9423. IF WE'RE EVEN IN THE SAME TOWN, CLEAR OUT

IF WE'RE EVER IN THE SAME

TOWN, CLEAR OUT

Like Whistler had his bones and Stalin

had his steel, so I come running to you.

My head's on fire and my legs are hot,

can you understand or do you not? I

walked in tonight with Ed O'Brien,

the used-to-be geek who was the chubby

Mayor of my town. Back then. He was

raising Irish whiskey to his chin. All the

lines of double-talk he's ever spoken

were lined up at his lips : 'Yes, it's silly 

season once again, Fat Boy, drink up.'
-
And to think, I was once a friend with
Bert Blyleven too : what a life and
what a game. Now I do nothing but
stand in line  -  50 bucks a day for
jailhouse line-up calls, and ID
procedurals. I'm never the guilty,
just a stand-in for whatever went down.
-
Sure it gets boring, but there are lots of
pretty girls and plenty of papers and
magazines to go through : forget the
phones and hand-held notebooks and
computers. I don't do any of that  -  for
my dumb line of police work, it doesn't go
with my 'age-group.' And yes, they had
the nerve to put it that way, the fools.
- 
However, in all this time I am writing the
novel of the century, even though that's 
fairly preposterous to say this early in
that century  -  but you never know. It's
get everything now needed - the florid
language with a modern touch, the sex and
scandal, even the driverless cars. What the
hell, I'm no fool. Have you ever thought
how what was once a science-fiction story
would now be filed under 'Realism' instead?
-
One time I was reading Arthur C. Clarke.
It was about 1974, and he had a story that
floored me to death : all the phone lines, on
all those poles everywhere, well they began 
listening in on all the words that passed, and
they got together (as phone lines will, I guess)
and planned a way to use all those words and
take over, re-aligning the messages to say other
things. Everywhere. And it worked. And they won,
and took over, and Mankind never knew a thing.