byahweth

...this was going to be a long essay, but really, I think we can do this in a few sentences.

If you are yelling at a politician or a political party or some other winning-elections-focused entity, saying, I'm mad about this thing! If you don't give me what I want, I won't vote for you! -

- then the entity has to ask itself the question, Is this person going to vote for me if I DO give him what he wants? Or is this a person who's going to find a reason to be rebelliously mad no matter what? Is this a person who has identity invested in being opposed to me?

If the entity comes up with the second answer, then congratulations! there is no concrete reason to pander to you, ever.

El Ojo ‘The Eye’ Island Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

On The Florida Project (dir. Sean Baker, 2017)

The thing you have to understand about The Florida Project — before you can understand anything else about it, before the sad-children-in-the-shadow-of-Disney reading can even begin to do the work people want it to do — is that the land the Magic Castle Motel sits on was specifically the land Walt Disney didn't buy in 1964, and the reason for both halves of that sentence is the same reason, which is that Walt Disney was engaged in what may be the single greatest private real estate acquisition in American history and he was doing it using shell companies.

The story is that in 1964 Disney sent a handful of lawyers and bag-men to Central Florida with instructions to buy up as much contiguous land as they could, quietly, through a rotating cast of fake corporations with on-the-nose names — M.T. Lott Real Estate Investments, Ayefour Corporation, Bay Lake Properties, Reedy Creek Ranch Lands — and with strict orders that the name Disney not appear on any document, any check, any filing, anything, because if the sellers figured out who the buyer was the price per acre would go up by an order of magnitude that afternoon. And it worked. Walt picked up roughly 27,000 acres of swamp, pine scrub, and exhausted citrus land straddling the Orange–Osceola county line at something like two hundred dollars an acre, which even in 1964 dollars was cheaper than the dirt had any business being, and when the story finally broke in late 1965 and the Orlando Sentinel figured out who had been buying the entire lower-middle part of the state, the remaining parcels around the edges of what Disney had already assembled shot up to nowhere in the space of about a week.

And everything around Disney — the entire US-192 motel strip the Magic Castle sits on, the entire tourist corridor from Kissimmee west to the park gates, every single purple and cyan and flamingo-pink mid-century-moderne motor court whose sun-faded carcass Sean Baker used as a location — is sitting on land that was somebody's late-arriving, post-reveal, high-priced consolation prize. You couldn't get a piece of what Walt got. You got a piece of what Walt left behind, and you paid more for it, and you had to build something that would extract value from the proximity to the park without being inside the park, because inside the park was off the table.

This, institutionally, is called "agglomeration without spillover." Normally when you build a major regional attraction you get a ring of tax base around it — restaurants, hotels, retail, services — and that ring shares in the value the attraction creates by capturing a fraction of the visitor spending, and the local counties tax the ring, and the ring supports public services that support the attraction, and everybody's incentives are at least nominally aligned. Disney did something specific to avoid this. The Reedy Creek Improvement District, chartered by the Florida legislature in 1967, was a quasi-governmental entity carved out of the Orange and Osceola county maps that functioned as Disney's own private municipality, with its own building codes, its own fire department, its own utility authority, its own bonding power, and effectively its own police. The district's board was controlled by Disney landowners. The district's revenue went to Disney infrastructure. The district's tax base did not contribute to Osceola or Orange County services in any meaningful sense.

Which means the ring around Disney — the Kissimmee motels, the US-192 t-shirt shops, the souvenir warehouses, the low-wage service infrastructure — got all of the externalities and none of the tax revenue. The kids on US-192 go to Osceola County public schools. The Osceola County public schools are funded by Osceola County property taxes. The single largest property owner in Osceola County pays its property taxes to itself, through Reedy Creek, to build its own roads and maintain its own fire hydrants. This is not a secret and it is not contested, it is the explicit legal structure the state of Florida agreed to in 1967 because Walt had made it clear that without this structure there would be no park, and the state of Florida in 1967 was desperate enough for the tax base to make a deal that would, seventy years later, produce the specific conditions inside of which Moonee's mother would be trying to make her weekly rent.

Now, the motels themselves. US-192 was not originally built as emergency housing for the precariously-employed working poor of the Greater Orlando service economy, it was built as mid-market tourist infrastructure for the 1970s and 1980s middle-class American family driving down from Cleveland in a station wagon to take the kids to the Magic Kingdom, and the motels were built to that price point and that aesthetic. The purple paint, the neon signs, the "Futureland" and "Arabian Nights"-type theming — that was meant to catch the eye of a family doing sixty miles an hour on a four-lane trying to decide where to stop for the night, back when the only on-property Disney hotels were the Contemporary and the Polynesian and everything else was off-site.

Then the 1990s and 2000s happened. Disney kept building on its own land — the Caribbean Beach, the Port Orleans resorts, the All-Star Value Resorts, the sprawl of Disney-operated hotels in the thousands of rooms — and the off-property motels on US-192 got undercut. The All-Star Music Resort is a Disney-branded budget property inside the bubble, on Disney transit, with Magic Bands and park integration, for not that much more than a room at the Magic Castle, and once Disney built it the calculus for a visiting middle-class family changed permanently. You could stay in the bubble. You no longer had to drive in every morning past the Walgreens and the Winn-Dixie and the souvenir warehouse with the giant orange on the roof. The 1980s motel's entire business model was "we are what you can afford and we are close to the park," and that business model died the moment Disney figured out it could be what you can afford.

