Word Count: 430
The data, the charts with their colored towers, the numbers, especially the numbers, were driving him crazy. How could they offer this crap as proof?
He’d stopped the newspapers. He now read them all online. The Times, The Post, the pundit blogs. So much to read. So much to verify. The easy but time-consuming access to resources to prove them wrong. The multi-stop-shopping of information that started to consume his time. Despite his wife’s fearful cries, he quit his job and spent his days and keyboard-lit nights checking stats and firing off angry commentary on the errors. It did him no good. They kept coming.
He set up a website, crowd-source funding to pay for their mortgage and utilities and food. He woke every morning at seven a.m. and checked the newsfeed for articles, marked some as unread to read closer. By nine he had read all the news to be read and by ten had fired off statistical proof to the contrary. He worked through the day into evening. Factcheck and Snopes were checked first; no sense wasting time if it was already covered. But he dug so much deeper. People started taking his figures as facts. He spent his spare time correcting entries in Wikipedia. He became known as the ultimate purveyor of truth. He had millions of followers on Facebook and twitter, and thousands of comments each day on his blog.
He saw very few people–his wife and the kids as they poked their heads in to say hi or goodbye –and rarely went outside his house. Everything that stimulated, excited him was right there on his monitor screen. He gloried in each rebuttal he backed up with facts. He sank into despair over each new day’s lies and distortions. He was not apolitical but truly neutral, fighting both sides from the middle. Which resulted in constant conflict and stress.
His wife took the kids, left him a week before he noticed them gone. He tripped over his beard on his way to a once-a-week shower. He ate the last stick of butter Tuesday sometime around noon. He knew he was edgy and angry with an intensity that tightened its grip on his dreams and turned them to nightmares.
They found him dead, slouched on the couch with his laptop, after someone noticed his postings had ceased. Some said he’d suffered a heart attack, some said an aneurism exploded inside of his brain. I think he just had forgotten about eating when he ran out of food and starved.
