The Other Way Around

Read aloud quickly, starting now, repeat if necessary. I drive a Vitamin|Energy truck. It’s one of those drinks that looks like a prescription. You’re not supposed to care how it tastes, which is lucky; it tastes like kids’ cough syrup, only blue. You gotta love business: blue water, two bucks a bottle. That sneeze you heard, it’s blowing your way, courtesy of our board of directors. That tinkling sound is my boss’s water flowing downstream. There’s something unsavory in the meat and when all of it makes you sick to your stomach, this multinational nutritional product conglomerate I represent with my ass on the seat, the big rusty greenback-printing machine that eats resources and has to be cooled with gallons of vitamin energy will send you to the hospital and stick you with the bill. It made us think our union was the enemy, our pension was a gift; it makes us pay so much for our vacations we can’t afford to take them. Have a blue water. You don’t look well. Have you been sleeping? There’s a product that might help, always. Sleep is green, I think. Instead of working less and eating better, there’s a drink with—get this—vitamins! Same old vitamins, same old water, but dissolved; that’s gotta be worth something. I drive the Vitamin truck north to the provinces and cross the border back again in another truck with a cargoload of imported carbonated something or other. I don’t know how the Vitamin trucks get south again. Overnight, I visit my girlfriends, two or three times a week as the schedule goes. The question for you, knowing what you know about business, did I arrange the route to see my girlfriends in the provinces or, like everything else that’s true, the other way around?

Copyright © July 05, 2008 David Hodges