am the brother of him, Man... --that wicked construction of life which. . . --harbors... --interestingly... --no relationship to God but only to … --the worst parts of nature which I, like Herod or Homunculus the Deranged, can only cure. In cars, in busses, trucks and planes and such... --that’s how they might be found, yes. . .

His favorite book, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” was lying on the coffee table. Inside this book, taped to the back cover was a microphone. And through the signal of the microphone, one man heard the words Gregg spoke in his sleep. ‘Profound,’ the agent thought. ‘Truly remarkable.’

When Gregg awoke he continued to jot down his thoughts on activism law. He yawned and said aloud, before taking yet another nap, that he ‘loves the agents most of all, who take him seriously, and who feel better for knowing him.’ It was warm respite for the man on the other end of the signal, who thought far too much and did far too little.