JCN 3001 (part 1)

Miniaturization. A process that became popular in the early 20^th century. A process doomed to reach an abrupt halt. After a while it became obvious that you can only make things smaller to a certain point. Practicality finally became an issue, as man realized his microchips were getting microscopic and his notebooks were getting so thin they could break like a plate of glass. Cell phones were so small that you could hardly press the buttons. DVD players were the exact same size as the disc itself.

There was a time when computers were so big they filled the whole room. They were slow and could hardly do anything. Then only NASA computers were so big they filled the whole room. They were powerful and incomparable to ordinary PCs. Now the NASA uses a single laptop the size of a 10 cent paperback novel to calculate the upcoming trip to Mars. Extremely powerful computers are in every household and PC became an insult.

In 2059, a square inch of integrated circuitry did all of Wall Street’s accounting. Von Neumann’s scheme was long gone and nanotechnology was on its way. AI was in the works. And in this time of absolute miniaturization and near perfection, the JCN 3001 was built. A computer the size of a five-storey building. It was so powerful, that only a computer of equal size would be capable of precisely counting its capabilities. A power plant had to be built next to this behemoth to keep it running. But it was worth all the trouble, as the task it was to fulfill was even more monumental than the engineering feat that made it possible.

JCN, short for Joint Computing Network, was going to tell us the future. By determining the exact position of every single molecule, it was in theory possible to predict their position at any given point in time using complex equations that are not unlike those used to forecast the weather. What this means is that we could know, with absolute precision, what will happen to anyone or anything, anytime. A house might burn down, a book could get stolen, a president assassinated. We would know the position of the bullet a second before it hit the target. A minute before. An hour after. I could tell the names of the grand grandchildren of the policeman who bagged the bullet as evidence.

Needless to say, the project was top secret. What might be unexpected, though, is that the project was completely private. It was the government that didn’t know about it. For once, the military was kept in the dark. And we, scientists from all over the world, were determined to not use the information for good or for evil, but for studying. We wanted to know everything. But when we turned the JCN on and initiated the computing process, we did not learn much. Actually, we were as clueless as ever.

It was programmed to give us data for the next day and then wait for further instructions. We compared the data with what really happened as the day unfolded, and we were amazed. Everything was perfect. Our super secret super computer predicted the future. We turned it on again and waited. Watched and listened, as the giant structure silently whirred, fed with electricity from its own power plant and cooled with jet engines surrounding it from all sides. And then, JCN 3001, greatest thing man ever built, spat out data for a week and shut itself down.

And at the end of all that data, all those numbers and coordinates for every single molecule, all of which needed to be translated into understandable form, six letters appeared.

The End

We stared silently.

Summer in the City

One written way back in July...

Old people don’t sweat much. Probably because they don’t drink much, either. And that’s probably why old people are just dried-up versions of their already balding and menopausing children.

My point is, old people don’t sweat much.

I suppose it’s no real advantage in the long run, what with instead of perspiration they are incontinent. But in the summer, not sweating comes in handy.

In 1724, German-Dutch physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit says the temperature of the air around me is 95°. Around 1742, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius tells us it’s 65 degrees outside. Then in 1747, Carolus Linnaeus inverts the scale, so it’s only 35°. The numbers keep getting smaller, but it sure as hell isn’t getting colder.

Some of these old people, they might actually remember buying their first Swedish thermometer, that’s how old they are.

Searing hot concrete all around me, I’m standing in a narrow shade thrown by a lamp post. Unfortunately, the air around me doesn’t care I’m in the shade, and it’s just as warm behind the lamp as in front of it. And I’m not getting any cooler.

Old people walking down the street and up the street and across the street, they walk around me and they don’t sweat. Some old men are wearing leather shoes, some are wearing sandals, but with socks. All of them are wearing suit pants, shirts. Most of them are wearing a jacket. Some have a cool 1950s hat. One or two have sunglasses. Not one of them has a wet forehead or dark stains around their armpits. Not one of them tries to avoid direct sunlight.