So you had a whole inventory of purple tourist motels on a four-lane highway with collapsing room rates and declining maintenance budgets, and you had — in Central Florida, in the 2000s, accelerating dramatically after 2008 — a population of service workers and evicted families and people whose credit would no longer pass a normal apartment application, and the match between those two things was the invention of the extended-stay weekly-rate motel as de facto low-income housing in Florida. Which works for a very specific reason that the movie never explains and assumes you understand, which is that in Florida if you rent by the week and stay fewer than twenty-eight consecutive days you are legally a hotel guest and not a tenant, which means the motel can evict you at any time for any reason or no reason without going through the eviction courts, and you in turn don't need to pass a credit check or produce references or put down first-last-and-security to move in, you just need this week's cash.

This is the apparatus Halley is navigating. Every Friday she has to put together roughly two hundred fifty dollars in cash, and if she can't, Bobby can put her out on the sidewalk with her daughter and her belongings by Saturday afternoon without filing a single piece of paper. This is also why Bobby moves families between rooms every month or so, which the movie shows and doesn't explain — it's to reset the twenty-eight-day clock, so nobody can claim tenant status, so the legal machinery stays on Bobby's side, so the motel can keep functioning as what it is rather than becoming what it would be if the state of Florida required it to function as actual residential housing, which it cannot financially support and is not structurally equipped for and its insurance doesn't cover.

Bobby. Willem Dafoe as Bobby is the most important structural figure in the movie and people keep misreading him because the Oscar clip was the scene with the pedophile and everyone got fixated on Bobby-as-protector, which is fine, he is a protector, but what Bobby actually is is the middle layer of an institutional pattern that has no good name. He's not a landlord — landlords in the Florida statutes have specific duties and rights and Bobby doesn't have most of them. He's not a social worker — social workers are trained, licensed, and supervised, and Bobby is not. He's not a cop. He's not a therapist. He's the guy with the keys and the walkie-talkie who is, in practice, the last institutional backstop between the families at the Magic Castle and the actual street, and he's a private employee of a private motel operator whose business model is marginal and whose tolerance for his interventions is finite.

Bobby is doing social work without the training, the funding, the authority, or the backup, and the reason he is doing social work at all is because the state of Florida has, for forty years, been making a specific set of choices about where the tax base from Central Florida tourism flows, and a specific set of choices about the rental regulatory environment, and a specific set of choices about the Medicaid expansion and the TANF regime and the housing voucher program, and the downstream effect of those choices is that when a family like Halley's runs out of legitimate options the last option is a motel manager on US-192 who has to decide every week whether the kid on his property is in enough danger that he needs to involve the state, knowing that if he involves the state the kid gets taken.

(This is the choice he makes at the end of the film, and it is not a dramatic choice, it is a bureaucratic choice, and the movie is careful to let it be bureaucratic.)

What Baker is doing, across his filmography — and I'll be brief about this because I've been on about it elsewhere — is documenting a very specific American economic layer that doesn't have a good name in public discourse but is in fact the entire substrate of several American industries, which is the service-and-adjacency labor pool around the big private entertainment and tourism sectors, and the informal housing and care arrangements that pool generates because the official labor market doesn't pay enough to support regular housing and the official housing market doesn't have enough inventory to house the people who work in it. The Florida Project is the cleanest statement of the thesis because the metaphor is built into the geography. You literally cannot film it without filming it — the motel is a mile from the park.

Which brings me to the temporal rhyme, because this pattern is not new and it is not unique to Disney. Resort economies do this. The Catskills did it, the Jersey shore did it, Atlantic City did it in its second act — the periphery labor pool that services the glamour core cannot afford to live in the glamour core, so it lives adjacent in a shadow inventory of housing stock whose entire economy is structured by the glamour core's wage ceiling and land prices. Mining towns did it harder, because at least mining towns had the decency to be explicit — the company built the housing, the company owned the housing, the company took rent out of your paycheck, and you lived in a company town. The late-twentieth-century resort pattern is a company town without the company taking responsibility. The labor pool is there, the substandard housing is there, the shadow economy is there, but ownership is distributed across a hundred small operators and the actual beneficiary is a mile away behind a moat and a monorail, and when you ask the beneficiary what they're doing about it the beneficiary says "we're not in that business." Which is technically correct. They are in the business of hiring the labor that lives in that housing at a wage that makes that housing the only option, and they are structured as a special legal district that does not contribute to the public services that housing relies on, but they are not, in a literal sense, operating the motel.

The Hollywood studios did a cleaner version of this in the twenties and thirties, which is maybe the most useful parallel because it happened on similar geography — the San Fernando Valley's development as a bedroom community for studio crews and extras was explicitly subsidized by the studios in some cases, and the specific wage ceilings of non-contract crew labor produced a specific housing type (the single-story stucco bungalow with the detached garage) that is still visible from the air when you fly over Van Nuys. The difference is that by the fifties and sixties Los Angeles at least had the public infrastructure — transit, schools, annexation of incorporated areas — to absorb the periphery population into something resembling a functioning metropolis. Central Florida never did that. Central Florida grew up after the mid-century, in the Sun Belt expansion period, under a set of state-level political and tax regimes that were specifically hostile to the kind of metropolitan integration that Los Angeles got. Orange County and Osceola County did not build the transit, did not build the schools, did not build the public housing, did not build the medical infrastructure, that would have been required to support the service population Disney's presence was creating. Instead they collected what property taxes they could from the non-Reedy-Creek parcels and hoped.

