man loses way

Following nearly a decade of reliance on global-positioning-satellite-enhanced navigation via his handheld mobile communications device, local bachelor Gregor Harold Bantanigian ran into trouble when his phone suffered a total systems-crash three miles from his house. Having no coins on him and knowing none of his contacts’ phone numbers by heart, for the first fifteen minutes of his ordeal Mr Bantanigian sat in his car staring out of the windshield, unmoving. Glancing upward at the stars in a vain attempt to find North, he realized he had forgotten which constellations stood where in the Fall sky, preferring instead recently to scan the heavens using an application on his phone.

Pulling the device back out of his pants pocket, Gregor banged it against his left palm a few times, then mashed clumsily at the power button until his thumb started to cramp. As this article was going to press, Mr Bantanigian was seen waiting around in front of a nearby grocery store trying to ask strangers for directions back to his home. Upon seeing his fashionably ripped t-shirt and loose fitting cotton sweatpants as well as the desperate look in his eye, however, they assumed he was a drug-crazed street person and kept their distance.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

my sentiments exactly

‘This is the life,’ the drug dealer thought, pulling back on a hinged brass handle screwed into a row of others like it. A brownish, fermented, sugary fluid ran out of the nozzle attached to the handle, flowing into a freshly washed glass. Setting the now-full glass down on the copper counter erected for the purpose of giving the users of that particular drug somewhere upon which to rest their arms while using it, the drug dealer took cash in exchange for the addictive, mind-altering substance he’d just dealt.

The appearance of cleanliness was important to the drug dealer, wherefore he carefully wiped down a few meters of bar dirtied by customers who’d become slightly sloppy after using the habit-forming drug he peddled. The drunk people had left earlier - not because he’d kicked them out for shouting crassly or the other drug users had told them to leave for making racist comments but because they’d decided to keep taking drugs elsewhere. Such things happened often, and the dealer was used to it. He knew they’d be back. He sold them the junk they liked in an environment they enjoyed, and he pretended to listen to their problems, which made them repeat customers.

“This is the life,” slurred a middle-aged patron, holding up his glass of beer to admire its color under the tepid house lights, his back stooped and bent under the weight of decades of sadness and addiction, his skin fallow and eyes yellowish from early-onset liver failure. On the bar in front of the middle-to-end-phase addict was a packet of cheap, pre-rolled cigarettes and a cheap lighter, things he needed on his sprint to an early grave. The drug dealer, who was in the process of mixing a drink using a more refined and potent form of the life-shattering substance he got paid to sling, nodded encouragingly, saying, “My sentiments exactly.”

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

local addict hooked on O2

Despite years of effort dedicated to breaking a lifelong addiction, unemployable local fiend Eroll T. Whitscomb remains hooked on oxygen. “I like inhaling it out here, in the open,” said the subject while standing and breathing deeply in a meadow not far from his home. “To me, it doesn't matter who or how many people tell me I need to quit – by now, my body really and truly needs it. God, once it hits your lungs, it's so good.” Mr. Whitscomb by no means struggles alone, said Dr. Alice R. Ushanginahi, head of addiction studies at the University of Southern Washington, U.S.A. “Every human being alive today is in some form or another addicted to oxygen. In fact, unless a person receives a dose of this chemical every two or three minutes, he or she will experience brain-death, and die.” Compared to food, or water, oxygen is apparently indispensable to a long and healthy life, and inhaling too little of it – due largely to bad posture – quickly causes the oxygen addict to become angry, impatient, and downright boorish. “We've studied countless cases in which individuals ruined social engagements and damaged interpersonal relationships just because their bodies weren't getting enough of the chemical upon which they'd allowed themselves to get hooked,” said Dr. Ushanginahi, who is herself addicted to the chemical. On the street, this drug is known as oh-too. “The most readily available and cheapest way to cure this addiction is, to my knowledge, suicide.” For more information about the addictive nature of oxygen – a free radical that damages the human body and speeds its decay by causing the iron molecules present in the bloodstream to rust – please visit www.urshitoutofluck.com or www.ifurbreathingurbelieving.com

© americanifesto / 場黑麥