That star of ours, that Sun, it’s raping the atmosphere. Penetrating the last bits of ozone, rimming the thermosphere, bitch-slapping the troposphere. I can’t help but wonder, is it just me, or did it just get warmer?

Old ladies, twice as many of them on account of WWII, well these old ladies are wearing long tweed skirts. Cardigans. Coats. Dragging five different shopping bags from five different stores, they go around town looking for the cheapest milk and freshest vegetables. It’s hot at least like hell, but you don’t see them wiping their faces with handkerchiefs. Or hiding under those Versailles silk umbrellas.

I have certified UV filter glasses, but most of these retired versions of sepia-toned photos don’t even squint.

Looking around me for a bigger lamp post, or maybe a bus stop or phone booth, just anything throwing a wider shade, I see other people my age. Short skirts and tank tops, see-through short-sleeved shirts, flip flops, bottles of cold water in everyone’s hands; they are all dying out there. More deodorant on them than the kids in China can produce. Empty cans of Adidas and Old Spice; it’s just more heat coming down on us from in-between the wider and wider spread legs of the ozone layer.

Selling body spray is the perfect business: just by selling it, you help create a bigger demand.

I take a run for it, dodging rays of light and hiding behind mailboxes and fat people. I get to the corner of the street and take a left, and I made it. Banks and publishing houses and stores, big buildings shading this half of the street. But it’s a little crowded here, with much of the same people I saw dying out there in the sun. Teens and their parents, we are all hot and thirsty and tired, and the seniors are roaming the streets free.

A regular Day of the Almost Dead.

When I see movies like Sunshine or Day After Tomorrow, I’m thinking yes please. Kill the Sun and bring on the ice age. Because ultimately, it’s much better to be cold than to be hot. You can always put on another layer of clothes, but when you’re hot, even being naked doesn’t help.

Anyway, when dusk finally comes, it’s time for the youngest offspring of Man to take over the city. Air-conditioned bars, park benches, and bus stops. The young, recovering from the heat with booze and smokes and dope and coke.

It’s our turn to live a little.

Until the big white face rises up above the horizon and calls for the old people to come out and pay. A curtain call for most of them, the seniors take their place under the stellar spotlight and do their thing. Then winter comes to claim them.

The things that are nigh...

What does a temperature drop of 20 degrees and constant rain for three days tell you? Some say ‘who cares,’ others say ‘global warming did it.’ Me, I think the Apocalypse is coming. Not out of some religious belief or based on any hard evidence. I just sort of feel it. Like when an old man feels weather changes in his old rotten joints, only I feel the imminent end.

And really, why couldn’t I? These kinds of stories always have the one person who knows destruction is nigh and no one believes him. Did anyone listen to the sheriff in Jaws or the architect in Towering Inferno or the scientist in Day After Tomorrow? I don’t think so.

It came to me as the same sense of knowing you get right before a car hits you. Or when an unlikable hockey team is about to score against your guys and win. Or when you bet on a horse and then it trips. When the shit’s right about to hit the fan, the split second when you see it and know everything’s going to hell, that’s what I feel looking out my window.

Day one, everyone just said it’s raining and carried on. More layers of clothing, a lot more umbrellas in the streets. Someone occasionally stepping in a puddle or getting showered by a passing car hitting a pot hole. People complaining but generally not caring much. Me, this is when my feeling started.

Day two, some villages got flooded a bit, but it was hardly a reason to call Noah. People, still used to all that cancerous sun light, got annoyed by all the clouds and darkness. Dark clouds and even darker darkness, to be exact. Wet twilight all day long, that can spoil anybody’s day, right?

Day three, people are depressed and cold and some are angry and jumpy. Some start saying this is typical pollution weather. Other stopped caring, knowing they can’t do anything about it. Me, I fear every new hour, because it’s always an hour less till judgment day. Day three, I begin to more than just suspect everyone will die. I’m what you call 100% sure.

