Tag: commentary

Liberated

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We were liberated by the British.
The Americans, they bring doctors. They bring food. They bring water. They bring medicine. They bring trucks and jeeps. They talk and they cry.
The British, they bring nothing. Not even clothes.
I ask one for food, and he turn his back on me. He get into his jeep and drive off with other soldiers.
I cannot eat freedom. I cannot wrap myself in freedom.
We wander in the street, the forest.
We do not know where to go or what to do.
It starts to rain, and we open our mouths to drink.

Blind Man’s Wallet

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Joe has been blind since birth, but he keeps photos in his wallet.
We ask him who they are of.
His wife. His daughter. His parents.
He opens up the wallet to show us.
All three are beautiful, almost-perfect.
They are the photos that came with the wallet.
We know they are fakes, but does he know they’re fakes?
And does he know that we know they are fakes?
We play along.
Or is he playing along with us?
Does he really have a kid? Is he really married?
He’s got the ring, but then… the photos.
What’s the truth?

Weekends

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When I was young, time crawled.
Now that I’m older, and the schoolweek is now the workweek, things feel a whole lot faster.
And it’s a good thing that the workweek goes by so fast. So much crap I just want to just get through.
It’s the weekends that matter to me. I live for the moment I can walk out that door and I’m free until Monday morning.
The problem is, if the week goes by fast, then the weekends go by even faster.
Sadly, Friday to Monday is a lot shorter than Monday to Friday.
When’s retirement again?

Helpful

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All our company’s technical support is moving to India.
It’s not because they are cheap workers.
It’s because they really like to help others.
Boatloads of them show up at our ports, asking if they can help with anything.
We send them back, and they offer to help with that, too.
“We’ll call you if we need any help,” we say.
They waited for the call, but we never did.
So, they started to help themselves.
These days, they’re the ones turning back boatloads of our people.
“We offered to help,” they say. “But we think you’re beyond help now.”

Predetermined

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You can’t change fate. Everything is predetermined.
From the beginning of time to the end of time, everything has been planned for.
Even the roll of the dice has a set outcome.
Don’t bother trying to escape from your fate.
This doesn’t means you should just sit there and let things happen.
Because the times you make happen, well, those were fated to happen, too.
The fact that everything happens according to a plan means you are completely absolved from the results of your actions.
This is what I’ll be telling the judge about those seventy-eight murders you committed.
Psycho.

Rite of Passage

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Some societies have complex and deadly rites of passage. The elders really bust your ass.
Others require that simple rituals be performed. That kind of cake walk makes for a weak man and a weak tribe.
The times sure have changed since my tribe roamed these lands, before fences. Before the white men came.
My great-grandfather had to hunt ten rattlesnakes on his own. Now, my grandson gets a hundred bucks worth of chips and is told to make it last the evening.
Otherwise, we’ll throw a rattlesnake at him.
Maybe the times haven’t changed all that much after all.

The Candidate

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Crowds surrounded the candidate, or the spot they thought he was standing.
Throughout the campaign, everywhere they thought he was politically, he wasn’t.
So much so, with so many lies and double-deals, he’d ripped a hole in the fabric of space-time.
One step ahead, his campaign called it.
Displacement, the scientists called it.
The distance grew. Pretty soon, the candidate appeared miles from where they thought he was.
Despite this phenomenon, he was elected. When he took office, as he put his hand on the Bible, he vanished completely.
The hole closed over.
The judge said “Amen and good riddance.”

Last Dance

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All the time, folks say they can’t wait for me to up and die.
My funeral’s gonna be one hell of a party.
Clowns and dancers and musicians and fire-eaters.
Hell, I got the perfect spot for it.
There’s this dancehall I grew up around.
Everybody there, they know me.
They’re the folks who wanna see me croak.
So, when I go, they’ll have a big party there.
And bury me under the dancefloor.
That way, for the rest of their days, they don’t have to travel to dance on my grave.
Hey, it’s the least I can do.

Sabbath

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Servants are unreliable.
When the Sabbath comes, you cannot depend on them to do work.
Unsupervised, they do such a poor job. And they steal.
So, we decided to build robots to do the Sabbath chores.
It wasn’t enough to program them with the ability to cook, clean, and mend. They must do it the right way. We also filled them with reason and piety, all of the Talmudic Law on a chip.
The robots worked great. They freed us to do so much.
Until Sabbath. They joined us in prayer, reached for their own switches, and turned themselves off.

Caricature

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The revolting, hook-nosed caricature loaded his grocery cart with every discount Kosher food he could.
When finished gathering food for tonight’s blood rituals, he haggled with the young lady at the checkout counter, protesting every penny.
She kept sweeping every item over the scanner. Beep. Beep.
“Want paper or plastic?” the bagboy asked.
“So hard a decision,” said the caricature. “Does the plastic come from petroleum stolen from Arab holy lands? Does the paper come recycled from shredded and defiled Korans?”
The girl stopped scanning the items and the bagboy stared into empty space.
There was nobody there.
Never was.