Thumper scanned books and told customers to swipe or insert they card. Two ways to pay: swipe or insert. Or cash, but ain’t a soul pay in cash all morning. Thumper thought paying with a plastic card was paltry shit. A proper nigga paid in cash. Cards was like a wheelchair for your wallet.
There’s cards you don’t even gotta swipe or insert. You just tap it around, and it goes ding. You could walk by a nigga, and he be dinging your card. Tap-a-tap-tap, he snap-snackin’ on ya cash. Bullshit. When Thumper told this one high-faluting ruddynut honky to swipe his card or insert it if he prefer, the honky said, “Nah, I’mma tap it, you trashy tapless nigger coming outta prison ign’ant and shit, I don’t swipe or insert, I tap, you don’t know nuffin, oughta put you back in a bitch-nigger cage to learn how to tap yo’ thing on the other thing”. He ain’t say that exactly, but what he said he said like Thumper was a piss-poor nigga for not guessing he was the kinda honky who tap steada swipe or insert.
You can pay with your phone now too. Swipe, insert, tap or phone.
Thumper don’t know how to put money into his phone, and he ain’t wanna axe, cuz they’d treat him a lost puppy and show him how and it’d take like a hundred steps, buncha passwords to forget, prolly gotto talk to a gravelchin nigga on the phone. Thumper don’t got time for that nonsense. He like having real cash he can count in reality like a real nigga living in real-time and real-space. One sunnyskin man did it though, hovering his phone around like a hypnotized helicopter, till eventually there was bunchesa buzzes and beeps and boops and the phone vibrated, and then the cash register said “approved”.
Ain’t even a real cash register, it was really a li’l computer that was really a big phone that was really just a monitor, but to the Puffin Books bitches it was a register. Everything was a phone nowadays. You best believe Thumper disapproved of that, disapproved hearty as stew.
The morning drifted on like time was a chore. Thumper’s mind wandered back to prison, where at least you paid in cash or like ramen noodle packets or something. That was better. Thumper wished the world would go back to barter. Like, I’ll trade you a cow for maybe… a thousand apples. But then what would you do with a thousand apples at once? Make cider maybe.
And cider’s delicious, so that’s fine.
World was going in the other direction though. Everything was more abstract, ain’t nothing physical to hold onto. News was on the phone and mainly talked about what people was typing into they phones — seriously, they do whole things on the news about what bunchesa nobodies said, like a serious-looking racially ambiguous reporter get up there and say “somebody named buttmama called for peace in the Congo, but then a non-somebody named noodlesucker said Congo niggas can go fuck a duck”, and then the news is over, and Thumper still ain’t got a update from Congo since Ali won the Rumble in the Jungle.
Kids was phone-bullying other kids into stabbing they grandmas, lazy-eyed niggas was buying Russian wives on the phone, cauliflowery whiteboys be stealing the treasury on they phone and burning down schools, it happens, shit, look it up!
Young folk don’t even smoke weed proper no more. They vape it. It’s like weed and email got combined. They done optimize smoking weed till there ain’t nothing left, you just look at this little doodad that lights up, exhale smoke that smells like sleeping by yourself for the resta your life, and you done. Don’t get high, don’t laugh at nothing, don’t run from the cops. Shit’s bullshit, nigga.
From Thumper on Parole
