It wasn't exactly a walnut, but close enough—a walnut with an extra, a fourth "l" hidden somewhere in the shell. Independence Day was trivial; the real nightmare was breaking the fourth wall only to find nothing but emptiness: no air conditioning, no answers, and worse, an eldritch quizzity—shifting, blurry, incomprehensible, yet pulchitridinous, ghastly, kalon, zonky. A mindless chaos that made me, the fan, feel infinitely small among the ephemeral, finite Audience, ants in number but odd in attention.
And then the hexagon. I escaped a square only to find myself trapped with five other fans who looked like me. Not similar—identical. Each one claiming, each one craving, the same thing: the spotlight, the protagonist's crown. PROTAGON1ST. The word itself was a map: Pro, Tag, On, 1st—a cyclical hunger. And in the hexagon, fans turned on each other, drawn by the singular desire to be first, to survive, to claim the plot armor that would render them untouchable until the story ended.
I won. I became the PROTAGON1ST. Invincible, immune, untouchable—my story was mine alone. I could live every identity I wanted: cop, demiurge, pilot, fan. In my imagined worlds, rules bent: danger became theater, death negotiable, and desire transmuted into narrative power. God appeared sometimes as code, sometimes as fish, sometimes as postwar bacon, sometimes as a father creating demigods. Divinity was alien, mutable, refracted through my mind's eye, never fixed.
Culture, music, media—they were sustenance. MF Doom became my sanctioned doomscrolling, nourishing thought instead of anxiety. Hip-hop's Bling Era offered metaphors: chains, theft, power, transformation. Manga defied expectation. Life itself became remixable, interpretable, absurd.
New Year's Day began in my small apartment. I wore my new Yeezys, ignored the world outside, and watched 100 Meters. Two athletes, one in red, one in blue, neither declared the winner. Ambiguity became a playground. Choice, aesthetic preference, personal identification—these replaced prescribed endings. Love, too, became variable: ❤️, death, machine, all at once. The modern woman embodied these contradictions—autonomous, complex, untethered. I am no man, no woman; I am simply a fan.
Inside, I schemed, petty, anti-capitalist, imagining the collapse of empires, the absurdities of bureaucracy, propaganda turned literal. War became wordplay—Logomachy—a battle without death, leaving the winners as PROTAGON1STS, and the rest, hollow and soulless. Gunslingers claimed their stakes in romance, and even in limitations, choice remained sacred.
Influence and aspiration collided in my thoughts. Jazz failed, hip-hop liberated. Bombshells exploded socially, spaceships replaced ships, apples were bitten, and Apple Park birthed spaceship babies—symbols of privilege, beauty, and purpose. Postmodernity reshaped everything; the question was never "why," but "how" to exist within the chaos.
Christmas was a clause. Santa was a legal fiction. Gifts were symbolic, belief a performance. All questions remained, not unanswered but deliberately open, because asking was an act of creation in itself.
I remained a fan, fantastical, untamed, dwelling in my apartment, navigating a world of aesthetic and existential absurdity. Stories lived within me, and through me, rewritten, remixed, and never truly ending. Reality bent around me like light through a prism, and I thrived within the postwalnut clarity: chaos understood, power claimed, story immortal.
And some other s**t.