The meeting was pure fortuity, strangers intersecting in a public establishment, in this case a restaurant, Mongolian cuisine. The person at the next table and I, both arriving just as the restaurant opened for its dinner service, were the only two in the dining room. Over glasses of Arkhi, a milk-based vodka, we fell into conversation; actually, it was a one-way conversation as he got quite voluble after only a couple of swallows of the traditional Mongolian liquor. Punctuated with examples he would call up on his cell phone, the story he told me, pretty much verbatim, is what follows:
I lived where good things were always happening to me, and bad things almost always happened to other people. I stayed at her parents’ house in Quito for a few days. Her dad was an ophthalmologist, and her mom taught third grade at a Catholic girls’ school. I had my own room and they graciously gave me a house key so I could come and go while they were at work. Now good things are still always happening to me, but bad things are happening to me too. Variation of Murphy’s law: Whatever can happen can happen to you. So, there’s less free time.
The photos on the web were all before the accident, before my face became the absolute and final phase of the baroque. I could only go so far in the treatment plan. Enough to where I could work and live independently but only sitting in an unmarked cargo airplane on an anonymous tarmac in a desolate corner of the world type jobs, dark and graveyard gigs, securing endpoints and the data that flows between them, and never go out during the day. I’ve done some crazy river’s edge I don’t know how I’m still alive to tell you about it shit in my life. There’s an entire literature.
There aren’t many people in the USA with nothing to lose. There are more people with nothing on their calendars except spa reservations and parties than there are with nothing to lose. Some have more, most have less, but very few feel they have nothing to lose. The idea of a citizen uprising is absurd. Look how avaricious are the richest and poorest about their things. Plus, we’re extremely knowledgeable about international cuisine. Extraterrestrial terrorists only need to weaponize inconvenience and the good citizens of this country will turn on each other.
But then there are other cruises. There’s the sanctity of life crowd, both pagan and religious, plus the narcissists, plus the people who are afraid of death---they are who capitalism relies on to ensure sufficient production, continuing and sufficient production, continuing continues and increasingly sufficient production for the preservation, maintenance and expansion of wealth.
While Unsuk Chin’s “SPIRA” is heard in the background, I’m remembering some small town in I forget where, I want to say Oregon, and a mother with her kids at the laundromat, or the bookmobile that shows up at the park every Wednesday morning for two hours, and the new animal shelter and the proposed senior center. The line should have been drawn at Swiss damselfish to make up my final mind, but no: a pride man is a rope-released donkey. While two symphonies fantastique are heard in the background (Berlioz’s, and the birds in the orchard) I see three, I see four.
Morbid wealth trickles down from the southern highlands and the northern plains and becomes body parts at a garage sale in the central lowlands. La Princesa del Rancho graduates from LSE and now has one foot in Asia from January to June. She just had a baby. Seen one you’ve seen ‘em all, but you haven’t seen one like this, Salvador, mas grande. Now, while Igor Stravinsky’s “Apollo” is heard in the background, the rice is simmering, and an old white man in a red desert climate getting speed wobbles from cruising the internet in a NordicTrack rocking chair.
Welcome to Capitalism Today, USA edition. Without the billions of spinning tops doing its bidding, capitalism and those who sit atop it would plummet like a mansion on eroding bluffs falls into the sea. So, they don’t want you opting out. You are still a revenue source, a profit center. They are indignant about death. And that’s the sanctity of life.
© Copyright 2026 Randy Stark
