satire – Page 12

Kicking Around

A shrewd entrepreneur would–should–do anything in their power to corner the intuitive market of scarcity designed for the particular demographic concerned with–for example–how many hands reside on their watch face. Two is the bare minimum, three is optimal, four is impractical and irresponsible.

Along with this peculiar and pragmatic market segment, several other significant archetypes are not to be left behind (popular categories are conveniently located in your handbooks for perusal at your leisure). As their respective facets are revealed, it will invariably be identified that many of these have indeed been kicking around since the dawn of history, let alone the beginning of the free market economy.

When pressed to demonstrate our knowledge of these groups, exercising our right to dissect this polarizing slice of modernity, we must admit to ourselves that stereotyping can be dangerous if taken as truth. All of a sudden our watch-hand-obsessive type takes on a bit more humanity. Did you know that a noticeable amount of people within the watch-hand-obsessive grouping prefer their toasts unbuttered, substituting a liberal helping of sliced avocado? The algorithms never lie.

Crux

Feel free to experience the soul’s consciousness for as long as you can possibly bear it; don’t make excuses to avoid or replace it with cheap thrills designed to siphon thought into a tawdry funnel of spent emotion. You’re better than that, Deandre. I’ve known you since you were a budding young talent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m your biggest fan. I can only imagine the potential you hold in your incisors and between five to ten fingers, depending on your level of ambidextrousness. Do not fret! Fretting will get you absolutely nowhere. I’m saying no man’s land, ya dig? Many people have been in your position plenty of times in recorded history, and the issue lies in their penchant to alienate themselves until their perception of life comes from an internal gyration that’s out of tune with the common perception of just what it is that seems to make life so special in the first place. If you can answer me why it is that life is at all special (with a nod to my unflappable inner cynic, mind you), I will reward you with the knowledge that comes along with the essence that could be construed as the crux of Johnny Cash’s “A Satisfied Mind”. Just listen to good music, dear, and don’t worry about forming your own tastes and possibly offending others with your assertion of the importance of personal expression.

Are you going to eat that applesauce?

Spitballing

I may be a temperamental weirdo, but at least I don’t refuse to bathe for fear of shortening my lifespan. I don’t profess to have an alter ego, and I most certainly don’t carry a blank-loaded revolver with me to scare off adoring fans. Then again, I don’t need to worry about fanatical admirers breaking down my door to get an autograph (or even just a good look at me), so perhaps I’m taking my relative anonymity for granted here. In my heart of hearts, I suppose I’d like to achieve at least a modicum of notability for my extended creative efforts, but if that daydream actually came to fruition, I’d need to come up with a nutty character quirk to demonstrate to the masses that I’m a one-of-a-kind talent. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here, but maybe I could carry a straw and small scraps of easily-moistenable paper with me, to ward off rabid devourers of my work. I could develop the habit of high-pitched yelping, you know, to emulate the sound of a wounded woodland mammal. Or I could carry around a “pet” with me that I talk to all the time, like a bottle cap or wooden bowl. All of those ideas are crap, I know, but if I hit on a good one, I’m pretty much guaranteed to go down in history as one of those “oddball eccentrics” that the normies can have fun chuckling about at their potluck dinners.

First Things First

Nobody will tell you that religion is simply an iteration of our innate human ability to question and ascribe meaning to the phenomena we encounter in our immediate surroundings. Being able to alter our environment with the level of skill we’ve come to develop over the past few millennia, how many of us ever stop to wonder about the first moment our species graduated from nature’s master class in manipulation? Let’s not forget, we were once as defenseless as all the other beings to inhabit this planet, but we took great measures to ensure survival at all costs, to the chagrin of the very globe that fostered our greedy development.

Now here we are, coughing up smog and trying to figure out how best to colonize our moon (Mars is still a pipe dream). Hopefully we can find a way to bring our religion to other regions of our solar system, and perhaps even to the rest of the universe. As chosen (not brainwashed) people of God (not a fictional authority figure fabricated to alleviate the guilt that forms when we commit genocide and snatch unsuspecting people’s land), it is our divine duty to carry out HIS WORD. The wool has been removed from over our eyes (with the rug soon to be pulled out from under our feet), and there’s a whole universe of sinners who need the salvation of the LORD!

