The Kite Test - The End of the World

THE END OF THE WORLD

Dear Hank,

I don’t want to sound alarmist so I hope you will keep this under your hat so to speak but I feel I should tell you that THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT IS STARTING.

Let me explain in one sentence: The world will end on 3-16 or 3-12 or maybe 12-21; I can’t say for sure but I can tell you this - it is my fault because I took that stupid test; the one that asked you to rate yourself as a kiteflier and gives you a score, which I have to say I did pretty well at and therein lies the problem because, you see, everyone will want to do well (“What did you get? Oh too bad I got a better-than-you score - ciao loser.”) so soon people will cheat and puff up their kiteflying number or they will say “you forgot this” or “what about that?” and then someone (like me) will try to include some really relevant stuff, which coincidentally puffs up my kf score, but then the pretenders will come along and say something like “Give yourself a point if you’ve flown kites with John Doe. - signed Sally Doe.” and then there will be the splinter tests like: “Test for four liners” (and two and one and three and five - etc.) there will then be a big annual banquet that will start out being a big party and everyone having fun but will eventually get squeezed out because “everyone wants their moment in the sun” and there will be bunches of overlapping awards and plaques to be handed out along with the inevitable windy (get it “windy?”) speeches and the special awards and there will be a convention with the same old boring workshops (“How to score big on #34.”, “Do you really have to see Messr. Lynn naked to get a point, Isn’t a photograph good enough?” etc.), and then there are those that, while they don’t cheat they only play to the test, hence no one sees any kites made or flown except enough to score the points (not to mention the folks that end up impaling themselves in someway because they are carrying around sharp or pointy objects in their pockets that they don’t really know what they are or how to use them but hey they get the point (“get the point?” clever again huh?) and then the inevitable pins, patches and t-shirts that follow, which become a mini-industry in itself but all this misses the point because the real problem is the segregation of our society into warring classes and counter accusations, which of course will start out civil enough because someone will create a kite mensa society (“What did you score I got 130!”) and the inevitable reaction to such (“Jane you ignorant slut the test only goes to 73!” [to which the reply is, “Oh you poor dumb boy, all you have to do is multiply your score by 2!”) and this will lead to the haves and the have-nots which will mean one group will feel superior and if the other group feels inferior they will try to get back at the superior feeling ones which will lead to fights and new rules which will turn off some and others will be eliminated because we don’t have insurance or we decided to change the rules so whatever you used to do that was fun is now a burden and so people will no longer care about the original test and there will be another group or three that will form on their own with their own test and like the Tower of Babel whatever energy we had will be dissipated and lost, but we will try and recapture it by bringing new people and groups into the fold only to piss them off with some new slogan like “No kiteflier left behind” but then we’ll say something like, “You’re not a kiteflier you only got a 13!” and there will be accusations of teaching to the test and there will rise up a group of teachers and false prophets who will claim to know the truth and will not (btw I’m negotiating with Madonna and the NFL to get the props from the half time Super Bowl show so we can have a proper induction ceremony for the Corey as Lama or to celebrate Kathy Goodwin’s next big birthday. Not sure if we can get enough muscled Roman soldier types to suit Kathy [or bare breasted bikinied bottomed buxom models to suit Corey], but I digress); however, we will then see the rise of the “off-the-test” reactionaries, which will include the fundamentalists (“there is only one test”), the test-partiests (“our fore-fathers did not fly kites to have them taken away from us by the kite boarders or the para-gliders”), the conservatives (“my Daddy and I flew a Ben Franklin two sticker and that’s good enough for me!”), and the deanists (“It’s too late, kiteflying has gone to hell, we need to rise up and only fly with our friends, you - btw - are not my friend”) and so it will go until someone in California calls a halt to all this silliness by proposing something even sillier and they will be known as the K-dasians: a willy group of seni-close knit family members with no apparent kiteflying or kite making skills who will launch themselves into the middle of the kiteflying world by grabbing headlines week after week (“He stole my heart, then he stole my kite [design]”, “She lost 87 pounds in five weeks and you can too on the kite diet!”, “...is in rehab. I can’t fly another kite I’m so addicted”, “I gave up sex for this?” etc.) and then the goodness that we had hoped will ultimately dissolve into a K-mart endcap selling plastic kites from China that are a knock-off of the ones you saw someone else steal from someone else from someone else and well the world will never be the same.

Gotta go someone’s at the door with avocados.

Bryce