Wind's Dark Sigh (1. Pause before pie)

   "Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing." -- Sylvia Plath


This story begins with Rolanda Maze setting up a voting poll on her Twitter page. She gave her followers three options on how she would celebrate her achievement of reaching one hundred thousand subscribers on her YouTube channel. What she was definitely going to do was perform a song on her new SG CM black Gibson guitar her brother Michael had given to her on her birthday, but her followers were going to choose what was going to be done to her as she sang. 

     The three options they were voting on were: A) Maced in the face after the first verse; B) Pied in the face fifteen times the entire duration of the song; and C) Be randomly shocked by muscle stimulators connected to her cheeks. 

     For three days Rolanda had the poll up on her Twitter page, and a few thousand of her followers voted. At the end of the three days the results were in, and Rolanda saw that most of the followers who voted wanted her maced in the face. The thing was she was the only one to see that option to be the winner. She knew it was going to be either that stunt, or the muscle stimulators, so she got one of her computer savvy friends to rig the voting poll, setting it up so if people voted for option A, or option C, their votes were going to option B, pied in the face, the least painful, and the votes for getting pied in the face were to be split in half and spread evenly to A and C. 

     Yes, Rolanda had rigged the voting process. Even though she believed in fair elections when it came to politics, this Twitter voting poll was just for fun, and there was no fucking way she was going to be like those other YouTube idiots by getting maced, or electro shocked while she was doing something she wanted to do for the rest of her life after her time with being a Social Media Celebrity was over. 

     She filmed the video in the living room of her apartment in Los Angeles with her friend — another YouTuber — Zilla, while her roommate, Harriet, was at work. She usually never filmed a video outside her amateur studio, which was also her room, but she felt for this celebration it was more fitting aesthetically to film it with the living room’s big window in the background; it had this nice view of tree tops she loved to look at every morning as the sun rose. 

     Harriet never liked it when Rolanda filmed the apartment outside her room, even with her SnapChat, or taking pictures for her Instagram. She said to Rolanda that it was cool she do it in the kitchen, but not anywhere else in the apartment, especially her own room, or anywhere close to it, where she had this nice set up for her own job. She wanted nothing to do with the Social Media scene. She led a generic life, working as an intern architect for some big company in Downtown Los Angeles. 

     “Does Harriet watch your videos?” Zilla asked Rolanda as she mounted the camera on the tripod. 

     “No,” Rolanda replied. “Sometimes she’ll listen to one of my albums while she works in her room, but everything else I do she has no interest in.” 

     “If she sees what we’re about to film, you think she’ll flip out and kick out of the apartment?” Zilla had already hit the record button on the camera. 

     “I don’t fucking care,” Rolanda said. She plugged her Gibson into the Marshall amplifier. “She’s my friend and all, and sometimes we go out to the bar and have a good time, but she is one picky bitch. She acts like she’s the goddamn landlord.” 

     “But the pies,” Zilla said, “she won’t like the fact about pies being thrown in the living room.” 

     “What’s she gonna do, spank me? Look, we moved the furniture up against the walls, and I put plastic over the fucking carpet.” Rolanda tapped her bare feet on the plastic. 

     Zilla gestured to the plastic covering, saying, “You should’ve gotten a bigger one, it doesn’t cover the entire carpet, and the furniture isn’t covered with plastic.” 

     “And your point is?” Rolanda asked with attitude, one hand going to her hip. 

     “My point is when the pies hit you in the face they will splatter their ingredients all over the place, getting on the carpet, the couch, the table, the goddamn chair, and maybe on the wall there, it’s close enough. These aren’t whip cream pies I’m going to throw into your face, they’re a diverse variety with cherry, chocolate, egg, peach, raspberry, flan —.”

     “Oh, my God, shut up,” Rolanda interrupted, “you’re fucking boring me. All I care to know at this moment is do I look good in this two-piece swimsuit.”

     “Yes, you look good,” Zilla commented. “Why are you wearing a black two-piece swimsuit?”

     “Because I don’t want to stain any of my clothes,” Rolanda said, strumming the guitar with a nice distorted riff, and turning around to shake her booty for the camera. 

     “And you still don’t mind if the carpet, or furniture gets stained?” 

     “We’ll clean it up before momma gets home, Zilla. Come on, let’s get this show on the road.” 

     “I hope the song is short, because the sooner we clean it, the better. If Harriet comes home, and notices a small fucking stain, remember, I was not here. This was all your doing. You will suffer the wrath of Harriet.”

     Still shaking her booty for the camera, and doing a short solo on the guitar, Rolanda said, “Are you ready to do this?”

