Flight of the Sack of Deerhorns

"Dear Mr. Deerhorn,

We regret to inform you that we decided not to move forward with your application for ________ at this time. Unfortunately, neither your profile picture nor your algorithmically determined mental health status meet or exceed our benchmarks based upon the data on your profile. However, we encourage you to apply for other _______ on our website.

Indubitably,

_________"

Charles Deerhorn skimmed through various emails of this nature in his inbox. He missed the days when he used to get rejected by the post. At least then it felt cathartic to throw away or burn the notices. Charles went to the kitchen in a fit of boredom and hunger. All he had to “eat” was a dusty can of coffee in the pantry and some floppy celery in the fridge. He’d been “eating” like this for sometime. Occasionally, he’d venture out and buy a diet grapefruit Shasta and a Nut Roll from the recharge station, but he’d been too lazy to update his new address on his account which received universal basic income checks each week.

Sighing, he decided to take a walk to the recycle hump. He grabbed his favorite T-shirt, pulled it over his head, and fed his bony skeleton-like arms through. His collar bones protruded from behind his shirt. Next he pulled his pants on. They used to fit well, but now the regular fit jeans looked like he was trying to wear baggy pants like Rodney Mullen in the 1990s.

He left his house. The sun was shining. Everyone's lawn looked perfect, as usual. Each neighborhood voted democratically on the weather, and each day of the week had its scheduled meteorology. This made small talk existentially boring, as it turned out most people just wanted to live in 20th century California weather. It would suffice to say that it was sunny ninety percent of the time. As he was locking his door he overheard his neighbors Xander and Tray talking.

“Another day in paradise, am I right?” said Xander standing on his porch, hands on hips.

“Yep! Another day, another dollar!” Tray said without actually looking at Xander as he took a hyphy selfie of himself drinking a frappe and throwing up arbitrarily hip hand signs.

“Goddamn, not these guys. What I’d do for some overcast and a little rain.” Deerhorn muttered to himself gazing up at the sky shielding his eyes. Deerhorn walked down to the sidewalk.

“Yoooo Deer-horn-dog! What’s up man? Hey, when are you gonna hit the gym with us, man? I’m tellin’ ya, you could be lookin’ cut as fuck after a few months, and this new creatine supplement I just got.” Tray said.

“Oh hey, yeah, I was thinking about it, but everyone’s jacked nowadays. Also, I just read Siddhartha again recently, and I think I’m gonna stick to that aesthetic nomad bod.” Deerhorn had another reason for maintaining such a measly diet as of late, but he knew that Tray didn’t actually want to talk about anything of consequence, so instead he said some words that sounded interesting and kept things surface level.

“Oh shit. We got ourselves a reader. Get outta here with that arrogance, Deerhorn. That’s try-hard behavior. Why would you read, when you could just watch the video or listen to the audiobook?”

“Not sure, man. I guess I’m obsolete. I’ll catch you later!”

“Huh? Aight then. Chao!”

Deerhorn actually did like those guys. They meant well, but their conversations always felt full of sawdust to Deerhorn. Deerhorn continued down the sidewalk. Robots were delivering packages. They were all famous robots from famous movies. If you had enough money (if you were influential enough on the internet), you could request which famous robot character delivered your mail. This was true for most robo-servants. Some genius realized that the only way to get people to allow robots to take their jobs was to inject Hollywood into the situation. This was ironically beautiful in Deerhorn’s opinion. It had been Hollywood that had scared people out of trusting robots in the first place. It seemed fitting that the same tool would be used to douse their fears. Deerhorn inconspicuously tripped a faux-scary silver robot with red eyes. It grunted “agghhh, excuse me!” politely with an Austrian accent. Deerhorn whistled a tune and continued on.

He was down by the water now. At the edge of the wharf was the mountainous hump of recyclables. The past’s environmental irresponsibility and militant greed had left a large portion of the Earth uninhabited, but technology finally caught up. Here was where humanity's extravagance was made sustainable. This was one of Deerhorn’s favorite places to go. He felt like the hump did. Obsolete, algorithmically unattractive, and deeper than most of the other piles of garbage in the vicinity that he’d come to know.

Deerhorn spent hours rifling through piles. It reminded him of garage sailing back in the day. Everyone just bought new things now since recycling technology had come so far. Anyone interested in the thrifting fad had long since faded into obscure rarity. Giant recycling machines had been working on this pile for decades, but it was still quite large. Deerhorn would take things home and fiddle with them. Sometimes he’d take tape players home and record weird theatrical conversations with himself. He had a running collection of some things. Whenever he saw any sort of digital camera or TV screen, he’d bring the pair of them home, and wire them together. The northern wall of his living room was stacked with a menagerie of cameras that filmed the couch and streamed the video to his various TV screens. Deerhorn liked to dance to music in front of his wall of camera eyes. It made him feel like he was in an old music video.