Day four, it never comes. Because on the night of day three, IT came. Around seven on that fateful last night, it really started pouring down. I mean, it was Saigon. Over the top. Rain so thick I couldn’t see across the street. City infrastructure gave up and streets turned into rivers. Basements were pools, roofs were sponges, gardens were swamps. Imagine a bucket of water dumped on you every second. Well, this was worse. And by this time, I wasn’t the only one saying the Second Coming is here. Actually, there were people screaming Jesus is coming back.

Not that I particularly believe in that stuff, but the weather was really becoming biblical in proportions. Noah’s little boat would’ve been screwed in this. I mean, when whales start drowning, you know you got a problem. When mountains become islands, it’s obvious you’re fucked. When the pope has nothing to say, it’s mayhem in the Western World.

By eleven o’clock, half my neighborhood drowned and the other half was about to. The feeling I had that the end was coming, well it was mutual. From something deep inside, it turned into an inevitable certainty. A hint of what was to come became the shit that hit the fan. And then some.

At midnight, the last person on Earth drowned, and that person was me. For some reason, I had to witness it all. For some reason, I’m now flying to a planet not so different from Earth, and telling this story to the masses. Not as a soon to be forgotten warning, but as an oral history of my home.

And people listened.

And it started raining.

The Flying of the Bulls

I expected to have a similar experience as Kafka, which he recorded in his story Aeroplanes in Brescia, but there were two problems. First, I don’t know what it was because I didn’t read the story, and second, there was no Red Bull in 1909. Of course, I’m talking about going to an Air Race event on Sunday.

Officially, it was called Red Bull Air Race Duel, and a duel it was indeed. Two pilots, a guy from Austria and a guy from Hungary (I think), flying between giant inflatable cones built up on pontoon platforms on Mozart’s Blue Danube. (Only the river’s sort of green/brown and anything but beautiful.) It was a timed race, and the idea was to fly the course faster than the other guy. Well, obviously. But instead of watching this race, I got to see other things that in their own way were even more interesting than two blue planes performing death-defying acrobatics under the Bratislava castle hill.

I went with my sister, who was mostly interested in taking pictures of the race, not the race itself. I pretended to be completely uninterested, only there as company, but I was actually going in hopes of seeing some cool flying and maybe a plane crash killing thousands. So there we were, getting off the bus at the bridge off-ramp and walking to the desperately crowded river bank. The organizers said a hundred K would attend, but I, never being good at guessing the number of people in a crowd, thought it was a lot more.

We decided to walk back to the bridge, onto the actual road, as did many other people. Maybe not the safest thing, but who cares, it was an adrenaline sports event. We walked up a grassy knoll leading to the asphalt-topped two lanes our bus covered just minutes ago. It was no place for lone gunmen, as someone decided to use the steep hill as a toilet, and the few meters of hiking were a test of the senses: the smell, the even worse sight of the shit-covered napkin. What a great day to be a fan of dangerous flying.

Merging with ongoing traffic may be pretty risky for two people, but since a rather large mob already decided to do so before us, the cars and semis, or their drivers to be precise, were alert and went by slowly. Our view of the river was OK, but the inflatable cones, the important part of the river, were blocked by trees on the river bank. We did see a plane fly through the obstacles a few times and do some wacky stuff, but our position was less than ideal for observing and practically useless for taking pictures. Also, leaning over the railing was anything but pleasant. We were on the part of the bridge that wasn’t above water, but it was still a pretty nasty fall down to all the people on the ground.

Speaking of people, I did have the chance to observe some pretty interesting stuff. First, on the bridge there was a couple of Russians standing all around me and the sis. To be honest, I only assumed they were Russian based on their looks, but I was unable to distinguish any words, so maybe they were speaking Ukrainian or whatever. But there was one guy with them who had the looks of a mobster on vacation from the underbelly of Moscow or Yekaterinburg. He had the shirt unbuttoned to reveal a hairy chest, the golden chain and big golden watch, the rascally, rugged looks, and the cool sunglasses. You know, a Russian.