This is how you end up with Moonee. Not through the malice of any particular actor and not through the failure of any particular program, but through the compounding effect of a set of institutional choices made at the state level between 1965 and about 2005 that each, individually, looked reasonable to the people making them and that collectively added up to an environment in which a bright, funny, healthy seven-year-old child lives in a purple motel a mile from the happiest place on earth and her mother turns tricks in the bathroom while the child watches YouTube in the parking lot. The movie is not making an argument about the moral failure of anybody in the frame. It is showing you the set of conditions, patiently, at length, at kid-height, and it is trusting you to work out that the conditions are the argument.

The title is doing some work, too, obviously. "The Florida Project" was Walt's internal code name for what became Walt Disney World, during the acquisition phase — the blueprints and the planning documents all say "Florida Project" because anything that said "Disney" would have tipped the price. The movie's title reclaims the phrase and points it somewhere else. This IS the Florida project. The kids are the project. The motel is the project. The service labor force living on US-192 in tourist-bait mid-century motor courts that the company town couldn't be bothered to build because it got a better deal by not building them — that is what Walt's Florida project actually produced.

And the ending, which people have been arguing about since 2017. Moonee gets found by child services, who are about to take her. Jancey — her one real friend, the neighbor kid — grabs her hand and runs, and the movie follows them, and the camera suddenly switches from 35mm to iPhone and the two of them are sprinting through the gates of the Magic Kingdom down Main Street toward the castle in the lowest-resolution consumer-grade footage imaginable, a formal rupture so violent that it reads almost like an error in the print, and that is where the movie ends. The reading I find most persuasive is not the "is it real or is it a dream" reading, because the formal rupture forecloses that question — the film has already told you by changing cameras that this is not of a piece with what you have been watching. The question is not whether it happened. The question is what the iPhone means. And what I think it means is: this is the only format in which Disney is accessible to these kids, the unlicensed illegal guerrilla stolen shot from the fan's pocket, the footage that didn't require a permit because no permit would ever have been issued, the dream in the resolution that the dreamer can afford. Baker couldn't get shooting permits inside the park, so he shot it guerrilla on a phone, and the guerrilla iPhone becomes the thing itself — the last shot of the movie is exactly as much Disney as the characters will ever have.

all art, all creation, is industrial capacity.

to make the innovative, big, permanent, interesting, stuff that lasts forever and gets books written on it, you need to have a low level base of pissant barely noticeable stuff underneath it.

in regular industry, this is the issue of the soviet union, focusing largely on heavy industry and these big important projects meanwhile the smaller and nimbler consumer goods and innovations in even lower level pissant penny ante stuff goes by the wayside.

art is the same. you NEEDED the pulps. The pulps, the disposable art, the bad stuff that people with taste thought sucked, the things that get forgotten. because that stuff not only creates a table stakes of contemporary ideas to draw from, it also creates a pool of talent for people to rise through. you can start at the lowest low brow dogshit performance art, visual art, storytelling, and sharpen your skills while getting paid and rise as far as you are able.

Don Quixote only exists due to a large volume of trashy knightly romances that Cervantes decided to commentate on. Edgar Allen Poe exists in the context of a lot of people being Edgar Allen Poe but cheaper, more local, and worse.

You look at the artwork of people like Frank Frazetta, and it's insane that this was considered trashy disposable art. a dude painted a fucking painting that went on a magazine you would throw in the trash.

now, to be a bit of a romantic, I think it's good that really beautiful stuff could be made by people on the cheap and put into the hands of the low brow idiot demographic.

the issue of AI and the way we do internet creative work is that the path from seeing something you like to being able to financially support it is convoluted and confused. And that's when you're not including the large volume of AI slop.

a company pays frank frazetta to make a painting of a barbarian with a juicy ass and thick thighs hoisting his blade aloft. They pay him to make artwork of this type weekly, monthly, per piece, what have you. and then they put it on something that a person pays money for to look at. It doesn't go DIRECTLY to Frank, but it's good enough as a workable way of doing economic incentives. Plus, if Frazetta is good at contract negotiations and sells his art to the right people, we have royalties to consider, so every time they sell a poster or reprints or what have you, Frank ends up with some royalties. It's a system that allows for cheap art, without requiring the artist to be the producer as well. You no longer have to either hock paintings in the public square or indenture yourself to a rich patron.

all of this to say, this entry level stuff is great for creativity. the system of disposable crap art of the mid 19th through late 20th century in the united states is responsible for the greatest explosion in music, literature, artwork, and performance in human history since the renaissance.

and now we've thrown a goddamn wrench into the thing.

it's like how western clothing donations keep Africa poor and non industrialized. Textiles are a very easy early form of industrialization for building up proletarian labor and generating capital which can serve to grow an industrial base. But you cannot compete with free. You cannot foster the spark of a textile industry to service domestic clients if you are literally drowning in losing superbowl team tshirts. It's why several African nations have put foreward the idea of banning the clothing donations as an economic measure.

this is why I think we need some sort of rationalizing of the online economy so there can be a more straightforeward way of easily paying artists so that it doesn't require a tv studios budget to begin making a living doing art online.

we need more entry level disposable crap that people gotta pay a pittance for.

My sympathies incline toward the Garrisonian & third-worldist positions for obvs reasons but there’s a resistance to this. The difficulty is that, in the end, the Douglass interpretation prevailed. The constitutional order, once denounced as a slavers’ compact, was amended + refashioned into the textual foundation of abolition and reconstruction. This transformation was neither an act of enlightened benevolence nor merely a recalibration of domination. It was compelled into being, secured through conflict, labour, sweat and blood, including that of the formerly enslaved themselves.

