Holograms
What if life is a projected screen illusion and we are really our social media profiles? This is simulation theory carried in a backpack to school, put in a locker with a bag lunch, and taken out a week later after Easter break. The form of our lives is changing. We are painting watercolors of ourselves wearing dark goggles, with old snow gloves on. It’s an abyss.
I used to want one of those school projectors for my room. If you are young, you probably think I am talking about a magic board, but I’m not. Teachers used to write on translucent vellum and project the writing onto a screen. I thought it was so cool. I still didn’t pay attention. I was always looking at Kathi Bailey. She had no idea I existed.
I once tapped a girl on the shoulder in the book store at Babson College because I was sure it was this girl that my roommate hooked up with the night before. It wasn’t. When she turned around, I just looked straight ahead as if I didn’t tap her on the shoulders. There was no one else in line.
I prosecuted a case that ended up with a life sentence one week. It was a minimum mandatory, there was nothing we could do. The next week, his mom was on one of my jury panels. She said she could be fair. I wanted to disappear.
I allowed kids to call me Brian for a week when I moved to California from Brooklyn because I was too embarrassed to tell them my name was Jonnie. It was actually Jon now, but only because my new teachers asked me if that’s what I wanted to be called and for some reason, I said yes.
I pissed my pants in eighth-grade science class in what could only be described as a tidal wave. No one said a word. I went through school the rest of the day with piss-soaked corduroys. Life can be a dagger inside of a knife display, shot out of a cannon at you. Bullseye.
I was with my girlfriend in the airport, waiting to board a plane. The pilot started talking to us near the snacks. When we were getting off the plane, he overtly made a comment about our age difference in front of the stewardesses as we were deplaning. Thanks for the ride.
Sometimes I introduce myself to someone as Jonathan and the next time they refer to me, they call me Jon. This absolutely boggles my mind since I just told you what my name was. I often daydream about someone introducing themselves to me as Frank and then referring to them five minutes later as Fanny, just because.
Maybe we are just object beams that reflect off each other in a windstorm on a cool, fall evening. Next door, Mrs. Hammerstein is yelling at Abe, her husband, because he left the refrigerator open again. I wonder what he will post on his Facebook page about this.
There are three separate pieces of clothing downstairs that I ordered that either don’t fit, don’t look good, or were wrongly sent. They’ve been there for months. It’s too much friction for me to make the return. Sometimes, I am frail.
I want to delete all of my social media profiles and online accounts so there are no holograms of me left.
© Jonathan Greene, August 11, 2026
