[Newspoetry] advert
Brandy Watts
bwatts at anacroatan.org
Tue Aug 20 08:05:46 CDT 2002
She wasn't born after the war, well, the Terrorist War; she functioned
sometimes gleefully while it was operating. She gave an askance spit
at the shoes of the reporters as she quickly walked by; smirking
pleasantly to herself and for them to see. She pitied their remiss
while despising their insistance on the truth. That would be the first
word to ostrasize. She sat in a chair with her head resting against
the chair in front of her; she was leaning over her papers writing a
reponse to her economic system. It had recently gone bankrupt and now
investors were taking over the reporting end of the reporting
industry. Jobs were scarce so everyone was acting as reporters to
compete in the truth industry, wanting their truth to make it as part
of the truth and desperate for a distraction from the truthless
economic system failure. She printed a text of temporary word meanings
that she handed to reporters while winking at their forlorn vehement
faces. The other paper she assembled and gave away was a flawlessly
organized mass of responses. She was almost insignificant to it other
than that she meticulously collated it and orchestrated it's parts into
the most sought after paper in the city. It had become that in the
midst of the economic system declaring bankruptcy. This gave her an
odd mood. She was apprehensive of trends. It was a responsepaper.
Most read it for their need of news and need to think. It was a snub
at all the scrambling reporters maneuvering viciously against each
other. The media and the stock market had merged and become the media
stock market. Investors bid on the stocks of reports which were bought
and sold and speculated about. The paper was mostly contrived of
laypeople's thoughts in response to the peculiar society and their need
to converse as a means to make news. Most people were now on the
wire. Associated Press had resigned as an institution and in it's
place was a computer system that stored and distributed news
internationally. The computer system was not owned and was impossible
to rigg. Only a few computer specialists were needed to maintain it.
She was methodical about everything she did. She was strategic with
each of her interests and each of her desires. When she was five she
had felt uneasy not understanding how the economic system worked. At
her place the wire came in on fourteen different lines, twelve in
languages she was fluent, two in languages she wasn't; which she read
anyway. The computer system needed a certain amount of responses to
continue. Fearful it might stop, people frantically and impecabley
wrote responses to what was wired; which then was rewired back out.
The paper was for those without access to or with a distaste for
computers. Though, most would take one for coffee table and traffic
reading. Everything had become amuck in the society and the paper
seemed to be a straightener, relation generator, to people's wits. She
took the celery from her Bloody Mary and plopped it into her Martini.
Neither had alcohol. No one drank alcohol anymore. It was for
computers only. Electricity was no longer condusive to computers.
Before her was a glass plate with olives with pimentos in them and a
pickle. It was crispy, the pickle that is. The olives she ate in
between bites of the pickle. She was also intermittently biting her
nails. She kept thinking that he had been looking at her just
blankly. The printer was clean. She looked once more then shut it.
She swallowed and realized she'd sipped the wrong drink. That one came
second. She hopped in the tub and read the stocks, then a novel, then
the stocks again, then another paper. She put a floaty underneath her
and fell asleep in the water with unfortunately all the papers and the
book. She slept until seventeen minutes after the sun could be seen
from the printer.
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