SRF Heavy Industries

This one time a handful of pigs built houses to live in and then a wolf with really bad breath came through town and knocked them all down except for one or two, and everyone tried to move into those houses simultaneously, and then there was what you might call a bit of basic unrest.

You can see the immediate problems with all this. Pigs all over the world do well for themselves without even knowing what a house is. Then they get the idea they need a house, and don’t really sweat what that entails. You have goobs on the city council inflate the housing codes to require materials their idiot brother-in-law has managed to corner the market on just to make their wives tolerable to live with, then you have contractors who know that the codes are B.S. just do whatever they think will make a house stand up because they all individually consider themselves to be geniuses but they’re really just good at building shams and bribing inspectors, which is often cheaper and inflates the profit margin, and the pigs just care about granite countertops, huge TVs, impossible-to-maintain landscaping, and enough “curb appeal” to make the other little pigs green, knowing in their little piggy hearts that if something goes wrong, it’ll all be someone else’s fault, which we all know is the thing that counts in a crisis.

Because if it’s someone else’s fault, that means the people who have done wrong are obliged to take care of whoever they’ve wronged, right? Because if there’s one thing pigs know about little piggy nature, it’s that those with criminal profiteering intent are big on fulfilling obligations to their victims when the chips are down.

And when the sheriff is dragging people out of a crowd, one at a time, standing on their necks, prying baseball bats out of their hands and trying to talk them out of the murderous rage they got when the aforementioned granite countertop fell through the floor and crushed the 58″ flatscreen in the basement boar-cave, also rupturing the home-brewing rig and incidentally breaking the leg of one of the piglets that was trying to scurry to safety, the sheriff has to listen to the same old litany of blame that loosely translates to the list of people the pig would like to take care of them now that they don’t have a house to live in: the wolf, which has already blown out of town, the builders, the contractors, the “insufficient” building codes, the city council, and the well-off/foresightful few who still have houses that are standing. Just about always there’s one individual prominently left off that list, and its usually someone with a recent bootprint.

I try to make myself feel bad when, while standing on the necks of the people who were kind enough to elect me to office, instead of feeling charitable, I really wish I was a wolf myself and could blow through this spontaneously organized, prey-concentrating farm, wilting the overpriced hairdos of all the wailing survivors and, I dunno, have a really big damn lightning-powered barbecue to celebrate the windfall of free-running piggies who suddenly have nowhere to hide. I consider beating myself with the bat I’ve just taken away because I can’t feel any sympathy and I know I should be hurting somehow, but unfortunately I was blessed with insight and common sense and a stress-triggered fight-or-flight response that evolution insists I have, while the majority vote of the diseased organism of which I am a sometimes useful part has promised an extraordinarily miserable decade or two as a reward for me if I use it.

So here stands the sheriff, with his boot on the neck of a distraught citizen, better damn be sure on-purpose-like holding this bat by the wrong end lest thousands of hours in batting cages take over his muscles by reflex and start swinging for the parking lot on the other side of the upper deck of the bleachers.

And then, because something has to give, there is a strange noise in my head and the world shatters into a million pieces and I start laughing and I know this is nearly as bad as swinging but I can’t stop. I can’t stand up anymore so I chuck the bat out into the street and fall down on the grass laughing like a madman, laughing and laughing and laughing at the stupidity of everything going on, everything mankind has ever done that makes this the thing that happens again and again and again everywhere in the world where bad things happen to civilized people and then a big wolf howl comes running down the street laughing the way wolves laugh, joining right in and screaming to the sky how funny it all is and then, apparently, they loaded me into that ambulance and took me to the hospital and treated me for a stroke which pretty much left me untouched except for the occasional olfactory hallucination and the tendency to laugh like a madman when I witness tragedy and human misery, except I’m really not so sure I’m not faking it and using the stroke as an excuse.

But … whatever it takes to keep me from swinging that bat, you know?

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