Edward [FICTOID]

Due to an atmospheric anomaly and of failure of campus recycling efforts, a huge cloud of cultural studies appeared over the East Village.

The cultural studies came from Columbia University, decades upon decades of thesis papers finally scanned and digitized, their original hard copies consigned to the recycling bin.

But an error on the part of a recycling technician (trash collector in 20th century parlance) resulted in the documents being ejected out of their mass shredder instead of being compressed into thick cubes that could be used for God knows what purposes somewhere.

(I mean, they must have a reason for doing so, right?  Otherwise it makes no sense.)

The long thin streamers of paper shot up thousands of feet into the air where they got caught by an eddy of wind that swirled endlessly over the East Village.

Nobody ever noticed the eddy before because being air it was invisible and the few times some bits of debris got caught in it, it was too high up and two small to see.

But one hundred and seventy-one tons of pure academic B.S. is kinda hard to miss.

The cultural studies eddy became the topic dujour for the day.  Interestingly the right wing podcasters saw it as a good thing, a novelty that would bring more tourist revenue to New York City while progressives decried it as an attack on the American educational system.

And what did the eddy think of this?

Edward (as the eddy preferred to be called, even though its parents named it Francis) thought this was a dialectic distillation of contrarian modes of thought in modern urban based societies revealing the influence of eco-colonialist micro-aggression.

Hey, you don’t absorb one hundred and seventy-one tons of pure academic B.S. without learning something.

© Buzz Dixon