I’m not dead I’m just vitality-challenged

NOTE. This post ended up degenerating into silliness. Tomorrow I'll write something better.

Dear diary,

Everyone wants her own army. That’s the first thing that people always wish for, when they find a genie in a bottle, according to a recent Gallup poll.

But why armies? Why must we always be fighting?

Because that’s the way things are, I’m told. Humankind cannot survive without killing itself. That’s why I’ve always found it strange that suicide is illegal. — Yet again, only the U.S. has the right idea: for, in OUR court system, the crime of attempting suicide is punishable by death.

And the borders of countries are necessary to help us remain divided, isolated, & suspicious of each other’s culture; otherwise we might homogenize into one vast Tyger. Cuz the problem with robotic beasts that have amalgamated all their world’s intelligent life is that they don’t use the Internet to purchase very many products: for, being mechanical, they don’t need much food; and there’s no reason for them to stock up on supplies to barter, as there’s nobody else to barter with, since All became One.

So, OK, I’m persuaded now. You convinced me with your argument. I’m now in the camp that says we must all choose a camp.

And when I find my lantern, I will activate its magic somehow — probably by stroking its fur — and the genie will not even need to ask me what he can do to please me: I will just say “Gimme the usual,” and he’ll understand that I’m demanding my own personal army.

But my army will be different in one important way. Notice how everyone else’s armies use tanks; and some have bomber planes & submarines — but I prefer to be unique; so I pondered long and hard about this decision, and I think I finally figured out a style of army that nobody’s ever done yet (I discovered some vacant real estate in the army-sphere, as it were) — my idea is this:

I’ll have the first army that will use exclusively railroad train tracks for travel. So, to be clear, my army won’t have any tanks or planes or subs — we’ll only use steam engine locomotives. And they’ll be heavily armed.

Let’s envision how this might play out, in reality. Say that my foe Samantha has an army that is located in Maple Grove; and they now appear with all their tanks lined up at the front door of my homeland in Thief River Falls and attempt to dine on all of my livestock.

First of all, I don’t even keep any livestock on hand — we just eat our pets as soon as they are born — and we don’t waste anything; which is why our uniforms are made from the inedible aspects of the creatures that we’ve eaten — all we keep in our stables are books, and you can’t kill books.

So already Samantha’s army is disappointed. They show up, ring the doorbell; but there is nothing to slay; therefore they try to read our boring classics. Eventually someone suggests: “Let’s burn ’em up.” And that works. Now our books are all burnt.

So, in the following scene, my own army, yawning, steps out from the barn and notices a great heap of ashes in the middle of the yard. At first we think that someone’s having a bonfire, in celebration of graduating from law school; so we raise our eyebrows slightly, and slightly smile — but then the truth hits us: Samantha’s army has arrived at last, in accordance with prophecy, to defend themselves from our first-strike sneak-attack.

Now we’ve gotta figure out how to win this battle: put on our Machiavellian hats; and get in touch with our inner Draconia. Now I, Raylene (my name’s actually Bryan Ray, but I gotta put on my girl-suit for this blog farce, because it happens to be female-only), even I, Raylene, am what is known as the Supreme Commander, therefore I have better ideas than anyone else among my troops; so I devise a plan:

“Let us run some tracks up to the windshields of those two tanks in the foreground,” I say. “Build the tracks so that they curve to the right; and have them stop at the driver’s side. What we’ll do is take our two trains and set them on the tracks here, and over there, where their respective paths shall begin; and in time the trains will rev themselves up to speed & eventually reach their destinations. Now allow me to address the trains’ conductors directly:

“Upon finding that you’ve arrived at the enemy’s vehicle, go ahead and toss a grenade over its windshield, so that it curves and lands inside thru the tank’s convertible top. If, when you get to this point in the plan, you find that the vehicle’s top is closed (or only partially open), simply reach toward the border of the canvas and gently pull the snaps away from the tank’s frame. What I’m hinting is that you should just open the damn thing yourself. Remember: this is war — you don’t have to ask permission before removing the protective cover from our enemy’s combat vessels. And subsequent to finishing all of our maiming, wounding, murder & destruction, we can sort out the details of the settlement — who gets what spoils, etc. But, in the meantime, let the chips fall where they may.

