slam piece

I tend to jump into situations with reckless abandon and virtually zero forsight.

turbo.

Turbo is faster than regular. It said so in the manual. It was, without a doubt, not a secret.

Janie's new car was a Turbo. And it was faster than a regular car. "My car," she would often be heard to remark to people, "is a Turbo and it is quite fast." Her hair was dark like an oil slick against night sky and she'd often speak to strangers without being prompted. And not always just about her car.

Today Janie walked to the gas station up the street from her apartment. The Turbo was in perfect working condition, but Janie decided that a brisk walk would be in her best interest.

"I walked up here for an iced tea despite the fact that I have a car," she blurted to a portly man beside her at the counter as they each waited for the teenage clerk to end his phone call. She smiled, though the man said nothing and heaved his Sunday paper to the counter. After a few more muffled words the clerk laughed, hung up the outdated handset phone and then quickly blushed and strode over to the pair.

"Just the Sunday Times, sir?"

"And a soft pack of Kent 100s," the man grunted and then looked away. Janie thought that the man looked like an ape that had been carefully shaved to look like a man. Masquerading as a human for news and tobacco? She chuckled to herself almost silently.

"Five dollars even."

The man shoved a crumpled bill to the counter and brushed by Janie as he turned and walked towards the double doors. Janie watched, momentarily ignoring her turn at the register, as the man pulled open the rusted door to his compact car and slumped inside.

"That man brushed against me as he left the store!" she said loudly to the clerk who looked like he really wished he hadn't heard what Janie said. "I believe he did it by design!"

The boy's cheeks reddened again and he shrugged his shoulders dismissively, "Just the iced tea then, ma'am?"

Janie refused to leave without some sort of reaction or sympathy or empathy or anything from the child clerk, "Did you see what happened?"

"Yes, he did brush against you. I saw that, too. What a jerk. Why would anyone do that?" The boy stumbled through his comments as though he'd been reading from a cue card.

"I'll tell you why," Janie said. "He was attempting to derive sexual pleasure from it! He grazed my left breast as he passed and I really think I saw him lick his lower lip as he did it!"

The clerk shifted from sneaker to sneaker uneasily before ringing up Janie's tea, silently placing it in a plastic bag and gesturing to the LCD that read 1.29.

Janie reached slowly to her jeans, forced her right hand into the tight pocket and withdrew two folded dollar bills after digging for a few seconds. She gave them to the clerk who quickly returned to Janie a handful of assorted change to the tune of 71 cents.

"My car has Turbo," she said to the teenage clerk as she turned to walk home. The iced tea was cold and delicious on her throat and she thought, "I'm glad I decided to walk."

RoCOW.

Serious Bike for Serious Children.

For Serious Use Only:

-Should child smile, or begin to smile brakes will engage until such time as the smile recedes
-Child must be under direct adult supervision at all times
-Child must wear full spandex bib with no chamois
-Suggested for hillclimbs such as the Manayunk Wall or Lombard St.
-Suggested use for commutes to dentist, Sunday/Hebrew School, violin lessons, and trips to weird Aunt Patty's only

Warranty is void if:

-Bike is stored without kickstand extended (i.e. "leaning against the wall")
-Top tube cushion is defaced with marker and/or stickers
-tassles attached to handlebar grips (may cause bike to explode)

Warning:
-The souls of those parent of child has wronged in the past will be released upon depressing presta valve on tires.
-Upon release said souls will torment and haunt child until young adulthood. Serious Bikes, Inc. takes no responsibility for a life of lost potential, psychological maladjustment, and blurred vision inflicted upon child.

The World.

Comrades, I don't think that there was ever a time when living in America wasn't scary as fuck, at least for some "minority" or demographic. I suppose that's the price you have to pay for living in Earth's Most Powerful Nation. Or any superpowerful nation, for that matter. I don't think that that was ever a picnic. Not in the Soviet Union, not in the Mongolia of Genghis Khan or anything in between or before. And probably also not in the China of 2020.

What's special this time around though is that America somehow managed to get scarier for no good reason other than George W. Bush. 911 and the entailing Don Quixote-like Holy Crusade just pushed it over the top. (Terrorists = the new windmills?) The whole housing market/economical crisis thing is really just the icing on the scarycake. I'd figure that losing your job is less scary than being deported because you're an immigrant of Muslim faith, even though you didn't do shit and have been living in America for several years. I mean, this stuff actually happened after 911, and happened systematically. There were blacklists just like during the commie scare and shit like the FBI knocking on people's doors one day after they had cracked jokes about the government at the gym did happen.

