I've had this ongoing fantasy of being my office's communal pet pig. Everyone's blubbered up little toy to fatten, play with, and abuse to get their stress out and get through the day.
In the mornings come the sweets. Donuts, muffins, scones, and every sticky, sugary breakfast treat that can be carried in those familiar pink boxes gets delivered to my desk. People take turns shoving a few pastries in my mouth before wiping the sticky mess from their fingers onto my too-tight shirt, a couple of them give my belly a few firm slaps before heading to their desk to work. A few stay behind to watch me paw through the pastries, gorging myself as my chair creaks weakly as it struggles to support my growing weight. They have a betting pool going to see how much longer it can hold out.
At lunch time they come by with the unwanted scraps of their own meals, a few committed individuals packing full lunches just for the office pig. They marvel at my gluttony, treating me like the human garbage disposal I am, and watching in mixed pleasure and disgust as I eat everything they give me through heavy breaths and muffled burps. "Good job, fatass." they say, grabbing and shaking one of my overflowing rolls and watching my fat body ripple from the motion. A stray button flies off my shirt, and the person feeding me starts fingering the newly exposed gap in the fabric, prodding my plush blubber as they shove another large bite of food down my throat.
At the end of the day I'm waddling to get to my car, painfully stuffed and aroused from being used as everyone's tubby stress ball all day long, clothing barely hanging on, stretched over the too-full belly now hanging out the bottom of my shrinking shirt. And it's only Wednesday.
Generation Loss is a comedic tragedy in every sense of the word. Every character we see exemplifies this fact, but no one other than The Austin Show proves its truth.
We begin at the carousel. Austin, Gay, takes his turn by pleading for himself to live because he has a wife and children back home. The rest of the cast interrogates him about his “wife and kids,” clearly suspicious of his truthfulness without even knowing his dubbed “title.” Everyone in the room treats Austin like a joke.
In turn, so do we.
Next, we reach the closet and shortly after the failed drag show, Austin remarks, “Look, I uh… I didn’t expect to die here.” It’s a moment of pure honesty, whether we like it or not. It happens again when the Puzzler tries to party with them, and Austin has to angrily remind him that they are his captives and are actively trying to kill them.
Austin: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? We're trying to get out of here. I have children and wives— wife. One wife! What is this some sort of game? I’ve been stuck in hear for hours it seems. We’re trying to get out. Why is nobody else freaking out? We’ve got C4 strapped to our neck…”
It isn’t until Ethan’s death, his blood pooling out from underneath the door, Austin screaming at the others, begging them to have a reaction, to care about their circumstances, to care about death, that we finally understand Austin’s role in Generation Loss.
After all, in every great comedy, someone always has to play the straight man.
I should be able to put "Come watch me" on my cv I just managed to turn two very angry customers who were fizzing about venue staff into happy friendly customers with their show tickets a gin and tonic and a well organised spreadsheet in hand and the information about who made a mistake how it happened and who to contact about it (coincidentally a different company entirely) and who became immediately convinced to be loyal returning customers in under five minutes. I'm not even a supervisor. This is why you should promote me. Don't make me interview my application should be allowed to simply be "check this shit out"
today the older lady I was sharing eclipse glasses with was asking me about my future plans, and then she asked me if getting into a phd program was hard, and I just