Marissa sat on her couch staring at her laptop. She’d clicked onto Oliver Gladly’s channel.
“White vans are our earth angels. They ferry people to and from plot points in their lives. Sometimes it’s an inciting incident. Sometimes it’s just mundane repetition. Life can begin and end in a white van. Their mysteries intrigue us throughout the generations,” Oliver Gladly pontificated to the camera. He stepped back, raising his hands, wearing once more a colourful poncho against a tropical backdrop.
Wonder what it’s like in California? Marissa thought as she snacked on a large bowl of popcorn, watching Oliver Gladly preach his carefully cultivated observations to the millions who watched him, whether for love or hate. Wonder if I’ll ever get there and would I meet cool people like Oliver Gladly?
“It all seems a bit dodgy with a bit of bohemian sprinkled with apathy and conditioning. Throughout the generations, we’ve been groomed in our observations of how to interpret that which we see before us. Back in my younger years, there was more of what was referred to as critical thinking. And before you roll your eyes and sigh at the old man screaming at a cloud, consider what has come before now. Right now, we’re in now, but there was a time before now, even though we’re always in now. As our minds evolve, so do our theories and expectations. Repetitive situations and occurrences, especially the traumatic ones, imprint on our genetics, and we carry those karmic scars for the rest of our human lives and into our next spiritual realm. Those with many karmic scars ring louder than the others. And so it is with the white vans. We have expectations of what might be in that white van.”
Four monitors behind Oliver blink on, each showing a different scenario. Monitor One showed a white van in grainy film, the caption revealing it was from a newsreel in the seventies.
Marissa clicked away and over to another channel. This one was a reaction channel to a channel. The vlogger was a young, twenty-something with colourful hair. They played a video, stopping every couple of minutes to critique.
“This girl, this woman, this person…she has claimed for years to be watching her weight, watching her diet, hoping to sign up for some sort of TV show. What a mess,” the vlogger chuckled as they played a video of a very large young lady walking across a vibrant green lawn with huge effort.
“Look at her; she can barely breathe. What are you doing, AnnaLee? You started your channel as a weight-loss channel, and now you’ve gained at least three hundred pounds? How can you only walk three steps without clinging to that tree for support?” the vlogger mocked.
Marissa sighed. That vlogger, Gretching Goose, had spent years mocking AnnaLee and her yo-yoing weight and mental health issues. Gretching Goose wasn’t the only one. Many channels were “reaction channels” to AnnaLee’s. Was that not bullying?
Marissa had watched this going on for years. She’d even reported Gretching Goose and some others for bullying AnnaLee and mocking her weight, and yet, the reacts, live or recorded, continued on. And according to the statistics, Gretching Goose and many more made thousands of dollars a month piggybacking off one woman’s human struggles.
Marissa clicked further.
“Disney is so woke that no one is going to watch the new Star Wars,” a middle-aged vlogger with a Star Wars baseball cap yelled. The person beside him was wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and he shook his head. He pulled off his glasses and wiped them then put them back on.
“Disagree. The new generations will line up for miles for new Star Wars. They don’t understand growing up in the seventies, and how the original Star Wars changed our lives in so many ways. New sound, new visuals, how many times did I go see it just to pretend I was flying through hyperspace the first time Han takes us for the ride? No thrill like that thrill and it’s sad that future generations will never understand that magic. It’s impossible to recreate.”
“They can do new magic if they weren’t so woke. What’s with all the virtue signalling?”
“There’s no innocence anymore, and therefore, things can’t be black and white. There can’t be good against evil. Everything is now grey. And it’s hard to be innovative or surprising in grey.”
“I wish they’d focus on story. I wish they HAD focused on story, on giving good resolutions to the legacy characters we hadn’t seen in forty years.”
Marissa clicked away. Fucking Star Wars nerds. Talk about fifty years of blahblahblah. Glad I’ve only been around for half of it.
Marissa returned to Oliver Gladly.
“The white van was reported to have been parked by the residence for three days. Neighbours thought it belonged to the construction workers renovating a nearby home, but once the murders were discovered, it disappeared. Since it was the eighties, no one thought to snap a picture or do a tiktok. The couple was lying in their own blood for at least a day. And the daughter has never been found. Not a trace.”