Damned By Faint Praise: Where fiction and reality meet and eventually fuck, spawning horrible, horrible children

The following is an excerpt from a short story I wrote a few months back called "My Life as a Model UN Delegate." In 2002, as a junior in high school, I was 18 going on 19, and if the truth must be told, I should've graduated in '01. Because I am/was a truant and have no qualms admitting it, I didn't graduate until '03.

Yes, I really was a Model UN nerd. Kind of. One of the running themes throughout these entries is 9/11. I don't write about it a lot for various reasons, but it was certainly in the background as we traveled. The dates are accurate.

and now...

March 27, 2002 from "My Life as a Model UN Delegate"

I hate these fucking dress shoes. They give me blisters. Carla sneered at me when I complained. Lunch break. Hopefully it’ll be better than the awful continental breakfast. Those are always bad. Nothing new. Two meetings in, and the only thing I really remember is the moderators-- college kids, all fucking one another, most likely; sexual tension and all; sexual competition; gender division; girls moderating the Security Council; guys moderating the Human Rights Council; who can churn out the most resolutions; intimidation-- with their gavels and their obnoxious loud voices, yelling about decorum. Decorum you little shits! That’s what they really want to say. So I laughed when Miles showed me a funny picture of one of the guys with a huge dick ripping into his ass and cum gushing out of his mouth like one of those European fountains you see in all the tourist photographs.

Mostly we sat around watching representatives from other more important nations running around, wheeling and dealing. Ideas. Debates. Resolutions. Occasionally we’d be approached by someone from Lesotho or Papua New Guinea wanting our input on some resolution they’d drafted that guaranteed such and such or affirmed whatever for whomever they pleased. It was all very boring, very useless, and very much an exhibition of spinning wheels on wet pavement. Futile, destined to hydroplane. Good luck getting America to give half a shit, much less the two that seems the hyperbolical norm.

Met these two guys from Vermont. One was Jewish, the other Muslim. Best friends. Nice guys. We showed shock at the revelation of their long tenured friendship. We shouldn’t have, but the current events, the media; in that moment, we were everything we hate, I think. They represented another country that would have little input into the meetings. In fact, if you weren’t a Western power, an Asian power, or certain middle eastern countries, you were destined to spectate.

Ben and Carla came to our council meeting to brag that they had just been "semi-instrumental" in getting a resolution passed. Yay for them, but I'm not sure what they mean by "semi" instrumental#. Anyway.

After all was done, we did some more tourist shit that culminated in a trip to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Miss Tanguay and Jasen held one another quite romantically, making me very uncomfortable. Miles must’ve been off smoking a cigarette, and Ben and Carla, who knows? Asking questions at the information center? Either way, it was pretty damn fucked up to leave me there.

It was cold and high above the city, the building having reclaimed its position as tallest building in NYC. By default.

More tomorrow. Goodnight.

©Patrick Patterson-Carroll (2009)

A note on the #. Apparently this format doesn't support footnoting. In the story, the footnote is simply a dictionary definition of "instrumental."