I didn’t always live like this—counting crumpled twenties, watching phantom faces flash across empty velvet rows, and praying to the flickering gods of Hollywood. There was a time when movies meant something, when the smell of stale popcorn mixed with nicotine and sweat, and the rattling reel of film was as sacred as mass. But that time’s gone. Swallowed whole by algorithms, marketing monsters, and some bastard child of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Now I’m just a front man for the long con, a midway barker for a broken funhouse.

Zero Interest Rate Policy, that’s the racket now. Cheap cash flows like watered-down bourbon, and everyone’s got their hands in it—studios, hedge funds, even the damn ticket scalpers. They all figured out how to turn art into spreadsheets, and I’m the last sucker on the chain, selling fake dreams to fake people.

Welcome to the new economy.

The game’s rigged from the start. The film industry used to be a gamble—Russian roulette with a hundred thousand-dollar bullet. If the picture flopped, you’d feel it in your bones. Hell, I’d feel it in my theater, in the dead silence that echoed after the last frame cut out. But now, with ZIRP money flooding the market, there’s no risk. Just a game of musical chairs, and every seat is bought by some studio exec with an expense account thicker than his sense of reality. They don’t even need you to sit down. They’ve already bought the ticket, sold the dream, and padded the weekend numbers before the film even hits the screen.

See, it starts small—whispers of a new blockbuster. The studio shoves a suitcase of money down the throat of every theater in town, promising they’ll fill every seat, whether real or imaginary. I play my part, I pocket the cash, and smile as I project the latest visual narcotic to a room full of ghosts.

Bulk purchases, that’s the trick. You’d think people would smell the rot, but they don’t. Some poor bastard logging into Fandango sees that half the seats are gone and thinks, “I better get my ticket now, or I’ll miss out!” Little does he know, those seats were bought by an intern in a dark room full of blinking servers, feeding the illusion. Click, click, click, it’s all ones and zeros now. I’ve seen blockbusters “sell out” faster than you can light a cigarette, and when I step into the theater, I can count the real people on one hand. It’s like a reverse séance—no spirits, just empty chairs haunted by the cash that bought them.

Then there’s the seat-filler con—buying up entire rows, entire showtimes. Not to fill theaters, mind you, but to fill the studio’s numbers. You’d think it was some kind of arms race. Who can pad their box office the fastest? And I play the willing accomplice, because the ZIRP gravy train keeps the lights on and the rent paid.

I used to hate the silence. The low hum of a movie dying on its second act, the sound of an empty audience not reacting to anything, no clapping, no laughter—just the crackling buzz of the projector burning through film that nobody came to see. But now? I love it. The emptiness of the theater is the sound of money flowing upstream. I could fill the place with mannequins, and it wouldn’t matter, as long as those little green numbers keep rising in someone’s data feed.

Theater owners like me—we’re just props in the grand spectacle now. We put up the neon lights, sweep the floors, and make sure the popcorn machine’s running, but we’re part of the bigger scam. It’s all about perception. Make it look like a hit, and it’ll become one. The public? They don’t know the difference between real demand and the shadows we cast on the wall. They want to believe in blockbusters the same way they want to believe their vote matters or that their crypto’s going to the moon.

But let me tell you, this whole thing’s a Ponzi scheme on steroids. The studios pump money into the illusion, and the illusion keeps spinning. They say, “Just wait for the big weekend box office numbers!” It’s all a front. The films don’t matter; the numbers do. It’s like shooting up heroin, chasing that first high. The studios buy the illusion of success, hoping it becomes real before the money dries up.

And it will dry up, oh yes, one day the cheap money will run out, the ZIRP tap will close, and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. When that happens, I’ll be standing here with an empty theater and an even emptier bank account. But until then, I keep playing my part. I keep selling tickets to invisible audiences, because that’s the game now. We’re all just players in the Great American Scam, chasing ghosts with stacks of counterfeit cash.

But here’s the kicker: I don’t hate it. Hell, I thrive on it. Because when you’re in on the con, when you know the hustle, you can ride that wave as far as it’ll go. The public eats this stuff up. They think they’re part of something, part of some cultural moment, some Hollywood “event”—but they’re just another line item in a balance sheet.

So yeah, I’ll keep dimming the lights, cueing up the projector, and letting the phantom crowds shuffle in. Because as long as the ZIRP money flows, the lie lives on. And in this game, the lie is more real than the truth ever could be.

Welcome to the flickering hustle.