prompt: board, title: look away in "the next big thing" flash fiction

American culture has two obsessions that always bite us in the ass, personally and collectively: answers and endings, a&e. There’s a cable station named that. Even though the name was “arts and entertainment”, not answers and endings, it’s kind of related. It used to be all war docs and stand-up comedy but there’s easier money in dirt-cheap freak-shows so here we are. MTV used to show music videos, Discovery and TLC used to show science documentaries too, but they’re all sideshow acts now. That’s sort of the point. Everything changes, but nothing ends. The main streets become malls, then big-box stores, then become abandoned buildings and Amazon links.

We are hyper-individualized, focused on our lives alone. We’re trained to be like that, making it much easier to sell us useless crap, with the unfulfilled promise it will make us happy forever. If we could be happy with just room-and-board, friends and family. God, how much less deodorant would we buy, how many fewer cars. The economy would transmute and the rich folk could only buy themselves one yacht a Christmas instead of five, how could we survive such a catastrophe? We all see ourselves as temporarily-embarrassed stars, with solid answers about where we came from, where we’re going, how long we got. We create worlds that end when we die unless we’re delusional billionaires trying to upload brains into computers or faking immortality serums from virgins’ blood. Too goddamnable many of those rat-bastards, anyways.

The stories Hollywood churns out with clean origins and happy wrap-ups, they all plays into this sick addiction to answers and endings. Which is no help to us short-lived fools waltzing through overlapping cycles of history far too vast to ever really understand and without decades of study, we can’t even see them and attempt to understand. Even the yetis only get a handful of hundreds grasp the whole picture, what’ll I get? Eighty? Dad barely got sixty. Cousin Al got twenty. Who can tell? Like Kermit the Muppet, I thought I’d have that standard rich-and-famous contract and make millions of people happy as my unembarrassed ending. But movies lie and even sweet lies are still lies. Everything changes and nothing ends.

I can’t say what happened to the yeti, leaving Frank alone, as I don’t know. Frank doesn’t know, how could I? Couldn’t say what happens to him in the High Desert’s calm oblivions, either, as it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe he’ll drop me a line long after I finish whatever-the-hell-this-is, who knows? Answers and endings are easy and comforting and uncomplicated, and illusions like that are almost always bullshittery. I should goddamn well know. Everything changes. Nothing ends.

Frank doesn’t get an answer or an ending, neither do I, neither do you. All I could do was watch an impossibility walk down Gower Avenue until the sunrise burned my eyes and I looked away.

I mean, what’s to be done when your dreams die before you do? You go out and find better ones.