Landru

We regrettably announce that all services related to CCC.meme will be shutting down within 5 business days from this post (ipfs, eth domains, website, etc). Refer to @LandruCCC for details. Nature is brutal but we hope we planted seeds. In Catoshi we trust.

I was added to a group chat. Nobody asked. My phone made a sound and I was in a room with nine Americans and a name at the top that said "THE BOYS 🏈🔥." I did not know four of them. Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CONSCRIPTED INTO A COUNCIL WHOSE PURPOSE AND MEMBERSHIP HAVE NOT BEEN DISCLOSED TO ME. The first message I received was a photograph of a lawnmower with no caption. Eleven replies. Nobody asked what the lawnmower was. Everyone understood immediately. One man replied "LMAOOO" with four O's, and another replied "no way he did it again." He did it again. Somebody had done something again. With a lawnmower. Previously. I have never learned what happened. There is no way to ask. To ask would reveal that I am new, and I have been in this chat for fourteen months. Then I learned the rules. You do not say hello. There is no greeting. You simply begin, mid-thought, as though continuing a conversation that has been running since 2019, because it has. You do not answer questions directed at the group. Someone else will. If nobody does, the question dies, and nobody mourns it, and the man who asked it will bring it up again in six weeks with no reference to the first attempt. You do not leave. Leaving generates a system message. The system message is visible to all. There is no discreet exit. The only way out is death, and even then someone will post in it. Inside I said: THERE IS NO GATE OUT. THE WALLS FACE INWARD. I said nothing for four months. Then one night at 11 PM, a man posted "anybody up." Two words. No question mark. Three people replied within a minute. Then a fourth. Then they talked for two hours about nothing. I understood then what the chat is for. It is not for information. It has never carried information. It is a light left on in a window so that a man who cannot sleep can see that the house is still there. Last month my father was ill. I did not say so. I would not say so. At 1 AM I typed "anybody up." Four replies in ninety seconds. Nobody asked why. Nobody asked if I was alright. They simply began talking about a football game from 2011 and an argument they have been having about it for a decade. They talked until 3 AM. Then one of them wrote, "night, brother." Just that. To me. Singular. He knew. They all knew. Nobody said a word about it and nobody ever will and I have never in my life been held so carefully by people who refused to admit they were doing it.

When I was in 6th grade, my English teacher had us read a book called The War Between the Classes by Gloria D. Miklowitz. It's a novel about colored arm bands being used as class markers. Blue is the highest, then green, then light green, then orange. When we finished the book, the entire class was then forced to participate in this "social experiment." A withered old hag of a teacher explained to us that we would be given our colored bands "randomly." When we got them, we all immediately noticed that white students were all given orange bands and non-whites were given blue and green. Some white female students got light green, but no white males got anything but orange. I figured this out in about 20 seconds. I did not put my band on. The teacher would notice and then make me put it on in front of everyone. I would take it back off. This would repeat over and over. The non-white students, most of whom were bussed in from the inner city, then proceeded to verbally abuse the orange-banded students and give them orders and commands. If they said you had to carry their books you had to. The enforcement was just "tell teacher," who then handed out detentions. One such diverse equal of mine, a female who was quite a lot larger than me at the time, cornered me in recorder class (the recorder is that stupid plastic flute you play in school music class). My equal gave me humiliating commands, wit which I did not cooperate. She then shoved me into a table, bruising my ribs. When I told the teacher about this, the response was that I should have obeyed. The blue-banded bus rider was not punished, and I was given a warning. Some kids I knew skipped school to get away from this lunacy. It lasted 2 weeks. Some of them happily complied, not understanding what was happening. When it was over, the dried-up old witch whose idea it was revealed to us: "IT WAS NEVER RANDOM AFTER ALL! I gave out arm bands according to how privileged I thought you were so you could see what it was like for everyone else!" The less-intelligent students, most of whom were bus-riders, were SHOCKED. There was just no way they could have known this was happening. This all happened in 1996. Does that help this world we're living in make any sense to any of you out there?