VI: The Man Who Saved the World (fiction)

The world was on the brink of strange happenings the day Barry Levinowitz saved the whole thing. The problems of both the large and small worlds had finally become so much that Barry's entire mind was consumed with them. In fact, it had gotten to the point that all he thought about all day was problems, the great push and pull that is the duality of existence. If the whole world had air-conditioning the ozone would be gone, but if no one had air conditioning people would die of heat stroke, bacteria would fester, hospitals would be unsanitary, cats and dogs living together....complete chaos. This is the lightest of fare that was ever on Barry Levinowitz's plate in the early part of the 21st Century when he decided to save every human on the planet.

It was the whole double helix of existence that really made the veins on his forehead surge everyday. All day. To build a home for a family you have to flatten many square feet of nature, in order to farm you have to destroy the forest and then build fences to keep perfectly innocent animals out of your goods so they don't eat it all themselves. Throw in livestock dung emissions, pesticides, farm equipment, and the next thing you know you're up to your teeth in destruction of the Great Mother. The other thing that made him so sick to his stomach everyday was how marriage was falling apart in America. All these ass jockeys running around sticking safety pins into strange women from different cultures while their wives were at home watching the TV and pills babysit the kids. A whole generation of people who were so disenchanted with romantic love that they had decided it was a thing that only existed in the movies, even though secretly they all knew it was there and longed for it with intense passion. The whole world was showing their tits to perfect strangers in exchange for cheap plastic beads and hard liquor and it made Barry Levinowitz shake like a leaf all day everyday. Where had morality gone?

Barry Levinowitz also cheated on his wife regularly with Sarah Apollonia from the accounting department where he worked at Benifold and Mason. Benifold and Mason was the largest manufacturer of children's toys that still had its factory in the United States of America. Benifold and Mason had been supplying the nation's children with toys since WWI when they came out with the Doughboy Kit. It came with a little tin gas mask, a tin can that said Mustard Gas on it, a fake knife, and a small toy pistol. Benifold and Mason continued to outfit the nation's youngsters, their toys were rated 4yrs and up by Uncle Sam you know, with weapons until the late 80's when it suddenly became unfashionable to teach a child that it wasn't so outlandish to settle an argument by shooting someone. So Benifold and Mason went two ways with their money. They began to make movie props such as the entire arsenal in the movie Death March and the futuristic weapons of Nebula Nemesis which won an Academy Award for best simulated death instruments in a fiction. It was only natural since they had made toy pistols for so long, adapting he kit to each war up into Greneda. They also began investing in the basically uncharted realm of home video games in the 80's and Benifold and Mason, whose subsidiary in the video gaming industry is named Game or Die, introduced the entire world to death at home when they outfitted the first video game paddles that were shaped like submachine guns. They made the switch to software and in the 90's gave us Riots: USA, Death March the Game, Corporate Army, Riots: Brazil, and NFL: The Refs are Dead! We're talking billions of dollars in selling violence to generations of Americans. All of this bothered the living shit out of Barry Levinowitz. He believed in peace and love towards all of mankind. Even though it made him want to puke that he had a chink as a boss.

Sarah Apollonia worked in accounting and every Thursday she would meet up with Barry Levinowitz and have sex in the missionary position on the floor of their office. They each had a spouse at home watching their children being babysat by their pills and the TV. They both had a reputation as a good Christian and they both thought that people who cheated on their spouses were despicable. They also had each had their hearts broken before by someone who they loved more than themselves who cheated on them. Yet every Thursday there they were. It went like this. Friday morning each was disgusted with their own actions from the night before. They were self loathers and barely looked at each other all day. They also went home and hugged their real spouses very tightly as if they had quietly without saying so decided to never cheat again. Saturday and Sunday they didn't see each other so technically they didn't exist. They were submerged in the world of their homes. Their children, the TV, each other, and fried chicken made the entire weekend a whole other world than the one of lust that existed on the office floor every Thursday. And Monday was met with new confidence because of this. Now they could resume their friendship. Both Sarah and Barry had decided without speaking to each other every Monday since this started that they could return to being friends as they had before they started sleeping with each other. And by Tuesday they were exactly that. Two friends who found each other sexually attracted and were bored with their lives of cubicles, pills, TV, and monogamy and who passed the endless hours of terrible old life in the office by flirting like mad dogs. By Wednesday they were getting touchy with each other again and then by Thursday it was back to making excuse to stay late at work and then fucking like pigs on the floor exploding out the emotions of the week like a supernova of hate and love all at the same time. This is how all things were in the life of Barry Levinowitz. Extreme black and white at the same time, a life full of constant mental torture.

And then one day he woke up with the most amazing feeling of peace and knowledge. The sun felt like God had sent in angels to kiss his face an gently awake him with massaging touch. His feet hit the ground and he began to walk towards his bedroom door with a clarity he has never before had in his life. You see Barry Levinowitz, our Barry Levinowitz, figured out how to stop all the people in the world from killing the world as they thrived. And he figured out how to stop being a racist, and how to stop those God damned chinks and towel heads from taking America and flushing it down the fucking toilet. He realized that every person had to stop buying products from China in order to make the Chinese have a weak economy and he also understood that here was only one place where he could afford to feed his family at and it was ValuMart. And ValuMart certainly did buy all of their products from China or how else would they be able to offer such cheap prices. If only Benifold and Mason would offer him enough money to buy American he could help cut the legs right out from under that big money making yellow chink monster the People's Republic of China. And he figured out how to make people moral again and how to make it up to his wife, Sarah, and even her husband and all of their kids. He realized what every man must do and started with himself to set the bar.

He walked downstairs and into his basement. His pajamas were wet in the back by this time because he walked right through the dog pee that he usually would have screamed about for hours. He walked right by the broken glass from where the paperboy had broken the window for the third time. He walked straight to his safe and thought of nothing but empty space. No more would he perpetrate the duality of the human existence. He was the worst kind of sinner, the sinner who knows that he is sinning while he is doing it but does nothing to stop himself. Only sins and then slumps in tender recognition that he is a failure in life. He isn't the mad man who eats flesh and believes God has given him the right to do so, he is the sinner who knows he is only man and knows he is breaking the rules while he is breaking them. All men and women do this everyday. They do things that they know are terrible and that they know are hurting people and the Earth but they do them anyway because it's socially acceptable. Or because something doesn't really happen if you pay no consequence because each action has an equal and opposite reaction. No reaction, no action.

And now was the time for Barry to save the world. He slumped onto the floor in front of the open safe door and reached inside. As he did he thought as hard as he could of fucking Sarah Apollonia on the floor of his office in the missionary position. And when he finally felt like it was real as real could be he slid the barrel of his .357 magnum into his mouth and blew his brains all over the back of the wall. And after his body had completely decomposed and no longer has any carbon to release back into the world, he would be done destroying everything he touched, as every human does. From hearts to blades of grass, a human hand breaks everything it touches. Except of course for the hands of Barry Levinowitz. But he's dead now so I guess he doesn't really matter much does he?