Agony: A Proposal

The following chapter is from Agony: A Proposal, which is a work in progress. Agony is a game played by three teams, referred to as “Families”: The Gods, Talk Radio, and The Animals. Agony is played once every three months. The chapter below concerns “The Covered Wagons,” which is a term that refers to three months of television preceding the day of the game itself. The members of the three Families, during The Covered Wagons, are referred to as “Pioneers,” and they are televised every day. Pioneers dwell within “The Frontier,” which is the stadium in which their Agony will be played out. The Frontier becomes “The Casino” on the day of Agony (also referred to as The Day Of Gambling), once the Families have moved out on to the field of play.

Pioneer Family Television

The spectator never sees The Covered Wagons moving—never sees The Covered Wagons from afar. The spectator sees, through a peephole, into The Covered Wagons. What does he see? He sees the Pioneer Families apart from, but bound into, Agony. His seeing begins seven days after The Fix and continues on until noon on The 65 Breaths.

Pioneer Families have long been a great source of entertainment.

Most of a spectator’s days are nothing less and nothing more than a shifting glimpse of the Agony-bound life that The Covered ­Wagons give shelter to. The bulk of a spectator’s life is spent looking into preparation for a spectacle that never keeps him long. Whether or not we recognize this fact—and if we have recognized it, how we proceed to shoulder the burden of the myriad dilemmas it gives easy birth to—tells who we are, or at least who we have pretended for the longest time to be.

While Families may be distinguished during Agony by the color of their torsos, before Agony they are distinguished by the manner in which they are accessible in the peephole.

Talk Radio are the most familiar of the three Families; within The Covered Wagons, they are broad­cast fully and plainly, which is to say, with clarity of image and audio. They wear the formal attire that they are provided with, except during the first eight days of The Covered Wagons, when they are naked. Their only unclothed ap­pearance is in the first fifteen seconds of their being on air (during The Hand-Jobs, which are discussed below). When an Agony begins, their faces, voices, and worldviews are familiar to most spectators, or at least considerably more familiar than the faces, voices, and worldviews of The Animals, and cer­tainly more familiar than the faces of The Gods.

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