July 15, 2010

• Post-Apocalyptic Passing Game

  I daydream a lot when I walk, and I walk a lot because I have no car, in a town that is small enough to have never heard of public transportation, yet big enough to put the nearest grocery store, shopping center, and bank a mile away from a college campus. So this means that my mind tends to wander a lot as my legs clip into a long striding gait over poorly-kept sidewalks. One of the last times, which was a few days ago, that I had one of these long walks, I had a strange fantasy of a bunch of people, after some catastrophic event playing a game with trash and metal scraps to see if there was anything useful in the pile. It went something like this.

  The first person would pick up a scrap, look it over, then chant “Don’t want it” Turn it over, then say “Can’t use it” Try to bend it or lick it, depending on how desperate the group was for food “Can’t eat it” Then put the item in a burning trash barrel and say “Won’t need it, Retrieve it”. Then the next person would pick up another scrap and repeat the chant, until someone actually found something useful, then they would stop the chant and just unceremoniously toss the item into another barrel, that’s not burning currently. Or, if it was edible, everyone would fight over the morsel, and whoever won would eat, and return to the circle after they wiped off the blood.

  I can attribute this to some mental disease that has not been diagnosed, or just consider it kind of awesome and creative that I think that people living in horribly harsh conditions can still turn tasks of survival into a game.

  • 1:31 am
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