Just a bit of heads up for folks that may care, my mental health decided to lock itself up in basement for some emo hours so I will probably be kinda scarce today and maybe all the way until next Monday (since I work on weekend). So, if I’m reblogging stuff, it could be on queue and your asks aren’t being ignored (if there’s any), I just don’t have anything in me to say.
((I know I should respond to threads, but I have a bit of a block and take a while completing good responses. What I'm thinking is if I post at least one thing a day, this blog will never become inactive and I'll respond to everything eventually. Remember, I love you all, your responses are fantastic and here's a back story thing to occupy you in the meantime))
This is the story of a man named Howard. Howard was a black haired, 5-foot tall asshole with a smelly coat. He resided among billions of other humans inside The Hotel. His room number was 5010101008 and he was dead.
While the residents occupied rooms with different numbers (seeing as room 5010101008 lacked the infinite space required to allow otherwise), they were all equally dead. In a sense, it wasn't so much a hotel as a 5-star mausoleum with a welcoming air. While Howard's instructions inside The Hotel were the same as the others: cope, don't mention who you are and enjoy, he was among the 36% who had difficulty with the first bit.
With all the major metaphysical funding The Hotel had at its disposal, it provided millions of programs and services to help residents follow their instructions, ranging from standard CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to 10-year SSS (supernova spanking sessions). Working through all of it would take several millennia, yet that's just what Howard did.
The main reason Howard was unable to cope with his death was its cause: being murdered and weighed into the Mediterranean off the coast of Marseille. He disappeared off the face of the earth as far as anyone was concerned, and it hardly mattered. He tried looking for some of his friends in The Hotel, but it functioned in a way that everyone regardless of their memories and identities started a new life with a clean slate. It was fair in a sense, but Howard did not take starting anew without identity as paradise. For him, it meant that in all dimensions - physical or otherwise - he was several cubic meters of flesh (or metaphorical tangibility) from not existing at all.
You might say he became a bit depressed, and find hundreds of hotel residents passionately and angrily agreeing with you. Not even a Huxlian lifestyle complete with copious amounts of sex and drugs and all other sorts of unrestrained entertainment could win him over. Many of his neighbours, acquaintances and short-term partners found themselves dragged down by his defiantly passive behaviour. In The Hotel's eyes, this was a problem.
One sunny indistinguishable weekday afternoon, after Howard's PDST (Pornographic Dinosaur Skating Therapy) session, he returned to room 5010101008 to find it resembling the interior of a tree house. All the rooms in The Hotel were catered to their residents' preferences, and seeing as how tree houses weren't part of Howard's, this was clearly wrong. Entirely disoriented, Howard resolved to retire to his life-size marshmallow replica of the Roman Colosseum to relieve this confusion along with the aches and pains those dinosaurs introduced his legs to. He passed his elegant Victorian bedroom and found the atmosphere of bleak inequality and class struggle diffused by a picture of a smug-looking Karl Marx. The dining room where he'd find desolate orphans munching on raw cabbage and drinking from their own tears was replaced by a cheerful nursery playground. The living room filled with enough stuffed dead animals to put off a rabid hunter was replaced with a small forest sanctuary. And finally, the life-size marshmallow replica of the Roman Colosseum was replaced with a sherbert Egyptian throne room, where a man sat with a laptop and laughed to reruns of 'Oprah Winfrey'. Upon Howard's entrance, the man typed a bit and a windows message appeared out of thin air titled "FUCK OFF", with the body specifying where to fuck off to.
Howard didn't have much choice to begin with. As soon as he stepped out of what was now even more foreboding than his old room, he entered a relatively large office space.
The mahogany desk of the office space was occupied by a single woman, who sat there as if expecting Howard.
"I was expecting you", she said to Howard. Presumably, she felt it necessary to make that clear to him.
"I apologize--", was Howard's response.
"No, no, it's perfectly alright". Was the woman's polite method of beheading Howard's response. She quickly went back on that: "Actually, it's not alright. Do you know what the purpose of this plane of hypothetical existence is?"
Before Howard could evoke his memories of quickly answering the teacher's questions to the groans of his fellow high school students, the woman politely beheaded his response again. "Why do I bother asking, of course you do. We attempt to make everyone here utterly content with what they have instead of lives. We worked hard to develop this establishment, or establish this development or whatever it was since we first started dying--"
"Sorry, who are you?"
"Eethe, cofounder, director and complaints manager of--"
"Isn't that 'Eve'?"
"They got it wrong, but I was making a point. We devoted ourselves to the happiness and contentedness of all post-persons. I've received direct complaints from many post-persons who regard you as a violation of their happiness and contentedness. Now you may be surprised to know we equally value your happiness and contentedness as well, even despite the fashion in which you've been described and continue to live up to that description. The nature of our concern seems to be--"
"Is".
"--that you are unsatisfied living in The Hotel, and everyone else seems to be--"
"Is".
"Shut up --unsatisfied with you living unsatisfied. As selfish and petty as their lack of satisfaction... is, it is still valid. Luckily", and this part disappointed Howard slightly, "yours is a fairly common case, which can be solved fairly easily..."
Eethe paused, as if to offer Howard a guess. Aside from his asides, he hasn't been given a chance to speak this entire time, and stood in stone silence until now. As soon as he opened his mouth, his response was politely beheaded again:
"We're relocating you. Specifically, to another plane of metaphysical existence where you'll surely be satisfied. We need not request what will make you happy and content, your many scarred psychologists have provided us with all the information we need".
Eethe paused again. She nodded to Howard, lips entirely sealed.
"Where".
Eethe uttered the last words Howard would ever hear from her "Find out for yourself", and vanished.
Where Eethe sat, was a cardboard box that smelled of the vaporous manifestation of passive aggressiveness. The contents included Howard's coat, wallet, and a few other possessions he presumably needed. At the bottom of the box was a nametag, which read:
