The story below is a work of fiction.
A competitor called in all their remote workers, ones that were hired during you know what. So we did it too. Mandated by next calendar year. People are already pregaming before the big day. Today there was a guy in my normal seat at the cafe. I know who he though we’ve never talked. The only black guy in our department. Nigerian name (I looked it up) but he’s completely Americanized. Dresses dapper in a slovenly back end office environment. Neutral suits with colored socks. I don’t have the nuts to make that move. How did his parents make it here. What did they have to do, who did they do it to, to get legitimate papers and make it over. Does that even matter anymore. If you’re smart enough you can make anything happen. That old adage.
On a podcast I heard a narration of a samurai’s diary. One of his balls was twisted his whole life, constant numbing pain, big gulp of sake type of slight limpy gait. But he still had a brood of kids. When the samurai was a kid he made a paper boat and sailed it, and one of the other village kids threw a rock at the boat and sunk it. Samurai-kid dove in and found the rock and split the kid’s lip open with it. When he had a house his hand was crushed by a collapsing wall but he still worked and did whatever samurai do until he died. How did humanity end up like this, our day ruined by a different brand of oat milk at the coffee shop.
What would the nut-twisted samurai think of us today, us getting miffed by our team losing or the nachos are stale. We all know the answer but we don’t want to be called another Ted K and what are you gonna do, blow up another building. Get doxxed you weirdo. Why do people always gotta jump to the extreme furthest mile when you just take a step. I like this thing. Oh, so you don’t want anyone else to like that thing. You know who liked this thing, right. That’s not okay.
There’s no art to conversation. It’s always take and run. We deserve to have our nuts twisted until we learn. What if God went further with Babel, just made us stop talking altogether, blessed us with the ability to communicate with dancing. Sock color would play a role. Our buildings would be perfectly safe too. No one who wears chartreuse socks and calls them “my chartreuses” would bomb a building. I’m gonna take my vacation in Nigeria.
4 Comments
One of my best friends in college (the first time around) was Nigerian. He did things quite differently from American students, but he was just a really cool dude. And he dressed well, but would wear wild socks from time to time.
Was he an exchange student?
Nah. It was a combination of private money and some religious grants from various religious agencies for him to come to Oklahoma Baptist U. I just thought that your fiction coming so close to my reality was cool. There were lots of other African students there on similar terms, but he was quite the character.
Maybe there’s some long-distance osmosis function happening that made me write that? If I were one of “those people” I could attribute the coincidence to the simulated universe. Every silly thing can be explained with that. Deus ex simulatione.