You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) by Andrew Stanek

Author:Andrew Stanek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor
Publisher: Andrew Stanek
Published: 2017-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

As Karl Marx once failed to say, if religion is the opiate of the masses then vodka is most surely the vodka. Dead Donkey was a very hard drinking city, as what with the arsons and the muggings and the mayor, many people found that a very large quantity of potent alcohol was the only thing that could get them through the day. However, whenever you ordered a drink in Dead Donkey - whether it was water or a beer or just a simple pint of acid - you were basically taking your life into your own hands because liquids in Dead Donkey were very rarely what they were supposed to be. This was basically owing to a massive terms-of-trade crisis that broke out after a previous administration switched from the US dollar to the Burmese kyat and people thereafter found that they could no longer afford alcohol, since the exchange rate was so bad. To continue to give people the illusion of alcohol, vendors had subsequently filled beer cans with soda and sold it as beer, but this presented a problem because now all the soda cans were empty. When soda drinkers started demanding soda, the same vendors panicked and filled the cans with mineral water, but then when the mineral water drinkers came in, they suddenly wanted their usual beverages, so the vendors had to fill the mineral water bottles with Red Bull, and so on down the line. These days, you were lucky if water came out when you turned on the tap in Dead Donkey, as opposed to something like natural gas or wiper fluid, so severe had the crisis become. Vodka was largely unaffected because vodka was made locally in Dead Donkey, and it’s pretty much impossible to accidentally ferment and distill wood chips and maize into anything other than hard liquor, though on occasion Dead Donkey brewers have had it come out toothpaste.

However, this was all in the past. The liquid substitution crisis had eventually passed, thanks in no small part to the intervention of the mayor, who was pretty hard drinking himself. The mayor had resolved the crisis by harnessing one of the most powerful business blocs in Dead Donkey: the travel agencies.

People who say that Dead Donkey travel agencies’ businesses amount to legalized hostage taking are very much mistaken. Their practices are far from legal. The way Dead Donkey travel agencies work is simple: they lure people to the city with promises of free transportation and lodging, then charge them through the nose to leave once they get there. Thus, the tourism business was lucrative and booming in Dead Donkey, but was monopolized by a handful of companies with access to teleportation technology. The mayor, in one of his more lucid moments, realized that there was an enormous opportunity here to get the city government cut in on the profits while at the same time forcing alcohol sellers to properly label their beverages. At the mayor’s instruction, the city council passed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.