Silicon Valley

The last time I will see my parents in 8 months, they are gayvestigating my brother. Word goes around the village he has never had a girlfriend. The word incel means nothing to them. I'm trying not to swerve lanes after my Dad in the back seat recounts how his friends think his son's terminal isolation, now eclipsing a golden three decades, suggests the existence of a secret boyfriend. Name after name, they start listing his old high school friends I used to play pool with, genuinely entertaining the conjecture. I've got the best poker face in the world, pumpin' cash, straight Moneymaker, baby. The word incel means nothing to them. Why would it? They grew up surrounded by cowshit and cowlicks that brushed up against low and crowded concrete ceilings. And it was from out-of-print textbooks decades older than them that they first learned their history, rather than make it, and from the first batch of government subsidised pencils that they began to write culture.

It is 1996 in the heart of 南山's very own Silicon Valley. With his life benignly stuffed on his back in a daypack, my Dad saw skyscrapers grow into the sky from fishing huts like beanstalks. They were built by men like him, and it was there he and his peers learned something truer than knowledge, and that was consensus, and something truer than language, and that was progress. To see rivers split into two, from them emerging roads like old snakes from the earth, and fishing boats sinking in the maw of steel obelisks, these visions were as real to him as the graphited stencils of quarks and atoms in notebooks gathering dust at his father's home. The word incel meant nothing to them. That year, the second consciousness of every city boy woke up for the first time, and stagnation was known as one of the four Olds the same way anyone could tell you the sky is blue. What those men saw was real, and it was true, but no more than how one and one make two. The word incel means nothing to them. And there's no synaptic pruning that can be done here, because the weeds don't even exist. I want to fall asleep at the wheel, and I think about whether I'd prefer a gay son or incel daughter.