Empire of Beef

Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a weird post and I apologize ahead of time for the madness that I am about to unleash upon you. However it was so fucking weird to live through it, that I have to write it down before it fades. Friends… I had one of those nights where I woke up, and then fell back asleep to a dream within a dream about the previous dream. So much so that I literally have no clue what is reality and what is dream at this point. In the first of this series of dreams I was traveling to visit family in Ohio. Lets not get caught up on the detail that I have no family in Ohio… because that is not important to this tale. I also have no clue what town in Ohio we were going to visit them at… because again that isn’t really important. I keep my car stereo pretty much permanently tuned to the local NPR station, and for some reason I turned on the radio wanting some music. Instead of NPR I was treated to a radio station filled with propaganda. The person on the radio was speaking in a conspiratorial manner like Andrew Ryan from the Bioshock games… talking about the virtues of Beef. He would go on about the wonders of the modern Roast Beef Industry and how good it was for both humans and nature. If you have never played Bioshock… then I urge you to listen to this remastered version of the intro speech so that you can fully understand the gravitas of this voice that was speaking to me over the radio about roast beef and the absolute absurdity of it. So we get to my family and they work… at an Arbys. They say that they have no clue who runs the station but that it has just been a thing their entire lives. That nobody much thinks about it, and anyone who actually listens to it is considered a bit of a kook. There is a bit of a break here, because it flips around as dreams do… and next thing I know I am driving my family to work at Arbys early in the morning, and we are there before sunrise. I am helping them get the place ready and am taking stuff out to the dumpster out back. For some reason I have this little blue and white transistor radio that I had as a kid and I am listening to the damned broadcast of what I have not learned are referred to as “Beefists” and their ideology. Around the time the restaurant is about to open up in the morning… because for some reason in this dream Arby’s opens early, Bernie Sanders pulls up with some lady with him and he goes into the restaurant. The radio starts blaring in a tirade about how Senator Sanders has come to town to harm the Roast Beef Industry and that he opposes their Beefist ways. The speaker says something about getting up early to paint his house so he would be ready to do battle with Sanders. I think it is around this time that I woke up to go to the bathroom as one does when you are almost 50… and can’t sleep wall the way through the night anymore. When I get settled back in I start dreaming about coming back from the trip to Ohio and trying to research anything about this radio station and its enigmatic Beefist orator. The thing is I find absolutely nothing about it. I can’t find any signs of anyone even knowing about it. I even get on Mastodon and make a post because I think surely that someone will have heard of this or might live in Ohio and be familiar with it. I get nothing at all apart from Arbys ads popping up everywhere. In truth I am not even sure where this dream could have come from. It’s been months since I last ate at Arbys, and even more so I am not usually a big fan of beef in general. I always prefer to have chicken or pork and have for most of my life. I think I was reading an article the other day about the Beef industry struggling… but honestly after some googling this morning I am not even sure that was a real thing… and not just more scaffolding from this bizarre dreamscape. Now that I have excised this from my brain… you too can revel in the madness of Beefist propaganda. The way in which I had to get up and write this down makes me question if it were an SCP style Cognitohazard. Regardless… I have done its bidding now and can be free of it. I am sorry. The post Empire of Beef appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.