Down under us, the people I was afraid I would crush as I’d fall on them, they were mingling among parked cars of the Red Bull people. There was this shiny new Hummer, the kind (and color) they have on CSI Miami, which is exactly what we both told ourselves, probably because the car is the only memorable thing about that catastrophe of a show. And this being Europe, and not exactly the rich part of it, big cars like this are rather rare, so a few people were taking pictures with it; something I found pretty stupid. Later I made my sister take a picture of me standing in front of an old Soviet car we found in a different parking lot, just to privately parody the hillbillies with the H2.

Of course, we soon abandoned our position on the bridge, not just because it was no good, but also because two metro cops were attempting to crowd control us all off the road. I though the two of them would make a wonderful couple on a TV show. One really thin and short, the other so fat you’d think he ate the small guy’s family for breakfast. But before we departed, we had the honor of hearing a man from the crowd argue with the cops in a very disrespectful manner. It had me thinking how cool it would be if the two cops called in a SWAT team and arrested our collective ass for slowing down traffic or something.

The plane we just barely saw from the bridge, that was just one of the pilots doing a test run and then flying back to a small airport which I didn’t even know existed before. Now, as we climbed back down the grassy knoll and didn’t shoot anyone, as we merged with the masses on the river bank and failed to be awestruck by Horatio’s truck, four planes flew above our heads, making people look up and stare straight into the shining sun. My parents’ daughter took some pictures, the shutter clicking rapidly to the sound of the four engines. The planes, by the way, reminded me of all the WWII movies I never enjoyed; their motors sounding the same as all those Junkers Stukas and Messerschmidts. If only they released bombs instead of the green smoke trailing their every complicated spinning move. Now that would’ve gotten the adrenaline flowing.

We did see the planes flying overhead, but from our position on the river bank, the inflated cones were now completely hidden behind the same trees that were in the way when we were back on the bridge. There was no chance of moving closer to Mozart’s muse, there were just too many people. Small children and everything. But, naturally, I had a plan. The bridge is not just the road. It also has a walkway for us regular pedestrians, and I wanted to go up there, but it was crowded as well. We tried anyway, but all we saw was a kid sitting on a bench in the shade and gasping for air. He was the nerdy metalist type. Long hair and concert T-shirt, but also glasses and outdated slacks. Then, more people everywhere, and no planes to be seen through either more tress, the bridge’s pillars, heads of other people, or lack of trying hard enough.

Anyway, it was a hot day and I couldn’t blame the nerdy metalist for almost fainting. The only refreshment available to the masses was a Red Bull stand selling (or giving away, I don’t know which since we couldn’t get near it) cans of their sugary beverage. In a more developed country, or a more fierce capitalistic society, there’d be Pakistanis and Gooks selling lemonade all over the place. This once again being the lamer part of Europe, where everyone‘s still so used to not being able to get anything they want (a thing we had here under the big red star and hammer and sickle), nobody thought of complaining or opening their own refreshments stand. They all brought their own water, everyone but us. My sister, the poor thing so used to better services from the time she spent in England, didn’t want to bring our own water, thinking we could buy some there. Here. But no. We were thirsty the whole time.

There was a dark blue chopper filming the whole thing, probably a Red Bull company copter documenting this promotional happening for the suits back in wherever’s their HQ. Naturally, it wasn’t in the air all the time, because neither were the planes. It landed in a field behind some more trees, where no one would stand even if there weren’t any fences closing it off. We decided to walk over there, giving up on seeing any of the stunts and the whole race, mostly because the sister of my nonexistent brother wanted to take pictures of the chopper landing. I admit it’s a pretty cool thing to see, and it was always my dream to fly (in) one of those things. Maybe a Huey cruising above the rice fields of southern ‘Nam. But this Bell they had here would do, too.

