Musket

I had a dream and it was all shades of gray. There was an assembly line and there were whirring noises and the belt was tattered and the edges frayed. A man with a tattoo had his cuffs rolled up and hanging from his dry cracked lip was a flaccid cigarette that was stuck there by a bit of moisture. His tongue sounded like sandpaper and his fingernails were dirty and cracked and there were bits of cuticle in pretty little curls at the end of each finger and it looked painful but I kept looking. He stared at me sideways and pretty soon his eyes were in his temples like a human in utero but I didn't look at his face, I just stared at the grooves where the filth accumulated in his thick fingernails.

His sandpaper tongue moved past the opening of his mouth and back in again like a robot. the deep valleys in his face collected sweat that collected dust and his nostrils flared up. pretty soon his neck got tired like an old toy that was played with too hard and synapses started to misfire and he drooped down a little more each time the belt brought a new hunk of metal and wire.

Then a cartoon whistle exhaled some steam with such force that the whole room bellowed up and everyone collapsed, but the belt kept whirring and machines were clanking and parts of car were piling up and overflowing out of sagging cardboard boxes. A girl in a dirty dress sat crumpled up in the corner and then a stampede of rats flurried over her and then she was gone, like in the jungle.

This is disturbing. I thought about it and decided that my corporate job is the soft core version of Fordism because it's easy and streamlined and every day is a cookie cutter and you actually think hey this isn't half bad and you get fooled into believing it. A sugar cookie that somebody's grandma's hands set gingerly on a cookie sheet and slid into the oven and frosted perfectly with a gob of pink buttercream balanced on the end of an angled spatula. Then we all fucking binged and touched our fingers to the backs of our throats and called it Christmas, because you could still see the deep red dragées and the pastel sparkles and the yellow nonpareils, all swimming in glittering swirls of diet coke and pink buttercream, except now you're not sure about all of this because are those deep red dragées and the yellow nonpareils food coloring or blood and bile?