Starring Steve Buscemi

It is 4:00am and the world is perfectly silent, except for the sound of the talking heads. It is also perfectly dark…beyond the reach of the eerie grayish-blue glow, that is.

But that dimly effervescent glow and the babble of the talking heads that dwell at its epicenter know no borders. Not anymore.

Five TVs sat stacked chaotically in the far corner of the dank loft. Two thirty-seven inch sets sat on the floor, serving as a sort of base, with two more on top. One was around thirty-one inches, the other twenty-seven, and there was a twenty-one inch on top, so it looked like a mound that was falling apart. From behind the monitors cables that were coiled wildly slithered out from different sides of the heap of talking heads and into different sockets. To the right, satellite receivers for each TV were stacked in a far neater pile, one on top of another.

The place was rather bare, in spite of the random collections of what appeared to be infinite congregations of clutter. Against the far wall, near the bed, was a desk; the post-modern sort with black, varnished, particle-wood surfaces and a chrome tube frame. It looked like any you’d get at your local OfficeMax or Office Depot or Offices ‘R Us or whatever the hell have you. A small set of black acrylic inboxes sat just beside the computer monitor, though it was apparent from the scattered paper pouring out onto the desk that the task of keeping things under control had gotten away from them.

In fact, the paper almost seemed to have staged a coup that only half succeeded, the way it spilled out onto the desk in thick scribbled-upon stacks whose populations thinned and wrinkled, growing wilder as they drew closer to the edge. It happens in the best of families, after all. The writing on the paper grew less frequent further into the fringe. A few lines here, some brief scrawling there, on some sheets that hung off the edge, no more than a doodle. But the paper hadn’t stopped there. Some had made its way to the floor, as well. Everywhere were balls of paper, white and yellow, legal and sketch, and who knew what had been printed on them as they formed a trail of refuse to the living room, little crumpled corpses of the fallen rebels occupying nearly all the floor between the couch and the talking heads – a final monument to the Great Inbox Revolution!

A once beige couch in front of the TVs appeared to be suffering from a bad case of jaundice, and perhaps the onset of cirrhosis. In contrast to the packs of possessions randomly set on nondescript, free-standing, steel shelves along the walls, it was meticulously centered across from the pile of screens, and a few feet from it’s left side arm, a white support beam ran from the polished concrete floor to the high but dingy ceiling.

And on the couch, sat a man once named Jacob Lyons. But now known to the world only as M.T. Sbazis.