The OrphanAGE, Vol. 1.23

– 3 min read
Image depicts the edge a a bookshelf with grafitti written in makeup? The lower arm of the letter L separates the letters ove above and ust below. Love/Lust.
Photo by w.e. leathem

First Lines

She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. ~ Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

Drawing (literally and figuratively) from the scattered provinces of the realm, we are excited to welcome back the back-lip of our east coast correspondent, Aliciana. Chiming in from the depths of Missouri’s Mark Twain national Forest, the ol' Blue Owl, and lending an all-seeing set of eyes, Riley.

Peace,
Dante

In this Issue

  • Art by Riley
  • Essay by Aliciana Slagenweit
  • Poetry by Philip "Blue Owl" Hooser

I See You

by Riley

Black ink drawing of a distorted human face with exaggerated features, large empty eye sockets, prominent lips, and textured shading.
Riley, ball point on paper

Eternal Dong

Fuck my job. I just want to paint dicks like the kid in "Superbad."
by Aliciana Slagenweit

Work culture is one of humanity's newest religions. Somewhere between the invention of the PowerPoint and the invention of: per my last email, we collectively decided that the thing we'd dedicate our identities to wasn't God… family… tribe… or surviving winter. It is: quarterly objectives. The meeting that could have been an email that could have been a silence that could have been nothing.

This is your life. This is your life

    Synergy…
    Alignment…
    Optimization…
    Stakeholders…

The concept that what you do for money is who you are (that particular psychic hostage situation) is so new that your great-great-grandmother would not have understood it. She would have thought you were describing a curse. She would have been correct.

What your great-great-grandmother would have understood, without any context at all, is a drawing of a penis on a bathroom wall.

In the Roman Empire, a guy named Lucius probably spent six months preparing a presentation about grain storage only to have another guy immediately draw a dick on the side of it.

History remembers dick.

Archaeologists dig through the ashes of Pompeii and discover election notices, advertisements, business records, and, scattered throughout the city like beautiful little time capsules, endless penis drawings.

    not a few…
    not an occasional one…
    an alarming amount…

The official language of civilization appears to be dick jokes.

Entire empires have risen and fallen. Kingdoms have collapsed. Religions have split into factions. Languages have evolved beyond recognition. Yet somehow a human being still sees a blank surface and thinks:

    You know what belongs here? … a drawing of a penis.

There is something comforting about that.

You can spend twenty years climbing a corporate ladder only to discover the company was acquired by another company [whose logo looks suspiciously like a cartoon evil empire and a probiotic yogurt company had a baby].

    …your employee badge stops working
    …your email disappears
    …your job title becomes a memory

Meanwhile, somewhere behind a drywall panel during a renovation, maintenance workers uncover a drawing from 1997 that says:

    DAVE HAS A SMALL DICK!

And suddenly Dave achieves immortality.

The Egyptians built monuments. The Romans built roads. Medieval monks preserved knowledge. Every civilization also produced a guy who looked at a wall and thought: this needs a penis.

That guy has never gone extinct.

    …he survives recessions
    …he survives wars
    …he survives technological disruption

Artificial intelligence may replace accountants, customer service representatives, and half of LinkedIn. But somewhere a teenager will still draw a penis on a desk and immediately become connected to every ancestor who ever lived.

Sometimes I imagine archaeologists ten thousand years from now uncovering the remains of our civilization. They'll find hard drives they can't read. Corporate mission statements. Thousands of forgotten productivity apps. Millions of emails beginning: Just circling back…

None of it will make sense.

But then they'll uncover a bathroom stall, and there it’ll be: a crudely drawn penis.

    …no context
    …no explanation
    …just confidence

A message transmitted across time itself. In that moment, those future archaeologists will finally understand us.

    …not our economic systems
    …not our political structures
    …not our strategic initiatives

Just who we really were. A species capable of building skyscrapers, splitting atoms, mapping the human genome, and then immediately drawing a dick on the nearest available surface.

The quarterly reports long gone. The penis remains.

    as it was…
    as it is…
    so shall it forever be…

William Carlos

by Philip "Blue Owl" Hooser

So much depends on poets
noticing the details
that show our lives
have so much beauty in common
I thought while playing
Candy Crush
on the can at 3 a.m.