"A fly, a fairly ordinary fly, was doing as it normally does, which is fly, and also sometimes eat, and as it was flying, had its life suddenly altered, for both the better and the worse, depending on who is thinking about it. It would be nearly impossible for one to attempt to compare the consciousness change that occurred in the fly to any other example of consciousness change due to the complexity of the cultural situation in which this fly happened to be brought up in, but if I were to try my best, Iʼd say it would be a bit like having sex for the first time (with another animal of ones species), but instead of just having sex, the sex became the air molecules and then you sat in a sauna of these sex air molecules until the sauna either got too hot, or your head explodes, which ever happens to come first. For smarter flies, it is a bit easier to realize that the sauna can, in fact, get too hot. But this is implying that it is smarter to join the group of flies who realize the sauna is too hot, and to travel back to tell about their strange and wonderful life- altering immersions into the godhead. Some flies would argue that doing that would be just horrific as having ones head explode, having to attempt to explain something to a stubborn clan of flies, most of which refuse to believe you and claim you may have spent a little too much time looking for the moon in a porch light, while the remaining others cling on to the information and become dogmatic about what you have to say. What really happened to this fly cannot be explained simply, although this sort of experience can happen to any kind of fly at any time. The early life of a fly is often rough, being thrust out of some dank womb with hundreds of other slimy off-white things into the dark and stench wrenched space of the inside of some trash can outside a steadily declining fast-food restaurant. Their livelihood is brought forth through the waste of their neglectful dukes and duchesses, which sits marinating in the pungent vinegar and other various indescribable rot-system slaved juices, made from the combination of so many ungodly smells and chunks of matter, so one can assume that anything that smells or tastes even slightly better than any of that would send a flyʼs mind way past the penumbra of our atmosphere. This fly, was now doing as it normally does, which is fly, and as it was flying, it flew through a smell that, as I said a sentence ago, could send its mind way past the penumbra of our atmosphere. This smell, which saturated the exterior, and quickly after, the interior, of this fly was being generated by a freshly cooked and prepared gourmet cheeseburger, which was about to be consumed with great pleasure by one of the beings the flies sometimes called a duke. Even for this duke, or dooke as the flies spelled it, whose flavor platte has had extensive training over the years, especially in comparison to this trashcan-bred fly, the cheeseburger looked, smelled, and presumably tasted pretty damn good. This fly, who had been raised sucking literal shit out of wrinkled and discolored plastic bags, is now encountering the smell of not just edible matter, but specifically prepared edible matter, that, to human standards, would rate at or above the label of being pretty damn good. Which, in comparison to any other thing that that fly had smelled in its entire life, was the most intensely beautiful, blissful, and life changing smell it had ever experienced. This fly, whose second most important activity, which comes in just shortly behind flying, is eating, has a brain that is programmed so that smells and foods take up about fifty percent of the entire livelihood of the fly, while humans may have many more activities going on in their lives besides flying and eating, reducing the smell and food center of the human brain to about thirty-five to forty-five percent. Now imagine how satisfied and fulfilled one would feel after consuming a deliciously prepared cheeseburger such as this. All the fly could do is revel in the scent, and fly, to never leave this general area, as it had actually found paradise. It even got close enough to the godly smell-generating matter to touch its skin, which had a consistency unlike anything the fly had felt before. It wasnʼt cold or hard like the metal of the trashcan. It wasnʼt crinkly or suffocating like the plastic bags which held the literal shit. It wasnʼt oozy, goopy, gross, loose, strangely colored or marinating in all those various indescribable rot-system slaved juices like so many of the things that the fly had been so used to. This matter was soft, coherent, made up of distinct elements, all of which had their own character, equally contributing to the beauty of the smell as a whole, which the fly could not believe. There was salt, there was fat, there was sugar, there was oil, there was starch, there was water, everything a little fly would need to survive for its entire life. If only he could spend the rest of his life stationed on this incredible life-sustaining super-force. He dive-bombed the juiciest looking spot and began sucking as many nutrients as it could from this God. This didnʼt really make the duke, or dooke, very happy, because he didnʼt want this fly, which had spent its childhood sucking literal shit out of wrinkled and discolored plastic bags, trying to touch his deliciously prepared cheeseburger. He would swing his hand around the burger in attempts to blow the fly away, which it would do, but as with most human solutions, it was not very permanent. The fly, whose perception of speed was much faster than the humanʼs, could avoid the swatting hands with ease, quickly returning to its delectable communion with the holy spirit. Dooke decided, after quite a struggle with this fly, to take care of business, which began by rolling up the closest thick stack of papers, which were often housed in this vehicle, Dooke being a student of physics. The closest thing he could find to a stack of papers, as he had recently cleaned the interior of his car, was the book Contact, by Carl Sagan, which had been left under the seat for months after he had randomly found it at a thrift store for $1.50. He had enjoyed the Cosmos series very much, and figured one couldnʼt know too much about somebody like Carl Sagan. Sadly, the only bit he had read out of it was the note that was handwritten on the inside of the front cover. It was some attempt at an inspirational comment from a father to a son. It was something corny telling the son to make sure he keeps his imagination in flight, and to have no fear when exploring things outside ones comfort zone, because the most amazing experiences, with high probability, exist outside that comfort zone. The note was corny enough to turn Dooke off from the book and for him to throw it under his seat, to eventually use it for the swift execution of this incessant fly. It sat perched on the window next to him as he smacked it, leaving a oozy, goopy, gross, loose, strangely colored residue on both the book and the window. The image was fairly nauseating, and quickly chased away Dookeʼs appetite for the cheeseburger, which he threw into a pretty gnarly trashcan a few yards away from his car. The burger fell right on top of some bag of some literal shit and began its rot-juice-generating-rot-fest, with the nest of flies, which raised that one particular fly, completely unaware in the trashcan next door. Dooke saw the nest of flies and maggots and larvae in that other trashcan.
“Fuckinʼ flies.”
He picked up the book Contact by Carl Sagan again, and tried to wipe off some of the grime with something that had about the same amount of grime already on it, only slightly older and drier. He cracked the spine, knowing to avoid the corny handwritten note in the beginning and jumped to the first page. It began with another quote. A poem by somebody named William Blake, titled “The Fly.*” Dooke didnʼt even notice the connection, at least not right then.
*Little fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
-WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Experience
"The Fly,"
Stanzas 1-3
(1795)"
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