Whore of Babylon

More Weird Shit I Found in the Woods™.

(at the end of the path)

“Listen. I know everyone wants to summon a demon at summer camp. I get it, I really do! But if you’re gonna try that shit just… put some effort into it. I mean look at this shit. IT’s just…It’s not even symmetrical. And look at this egg thing. It’s wildly disproportionate to the rest of it. It sucks! It objectively sucks! If I were a demon and I saw this, I would actually be offended. Try harder, kids. Try harder.”

i figured you’d say something sarcastic and strange like chartreuse or evergreen or wintermint

but you looked at me with those eyes that meant you had glimpsed something of your future and sort of hated it and you said “you know the color you feel when someone you love slowly forgets you”

and i swallowed hard and said yes, yes i had lived through a couple of those

You know, I’m pretty much 1000% OK with anyone in Houston jacking a flat screen.

I mean, you’re gonna have multinationals rip rare Earth metals out of Africa at gun point and ship ‘em to China to be assembled into a TV in some factory where they got nets on the roof to stop ‘em from jumping off. You’re gonna put it on a boat crewed by a bunch of Filipinos who are gonna find out when they get to port that the boat owner defaulted and isn’t paying ‘em, and if they complain they’ll get blacklisted. Slap that shipping container onto a truck where the trucker is in debt and working at almost no profit margin, from an owner-operator scheme, and can’t even unionize because he’s “not a worker”. Slap the TV into some big box store where an 80 year old woman whose benefits got cut is working the register because her son can’t support her any more because his factory job got “outsourced” to prison labor and now he works at a burger joint while pundits shout that if burger flippers wanted better wages they should have learned to work in manufacturing. Now, have a hurricane run through town and flood the place, after fossil fuel companies spent decades paying politicians to ignore the warnings while they rip up the mountains and the prairies, poison the water and the air, and hot-box the whole planet, so we’ve got “100 year” and “500 year” storms happening every couple years.

THEN, you take some guy whose farm went belly up because US government-subsidized corn flooded into Mexico, and whose hometown got overrun by cartel fueled by US drug money, so he ran across a border to make a living in Texas, and he and his family decided not to run from the storm because ICE is deporting every undocumented worker they catch back to God knows what future.

- and THAT motherfucker decides, once the whole city is flooded and everything is hell, “Fuck it, at least I can watch Game of Thrones in HD next season!”.