IMO a similar dynamic is observable in the development of the body of int law. The body of treaties + customs that now constitute the field was not simply imposed as a finished Western artifact. It was contested and, in material respects, reshaped by postcolonial states following independence. The expansion of membership within the UN, which more than doubled with decolonization, altered the composition of what is now termed “the international community”. Many of the norms retrospectively attributed to Western initiative were, in substance, products of pressure exerted by newly sovereign states. The West has often resisted these constraints in practice, even while claiming authorship in principle.

Prepare yourself.

Where I am, it is Monday always.

When a newcomer arrives, they are greeted by Sivad. Sivad is the ruler of this place, which has no name but many call Mondays. It is always Monday in Mondays.

Sivad has told me that Mondays is not infinite, but it is large enough that I no longer see purpose in making the distinction. It is a plain of small green hills which continue on in each direction longer than anyone has ever traveled. Sivad claims that four impassable perpendicular walls lie at the ends, which connect at the corners to create the massive square of land in which we reside. I often ask him if anyone has ever reached the walls, and no one ever has. I have also asked to know in miles the distance it spans, and he will not answer. He does not often respond to questions with numerical answers: the number of people in Mondays, the amount of towers spanning all of this place, the eons that have passed since my death, these are mysteries.

The hills are repetitive: grass, people, towers. There is nothing else. Grass is everywhere, it grows back as soon as it is pulled, most people remain in towers. I am a continual traveler, which is uncommon but not rare enough to draw interest. The majority remain in the same tower or group of towers for centuries or millennia at a time. I have rarely stayed in one for longer than a month.

There is night and day, but no sun. Light slowly and inexplicably ebbs and flows from the clear sky. Days last exactly nine hundred hours. I have counted this and heard it corroborated by thousands of others who have done the same. There are no stars at night, and then it is only possible to travel by the glow of the towers.

The towers are arranged in a uniform grid. They are similar, but each has differences in construction, some more than others. They are all concrete, tall and unpainted, between forty and one hundred and forty stories tall. Each floor on each tower except for the first floor and the roof has thirty rooms. Twenty-nine of the rooms are undecorated identical bedrooms and the last is a library which is normally the room closest to the building's staircase. The arrangement of any floor's library is unique, but every library in every tower has the same content: several thousand copies of the same indestructible book. The book is unchanged at every tower. It is over twenty-two hundred pages long, bound in orange leather. It has no title or author inscribed on the front or side, but four thick black stripes run horizontally across the surface.

If one runs in any cardinal direction from a tower at a fast pace, they will reach another in about four hours. No matter where someone is standing, if it is day, it is always possible to spot exactly one tower. This shouldn't be possible, as taller entities can normally be seen from farther distances than smaller ones, but it is natural in Mondays. As soon as a traveler crosses the halfway point between two towers, the one that is farther away will vanish from sight even if it is being seen by someone walking backwards. I have conducted this experiment on countless occasions. I stand still and push my head forward and back at an invisible border, watching a tower reappear and disappear with each movement. It is impossible to see two at once from the same location. If two people with towers behind them stand at the opposite side of a border and face each other, neither will be able to see a tower, but if they each turn around they will notice what the other could not.

I came to Mondays in my early thirties. I died young. My husband had picked up baking as a hobby during quarantine, and I stole a taste of raw cookie dough, which killed me.

There is an area of towers in the center of Mondays, a twenty by twenty square where newcomers arrive. Immediately after death, they always wake up in a bedroom, alone, in one of those four hundred center towers. Sivad greets them as they wake and offers to answer the questions they may have. I should say that he greeted them. Sivad has told me that no one new will ever come to Mondays again. Humanity has died out, and everyone has either been sent here or elsewhere.

Everyone sees Sivad differently. I see him as a flat humanoid shadow moving through the walls and floor, except for his hands, which stick out from the wall and are made from moving sand, the fingers of which snap repeatedly whenever he answers a question. I have heard descriptions of him as a man made of grass, a living gold statue, a talking hat, a perpetually bleeding horse, a small sun, a collection of colored pyramids, a suitcase with teeth, and a lizard which vomits glowing images of numbers whenever it speaks.

I once met a woman who said that her Sivad was Jon. I am certain she was lying.

My first question when I came was where. Sivad does not call it Mondays, this is only the name that those who stay at the center have agreed on, which has spread through slow osmosis over time. He told me that we are in a place where it is always Monday, and I asked for him to explain further, to provide me with reason, and he did.

Measurements are not a human construct. They are implanted inside us by the Kings, who Sivad will not elaborate on beyond the cold statement that it was they who overthrew and consumed the Creator. Some measurements used by humans obey the desires the Kings have given us, and some rebel against these natural instincts.

Sivad calls it obedience or rebellion, but he has never dictated either to be positive or negative. The words are only explaining if we are living in accordance with the Kings' measurement systems. Metric is obedience, imperial is rebellion. Denary numeral systems are obedience, all others are rebellion. The Gregorian calendar, or any calendar with a repeating seven day structure, is also obedience. Monday is the human name we give the second day of the obedient week.

Only time of death determines where we go. It is not a punishment or a reward, only how it is. Each day delivers everyone to a separate afterlife where obliteration is impossible, and from each of these seven afterlives it is possible to escape to a final destination which is said to be a shared eternal paradise, free of suffering. This paradise is not us ceasing to exist, it is a place, I asked. No one who is there would ever want to leave.

There were never children in Mondays. Those who die before the age of sixteen are sent immediately to the shared paradise.

