A monologue from the play by Kate Robin
NINA (forty)
Nina is watching her kid play. She has struck up a conversation with a father who’s there watching his kid too.
I mean, look at what’s happening out there. Civilization is totally breaking down. Everyone’s just yelling at each other.
Or ignoring each other—plugged into whatever it is that isn’t really happening. And all this . . . media. Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest.
All these narcissistic declarations instead of conversations. I mean. Stores have blogs. What’s a store going to say to me that’s meaningful?
And meanwhile the planet is just . . . shuddering. Just swelling and sweltering and flooding and storming and we all just go deeper into our screens —flatter.
We just get more and more . . . flat. Tuning it all out with anti-depressants. And blaming our psychic fatigue on gluten.
Everyone thinks they’re allergic to gluten. And of course, I know some people really are, and the wheat has been genetically modified into,
like, cardboard, and God knows it’s not easy to digest, but I think for most people the exhaustion, and the bloating, is just from denying reality every day.
The end. The decline. Of everything. The decay. The toxins.
You can’t even tell people they need to read about what’s in their meat, their milk—the chemicals and the bleach and the fecal matter—they’re feeding their kids.
Everyone’s so obsessed with protein, they just say “I can’t.” I don’t want to know!” I don’t want to know? What kind of existence is that?
I don’t want to know.
