Stranger Kindness

“Co-pay will be ten dollars ma’am.”
“Uh, what? T-ten dollars?” The woman turned to her husband and spoke quietly, but not too quiet that the receptionist couldn’t overhear.
“…last of our money. How will we go home? What will we eat tomorrow?”
Her husband reached up and gripped her hand. They looked at the child laying her head on his lap.
“We don’t have a choice,” he said, caressing her cheek. “Things will work out for themselves.”
The woman shakily turned to the receptionist, sliding a ten dollar bill from her battered purse.
“Ma’am, I apologize. I have reviewed your records again, and it seems that I have made an error,” the receptionist said. “It is not necessary to co-pay at this time.”
The woman just stood there dumbly, hope and joy and complete thankfulness suffusing her weary face like a break in an ugly storm. As the nurse came to receive them the receptionist dug into her purse, blinking through tear-filled eyes.

Her groceries bagged and shopping cart filled, she stood at the end of the check out line with slack-jawed dismay, her whole body slowly engorging with despair.
“Try it again, please.”
The clerk swiped her debit card once more and shook his head.
How could this be? She desperately hoped what she knew to be true wasn’t true. Robert was out pretty late last night. Did he go to the casino? Heart racing, she was a statue in the store with slightly trembling knees. Paralyzed.
“Look, lady, you dropped something.” The gentleman in line behind her was picking up, out of all things, a hundred dollar bill. Her hand covered her mouth.
“N-no, that’s not mine.”
“Well, It was just lying there, and you look like you could use it more than I could. Go on, take it. Go on.”
By the time she reached her car to unload the groceries she was weeping with great heaving sobs, her newborn son wailing accompaniment from the iron nest of the shopping cart.

She had been in business all day. There were no customers. People passed her by without a glance in her direction. What was wrong?! The product she served was of the best quality, and handmade with loving care. She had pasted flyers around the neighborhood in brightly coloured advertisement. She pouted angrily in the hot sun and watched the ice melt. Across the street, a shy little boy, five, maybe six years old, at the urging of his mother dawdled slowly towards her. He had a brown bowl cut and a cute little gap in his teeth. He walked with his hands twisting behind his back and when he finally arrived at her stand, he just stood there and looked back at his mother. She waved him on. He wouldn’t look at her and said through a bashful smile, “Two lemonades please.”
Her first customer!
“That’ll be fifty centh,” she lisped. Fresh ice for the first customer of the day! She told the boy to wait a moment and rushed into the house, going “YAHOOOO!” past her perturbed mother. She brought ice and poured a nice tall cup of lemonade. Then another. The boy’s mother came to take the drinks, and she beamed at them with a smile like a lemonade slice.
“Thank you,” she said and sat back, putting her hands behind her head. This was the beginning of an empire, she thought, admiring the glint of light on the quarters.

capital fictions

Suspended in a state of almosting, like a fly in amber, he vacillated between minimal accomplishment and destitute poverty. The movements of the world twisted around him, a torpid torrent of false truths in the form of imaginary monetary units that gave precedence to otherwise senseless acts and meanings. The sky free and true, stretched above him, as he is caught in the webwork of illusion, of maya wearing a mask of maya, and his whiles are spun away in a soundless farting deflation of soul. Like a stone subjected to the wiles of a raging river, he is eroded, the shape of his being abraded to smooth featurelessness. Soon he will turn to dust, and join the sky in its true freedom, the shackles of the world clattering to clasp onto the spark of a new bright questing alive soul.

Geez

My girlfriend is a conspiracy theorist

Debit Woes

When you use a debit charge card at the pump, an amount closely approximating fifty dollars, plus your charge amount, is withdrawn from your account, to be redeposited after the passage of a few business days when the bill has been verified. Quite often, as I was, you might be caught unawares that such an event has occurred and, falsely misled into thinking your funds were secure and accurate, used your account as tender for further purchases to, surprise! find yourself embroiled up to your neck in wtf surcharges. So if you’re subsisting on an income equivalent to that of a college student, as I am, ’tis better to pay your fuel purchases in cash. Greenygreengreen wads of papery linen.

Accounts dealing in electronic funds do not have your best interests in mind, especially that of credit card companies. The reason you’re getting so many applications for credit cards is that there is a high likelihood that your credit rating is so-so and doesn’t compare to that of, Donald Trump, perhaps. People with decent credit and people who pay their bills on time are despised by the card companies because they are subverting the law of interest: trap, trapping, trapped into a lifetime of financial slavehood.

Capitalism… in the hands of greed only reduces the concern a man has for his fellow man, and the more traditional methods of procuring food and bed in the wilds of nature evolve into a demoralizing panoply of action in the cloistered streets of the city: prostitution, dope peddling, larceny, and even murder. It’s not to say money is the root of all evil, but the belief in money that is the root of most evil.

Corporate Pornography

Joseph Campbell elicited that anything which arouses desire is pornography, be it a steaming Philly cheese steak or the glistening Mustang belonging to the next-door neighbor. It does not have to be flesh to become pornographic, and I beg not to digress to agree. Take America’s many celebrations: hallmark inventions. (heh heh)

Holidays are cash machines in the form of piggy banks, designed to stomach consumer spendthrift folly, to shit out perfect green bills which soon manage to find their way back into the sticky clutches of perpetually jonesing consumers who find their fingers were not so sticky after all…

It s all sensationalism, all flash and bang and glitter, the neon impress of garish color on your retinas, of symbolism stripped of its heaviness to lift upward, full of hot air, to trap itself against the ceiling of futility: the ritual of meaning has fallen away from the forms of practice and we are left with a cardboard charade, or a dance of inflatable dolls that bob at the whim of the great fiscal machine. It grinds, in its tautological logic of capitalism, of progress defined by the circulation of numbers that in itself becomes more in importance than the events that precipitate its existence: a bone structure more obsessed in calcifying itself than adding meat to dem bones.