“OK, so, as soon as the convertible top has been removed, whether you do that step yourself or if the task has been completed aforetime by the enemy (it looks like that tank up front which I’m pointing at right now has left its canopy open — its crew-mates probably did this on account of the weather being so nice & sunny today; but I can’t tell if the tank next to it is currently canopied or not — it looks like its top is shut; perhaps one of the passengers is fair-skinned and thus susceptible to sunburn), I say, once you get up to that windshield, go ahead and lob a grenade thru the air (if you’re feeling confident), or, if you prefer a more direct approach, you can just reach over the top of the windshield and personally offer your grenade to the vehicle’s driver. While doing so, you might exclaim, in an authoritative tone: ‘Be so good as to hold this item for me, while I shoot all your companions in the face.’

“But don’t forget to remove the grenade’s pin, before you hand it off to the enemy. A grenade with its pin intact will not explode; and the idea here is to kill as many of THEIR soldiers as we can, so that they eventually cave and say ‘We surrender!’ — THAT’s the point I’d like to get to, sometime in the next couple years. Cuz the moment they surrender, we’re allowed to carve up their homeland of Maple Grove; and new paperwork is signed declaring us the owners and rulers of that part of the world — at least until someone else decides to challenge us for the Championship Belt (‘a large, extravagantly designed girdle used in sports such as warfare to signify which corporation is the hero’).

“Anyway, once the tank’s driver is holding that grenade, grab your machinegun and annihilate the passengers. Press the trigger and wave the gun back and forth, until everyone’s asleep. Make sure you don’t miss — for even one single enemy who remains alert after an ambush like this will probably suffer from excess anxiety, over the course of her life. Survivors of this type of rampage will also be more likely to take a vengeful attitude toward its perpetrators. And if they begin to hypothesize that we, the good soldiers of Thief River Falls, might be responsible for a decline in the quality of life among Maple Grovians, they’re liable to be less cooperative at Town Hall meetings. I’ll give an example of what I mean:

“The enemy combatant that survived your murderous attack is likely to become the most troublesome heckler in the audience, during the Q&A session after my victory speech. She will not relinquish her time in the limelight: when allowed to address the speaker, she will continue to ramble. This will be her revenge. One of the custodians will hand her the cordless microphone, reminding her that she is to ask only one brief question, ‘Do NOT deliver a lengthy, preachy sermon against the new commander of Maple Grove,’ she will be told; but what shall this troublemaker do? You guessed it: she makes a lengthy, preachy sermon. And my assistant will keep trying to pull the microphone away from her, but she will grip it all the tighter, knowing that now is her chance to humiliate me in public:

“‘This evening’s keynote speaker Raylene,’ (my heckler will say,) ‘is the absolute worst Supreme Commander this city has ever been conquered by. And let me tell you something that her administration does not want you to know. I have video on my portable device which I recorded during a battle that we enjoyed last May, showing an engineer from one of Raylene’s locomotives attempting to relieve our tank of all its human passengers, and yet she left ME alive! Talk about the inefficiency of government! Do we Maple Grovians really want Raylene running our city into the ground? I myself would prefer to see someone less annoying run our city into the ground.’

“(And, for the sake of emphasis, I repeat that, during the entire duration of this affront, one of our ushers will be trying to tug the microphone away, but the heckler won’t let go.)

“So you can see how important it is to make sure that you spare no living soul, during the battle, but, as the good LORD commanded: ‘slay both woman and child, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’ (1 Samuel 15:3).

“Once you have done this, return to your train engine, toggle the directional lever to ‘reverse’, and chug back down the tracks to meet us here in the barn. At that point, we’ll dismantle those initial two rail systems and build a couple more tracks that shall lead to the driver’s side of the neighboring tanks. — We’ll continue this routine until the whole first row of tanks is obliterated; then we’ll begin to take care of the second row. And so on & so forth, until Samantha surrenders.”

*

I think the best part of this idea is that our railroad trains could be used against other types of armed fleets, just as effectively: For a submarine attack, we’d only have to waterproof our rails — this could be done by painting a protective layer around each rod of iron. And for airplane bombers, we could set aside some of the rods to serve as stilts, and basically build up each track upon scaffolding like a bridge — this type of elevated rail system, in order to reach into the sky, will necessarily be a little shorter than the ones we built on ground-level out from the barn; so maybe we’ll have to assemble just one rail system at a time, instead of committing to a dual-train offence, when we engage in air-fights. The only thing that matters is that we make it up to those windshields: THAT’s the key. If you can get to the windshield and peel back that convertible top, the rest of the job is a piece of cake, whether tank, plane, or sub.

So that’s my idea about a new type of army for war: A deadly set of locomotives with reusable tracks.