Any Similarity to People Dead or Alive
You’re walking down a street. The street is probably
pretty dirty because it is down town. What’s worse is
that it’s in the ‘bad’ part of down town. The entire
sidewalk you’re walking down is covered with assorted
forms of litter, refuse, and the debris of an
unsanitary society.
You’re probably a little bit disgusted when you see
some form of rotting food on the sidewalk but you’re a
big city trooper and eventually you find yourself
desensitized to the overall noisome conditions. You
straighten your shoulders, lift your head and continue
thinking about whatever you were thinking about.
For the sake of this story you’re going to be
thinking about supper. It is about 7 p.m., it’s cold,
and you’re hungry and thinking about supper. You’re
bit low on funds so you decide to go slumming and eat
a downtown ‘diner’. The one you decide on is actually
called “diner” (you can chose a different restaurant
but I am personally against printing commercial names
in my stories and “diner” is a perfect multifarious
and cliché name for a down town restaurant).
You step into this diner and ask the cook to make you
whatever you want to eat on this cold day (the weather
is such that your meal will probably be warm and large
(perhaps Italian? Pasta seems to fit the bill
perfectly here)). Because you are romantically
inclined you sit by a dirty window and stare at the
people outside.
You conscious mind feels very anthropologic but you
really know that you’re watching your less than rich
neighbors for the same reason you watch talk shows.
Watson might scratch his head but Sherlock Holmes
would note how ‘elementary’ the case really is: you’ve
fallen victim to America’s morbid interest fad that’s
turned everyone in the whole country into
‘pseudo-psychologists’ (spelt ‘psicoligist’ among
grade ‘eighters’ who have chosen such a profession for
a future goal.).
You sit there and chew your meal slowly because
you’re too tired to be hurried and your mom taught you
to eat like this anyway. Because your vision is
either 20/20 or you’re wearing a very nice and
appropriately prescribed pair of glasses you can see a
young or old man or woman sitting in an alleyway.
Also for the sake of this story you have seen this
man or woman on other financially enforced
‘slum-runs’. You know that he or she is a homeless
drug addict and you’ve maybe even donated him or her
some money (although we both know that you knew he or
she was just going to buy more drugs with it). So,
you’re chewing and staring and finally you see
something ‘worth your seat’ (which is a saying created
Yours Truly that I feel is creative enough to become
popular). That man or woman starts to shiver and you
see him or her cough.
You don’t know his or her name because names aren’t
necessary for the purpose of this story so you don’t
really care about him or her in the same way you would
care about someone who you really knew. So you sit
and watch and eat.
As the man or woman coughs and shivers he or she may
look up at the window you’re sitting at. This
probably scares in a way reminiscent of child-hood
guilt-induced fears of getting caught. Luckily for
you the man or woman is just twitching and can’t see
very well anyway.
As you watch the man sit and shiver and cough you
probably take another bite. Because you have
involuntarily been watching this man or woman for a
longer time than you first wanted to watch you may
find that your food is cold (which probably irritates
you; unless the food is Italian, as Italian food
tastes good both warm and cold although in different
ways). Perhaps, as a side thought you feel somewhat
grateful for the food you’re eating when you think in
relative terms the sitting, shivering, coughing, and
perhaps starving man or woman outside.
Probably not.
Because your meal is cold you eat just a little bit
quicker and pay a great deal more attention to your
attention to your food than the shivering bum outside.
Finally, you finish and pay the happily low bill and
leave the restaurant.
Once outside you see the man or women sitting very
still. You find this surprising so you decide to
non-chalantly walk over to the no longer moving man or
woman. There you find him or her quite blue and
still. Because you have watched a great deal of TV
you know that he or she is dead.
You probably undergo what is known as a panic attack
at that point and it probably takes a lot longer that
usual for successful person such as yourself to make
decisions.
You can choose what the decision is from here on as
it is not consequential to this story at all. I was
able to make some pretty ‘good’ inferences before
because I’m a ‘anthropologic’ fellow and am fairly
opinionated anyway. But from here it’s all you
because I really can’t guess what you’d do from here
onwards, as I have never seen anybody react to a dead
body before.
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