WATCH PARIS BURN! (CHILL STREAM)

Paris was burning but Gary didn't care. He was too busy getting high with his 1950s exotica-style bong and doing multiple shots paid for by super chats on his YouTube channel. In all honesty, he'd become desensitized to things burning down after the George Floyd riots of 2020 when his home city of Portland went pretty much up in flames.  

"Life's a video game man. The easiest way to look at real shit is like it isn't even real."

Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned but Gary didn't have any talent for music so just scratched his nuts and sucked on some cold ones while he streamed multiple live Tik Tok accounts via his YouTube page and watched his numbers shoot up like a rocket. He hadn't had numbers like these before and it was making him a little giddy at first so he took a few slow inhales of some brand-new kush he'd bought from the kids on the street they were calling 'Apathy' to slow the surge of his adrenalin.

Back in the day when Gary was live streaming and gaming 24/7 he used to get adrenalin rushes that turned into extreme panic attacks and had to cut his lives. After seeking help anonymously on some online health forums and chat rooms, Gary decided to reduce his amount of time game streaming. Now he tended to go for event streaming by using other people's live content (mostly stolen from TikTok) and syncing them up on his channel. This way he could just sit back and chill while the world went to hell in a handcart.

"Who knew Paris burning would get my account to blow up. If I'd have known sooner I would have found some terrorist videos to get all you peeps excited about. Nah. I'm just kidding. This is all chill here. FBI, CIA don't come to my house, please."

The streamer had never been outside of Portland, let alone France which he knew  as much about as he knew of the playwright Christopher Marlowe who one of his super chatters had recently asked him about, more in jest than in hope.

"Have I read Marlowe's 'Massacre At Paris'? No I never did. I played 'Assassin's Creed Unity' though and 'Riot: Civil Unrest'. They were fun man. I'm telling you there were like trailers for all this chaos we seeing now. I got this theory all these games were our generation's military training for when anarchy breaks out amongst our so-called 'civilised' countries."

Though Gary's initial focus had been on streaming the riots in Nanterre, street protests were quickly spreading like a contagion through Paris as fires, looting and gun fire started breaking out in Bezons, Gennevilliers, Garges-lès-Gonesse, Asnières-sur-Seine, Montreuil, Neuilly-sur-Marne, Clamart and Meudon. Luckily the YouTuber's talent was for locating live streams where that action was taking place and his screen was increasingly beginning to remble a mass surveillance gallery where he was slowly being reduced to a shrunken head in the bottom right hand corner.

"I'm  gonna need a bigger monitor at this rate, man."

For a donation of $50 dollars, Gary offered to do a shot, followed by an extra $25 for a bong chaser, drinking and smoking as much as he could while the chat was paying for his addictions. The wilder the riots got, the more hammered Gary became. Destruction of one of the jewels of Western civilization was one thing but a one man self-engineered destruction in his basement was another. Gary didn't see his fate as being entwined with Paris so much as his predilication for nihilism which offered one way out of his dead end life. If it hadn't been for his YouTube channel he might have disappeared into obscurity after hanging up his joy pads from his gaming days but as Paris burned and the footage flickered against his grubby glasses lenses Gary held onto hope that all was not lost quite yet. Even if Europe was.