QROAM

 Submitted by Wendy: I can barely walk. Putting one foot in front of the other takes about all I have. So tired, weak, and disoriented, I perceive what is directly in front of me as if through a veil of thick mucus. The world is dim and unfocused. Wait, something is flashing red, insistently, at the far-right corner of my vision. Instinctively, I turn toward it, and I am instantly rewarded. I see some movement, and I hear a commotion and voices. I decided to aim my stumble over there, where the action is. Something is telling me I somehow made this happen. I made the red light lead me, so I follow it mindlessly through this maze of fog. I am reminded of an experiment I saw in a documentary featuring a flying beetle. It had been glued to the head of a stationary pin. Electrodes had been inserted into its simple nervous system. By activating one or another of the electrodes, the beetle would attempt to turn towards the stimulus, flapping its useless wings harder or softer depending u...

 Foremost in my mind was the fact I was dope-sick. There was another insistent pressing matter building in intensity to be taken care of before I could get well.  I am not a puker. I am a shitter. When I am dope-sick, I am an everlasting fountain of filth. Hauser knows this about me. I assumed his witnessing of my tormented face was why he motioned to the shadowed corner of the room behind him, indicating a hall stretching into the home somewhere beyond the vanishing point, and said, "Second door on the left." I shuffled and shambled in what, to me, was observed as an infinitely slow progression, wherein my range of motion was limited due to cramps. I tried desperately to make it to the bathroom quickly while at the same time being careful in my movements, endeavoring to, for now, at least, constrain my bowels. I am sure Hauser saw all of this only as a momentary blur of motion, if he noticed it at all. Eventually, I made it down the hall and into the aforementioned room, for...

 Colony Collapse: Elder, Glen; Utah-- So, I was watching this documentary about bees; you know, one of those, ‘Humanity is so awful, destroying the world, farming is evil’ type of things. It did not represent the natural world in a ‘real’ way; it was some green bullshit. They said because we use bees, we cause colony collapses and the reduction of native bees by introducing European bees, fertilizer, pesticides, or mono-culture crops. In other words, they don’t know what particular bullshit reason they can pin on us farmers, but they will find something that sticks. Bullshit. I have been farming almonds out here in the desert since I could walk, my daddy before me, his daddy before that. Well, the whole time, we’ve been working with the same company that comes out and sets up a bunch of hives for us each year during pollination season. It is something we do every year always have. This company has semi-trucks stacked high with bee hives; they drive around the country from farm to f...

 VPWWG1WGA!: Landry-- “Vice President Smith, I am a big fan; it’s wonderful to see you here today.” I knew Jeff Smith’s face from his blog. I had never before met him in the flesh. He paused, looked me right in the eyes, then touched the frame of his smart glasses a few times and said, ‘Great to see any of my followers here. I knew I could count on you, Vice President Landry Jones.’ I was thrilled he had recognized me, even if it was with the aid of his digital assistant. It must have matched my face up with his subscription list, another reason to be glad I wasn’t wearing a mask. I had been one of his first couple of thousands of his followers. There were a lot of VPs in attendance at this rally. Many of them were there to see the boss, President Carlson, and all of us VPs were there to see Vice President Flynn. After all, ‘Where We Go One, We Go All,’ and all of us were one with Flynn, and Flynn was one of us. So, the way I, and a lot of people like me, see it, we were all second...

Dog Eat Dog World: by JBK   “The dog kennels were stacked three high, and packed two wide, for a total of six in each stall. The stalls were designed for cows, but nobody raised cows around here anymore, and hadn’t in a long time. My workplace, the barn, had big open doors at each end, running between them there was a cement strip big enough to drive a truck right through the middle. There were food troughs on each side of that, then the stalls, then excrement sloughs on the outside. It was clad in red corrugated aluminum panels that didn't reach all the way down to the ground, so there was always a breeze, but it still smelled worse than anything I have ever encountered, before or since. Where the walls met the roof there was a strip where, instead of aluminum, the corrugated panels were made of a translucent plastic, allowing in enough light, along with what leaked in from the doors, to work between dawn and dusk. The barn was visible from the road, and even from the freeway exit...