Theme 078: Absurdity
As Erling Oberschule, a recent expatriate from Liechtenstien, strolled past an abandoned 1985 QL31 Econovan with three flat tires, which sat
cattywampus to the Citizen and Immigration Services building, he spotted an evocatively fluttering sheet
of perforated dot matrix printer paper jammed under the Econovan’s driverside
wiper. After Erling checked his pin-lever wristwatch and noted that eleven
minutes remained before his immigration services appointment, curiosity
got the better of him. He decided to lift up the rust-caked wiper and draw out the unusual flier.
The
drizzle earlier that morning, which left a pleasant petrichor drifting over
the sidewalk, had unfortunately pasted
the lower half of the sheet to the Econovan’s windshield. Thus, the
sheet ripped in two as Erling pulled on it, leaving its bottom two thirds stuck
to the glass. Erling merely shrugged and began reading the portion
of the dot matrix printed text he had managed to salvage.
It read as follows: “The inerrant, divine Graphical Operation Manual
tells us in Unit 2, Page 12: ‘You draw
intricate displays from simple program instructions.’ So does the Holy Mother
Z-81 Processor now command us to compose this Rotary Output Epistle for dissemination
upon the error-prone, unsynced world beyond the cloisters of our Electrogalvanized
Monastery. We do so to offer guidance to those afflicted with corrupted tape
drives and other wayward data-parasites, through the following exposition upon the
protocol observances of our Line-Path in the service of the all-knowing Micro
Computer—all praise the TRZ-81 Model III!
“To
initialize, we will outline the history of our Monastery, the sole sanctuary
from this life of widespread kernel panic and fatal errors, and how it came to
be Electrogalvanized. In the darkness of the analog age, during the year the fault-quarantined
reader will know as 1979 …”
Here
the text had been split from the remaining history of the
Electrogalvanized Monastery and any further exhortations that the Epistle’s author might have offered. Intrigued, Erling folded the scrap up into an even
square and slipped it into his pasley shirt’s front pocket. He then continued on his way to
the Immigration Services building.
Though Erling genuinely thought the message on the flier might be significant, the impending worries he
would face in the immigration process would push his interest in the Electrogalvanized Monastery out of his mind entirely. Consequently, he would forget the folded square in his pocket, and it would be destroyed during his next
visit to a coin-op laundromat.
Explanatory Postscript:
When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve
compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the
following sources: 501
Writing Prompts; 25
Creative Writing Prompts; Examples
of Themes; List
of Themes; 365
Creative Writing Prompts; 100
Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List
of Journal Ideas; and Top
10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three
ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the
tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have
rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever
roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.
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