The Bachelor Watches “The Bachelor”

I sit on the couch & witness my life projected on a screen — I am white w/a chiseled, dimpled chin & no lips. I’m a farmer who lives alone in a loft & not a lowly office worker who lives w/a roommate in an apartment where dust balls decorate the floors & walls & the ceiling rings w/children’s feet running back & forth like baby bulls. I am crazy enough to be a contestant on a show where I’m contractually obligated to propose to a woman who believes in a heteronormative, patriarchal idea of what a family should be. At the end of every episode, I offer roses to those I wish to make out w/more & take out on prepackaged romantic dates I could never afford on my bachelor budget. For example: a date in a castle, a glass slipper prop, a clock winding its way down to midnight. My date & I sip champagne, chat & eat, then we dance to a live orchestra led by a maestro who wishes he were dead. A giant screen appears & plays a clip of a live-action Cinderella movie w/Prince Charming played by an actor I’ve seen slaughter & behead a soldier like clipping the head off a rose. In real life, my dates consist of dinner at Burger King where we dine on chicken fries & don paper crowns for a royal feel. On another show date, I take two women into South Dakota where we fly over the heads of white slave owners carved into a sacred Native mountain. At the end of the date, I offer no roses to either woman & abandon them on a canopied bed in the middle of the Badlands & take off in a helicopter to provide the cameras an aerial view of wilderness & despair. At the end of the show, I find myself proposing to a fertility nurse in a barn made to look like a chapel & not the place where I raised my first horse, fucked my first goat. Here, I will milk the cows for our future offspring to drink straight from the teat like I did as a kid. The show ends & I rise from the couch & walk into the kitchen. On bended knee, I reach for a bottle of beer deep in the back of the fridge, pop the top like a question & take a swig, cold & crisp once it hits my full lips.