Today he was looking for something new. He was looking for gear to help him fulfill his “magnum opus dream” - as he called it. For some time now he had been having a recurring dream of flying. In the dream, he’d fly up into the sky, and when he came back down, things would be different then they were. He didn’t really know exactly what he wanted to be different, but he felt like something was wrong with the world he lived in. He loaded up a cart with several of the items he needed and pushed it back up the hill to where he lived.

By nightfall, he’d made it back up to his neighborhood. He pushed his cart into the back alley behind his house. He heard a siren in the distance. As it got closer the pitch modulated up naturally. Turning around Deerhorn saw a self-driving ambulance catch air off one of the neighborhood speed bumps. As it turned the corner and drove away, a small runt of a puppy bayed mimicking the sound. The dog finished it’s howl and went down onto its back rolling on an empty pizza box with it’s tongue out. Deerhorn had always loved how ludic dogs could be. He always aspired to be as carefree, but could never quite achieve the same frivolity of attention-span. Of all his attributes, he thought that his attention-span was the most obsolete. He could focus for hours on a single thing at a time, and he liked to too. This made it difficult to keep interest in conversations - for both parties. He, in a display of monogamy, would want to give each issue its due time and depth; whereas, his conversers would often want to hop around from subject to subject transiently. Perhaps this was merely a difference of interests, but perhaps not - as Deerhorns had this feeling quite often.

Deerhorns knelt down with his hand out for the dog to sniff. As he did the dog sat up and ran towards him tail wagging. The dog licked his hand, rubbed up to him like a cat, and rolled onto its back again. The dog was seemingly smiling. Deerhorn smiled too, brushed the dog’s hair, lightly squeezed the dog’s ears, and patted it’s belly. It was a girl, and it weighed no more than 20 pounds. He invited her inside his house.

The next morning he awoke with a big dog nose in his face. He’d been up late working and went to bed quite tired, but was pleasantly surprised to see such a happy face first thing in the morning. He walked into this bathroom and weighed himself. He was 120 pounds. He’d finally reached his goal. In fact he’d overshot it by nearly twenty pounds. The doorbell rang. He went to his front door and grabbed the dog food and pizza he’d ordered from his standard-issue polite gold robot with a red arm. He poured the dog food into a bowl for his dog which he’d ended up naming “goD” last night. The dog panted happily looking up at him, then sneezed.

“God bless you….goD.” He said awkwardly, then grabbed a few slices of pizza and stormed off to his couch. He pressed a giant red button and the lights flickered as a legion of cameras and TVs turned on. He smiled at himself on screen, and picked up a book on Diogenes for some early morning reading. After Diogenes he moved onto some Bukowski, then took a short nap.

By the time he awoke it was just past noon. He felt eerily zen-like. It was one of those moments where the seams of his familiar setting seemed natural and not flawed. He looked out the window and saw the world’s nature for what it was. His neighbors bobbed about as their will intended. He wondered what it might cost to be more normal, and he wondered why he asked that of himself so often. He saw his need for love just like everyone, and he saw his question of why his love was so complicated. He looked inside himself and saw the cords of his twisted puzzling heart. He smiled and decided that it was time.

Quick as a flash, like a superhero into his secret lair, Deerhorn skitted into his garage. There, on saw-horses, sat his “Sack” as he came to call it. It was a mesh of sewn together burlap celery sacks he’d accumulated over months. It was about four feet deep and ten feet in diameter, so he could stand in it or lay in it like a hammock if need be. Sewn into the top of the Sack were several metal loops with several cables running through them. At the other end of the cables was a legion of old drones that Deerhorn had found at the recycling hump. Duct taped to each of these drones was a flashlight.

Deerhorns ran over to his workbench and grabbed two sets of goggles, a scarf, and a heart shaped locket. He called over goD, put the locket around the dog’s neck and opened the locket to make sure his contact information he’d engraved could be found easily.

"goD Deerhorn. If found, please call Charles Deerhorn at _______."

Deerhorn closed the locket, threw his scarf on, and pushed his Sack out into the driveway, lifted himself and goD into it, and brought out the remote controller he’d rigged up.

“God I hope this works…..goD.” He said to his dog awkwardly, then flipped the “ON” switch. Suddenly, a magnificent hum of propellers engaged and the Sack was lifted. Deerhorn’s sharp elbows and other bony extremities protruded from within the Sack. Tray, Xander, and his other neighbors came out to see what all the commotion was about.

“What the hell are you doing, Deerhorn?!” Xander said. Even though it was the middle of the day, Deerhorns flipped the switch to turn on the flashlights attached to the drones, which were surprisingly bright. The neighbors shied away and shielded their eyes.

With a forward thrust of his controls Deerhorn exclaimed, “I’m looking for an honest man, and shittier weather!” and flew down the street and into the sky.