     “There’s just no reasoning with you, is there, Rolanda?” Zilla said with a sigh, finally relenting on the subject. 

     “This is a celebration, girl,” Rolanda said, “I hear nothing but the cheers of one hundred thousand people. Well, really the sound of mouses clicking on the link to my videos, but one day I’ll be standing on a stage in front of what feels like a crowd of a hundred thousand, all cheering my name. I don’t really care for a stain on a goddamn carpet. I must remain focused, more so than Harriet when she’s designing some new goddamn building.” 

     “Okay, fine, ready to start whenever you like,” Zilla announced. 

     “You ready to throw the first pie?” Rolanda inquired. 

     Zilla turned around to the fifteen pies covering the top of the kitchen table — there were a couple on the chairs — and picked up the first one to be thrown at Rolanda as soon as she began performing an original song she wrote just for this particular YouTube video. 

     “Poised, and ready, Rollie,” Zilla said, holding up the first pie over her head. 

     Rolanda hopped, doing a one-eighty turn to face the camera. 

     “Rollie Maze here,” she announced, pointing a finger directly into the camera lens. “I’ve just hit one hundred thousand subscribers on my channel, and I want to give you all a gift. An original song just for this occasion which I will perform for all of my dedicated fans. And the votes are all in. I’m going to perform it while getting pied in the face. Here we go.” 

     She strummed the first distorted riff with the guitar pick. That’s when Zilla threw the first pie, an American Caramel tart, right into Rolanda’s face. 

     Fame is the name of the game

     I’m workin’ hard to get that free cocaine

     So I’m singing a song while gettin’ pied in the face

     [Cheese pie]

     Thank God it wasn’t me gettin’ maced

     Or electrocuted in the face

     [Cherry pie]

     One day I’ll be like Lemmy

     Be up for three weeks after an ounce of speed

     [Big Egg tart]

     These pies taste so damn good

     If I didn’t work out, this’d be my only food

     [Flan]

     Fame is the name of the game

     Anything else is considered too lame

     [Flapper pie]

     They should make a pie laced with cocaine

     Rolanda continued — sometimes pausing for a moment to taste chunks of pie collecting in her cleavage — until she finished by turning around, bending over, showing off her booty to the camera, and getting the last pie thrown right onto her ass. The song was over, and she laughed and cheered, raising her arms into the air. 

     She looked into the camera, and said, “Thank you everyone for your praise and support. I will keep doing what I do best as long as you keep watching and clicking like. Tell your friends to subscribe. Now I got to clean all this up, or I’ll get stabbed by my roommate.” 

     End of video. Zilla pressed the button on the camera to stop it from recording anymore. 

     “Well, I hope all this shit was worth it,” Zilla said, surveying the mess.

     As she expected, there were splatter marks not only on the carpet, but also on the furniture, and the walls.

     Rolanda didn’t respond, she simply walked over to the counter in the kitchen where her cellphone was, picked it up, and began a SnapChat video. 

     Holding up the phone so it’s camera could get a nice view of her with the mess in the living room in the background, she said, “Here’s the aftermath of my one hundred thousand subscribers video celebration which I’ll upload on Wednesday. First, I got to clean all this pie shit up before my roommate gets off work. Are you ready, Zilla?” 

     “Fuck you, Rollie,” Zilla said. 

     “I love you too,” Rolanda said, still looking into the camera on her cellphone. 

     End of that SnapChat vid. 

     A few days after Rolanda uploaded the video to her channel, she announced on her Twitter she would respond to comments for an hour. Usually she would spend half that time responding to the YouTube comments on her other videos, but since this was an auspicious occasion, she felt should give her fans a special extra treat. They deserved it, and she, in a way, deserved to read some praise. Of course she knew there were going to be some trollers bashing her, but that was part of the internet people like her had to deal with on a daily basis. Things like that had to be taken with a grain of useless salt. 

     Scrolling through the comments, she responded to as many as she could. 

     

     One said: You’re fucking awesome, girl. I showed all my friends. 

     Her reply: Thank you so much. You make me so grateful to be a musician.

     Another said: Cool fucking song. I especially love the line about Lemmy.

     Her reply: R.I.P. Lemmy. He’s entertaining the cosmos as we speak. 

     Then she came to a comment she didn’t like. It was the kind she’d expect a troller account to make. If it was a troll account that didn’t have a face to one of the many weird names trollers came up with, she would’ve disregarded it, and moved on, but in this case, not only did the account have a real name, it had a picture as well. The person was real, and the person was one of her subscribers. She even recognized him. 

