The Daily Fix

The problem with child labor is that it’s in all the poverty-stricken places, and isn’t getting imported into the prosperous nations it ought to exist in. For example, I need (desperately) an eight-year-old butler to cater to my every whim. “Roberto, commence the fanning!” I would cry, and hence Roberto would come toddling forwards from his cleverly hidden quarters (also known as the “dryer”), carrying with him an immense palm frond. This palm frond would be utilized in the most ingenious of ways, as an air-circulation device. Who needs strength of character when an eight-year old Puerto Rican boy is hand-feeding you grapes, I ask? Nobody, that is who. Not even the Dalai Llama could resist Roberto’s charms, I feel.

But enough about my upbringing! Or, perhaps not. It is important to realize that it is not in my, Roberto the writer’s tiny scarred hands that the power rests in. Rather, it is John Moses Tarkington that holds the power over me. I am frenzied, hurried, driven mad by the delusive power of my literary glory! Or not. I believe John Moses Tarkington and I tire easily, and require sustenance. To the ink bar!

Perhaps the answer is only in the deification of the old boredoms, the droll amusements we used to hurl ourselves into in order to scare away any type of contact with one another. They’re gone now, you know. Those long summer afternoons, spent staring at the sun and throwing tiny pebbles into the void. Gone and dead. Now we take our dogs for walks in separate parks, watching the clichéd mist form from our mouths as the winter air grasps our carbon dioxide in its tiny, prickly forearms. Winter is all-encompassing; it seems as though the shovels, men in jackets, women in jackets, children in jackets, even those asinine animals in jackets with their idiotic frou-frou owners running after them rule our stultified, strangled and strained world inside the snow-globe. Sadly, suburbia this isn’t, and we have to deal, head-on, nastily, with the introduction of other people’s vignettes to our own pithy existences, watching the dime-store-novel romances and coffee-shop bohemian lurching of suppressed minds color the travails of our otherwise drab lives as though they were the screens we once so longingly and readily gazed upon, as our little men beat the living shit out of one another. Well, not for much longer. Spring comes, it comes and it goes and it comes, and what have we to show for it? Nothing but our own hypothermic delusions, fueled by our fevered brains bludgeoned by beaurocracy and barbiturates, barring the bastions of blue brilliance that spout out of your profanity-riddled nightmares.

Good Night.

I’d like to think that the fourth wall is broken every time a piece of art is created. After all, all art is created with the intent of viewing, and so the art communicates (intently) with the viewer, on a visual, aural, or perhaps literal level. Hitherto, this work shall be referred to as “John Moses Tarkington.” Say hello to John Moses Tarkington, will you? Did you know that John Moses Tarkington’s Flesch-Kinkaid reading level is at eleventh grade? A high-school junior probably wouldn’t agree with this; they are so full of vitality and youth (and therefore mistaken thoughts that they are here for a reason) that they couldn’t ever ever ever ever ever love John Moses Tarkington. Of course, he’s not meant to be loved- OH GOD A PRONOUN.

This particularly infantile practice of quickly ending a sentence by segueing into another, totally irrelevant one seems to be a large, hairy dinosaur. Dinosaurs existed mainly for the edification of Rhodes scholars, like Kris Kristofferson, certified member of the board of Members, Canada ’s largest organization of male organ donors. They’ll “donate” their organs to you any time! It’s just that they’ll put them back in their trousers when their done (as if you didn’t get the high-laaariously amusing joke already, I have hidden inside this infant paragraph the gift of obvious secondary lines that add no value to my already invaluable humor).

Good evening, my computer compatriots! A Pragmatic sweep of our resources has found that in our electrified-barbed-wire holding-cell, there are scant items of food left raw and living. This is where, after all, the lovelier bits of human nature are arraigned in glory about the shoulders of some lovelorn neighbor-boy like a shawl, despite the fact that he's ben locked up in a cage made of electrififed barbed wire for a few hours.

I think our problem is that we just don't communicate well enough, him and I. He seems to look down upon me in a rather disparaging matter, the runt, having decided that my vocabulary consists mainly of a few random squawks and yelps. This cannot remain the situation at hand! There must be dialogues, serious dialogues, my friend, as to the nature of the problems our relationship is undergoing. He only has a few days to live, after all, before I cap 'im and feed him to the squid, and I am not under the illusion that

Jose says I should use some type of punctuation to indicate that I have made my departure from the particular line of thought I'm departing, but what does he know? He was foolish enough to be trapped by a gigantic descending basket, so what does he know? Not much, admittedly. Wait, I'm not admitting anything. That wasn't signed, you can't link it to me in any incriminating way!


Whose writing is this, anyway? I think Jose is just jealous, due to his lack of contact to the outside world. I bring him his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and yet he refuses to speak! The yellow wallpaper speaks to me, Manuel, Raoul, Omar, Paco, Sancho, and all the rest of me and m international friends! I think the world looks brighter in a poncho, because the border's so far away and the sun shines brighter when you don't have a sunburned white man hugging your legs as you do a little cha-cha-cha away from the schnauzers who seem to be hell-bent on biting some, any piece of you. Just an opinion, a personal opinion.