I've been transformed into an anteater Beanie Baby. The process was extremely painful, but it's been long enough now that I don't think about it very often. There are worse things to be. Before my transformation I was a political cartoonist.

I remember materializing in a Goodwill in my new form, feeling like I had just woken up from a dream. I sat there for days, never becoming hungry or tired and never needing to sleep. That was the strangest part. In my life before I had never sat alone in the dark like that for hours on end, nothing to do but think. The first night I flipped out and spent hours straining, trying to get my nubby little legs to move, my snout to twitch, something, anything. No dice. Around the third night was when I realized that I wasn't going to accomplish anything and started to calm down and take in my surroundings the best I could. Losing full movement of your head takes some getting used to.

The next few nights in the Goodwill were pretty zen. I stared at the popcorn ceiling and traced patterns and found constellations. I took notice of the other stuffed animals around me and gave them names and their own backstories. The kind of stuff I did as a kid. It made me realize how much I missed that way of thinking. I wasn't a workaholic by any means, but once I had the time to sit and stare at the ceiling I got to wondering why I never made time to do it in my old life. If it wasn't work, it seemed like my mind was always on some chore or complaint, some social annoyance or stupid tweet or the dick that cut in front of me in the Dunk's line that I didn't really want to think about. Once I was able to step back, I couldn't believe how much of a baby I had been. I mean, I could just take a second to think about it and KNOW that there are better ways to spend my time. Of course I didn't enjoy getting angry at someone on the internet or staring a hole through my electrical bill or writing emails. Even the promise of working hard to make lots of money rang hollow; I was a cartoonist. Was there some moral prerogative I didn't realize I was enforcing on myself? Some leftover Puritan scraps, an invisible dictum handed down through American cultural history that I let wiggle its way into me? One that said that if you're not angry or exhausted or working or miserable, you're not good for anything? My very job description had been to turn a critical eye to these American cultural mores; I was more practiced in that kind of thinking than anyone I knew, and a fat load of good it did me. I'd been miserable all the time. I had the Pavlovian urge to draw Bush and his big fat bat ears saying something stupid, but even this, my most treasured and intimate form of expression, had been taken from me. Now I wasn't sure whether being an anteater was better or worse than my old life, and on top of that I couldn't move around or pace to air out my thoughts, so I sat there festering and looking for shapes in the popcorn ceiling until I calmed down again.

At some point, I had lost track of the days, someone came in and bought me off the shelf. This was a weird feeling, both being bought like chattel and getting to move again, even through no effort of my own. From the shopping basket I was able to get a look at her: she seemed like early 20s, brown curly hair. She dressed kind of ugly, to be honest. She dropped a bunch of change at the checkout counter and kept apologizing to the clerk. When she brought me into her car she gave me a little pat on the head and set me on her dashboard. She started telling me about her day, presumably not actually thinking I could hear her, but I wasn't really listening anyway. Coming into the sunlight for the first time since I became a Beanie Baby was jarring-- my plastic eyes didn't adjust, but my brain still had to.

When she brought me home she set me on the desk in front of her computer, facing out so that I couldn't see the screen. I could just feel the blue and purple light in my peripheral vision.

I found out a lot of things about her from sitting on her desk. She was a Twitch streamer, first of all. I would've thought sitting there and listening to someone talk for hours at a time, days on end, without being able to move or contribute anything to the conversation would've grated on me, but it ended up that it was kind of nice. I wasn't alone anymore. Plus she always talked about things that made her happy. I couldn't see what her chat was saying, but she always told them about the zombie show she was watching and tell them not to spoil it for her. It became a nightly routine where she would come home from work at five, make some instant ramen for dinner, and sit down and start streaming. I would listen to her talk and bask in the shifting, flashing light from her computer screen for a few hours, and then she'd turn everything off and go to bed, and I would contemplate the popcorn ceiling.

Once, she said: "'Show your setup?' Alright guys, but I should warn you guys it's not-- uh, it's, hehehe, just don't make fun, alright?"

She reached her arms over me and came back with a set of computer speakers, showing them off for her webcam.

"I think these are, uhh-- my computer's a Dell, I think these are Dell too. Y'know, they get the job done." She put them back. "And then, my headset here," she had the kind with cat ears, "it's got, like, a built-in microphone, and these cool LEDs I can make different colors,"

"And thennn," her hand was getting closer. Oh wow. "I picked this little guy up at Goodwill a couple weeks ago," she was picking me up. It felt like something. I didn't know what. She held me in her hands while she talked.

"He's pretty cute, the tag says his name is Ants, so-- chat, say 'hi, Ants!'"

