In a grim looking basement room with a long folding table up against one wall an old coffee urn bubbles erratically. Next to it is a stack of paper cups and a plate full of stale donuts. There are about fifteen people in the room and they all look depressed, tired, and disinterested. Some of them are doing what appears to be a strange thing. The bring their hands up to their mouths and just when it looks like they’re about to bite their fingernails or something like that they jerk their hands back down into their laps. There is a woman sitting by a podium in front of the group and she has her arms crossed. She points to a disheveled young man and indicates that he should come to the front which he does. He stands there looking about with a bewildered countenance. The woman tells him to go ahead. He starts to speak but the woman stops him and tells him to stand behind the podium. He goes behind the podium and begins again.
“My name is Sparky and I’m a cannibal.”
“Hi Sparky!” Everyone shouts back though in a lackluster half assed way like it’s killing them.
Sparky stands there for a minute and the woman sitting next to him says, “You know what to do. Tell you’re story. Don’t be afraid.”
“Well,” said the young man, “Like I said I’m a cannibal. I’ve been a cannibal for about four years now. It started when I was about halfway through third year in college where I was majoring in Education of Special Needs Personnel. Well I was honing in on exactly the group I wanted to work with which were people who were born without cerebella. Basically these are people who have the mental power of a over baked lizard like you might find in a hollow metal drum on the edge of a desert where it’s essential fluids have been boiled out and the small remnant of its brain has been desiccated to a nut like consistency. I was assured by my college counselor that I would have a job within five minutes of graduating which was encouraging news to me since my college loans were up to about ninety thousand dollars. He said that half the population needed my help and that I would never lack for work. So then what I did was dropped out of school and decided to get some other sort of job. But that was right after the economy crashed so I couldn’t get a job. Then I decided to go back to school only now I wanted to be an artist. It was hard to get back into a program because of some snafu with my loan originator but I finally did get in. I graduated but couldn’t get a job because all the employers said I didn’t really know anything worth a shit. So I decided to go to graduate school which was really scary because now my college loan debt was up to 110 thousand dollars. I decided to get a graduate degree in the history of medieval roofing materials which chalked up another 54 thousand dollars in debt by the time I was done. When I went to get a job all my employers said I didn’t know anything worth paying me more than four dollars an hour which I refused to accept. I couldn’t believe the position I’d been forced into by fate. Now I had 164 thousand dollars in debt and, according to all employers, didn’t know shit from shinola. I decided that what I was going…”
But here the young man was interrupted by the woman. “Didn’t you say that your cannibalism started during your undergraduate work? It seems to me that you’re on a tangent.”
“I really don’t know what a tangent is.” Mumbled the young man.
“Well, that’s understandable since you only have a Masters. But if you had a Phd, I’ll tell you, you’d have problems galore. Anyway, you need to talk about the cause of your cannibalism.”
“Well,” said the young man, “I started my cannibalism because I could not afford to buy food and I couldn’t buy food because I spent all my money on video games which are incredibly expensive. I was really becoming very good at playing video games and some times I would stay up all night which would cause me to miss class the next day and I would just lie in bed all morning anticipating what to do with my plunging grade point average. It really froze me up because I would worry so much about flunking a class that I would be afraid to go in and face the professor which would cause me to just play more video games in order to reduce my stress. But then I would think about my GPA and…”
The woman reached over and tapped the podium with her hand. “Sparky, you need to talk about the cause of your cannibalism. This is Cannibals Anonymous not Video Games or GPA Problems Anonymous”
The young man looked down at the floor and mumbled, “Yes mmm.” He rubbed his hands together down in front of his stomach and then rubbed them on the front of his pants. But then he just stood there staring into space. The woman looked at him and shook her head. “Well!” She said in a loud voice.
“Well,” He said “After I sat in my bed long enough I would get up and start making some food. Usually I would make something like Ramen soup or burned rice. It wasn’t very good tasting but I didn’t have anything else to eat so I would have to eat it. Sometimes I would cook for an hour or two and when I was done I would have some burned rice and really salty Ramen. Sometimes I would almost throw up when I ate this food. But then I would start worrying about my grade point average and my video games. It seemed like every time I was eating really salty burned food I would start worrying about my video games and grade point average…”
Now the woman stood up and grabbed the young man by his lapels. “For God’s sake!” She shouted. “Can you get to the point and talk about your cannibalism? We don’t care about your grade point average or anything else! Tell us about your cannibalism and nothing else!”
The young man was visibly shaken by the woman’s abrasive behavior. He wrung his hands nervously and then wiped them on his pants again. Then he rubbed his face as if her were waking up from a bad dream.
“I became a cannibal when I stopped buying Ramen soups because I was tired of scalding my mouth out. I started buying canned soups. At first I just bought a few cans and then I found myself buying like fifty cans a week. Every time I went down the isle where the soups were I would see the sign saying something about canned goods and I started thinking that I might be a cannibal since I bought so many cans. I didn’t really picture it as a problem…”
The woman stood up and put her hand on Sparky’s shoulder. “Sparky,” she said, “you are not a cannibal. You are more like a dumb ass.” She aimed Sparky towards the door and kicked him in the ass. The half dead members of Cannibals Anonymous were sneering at him as he made for the door. But several other people in the audience got up and followed Sparky. They were all saying, “Gosh, WTF, we’re not cannibals either.” The newly formed group walked out the door, across the street and straight into a park. And thus, this small group of ground breakers, after smoking about five pounds of dope, began the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” Or, at least that’s one plausible version going around the web.
