This Was Going to Be Shocking
2004-02-07 - 11:31 p.m.

This was going to be shocking.

It was going to make you turn away in horror at the twisted ideas to which I’d given voice. It was going to turn your stomach, and it was going to give you bad dreams. It was going to make you feel ashamed to have read it. It was going to make you glad that the story was fiction, and not fact.

While the ideas were still forming in my head, I sat down to watch some TV. While I was trying to think of something disgusting, I watched a group of people make a banquet from buffalo testicles and giant cockroaches. The cockroaches crunched like potato chips. Click.

As I was trying to conjure up something supremely disturbing, a smiling anchorperson told me about a woman in not fifty miles away. Turns out she’d gone shopping a little too late, and was attacked by a man she didn’t know in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The anchorman, with pantomimed concern, told me that she’d been driven a ways out of town, brutally raped, knocked unconscious, and her car driven into a nearby lake, with her inside. Click.

As I tried to come up with a terrifying concept, a police officer from a nearby county was recounting the kidnapping and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. There were memorials, and close up of her mother sobbing. It seemed too personal, too uncomfortable, and what kind of a man wants to rape an eleven-year-old anyway? They showed his picture. He kind of looked like my next-door neighbor. I don’t think it was though. Click.

A German cannibal who eats people alive. Click. A bared nipple on national TV. Click. Bare everything else on premium channels. Click. Kids killed drag racing. Click. AIDS killing millions in Africa. Click. Shock and awe, bananas going extinct, nationwide genocide, children molested, holy wars, sex slaves, click, click, click, click.

I finally turned it off.

So I sat down here to write my macabre masterwork, but I just didn’t have any ideas. After all, this was supposed to be fiction.