She held me up to her webcam. I didn't see the chatbox anywhere. The only thing that was open was a Firefox window with a couple Wikipedia tabs and Google Docs open. She put me back down.

When I open the window and squeak my bird calling necklace, the sparrows and woodpeckers outside will be able to tell that I'm outside of society-- I don't reap the selfish joy of man's hubris like most people-- I'm very aware of our connection to the natural world, and I'm respectful of it, and they can smell it on me. If a woodpecker doesn't come and land on my hand I'll start crying.

A tan rabbit with pale green eyes and a tuft of scrappy hair on his head. His name is Tansy. He can't remember where his warren is, so he's out looking for it. He's sure they're all worried sick for him in there. He woke up running, but he doesn't know from what. A glimpse of it skitters over his mind like a memory of a dream: it's big, really big, and alien, not like a fox or a badger.

I don't like this feeling of being chased down. I guess nobody does.

The tan rabbit dodges back and forth in a Z, looking for a shrub to give him shelter. Nothing is good enough. Everything is scrappy and sparse and though he hasn't looked behind him to see what it is that's chasing him, he knew if he did in these scraggly bushes he'd be seen immediately.

He tried to remember more about what was chasing him as his little feet launched him forward. Something long, and straight. Shiny. It looked like a fencepost he'd seen once. Something like an animal but big and tall, standing on two legs. It held the fencepost and had pointed it up at a pheasant, and there was a sound that ripped apart the earth under the rabbit's feet and the pheasant fell in a tailspin to the ground.

So that was what he was running from. He didn't want to be like the pheasant.

He ducked into the roots of a tree. He had to stop. His eyes were rolling in his head and his heartbeat was ringing through his big ears. For a fraction of a second he couldn't get enough air and he felt like choking, but soon the oxygen returned and he could blink a couple times and see where he was. He listened. Nothing.

Then, the sound again-- only this time it really did rip up the ground under him. A big whoosh of air in the hidey-hole under the tree roots. Clumps of dirt flying everywhere, his nails digging and tearing at the grass yanking himself out and flinging himself totally instinctively forward. The next thing he knew he was yards away, and just as his next thought started to form, the noise ripped the ground apart again.

It was far away and right between his ears. In less than a second the back of his head was scorching hot, then cool, like a breeze blowing over wet fur. A taste in his mouth he'd never had before, a dandelion being blown apart by the wind, release. His paws would not work to catch him at his last stride but before he even hit the ground he was nothing anymore, forever.

Sometimes they're more violent. Sometimes when I lose my grip on what's going on I'm running away from a terrier, but he always chases me into another one and they bite me and shake me around and rip pieces of me apart until I can't move anymore, and the hunters stand still in a circle and look down at what they're doing to me and they don't stop them. Once, the worst one, I was a rabbit but I was still myself, and as I was coming in the door of my own home the hunter was waiting for me. I started trying to run up the stairs but I tripped, and he started blowing pieces of my body apart with his shotgun, and all of my blood was soaking into the carpet, and when I couldn't move anymore and I was scattered all over the stairs he walked up to me with the rifle and turned it backwards and started bashing my head with the butt of his rifle. And the worst part was it didn't really hurt physically but I knew he wouldn't stop until I was nothing anymore but a big black stain ground into the carpet and some tufts of fur and little bloody specks you have to scrub out, until I was completely unrecognizable, until you didn't know I had ever been a living thing in the first place. Sometimes the last thing I remember before I come out of it is being underground-- but not my body-- and I can see all of my relatives who had died who had had nice quiet open casket funerals, but I can see their faces now and I can see their skin is like paper stretched over a skeleton and it's torn in some places and their teeth are all showing and they're yellow and tight and dry and they have worms crawling in them and eating them, and the older ones, my grandparents who died when I was really young, are like nothing anymore, their bodies are like ground up matter like dirt or compost and the dirt that used to be their bodies is sitting inside their clothes and rotting through their skulls and they can't do anything anymore, and the worms decide how their heads turn and how their fingers twitch, and I want to feel sick and curl up in a ball, but I don't have a body anymore either.

Once, though-- this was the worst one-- it all happened like that, and I was without a body, I wasn't anywhere or anything anymore but I could see underground all my dead relatives, and they were perfectly intact. It was like they were sleeping-- they hadn't changed at all since the day they died-- that one scared me the most.

After the worst rabbit dream I remember waking up to my mom holding me on the stairs. For a second I remembered we were on the stairs because my bed had a huge spot where my blood had soaked into it, then I realized that that hadn't really happened either. I was sitting a couple steps below her, clutching her leg with her holding my head in her lap. She had looked really tired.

