About Death Pestilence
Snif, I’m touched that you want to know.
I was born in 342 B.C. in a small Babylonian town next to the Tigris river. We were a peaceful people, until the space locusts came. You should have seen it, the way they dove out of the sky in their metallic death ships, dropping fire and acid onto our crops. We knew nothing about digital laser tracking systems or high-velocity smart bombs and our efforts to fend them off with our primitive weapons of stone and wood proved to be completely worthless.
When the battle was over they explained that they had only come to release us from the tyrannical and sadistic oppression of our backwards lives. They had cool movies and television programs with wide-screen displays and quadraphonic sound to prove their position. It was really convincing, the ones of us who were left alive believed it absolutely.
After they took all our oil and blessed us with a superior democratic system of government in which the guy who gets the most votes isn’t always guaranteed a victory; they left us smiling and waving and making false video documentaries that established our gratitude and taught us how to think of them.
It was about that time I fell into a deep hole that was then sealed shut by a volcanic eruption. For the next several thousand years I amused myself by changing my physical form to whatever my memories or imagination chanced upon, and writing haiku.
A fragment from sky-lab punctured my crypt in 1964, and I found myself in a world that was superficially very different from the one I had known, but deep down I could tell right away it was just as shitty. At the same time I found that I had somehow been endowed with the powers of the Valkyre, and the ability to remember every song lyric from the horseshit music of the 80’s.
So, thus my journey began, and brought me here. And now our paths have crossed, and we go into oblivion together. And when we die it will be with the knowledge of one another, which will then be forgotten and swept away in our mutual insignificance.
But don’t feel bad. At least you don’t have to suffer the death attack from the plague of iron-clad locusts breathing acid and raining down Kevlar piercing bullets.
Oh, and I got laid for the first time when I was sixteen. My first thought was that jerking-off was better, my second thought was, “is that my dad at the window?”