Car mirrors have legally insisted to all passengers and interested passersby, desperate for reading material, objects in mirror are closer than they appear. They try to remind us, this nearly inconspicuous, almost invisible image in the view, that being seen smaller in there doesn't necessarily equate to being further away, out here.
No mirror so far observed carries warnings or alerts about smoke being wielded in there, by professionals sent to distract us by way of politicians, corporations, or religions, to name only a few possible sponsors sent to trick our looking and seeing, trying to put off our few visions with unending illusion.
Also, we notice, these mirrors have no smoke detectors, nothing to warn us when such sleights of hand, such smoke and mirrors are all employed, when such Trompe L'Oeil is in use -- a true and certain need in these times, a niche left mysteriously unfilled by corporate greed, is smoke detectors for all mirrors. Surprisingly, there are not already bills jammed through Congress, demanding their use in all public and private arenas, with a few favored corporations given the special nod for approval.
Give it time, give it time.
The standard warning message, these days, seems it should be, objects in mirror reflect life here growing rapidly weirder. As already mentioned, we could do with those smoke detectors, too.
There are motion detectors, already invented. There is a surplus now, probably a glut on the market. They were originally deployed to warn of Republican lies being slung, hung, and draped heavily into everyone's breathing space -- until most people figured out you could just watch the lips, save yourself some expense. If those Republican lips were moving, you would already know the regular person was in trouble, was already in for it, and in for it big time, to be sure.
Hereabouts, over here, out our way, down at this end? Our mirrors simply give off a barely-visible shrug, unimpressed with our passing, our comings and goings. They are used to us. They continue to report we're all much older than we think, or last thought. They are merciless, and we don't look in them much for that very same reason -- at least, not directly so, anyway.
But, we have long used mirrors here for our own purposes, though. We share with these mirrors a variety of newspaper and magazine articles and such that we happen upon and wish to have decoded for us.
To make sense of life anymore, it should be said, we hold up and show these newspapers and magazines, right to the mirror, all held out before us, Gorgon-like, us not daring to read them directly from the page.
In this way, it seems safer. We are not turned to stone from looking directly at these horrid, terrifying things -- not yet, not so far. Looking at the articles in the mirror, instead, everything seems right-side-up and right-side-out this way. Admittedly, it does take more time to do it this way -- slowing our consumption of news, an additional benefit of this method.
Take this one article right here: Talk about objets d'art in mirror are weirder than they may first appear! An apartment in New York just sold for 88 million American dollars. Go ahead, trace it again in the mirror -- same way, backwards or forwards, 88, it must be, and then, yes: million.
It must be 88, as the only BB we know is Mr. King, and, besides, "BB million" makes even less sense to us, as apartments go.
Reading in mirrors, for our protection, is slower, as has been said, and requires a little patience and detective work, too -- a small enough price to pay than gaze directly at Gorgons, at all manner of dragons glaring back up at us, hypnotically, mesmerizingly so, all set in print.
So, yes: 88 million dollars. The monthly rent-check on this baby, oooh baby, is going to take a considerably larger piece of paper to finagle. We'll be needing the economy-sized checkbook -- the ones the size of the greater Economy, that is, and not the smaller, more economically-sized versions we all have, tucked away with our ledgers. No, ain't no one tryin' to economize here, no sirree!
See, we'll be needing the giant-sized checkbooks, like the ones they use for prize-winners, for donations to foundations -- those enormous, van-sized checks -- in order to fit in all those extra digits into that teeny box of a space, where the payment is to be recorded, in that little rectangle, by the dollar sign.
You can't physically fit that payment number into that spot, not on our checks, anyway, no matter how small you write. Put that huge number in there, for the monthly payment on an apartment costing 88 million? There's just no way.
But, with a matching, giant-sized, larger-than-life-sized account with that gigantic checkbook? It could work, it would be nice and helpful, too.
After all, you try to float a huge, puffed-up, lead balloon of a check like that from our kind of accounts? You try to do a regular, Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, hot-air-and-helium-filled, swelled-up check like that, held down from escaping, from bouncing straight into the stratosphere by fifty strong, heavy-duty technicians in special suits and equipment?
You try a financial instrument maneuver like that using our kind of bare-bones accounts, using the kind of leftovers we all keep locked up in there, you'll be left shouting on the wrong side of the bars, left sputtering about your own personal rights in this country, gasping out those requests for making that one mythical, epic phone call we're all supposedly and still entitled to get, offer still available in many locations and states -- be sure to check the fine print for participating locations, here, in the U-S-of-A, well, shoot me for just thinking.
You know what would happen.
Not only that, you know as well as we all do, the banks will erupt and break out in demented and endless giggles, rubbing their hands over and over in some festival of glee, like children at a surprise party, not quite able to contain their exuberance, having had way-too-much-sugar, going all giddy and gaga-a-go-go, at the thought of this moment:
Those banks are now ready, brother, after a sailed check like that, to charge you yet more of something they are already certain -- yes, it's all been triple-checked and quadruply confirmed, whoopie! -- you have absolutely no more of, nothing, not a thing in there, not in that account you don't, it's all whisked out, all zeroes, all zeroed out, all empty in there.
This, by the way, is known generally in the industry, in banking circles, as "The Law of Diminishing Banking-Humor Returns." The LDBHR, pronounced conversationally as Load-Bearer, runs in the opposite direction, runs right away, in fact, from bankers' mothers' milk and mammon, another law of banking, known as, "The Most Holy Umbrella: The Miracles and Providence of Compounding, Raping, and Pillaging." This is usually referred to, and most reverentially so, as, MHUMPCRP, said as Mmmm-Hump-Crap, for short.
Load-Bearer starts out with a crescendo, with a crash of cymbals, and then peters out and fades into a quiet, pointless nothingness; whereas Mmmm-Hump-Crap starts off slow and unsure, angling up lazily, until the afterburners kick in, and then shoots straight up, rockets right up there, to the stars, freed from all bearer-bonds of Earth, freed from all other constraints or obligations to species or place, no longer bound by sanity or possibility, at last slung free, freed from gravity, free to soar and blast all over the place.
Now, that's banking!
Isn't capitalism something!