It's kind of weird, but, if I look at a world map and try to figure out where a man could live with the least amount of bullshit nowadays, I can't help but think about minuscule yet obscenely rich countries like Andorra, Switzerland, Monaco... Those never seem to get into any trouble. They just let the big boys play the physical power games and have them protect them while they set up their crazy bank or tax systems that guarantees their own wealth and political power. They don't have to deal with any internal social unrest because everybody's rich (enough) and they don't have that many people anyway and thus not much diversity. Government's never going to get big and bloated and menacing because... it's a small ass country, how big can its government get, really, and why should it even care? In the case of war they are no good as targets because it's hard to even find them on the map and they aren't strategically important. Who the hell would ever aim a nuclear bomb at them? It's like: the most secure fortress is the one nobody cares about besieging in the first place. I've only heard about Andorra a couple of years ago thanks to me looking up the world's highest GDPs on Wikipedia. I thought, "What the fuck is Andorra? I could swear we didn't even learn about it in geography when I was in school...".

Guys, everything that's evil in the world today comes from Switzerland. They are playing dirty in everything they do, from agriculture to pharmacy to arms dealing to banking. And they get away with it. Don't get many death threats from Al-Qaida either. Life's just not fair!

You know what to do though, do like the new recruits do: keep your head down and "be the gray man." Always walk the path of least resistance and never get caught up in a power struggle you can't win. That's how them terrorists are beating your boys' asses right now. It's how the Russians beat Napoleon's ass and made him lose a whole army, without them having to fight a single battle. (There may have been a single battle fought, though I'm not sure.) And it's how Ali beat the shit out of Foreman when everybody thought he was going to get his ass royally beat.

The trick is just to let the big man come -- let him come into enemy territory -- territory he can't handle -- lead him into a crowd screaming "Kill him, Ali!, Kill him!" and into a ring with loose ropes for you to lay into -- lead them into a snow desert where they'll suffer the devastating effects of the Russian winter and where they'll be attacked, nay irritated, nay merely annoyed!, by a handful of Cossacks taking singular shots at them like mosquitoes, like guerrilla soldiers, like special forces units, like ... "terrorists" -- let them come into one country and draw them out all over it with little mosquitoes biting them everywhere they go, then draw them over the border into another country, and then further into it and then (to be continued...) -- and once that is done... the big man will be -- not smaller, no, even bigger, even more plain to see, -- yet skinnier, with his strength drawn out -- all over the place and nowhere in earnest -- and he'll seem so fragile then. And maybe he will be.

The beauty and tragedy in all of this is that this shit is older than even Sun Tzu. The workings beneath it have been the same since the fucking Big Bang and while at first there was no one there to understand them, nowadays there are some who do and many more who still don't. The rope-a-dope still works like magic on aggressive brutes. Terrorism still works like gangbusters on a big target. And the big man obviously also still wins the fights against the small man that's dumb enough to fight him head on. When he doesn't though and picks his shots then the big man just can't knock him out. Still, after all these years, decades, centuries, and geological epochs nothing has changed about the strategies. Technology and the times have changed and dressed everything up in different colors, which is why you still need intelligence to be able to adapt the impossibly old yet still valid strategies to the new-looking situations. You have to figure out that an atomic bomb is neither sword nor bow -- it's a hostage. As an obvious example. And you have to figure out that people with towels on their heads that touch their foreheads to the ground five times a day aren't idiots -- they're cunning adversaries.

It's kinda sad when you've got people governing you that are oblivious to the facts, maybe because they won't read no stinkin' old books from communist China that don't have Jesus in them. Maybe because they -- even worse -- don't care if they'll win or lose, as long as they won't win while they're still profiting from not winning, and as long as they won't lose before they can profit from losing after their eight years of power are up.

Maybe it will work out for them, maybe it won't, most likely it has already; it's kind of sad anyways.

Or maybe it's brilliant and I'm just jealous.

Big Trickin'

I think the next step for Hip Hop and jewelry is to have it so big they can't even wear it. You follow 'Generic Rapper A' to his garage on "Cribs" and as the door lifts you see (next to the Escalade with Louis Vuitton tires, a Spongebob paint job and faux-polar bear pussy interior) is a necklace so gargantuan it's immovable.

"Yo, son, sometimes I like to just come out here with my teddy bear at night and sleep in the middle of this bitch... just fucking snuggle up with all this fucking ice, B. It's a restful sleep knowing you's the flyest nigga on the planet, kid. Word is bond."

Just how big is that necklace Generic Rapper A?

"This motherfucker is big enough that that Statue of Liberty bitch could wear it to the Source Awards, son. This motherfucker here? Big enough for Missy Elliot to wear BACK IN THE DAY, son! This motherfucking rope right herre in my garage? Big enough that they changed the shits name from Fort Knox to Fort Lighty Taps my nigga!"

Word.