Five of the seven afterlives have been collapsed, as everyone inside them has escaped to the shared paradise. No one has ever escaped from Mondays, and no one has ever escaped from another day, although Sivad will not tell me which one it is.

Naturally I asked Sivad how I might escape. Everyone in Mondays can only escape together. There is a question which Sivad provides us. It is a binary question with a correct solution and we can only answer yes or no.

Whenever we are alone in a bedroom or a library with a closed door, we can summon Sivad by calling for him. It does not matter if someone has summoned him elsewhere. If we are not alone he will not come, and if we are speaking and someone opens the door he will leave until we call him again under the correct conditions. Whenever we call Sivad we can change our answer, and he will remember it until we change it again. We begin with no declared answer, but once we answer for the first time we cannot go back to being undecided, only switch between yes or no. We can change it as many times as we wish. We can also summon him to answer questions for us, many of which he does answer, many of which he does not.

In order for us to leave, we would need to all, everyone who is in Mondays, what is likely about one-seventh of all humans who have ever lived, need to at the same time have registered the same answer to Sivad's question, and this answer would need to be correct. If we all provided the same incorrect answer, our memories would be erased and we would be sent to random towers throughout Mondays. This has not happened before.

I asked what the question was. Sivad told me.

"On the 30th of May, 1990, did Jon Arbuckle drink dog semen?"

The first time I heard this question, I asked him to repeat it. This is all he will do. He is the most strict about questions which attempt to clarify his question, which is a terrible problem for us. We cannot ask for definitions or clarifications, so he would not tell me who Jon Arbuckle was.

When I realized my attempts at clarifying the question weren't going to work, I moved on.

The next questions I had for Sivad was about myself, and he answered. Our minds and bodies are changed when we arrive in Mondays. We cannot die again, we cannot be hurt or experience pain, we cannot eat or drink, we cannot make waste, we cannot sexually pleasure ourselves or others. My penis now has as much sensation as my toes and nothing can motivate it to rise. My prostate, once a trusted smile provider, now grants me only indifference. We can sleep, but we do not have any physical need. We never physically tire, even with severe exertion. It is impossible to lose or gain weight, but it is only cosmetic. Everyone is as strong and fast as everyone else. We can run for years without needing to stop. Our memories are improved, and we have an immeasurably greater, but finite and imperfect, ability to retain information. I can remember everyone I have spoken to since I have come here and all the conversations I have had in enough detail to recreate them perfectly in my head.

We do not and cannot speak any language from Earth. I once knew English and some Portuguese, and I cannot remember how to speak either. The language on Mondays sounds similar to German, I am told, but it involves frequent purring, which we are all innately capable of. Strangely, it often takes newcomers minutes or hours to first notice the switch.

We cannot touch others. If two people attempt to shake hands, they will phase through each other as if they are ghosts. It is possible to interact with another through objects, but not harm someone. If someone were to throw a book at my head, it would connect, but there would be no pain or injury even if they had dropped it on me from the roof of a tower. It takes us several minutes, but we can travel through walls of the towers and most objects, so it is not possible to be trapped.

After I learned this I decided that I would leave the tower and seek help, reasoning that others who had been there longer would be more knowledgeable than I and that I could call for Sivad again later. I left my bedroom and ran into a woman immediately in the staircase. I told her I was new, and that I didn't understand the question, and she brought me to the floor's library. There was a small crowd gathered reading and chatting, and she ordered that everyone be quiet. She explained to them that I was new, then she thrust one of the books into my hands and had me read silently. They all watched me. I noticed many of them smiling.

The only book inside every library is a complete collection of every nationally syndicated Garfield comic strip published daily from 1978 to 2038, one month short of sixty years. They were ordered by publishing date, and there were on average ten comics on each page. When I read it for the first time, I discovered that Garfield's owner was named Jon Arbuckle. Garfield was not a significant factor in my life prior to my death. I had read less than ten of the strips and had never purposely sought them out beforehand. I once as a child won a keychain with Odie's face on it for a subpar performance in my school's spelling bee, which I lost and had not missed.

I read enough random strips to grasp Garfield conceptually. Jon Arbuckle was a lonely young cartoonist who lived with his dog Odie and his obese tabby, Garfield. It is not always Monday in the world of Garfield, but time does not seem to pass. No one ages, the status quo is rarely harmed. Their dimension is encased by a bubble of slow, invisible lasagna which weakens the damage time would otherwise inflict.

The punchlines came as I read, universal truths which I was made to recognize. Jon was lonely. Garfield was lazy. Jon was geeky. Garfield loves lasagna. Jon, despite his best efforts, was not skilled when it came to attracting women. Garfield was a poor mice catcher. Jon's optimism was rarely awarded. Garfield bullied Odie. Garfield bullied Nermal, a small kitten who annoyed him. Garfield bullied Jon. The universe often punished Garfield for his cruelty, laziness, and pessimism.

It did not take me long to find the strip for the 30th of May, 1990. It had three panels, as do most Garfield strips.

In it, I saw Jon, Garfield, and a female veterinarian I would later learn was Liz. For more than twenty-five years of the comic's publication, Jon attempted to unsuccessfully seduct Garfield's veterinarian, a sardonic woman who most often displayed apathy and occasionally open contempt towards him. In 2006, they began dating, although the apathy remained. In 2032, they wed.

Garfield was the ring bearer. He ate it. Garfield is fat.

They were not dating on the 30th of May, 1990. In that day's comic, Jon had taken Garfield to her office for a physical examination. Liz and Jon are standing, and Garfield is watching them from the examination table.

