Tags

goodwill, government, honesty, politics, society, trust

There’s nobody here who has anything to do with governments! We’re all good people!

– Philip K. Dick, “The Last of the Masters”

The Thing About Abusive Relationships

Tags

45th, abuse, america, mixed message, politics, resist, satire

He told me his support was the best, unheard of. But then he told me about some inconsistencies in the process. Which was it? Some friends of mine tried to tell me the truth. He freaked out–called them liars to their faces. He started watching who I was talking to. He actually threw some of them out of our apartment just for disagreeing with him. There was a certain way he wanted me to dress. A role he wanted me to play. Especially in public. I thought it was just an act at first, kind of a schtick, but it got worse instead of better. He buys me nice things. Sometimes he grabs me a little forcefully. My ex showed up on TV the other day and he went ballistic. He brags a lot. One of my friends asked him to prove what he said. He wouldn’t do it. Then she found his journal and passed it around. That’s fake! That’s not mine! He yelled. He yells a lot. My girlfriend from Germany stopped by the other day and he wouldn’t even shake her hand. He wants to make me great again.

Lunar Influences

Tags

madness, moon, nonsense, politics, randomness, serendipity, tangents

The moon spoke to me the other day. One of those early evenings where the sun hasn’t set, but the moon got tired of waiting. Maybe you want to know what it said, yes? OK, well, it’s probably not going to make all that much sense, but the moon told me:  ZX7-399.  What? That’s what I said. I’m not saying that’s your response. That’s all the moon said to me. I tentatively glanced over my shoulder just to make sure no one else was around. No one capable of that sort of weathered stentorian delivery. Not a soul in sight. How can I be sure? Well, I was hovering in space. Not a lot of places for somebody else to hide. You’re probably thinking the same thing my second cousin Janx was thinking when I told him this very same tale: How do you know it was the moon and not the sun? I’ll roll my eyes at you just like I did at him. I’m not crazy–the sun hasn’t spoken to anyone in 473 years. But the moon’s outbursts, peals of wisdom, and cheesy jokes are well-documented.

It took me a few days but I figured out that this was a license plate on one of those mobile, metal boxes used for transport on the planet closest to the moon. Think of this as target coordinates. I now had a mission from the moon. And so, like any good asteroid, I aimed myself using the ZX7-399 coordinates. Used some quick calculations to adjust for the pollution index and the evening rush hour and headed for what the planet’s dwellers call Atlantic City. The device marked ZX7-399 would have been destroyed had it not been for a local politician whose parents were fond of alliteration. He had part of this bridge shut down on purpose to retaliate against some other politician. This altered the traffic pattern and sent me off course. So, instead of obliterating ZX7-399 as the moon instructed, I crashed through solid earth and into some sort of giant pipe that started leaking black liquid.

It turns out this pipe was connected to a whole underground of related pipes. The owner of these pipes realized they had suddenly been made useless by this accident. He stood to lose a fortune. He hatched this scheme where he would become president and have the federal government purchase all his land through imminent domain before anyone discovered how useless this property was. It was a mostly benign scheme as mass defraudings of the public go, but to complicate matters, unbeknownst to this wealthy tycoon, he had been under Russian mind control for several years. Every day he attempted to send a coded series of cries for help through some short messaging platform the humans called Twitter, but these cries for help were misinterpreted.

People were very confused. Small mammals began to commit mass suicide in protest.

And the moon? He just smirked crescently.