Image by grendelkhan via Flickr

Back in May 2009, my Uncle Sam on my mother’s side, helped support me after Frank the baker cut off my dough and tossed me out the back door with the used doilies.

Although I am eternally grateful to my Uncle Sam for his financial help while we tube fed our bank account, he could do more to help the unemployed by euthanizing the voice mail system that causes brain decay and replacing it with one that doesn’t blight minds.

The funding could come from corporations with fat assets that profit from not paying taxes and hiring cheaper workers overseas.

VOICE MALEVOLENT

My brain almost melted after spending close to an hour on the phone with the New York State Unemployment office trying to speak with a live-bearing mammal or something with human DNA.

Instead, I listened to a monotonous voice prompt that made my head explode like a rear-ended Ford Pinto.

The voice mail options were something like . . .

•    If you’d like to continue in English, press 1 and click your heels three times.

•    If you’d like to continue in Mandarin Pig Latin, press 2.

•    If you’d like to file for unemployment benefits in this lifetime, press 3.

•    If you’d like to return to the previous nonexistent menu, press 4.

•    If you’d like to hear a list of frequently asked questions about lunch, press 5.

I chose option 6 and tossed my phone down the garbage disposal.

If Only There Was a Lost and Found for Brains

I once had a brain but it went MIA above the yondering blue where the space ships cruise in weightlessness. That’s where my brain is — somewhere in space, the final frontier — floating in a vacuum of nothingness.

In space, there is no air or reason to put on airs. Everyone looks the same hermetically sealed inside a suit, if one is lucky enough to afford a suit and fasten their brain into the helmet before it drifts away. You know the one that got away. That’s my brain orbiting over Japan, Qatar then Afghanistan.

Some starched white shirts below may think my brain is a UFO. It’s happened before. We all know about Roswell, but that didn’t end well for the extraterrestrial, a.k.a. weather balloon. They’re easy to confuse when blinded by the light of a desert moon.

Luckily, my brain is stuck in orbit circumventing the earth. Still on course. Not a chance it will plummet through the atmosphere—an ambience of sorts without mahogany wood decor and the scent of brandy wafting from bore to bore. 

Out here in space, a glorious scent is benched for a view of the first string team of shooting stars, whooshing by at the speed of light through deepest dark, except for an occasional gaseous substance, a.k.a. the sun spinning on its axis. My brain has no axis to grind, soaring above the third planet from the sun, mistaking particles below for empty souls. 

If I could only see, but the fog and red tinted clouds obscure breathtaking views. I find myself pondering what I could have seen lurking beneath the convoluted atmosphere—some good, some bad, some particularly scenic overlooks off the highway. 

Perhaps rocks, and grass, fragments of automobiles and shattered glass scattered across the shoulder. I can only imagine what happened to those inside—bones and more bones vibrating against flesh, as the car smashed through a barrier and tumbled around amid shrieks and prayers and what might have beens. It’s sad really. But I don’t have the luxury of pain. My brain says it best. Keep the signals pulsating from one synapses to the next, and I will continue drifting through space, orbiting above the distant place below also known as home.