“Chicken-Man Tales”, 2025
oil on canvas
At 9:53 AM on Tuesday, the regional emergency dispatch centre received a call about two middle-aged men reportedly in danger of drowning. When first responders arrived at a nearby town square, they found 53-year-old Jari and 56-year-old Janis bone-dry but fully invested in the theatrics, insisting they’d been surfing life’s biggest waves for the last 15 years. Today’s grand finale? Janis dove head-first into a vodka bottle—predictably, the bottle shattered. Enraged by this glassy debacle, Jari landed a clean hit to Janis’s nose, unleashing a nosebleed that promptly upstaged any risk of actual drowning.
Isn’t it remarkable how the whole apparatus is set up to reward this nonsense? Taxpayer-funded emergency crews exist to “rescue” people who’ve gamified their own near-disasters, while endless preventive measures funnel public money into policing self-inflicted mishaps. It’s a Kafkaesque loop where professional time and resources are squandered on absurdity—and somehow we all dutifully keep playing along.
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