There's one ridiculous phenomenon that I can't accept, though, that other big-city dwellers have probably noticed. Picture this: you're waiting for a subway train. You've been on your feet for eighteen hours and you're exhausted. It's your lucky day! When the train pulls up, the doors are right in front of you, and through the window you see an empty seat.
The doors slide open and in less than three footsteps your dream dies. Before you get to the seat, a rambunctious little rugrat scurries between your legs and clambers up onto it. They smile. "Look at me!" their face says. "I'm sitting! Wheee!"
You shoot them a glare that would paralyze oysters. "You're sitting, kid," you want to repeat. "You didn't make a hit record with LaToya Jackson."
I blame parents. A kid does fuck-all and they act like he's won the Nobel Prize. You ate a carrot? Hooray! You took your socks off? Whoopee! You stuck three Legos together? OHMIFUCKINGOD! I worry about the damage it's going to do to the kid. Twenty years from now their boss will say, "Hey, what's up with that Farnsworth report?" and they'll say, "I haven't started it yet, but I've been pooping into porcelain!"
As an observant human, this kids-on-the-subway phenomena confuses me. Doesn't a child's life consist of running around aimlessly? While adults are sitting in comfy chairs drinking cappuccinos, kids grab at the opportunity for exercise. "Gosh," they think, "I wonder if I can run in a circle until I carve a groove into marble tile!"
Yet the second they're in a moving metal box with strangers they're like, "Oh, shit. I just gotta get offa these dogs." They play endless sports. They scamper across streets. They march in place in their bedrooms. But they minute they're on a subway car they're staring at everybody seated with tears in their eyes, like "I been chasing a squirrel with a rock for eight hours. How's about helping a six-year-old out?"
They can fuck off. You focus on your smartphone but from the corner of your eye you see the sad face. "Yo, bud, have some sympathy," it says. "These little pink legs are swole!"
Once the kids sit down, though, their demeanor changes. Now the energy is back. Now they can hardly sit still long enough to stare out the window. "What the hell?" they think as they kick everything within eight miles with their dirty feet. "There's a motherfuckin' pigeon out there!"
I don't understand their parents. They know the kids don't deserve or appreciate the seats. Why don't they make the kids stand? It wouldn't be difficult: just say something like, "Teddy, I'll bet you can't jump up and down until Jesus returns." "I'll bet I can!" Teddy yaps. He leaps out of the seat and the 92-year-old lady in front of it smiles for the first time since Rudolph Valentino took off his shirt.
Before she can get to it, though, a little girl is there. "You look just like my great-grandma!" she says. "Holy shit, is that graffiti? Raddison Marie, get your little pink Keds over here!!"
A handsome police inspector who is questioning a lady may often find it is the wrong question that is being answered. So discovered Sir Thomas Bertram, squire of Flittylocks Manor, as he cross-examined accused murderess Fanny Coleripple about a lifeless corpse discovered amidst a copse of quails on the grounds of Lower Smalldimples.
"It is quite easy for a horse to be led astray," lectured Sir Thomas. "The question is how many biscuits are required for him to find his way home."
Miss Coleripple raised her brow and giggled delicately. "Sometimes it is best to save one's biscuits for a more reputable mare," she bespoke.
The fetching owner of eight piglets and a tractor glowered. "It is all fine for you to stare at me out of your countenance, but there was an act of violence over a quarter-dollar ago and I am determined to uncover the truth."
The visage of the resident of Titteridge Place adopted a girlish vexation. "It is often discovered when one tries to hover," she pined, "that they uncover something from which they can't recover." She raised a long limb and delicately lowered it across the other.
"I daresay, Miss Coleripple," said the most skilled dancer of Bigstaples County, "I am quite in the dark. Which is something I can't say for a significant portion of your underoos."
There are a million acceptable options for a proper lady's wardrobe but just one truly ghastly choice. Reader, I'm talking about knickers. Because when she returned to the third-smallest thatched-roof ivy-covered cottage in Upper Dashboard Valley for the final time, the prettiest woman to have played a half-round of croquet at Woodcheeks Manor would discover the hand-tatted lace panties she thought she was wearing crumpled upon the settee. Her team of horses raced to meet the last train to Warsaw and, as one can scarcely listen to a thing which does not speak, she was never ever heard from again.
Philip K. Dick:
I piloted my red Hydro Booster X711 down Inter-Steller 405 and stopped at the Police Station that hovered just off the border of Sector A-14. There, a wealthy man's housekeeper was being held, suspected of his murder. I peered through the nano-glass of her extruded cryo-cell. She was beautiful all right -- but she was also a replicant. She might have been well-programmed but even Windows 4763-X(b) had bugs.
I had her trans-portaled to the plasticine Interrogation Capsule and when I entered she was floating in a pool of crocheted neon. I took my seat behind a flickering hologram of a desk.
I couldn't take my eyes off her. I'd rarely seen such excellent work. "It's not looking good for you," I said. "You never should have impaled him with those weaponized titanium geese."
A tear rolled down her cheek. "I -- I didn't do it," she choked.
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. I looked into her eyes: a matched pair of Bernlicht R-2000s, fashioned from the finest vinyloid harvested from cloned Japanese cattle and pure latex rubies. Was it possible? Had some sort of virus corrupted her operating system, or did she honestly think she wasn't guilty?
She crossed her legs and exposed her nether regions to me. I looked up her skirt and saw it all: the sleek hair, the sultry lips, the little man in his red space ship. Obviously this was a P386x, a part instantly recognizable to all synth-human developers. This little work of art all by itself cost more than the residents in this quadrant made in their lifetimes. It was the finest vagina money could buy.
She was hoping to unnerve me, but her little trick wasn't going to work. See, I've always been able to control myself. Completely. Every muscle, every fiber, every cell in my body. In fact, ever since I was a little boy, I could --
Oh shit. I AM A REPLICANT TOO!
Ernest Hemingway:
I was asking her about a murder. A murder she probably committed. Her fingerprints were all over the joint, and five miles from the murder site I found a blood-covered lace serape that was exactly her size.
I had to question her but I couldn't. I was the blotchy, bone-shaking, wine-addled son of an itinerant highwayman, and she had flaxen hair, a delicate manner, and porcelain skin that would make everyone in Germany smash their Lladro and scream, "WHAT KIND OF USELESS SHIT IS THIS?"
It was difficult keeping myself together. I tried to confine my wandering thoughts to matadors but the horns of the snorting black beasts kept growing foreskin. Here I was, a big tough guy at the mercy of this unwrinkled wench who couldn't have weighed eighty pounds if she was holding a wheel of cheese and my testicles.
I was at her mercy.
I was starting to say a prayer for myself when she threw one skinny leg over the over and whaddaya know?
Pussy.
2. They actually want to go for a jog but they're too fat to get off the couch.
3. They know that one day the world is going to recognize RHUBARB!
4. They just finished eating thirteen cans of baked beans and they've got their fingers crossed.
5. Actual hospital studies aren't shit compared to Buzzfeed's medical breakthroughs.
6. It's the only link they haven't clicked other than, "This Father And Daughter Took The Same Photo Every Year. DON'T CRY WHEN YOU SEE THE LAST ONE!"
7. They thought it said, "11 Foods That Fight Canaries."
8. They are the last living souls on earth not saying to themselves, "Oh, Holy God -- would you please SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT BROCCOLI?"
