1
And with that, she turned and started walking out of his life before she had even properly entered it. Or improperly. Yet she had struck a nerve. He had tasted her discontent with the content that society was convincing everyone else to swallow, smelled her comfort of unconformity in the face of a faceless state-maintained delusion of authority, or maybe it was just the dress.
Either way, he knew that he probably wouldn’t sleep soundly again until he dove head first into her slippery stream of consciousness, fully engulfing himself in her ebbs and flows, and only once he’d pried his clinging fingers from their last grasp at the straws dangled by the banks, would he be free enough to float through the treacherous waters of trepidation, and arrive at whichever oceanfront utopia this sparkling angel of anarchy had surely been crafted by the gods.
On top of the dress, or under it maybe, she wore a peculiar mystique that had driven a piton directly through the sore spot of his crumbling identity, and now as she climbed into his memories, he was frozen in a tangle of bewilderment. Her essence seemed to be a blend of extremes, a sophisticated simplicity, so stripped down that at first glance she appeared inseparable from the streets she was traversing. But a second glance revealed something much deeper, an insatiable intrigue, a complexity beyond compare with anyone who existed within the borders of our patriotic indoctrination.
She knew things, she had lived, like really lived, and her experience wasn’t passed off as just another notch on her ego’s bedpost, it was held close, held sacred, and anyone lucky enough to truly explore the depths of her wisdom, would certainly unlock a few mysteries of the universe along the way.
She was half a block along her own way, when she turned around and flashed a mischievous smile, “Well, are you coming or what?”
It took about a third of a second for him to rsvp and another third to catch up. He had no idea where they were going, yet he felt no hesitation, he only knew that if he let her fade away from his story, he’d feel the sting of regret with every breath left in his miserable excuse of an existence.
“Bout time, you know I was only gonna wait another third of a second or so. As much as you’re meant to be there beside me, the revolution waits for no one.”
“Sorry I’m late, so where’s this revolution of yours happening?”
“Oh, here and there.”
“Ah, and over a couple rainbows I’d imagine.”
“Under them actually, but first is here.”
She ducked into the corner Seven Eleven, walked past the assortment of subpar food items, that for a couple of bucks, are the only option for their povertous clientele to feign any attempt at nutritional intake, and made a beeline for the coffee station.
She circled her prey, carefully perusing the collection of caffeine, landed on a near empty carafe, half filled her worn out travel mug and exclaimed, “Oh drat, you guys are always out of the one I like, no worries though, guess I’ll just walk a few blocks to the other one.”
As they reentered the bustling street scene, Miles pointed out that there had been a full canister of her most desired house blend right next to the empty.
“Yeah, which means they were getting ready to dump this out, and they verify their inventory by the amount of styrofoam cups they unleash into the world, so by my account, I’ve done everyone involved a huge favor.”
“Interesting thought process, doubt that Mr Eleven would tend to agree.”
“Who? That old geezer? The one profiting off the backs of the vulnerable, as he perpetuates the illusion of convenience for the sheep? I think he’ll be just fine without my half cup of sacred energy poured down his drain.”
“Illusion of convenience?”
“You know it brother. It’s all a charade, a sham, a scam, it’s damn near a pyramid scheme, where the only way to get ahead is to push down those who society has glued to the bottom rung.
Let’s take your little froufrou coffee trash to-go, certainly seems more convenient to grab a freshy everyday, than to lug around this old clunker like I do. Of course, you’ll need a few hundred cups to power an entire year of spinning your wheels, and so will millions of other convenience snobs, and now we’re left with an Earth cluttered by the collateral damage of the convenience war.”
Miles couldn’t find the words to contribute, especially as he looked down to see the steaming gun in his hands, but luckily she had a few more rattles to shake off, as she unraveled the narrative woven into the threadbare fabric of the American dream.
“Or like that shirt you’re wearing, and I’m not trying to pick on you, it’s most of the shirts that most people wear, you’re just the only one on the fringe enough to even be able to hear me. Or want to, at least.
It’s way convenient to walk into that store over there and grab some garb to freshen up your friday night attire. Much easier than the effort it took to replace an ecosystem with a poisonous cotton field, but luckily our nation’s capital was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of those enslaved as prisoners of the war, which seemed rather convenient to anyone who was allowed to vote on another human’s life worth.
But that’s all in the history books now, which were written by the kings of convenience, and as the victors spun the white web of justification, the spinning wheel was exported to an underpaid, underprivileged, and underage workforce, who were way less American than three fifths of those sold on our own black market.
So now our shops are built on the sweat of an even more worthless breed of human being, and I’d be willing to wager that they manage to bleed and cry a bit too, but darn it if it’s just not so convenient to live a comfortable life blinded to the discomfort involved in the exportation of exploitation. Convenient for us, anyway.
And so’s the half-assed attempt at processing the human spirit through an over-packaged and under-nutritioned food supply. It’s super convenient for the caged cattle that never have to worry about the other side of the fence. And for the caged consumer, who will undoubtedly contract one of the many diseases cultivated through agrinomics, but conveniently, the government subsidized drug cartels also own the monsanto mafia. A one stop shop of convenience alright, and the masses eat it up, as their own mass increases, because it’s infinitely more convenient to sit around and watch a TV dinner, than to stand up and do a damn thing about anything.
But it is pretty convenient to lounge around the comfort of an oil powered lifestyle, beats splitting wood to warm yourself up, though now you have to drive across town to sacrifice your own energy just to keep the lights on. Gotta take your place among the traffic jam of slaves to the system, car beats bus, bus beats walking, and planes top them all, and as we top off the tank, we see that the farther you climb the corporate ladder of convenience, there’s an equal and opposite depletion of life quality for those too forgotten to ever scroll across the bottom of your in-flight news programming.
Birds covered in oil, water filled with oil, reservations stolen for oil, and even some good old white folk suffer, as their family farm is now in the incineration zone of what has been conveniently labeled as natural gas.
And naturally we buy into it, because the alternative sounds like entirely too much work, so we pass the dependence on the buck down to our children, who will be the ones to face the wrath of our collapsing global equilibrium. Dirty oceans are rising and fueling unnaturally massive disasters, wet places are dry, dry places are flooded, temperature shifts are growing more sporadic, and record breaking blizzards pushed down from the high pressures of a melting arctic, are just enough proof that there’s no way it’ll get as hot as those silly scientists are saying.
People would much prefer to believe in the storyline that supports their convenient way of life, the one told by the political prisoners of corporately subsidized campaign finance violations, and they’ve made a career of telling people what they want to hear, so all those listening intently have no intent on lightening the load they impress upon our worn out planet.
Impressive indeed, that they could spin an authentically manmade yarn of human supremacy, that even as hundreds of species are becoming extinct every single day and the conditions required to sustain human life are fading from the landscape even faster, somehow they’ve convinced everyone that the solution to pollution is to simply add more fuel to the fire, to trust that multinational conglomerations of businessmen will discover the holy grail of convenience, and we’ll be able to save the human race from self-destruction without ever having to lift a finger, except maybe to let Netflix know that we’re still watching.”