skit #38: five Nicks

171
The foot of the forum was very close. A boy, Nikolaos, had weaseled past the lictors to the front. The blathering of the plebes ceased once the dictator begun his oration. Nikolaos could talk, but not orate. The dictator's rhetoric was enrapturing, describing things which were ineffable under the market argot. He described the uniqueness of this century, the pride to be Roman, their confidence among of the gods. The plebes were quiet, entranced. The dictator possessed rhetoric Nikolaos wanted.

1711
His father opened his printed copy of the Bible. Nikolaus listened to his solemn father recite the passages: the sinners and their depravity, anecdotes proving the Lord's omniscience and omnipotence, the pending beatitude or misery of the afterlife. His father would slowly reread each word until he understood it. A proverb could linger with Nikolaus for days. His index finger felt the texture of the letters. Nikolaus wondered how something so flat could yield such depth.

1927
Nicholas spun the doohickey's knob, making the line dance. He yelped when the silence broke into staticky belches. His sister snickered at the success of her prank by the electrical outlet, but Nicholas ignored her just like mom instructed. He spun the knob like a roulette player amused more by the whirling than the odds. The streaming sound informed and slandered and and sung and fiddled and advertised and preached in a frantic human medley. Nicholas lay awake long past his bedtime with the radio, reveling in its incessancy, in the bombardment of chatter, in the plethora of stations, in its tireless companionship.

1972
Nicky was invited to watch television with the family when he turned old enough. He snuggled in between the thighs of his The aura flickered in the parlor, inducing a serenity and finally the meditative state he so often saw his folks embrace. Television condensed time, color and sound into an single horsepill. The phenomenological world had been dismembered, its efficiencies calculated, its vestigial moments discarded, and finally recapitulated into an RBG-tinted haze. Nicky meditated, consuming more life than reality could offer serially.

2007
The mouse took both of Nikolai's wee hands to wrangle. He clicked haphazardly and insatiably, delighted with the websites of everything he'd produced: an albino tiger, firecrackers, a bazooka, a lamborghini, an allosaurus. The internet bestowed to him all the birthday presents he had yearned for. They appeared in every with every opinion, in every context, in infinite variations on what he thought he'd wanted. And the internet bestowed to him things he hadn't known he'd yearned for yet: mortgages, valium, blowjobs. Nikolai ventured curiously past his adjacent world into a theatre of dreams.