You have been trapped in a compulsory points game for all your life in which you must score points on the other team in every thought you commit to thought and every action you commit to action. Not a lot of people know this about you; in fact, you've only recently come to realize it yourself. The other team consists of every other human being on earth.

You keep your new discovery in mind as you go to wash the dishes. It used to be that you almost never washed the dishes; you'd lose too much time in which you could be scoring points. The other day, though, a thought came to your head and made you realize that dishes, too, could be an effective point-scoring vehicle. You think of it now like this: the other team would get a point if you had an apartment full of dirty dishes and nothing to eat your lunch off of, so there's one point. You're nursing a hunch that there may be a third team in play which consists of nature itself-- keeping your hands warm in the hot tap is a phantom point for you until your hunch is confirmed. It's good to keep these things in mind, just in case. At any rate you figure you've scored at least one point on nature with the way you keep the heat in your apartment turned all the way up and a container of shea butter on your desk to keep your skin from drying out. You made sure to look for an apartment where heat was included, so that's another point for you on your landlord. You've gotten quite good at this game ever since you stopped leaving the house.

The dishes are done now and you run your eyes over the kitchen deciding on lunch. It's 10:50 AM, so you have some time. You dumped a bunch of flaxseed into your smoothie this morning to curb your appetite later in the day-- that's one point for the flax seed (healthy), one preventative point for the weight you're not gonna gain from eating waffles for breakfast, and one point for cleaning out the blender when you did the dishes. While it seems like you can earn points for most things, you try to keep on top of accumulative point-making objectives like staying skinny and keeping the apartment clean. If you don't, the fail state catches up to you quick and you take a big point hit. The most visible and humiliating fail states deal the most damage. You'll probably eat some plain spring mix out of the bag for lunch.

As you go to sit down at your home office, you can tell you're not going to be able to focus on work today. That's alright. The nature of your job makes it so that the work inefficiency fail state is one of the most invisible and forgiving. You tend to think from the way that they talk about it your coworkers on the other team are content to let this point battle slide (you can never be too sure, though).

Your mind at the moment is not on your work, but a line from an episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia-- you don't like to watch much TV, but your friends like this show, so you thought it might be strategic toward scoring future points to get familiar with it. You can't tell if it's working yet.

In the episode "The Nightman Cometh," there is an obvious joke at Mac's expense when Charlie tries to convince the gang to put on a musical he's written. The concept of creating art for the sake of personal fulfillment clearly too lofty for his cromagnon mind to comprehend, Mac asks, "Who against? Who are we doing it against?"

You hate Mac. His grating naivete makes him absolutely your least favorite character. But occasionally you hear this line ringing through your head when you haven't had a distraction from the points game for a few hours. You know one throwaway joke in a sitcom shouldn't rattle your very modus operandi so easily, but you're startled at the effect it has on you. You're not like Mac. You start to sweat thinking of the points you'd lose should anyone else make the comparison with you-- that's a humiliating one.

It dawns on you that, due to the scale of the ranks of the other team, they could be more than capable of pulling off a psyop like the one your mind is starting to describe. You'll have to dedicate some more thought to this. For now you think you'll stop watching Always Sunny.

Your computer monitor begins to burn a hole in your eye as you sit there with your hands on the keyboard. You think about other things you could be doing right now and whether you could be scoring points. You don't really care about losing your job; even before you'd figured out the nature of the game you had an intuitive sense against spending your money (giving your money to other people is often a point for them and a point deducted for you), so right now you have about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank. You keep the job because without it, small talk can become muddy and confusing and there's much more of a chance of committing some kind of faux pas or stepping on a point landmine when asked something as simple as "what do you do?" It's strategic more than anything else. You may go for a walk.

Before you leave you walk through the apartment working through your mental checklist. The stove is off. The heat is all the way up. Dishes are done. Plants are watered. You give them another spritz just to be sure. You're still a bit shaken up over the line of thought you were entertaining before: would the other team think to slip hidden messages into the media you may consume just to try and make you lose your footing? Would they do that? You're glad you have the plants in here, that whatever happens you can be sure of your own supply of clean oxygen inside the apartment. This is your domain, and outside the domain of the other team. There's no telling what they could be doing out there, what they could be releasing into the air...

You spend some time looking for a face mask in your coat pockets. It's been a while since you've had occasion to wear it. When you pull it out of the inside pocket of your brown Carhartt, you hold it in front of your face and stare at it for awhile, trying to decide whether wearing it will earn or deduct you a point.