Probably because this just wasn’t our day, we missed the landing, but at least we got close enough for the wind from the rotor to cool us off. Then it went back to action, and my genetic double got the money shot done. We walked back to the mob under, on, and above the bridge, and this is when I posed with the ancient Lada Samara, a car named after the creepy girl in the creepy Japanese movie. Or, more likely, a car with absolutely no relation to the creepy girl from The Ring, or Ring-u if you will. This is also when my sister complained about the lack of political immigrants selling soda, and so we decided to walk to the nearby mall and buy bottled water suitable for infants. Not that I’m particularly picky when it comes to water, but that’s what they were selling. Evian or pool water, it all comes from the same source.

The mall and the subsequent bus stop on our way home were both filled with people who, most likely, gave up on seeing any airborne action just as we did. But it wasn’t all a useless waste of time, I suppose. I got to see crappy police work, crappy organization of a public event, and even someone’s old dried up crap. And at the end of the day, I got to wonder. All the people who had the good spots and saw everything, they probably had to arrive hours before the thing started, and they baked in the hot Sun we’ve come to hate and fear so much, because it kills the glaciers and causes cancer. So were the two planes flying between four cones worth all the trouble? Probably not.

Grave New Awakening

It’s funny how the mornings never change. Sure, there are small differences, but as a whole it’s always the same. These painful mornings after were the reason I never used to understand why people drink. Why go through all the trouble? Of course, I used to wonder about this before I started drinking myself.

In a way, this is similar to smoking. One always says, as a child first trying it out, after a few minutes of coughing and spitting, that he or she will never smoke. But, come the right age and the wrong friends, there we all are. Smoking.

So these mornings I never used to understand, they go like this.

And this is the worst case scenario.

Well, no. It could get worse. But anyway.

After opening my eyes, there’s the split second of Who the hell am I and what’s going on? and then my brain reboots. Now I know my name, and after looking around, I know I’m in my bed in my room. The inevitable question follows: How the hell did I get here?

A few times I woke up at a friend’s place, and then that question was preceded by Where the hell am I? and succeeded by Seriously, how did I get here?

It’s always such a mystery, getting home. Walking, taking a bus or a cab, whatever it is, I just never remember going form A to B. B being bed, of course. It’s like my brain is still somehow capable of picking up stuff when I’m not moving, but when I want to go somewhere, all the nervous system resources go into limb coordination, and my memory is fried. Not that I remember everything that went on when I was sitting on my ass, but at least there’s more.

Blackout syndrome, I suppose, is a perfect name. The bits and pieces of the evening always start with a fade-in and end with a fade-out. Everything engulfed in a darkness of having no clue. Hence, blackout. And apparently, this syndrome works something like this: Alcohol impairs the brain’s ability to transform information from short term to long term memory, so everything you do you only remember for maybe seven minutes. Tops.

By repetition, it is possible to get some things through to the long term section. I guess that means that if I remember throwing up, I probably did so a couple of times. But how ‘bout I skip this part.

After not remembering how I got home, more questions arise. My favorite one being Where’s my cell phone? It always turns out to be either still in my pants somewhere in the corner, or on the shelf right next to my head. With weak, trembling hands I take it and check outgoing calls.

God forbid I called someone and don’t remember it. Well, it would be OK with friends but a little awkward with relatives. Hey, grandpa, come on out and partayyy..!

Another fun thing to do is check the photos I might’ve taken. Usually there’s either nothing or just one blurry image of nothing in particular. Sometimes, however, I surprise myself with the level of artistry me and my cell phone managed to produce. Well, to be fair, it’s me, my cell phone, and my intoxication. Together, we do the great shots of hammered friends and tired bus drivers and cops in pursuit.

If I do find a new photo in the gallery menu, I tend to wonder how it got there. More often than not, the pictures tell me nothing. Only once did a slightly out-of-focus shot of two guys fighting help enlighten the previous evening and how the blood got on my shoes. Enough shock value for one morning?

I wish.

The hardest part comes next. Getting out of bed. As I try to sit up, the taste in my mouth hits me hard. The taste, and the dryness. When my feet are finally on solid ground, I swear for the umpteenth time that I’ll never dink again. And I hope everyone else from the party is also having such a great time right now.

