WE WITNESSED THE ADVENT OF A NEW APOCALYPSE DURING AN EPISODE OF FRIENDS - Blake Butler

The complications of the coming death of Earth or some part of it became apparent as 59.6% of all television-owning American households were watching Friends. Families sat huddled around their flat-screen LCDs with take-out containers and microwave-safe plates, eating in silence under the blaze of weird color as Ross and Rachel and Chandler and Joey and Monica and Phoebe moved about the screen. The viewers viewed without blink or comment as the handsome actors delivered their lines with a timed precision and jocular wit many at home had tried to replicate in their own lives—employing small approximations of the ease and subtle exit strategies demonstrated by these now all too familiar characters in their amusing manifestations of minor duress—and yet most had yet to find such triumph. Despite buying the products by the same designers as provided in the actors’ wardrobes, having their hair quaffed by professionals into some approximation of what they’d seen on screen, most of the viewers’ days went on the same as they always had, one after another. Many sat alone in their cars on the way home from work thinking of who they’d been and what they might be, sick for the simple arbitrary direction of a popular television sitcom. Still they smiled wryly to themselves at the jokes not funny enough to laugh aloud at despite the bright intonation of the canned studio response, intended to make their brain more rapidly produce serotonin and other similar chemicals that would leave them with a feeling of productiveness and goodwill. At night they’d sleep that much more soundly. They would hold the tickle in their heads.

On this particular evening at home, some certain viewers would get down on their hands and knees and kiss the screen, while outside in the streets, beyond the glowing windows of so many homes, the sky overhead sat wide and ready, a white so bright it appeared reflective.

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