Day 4

I want to go to a movie theater where they make you pop your own popcorn.  They give you this paper tub with an apparatus on the bottom.  Maybe it shoots hot streams of butter up out of it, too.  Watched Howl's Moving Castle yesterday.  Great!  Found this program called spreeder.com that allows you to speed read things at a million times as fast as you probably should be trying to read them.  I have a feeling at one point speed reading seemed like a good idea to a lot of people.  Fuck it, that's the kind of thing I'm into so I'm going to ride it out.  If you crank that puppy up to 2000 wpm you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 20 minutes.

Getting onto the train of thought someone established years ago is about as good as getting your own stream of consciousness going.  The trenches and grooves are already there, all you have to do is fall out of the cart and get swept along in them like an avalanche.  The secret is the opposite of zen, you get your brain cooking at 20 thousand miles per hour and try to have your hands keep up with it.  This is my personal motivational speech before beginning writing, it should be in parentheses.

Day 2 of the story from yesterday.  It's not that I'm feeling unoriginal, but this George guy should go into town and buy some spelunking equipment.  There's nothing more interesting than buying gear.

            Story about the hole continued

            That night George had a long vivid dream that he could not recall in great detail in the morning.  He was performing in a sort of balancing act, the rest of the performers were women dressed in Hula gear.  He was jumping onto a series of wooden pegs, avoiding being pummeled by a barrage of fruits and legumes being hurled by the towns folk.  The inhabitants of this island village looked cross and angry simultaneously, clapping at individual rhythms and shouting foreign words at the sun.  Dream George tried his best not to make eye contact with the crowd, as is the nature of dreams if he had been able to do so it might have shattered the whole series of thoughts, but even so he thought it of the utmost importance to keep his eyes focused on his feet.  The pegs George jumped from varied in height, and as he jumped from one to the next he was never able to establish a real rhythm or confidence.  In the distance, he saw a little cabin with a light on which he recognized without a doubt as being his own, yet he felt no desire to return there.

            Sitting upright in bed and rubbing his forehead with his thumb and index finger, George started to wonder about the hole.  He reached for the chain on the lamp next to the bed, and the mattress moved with him as he turned.  Winslow was asleep next to the door of the trailer, ears and arms in a heap.  Looking out the window, George saw only pitch dark other than a crescent moon jumping out of the darkness like the tab in a popup book.

            Flipping on the light, George thought of going through his belongings which were still tied together in a neat square and covering the majority of the trailers floor.  The thought of uncovering his cellphone and checking the messages alarmed him, however as it was an inevitability he hoped there’d be no reception in this hinterland retreat.

In the closet George found a series of old magazines and a few hat boxes full of old receipts.  There must have been more here at one point.  More people, more than just Uncle Smokestacks.  Sitting down on the bed, George started pawing through some National Geographics.

The morning sun pierced through the window as if it were a magnifying glass.  Tossing the magazines off his stomach, George rose and struggled in vain to exercise a crick from his neck.  Refilling the dog dish with fresh circular meat chunks, George grabbed the water dish and a jug for himself and headed down to a forested spring.  The spring was on the opposite side of the lake, beyond the interstate over a few brooks. 

Before he could set off, he caught sight of of Uncle Smokestacks in the distance, waving his hands overhead. 

“I’m riding into town, few things I need to pick up!”  Smokestacks called out.  “Want to hitch a ride?”  George thought better of tredging a sabbatical the few miles to the spring, opting instead to buy bottled water in town.  “Great!”  George called out.  “One minute!”

Quickly running inside to change into the same thing he wore yesterday, George dumped what was left of a thermos of day old water into the dogs dish, thought about chaining the dog to the house, but then realizing he had no collar decided instead to take the guy with him.  It’s like taking care of a baby with the reverse Midas Touch, he thought to himself.

George had to sit in the back of the trailer, the passenger side of Smokestacks Pickup had no seat in it.  They tried to keep a conversation going shouting over the sounds of the road, but Smokestack had this bad habit of trying to make eye contact when he was in a conversation, and George thought it would be better to mind his own business and enjoy the passing scenery. 

Outside of some tall grass, a water tower, telephone wires, and an occasional barn there wasn’t much to see.  George hadn’t been able to explore around town much; arriving at the bus station he had too much stuff to carry with him to do much on foot.  Still, from what he did see there wasn’t much to get excited about.  A decent sized general store, 1950s era gas station, a diner, some trailers hitched to the back of such places, that was about all there was to see.  A few indiscriminate abandoned buildings sat boarded up and useless around the periphery, this was a veritable ghost town.

The truck jumped when Smokestacks pulled up the emergency break, and recoiled again when he slid out of the cabin.  Dust and bits of straw flew up into George’s face, and in the process something got into his right eye.  Squinting, he grabbed the dog and released the hatch of the truck, jumping out onto a sandy dune.  Smokestacks gesticulated to follow him, and began a lazy saunter towards the general store. 

“Truck can only hold so much,”  Smokestacks warned.  “Wouldn’t say anything, but the last guest I had didn’t understand that.”

Grabbing a cart, George was impressed by the amount of American flags in the store.  The place was wall to wall decorated with flags.  Collecting some bottles of water, a rope, a wrench, some knee high waterproof boots, some of those stretchy gloves, a few cans of baked beans, and beef jerky.  The cashier chuckled at him at the register, making a wisecrack about digging for buried gold.  “The kids new in town”, Smokestack said, eyeballing the many varieties of chewing tobacco behind the register.

On the trip back, George thought about what was left of his life.  It was just him, his dog, this old farmhand, and a giant hole.  When life gives you that giant hole, it’s better than nothing.  He kept his mind off of what his family and friends were doing back in the city.  It was usually enough to think about his fiancee to keep his mind from wanting to wander.

You kind of picture what the next thing that is going to happen is like in a movie, but try not to move to it too quickly.  It's about not getting too excited, I think.  This all has to become something you naturally do, alright; the quality I'm looking for here is confidence.  See ya tomorrow.