Two Adornos
The name painted in black letters on the red mailbox was Adorno; but whereas Theodor Adorno, who invented the influential philosophical procedure known as critical theory in an effort to adapt Marx’s analysis of the commodity to the cultural and economic conditions of late capitalism and the so-called “culture industry, was a German-Jewish émigré who died of a heart attack in Switzerland in 1969, Gregory Adorno, who lived alone in the tumbledown house at the other end of the gravel driveway and had scrawled his name on the mailbox himself in leftover autobody paint, worked as a security guard patrolling the grounds of the nearby paper plant (which had been out of business for at least a decade, but someone still had to keep the window-breakers and other mischief-makers off the property) and tossed back Buds at Jack’s Red, White, and Brew on Route 5 every Friday and Saturday night. The locals, needless to say, were well-aware of the difference between their Adorno (alive) and the other (not), but from time to time some desperate Ph.D. student from out of town would show up at Gregory’s door, greasy-haired with bloodshot eyes and a satchel of overdue library books slung over one shoulder, begging him to please, please, please help them understand critical theory before their upcoming qualifying exams.
“Honestly, I don’t know a thing about it,” Gregory would have to confess.
As a security guard, on the other hand, he knew quite a bit about how to wield a Billy Club, something several of the students who visited him subsequently discovered was at least as useful, when it came to passing their exams, as the ability to analyze the portrayal of the mechanization of leisure time and the mass production of consumer desire in Siegfried Kracauer’s Georg.
Eli S. Evans has been littering the internet with his work for twenty years. A small book of small stories, Obscure & Irregular, can be purchased via Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera, and a larger book of even smaller stories will be forthcoming from the same just in time for the holidays (though at this point, we're not sure which holidays). He'd also like to do a chapbook or small book consisting entirely of stories in which someone is run over by a truck, so if you dabble in printed matter and would like to collaborate, get in touch at elisevans@gmail.com