In the first panel, Jon notices an unidentified cup of liquid on the same examination table Garfield is sitting on. He looks satisfied with himself. He imitates Liz and declares in her voice that the cup is filled with coffee, which she has left for him. He thanks his crude emulation of her and reaches for it. Liz appears shocked, and most readers before reaching the second panel understand that something is wrong. It does not create the expectation that what Jon is drinking is what he believes it to be.

The cup is blue and opaque. The reader cannot see the color of the liquid inside it. One recurring point of debate is whether the cup is a mug or not. The cup appears to resemble, in thickness, a mug more than a disposable or plastic cup, but the reader cannot see any handle in any of the three panels, and Jon does not pick it up by the handle when he drinks it in the second panel. It is theorized by some that the cup is a mug and that it is always positioned in a way where the handle is hidden from the reader's perspective. I disagree with this idea, but I am of the opinion that it doesn't matter. The mug theory is only important to the rare individuals who seriously contend that Jon is drinking coffee, and these people are hated by almost all others in Mondays.

In the second panel, Jon raises the cup to his lips and drinks, his eyes closed. He is still smiling, and we understand that he has not tasted it yet. Garfield is apathetic, but Liz's face has changed. She is herself again, sarcastic and unsympathetic for what Jon's hubris has brought him to do. She congratulates him, but does not say for what.

In the third panel, our earlier suspicions are confirmed. Jon was not drinking coffee, as evidenced by his face which is wrinkled in disgust. He may vomit. Liz smiles cruelly and tells Jon that he is going to give birth to a fine, healthy litter of puppies.

Garfield hears this and his eyes widen. He exclaims that he hates puppies. With this remark, the strip is over.

The first occasion I saw these three panels, in the library in front of the crowd, I read it almost ten times and then dropped the book on the floor. I had accepted my death, it had not been difficult. This was harder for me to come to terms with, that my salvation would depend on my understanding of whether or not Jon Arbuckle had consumed dog semen.

I looked at the ones who had been watching me. I said nothing but hoped for reassurance, and they laughed at me, the hopelessness obvious on my face.

They weren't trying to hurt me. It was funny, and they had all gone through it themselves. I had died early in human history. People had only been in Mondays for at most several hundred thousand years, when the first Homo Sapiens died. People were more friendly then, as a whole.

Most of the crowd ignored me after that, but a small group including the woman who greeted me sat down with me and explained the known history of Mondays and the basic arguments of Sivad's question.

People arrived in Mondays long before Garfield was created, I discovered. The first ones discovered they could read despite having died before the creation of the written word. This is not because Mondays is separated or disconnected from time in our universe. The comic strips were transported from the future to the past so that the first arrivals at Mondays could begin to think about the question, although they were not allowed to answer until there was a population exceeding five hundred million.

The first problem the question creates is that we cannot know what it is truly asking. We do not know what it means when it is asking whether Jon Arbuckle has consumed dog semen. Presumably Jon Arbuckle is fictional, and does not exist. When we want to know if he has done something, what are we appealing to? Is it asking what the artist of the comic believed Jon Arbuckle was drinking, or what Sivad thought he was drinking, or what the Kings thought he was drinking, or what the majority of people who have read it thought he was drinking? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle's dog semen consumption is an objective universal truth or falsehood? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle does exist in a physical reality we cannot visit but that comics allow us to view, and that in that reality there was something liquid in the cup he was drinking, which was or was not dog semen?

Whatever the question leads us to conclude, we only have two answers.

The first is yes, it is dog semen. Yes explains why Jon is disgusted and why Liz would connect it with a hypothetical canine pregnancy experienced by Jon. Yes is appealing because it is intuitive and seems to connect with the original intentions of the comic the best. Yes Men often are more focused on the conditions around the comic instead of the comic itself. They think about who the comic may have been intended for and how people tend to interpret it contextually. They primarily rely on a perspective that takes our own world into account and focuses chiefly on how the comic suits it.

There are actually some outside conditions that would suggest no, but Yes Men ignore them or have invented counterarguments, some of which I think are excellent. The largest of the outside conditions against them is the word of the author. Some people have reported that while on Earth they read about an interview with the creator of Garfield discussing the strip we are tasked with analyzing, and this rumor which by now is impossible to prove or disprove is accepted as fact across Mondays. When asked, he supposedly stated that he did not intend for the drink to be seen as dog semen. He grew up on a farm, and he said that pregnant cows would be given special formulated supplements to improve the health of them and their calves. When drawing the comic, he said that he assumed a similar formula might exist for pregnant dogs, and that it is this formula that Jon is drinking.

The Yes Men have multiple responses to the word of the author. The first is that he is lying. Garfield is a highly commercialized family-friendly comic which intentionally avoids politics and inflammatory controversy as much as it can, and the artist clearly has a strong financial motivation to refuse to acknowledge that the deuteragonist of his story swallowed a warm cup of dog semen.

Another answer is that the word of the author is unimportant to the question, and that the art itself informs us of the truth we choose to accept, not the artist's attached statements, especially ones made decades after the fact. It is or isn't dog semen, but this is not up to the artist to decide.

One last response, which I do not care for, is that the artist's opinion can be ignored because he is incorrect about the existence of a supplement formula given to healthy dogs. I do not know whether it is real or not and I do not care. I have spoken to many experts and many others have claimed to speak to experts and have heard it said with absolute authority that it does or doesn't exist. I do not think it concerns us and I refuse to carry on conversations about the scientific accuracy of this detail. When I meet people who are concerned with this issue I immediately leave them and move on to the next tower.

