Take in a deep breath with me. Draw in a big whiff of the world through your nose, and then let it out slow.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
What do you smell?
Air, right? Just plain ol normal air.
But that's not normal air, that's not healthy air, that's just what you're used to. It's filled with filth, filled with pollution, filled with extraneous CO2 that really shouldn't be there. Maybe you can smell the mold and mildew from cheap drywall. Maybe there's that faint burnt plastic stench that you can never quite clear out of your household appliances. Maybe there's that 10 percent floral, 90 percent nose-rape scent of an air freshener that's twice as strong as it needs to be.
Take a deep breath and you'll smell all the ways that corporations are fucking you. Fucking you right in the nasal passages. That mold and mildew? That wouldn't be there if your house wasn't built by the lowest bidder, using the cheapest materials, with the minimally skilled labor possible, all assembled to the barest of standards and codes.
They didn't pour the concrete right, letting the water seep in through your basement. They didn't put the vapor barrier in the right place, and now the insides of your walls are a greenhouse. They used the wrong kind of insulation, and now the walls of your home are a breeding ground for pestilence.
That plastic stench? That's the scent of the best labor twenty cents a day can buy in some overseas slum, pieced together with parts put together in some third world country. But it's made in the USA, because somebody spends five minutes screwing in the pieces that make up your toaster oven.
And that's all you can afford, the cheapest of electronics in the cheapest of houses. Why? Because corporations want to be free. Free of restrictions. Free of limitations. Free of pesky little things like human rights, of outside oversight, and of government regulation.
[We open to the sad sight of Spark, Kalinda's kitten-sized dragon companion, all bandaged up with his diminutive frame covered in a full body cast. Tiny bandages have been wrapped around his head, and he's sporting a black eye.]
[The camera pulls back from the wee little bed to see none other than Dr. Alfredo Acula, Physician of the Supernatural, Attorney at Law looking worriedly over a clipboard. There's a rhythmic beeping as a heart monitor bleeps and bloops the state of normalcy.]
[Dr. Acula pulls a small case out of a pocket on his lab coat, removes a pair of spectacles, only to dramatically remove them and look sad.]
Dr. Alfredo Acula: The prognosis does not look good, I'm afraid. It looks like we're going to have to amputate. The damage is too severe. You'll loose all of your legs and one wing.
[We open to find ULW's Big Blue Brute, Kalinda Kriegdottir, in what we presume is her apartment, flopped down on her bed. Well, we assume it's her apartment because the bed is huge and sized for her seven foot frame, and the ceilings are high enough that she won't bonk her head.]
[The Deadly Dragonspawn isn't looking so deadly, nestled in a nest of pillows and blankets, staring up at the ceiling, pondering things and eating a sliced of recently cooked frozen pizza.]
Kalinda: We're not getting this one again, Spark. Tombstone. It's very bland and there's no crust to it, so you have to grab ahold of the cheese.
Spark: Or you could use a fork.
Kalinda: Blasphemy! You pick up a slice of pizza without the aid of silverware! Only when you've loaded it with so many toppings that the structural integrity can no longer be maintained, then and only then can you use utensils.
Something so skinny as a thin crusted frozen pizza does not meet this fundamental requirement. Thus I think I would much rather chew on an actual tombstone. There's like no flavor here, so terribly, terribly bland.
Spark: And speaking of terribly bland, how's your Twitter brawl with The Inbred Assassin Eric "Chocolate Rain" Huehuehuerrera going?
