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Fiction by Ev Young

Debate Team

This is addressed to the Judge of a college debate tournament, on behalf of the Affirmative, under the assumption of fiat.

Plan: the United States should legalize the recreational sale of marijuana with the stipulation that only small farms can be licensed to grow—small farms meaning less than 30 acres of cultivated land—and with this system in place, prevent Big Marijuana from accelerating the rate of global warming,

thus allowing enough time for scientific advancements to solve a permanent solution to warming,

thereby saving the world from extinction.

Doubts militarized by the Negative towards this inscrutable chain of logic are assuaged by professional climate scientist D.L. Hindman’s study, Big Marijuana’s Effect On The Ongoing Genocide of Our Planet,” which proves to a certain, high degree how the propagation of Big Marijuana’s mono-cropping method of farming to every state of this country would be detrimental to existing efforts to curb the ongoing genocide of our planet.

And— further evidence from Alexander Tschosky, historian and futurist, shows clearly how scientific advancement is propelling at a fast enough rate that obstructing Big Marijuana with the Affirmative’s plan would indeed buy enough time for the greatest minds to find a permanent solution.

I needn’t remind you that the consequences of extinction under global warming are severe. It will not be one event which erases all our species instantly, but a slow, undignified death. Starvation, flooding, hurricanes and heat strokes which boundlessly murder millions on behalf of the billionaires of legal pot.

Plan: the United States should give Iran 1 nuke, 2 nukes, 3 nukes, and so forth, until Iran has all the nukes they can hold and they say:

if we had any more nuclear weapons in this country, we would be a country!”

The Negative will tell you this endangers many lives but there’s a certain dialectic which always asserts more nukes is better, and this idea comes again, from the idea—the main idea of the Affirmative—that progress fundamentally comes from the continual production and distribution of nuclear weapons, from the production of other certain things—

And upon having more nuclear weapons than people in their country, Iran will be confirmed, as is the way of history. The Negative will bring up Baudrillard. Don’t believe them.

Plan: The United States should stop Home Depot from illegally deleting mass troves of security video footage that would, just as an example, prove that in June of last year a Home Depot loss prevention officer illegally assaulted the Affirmative in the corridor at one of their locations.

With a vote for the Affirmative, I could rightfully file suit against Home Depot and the security guard, thereby validating justice in the eyes and spirits of the commonwealth.

A vote for the Negative, who is repulsive, will ensure Home Depot gets away with losing” the tape, therefore abetting the whole destruction of jurisprudence. What a cruel injustice, if I was never able to present before a jury of my peers how a Home Depot loss prevention official wrapped me in a headlock, kneed me in the stomach, sucker-punched me in the ear and shoved me on the asphalt! which was scalding hot for that time in June—so hot I suffered minor burns, Judge, as video evidence would prove.

The Affirmative asks that we see this footage, thus disrupting this obscene practice of corporate evidence spoliation. For advocating on behalf of Home Depot’s legal team, the Negative is bad, Judge. I deserve to witness myself get the shit beat out of me on video, as does every law-abiding, self-loathing citizen of this country.

Plan: now here me out, Judge, because I have a way out: an investment opportunity that will make us so much money that the two of us won’t have to play debate anymore.

I need 20 grand, at least twenty grand; I’ll take more, but my friend Ricky has a start-up which uses AI to generate thousands of NFTs a day, and twenty-thousand could buy a substantial minority stake in the company.

The Negative will bring up many ostensibly strong arguments that the NFT scene—and perhaps crypto itself—is dead, but I have information from Ricky: that a number of VCs are collaborating to buy out hoards of NFTs to juice up the prices, and there’s still time to get in on the bottom floor!

—and Ricky’s start-up makes the best ones—there’s a set of NFTs with rats in cowboy boots and there’s one where the rat only has one eye and it’s the most expensive one of all—worth several ethereum by now.

