BEWARE!!

I call them TIME VAMPIRES!!

They're totally unpredictable and are masters of disguise. As shapeshilfters they can effortlessly morph into a neighbor, co-worker, business associate, family member, friend, priest, rabbi, or even a stranger in need. Any encounter with a Time Vampire ensures the victim will have an frightening experience known as lost time phenomena which is exclusively associated with a Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind.

These anomalies of humankind exist for one reason only; to suck every nanosecond out of your day and they don't stop until you lay motionless like road-kill on a deserted country road or your ears blister and fall off as if you were a leper.

Recently I was enjoying a wonderful afternoon of perfect weather by taking in the sights at my local farmers market. It's a great place to people watch and includes a mini Westminster dog show every Saturday.  The constant parade of perfectly groomed pedigree's, designer dogs, and their not so perfectly groomed owners, always makes me smile and in some instances laugh hysterically; albeit to myself.

I was admiring a handsome senior couple with a magnificently groomed Kerry Blue when she magically materialized as if Scotty from the Star Ship Enterprise beamed her in from somewhere in the ionosphere. She invaded my space like Ulysses S. Grant invaded Georgia and immediately began to incessantly flap her gums like a meth-head who decided snorting a 1/2 gram wasn't enough so for an extra kick shot up 50cc of pure adrenaline. I had heard from several sources she was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs but never realized the extent of her insanity, or Time Vampire powers, until that moment. Without taking a breath, and with the ease of a seasoned filibusterer, she elucidated on every subject from her Encyclopedia of Nothingness with a constant barrage of banality that seemed impossible to accomplish simply from memory.

This affliction is defined in medical journals as Talkus Uninterruptus.

After an hour I tried to speak but my tongue and lips weren’t fast enough to interrupt her overpowering vocal capability of literally talking my head off and as she continued
her verbal assault I began to lose consciousness. The background slowly began to fade out of focus. I could no longer hear. She broke my ears.

At ninety minutes all I could see were her lips moving frantically as they desperately tried to spew out as many sentences as possible before God compassionately cut off her supply of words by striking her dead in mid sentence. The more she spoke the more glued I became to the steps and the wider her eyes became. She talked and talked and talked until all I could see were her bulbous lips protruding like the ass of a woman on a Botero sculpture. It was as if her power could manipulate gravity and hold me captive until either gravity broke free of her grip or my head spontaneously combusted. It was terrifying!!

These types of Time Vampires cannot be killed by any conventional or non-conventional means. The good news is they almost always self-destruct by talking themselves
into believing they’re something special.

As a seasoned Time Vampire her exceptional oratory skills were finely honed by her professional background as a litigation attorney. For years it’s been the legal professions' well kept, dirty little secret, but the word is finally getting out. Most lawyers are in fact Time Vampires. Clue: Billable hours!!

This wasn't my first encounter with a Time Vampire nor would it be the last. Several years ago I worked with a film editor whose Time Vampire powers could trump those of the
Ark of the Covenant. Incredibly adept with Final Cut Pro and every application in the Adobe Master Suite she was brilliant but her personal life was in shambles and her husband,
who suffered from severe manic depression, eventually walked out in the middle of one of her endless soliloquies about Trappist Monks who practice complete silence.

There is good news. When Time Vampires mate their offspring are born without the time consuming gene but the bad news is they mutate into something more horrifying and
absolutely unstoppable. Spending a mere few minutes with these mutants is equivalent to going 10 rounds with Mike Tyson when he was in his prime. They’re human black holes
and will consume your entire being without leaving a trace you ever existed.

They’re known as Energy Vampires!!

More about them later.

djn :)

A Short Story About the Economy

                     

Once upon a time, in a galaxy very close to the Milky Way, Fortune 500 companies recruited college student’s months prior to their graduation. They were only interested in the crème de la crème; the Magna and Summa Cum Lades who maintained outstanding academic achievements and exhibited the type of corporate aggression they thrived upon.  Within weeks, sometimes days after flinging their miter boards towards the sky, the recruits were able to indulge in all the trappings and extravagances their new six figure incomes provided.

They were the new cigar smoking, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes owners who only shopped at Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Saks 5th Ave. They skied in Vail, golfed in Pebble Beach, and only dined at Zagats top 10. The women wore Issey Miyake, Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik while the boys transformed themselves into chic young men by giving up their flip-flops, T-shirts, Gap jeans for the uber cool Hugo Boss, Zegna, and Giorgio Armani.

These were the over confident, self-assured, “nothing-can-go-wrong” concept machines who generated edgy ideas faster than a Turbo Carrera can do one lap at Nurburgring. They had one hand on the Wall St. bulls’ bronze balls and the other hand squeezing a tit on the Statue of Liberty. They had all the solutions….or so they thought

...and then something happened. 

Wall Street became a victim of its’ own greed and self- destructed. Investors lost billions and suicides were as plentiful as Monarch butterflies in Carmel-By-The-Sea during springtime. If that weren’t bad enough the real estate market tanked. Speculators and investors discovered their overvalued properties were only worth 1/3 the original purchase price. It seemed as if it were a nightmare but record foreclosures and unemployment statistics sealed the deal as brokerage houses with solid150 year financial investment histories died slow, painful deaths. Oddly enough banks were thrown a lifeline by the Feds in the form of “bailouts” so they survived the bloodletting yet the taxpayers themselves, who provided the bailout capital through their own income taxes were thrown to the collection agency wolves like Christians were tossed to the lions in ancient Rome. All the while businesses of every size and description circled the drain of failure like lemmings diving off a cliff. 

Nowadays anyone over 50 who lost their cushy jobs with juicy expense accounts, million dollar budgets, and traveled first class exclusively shares an awkward epiphany with blue-collar workers that they are no longer employable. They have become the new dispensable and realize someone half their age would gladly take their job for half the salary, work part time, and not bitch about benefits or country club memberships. 

Things are different now and as the saying goes "if America coughs the rest of the world sneezes" but now the entire world is coughing and blood is beginning to spew from its’ lungs. 

Successful small business owners with established track records and impressive client lists are suffering the same fates as displaced Ph. D’s from pedigree universities. They have became common fodder for the unemployment lines.  However some of the long-term unemployed, out of shear desperation, have packed up and relocated to obscure locations usually known for their association with the Federal Witness Protection Program. Iowa, Utah, Nebraska, N. Dakota, and Montana are becoming the cosmopolitan hot spots of the future. 


The masses are scared shitless. Newspapers dating back to the Civil War are crumbling like our infrastructure, company budgets have been slashed to cover bare essentials, and everyone in every field of business is afraid to spend a dime and terrified of failing for the very realistic probability they will be fired. If you're looking for a self-starter, highly motivated, recent college grad today you can find them at Walmart, Target, Costco, and throughout the country in your neighborhood mall where the Apple store is the Mecca of employment opportunities. 

With the Presidential elections just a few months away before you cast your vote remember what a wise man (my 78 year old barber) once told me. "In order to be a good politician you have to be a very good liar."