Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King" as a podcast

Benjamin Rosenbaum's magnificent, absurdist hacker story, The Ant King, is read aloud in this weeks' StarShipSofa podcast (starting around 35:00). My listening day is complete.

Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.

After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon's stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt-to-equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.

Aural Delights No 42 Benjamin Rosenbaum,

MP3 Link

See also:
* Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King" sf collection as a free CC download
* Ben Rosenbaum's "Ant King" story under CC license