Radio Študent,
22. november 2014
―
CONSENSUS TERRORISM: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.
I dawdled off into the staff cafeteria. There, a salesman from the copy machine company was pouring a Styrofoam cup full of scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn't even recovered yet from having been fed cock tails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party. It was pissing rain outside, and the water was drizzling down the windows, but inside the air was as dry as the Sahara from being recirculated. The staff were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office's fashion victims, sneezing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time-shares in Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous. I felt cynical, and the room matched my mood.
[...]
It's a Texlahoma she says, much to our pleasure, for Texlahoma is a mythic world created in which to set many of our stories. It's a sad Everyplace, where citizens are always getting fired from their jobs at 7 -Eleven and where the kids do drugs and practice the latest dance crazes at the local lake, where they also fantasize about being adult and pulling welfare check scams as they inspect each other's skin for chemical burns from the lake water. Texlahomans shoplift cheap imitation perfumes from stores and shoot eachother over Thanks ing dinners every year. And about the only good thing that happens there is the cultivation of cold, unglamorous wheat in which Texlahomans a justifiable pride; by law, all citizens must put bumper stickers on their cars saying: NO FARMERS : NO FOOD. Life is boring there, but are some thrills to be had: all the adults keep large quantities of cheaply sewn scarlet sex garments in their chests of drawers. These are panties and ticklers rocketed in from Korea — and I say rocketed in because Texlahoma is an asteroid orbiting the earth, where the year is permanently 1974, the year after the oil shock and the year starting from whi