Scratch

In school, we had to do some weird All About Me project in English class
And shockingly, one of the questions was one of those trying-to-be-deep-but-ending-up-thoroughly-meaningless questions!    (when is there not one of those?)
It was something about a metaphor for your life or something
I don't even remember what I did
Something lame and generic

My brother provided me with a sheet of paper upon which he had written the following:

METAPHOR: Alison's life was a barrel of monkeys. Internally dark and chaotic, figures tangled in grotesque chains confined and totally unaware of universes beyond the few cubic centimeters of the barrel's blue stoic plastic. Your typical corpra-capital American Average Joe oddly finds the cylindroid resonates with the rest of his Coca-Cola-television-self-gratifying-utterly-epicurean childhood and muses himself a simple man in having interest in such a minimalistic Milton Bradley (c) creation, opens it (with a prescience of emptiness?), examines a few of the non-native creatures (i.e. the monkeys), and then pushes the entire event out of his consciousness rather quickly and doesn't even remember it ever happened when his granddaughter has a set five years later.
   Both barrels and monkeys have little presence in 21st century American lifestyle, yet the barrel of monkeys is easily recalled to the front of our cultural conscious. While not particularly interesting or exciting, the monkeys are content to be withdrawn in their blue shell suspended in existential animation. She knows most people care only about shells and are solely shells themselves which is perhaps what draws them to pull apart the familiar blue casing and briefly look in at the tangled limbs and motionless faces and vaguely remember there being more in there last time until one time they check and there aren't any left.
Footnote: After all, children's toys often disappear. But alas, the barrel of monkeys always, mystically, contains at least a few.

^^best thing I have ever read

(And that is why I described the character of 'my brother' as 'an existential literary hipster' in the All About Me project.)