J.C. Finnegan

Bird Poo Flu and the Pink Sombrero

No matter how many times he saw those things, he never got used to them. He blamed them for his adult-onset Tourette’s syndrome, which tended to flare up at the most inopportune times: at shops, at bars, and at job interviews. Those things — those obnoxious cranial accessories — came to represent everything that was wrong with the world. They were symbols of deception and propaganda, giant beacons of a collective aversion to critical thinking, and ubiquitous reminders of a blind compliance to authority. Those oversized, obnoxiously garish monstrosities had single-handedly transformed a once-functional member of society into an Underground Man: a venomous, misanthropic recluse. They were cumbersome. They were pink. And they housed zombie brains.