The real oh for fuck’s sake moment comes when I find my wallet and it’s once again empty. Always the same story with this. I don’t take too much cash, because I figure the less I take the less I spend, which translates into the less I spend the less I drink and the more I remember afterwards. What usually happens is I either take extra cash just in case or I spend the little I take and then have a date with the ATM. In both cases the results never vary.

Grunting about being broke, I stumble and wobble and limp around the house. Pointlessly moving to shake off the dizziness of still being a little bit drunk. Pointlessly hoping the headache will, pretty please, go away soon.

But really, I don’t drink that much. I might actually drink a lot less than I give myself credit for. It’s just that when I do, I like to do it big time. And writing about it is so much fun, because everyone can relate to it. I myself have read and heard tons of stories and accounts like this, and I must say I always found a piece of me in them. Someone might tell me about how they found a mitten in their pocket and don’t know where it came from, and I’m thinking Yes, I hear ya, brother.

Everywhere, these stories keep coming up because everyone keeps drinking. Young people, old people, business men, doctors, mothers, fathers, sailors, soldiers, hobos, and bums. Even priests and old ladies receiving the blood of Christ. Wine used to be safer to drink than water. It’s not just a socially given, traditional kind of thing, it’s in the very nature of people. And I want to believe that everyone hates the morning after.

After I drain the rest of the poison out of my system and manage to eat something, I start to look forward to meeting the people involved in yesterday’s session again. The conversation we have the following day always tends to consist of the same sentences.

Great time we had yesterday. Yeah, but can you tell me what happened after, say, eleven o’clock? Oh crap, I was going to ask you the same thing. We never remember anything! You bet. But I think we’re missing on a lot of fun this way. Uh huh. There’s always this line and we never fail to cross it. Not just cross it, we fucking jump over it and never look back. Yeah, but remember when you tripped over that chair? No way, so that’s why my foot hurts. Ha, wait till you see my knee…

And on and on until we set the date for the next gentlemen’s meeting.

Oh, the shots and chasers, the music and jokes and musings about years past. Funny how I always can’t wait, completely forgetting what a grave new awakening will follow. Funny how we always all end up in the same situation. I guess one day we’ll do this so many times we’ll remember everything.

You know how the old memory saying goes: Repetition makes perfect!

Dogs that lick and dogs that bite, hounds that howl through the night

So polio and small pox and rabies are supposedly practically non-existent in our age of penicillin and whatnot. But if FDR were to rise from his grave, you wouldn’t want him coughing in your face, never mind the fact there’s a dead president around. And if a poor Russian immigrant with suspicious spots were to sit next to you on the bus, germ warfare is the first thing running through your head, even though the Cold War is over. So when a dog bit me, who could possibly blame me for freaking out? All these diseases, genetic, viral, bacterial, fairytale, they still exist somewhere on the planet, no matter what other people from WHO tell you. And it is my belief that they all exist in the filthy mouths of dogs.

Take my street for example: dogs of all shapes and sizes in all the gardens and on every sidewalk, doing their business, their owner thinking that if they fertilize it enough, the pavement just might bare fruit one day. I see dogs of all the popular sorts: Golden Retrievers and Lab puppies and crime-fighting Nazi Shepherds and sanctified Bernards with little barrels attached to their collar, in case there’s an avalanche in the suburbs of this the Capital City. And then there are the old women dogs. The small, fluffy, cute little dusters with legs. And lets not forget the dangerous hounds. The big Boxer and Doberman and Bulldog and Pitbull and Cerberus. Because in a neighborhood built in the 1950s and still mostly inhabited by the original owners, you really need these Baskervillians to guard you from uncanny old ladies and their grandchildren.

But not everyone has a dog. Some people have two. This one guy, died a few years back, used to live a few houses upstreet from us, he had four four-legged best friends. That’s sixteen legs in the house that don’t do any valuable, money-earning legwork.

