I sell ley-lands to crooked Jimmys who walk on oblique angles. It’s a mug’s game and I’m King Mug with two handles and a silver top. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I was a kid, I’d have probably answered a bar of chocolate, or dead. What’s the difference nowadays when everybody’s sizing you up for cold cuts and applying words to your character like they’re seasoning you in the unctuous oily tones of spiced plumage.

This one client’s got a particular kink that always makes me smirk. Whenever he remembers something, he looks to his top left and rubs the side of his nose. You really notice it when he’s recounting notched stories of youth with a candor like a spigot. Nice guy, late on his payments though. Red nose, wandering eyes, no wonder.

I’ve seen a lot of types as a salesman. The worst are ex-sales people. They act like their game is the best, like it’s actually a game. They’re so good at convincing themselves to buy and/or sell, I’m sure they’d walk into a doctors office and get a hypochondriatical case of the baby bump and manage to make a killing on the baby shower, and then resell everything double only to find out they were actually expecting. Hell, they’d even charm God himself into existence. In fact, they’ve already done that, damn atheists.

Acting, grandstanding. It’s all it is. “All the world’s a stage and we’re busy planning our future fester-in-caskets”. I can never remember that quote properly, but I remember the gist. He’s saying we should play more. Try telling that to a scrub looking to stay clean and fed by tooth and nail, bite and scratch. Many metaphors for money and suffering, too many lives to dispense both resources equally. Per person I mean of course. If everyone had access, then others wouldn't feel so priveleged. I tell ya, I'm king mug right now and someone else ain’t.

If you don’t act tall, you're small. I remembered that quote from just now. Made it up and remembered it straight away. Our words are like photos to our memories. They represent a time, place, sentiment, and then we pick and choose what they mean at our leisure and pleasure. Symbiosis in the world of finks. I want my memories to be words predicting the future. What am I saying, of course it works like that already, what with the power of determination, or is it divination? I can never remember which one the gypsies in the wooden house trucks hopping from beach town to beach town dance and sing about.

I think there once was a time when I wasn't so singularly defined. There exists some space within that says we, you, us, them in more measured quarts than just I. But I’d have to disagree with them, because we’d never survive unless reduced to just me. Numbers game, you see. There’s safety in numbers, but you need to be prepared to share the winnings. I just was more vested in upping my personal value compared to the rest that they fell away then after.

Perhaps that’s the prevailing winds of the ley-lands, denizens of blood and phone. It’s more immediate to receive for one than many. But if one was of many, it spreads like electricity. A virus. Shocked, appalled, sneezing. Tissue boxes would sell through the roof, then an enterprising sort would recombobulate to gather market research to better make the herd fizz and pop more and faster. Social chemistry. I’m certainly more than ever sure that factory farming exists within the digital age.

Is there meaning when expressed through ones and zeroes? Of course there is, but it gets ground down to on/off states that we can't help but be binaurally opinionated about. Since when did reason and logic sleep in the same bed? I make love with paradoxes myself — really gets the juices flowing, and I mean streaming. If I were to proclaim my lust through the tubes, I’d say it’s no different than what I do already with this portable garden of meat and bone I manage to keep upright and balanced (most of the time) within this terrain of metal and frowns, bows and clowns; emotions, all just promotions and demolitions in slow motion.

You’re probably still wondering who or what a crooked Jimmy is. Take a look in a mirror and spot the nobody behind you. Crooked Jimmys are those people you think you aren’t, but can't see because they’re you standing in front of the person you want to be. Sell your ley-lands, move up (or down) into the waters, eat the fish, but talk always of having better fish in ley-lands buried beneath childhood memories or fancy unpronounceable names elsewhere. Fish don’t care, Jimmy don’t care, and Jimmy does whatever Jimmy wants. Why concern the self when Jimmy’ll take care of it? Except Jimmy never has what’s at heart in heart. Jimmy’s brain is framed and on the wall, on the table, in the corner, at rest, in pieces; a jigsaw puzzle of a beef hamburger that has 1,000 pieces and 5 of them have gone walkabouts in the stomach of a dog. The soul is in the sole and Jimmy pounds the pavement until insolvent.

So what’s my role in the grand scheme of things? My schooling created a schema of meeting needs with resources, except the needs are more often wants and a fella has to put bread on the table. How much bread I can't divulge, but let me say that the neighbourhood pigeons are fed very well with 5 day old stale bread that I pick up from a nearby bakery when they vacate their premises of the unwanted, unsellable loaves. A bird’s gotta eat and stale bread is as edible and tantalising as its neighbour.

This day and age we’re sold time and time again on that lead-painted-gold nugget of “potential”. Buyer beware: it’ll cost you your time, money and mental headspace. There’s potential in anything -- its a quality of raw earth material as plentiful as nitrogen in the air, and yet its cultivation eludes all but the fewest percent. I make my living off slinging “potential” like a teenager slinging burger jigsaws for dollars, except in this market “palace” all the “potential” gets slung like a hot potato in an Aitken’s diet meet-up, to others banking on its hotter potential to be slung further away from them that they’d benefit more from its distance than actually utilising it, and end up hitting the paleos’ in the eye.

And as I shake my head side to side, I shake my Schott Zwiesel Boston Shaker up and down, pouring out a mixture of alcohol and sugar into a long tall glass of ice, ready to jumpstart my synapses into a beautiful waking coma to forget the past 15 minutes of exalted personal rumination. I can’t help but pity the crooked Jimmys, the ley-lands, and my own pitiful self. It’s akin to dusting off the jacket and holding up a rifle in a firing squad. Hey -- if I don’t do it, some other Jimmy will. And if this drink’s anything to go by, life as a crooked Jimmy really ain’t so bad. So here’s to pulling the trigger.

Written in August 2016