It's not really intended to mock LFB, Covenant, or SRD - I just find it amusing and wanted to share.
The First Utility Bill of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever
He was nearing his destination, the goal of the affirmation or proclamation that he had so grimly undertaken to affirm or proclaim. He could see the sign two blocks ahead of him: Bell Telephone Company. Hellfire! He was walking the two miles into town from Haven Farm in order to pay his phone bill. Of course, he could have mailed in the money, or set up a direct debit, or even paid online - but he had learned to see that act as a surrender, an abdication to the increasing atomisation and corporatisation of modern life. Hellfire! I won't stand for it, he gritted, as talons of black hatred clawed at his upper back and shoulder area, before descending in blazing increments to tear at his torso overall in a more generalised fashion, ending somewhere around his abdomen and coccyx.
In a town of no more than five thousand, the business section was not large. Covenant crossed in front of the department store, and through the glass front he could see several high-school girls pricing cheap jewellery. They leaned on the counter in provocative poses, and Covenant's jeans tightened involuntarily. He found himself resenting the hips and breasts of the girls - curves for other men's caresses, not his.
For he was no longer in high-school.
Now he strode past the courthouse, it's old grey columns looking proud of their burden of justice and law - the building in which, by proxy, of course, he and everyone else had been reft of the right to the publically owned and strictly regulated utility companies which for at least one hundred years had supplied reliable subsidised energy and phone services to the people of the state, free of the need to satisfy the greed of shareholders.
The gaping giant heads which topped the courthouse columns looked oddly nauseated now, as if they were about to spew all over the place, in a heedless riot of colourant and noisome emetic purgessence.
Without warning, a memory of the Enron hearings flared in his mind, almost blanking out the sunshine and the sidewalk. He reeled momentarily, and saw, as if before his eyes, the image of CEO Jeff Skilling smirking and pantomiming before the committee.
Jeff! How could you do it? Is profit more important than everything?
Bracing his shoulders like a strangler, he suppressed the memory. Such thoughts were a weakness he could not afford: he had to stamp them out. Better to be bitter, he thought. Bitterness survives.
Now he was passing the offices of the Electric Company - his last reason for coming to pay the phone bill in person. Two months ago, he had mailed in a cheque to the Electric Company - the amount should have been small; he had little use for power. Power was guilt, he knew, and impotence was innocence - but somehow, in the eye of the paradox, in the heart of the contradiction, they had sent him a bill that was just way too big. It's all computers now, he hissed to himself. Damnation!
Looking back briefly at the girls in the department store, he clicked rapidly through his VSS (visual surveillance of schoolgirls) and felt steadied. He returned his gaze to the sign of the Bell Telephone Company, half a block away. As he moved forward, concious of a pressure to surge against his anxiety, he noticed a tune running in his mind along the beat of his stride. Then he recollected the words:
Tutti frutti, oh rutti,
Tutti frutti, oh rutti,
Tutti frutti, oh rutti,
Tutti frutti, oh rutti,
A Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!
The doggerel chuckled satirically through his thoughts, and it's crude rythym and blues thumped against him like an insult. He wondered if there were an overweight goddess somewhere in the mystical heavens of the universe, grinding out his burlesque fate: A Wop bop a loo bop! A lop bam boom!
Nevertheless, he had been filled with a sudden sense of focus, of crystallization, as if he had identified an enemy, when he had learned that his utility bills were too high. The unexpected shock and outrage had abruptly made him aware of what was happening. The deregulated corporations were not only cheating him, they were now actively cutting off his dial-up internet access. He did not mean to stand by and approve this further amputation.
When he first got the "Server Not Found" message, his immediate reaction was to open a window and shout into the winter,"Go ahead! By hell, I don't need you!" But the issue was not simple enough to be blown away by bravado. As winter scattered into an early March spring without even Outlook Express being useable for email, he became convinced that he needed to take some kind of action.
So when his next phone bill came, he gathered his courage, shaved painstakingly, dressed himself in clothes with tough fabrics, laced his feet snugly into sturdy boots, and began the two-mile walk into town to pay his bill in person.
That walk brought him to the door of the Bell Telephone Company with trepidation hanging around his head like a dank cloud, and with anxiety hanging slightly higher above his head like a noticeably less dank but slightly more active cloud - altostratus as opposed to cumulonimbus. He stood in front of the gilt-lettered door for a time, thinking,
These are the pale deaths...
and wondering about laughter. Thankfully, nobody saw him doing this. It would have probably looked really weird.
Then he collected himself, pulled open the door like the gust of a gale, and stalked up to the girl at the counter as if she had challenged him to single combat (which, incidentally, she had not).
He put his hands down on the counter to steady them. Ferocity sprang across his teeth for an instant, while atrocity jumped up and down behind his eyes for a bit longer. Rage tweaked his nose. Tides of boundless outrage ruffled his hair a bit.
He said,"My name is Thomas Covenant."
To Be Continued...