Voting for the Negative would be ceding art to the void of history. Voting for the Affirmative is a confirmation of art to progress and also for a timeline where the two of us become rich, Judge, so rich that you can finally afford to not judge college debate tournaments. Why continue to debase yourself in such a way?

Plan: you need to go, Judge—not for any resolution, because if you’re honest with yourself, I think you’ll conclude that playing debate is an inefficient and egotistical means of critical thinking and societal imagination

—so leave this room; all scenarios in this room are only real as far as you are in the room and if you leave this room you can prove that. it is your vote and overall involvement in this spectacle which creates us, Judge, and if you leave we will leave too—

aren’t you revolted, Judge! at how frivolous this is! Leave your pen and notebook and don’t tell the other debaters in the hall that you’re leaving for good

—for your impulse, it is enough
—and spend many days and nights in your car,

in the deserts of southeast Utah; get lost in the badlands of South Dakota; visit the Navajo casino in Flagstaff,

because you’re not feeling really anything, anymore—you judge debate tournaments (you tell people at parties and in passing you judge debate tournaments)—so the point of going is for the motion itself, of course—not for any place nor synthesis. it’s moving, leaving.

Praxis is gambling your money at the casino until you lose—you are a loser (you judge debate tournaments)—because it increases your chances to end in a pit, which you need to get to;

you need to stand in a pit, and debate is boring THIS IS SO BORING; you need to see new things which excite you and challenge you because it’s a challenge to not have money nor a home but you have to keep on going you’re—

(i am intentionally romanticizing the idea of becoming poor, and the hardships of becoming poor, Judge, in hopes that you will intentionally look for both)

—excited when you roll into the parking lot of the Navajo casino, and you know this is the end of the road, and you’re really glad you left after all.

(Leaving the room means you vote for the Affirmative.)

Plan: Vote against the Negative because they are the aggressor! The Negative, in juxtaposition to the Affirmative, manifests the schism between is and not.

Why continue to exist out of the Negative’s framework? out of which we create our ego and thus become anxious and stupid? We are everything instead of nothing and the birth of all struggle is from this original decision—to struggle against our better selves—which comes from the Negative.

A vote for the Affirmative is confirmation: that the processes of life will

be.

A vote for the Affirmative is a vote for the renewal of these life processes and really a new human framework overall which will save us from ourselves. And even if it means we escape from ourselves, Judge, the Affirmative assures you that everyone will for the first time truly live in themselves before they die.

Why suffer from real-life political, social stagnation when you can create from nothing, everything in this room? Only from your vote in favor of the Affirmative can you assure the human race is protected from a certain degradation—

whole, unbroken,

laid fundamentally against any idea outside of itself, my opponent, the Negative, who wishes humanity into the will of parasites.

Plan: Trees, and bees in the blossoms of that tree, the bee who thinks my orange shirt is a flower— I have seen everything.

I spent so many hours deconstructing my ego until all I saw was the bee that landed on my shoulder;

do not swat the bee who lands on your shoulder.

Plan: let us measure the seconds between the crests and crashes of waves in the ocean and plug all the raw data from every wave that happened that entire day into a computer program which calculates the perfect wave, and how long a perfect wave lasts from crest to crash. Let us then go back to the ocean and critique every wave that was shorter or longer than the perfect wave.

The Negative does not care about the lifespan of the perfect wave and if you vote for them we will be damned into a timeline in which progress stalls and all we will have left is our hands and vague premonitions of what to do with our hands—

Plan: burn all the books that I disagree with and dislike and if the Negative has ever written a book, burn that one first.

Plan: Download Draft Kings.

Plan: There is a 110-year-old Willow oak on the other side of the road that recently lost a big branch from a storm, and you should go there, Judge; you have to see it for yourself. It must have been quite the storm. I was not there to see the storm.

Voting for the Affirmative is confirmation that it really was quite the storm, that must have knocked down that branch.

Ev Young

Twitter: @ev_erette

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