The other real world factor which goes against the Yes Men is that, Garfield being the safe and commercialized property that it is, it would not make sense for the author to have written a comic that intentionally implies that a character has downed a shot of dog semen. This is often challenged with other examples of Garfield comics that go against the trend and show us that even Garfield can break the rules. There exists a small series of comics in October of 1989, less than a year before the strip Sivad has asked us about, where Garfield awakens to find himself living in an existential nightmare, where Jon and Odie have abandoned him in an empty house and he is starving to death. Instead of accepting his situation, he denies it, imagining that Jon and Odie are still with him and living happily with his delusions. There are several other strips with minor sexual references, although there are none that can be charitably read to imply that Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's human owner, regularly drinks dog semen.

No Men are generally more focused on the comic itself, and our natural reaction is an afterthought. We may think initially that Jon is drinking dog semen, but logic makes it clear that this cannot be true. Most No Men subscribe to the dog pregnancy supplement formula theory, but not all. Some believe that it is a harmless drink that Liz had concocted to taste like dog semen in order to prank Jon, some think it is something entirely fantastical and futuristic, and others contend that it is actually coffee. The only common explanation more disliked than coffee is dog urine. I share this dislike.

The No Men ask questions. Why would Liz keep out an unmarked, unprotected cup of dog semen on her examination table during Garfield's checkup? Whether it is going to be used for eventual insemination or for testing there must be some refrigerated storage facility for dog semen at the clinic for her to use. She does not appear to be incompetent at her profession.

The Yes Men mostly answer to this that the same question applies to a formula for dog pregnancy, or any other proposed liquid that can be connected to Jon's theoretical dog pregnancy. Why does it make any more sense for dog pregnancy supplement formula to have been left on the table in place of dog semen?

The No Men are not bothered by the answers the Yes Men give them. There are always more questions.

How would Jon not notice that it was dog semen before drinking? Shouldn't the smell or feeling of the cup have alerted him that he was not bringing coffee to his mouth? Even if she is not fond of him, how could Liz act so horribly smug after seeing Jon drink dog semen? Why does Liz, a trained animal expert, suggest that Jon, a human male, would become pregnant after drinking dog semen? If she is only kidding, isn't her joke nonsensical?

The Yes Men are not bothered by the questions the No Men give them. There are always more answers.

Jon did not notice because he was not paying attention. His eyes were closed and he was focused on impressing Liz, not the dog semen he was drinking. Liz hates Jon more than we realize and put out the dog semen intentionally because she knew he would drink it without thinking. Maybe he has come into her clinic and stolen her coffee in the past, perhaps from the same cup, which she poured the dog semen into in order to trick him. Liz's joke is nonsensical, but only because she is shocked that her plan has worked.

These answers are always different in small ways, and they can travel back and forth endlessly, creating abstract hypotheticals too complicated and ridiculous for anyone to actually view as a correct solution. These are argued anyway as a game which both sides enjoy.

This game can be fun. Many of the proposed solutions are delightful. One of my favorite scenarios has Jon and Liz portrayed as bad actors. Liz is a saboteur who has put out the dog semen intentionally to deceive Jon, and Jon is a secretive pervert who is aware of her trick but who also happens to love drinking dog semen, and he pretends to be a fool who thinks it is coffee as an excuse, so he can drink the dog semen. They are both liars and each of them has won. It's almost romantic. Past and future comics are used to bolster these fantasies with loose evidence, which no one actually thinks is connected but everyone involved pretends to.

I also enjoy the schemes which appeal to science fiction or magic. I once encountered a trio of No Men on the roof of an otherwise abandoned tower who theorized that Liz was a scientist who had created a solution which would permanently alter a person's sense of taste to make all liquid taste like dog semen, and that she had added the solution to what was otherwise an ordinary coffee. This is the rare variety of coffee theory I enjoy. Another No Man I met suggested to me that Liz had actually engineered a way in which she could make Jon pregnant with dog spawn and that her remark at the end was completely serious.

These are only games, and while I once enjoyed them, time has worn at the novelty. Our existence is mundane and torturous, and I long for paradise or even true death, though I know we will never make it there. Our test is impossible. We are too spread apart and have no way of coordinating our answers, and there is great disagreement among us. With eons behind us and our original universe having descended into the final stages of heat death, I still encounter optimists. They are never itinerants. Being a traveler, it is possible that I meet fewer travelers than those who remain in one or a few towers for long periods, but never, never have I met another who told me that they thought we could do it. We can't. Anyone who travels knows we can't.

I only stayed in the center towers, which are emptier than most newcomers expected, for several million years, which is when all of humanity died and Sivad told us there would be no more newcomers. I left and went north, and I continued north until I decided to go west, and then I went south again, and I have gone south since.

I have seen everything.

There are towers with lone individuals spouting out nonsense. Pretenders. They are not crazy. It is not possible for us to go completely insane in Mondays, Sivad changes our minds so that we cannot. We cannot help but remain sane. Many refuse to accept this and pretend to be insane in hopes that they someday will be. I used to pity Pretenders, but I do not anymore. It is meditation, and I may decide to join them one day. It may be the closest I will ever come to peace.

There are the organized communities filled with Yes Men or No Men or both, towers with between hundreds of optimists, who argue with each other with the serious attitude that once they can agree they will be able to convince others and finally free us. Often these communities will be divided and floors devoted to different purposes. They will have a floor for serious intellectual debate on the dog semen comic and on how to convince others of their view, another for the fun game scenarios, more for casual socialization, and often a floor or floors for discussing other questions presented by Garfield which may help to answer Sivad's question. It is often debated whether or not Garfield can be understood by Jon on these floors.

