Jason Speaks

Illustration Friday’s word for this week (well last week, sorry, I was feeling poorly) is “emergency.” This naturally suggested a topic which is near and dear to my heart, namely, total effing paranoia and blind terror about almost every aspect of life. Hope you enjoy it!

State of Emergency

Have you ever lost a sock when you wash a load of clothes?
It almost always seems to happen, doesn’t it? You wash a load of clothes and you wind up short by one sock. Where does it go? Most people think they just fall down behind the washer, but that can’t be what happens, because you lose so many socks, that if they were all behind the washer, you’d have noticed by now. You’d have seen them stick out from behind the washer, and that would be that.
It must mean that someone is stealing the socks. I believe that they are being stolen for “nefareous purposes.” Most people don’t seem bothered by this. They don’t seem to care about someone breaking into their homes and stealing articles of clothing from them. I called 9-1-1 about it, but they said not to worry, that everybody loses socks. I think that’s precisely why we should worry about it. They could be stealing our socks to use in some strange Voodoo ritual. Or, perhaps they want to harvest skin cells from out of the socks, to make clones of all of us. It could even be something more unpleasent than that. There are all sorts of nasty things living on people’s feet.
Did you know that there are over a million tiny organisms living on your body? That’s another thing people don’t seem to be worried about.
There are millions of microscopic creatures living all over your body. From dust mites and bacteria, all the way up to tiny little parasites, invisible to the naked eye, they are all living on you, feeding on you, slowly eating you away, bit by bit. It doesn’t matter how much you wash, either, you’re just clearing the way for new things to move in. You can’t get rid of them, believe me, I tired. It makes me all itchy, just thinking about them.
I called 9-1-1 about it. I told the operator there were millions of tiny organisms living all over me, eating me away. She told me that wasn’t a real emergency. I told her, it may not seem like a real emergency to her, but if being slowly eaten away by a million microscopic organisms wasn’t an emergency, then I’d like to know what was. She said something very rude and then hung up.
I think that they are hiring ruder telephone operators than they used to. It concerns me. I called up 9-1-1 to report it, but they did not wish to discuss it. That made me quite angry. Suppose a man’s head exploded, I asked them, and he called up 9-1-1 to ask for an ambulance, and they were rude to him. That man would be denied important life-saving treatment, I told them. It wasn’t any good, though, the operator wouldn’t listen to me. She sounded like a very “nefarious” sort of person. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was in league with the sock thieves. I was so insulted, that I almost didn’t call them back to warn them about the air.
Over the last one-hundred years, through the use of the internal-combustion engine, we human beings have so poisoned the environment that the air we breathe is practically poisonous. You can see it in photographs of big cities in the summer-time, a nasty brown layer of smog hanging over the cities. That’s the air that people breathe and its practically toxic! I felt that it was my duty to warn someone. The 9-1-1 operator didn’t seem to agree with me, though.
Walk down the street of any big city. Not only is the air unsafe to breathe, and the water unsafe to drink, but there are people who actually try to hurt you. There are people with guns and knives waiting to rob you. The 9-1-1 operator says that people like that aren’t everywhere, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? If you knew where they were, you could avoid them, but they could be anywhere. Nasty, evil people looking to rob you or do Lord knows what could be lurking around every corner. I just felt that people should be told about it, that’s all, they go about their lives not seeming to notice at all. I’ve seen people walking down the street laughing – they actually laughed, even though large unpleasent men with guns could be waiting for them around every corner. The 9-1-1 operator warned me that if I kept calling, she would have me arrested.
There are dangers everywhere you look. If you get in the car to drive somewhere, it could explode, or swerve and crash into a truck. If you walk down the street, you could be mugged, or there could be a gas-line explosion, or anything. Why can’t people understand how dangerous things are. Life is so good, life is so sweet, why aren’t people more worried about losing it!
That got me thinking about people. It doesn’t seem right that people aren’t more worried about the hazards all around them, so I started thinking, what if they weren’t really people? What if they were clones made from all the stolen socks. What if they were sent to this planet off all the real people, by poisoning the air, and attacking them in the street and putting millions of microscopic organisms all over their bodies. What if the real people were the ones who were still worried about things like that?
I was very upset. If alien clones had invaded the Earth, I felt that somebody ought to know. So I called 9-1-1.
That was when the police came. At first I was happy, at first I thought, “Ah ha! About time they finally did something!” All they did, though, was to put me in a hospital. I know they must think I’m crazy, but I’m not. I’m just concerned. Its not so bad in here, though. There’s a guard at my door, to protect me in case anyone should try and break in. There’s foam padding on all the walls, which is there to cushion me in case I fall over. They have me in a harness, too, which they say is to prevent me from hurting myself. I don’t think that I ever would hurt myself, but better safe than sorry, I suppose.
For a while, I felt really happy, because, after all those years of worry, I finally felt safe. Then I got to thinking, all these things wouldn’t protect me if the ceiling caved in. Its funny, isn’t it, how no one ever thought of that before. We all just go about our lives blithely walking into buildings, without worrying that the ceilings might cave in on us. People should be warned, I’m surprised that no one thought of it before.
I wonder who I can tell?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Illustration Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.