Now first things first, does anybody here know how to build a rocket ship?

Catalyst

Extraterrestrial nervous systems never had been my cup of tea (in fact, I never thought I could be privy to such a phenomenon) until I managed to get my mitts on a real live corpse. Yeah, you heard me right. One night as I was driving home from an average day of pushing papers around, I received a call from an unknown number. I’m not sure what possessed me to answer it. I rarely answer the phone while driving, let alone from strange numbers. I just recall having an inkling that the intention behind that attempted connection was more or less benevolent. Funny thing to hear myself say, but that’s definitely what it felt like. Anyway, I answered the call and put it on speaker, only to hear a sequence of hisses and beeps in an unpredictable pattern of multiple tones. As I attempted to speak with whomever had just contacted me, the call abruptly ended. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t think anything of it. As I was pulling into my garage (I always back in for the sake of convenience when I’m leaving in the morning) I looked over my shoulder and saw a limp body in my backseat, gray and slender. Not from here, you could say. Well, as a man of science, I was immediately overcome with more curiosity than anything. I immediately schlepped it to my house–it was much lighter than I thought it ought to have been–to get my bearings. While clearly not hosting a living being, it would seem that even after an extraplanetary individual has ditched their meat vessel from the previous life, there remains a kind of intact life force within the remains, as though awaiting a new passenger. I had that corpse under around-the-clock surveillance and never once saw a breath enter or leave. Nevertheless, I didn’t detect any of the decay one would find on Earth, and there were still trace electromagnetic signals that confirmed beyond a doubt that these… physical manifestations, for lack of a better term, are perpetuated by a force yet unknown by our primitive race. That anomaly was the catalyst for my lifelong study of the biology of such foreign bodies, to the chagrin of every person in my life who, up until that discovery, had held me in high esteem. Ah well, screw ’em. They’re just afraid of the things they can’t explain.

Irrational

If only the irrational beings on your planet could grasp the true necessity of bureaucracy… those poor, poor mammals with their heads in the clouds, constantly chasing pie-in-the-sky dreams and never settling for pragmatic compromises. The fools who believe in their deepest intellects that art is the greatest contribution to the history of the universe (or creation, whatever they’d happen to call it) are deeply flawed in their logic. With what logic would beauty correspond? There is no rational way to extol the virtues of well-placed paint daubs on a piece of stretched canvas; the beholder is the only source of validation. That kind of subjective viewership is much too volatile for any global civilization if it wishes to thrive in the greater cosmic community. This application must unfortunately be rejected at this juncture. If you would like to try again, you may wait 2,200 Earth years and submit new paperwork at that time. We very much appreciate your interest in becoming a member of Galaxion Gardens, have a nice millennium.

Consumer Product

Incentivized Dingle-Doos have long awaited their time in the sun, enduring hardships inconceivable to the average consumer product. The first problem presented itself when the naming committee notoriously skipped their meeting and all mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again. It’s odd when seven people all simultaneously vanish off the face of the planet–their only earthly connection a superficial marketing gig–as though they’d all played hooky to go out on a spontaneous committee-planned ice fishing trip, subsequently sinking beneath the ice due to the sheer quantity of seething boredom localized within a single shanty. But nah, they all individually had bizarre tragedies befall them just in time to miss the fateful meeting that would undoubtedly lead a promising product prospect down the road to obscurity. The money people, being the beancounters that they are, decided it would be best to stick the interns with the project while they frantically worked up ways to acquire new creatives as cheaply as possible. And thus they landed at Incentivized Dingle-Doos, apparently satisfied with the subpar effort. What did this poor amenity of modern life ever do to these people–these SCABS?! Nothing! That’s at least what the shareholders thought when their stock prices plummeted over the successive fiscal quarter.