That’s right; I like me a soda from time-to-time. So fizzy. Bubbles bubbling over my tongue. Fizz! Fizz! Fizzzz! Gush—wish I was drinkin’ one right now. Oh snap—I am!Anyways, I’m pretty sure I’ve got bad karma. Karma Police, arrest this man because I went for a Coke this early evening from my neighborhood, swimming pool pop machine and… … …
I put in my quarters: clink (25), clink (50: “yes! oh, yes!”), Clink! (75: “that’s right! * licks lips; eyes bulge *”), and then for the final quarter… … What does it do, huh? What does it do? Does it also go ‘clink?’ NO! It goes, it goes… … ‘ker-klunk!’
KER-KLUNK?
KER-KLUNK?!
What did I ever do to you, Mr. Vending Machine, that you gotta give me ‘ker-klunk?’ Well, okay, I guess. Let’s see what this ‘ker-klunk’ is… …
A CANADIAN QUARTER? A Canadian quarter? What were you thinking, Mr. Vending Machine? Were you thinking: “Hmmm. This doesn’t look like a real quarter. I’ll keep whatever this mystery disk is (save it for latter, you know? save it for back at the Vending Machine Crime Laboratory where all the vending machines gather round with magnifying glasses and cigarettes and sunglasses and swap stories about the vending machines that got away), yeah, I’ll just return this offending gentleman a Canadian quarter so as to teach him a lesson against further infraction. Fast forward to the end, I still had my paper money with which to obtain a soda by that brute force, monetary method of days of yore. But, as to the Canadian quarter switcheroo, I object. I object on several grounds.
First of the grounds: You might call it the Ground Floor grounds. It goes like this here: WHY DO THE CANADIANS HAVE TO COPY OUR MONEY SO CLOSELY AND YET NOT FINISH THE JOB? Come on Canadians, either counterfeit the American quarter, or give up already. Lord knows, you’ve had enough time by now. You don’t see other country’s coinage falling out all embarrassedly of U.S. machines. Nobody puts in four quarters and gets back a peso or drachma or… … or a fussy potbelly pig.
Second Floor, while going up our Elevator of Irritation: How hard is it for a machine, in this day-and-age, to pick a quarter out of a lineup? You could put three quarters and The Hamburgler in front of this soda dispensing device and half the time the soda dispensing device would mutter, “Uh… the guy with ketchup on his mouth?” No, Mr. Vending Machine, it’s not the guy with ketchup on his mouth, going on-and-on about the delicious all-beef patties, the special sauce, the onions, the pickles (all the fixin’s, really)—it’s those three, silver disks to your right with the George Washington embossments.
That’s it, I suppose. Everybody out. No. Keep—keep your hands off the buttons, kids. And that’s right, Pop Machine, you cannot defeat me. Next time you try, I’m gonna come with the Lightning (flash!), the Wind (whoooosh! * raising arms / woooooshing *), some—some mediocre Rainstorms [sprinkling (yes, sprinkling)—gently sprinkling through your crevices and into your circa 1980s circuitry; making you sorry you ever met this guy].
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RandomThis is weird, unclassifiable stuff. Much of it centers around technical satire. There's some dream fiction in here also and a variety of experiments with the fictional writing structure and theme.
