THAT DAY

I have shingles, painful and exhausting. Rash spread to around my eye. Take acyclovir--4 grams today! The stress of shingles has triggered a flare-up of this recurrent mystery infection I have, too. Joint aches, headache. Take Tylenol. Put off most calls & trips.

Get an erroneous phone reminder for a doctor's appointment I didn't make and can't go to, the time conflicts. I have to call & argue till they reschedule it a week from now.

Herbs arrive--ones I depend on to suppress these attacks. They sent the wrong thing, though the form shows I ordered right.

Health "providers", feh. Capitalists need customers. So why can't they do anything right?

THAT NIGHT

I'm back in time, witnessing the very first encounter between Plains Indians and horses. Definitely a hard learning curve: they all fall off. Their top war chief falls off. Everyone laughs. And gets back on.

And yet just twenty years later, that tribe has the best riders in the world. Progress unbelievably fast. But then, every aspect of history zips by at ten times the speed I think. The Indian Wars are already over. Decades not centuries.

The tribe decides to muscle into the white economy and find niches they can make serious money in. But... how do you monetize horse-mastery?

They become the world's fastest couriers. And unlike railroads or the Pony Express, they'll go ANYWHERE--mountaingoating high in the Rockies, or deep into the North Woods to supply trappers, out into the desert to supply miners. Any scale, too, from mere messages to packages to substantial packtrains of gear. Wherever roads don't go, they do.

The tribe I follow has only a few dozen master couriers, but they average a million a year from it--in 1890s dollars, worth a good fifty million today. Their single best rider earns over a quarter of it--$290,000 a year to be exact.

They all talk of it as a quarter-mil, yet it's just as close to a third. Why? The lower figure makes sense because it's nominal--no Indian ever gets paid fully. A lot of whites renege, despite clear written contracts. White cheating is so common, for the tribe it's an expected business cost.

Their best rider proposes a solution. Contracts will be inked on hide capes, and prepayments will be in decoration and jewels. Flashy, silly, but if the hirer defaults, you have a collectible, and in the short term a contract-cloak will at least keep you warm. And it's harder to tear up or deny. More time & trouble to write, too; he suspects that alone will make whites businesses not violate them so casually. They'll have, literally, more skin in the game.

Trouble is, all the banks and businesses fight him fiercely--threaten him personally. They really hate the idea. Which is an admission of guilt! The plan just isn't that costly--except to firms that suddenly have to go honest after a generation of profitable cheating.

White Corporation Speak with Forked Tongue.

No news there...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Contracts violated: health "providers". Wrong appointment times AND wrong herbs. Payin' a lotta, getting' nada.
• Time compression: On foot, horses, couriers, business, Contract Cloaks--Stone Age to Lawyer Age in twenty years! I suspect this is me--20 years ago, I was a broke hippie naively expecting honesty. Now I co-own a multimillion-dollar cooperative house--and assume that for-profit corporations cheat.
• Racist cheating: I've been reading Henry Louis Gates's Stony the Road, detailing how the Klan eroded the gains black people made after the Civil War--largely for economic reasons. Makes my day's disappointments seem petty. But... are they different? Maybe not. I bet a financial analyst said "Pay crap wages to your clerical staff! Who cares if appointments and orders go wrong? It's only medicine. It's not as if lives depend on this stuff..." In late capitalism, cheating's the norm, and planned neglect is the safest way for capitalists to cheat.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites