Blooper Technologies, Inc.
They are coming to take you away hah ha. The app won't take you back. A dystopian parallel of the present tense.
Blooper Technology Inc
The Taxi service is called "Blooper" and the drivers name is smudged, he says it is Boobler or Boober and the text is mostly unreadable on the sealed in taxi licence notice. He takes you everywhere you don't wanna go. To hell but not back, to Fucksville but not to Nowhere Town.
He gives taxi advice but you can't hear him, his perspex shield is like his accent, too thick. He monstrously gnaws his vowels and consonants like a cow chewing the cud. I’m all "sorry what? this isn't the usual route, I didn't catch that, you are taking me to where?"
“Minimum fare is your soul - hope it’s enough you cheap fuck” he grunts and turns around to take a good look. He's the devil in-car-mate, he's the Satan of petrol stops, a complete gas guzzler
He can pick you up but can never set back down. He’s the non-stop talker about sports games that maybe never were and never will be. “Shame about those Devils” he says “you see the game?”
He’s the not so faint smell of “what the fuck is that smell?” and you can’t ever wind down the windows. The buttons are broken and the handle is wonky, it’s revolving on itself like a fishing reel eternally winding in a lost fish forever. The in-car TV is blaring, the program is repeating and set to ‘Dystopia TV News’ and everyone on it is super cheerful about the worst, of the worst, of the worst news. The primped guests and presenters look pure botox, orange faced from the fake tan they keep lathering on. They doll up in ocher pancake to prove that they aren’t actually whey-faced liars and only shilling for crooks. ‘It’ll all come out in the wash though’ the scrolling chyron on the bottom of the screen prints out. Later, much later though in documentaries called - 20:25 How could we have believed them?
Your flight leaves tonight and you usually need to be at the airport for five o’clock to check in. The blooper taxi driver he’s called Boober on his medallion, says he will get you there at five yes and way before that too but five when, you wonder? Maybe oh, never-mind. The dollar chronometer and the digital readout marches forward at a bewildering speed and your bank balance shown alongside of it being sucked dry. Ouch, where you are going you don’t need it anyway. Credit balance is now zero, your cel phone pings a text even though there’s no signal.
It is so easy to have everything you rely on be taken away, isn’t it? Bit late to do anything about anything now, I think. It was there in front of us all along and we all waited until it was way too late. Sigh. Someone was supposed to do something. It’s literally not fair.
“This isn’t fair” I say out loud.
Boober the taxi man laughs sardonically - “yeah, shame about all this buddy. No hard feelings, just doing my job. We just take the directions from the App and that’s how the cookie crumbles. It’s all the same. If it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else. Tragic for you, but we all data - you, me, all of this.”
It will make a man of you, it’s character building stuff, it’s martyrdom, the ship of fools, the Marie Celeste of taxis, the engine-running found deserted in the desert. A cold coffee and a half-circle tooth-carved sandwich abandoned. The suspended dice swings ominously on the breeze, the open door. There are impressions of footsteps leading away into the sun scorched yellow dust. It’s the foot pressing on the face of humanity forever. It’s Blooper app putting the bl-oops into traveling on, for the most discerning of those final journeys.
© John Munnelly 2023
Hello Reader
I changed up the routine today. Been on a run of songs and have more of them in back pocket. Found a piece though in meantime that I wrote some time in early 2023 and gave it a quick do over.
Who would have thought something bad could ever happen?
John