Lou Sees a Picture He Doesn’t Like
Lou looked down at the screen in his hand, crushed. He'd grown accustomed to betrayal, but this was new. He couldn't shrug it off. He glanced once more at the image and stood up from his chair a disgusted and misled man.
He walked into the kitchen, absentmindedly giving the dog a monstrous serving of kibble as he wallowed in preoccupied disappointment. It was like he had sleep in his eyes, but his thousand-yard stare was not that of a man redeploying into waking life. This was a man adjusting to a new reality altogether. Reality felt cumbersome and unwieldy. “Am I cursed?” he asked the barren kitchen. He imagined a modern-day Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill only to check his phone and see it roll back down.
Lou shook some ibuprofen into his left hand and dry-swallowed four tablets, no problem. Lou's a pro.
At the risk of repeating myself, double-dealing and treachery were nothing new to Lou. He'd dealt with more than he deserved. But this? He decided to double-check the screen. His headache was dwindling to an unremarkable ear-buzzing. Maybe he was thinking more clearly now. Maybe he was overreacting to the image. Time to check again.
He wasn't. This was bad. How could he be so naive? So ready and willing to just gobble up a mountain of bullshit? Lou reached for his pack of smokes, grabbed the last one from the pack, and walked to the window. He had to clear his mind.
As Lou slipped out the window to smoke his cigarette, the screen remained right where he'd left it. On the desk, blaring with brightness settings @ 100%, was an image of Matisyahu being slowly burnt into the pixels. The beatboxing reggae star purportedly from Crown Heights (but actually from White Plains... you don’t get to claim the neighborhood you move to, brodie.) was dressed in a blue jacket, unzipped. The beard was gone, his hair was dyed (hopefully dyed?) blonde. There was no yarmulke, no tzitzit, no hat. There wasn’t even a Star of David pinned to the fucking scarf he was wearing in the goddamned desert. This was not the man Lou had admired briefly years ago when his first live album was released. This man was a stranger. Lou was no stranger to strangers, but this was too strange.
"It was all a gimmick, and I'm a fucking fool," Lou said to himself, smoke pouring out his mouth and nose with every word, "Fuck this." Lou decided he'd un-save that one great Matisyahu record from his Spotify library. He had a low-stakes but confusing daydream about the implications of appropriating both Hasidic culture and reggae culture. He chuckled at the thought of a "Jah Jew". What the fuck was he thinking? What was anyone thinking, falling for this garbage? Fuck this, now and forever.
It'd be about 5 years before Lou listened to Live at Stubb's again. Despite it all, he had to admit it was still a pretty fuckin' great record.