Plantman took a brief but necessary vacation, or personal day — as if the rest of his days were property of Topiary Techniques — to visit the world-famous City Museum Complex.
The plaque outside The Hall of Hoaxes read, “Everything The City promised you, but never delivered. Everything The Nation promised you, but never delivered.”
Hyperbole, true, but what can one expect from The Hall of Hoaxes?
I was born without teeth — and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him.
– Mark Twain1
The nostalgia of elderly veterans looking back on months or years of their youth spent in US military uniform fighting in some exotic smaller nation thousands of miles from home is certainly not uncommon. Far less common are US veterans who fully realize the suffering caused by their shooting and bombing in someone else’s beloved country; invariably, it is a country already having been made poor a century earlier by the plundering of speculative colonial investment banks which invested similar military occupation.
The Possessed Man is not a bad man, nor a good one. He is terrified. Alone among friends and family, he “works” to support his family, but is not exactly sure of what he does. He “administrates creative product strategies,” according to the Job Description on file at Human Resources.
Today we shall feast and drink and watch football and give thanks to the Machine for prompt dispatch and delivery of hecatombs of slaughtered fowl. Tomorrow, we must put our shoulders to the wheel and shop, shop till it hurts, shop till it delivers us from evil, shop for the good of those who otherwise could not afford to shop if not for the brief, temp-gigs that trickle down from Santa’s workshop in celebration of…of….the sacred something or other…and of course, time off work….
What’s the logic behind using terrorism as a response to terrorism?
During ostensible…when rights…before they bombed better than ourselves for lesser crimes than being angry, outraged, disgusted and appalled. Too long now, this far-wheedling has gone, too far. Too long now it’s been too long for yet another generation.
It is the moral fashion of our time to be lifeless, shit-less, sex-less, diseased creatures — “beasts” is far too elegant a word.
“What is, is what is, like, you know? Anyway, a new election’s coming up. They promised us peanut-butter and freedom. Or was that peanuts and free butter? Either way, it’s the lesser of evils.”
Friday midtown. Friday payday.
“CEO Tobacconists.” Quality, overpriced cigars. Walk-in humidor. Air-conditioned smoking room. Customers relax. Smoke. Watch wide-screen TV. Recite the Smoker’s Ode:
green gone
brown dead
resurrection fire
leaf life
tumors bloom
like tulips
or teeth
oh wet pink lungs
