American Fez

From Blue Cross To Red Cross

Healthcare costs in the US continue to rise faster than the temperature of a patient with tropical fever. You almost want to fall sick in order to get your money's worth. Nothing requiring surgery, of course, or even hospitalization, but certainly expensive antibiotics, time-consuming applications of gauze, and perhaps the odd transfusion or two. 

It's a travesty that the unused portion of my annual payment cannot be rolled-over into a savings account to fund treatment of future illnesses. I must have paid a King's ransom in health insurance premiums over the years; enough to ransom not only the king but his queen and courtiers also, with enough cash left over to house them all in the castle of their dreams.

How I wish I spent the money on the fabrication of a DNA clone of myself, instead of some stupid HMO. At least then I'd have a sympathetic ear to listen to my whining about sore throats, sniffles, and aches and pains. God knows, the automatons working at the clinic don't seem to care.

But I shouldn't complain. One day I won't be able to afford healthcare at all. Even a simple flu-shot will be beyond my means. I shall have fallen down the slippery medical slope from Blue Cross to Red Cross, from paying for insurance to requesting charity. Please give generously if you are still alive when that dark day arrives. 

Abracadabra

"Magic" has become the most debased and degraded word of modern times.

Once upon a time, magic was a word that inspired dread and awe; a threat to the order of the world; a terrible power wielded by deepest forest-dwelling warlocks and witches only.

Alas, today, magic can be defined as the worst kind of chintzy, harmless, Disneyland distraction. It is the property and plaything of the feeble-minded and easily amused; a stream of banal, brightly colored confetti streaming forth from the plastic wand of a puerile wizard wearing polyester robes. Even Tinkerbelle practices darker arts than contemporary magicians do. 

Most of these modern wizards either look like someone's kindly grandpa or a supercilious prepubescent. At least Merlin had horny fingernails and smelled like a dragon's fart. But dragons and mists have been replaced by unicorns and rainbows now. 

Magic: the peach scented air freshener of occult powers.

City Park

An isosceles wedge of mottled green and yellow grass bordered by defensive, vinyl-sided housing and an exit to the highway, the city park forbids all ballgames and loitering after dark.

It's a busy-road dodge on my shortcut way to work. The "scenic route," I say, loudly enunciating those ironic quotation marks, since the area is about as bucolic as a nymph flattened by a steamroller.

There is a mailbox that appears to be rusted shut, an overflowing trashcan, and free-form arrangements of broken glass scattered along the path that runs from north to south. Snared on the twigs of an unkempt bush, a spent condom inflates in the breeze like an airport runway windsock. An unsupervised bull terrier evacuates his bowels, briefly sniffs the ground, then wanders off. 

Nearby, a constellation of cigarette butts has been crushed into the black asphalt beneath a concrete bench. Relics from a troubled resident's dark night of the soul? Or did a vagrant just need something to chew on between sips of methylated spirit? 

Nobody could enjoy themselves in this park. Nobody in their right mind would want to play ballgames here.

Dweller on the Threshold

With his lank, black Hitler haircut, herringbone eyebrows, and mismatched ears, Malcolm the intern's face is the monstrous visage that peers into your window on a stormy night. Even the Phantom of the Opera might consider himself lucky not to be cursed with such a monstrous visage.

At least, that's what I tell Malcolm when I encounter him devouring his daily pink frosted doughnut in the canteen. 

"I'm no oil painting," Malcolm agrees, apparently unfamiliar with the work of Edvard Munch. "But I have a kind heart."

"That was also true of Frankenstein's monster," I reply. "Speaking of which, if you could galvanise yourself, we have much to get done today. So when you've finished stuffing your hideous face, apply that abnormal brain of yours to some of the simpler tasks on your to-do list."

Malcolm could, of course, compensate somewhat for his unprepossessing facial features by adopting suave and dapper clothing. Yet he chooses to wear sporting regalia, cargo shorts and flip-flops instead of smart attire: an unprofessional outfit that only emphasises his aura of oafishness.

Good help is hard to find these days, God knows, but help that doesn't look like it crawled out of the deepest swamp is even harder.  

Blogging For Morons

These days, I find pretty much everything is an insult to my intelligence. And I am not an especially smart person. Even the pronouncements of learned men are expressed in imbecilic terms that might just as well be "the finger" given in the general direction of my - admittedly mediocre - brain.

If the Tractatus of Wittgenstein was published today it would be illustrated with cartoons. In fact, it would probably wouldn't be written at all; it would be merely a series of chatty web videos presented by Ludwig sitting in his deck chair. 

To account for such mental disintegration, I'm inclined to adapt Julian Jaynes' theory of the Bicameral Mind: the human brain is divided into two distinct spheres: a vigorous side (right) and a lazy side (left). Over time, the lazy side has taken gradual command of processing all information and ideas. Soon we will only be able to comprehend the simplest of concepts. All philosophy and science will be a mystery unless it's been dumbed down and infantilised.

If you ask me, the future of thought will be rather like how the manic one-hundred-and-forty character limit of Twitter has eviscerated blogs like this one.

Graveyard of Greed

Desperately hopeful gamblers used to stagger back and forth beneath these ancient neon signs, dragging their bad luck into a gleaming nether world of slot machines, card tables, and roulette wheels. Today, the signs are equally as broken and wasted as those martini-soaked crapshooters they once seduced, but at least the signs have a home. 

If you happen to find yourself in Las Vegas, The Neon Museum, also known as 'The Boneyard,' is definitely worth visiting, if only to escape the dystopian shopping mall that is the Strip.

One day soon, the Trump casino signs will also languish here; a reminder that even the highest of rollers always end up like Ozymandias: just a shattered visage in the desert.