the end of the broken toy empire

Its that special time again, cleaning up the dinner dishes. Our dishwasher, and everyone else's around this hood, is spreading permanent white film on everything I put inside of it. The tap water is foamy. I came to find by reading a flagrag from a faraway county that our immediate area suffered a watermain break in the not too distant past, um, just about the time our problem showed itself.

When these things happen, and they happen with increasing frequency, things like NO SERVICE showing on the cellphone screen or calling into the corporatocracy about my promised Windows 7 upgrade and being told by an obviously outsourced and disinterested voice to call back in around 2 days since they were "in reset" at the moment, or the major artery into and out of a midwest hub has crumbled from the overweight of homebound commuters and everybody drove into the river, or the commuter trains in head-on collisions because the computerized traffic signals MALFUNCTIONED crushing at least 25 people to smithereens while the engineer twittered, we who are watching have little alternative but to weep in anguish that the world we thought was genuine is just a broken toy.

What did the plastics pushers think would happen when plastic breaks? Did they think at all? What did the mechanical engineers think when they put the rolls of plans into the hands of the Soprano's construction manager? What did the construction inspector think when he ran across entire regions of over-valued roach motels infected with lazy errors, bandaids, beerbottles, buckets of cheap labors' urine and Elmers glue-all? What is the community tax collector thinking when he outlaws wells and grazing animals, who is he in league with to declare self-defeating regulations and piles on surcharges and service fees to afford to send out meter bills on postcards anyone curious can read and will? We found one from the property tax assessors recently on a postcard declaring the value of the house. Everyone got one. Everyone knows everything, its their job. Puts food on the table for those outsourced by the corporatocracy too busy "creating" to handle the volume of eligible laptop users trying to sidle out of Vista's clutches. You don't "qualify" without active x going though your underwear drawer.

Oh, these tests and trials, they are the brillo pads of these times. Scrubbing bubbles foaming up the mores of our peeps. Little seratonin smileys leaving the station, gathering sweetly on the platform for their turn on the theme park's uptake inhibitor. We're not supposed to know the world is a box in the garage filled with broken toys that has come alive and threatens to consume the house, the neighborhood, the Interstates, the municipalities, the banks, the food chain, the great institutions of the great urban centers, the health of every living being who inhabits the gross intentional juxtaposition we find ourselves trapped inside today. Even our correctional institutions are privatized sleep away camps. No longer the private cells for two, heh, its bunkbeds dorm-style so everyone does as everyone else will. Cheaper to construct and faster, but when its feuding time its everyone's riot.

...Corrections officers got word that violence was brewing at the prison, prompting a lockdown imposed Thursday night. Tensions between Latino and black prisoners flared two days later, according to officers here.

But in the end, inmates of every race were involved, leaving the cause of the clash unclear...

At the end of the day, all these self-destructing tchatchke and their plastic parts and soldered chips and shims and safety pins are human waste for urban landfills upon which monster doziers glide atop pressing, flattening until the next delivery repeats the overflowing toybox history of superpower legoland in the 21st Century on Planet Earth.

This brings me to to dispel a common belief concerning the popular Fema Camps story. The riot pictures above will have you thinking about that. There will be no internment of dissidents, no meals, no bunks in dorms, no hour of outdoors because it will be all outdoors unless you've managed to squeeze your family into a tent city until they are outlawed and you end up hobos in the underbrush huddling in a lean-to. There is no money for camps, there will be ... nothing. At least imprisoned felons are earning their way through the system, but you? Nada. Its all broken anyway, yes, it says Built to Last right here on the cornerstone, but that's silly, isn't it. Its another logoslogan printed on a removable sticker. The joke's on you. Have another Kleenex. We're all going to be brushing our teeth with leaf paste and eating bark until Darth Vader arrives with his citations pad and leashed collection agents.

Let's say you could play that one out all the way - comforting yourself that later on by Obamagic you'll qualify for some kind of relief. Homecare perhaps (I don't think so) or one of those Adult Living Facilities (no, again)? I seriously doubt the luxury of a nursing home in your golden years will exist anywhere unless Satan is running the personnel department.

The truth is we're in a trap with the lid padlocked and the keycode lost in a fedex breakdown on the Ventura Freeway. Passwords and plastic toy parts and desperate resumes flying every which way into the never-ending wildfires and plastic netting holding back the mudslides until there's no more netting to be found, no matter the price. We are facing no escape, no bunkbeds in government camps, no waiting in meal lines, no place to rest your body and just be. From here on out. After we're lost in the demands of the elements long enough, we could easily forget how it was we ever got there.