Dutchmen, Wal Mart, and the Soapy Boys

How strange a thing it is to be in the same place at once. How poor an anchor the body and how flighty the rest of it, riding into the sun on a flaming snowflake of Japanese design. The Japanese really do have a knack for building snowflakes, you know, capable of twisting and turning and executing majestic maneuvers through the rigging of a lonely wooden bar stool that stands starkly in front of the long, scuffed white expanse, standing and remembering. It was here long before the girl in pinstripe pants whose job it is to sit on said stool, and it remembers. It remembers the good ole' days, when men were men and squirrels were slightly larger, and it remembers how stagnant and serene yonder lake was before that fateful hour when Buck Rogers rode out of the sky on his plastecine steed, a-screamin' and a-hollerin' and cursing the very feet that bore him across the oceans of cumulonimbus, all the while singing, "GOD DAMN THEM ALL! I WAS TOLD WE'D CRUISE THE SEAS FOR AMERICAN GOLD! WE'D FIRE NO GUNS, SHED NO TEARS! NOW I'M A BROKEN MAN ON A HALIFAX PIER, THE LAST OF BARRETT'S PRIVATEERS!" He knows a thing or two about that sort of thing. Do you? How many flying dutchmen have you seen? None? That's what I thought. He's seen four, so he knows a thing or two. Honestly, where the fuck do you get off thinking you can correct him when you've never even seen a Dutchman (well, at least not one that flew)? That's what's wrong with America these days, and to a lesser extent Vatican City. Everyone steps on each other's foreheads over things that they aren't qualified to step on people's foreheads over. Why can't we all just drop it? I don't want to step on any foreheads; I just want to play cards in Montenegro. That's right, Montenegro. Gatsby's Montenegro. Bond's Montenegro. My quintessential nest of pretension and disdain for all things sold at Wal Mart. And while we're on the subject, I've been meaning to ask Wal Mart a question for quite a few hours now: Wal Mart, do you really think that blanking out the cusses on your CDs is fooling anyone? The word's there, and everyone knows it's there whether they can hear it or not. You're just feeding the very same process that spoiled these words in the first place. If you left them alone, no one would care. They'd just be letters, and no one would give a flying fuck one way or the other. But when you go and pawn it off like it's contraband, well then you've done it, haven't you. Little boys everywhere getting fat off soap, while you sit on your lifeguard tower in the middle of your cornfield and show "I DO DECLARE-" But then you sort of trail off, because you realize you have nothing to declare after all. But you can't just shout "ACTUALLY, I DON'T DECLARE," because you'd look foolish and the panel is watching and God forbid you look foolish in front of the panel. So you wing it, and you say something that really doesn't itself matter, since it really isn't anything because you really had nothing to declare and that was the point. The panel nods, you exhale, the corn cheers, and the soapy boys each cry a single tear at what their world has been hammered into.