My house, or rather,, ma parent’s house, or even my grandma’s house, come to think of it, well our house is one of the maybe five or six properties on the long street that are K-9-less. And I dare say it always will be that way, because our failure to succumb to the general feeling of fondness towards dogs is genetic.

In reality, there are no cat people and dog people. There are just dog people and normal people. Feel free to leave the cats out of the equation, because what are cats if not just smaller dogs that don’t want to be in a committed relationship? You have to wash them, feed them, love them, and clean up after them the same way you do with dogs, only cats don’t give a rat’s ass about you and leave whenever they want wherever they want. So my point is, my family’s not a bunch of cat people. We’re a bunch of normal people. (Normal, of course, only when it comes to this K-9 issue.) And just as we hate dogs, we hate their owners.

Pretentious assholes might not be the correct term, but it sure as hell sounds right. Your typical dog owner will do one of three things: talk about their pet all the time, make you pet their pet even if you don’t want to, and stick it in your face that they are part of a special community. Dog owners are not regular people. Despite popular belief, they might not even be people at all. Maybe some kind of missing link between man and dog. Werewolf is what I think it’s called.

A typical dog owner, member of this just slightly obnoxious and annoying community, is completely blind to the fact that not everyone likes dogs. They think you don’t mind when it sniffs around your ass and licks your fingers and jumps on you and tears your wind pipe out. How could you mind? It’s so adorable and cute and here doggy, good doggy. A person with a dog will typically socialize with another person with a dog very easily. You know, because they “get it” and you don’t. They have a dog for barking out loud, and the dogless just have no idea.

When I was out with a bunch of friends once, one of them brought her adorable little bitch, and it was just impossible to talk her (the person), because any kind of conversation would be 25% you talking, 25% you waiting for an answer while she was watching her dog 25% her saying “yes, you’re a good doggy” instead of talking to you, and then finally the 25% of distracted answers would come. And what’s even worse than your friend with the dog is your other friends interacting with the dog. It’s incredible how people known to use harsh language and drugs turn into people saying “Here boy!” to a female animal and throwing sticks instead of throwing parties.

Yes, I would say I’m oppressed. I probably wouldn’t complain about it to a black person or a Jew, but still I think I’m being discriminated against. Walking home means watching big barking beasts running towards me and just barely being stopped by the fences holding them in. Beware of dog signs were the first thing I learned to read and it will be the last thing I’ll read as well. And the best part is the dog huggers actually think they are the minority that should complain about discrimination. They complain about having to put up those beware of dog signs and buying leashes and vaccinating their dogs. Because to them, Planet of the Dogs would be the ideal world. A place where everyone gets to step in dog shit and get licked and barked at and bitten and be happy about it. They think it’s normal to walk behind their pets with plastic bags, hunting for their turds. They think it’s OK to feed dog chow to animals that once used to be scavengers and predators and can very easily be those things again.

But I wouldn’t want to go on a rant here, so let me get back to those diseases. Why did I mention those? Because every night, and especially during the warm months (lately I noticed those are all year round), I am forced to listen to the insufferable howling of these domesticated beasts. All around me, on my street and the parallel streets and the perpendicular streets, from every direction, dogs yell and scream and bitch and moan all night. And it’s not the full Moon, and they are not being tortured and they are not lonely, so I figure the only reason this cacophony of howls is on air all night every night is because all those dogs are sick. Flees, worms, rabies, polio… heck, even TBC and the plague and Tourette syndrome and Guillain-Barré and cancer, these dogs must have it all, or if you don’t think so, then tell me why won’t they shut up and let me sleep?

A Beatnik's Question

The innermost deepest feelings dictated to masses
What to do when you are on the edge of a cliff?
A wallpaper of lies covering the wall of truth
What to do when you are bleeding to death?
Nowhere to hide from the darkness of pain
What do do when you die in vain?

A pleasurable notion of reading Huxley's work
Walking through the doors the law has locked
It escapes me as I burn in flames of aging
What to do when you cannot stop life?