A Good ‘ol, Sci-Fi, Country Song (Weekly Writing Challenge)

(The Daily Post asked for dystopian concepts.  As a musical.  I can’t really pass that up.)

“Let me be by myself in the evening breeze
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever, but I ask you please
Don’t fence me in” -Cole Porter

**********

Well folks I’m gonna tell ya ‘bout this crazy little trip
You can call me a dadgum liar; I don’t give a rip.
See now I done seen things that you wouldn’t never believe,
But I promise my aim in all this is not to deceive.
 
It weren’t too long ago when I done woke up with a start,
I felt a shock that darn near wrecked my achey-breaky heart.
I found myself stuck inside a plexi-glass contraption,
And you can bet I did my best to leap into action.
 
I banged on the walls, I kicked and punched with all of my might,
But computer screens and numbers were all that was in sight.
I cried out for some fella or gal to come set me free,
But instead this voice piped in like a machine from T.V.
 
“You’ve been out for forty years.  Relax, we’ll take care of you.”
That’s what that there computer claimed it was going to do.
Well I hollered and I bellowed and I screamed, “Let me out!”
I wanted my freedom; I made sure that there was no doubt.
 
Well that hunk of gears and switches just wouldn’t let me go
And it worked and toiled tirelessly just to tell me so.
“We want to keep you healthy and restore your damaged hide.
Why would you fight against us only to go back outside?”
 
On and on they bragged about the benefits of their pod,
And how they could make improvements to my broken-down bod.
They told me if I stayed inside their high-tech, so-safe cage,
I’d never have to worry about my health or old age.
 
The blasted machine just outright refused to understand
That I’m a good ol’ boy who likes to roam across the land.
Gimme dirt under my boots, gimme the wind in my hair
Gimme farms that smell like a flatulent cow’s derrière.
 
I want snow that I can shovel or drive my pick-up in,
And I want women in bars that tend to tempt me to sin.
You can keep your tubes and nobs that look ever-so pretty,
I’ll take a piece of beef jerky that tastes rather gritty.
 
That new-fangled machine kept refusing to let me be.
It kept on about better living through technology.
It offered to inject these strange fluids into my arms
And claimed it would protect me from disease and other harms.
 
I laughed at the thing and couldn’t stop from shaking my head.
I offered up this rather solid argument instead.
I tell it if this is the future they got it backwards,
That ain’t the end destination that mankind should head towards.
 
We want nasty crud and strange dirt under our fingernail
We want to hear the tin roof fighting off the storming hail
We want to stub our toe and yell when the dog starts to bark
And we want to love on somebody when the lights go dark.
 
I said plainly that living that long just ain’t worth a thing
If you can’t get in a fight or have a fun little fling.
I know it thought its circuits and chips were on the right track
If that was the world I was offered, I’d rather go back.
 
Take me away from all that stupid purification,
Let me see people reflect the tastes of their own nation,
 I don’t care too much for gears that are silent and stealthy.
Shoot, I need at least some of my food to be unhealthy.
 
So them computers gave up, they unplugged all of their gear,
And they used some fancy time machine to send me back here.
Now I’m back in the present and I sure would like to think,
That one of you fine folks would go and buy me a tall drink.

Advertisement