Indigo

What is it you're all so afraid of, anyway?

I mean, has anyone actually sat down and thought, "What actually are the chances of that shit
happening to me?" whilst watching the news?
The news media plays a large part in the developement of what I refer to as "Unreasonable Fear".
From the 2000's onto now, the end of the 21st century, the big fear has been terrorism,
anthrax, paedophiles, and tornadoes. Understandably, these things are shit-yourself scary.
What about diabetes? or Asthma?
That's never a news story ever, that someone died of diabetes. And yet, diabetes and
asthma will kill more people in one year than terrorism and tornadoes ever will.

That was what I had to explain to Steven Hill on his live broadcast the other night, which
went out to a countless number of people world wide. But by this point in history, everyone's
already drunk the Kool Aid and we'll be willing to go with anything they tell us to be afraid of, as
long as you have enough entertainment on TV to bribe us with.

Anyway, a few days later, I lost my job. I was a journalist for The Word Online. What sucked more
than being fired was that they made me close my Feed.me account.
Actually, whether or not this gets published at all doesn't matter, I may open my account again, retype
all this and pay $2,000 to have this displayed on one of the many Feed.me billboards I see popping up
over the streets.

For those of you know don't ready know me and aren't fully aware of what exact species of toxic human
sludge I am, my name is Pink Smith. Born in 2044, back when it was still in fashion to name your child after
your favorite colour. Incidentally, I know quite a few Pinks.
The big playground joke was, "Pink as in pussy". Not me, I'm desperately trying to fight my way
out of that stereotype.
I've been fired from my main source of income, writing, supposedly because I have a pair of nuts,
or maybe by virtue of simply existing.
I'm a walking PR disaster, so no sane editor of a news outlet will hire me.

I suggest I get drunk on my own this New Year's Eve, seeing as I'm out of good ideas.

So what exciting events no matter how big or small they are happened this year I hear you ask, in my head.
Well, in order to tell you, we'll have to go all the way over to a far away land, called January.

This year kicked off on the news with the typical "Winter is cold" story. Except this was different because
it turned out to be worse than usual, in the form of a massive fucking blizzard.
Temperatures across the land plummeted to Reality TV IQ level, and the Ku Klux Klan's dream of an all
white America was finally realized.
I remember spending hours trying to dig my car's wheels out of the snow before the shovel caught the
ground and I ended up flinging a lump of warm dogshit into the front window.

Whilst I was at work, back when I had a job, all the reporters when out on the streets doing a piece
to camera about how amazing the snow wasn't.
The universal tone of all of there reports was a bleak one, constantly reminding us that the blizzard was absolutely,
definately going to kill everyone, unless it inevitabley didn't.

Largely though, the blizzard story seemed to be an excuse to turn the news into a giant computer
screensaver, showing endless amounts of snowy pictures, uploaded by average members of the public
to the channel's website.
After 2 weeks of nothing but fucking snow on the news, the story started to get a bit dry so they had
to somehow find a new angle. Some brainiac in the newsroom must have discovered that with snow comes ice, and
suddenly Danger Reports started rearing there ugly head and stories about how dangerous ice is were draped
all over the news like a slippery tarpaulin.
We were also told about several people who had suffered severe injuries from the ice, potentially giving
us something new to be afraid of, but the general public weren't buying it and seemed to spend most of the news
coverage out in the snow, playing about in the cold, making snowmen.

But still, they kept on pushing there "Ice is dangerous" angle, and in a bizarre and somewhat
desperate final push, they told us that the ice wasn't going to get any better due to an apparent
grit shortage. This injected some much needed drama into there storyline, which they
were quick to exagerate. Fortunately, this turned out to be completely false thanks to some
helpful sources online.
And as the blizzard went away, the news were left without a coherent storyline.

After January came February, and every fan of Cheech and Chong in the universe got what it had
been wanting for over a thousand years as the legalization of cannabis announced by President
Adam Morton. Young folk celebrated across the land and Hershey's chocolate and cookie sales
skyrocketed.
It was a suprise that President Morton had made this announcement considering a few weeks later he also announced the declaration of war against