Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Death of Logic

(Curtain opens to an airport waiting area. On a seat sits a man late 40s dressed in a suit pretending to read the business section of a newspaper. His face has a blank stare. Enter second business man that sits next to him one chair down)

Twenty years. Two Hundred and forty months. Nine hundred and sixty weeks. Six thousand seven hundred and twenty days…I’ve worked for this company for twenty years, I’ve seen exactly forty eight of the 50 states, Ive been to Europe and Asia approximately eighty times. Not once in those twenty years have I ever done something spontaneous, not once did I just hang out with the guys from the office after work and have a beer, not once did I ever feel in charge of myself..but whos counting? There’s something in a number, something that draws me to its every curve, every angle, every possible meaning in life. My life IS numbers. Its coded in numbers, made by numbers, fed by numbers, held by numbers. A prisoner in my head to the sequences of zeros and ones all around me…nothing exists out of place. The ants of humanity roam around the face of this earth to serve the zeros and ones.

(All noise and movement stop completely; people freeze in place as the man next to him reaches into his briefcase and pulls out scissors and a credit card. He sets the scissors down next to him and closes his eyes as they come to life. He dangles the card above them, like a piece of meat. The scissors snip at the card.)

How does he do this? Its not part of the artificial world created by the zeros and ones. It cant be real!

(the other business man looks him in the eye and smiles as he puts his hand in the shape of a gun to his head and pretends to pull the trigger. As he does the lights go out and come back on. The noise and bustling returns but the man is now gone.)

This is impossible; nothing adds up, no sets of zeros and ones created this. Its an abomination, imaginary!...The imagination is the death to all sense of logic, all creation. They cant know what Ive seen. Its not supposed to exist.

(He goes back to his newspaper but suddenly stops and frantically grabs his briefcase opens it to find two scissors and his work report, he places the scissors on the seat next to him and holds the papers in his hands)

If you are the death of all this then so be it. Set me free, let me start over. I want to start over in a world with no zeros and ones, kill everything that holds me prisoner in my mind! I want to be able to imagine, to live.

(He closes his eyes as he feeds the paper to the scissors. The lights turn off then on again. The setting is different, hes at home. In his hands are a pair of scissors and small bits of paper strewn across the floor. The Man drops the scissors and screams as he puts his hands to his eyes and falls to the ground)

2 comments:

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  2. Sorry, I made an irritating grammatical error in my last comment and I couldn't just let it hang out there!

    I just wanted to let you know that I wrote my scene last night and based it on this character. I named him Herbert. I hope that's cool with you!

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