American Fez

Parole Parole Parole

This crumpled, dog-eared blog is lodged in the back of my brain like an unpaid bill. American Fez owes at least a hundred words to Reader Utility Corp but all I have in the idea bank is a few pre-decimal paragraphs, some old Cyrillic letters left over from my Macedonian vacation five years ago, and that incomplete sentence I'm saving in my back pocket for a rainy day. But it's been a few weeks since I updated the page so I suppose this must be my mind making a final demand. So how am I going to pay? It's a mystery to me but every now and again I do manage to scrape a post together to keep the blog bailiffs at bay.

And even when I do cough up the requested 'content,' is it still credited to my account? Honestly, it often seems as if nobody at Reader Utility Corp is actually checking my balance, probably because they've long ago written off American Fez as a deadbeat proposition. Nevertheless, here is my latest remittance: a self-referential amalgam of self-justifying statements that will only please myself dispatched into the digital void and receiving no receipt. You surely can't get more 'Internet' than that, although maybe I should try sending non-sequitur sentences to a legion of Twitter doom-scrolling followers. It is the approved method of modern micro-blogging, after all.

Will There Still Be Wasps

Like many people in these interesting times, my thoughts turn to the human colonization and environmental development of Mars. In particular, I wonder whether there will still be wasps buzzing about our terraformed, idyllic, child's picture-book landscape. As we new Martian citizens sit down to picnic on a smorgasbord of genetically modified sustenance, will wasps still dive bomb our synthetic ice creams and cakes? And what about ants? Will armies of determined  ants still march over our ham-clone sandwiches and lab-grown salads? 

Of course they will. Somehow, someway, annoying insect stowaways will sneak onto the space ships blasting off towards humanity's future home. We may be intrepid pioneers and pilgrims creating a technological Garden of Eden on the so-called red planet, but in entomological respects our Adam and Eve will be Little Miss Muffet and Gregor Samsa, and I doubt, clever though he may be, that Elon Musk has calculated exactly how much bug spray Space X will need to send into orbit. Nevertheless, it is a great relief to know that those of us who don't understand computer coding will still be able to find work as fly swatters and cockroach exterminators in this brave new world. So westward ho and hurrah for the wasps and their creepy-crawly friends

Goggle Boxing

Everyone has a TV mind these days: she is streaming self-produced dramas straight into her synapses; he still has Cable hooked up to his cerebral cortex. Both are constantly broadcasting a roster of inaccurate news updates, infomercials for disposable lifestyles, unfunny split-second sitcoms and long documentaries about themselves and their opinions. She is currently hosting her own version of The View, discussing new shoes for Fall; he is a contestant on a game show, trying to win the first prize Porsche but he'll settle for twenty thousand in cash. Their entire day is filmed live in front of an imaginary studio audience of the world, who clap and applaud when he and she enter the scene and utter their famous catchphrase "Please pay attention to me." 

Alas, everyone else has a TV mind too, so attention spans ares short. Even if I do momentarily acknowledge their presence on my screen, it's only as a walk-on role, not the star of the show, who of course is me, or at least was me until the latest episode of My Working Week got such very low ratings. Industry insiders claim My Working Week will be cancelled after this season, in favor of an Investigative Reports special where a camera crew follow me going to different offices in search of another job. I just hope it's a feel-good story about finding a new vocation after fifty, and not some hard-hitting expose of rising unemployment amongst middle-aged men. I guess we shall see when the next issue of my personal TV Guide is published. Until then, tune in next week for another thrilling installment.