Election Day is over, and we’re sending a new guy to Washington.
The old guy, who never did anything, packs his stuff and comes home.
The new guy is full of enthusiasm and ideas, and he gets immediately to work.
Well, not yet. He needs new furniture for the office. He has to hire a staff. He has meetings to attend.
When he’s ready to sit down and get to work, he gets up and… heads off on the campaign trail.
It wears him down, and after a few terms, he’s accomplished nothing.
The old guy laughs at us.
Suckers.
Tag: dystopia
Charity Begins Somewhere Else
Every year, we set up a tent in the middle of the city.
The smell of freshly-roasted turkey, baked stuffing, and sweet potatoes fills the air.
This brings out the homeless, lonely, and poor in droves.
We invite them in and they sit down.
We make them wait for a while.
When they’re good and hungry, we ask them to bow their heads and then we feed them…
Into massive circus cannons.
We launch them everywhere… into the river, out into the dump.
Pretty much anywhere but here.
Good riddance.
Then, we sit down and eat our own Thanksgiving meal.
Look In The Mirror
I pour the white dust out on to the mirror and quickly chop it into lines.
One by one, they vanish up my nose.
I let the rush carry me for a minute and then sniff whatever I can off of the mirror before putting it away.
That’s when I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror.
My eyes are bloodshot.
My face is thin and gray.
I barely recognize myself. What have I done?
That’s the moment where I make the promise never to do it again.
I’ll never look at myself in the mirror after doing cocaine.
Poetry In Motion
After watching girls roll around the track and beat the crap out of each other in what was billed as “Poetry In Motion”, we walked out of the roller derby and put together our own sport:
Rollerpoetry.
Instead of helmets and pads, we handed out berets and copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book “Howl.”
Poets would circle the track, sharing the verse in ways that teachers and Kindles couldn’t.
Opening night, the crowds gathered around the track and booed the circling poets.
One bumped into another. They started throwing punches.
My friends, there’s no avoiding the truth: Culture truly is dead.
The Predator
The predator lay in a growing pool of his own blood, flowing over the photos and newspaper clippings he’d taken to remember his crimes.
I’d shot him in the hands, the feet, the legs, the arms.
He begged for mercy as I reloaded my gun.
I ignored his pleas and the growing sound of sirens.
He then found some courage. “Who are you to judge me?” he growled, “You have blood on your hands too.”
And, so I did.
“But it’s your blood,” I said. “Hardly innocent.”
And then I shot him in the chest, again and again.
Click. Click.
The Mechanical Arm
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The mugger tried to take the girl’s purse.
She fought back.
And lost, with a bullet in her heart.
Despite the fact that the girl in the street was dead, her mechanical arm was still running.
The AI routine was cycling through idle behaviors, drumming the fingers on the ground, opening and closing on its own.
She liked to wear gloves, so the lifelike sleeve with the tattoos ended up convincing the mugger that she was still alive, so he shot her a few more times.
The hand kept moving, twitching, and the mugger picked up her purse and ran.
Rehab
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Things got crazy at the party. Talia overdosed on longevity drugs and went into a coma.
We handed her off to the Sleeping Beauty Ward. They gave us an estimate of 80 years before she’d come out of it.
Eighty years?
They handed me the bill for her babysitting, and I scraped up most of it.
A kidney and some skin for burn grafts covered the rest.
That was 79 years ago. Vital signs say she’ll wake up soon.
Never did find anyone else, too old for her now.
I wrote one last note and walked to the termination center.
The Great Claw
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The Great Claw wobbles over our ravaged city.
Every now and then, it descends and grabs at a car or a building and yanks it up into the sky.
Invading the world wasn’t enough for the aliens, so they put it up there to torment us.
“The rest of the world is dead,” said the message. “But you’ll keep us amused while we extract the necessary isotopes for our next journey.”
Scientists at the university tried to come up with defenses, but The Great Claw ended those plans.
It rained bricks as the research center was hauled up… and up…
The Last Photograph
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The Conquest Museum on the Zagitz homeworld has many exhibits, but the most popular is the last remaining human DNA sample.
Drones guide their podlings to the guarded platform for a peek at the vial in magnetic suspension.
The thing is, that’s not the real sample. It’s just for display purposes.
Some claim that the real sample is in a research asteroid where the government is cooking up new batches of humans to stage fake invasions.
But the truth is, there’s no human DNA left. The humans were annihilated decades ago.
The conspiracy theory makes a good bedtime story, though.
Do you trust these pancakes?
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The courts upheld the ban against pancakes last year.
Now, the only place you can get pancakes is an underground grill.
Or, if you risk it, at home.
“We’re making waffles,” I tell the grocery checkout girl as she holds up my maple syrup bottle suspiciously.
The government says that waffles are a gateway breakfast food leading to pancakes, but I disagree.
I like waffles.
I like bacon.
I like orange juice.
But pancakes? No. They don’t hold butter or syrup like waffles do.
She bags the eggs, flour, and maple syrup.
I’ll make waffles.
But after that? Who knows?