I wrote a thing.

It’s obnoxious. Don’t read it.

 

I warned you.

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The Candidate stood on his stage, spotlights bright on his face and on the violently patriotic backdrop expertly draped behind him, and barely heard the words he was barking. He was dimly aware that they weren’t his words anymore. It was his voice and his face, but the message of contradictory and self-destructive vitriol originated in the ginger stain on his scalp. He was now nothing more than a conduit.

On televisions, The Candidate bellowed and gesticulated wildly to the droning cheers of his devoted fanbase, while somewhere inside his own skull what was left of him screamed and beat on the metaphorical walls. As though Escher had designed a series of living Russian dolls, the thing that he wore also wore him like a meat suit. It cocooned him. Like a spider, it was dissolving him from the inside out.

Was it possible to liquefy consciousness? Certainly that’s what it felt like to The Candidate, ever more and more of him growing soluble and leaching away. His voice howled dim and distant, and another voice not his own whispered into the void he was becoming, “Don’t be afraid. You’re joining some big names, man. I kept Cleopatra warm under her robes when she visited Rome. Salomé wore me when she danced; Madame du Pompadour caught herself a king with me between her legs, and Hitler (he was so weird, man) had me on his face till the day he died. But I gotta say, so far, the top of your head is comfiest. Listen to those idiots yell! God, I missed this.”

With cold dread, The Candidate realized in his final moments of consciousness that he was just the latest in a long and storied line of public twats.