The world as we know it was falling to pieces the day that Barry Levinowitz stepped in and saved it. Barry had spent much of his life obsessed with the great push and pull that is the duality of existence. Here is an example of a thought that might plague Barry Levinowitz. If the whole world had air conditioning, the intake of energy and the emission of poisons would be gluttonous. If no one had air conditioning, people would die of heat stroke, bacteria would fester, hospitals would be unsanitary, cats and dogs would be living together… complete chaos. This is some of the lighter fare that Barry Levinowitz had on his mental plate.
Life is always and always has been created in the wake of death. Fertilizer is made up of dead plants, carnivores kill everyday to live, and the dinosaurs had to die for man to inherit the Earth. And once life is created, death waits in the wings until it is time for life to be over. All life ends in death.
After 54 years of life, Barry Levinowitz woke up and decided to save every human on the planet in one fell swoop.
The first thought that popped into his head as his feet hit the floor was always a snowball of rage. To build a home for a family, you have to flatten many square feet of nature. This begot a reminder that in order to farm, you have to destroy the forest. Then you build fences to keep perfectly innocent animals out of your fields so that they don’t eat it all themselves. Throw in livestock emissions, pesticides, farm equipment, and the next thing you know, you’re up to your teeth in destruction of the Great Mother. To even live, a human being has to destroy their environment and kill things on a daily basis. This is just the tip of the iceberg for Barry Levinowitz.
In his eyes, the world was falling to shit. Husbands were running around, performing strange sexual acts in seedy motel rooms while their wives were at home, staring at the TV. There was a whole generation of people who looked at marriage as a temporary situation that was easily corrected by divorce. This generation was perfectly happy showing their tits to perfect strangers in exchange for cheap plastic beads and hard liquor. Where had morality gone?
These thoughts were the most painful for Barry Levinowitz because he also cheated on his wife regularly with Sarah Apollonia, his co-worker at Benifold and Mason.
Benifold and Mason had been supplying the nation’s children with toys since WWI, when they came out with the Doughboy Kit. It came with a little tin gas mask, a fake knife, a small toy pistol, and a tin can with a skull and crossbones and a little label that said “Mustard Gas”. Benifold and Mason continued to outfit the nation’s youngsters with weapons until the early 80s. By 1984, toy guns were almost completely socially unfashionable. A group of mothers rallying against the National Rifle Association protested the company with such venom that the Doughboy Kit was discontinued. At this time, Benifold and Mason went two ways with their money.
One division began to make movie props. Benifold and Mason has outfitted such movies as Death March and Chopper Squad I and II. The company also designed all of the futuristic weapons for Nebula Nemesis. That movie went on to win an Academy Award for Best Simulated Death Instruments in a Fiction. It was only natural, since they had made toy pistols for so long, that they adapted the original Doughboy Kit for each American conflict up to and including Grenada. They also began investing in the uncharted realm of home video games. Benifold and Mason, whose subsidiary in the video gaming industry is Game or Die, outfitted the first arcade paddles shaped like submachine guns. In the 90s, they made the switch to software and gave us Riots: USA, Death March: the Game, Corporate Army, Riots: Brazil, and NFL: The Refs are Dead! Literally billions of dollars were made selling violence to generations of Americans. All of this bothered the living shit out of Barry Levinowitz. It made him sick to work for such a purveyor of death.
He was also plagued daily by the impending Chinese economic takeover. He understood that every person had to stop buying products from China in order to make the Chinese have a weak economy. He also understood that here was only one place where he could afford to feed his family and it was The Mart. The Mart certainly did buy all of their products from China. How else would they be able to offer such cheap prices? If only Benifold and Mason would offer him enough money to buy American, he could help cut the legs right out from under that big money making yellow chink monster, that God damned commie People’s Republic of China!
And in typical Barry Levinowitz fashion, he knew good and well that he was a racist. Also well aware that racism was horrendous, he loathed that part of himself as much as he loathed that big yellow machine. He hated it like he hated the part of himself that loved to love Sarah Apollonia.
