So It Seems
I had received the official summons, a human tooth from the rubble of the battered multi-colored gum ball machine. My graphic T shirt announced that I was part of the Last of the Mo Hicken Tribe. We had out-run the Bottom of the Barrel group, who were stuck in the mire of reviving the Volstead Act. I was now one of the chosen. It was to be a hostile takeover. The property had to be dismantled. It was stymying progress, a thorn in the neighborhood.
Some people swore the house was haunted. I had viewed it initially on Craig’s List. Just to get a feel. It had become the local attraction for virtual tourists. There were the usual bells and whistles, a cacophony of discordant sounds, objects out of place, inappropriate comings and goings of amusingly animated emails. They were generated by the dark thoughts of snickering children.
PROJECTIONS OF PAUNCHY POLITICAL PUNDITS appeared to populate the walls. They were hollow-grams and pontificated on subjects beyond the known world, like gang-sourcing, mega-hawking and uber-menching. Words were flung at you like weapons, so out of context there was no defense.
Bands of tattooed teenagers passed through chanting keyboard commands. They aimed a EZ-Pass-like device that spewed blank sharp-edged tweets at intruders. They wore studded ripped jeans and carried moldy cases of genetically altered baby food. The ‘house’ was for sale, but then everything was for sale.
Something was smoldering inside. Something was going to happen.
There was talk of terror. But talk didn’t make your skin crawl, and mine crawled.
There was a sign outside, WORK AREA AHEAD. “Dare I enter,” I mused. The house reeked of enticing smells, Proust’s onions, or was it cabbage, Mailer’s sirloin steaks and Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. Fetid red wine mixed with schlagg poured copiously from the faucets. There were wire hangers bent like alphabet letters jumping through a ragged rope hangman’s noose that dangled from an empty tipsy bookcase that was about to topple.
They had come and taken out all the paper; there was none to be shared. But we had all forgotten the use of paper anyway. There was a roundtable. There were no chairs. It was a crime to mention manners or goodness. They said that when Ray Bradbury entered with a book in hand, it was the last time he was seen. There was a closet upstairs. A shrine, to him I guess, all the clothes in it had labels that said, “Made In America”.
The house was nestled between a Roark modern mansion and a big box warehouse. Once the house had lost its bid for Historic Status it had become a Dollar Store. But that was long ago, back in the time…. Zoning was a thing of the past. Yet zoning was the future for all of us, assuming we made it. Square footage prices had escalated and decimated at the same time. You could buy a foreclosure or buy on credit. No one seemed to know the difference. The word VALUE no longer existed. Language was texted or tweeted, it was not spoken. And it was never in caps. Crypto-currency had taken over.
No one that had visited the house ever slept again. We had heard stories of thought police; they violated intelligence. They used the house for hostile mobilization. It was a point of no return. The In and Out Market of reality, a pass thru, like a ‘50’s kitchen wall. There was no front porch. In was in.
I had entered, of course, because it was expected. The tooth was clutched in my throbbing fist. I was there to be bar coded. Bar coding permitted a one-way admission. We were programmed to accept our assignments without much introspection, none, but who’s counting. There was no turning back. I was already getting gently zapped for too much thinking. Somehow I still had a buzz going, but how would I take the next level? What might be coming?
There was no one benevolent left to judge. Here at 5th and Elm, as I temporarily stood my ground and took a deep breath, I knew nothing would ever be the same again.