I once liked these communities and I admire them, but they sadden me. I wish I could express to them how vast it is and how hopeless their efforts are. We will never find everyone, we will never coordinate, we will never agree. If they traveled more they would know. I am sure I have seen so little compared of Mondays, but it was enough to make me understand. I both want them to understand and want them not to, since I do not want to disturb their innocence. When I visit these communities, I now only visit the floors where the games are played and people relax.

These communities are easily destroyed. One motivated enemy can destroy everything. There are travelers who go around, both alone and with others, who look for these communities and enter them and scream whenever people in the most active floors try to speak. We cannot touch each other or trap each other, so these people cannot be punished or forced to leave. The Screamers will not be reasoned with. As they never tire, they can scream as long as they need to without end, and the community cannot leave to escape since they will be followed. Discussion ends and members leave slowly, and the community ultimately falls apart. The Screamers almost never lose. They will only stop screaming when people part ways.

Sometimes individual Yes Men or No Men travel and seek out towers where they share the minority opinion, viewing themselves as messengers for the truth. These people fascinate me. When they do manage to convert a tower, which is rare, they immediately leave. They are unhappy anywhere where people agree with them. I always ask them if they think we can do it when I meet them, and they say no.

There are towers with smaller communities which do not argue about Garfield anymore and have accepted what is our fate. Sometimes these communities spend most of their time sleeping, sometimes they stay awake and spend time together, trying to entertain each other as they burn through eternity. I agree with these towers and have fallen in love with the people in them, but I never stay. When I become comfortable with a tower, I soon start feeling like there is somewhere else I should be instead.

There was one tower with only ten people like this, and I stayed there for several million years, which I have never done at any other single tower. They were lovely people led by a psychologist who had died at old age from a terrible degenerative illness. She was healthy in Mondays but still had the appearance and body of an extremely sickly woman. I have never met anyone as compassionate and caring in my life or death.

After I was there for about three thousand years, a group of sixty Screamers came and entered the tower. Screamers love dramatic power disparities, both when they are in the minority and when they are not. They saw us eleven as easy pickings. I did not think we could beat the Screamers and I was still not attached to the group, but I resolved not to leave until the first of the original ten had, not wanting them to think less of me.

It took over one million years, but the Screamers all eventually left, which I have never seen happen anywhere else. I have come to the conclusion that smaller towers without dog semen debate are best suited to dealing with the Screamers. The members of the traditional communities are there to achieve a goal, and when the Screamers come and attempt to prevent that, they eventually decide that it will be easier to fulfill the same goal somewhere else. The only goal of the ten was each other. There was nowhere else to go, no reason to leave.

I stayed with the ten but eventually left and continued north. I avoided friends or traveling companions for a long time, but I made an exception for an old mostly bald man named Thomas, who was living together with a large tower community of Pretenders but was not one himself. In life, he had written about politics. I liked speaking to him because he would take anything as seriously as anything else, except for Garfield. He loathed Garfield. He would rant for hours about anything and I would listen to him. He liked talking and I liked listening to his talking.

He spoke about the Kings sometimes, who Sivad tells us devoured the Creator. He would call them fools and rant about how they were wrong to have disturbed the universal hierarchy. This always made me laugh, because he would admit that he didn't know anything about the Kings or the Creators. He just hated anyone who broke up any hierarchy.

He did not feel real to me. I would talk to others we would meet during our journey, and they would rarely acknowledge that he was beside me. Everything he did and said felt meaningful to me. We spent hundreds of billions of years together and I thought we would be together forever, but as we were leaving a tower he stopped me and said that we would only spend one more year together. I asked him why and he told me that he had said everything to me that he wanted to.

One short year later, he left me. He went east and I didn't follow him, as he requested. He said he was going to go exploring. I never saw him again.

I have been alone since, other than my brief visits inside of towers. I have seen the rise of the Cult of Lyman in the area of Mondays I have traveled through, who believe that Lyman is the Creator that the Kings replaced, and that he will return to save us. I have met a group of redeemed Screamers who try to convince other Screamers to change their ways, and a different group who were convinced that if every book were destroyed, we would be freed. I am still baffled by the amount I meet that are hopeful. I was asked today by an optimist at a debate tower why I think, with eternity on our side, that we cannot do it.

I told him this. I think maybe the Pretenders could be convinced to stop pretending and the Screamers convinced to stop screaming. I think perhaps with organization, I do not know how, but perhaps all the Yes Men and the No Men might agree to give in and submit to one side. It is unlikely, but it is possible. I think it might be doable to convince all the hopeless not to be hopeless and to try, to deconvert the cults, to stop playing games, to make progress. But with all that still we cannot do it, and I know why.

There is one tower I visited soon after Thomas left me, while I was going west. It was a small tower of forty floors, and there were seven people there who never left the second floor library. They sat and read Garfield together, but did not debate it. I asked them why they would read it if not to find the solution to the Sivad's question, and they replied without looking up from their books that they all just happened to enjoy Garfield. They would occasionally smile as they read, soft puffs of air gliding down from their noses.

I wanted to know if they were optimists, so I asked them if they would tell me what they thought about Mondays.

These bills have nothing to do with keeping young people from doing certain things or protecting the children or whatever. Their point is and always has been one thing: If your operating system knows who you are it is impossible to have any real form of privacy on the computer.