It's the consuming season again, so I thought I would dust off a piece I did a while back for a writing club. For your amusement:



Excerpts from Mart of Darkness With Apologies to: Joseph Conrad

…..I staggered on under the merciless gleam of fluorescent light, slipping here and there. At one point I reached out to steady myself, and my handed clutched a wooden object. A primitive religious icon of some sort I speculated, its carved form and garish paint designed to loosely represent a human-like form. Yes, I recognized it now; it’s savage features rendered in a kind of burlesque, an artifact crafted to take the raw material of sanctimony and employ it to manufacture the finished product of mockery. Those of European extract would describe it in concrete and secular terms: a Mohamed the Profit bobble-head; a spring-loaded parody of the one true faith, destined to live out its years imprisoned on some suburban car dashboard until novelty expended itself, or until a true believer was driven to indignant retribution. I replaced it with its wobbling fellows and wandered on…..

….What I thought at a distance was ornamentation turned out, upon closer examination, to be anything but. The savagery was such that my eyes registered the scene somewhat before conscious recognition took hold, in the sense of one contemplating a vista before them while hoping, momentarily, that it is not so. The row of rounded white objects was unmistakable to the human eye, and indeed held a deep and profound significance that is rooted firmly in our most early and primitive origins. The hollow eye sockets and grinning teeth offered a kind of mute cynicism, a suggestion that our recently fabricated layer of civilization was a very thinly construct indeed. And what was this? It couldn’t be! What was that red material suspended beneath the grinning row of human skulls? I feared a display of some barbaric talisman, a statement of intent, a stern warning to neighboring tribes perhaps. But no, it was but gaudily painted plastic, with bright colors and slogans that implied a gluttonous feast, foodstuffs extorted from one’s neighbors, and ominous threats of trickery and vandalism, the details of which were left to the fervent imagination.

I was startled out of my macabre reflections by a fellow who jumped out in front of me. He had the laconic demeanor of those in these parts; superficially friendly, but with a vague inertia lurking within their souls.

“Scratch and save!” He blurted out enigmatically. The dialect in these parts matched our own, in a close, but not precise fashion.

“I seek the manager, Kurtz! Do you know of him?” I demanded.

“Ah, Kurtz, yes I know him.” His grin was wolfish, but his eyes dead and disconnected, and looked into the distance. “Yes he will go far with the company. He tried to kill me once.”

I exclaimed that this could not be so; such an outrage could not happen within our civilized organization. Attempted murder? Nonsense!

“We were on the loading dock, moving refrigerators, and Kurtz was there, in an agitated state. He was certain that we should be moving much faster with our labors, and bellowed out orders for speed, including in his oration imagined references to our philosophy of work, and also our mother’s reproductive habits. These demands were hard to meet, given the heat and the very heavy weights we were carrying. ‘Productivity!’ he bawled, face livid, and eyes bulging, ‘I will have productivity! as he approached me swinging a crowbar in the most menacing fashion. Fortunately for me, he was wrestled to the ground by the dispatcher and the purchasing officer. He later cooled down, sitting in the dispatcher’s chair, after receiving a large glass of bourbon, in addition to some dyer mutterings in his ear from the assistant manager. There you have it.”

It defied logic, I thought to myself, we live in modern times, in which these sort of organizational relationships have been meditated upon, and honed to a smooth edge, and tribal impulses of this kind have been banned…….have they not? The man lumbered off. He seemed obsessed with his odd scratching ritual, which he again presented to several passers by, but with no more luck than he had with me.

….At least my thirst is now satisfied. I have discovered a fountain spewing out a dark brown liquid, the texture of which brings to mind the most disagreeable body functions. But necessity is a harsh master, and I have taken a large measure of the liquid, which has a taste like syrup laced with unidentifiable chemical additives.

……War clubs! There could be no doubt about it. The section in which I found myself contained a good stock of sturdy, wooden sticks, about four to five feet in length, wickedly curved at one end. On display too was a wide variety of defensive armor; objects crafted to provide protection to diverse body parts, from face masks to arrangements for the trunk of the body, to miscellaneous bits and bobs that were hard to define precisely. Also to be had were various items of clothing that followed a military style, with systems of numbering printed in proment places. I had little doubt I was a pilgrim traversing a savage land. My search for the manager Kurtz continued…..

….Lost! I can doubt it no longer; I am adrift in a sea of flickering florescent light and endless trivia, with one region looking very much like any other. I paused to take stock of my situation. The brown syrup previously consumed now laid heavily in my gut. I determined to scale a high point, in order to orient myself better to the lay of the land. As I climbed a row of shelving, bits of dispersed ruble fell away; foam and paper packing material, odd molded plastic shapes, and some unidentifiable tidbits. My hand grasped an outcropping, but it immediately came loose. It turned out to be yet another plastic oddment, a cup fashioned in the form of a grinning, stylized duck, dressed in what appeared to be the upper half of a sailor’s uniform; another talisman of a society on a return journey to its infancy. I let it drop to the ground.

The dizzying prospect of wave after wave of stacked merchandise, undulating in monotonous rows as far as the eye could see met my eye from the top shelf, dashing my fragile hopes of experiencing redeeming value during my journey. Gaudily painted plastic gewgaws, gadgets of questionable utility, tacky bits of clothing and ornamentation, instruments craftily designed to expire days after their warranties assaulted my senses. These world traveling objects had already left scars of pollution at their origins in the far east, fomenting labor unrest and inequality at their place of birth, and then burned up diminishing supplies of hydrocarbons on their long journeys outbound. At their destination they are instrumental in stripping away entire town centers, and in driving small family businesses up against the Wal. Their goal: to add volume to the landfills and garbage dumps of this country, after serving the briefest of intervals in providing modest novelty, temporary distraction, or, optimistically… some mediocre utility…..oh, the horror!……….the horror!!

Lol Etudiant. Very nice.