No strike.
All the dirty tricks have been left behind us. The company hired fake employees to sit around and picket the union. The media only interviewed the doppelgangers, never any real employees.
It's bad enough we live in a right-to-work state." I can hear Hunter S. Thompson talking to me from my Env3.
"The man coming down on me. Squeezing me. Throttling me like I was 2 year old with shaken baby syndrome."
I want to shake all the Trolls on the internet who strip away my attachment to humanity.
"I want to find that person." I say to myself. "Pummel them in the face. "
"But they are stupid." A voice in my head calls out for reason. "And that kind of stupidity often comes as the result of parental behavior."
"Probably." Interrupts Oliver Wendell Holmes. "But three generations of imbeciles are enough."
"We should have never allowed those parents to inseminate one another. We should find their kids and bash them against the rocks."
"We should rip the babies out of their mother's wombs." He reminds me. "The bible says we can't keep letting these things breed together."
"FUCK YA!" I shout back at him.
The shouting made me lose balance momentarily.
"I feel dizzy." I said. "It must be my low blood pressure."
"Maybe you are not getting enough sleep?" Asks the courtesy clerk with the stained arm pits.
"Maybe." I tell her.
But the mirror I face in the morning tells a different story. My face is yellow. My body is overtaxed. AID'S, Cancer, MERSA, the toe infection. The slow leak of toxic poisons has made me jaundiced.
"And now you say I can't sleep."
The area beneath my eyes is puffy and dark purple. My hair is falling out faster than usual. It sticks up in funny directions whenever I get out of bed in the morning. I look the most bald in the morning.
"I think stress is killing me." I tell the girl bagging my groceries.
"Stress is killing us all." My customer answers back for her.
I am not interested in what my customer says.
"She should shut her god-damned mouth." Hunter says. "No one was talking to her."
I may have glanced over at her to include her in the conversation.
"I have to include her." I tell Hunter, "but that's just because my employer hates in when I have conversations outside of the customer/employee mode of interaction."
"We're fucking slaves!" The voices of Hunter S. Thompson and Oliver Wendell Holmes rise up behind me like a black gospel choir. Complete with swelling organ music.
"I'm just scanning groceries, man." I tell them. "I don't want to put up with all this shit!"
"Why the fuck does every one always feel the need to diminish whatever statement another person says?" I think.
"They can't give you your FUCKING PAIN, man!" Thompson cries.
"Otherwise they have to give you the MEDS you need to feel better."
"I don't want to feel better." I tell Hunter.
"Feeling better is easy, man." I tell him "Why the fuck do you think they invented astrology?" I ask him.
Before he can talk I interrupt him. "And don't give me any shit about how Astrology on acid is real, okay?"
"All right man."
His voice sounds weak. I can barely hear Hunter and Oliver on the Env3. I watch the old woman watch the girl place her bags in her grocery cart.
I wipe my eyes on the corner of my sleeve. A batch of yellow sleep rubs off on to my black shirt.
I leave it there.
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