     Ronald Mungus: I don’t care much for the song. I basically pause it at exactly 2:46, because I’m a straight, white male. DON’T JUDGE ME! LOL.

     What made Rolanda so popular on Social Media was not based solely on her impressive talent as a musician, or the comedic videos she made for her YouTube channel, it was the fact she created music based off lyrics and poems written by her followers for free, and then upload a video on her channel performing the song. All they would have to do was e-mail their words through her website, and wait until Rolanda sent them a reply stating she’d created the song, and when she’d upload the performance. She started doing this five years ago. 

     At first the wait list was two weeks until the video was uploaded, then it turned into a month, then eventually got to six months. At that point, after reaching one hundred subscribers on her YouTube channel, and gaining a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, the wait list was over a year. To get people pushed forward in line, Rolanda setup a PayPal donation where the more a person donated to the song writing project, the sooner she’d create the song.

     She remembered this Ronald Mungus was one of them. He had e-mailed her a poem, saying it was written for someone he loved, and wanted it turned into a song. He praised her on how impressed he was with what she was doing with people’s words, how amazing and inspirational it was, and if only more people knew about what she was doing, she’d go far, to the top. He even donated a good chunk of money so he could here the song as soon as possible. 

     After reading his comment she realized this dude was full of shit. 

     She replied to Ronald Mungus. It was the longest reply she had ever written in the comment section of any of her videos. 

     Rollie Maze: Hey, Ronald, I remember you. I remember reading the poem you sent me to turn into a song, and I thought, ‘Here’s a guy that understands how a man should love a woman.’ I realize now that wasn’t the truth. How naive I must’ve been to think you were a good person by the way that beautiful poem was written. Now I think you must’ve simply plagiarized the words to — what?— get a reply e-mail from a ‘hot piece of ass,’ and get her to create a song you pretend to have written the lyrics for so you could impress your buddies at the bar. I am not some thing that you can have for yourself. I wholeheartedly regret making the song. And it makes me truly, truly sad that people like you exist amongst a civilized society who make it sometimes seem uncivilized. I thought you were cool. And I say to you, sir, “You’re just an asshole!” 

     Rolanda then moved on, replying to comments which praised her until the hour was over, and she logged off her YouTube account. 

     She took out her cellphone, and opened the SnapChat app. 

     “I just finished replying to the comments to my pie celebration video,” she said into her phone. “I want to thank all those who congratulated me, and rained in their praise for me achieving one hundred thousand subscribers. I did see some negative comments from those damn trolls that live on shaming people like me, but I pay them no mind, they mean nothing to me, because I am just too damn happy to notice.”

     The time limit for the SnapChat video ran out. She added it to the “My Story,” then began another Snap. 

     “And also big thanks to those who voted on my Twitter to choose how I’d celebrate,” she continued. “Especially to those who chose the pies over the other options. I don’t think I could’ve handled being maced, or electrocuted in the face while trying to perform a song. Thank God for democracy. Remember, it’s extremely important you register to vote in this year’s election. It only takes fifteen minutes. Let your voice be heard.”

     About twenty minutes after the hour of her replying to the comments was over, Ronald Mungus replied to her little lecture of a reply. 

     Ronald Mungus: That’s exactly the type of response I expected. LOL. I have even more respect for you than I did before. All this time I thought you were another Indie musician who’d sign a contract to a big corporation, and end up like those pop music idiots that dance half-naked on television, twerking their bony asses at the camera. Now I see you’d never stoop that low. Well, hopefully not. Money is a drug everyone wants. I can’t wait to hear the song you’ve made out of the poem I wrote. It’s very important to me. I love you for doing such a thing for giving lowly people like me who have a hard time finding a conduit to get our words out to a larger audience other than our relatives, and close friends. You’re awesome, and so damn funny.      

  

     Rolanda never read this reply due to her moving on to work on music for new videos, and doing collaborations with other YouTubers. The most important thing a Social Media Celebrity had to do was remain busy, and keep on uploading on the various social media outlets. One hobby she did to keep the energy up, and her mind focused and in the zone, was training in the Mixed Martial Arts. She never had the intention of participating in an actual competition, just wanted to be a tough, badass people would aspire to be.

     A week later Ronald Mungus deleted his comment, and his response to Rolanda’s reply. To remove her reply he had to report it to YouTube as harassment. That day when Rolanda was uploading a new video, she saw she had been flagged for said harassment, but ignored it because it didn’t really effect her in any way. It was the first time she ever got a notice from YouTube of being flagged for anything, and would be the last.