Gordon & The Stick War - 23/09/23

Context:

Gordon was a regular at my pub near Oxford. I used to describe him as ‘a bear of a man’. I had some good conversations with him back in the day. If you were in a battle, you’d want him on your side. I hope you’re doing well bud.

In The Hall Of The Mountain King - Edvard Grieg 

Story:

Gordon and I found ourselves sitting at a table one seat apart with a laptop open on the surface between us. Gordon was to the left and I was to the right of it. I can’t recall who actually owned the laptop, but they never made an appearance. Periodically, he would lean over to type something rude into the search bar. Each time, I would respond by leaning over from my side of the laptop to delete it only for him to lean back over and type something else equally as grotesque as the last. 

Something was then typed into the laptop to commence footage of a stickman war. My field of view then exclusively became the contents of what was showing on the laptop. Gordon and I being sat at a table was now obsolete. My conscious awareness was then engulfed by this new scenario that had started on a screen but was now my reality. As I entered this new state, the stick war continued to escalate. As I became more engrossed, In The Hall Of The Mountain King- Grieg began to play as I watched the war continue. The war had initiated with one stick figure on either side of the ‘screen’ running towards one another, clashing in the centre and killing each other, then two more would enter from either side, come together and kill one another, then three more would enter and do the same, followed by four, then five etc. etc. This continued until there were hundreds of stick figures entering the battlefield from either side to join the war. By this point, the entirety of the bottom of the ‘screen’ was black from the sheer number of stickmen that were now in the war. More and more of the ‘screen’ began filling up as more stickmen entered until it was almost entirely black. Then, as the song began drawing to close, the camera angle changed to a shot within the battlefield scene where there stood a little stick creature who lifted its head and, contained within the area of its head, had an image appear. This image seemed to depict a repeating cycle, as if the universe was moments away from ending and the creature itself was the spawn and/or seed of the new universe to come which was to start in exactly the same way as the one that had come before. This gave the impression that the stick war was an eternal cycle that was the cause of both death and rebirth of countless universes before and after this one.

End.