On the way to the armed forces recruiting center, Donald almost hits a turkey with his car. Standing in the middle of a busy road, the turkey brings traffic to a standstill as he/she/it gobbles this way and that before finally deciding to hightail it to one side of the road and disappear into a wooded area before someone got out of a car hoping to skip going to the supermarket this year to get Thanksgiving dinner.
Donald is glad he didn't run over the turkey. He wonders what it was doing in Cleaveland. Parts of the city are decaying back to nature, but a turkey? A turkey? A turkey playing chicken with automobiles? The city gets stranger every day, he decides.
When he arrives at the recruiters, he feels like the turkey. He doesn't know where to go. The Navy guy convinces him to take a test and raves afterwards that the results indicate that Donald can go nuclear. Nuclear? Riding around in a radioactive submarine for months at a time? Donald wants structure in his life, but that sounds like a straitjacket. The Marines guy arm-wrestles Donald and implies that the other services are pussies and he should join the Marines, but Donald's read enough war comics that he knows the Marines are the ones who get sent into battle first and take the heaviest casualties. The Air Force guy just tries to get Donald drunk with some watery American beer, and a bottle of Wild Turkey, and Donald, fearing that the plan is to get him wasted and then on a plane to Afghanistan overnight, escapes to the Army guy, who just loads Donald up with Army t-shirts, Army beer koozies, Army keychains, Army flashlights, Army pencils, Army teddy bears, Army tablets, Army hip-hop cds, Army flashdrives, Army backpacks, Army boxers, Army panties ("For your girlfriend. Or, for you, but if you're gay, don't tell me."), Army perfume, Army lighters, Army gas grills, and other stuff that he pulls out of a seemingly endless supply of cardboard boxes stacked in the rear of his office until Donald refuses anything else.
As the Army guy digs around the cardboard boxes trying to find one more item that's so cool Donald won't refuse it, Donald reconsiders his decision to join the military. Even with unemployment being the way it is, maybe he could just find a regular job instead. Then he wouldn't have to be away from Masani, who will never understand his desire to drown himself in the authority of another, to not have to choose anymore since his choices have been so poor as of late.
Well, aside from Masani, but it was more like she chose him than the other way around.
Donald thinks that he'd better stick with the military idea before he ends up dressing as a coyote again walking his neighborhood in the middle of the night futilely trying to get people to be more polite.
But which branch?
Well, Captain America was in the army. So was Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock.
He starts to fill out some paperwork the Army guy places in front of him ("Sorry I couldn't find that thing I was looking for. My partner, she must have given them all out. But here's an Army toothbrush I found. It says, 'Winning the war on plaque' on the side."), which is pretty straightforward (name, address, and so forth) until he hits the racial categories. In the past, Donald has picked whichever category he thought was most advantageous, whether white or black. Sometimes there would be a mixed race checkbox and he could just check that, but there doesn't seem to be one here. He never understands why it matters who his ancestors were since they aren't the ones that are going to be working the job.
He glances at the instructions again and notes that he can check more than one box, so he checks "White" and "Black/African Am."
He wishes there were a box for turkey caught in traffic though, because that's what he feels like at the moment. Does he really want to do this?
Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment