essay

 
Here, for the sake of oversimplication, is a metaphor. Imagine you’re watching a football game. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like football. Imagine someone dragged you along. All that matters is that you’re there. You’re at the game and you have terrible seats. You’re sitting in the top row of the upper deck, hundreds of feet from the action. Maybe the angle is bad. Maybe the view is partially obstructed by a beam. The tickets were junk. But you’re there, so you’re invested. You’re engaged by default. You can see the microscopic players running pass patterns and covering punts upon the artificial grass. Some of them are getting concussed. Some of them are ripping up their knees and writhing in agony. Some are taunting their opponents. Some are fluid and beautiful. You glance at the scoreboard. Statistics are being accumulated and points are being scored. There’s a jumbotron that’s allegedly broadcasting a version of the same game you’re watching live, and the multitudes of people around you are cheering and booing and guzzling Bud Light and arguing over the potential outcome. All of those things are happening. Yet there’s one detail removed from the equation: THERE IS NO BALL. The players are collectively pretending to throw and kick and carry a leather spheroid that does not exist. It has not been there for years. Perhaps it was never there at all. It’s been absent for so long that most of the players aren’t even pretending. They believe that the ball must be there, just as you do. They need to operate as if this game is genuine, because it would be terrifying to believe otherwise.
This is the whole world now. Why does it matter?
Okay, that’s the premise for your prompt. Your prompt is the following. You will write a SINGLE-SPACED, FOUR PAGE (EXACTLY FOUR PAGES, TO THE END OF THE FOURTH PAGE) paper using TEN PARAGRAPHS (NOT NINE, NOT ELEVEN), to address this prompt. You can address it however you want, I DO NOT CARE. All I care about is how you interpret what this prompt would mean to the world and the people living in a world that this kind of thing has been normal (we’re kinda living in this world as we speak). Okay, so…there are no rules (except for a few–the paragraph number, the page number) and the following. At the begging of EACH paragraph (including the first)–you must begin with these words:
Yeah, but…
And your essay MUST come together as a paper, as a story, as a whatever, using those parameters. GO CRAZY!
These will be due on Friday, and will be worth 25% of your overall grade. The music papers will also be due Friday. I WILL NOT be able to accept late papers because grades are due soon after Friday.
And remember, the more creative you are, the better off you will be. So…I’m not kidding…take this paper anywhere you want to. If you have a question like: can I do this: the answer is yes. As long as you follow the rules of the paper. Yay!