The Briefcase

One of the funnier things to me is to come across some tableau that tells a strange and confusing story. For example, if I were to come across an expensive suit that had been modified to have 4 arms instead of 2, and in the pockets was a partially used gift card to a bait-and-tackle shop, I’d be tickled trying to imagine what led to this outcome. Is this a Halloween costume? If so, why use an expensive suit? Why would you be buying fishing equipment in your Halloween costume? Does this person have some sort of mechanical arms that they use when fishing, and for some reason they wanted to wear them with this particular expensive suit? And what caused them to abandon it, gift cards and all?

These sorts of situations are, unfortunately, rare, because most things are normal and the slightly abnormal stuff tends to have quotidian explanations. Back in my late teens / early twenties, I found this to be tragic, and decided that I would like to create more situations of this nature, so that other people could experience the joy of coping with an encounter with the surreal. And so it was that at some point around 2006¹, I did this:

If you can’t quite make it out from the grainy mid-2000s-era phone photo, that is a briefcase full of gummy bears. I went to Office Max, picked out the most briefcase-y looking briefcase I could find, then went out and bought probably $50 worth of gummy bears to fill it up. My idea was to take the briefcase around with me to various places and try and act really suspicious with it. Occasionally I would open it up and surreptitiously eat some gummy bears, then close it back up quickly. Eventually I’d leave it somewhere unattended for a while, hoping that someone would find my behavior so baffling that they’d feel compelled to open the briefcase and satisfy their curiosity about what was inside; of course, finding that the briefcase is full of gummy bears would simply raise further questions, and they would have no way to get answers about it without admitting to having snooped in the first place. This burning question would lodge itself in their brain and they would think about it until their dying day, and on some distant day they would die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words would be, “Why gummy bears?”, at which point their descendants would be confused and baffled as to the origin and significance of this question, and my shenanigans would bear fruit in a new generation.

Of course, none of that happened because most people don’t pay much attention to their surroundings in the first place, and even if they do notice something weird they just write it off as, “Oh that guy’s kinda weird I better stay away from him.” Even if they saw my briefcase full of gummy bears, I suspect the median person’s reaction would be, “Well, that’s not something you see every day” and then they would move on with their lives. It’s absurdly frustrating for someone trying to create a surreal and whimsical situation that is just a little bit off, but alas that is the world we live in. Plus, if I had never done this, there’s zero chance that anyone’s day would have been brightened by seeing a weird teenager eating gummy bears out of a briefcase, and at least I got to enjoy thinking about the possibility of creating a stranger world for someone out there.

Footnotes: Link to heading