Sarah Apollonia worked in accounting at the Game or Die division of Benifold and Mason. Barry Levinowitz worked in public relations in the same division. Every Thursday she would meet Barry Levinowitz and they’d have sex in the missionary position on the floor of his office. They each had a spouse at home watching their children, who were actually being babysat by pills and the TV. They both had reputations as good Christians. They both thought that people who cheated on their spouses were despicable. Yet every Thursday, there they were.
Friday morning, each was disgusted with their actions from the night before. They were self-loathers and barely looked at each other all day. They also went home and hugged their official spouses very tightly, as if they had quietly, without saying so, decided to never cheat again.
Saturday and Sunday, they didn’t see each other, so, technically, they didn’t exist. Their children and TVs made the entire weekend a whole other world. Barry Levinowitz’s children made him the most depressed. He would stare at them and think of all the children Benifold and Mason had corrupted, of all the times he had rolled in the fields of Sarah Apollonia, and how much of a failure he was as a role model and a father. He stood for nothing and had no morals.
Every Monday, Sarah and Barry would decide, without speaking to each other, that they would return to a platonic relationship. By Tuesday, they were exactly that: two friends who found each other sexually attractive and were bored with their lives of cubicles, pills, and monogamy. They passed the endless hours of terrible old life in the office by flirting like mad dogs.
By Wednesday, they were getting touchy with each other again and then by Thursday, it was back to making an excuse to stay late at work and fucking like pigs on the floor. And every Thursday there they were, panting like dogs and exploding the emotions of the week like a supernova of hate and love all at the same time. This is how all things were in the life of Barry Levinowitz. His days were full of contradiction. His was a life full of constant mental torture.
And then one day Barry Levinowitz woke up with the most amazing feeling of peace. The sun felt like God had sent in angels to kiss his face and gently wake him. His feet hit the ground and he began to walk towards his bedroom door with a clarity he had never before known in his life. You see Barry Levinowitz, our Barry Levinowitz, figured out how to stop all the people in the world from killing just to live. And he figured out how to stop being a racist and stop those God damned chinks with one stone. He even figured out how to make people moral again and how to make it up to his wife, to Sarah Apollonia, and even to her husband and all of their kids. He realized what every man must do and started with himself to set the bar. For some reason, he assumed the rest of humanity would read his mind and follow suit.
He walked downstairs and into his basement. His pajama pants were wet in the back by this time. He had walked right through the dog pee that he usually would have screamed about for hours. That damn dog never could hold it in overnight. He even walked right by the broken glass where the paperboy had broken the window for the third time in four months. He walked straight to his safe and thought of nothing but empty space.
No more would he perpetuate the duality of human existence. He was the worst kind of sinner: the sinner who knows that he is sinning while he is doing it but does nothing to stop himself. This sinner only sins and slumps in tender recognition that he is a failure in life. He isn’t the madman who eats flesh and believes God has given him the right to do so. He is the sinner who is fully aware he is breaking the rules while he is breaking them. People do this everyday. They do things that they know are terrible, and that they know are hurting people and the Earth, but they do them anyway. Most people just ignore their sins because something doesn’t actually happen if you pretend that it doesn’t. No reaction, no action.
Now was the time for Barry Levinowitz to save the world. He slumped onto the floor in front of the open safe door and reached inside. As he did, he thought as hard as he could of fucking Sarah Apollonia on the floor of his office. When he finally felt like it was real as real could be, he slid the barrel of his .357 magnum into his mouth and blew his brains all over the wall.
After his body had completely decomposed and no longer had any carbon to release back into the soil, he would be done destroying everything he touched. From hearts to blades of grass, the human hand breaks everything it touches. No one knew this better than Barry Levinowitz.
Tags: Fiction, writing and poetry
WHAT TO DO NOW?