Welcome to the Goon World

 

Welcome to the Goon Cave, poor soul. It is dark in here, though a lava lamp provides a twisted sort of illumination, its contents sloshing together like blood and discolored semen. There may be some discarded clothing in a corner, perhaps a sock pile or two. The air is fetid, reminiscent of a locker room or some other place where mold can grow and fester. On a stinking throne of reeking leather sits a Goon, his eyes locked on a computer screen, the images passing faster and faster. His hands are smooth and supple, not unlike the palms of a woman, and every tender stroke elicits reverberations of ecstasy. The method is the madness—sustained, prolonged masturbation—and he will cruise in this phase as long as he is able, a yogi reaching for transcendental meditation.

There are other Goons he can communicate with, other hedonists searching for nirvana. They are just a message away, and if they wish, they can reference his distorted visage, eyes rolled back toward the top of his skull, mouth shaped like that of a surprised cartoon character’s. What they watch on the computer monitor can never quite sate them. Their synapses bask in a flow of dopamine, forever prolonging the search for pleasure. It truly is the journey, not the destination, that they desire. This particular Goon is a young man, twenty-seven years of age, in fact, and his edging sessions are often partitioned by video game marathons featuring many of his fellow Goons. To game and to jerk in perpetuity, ass glued to the leather by sweat and stink, the modern existence of a young man in his physical prime. Not all Goons are young, but many of them are. They aren’t all freaks—many are as normal as you or me—and they have jobs and homes. They wake up in the morning and drink coffee and get dressed and get in their cars and drive to their meaningless place of employment, and perform labor that is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Sometimes they live in their mom’s basement, but most of the time they have their own place, their own little inner sanctum, a site of reprieve from the prosaic procession of twenty-first century life in America.

A notable fact about our subject in question—let’s call him Noah—is that he’s more or less given up on the meat world. A college dropout, Noah has a job at fast food restaurant, grilling slabs of frozen beef product into something resembling hamburgers fit for subhuman consumption. Before that he worked at the Dollar Store before he quit. There was always a vague plan to take college courses online, but he’s never gotten around to it, and frankly, he doesn’t see the point. Nobody is hiring and they say that artificial intelligence will take all the jobs so why pay for more college? He isn’t interested in anything anyways besides video games and pornography. He had a girlfriend once, but the problem with girlfriends is that they complain and have desires, and why put up with all that when he can stimulate himself? His girlfriend wouldn’t suck her toes or lick her armpit or get breast implants or have a threesome. She’ll never be as good as the camgirls or porno stars, and they didn’t have much to talk about anyway, since she was always on her phone and so was he, the silence between them lingering like a bottomless abyss. She ended it or he did, he can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter—they never would’ve had the camaraderie he possesses with his fellow Goons. So what if he’s never met them in the meat world? There’s no promise there, nothing to fight for, nothing to captivate his frayed attention span. Goons were not grown in a vat. They were produced by the plethora of entertainment options available for the modern American and the resulting consequences of having the Internet always in one’s pocket. How do dull gray skies and chipped sidewalks compete with algorithmic content designed to immediately appeal to impulsive aspects of the brain? Jeremy’s parents didn’t think about him descending into Goonhood when they raised him on the Internet. They are Goons in their own way, you see. We all are.

Every time I get into my vehicle I have to avoid my fellow Goons, who can’t stop themselves from looking at their phones while driving. In the doctor’s office we stare into our personal screens, short form video content flashing, our eyeballs passively absorbing what we’re fed. Our budding Goon-children don’t have text books; instead, they have laptops that serve as a constant source of distraction. When we sit around the couch in the evening, we have our phones in our laps while the television plays content with simplified plots so that we can still sort of know what’s going on, if we deign to do so. The world is becoming filled with Goon Caves, and we’re all not so different from Jeremy, seeking eternal hedonistic delights.

In the future, we’ll be plugged into our own machines, which will interact with each other fleetingly as we inhabit the masturbatory fantasies that they feed us. No one will have sex or go outside or be interested in anything other than jacking it or playing the slots. There will be little empathy and precious little social development, and the history of our civilization will crumble as we devolve into sluggish worms. I can see it happening to Jeremy now. His skin sloughs in the leather chair; his neck twists and grows into his right shoulder, and his right hand become fused to his penis. His eyeballs fall out of his skull still connected, and they roll across the keyboard and press themselves against the screen. Every time an image flashes, he shakes, but eventually that subsides, and we see no movement at all besides a feeble twitch of his hand as he strokes himself with almost imperceptible sensitivity. Gently, he caresses himself to a heat-death of his own personal universe, and as his universe collapses into nothingness, the gulf between his eternity and that of our own becomes impassible. So goes the Goon World, and the history of man.