Protozoan Pathogens enter a City-Body impelled by the temptation of insatiable desires for wealth and power; they take cover behind back-alley dumpsters or inside park bushes; they perch on top floors of parking structures—studying from afar the behaviors of honest, red-blooded, law-abiding citizens—and eventually camouflage their moral compulsions to spread social disease beneath a veneer of philanthropy or primetime political “integrity”. With time, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a veritable Hypodermic citizen—city planner, mayor, CEO of industry—from a Protozoan Pathogen who has learned how to walk, work, reproduce, and even eat hotdogs in the sand at the beach alongside “healthy”, or, uncorrupted, T&B cell captains and assistant chiefs who have spent decades sniffing and snuffing out such criminal Protozoa. With still more time, the “health” of some T&B cells is compromised by the sorcery of a fully-assimilated Protozoan Pathogen, who exploits and harnesses their power in order to extend their own, like black, cancerous tendrils that crawl further across the City-Body with each pocketed politician and police officer.
The Protozoan Pathogen spares no time locating the corporate or political ladder they intend to ascend, and, pathologically impatient, proceeds to bulldoze the hordes of witless suits waiting to lay finger on a bottom rung off into the nearest gutter of self-loathing. For the ladder itself—who knows how high it goes or how many men and women cling to it—the Pathogen comes with a 2000V Super Arc Pulse Generator, sets a clamp on either rail, cranks its power to the max, flips it on, and runs like hell—dodging hundreds, perhaps thousands, of well-dressed bodies, and inhaling the myriad colognes and perfumes that drift gently down to street level behind them in an indigo fog. With a year or two—or a fraction of the time it takes the average citizen to reach a ladder—of this ruthless “unclogging” behind them, the Pathogen strolls inside the lobby and takes the elevator straight to the top of Manufacturing, Production, Trade, Economics, Technology, Investment, Agriculture, Entertainment, Construction; it matters little what they do, so long as the sense of power they experience while doing it is euphoric, and plain for any passerby to see. “Usurp-corrupt-carry-on” is their motto and no sector is safe from their insatiable appetites and depraved vices… a lie even when the truth promises a more lucrative outcome… daily cocktails of voracity as intoxicant; corruption: stimulant; and power as super-synthetic opiate 10,000 times as potent as morphine, which can only be found amongst these “men on high”, and whose withdrawal effects have driven some Pathogens to murder their own wives and children after they caught wind of their transgressions and threatened to call the authorities.
It is impossible to recognize the Protozoan Pathogen until their private sins explode with public exposure; their parasitic relationship on a City-Body will appear beneficial, and their grand speeches at ribbon-cutting ceremonies will sound sincere, but, in the end, their membrane of false persona—frail and fractured from years of deceit, and leaking the blood of the countless lives they ended with the legislative stroke of their pen—shatters as official reports and statements detailing the Pathogen’s corruption are released, and economic and political malaria spreads across the City-Body, to all its inhabitants, in a feverish mistrust for all elected officials.
Examples of Symbiotic Protozoa, or “Wandering” Protozoa, on a City-Body include: contract workers, college students, seasonal employees, flight attendants, cruise and yacht hands, forestry technicians, festival organizer, ski instructors, mountain guides, traveling salesmen and so on. They enter a City-Body, attach, provide a local service, absorb the local culture, detach, and carry on to another assignment on another City-Body. Theirs is a youthful existence guided by a lust for experience; an evasion of those barbs of permanence—“roots” of long-term career benefits, affordable housing markets and vibrant local cultures—set to snag and implant any peripatetic cell who remains in one City-Body for too long. The transmission of the Symbiotic Protozoa’s experience on a City-Body across inter-Body Synapse Media Platforms has been shown to have a greater long-term effect on the economy of a City-Body than any monetary contribution they made through their bills and labors during their brief time there. This is one example, of many, that illustrates the neutrality of the parasitic influence most Wandering Protozoa have on a City-Body.
Commensal Protozoans are mostly benign parasitic cells embedded in the annals of a City-Body—government subsidized housing projects, couches and spare rooms of friends or relatives in low-income apartments, half-way houses, four-beds-to-a-room sober living facilities, or nomadic RV camps that migrate from one illicit source of electricity to the next. The following is an account of a band of Commensal Protozoa that comprise one such RV camp.
For the longest time they had a pretty sweet spread down on the riverbed, thanks to the generosity of a toothless gas station attendant who let them jack-in to a covered outlet out by the bathrooms for nothing in return. Whaaaaaaa—they thought and said, extending for a long beat of disbelief before finally agreeing that the attendant’s gesture was a genuine, selfless, act of kindness which, ultimately, foreshadowed no unannounced, gummy, 3am perversions and welcomed no harassment from the Segway cops who patrolled the river trail daily. But life for these Protozoan “Gypsies” is rarely kind, and streaks of good fortune often culminate with mass arrests, RV fires and/or explosions, or a double drowning late one night (or early one morning) at the low-head dam downstream of this, their most recent RV paradise. And so, with heads hangin’ low enough to the street to scrape their noses clean off, the crew meets the kindly gas station attendant to thank him and return his 120ft extension cord. They pile into the three-RV caravan, two mostly-harmless—apart from public harassments and public pissings common whilst they are under the influence of certain chemical cocktails—parasites lighter, and carry on down side streets and back streets; prowling lifeless strip malls and crumbling Toys-R-Us parking lots—chasing decay—traversing varicose veins and circling melanomas; blurring by gangrenous store front blocks—neighborhoods on the City-Body left to rot, with this “rot” being the only “sensible economic response to progress”—until, eventually, they drop anchor under a canopy of Chinese privet in the far corner of what was once a fresh plot of asphalt designated for the loading/unloading of big rigs at a couple of loading dock doors now locked with a couple fist-sized padlocks coated with the rust of thirty years.
The autophagy of this import-export operation made way for untold retail birth-death cycles inscribed in a successive layering of parking lot grids—some only slightly offset from a preceding pattern, while others—be it out of madcap rebelliousness against standard parking-lot aesthetics or groundbreaking geometric genius way ahead of its time—completely disregarded and disorganized the partially faded lines of yore with aggressively tight patterns that overlapped, crosshatched, and, undoubtedly, befuddled those patrons meant to use it some however many years ago. The business today, upon whose property our Nomadic Parasites are loitering, is “Brass Bear Antiques”. They have it on good authority that the place is only open on weekends, and some weekends at that, and, so, as the collective anxieties of not knowing where they would spend the night without being fucked-with dissolve into their carefree laughter, they smash up a few pallets, start an inconspicuous fire, and pass ‘round a bottle of Ol’ Grandad in memory of their comrades fallen at the low-head dam.
Allyson, the parasite with naturally-red dreadlocks past her shoulders, and an art degree, stares out across the empty lot run through with ten-thousand tiny fissures and all those intersecting parking space lines, seeing the entire composition as a recording of those intersecting and conflicting efforts of one generation of cells against its predecessor, and feeling nothing of sadness—for this decrepit lot, or this diseased side of the City-Body—because she knows she would never fully belong to it, nor it fully belong to her. The bottle makes its way to her delicate hand, and she takes herself a dainty swig—her signature swig the gang is always giving her hell for. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, gazes back out across the lot and says, “Any of you fuckers know who Wassily Kandinsky was?”
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