Day 35

             This one is going to be especially bad, today.  But it will be especially true.  True and bad are synonymous because you try to distance yourself from what you're writing to avoid being self conscious.  Self consciousness is the most paramount evil to try to avoid in life as well as writing, some people are trying to make me believe.  You're supposed to tell about "what you know", regardless of how trivial or bland or self-explanatory that might be.  So, yeah, it takes a lot of "bravery" to write, whether or not that's actual bravery or just a Don Quixote willingness to accept a challenge.  Things will start to happen once these characters become real, and you only fail when you stop.  Where's all my negative feedback?

His old interests started to fade away.  He no longer felt the desire or urge to watch the TV, movies, or internet.  The only time TV was necessary was when he was entertaining a girl, his interests had become multitudinous and elevated in his own mind and his newly expanded vocabulary created a gap.  He sat with his legs dangling in the precipice.

The toiletseat was still warm.  Living with Phillistines had its perks.  The toilet was always warm.  His paranoia was finally receding after years of wasted frivolous movement.  The key was abstraction, the other side of the coin of obfuscation, an objective reality which is created from the inside out, not thrust onto the world like a million fishing hooks on a placid lake.  They were not out to get you, they just didn’t understand what meaning there was in your study, which was admittedly absent minded and misguided.  “They want the best for you,”  His mother, the rudimentary voice of reason, proposed a blanket statement.

There was no point to these friendships, anyone who hadn’t been absorbed into the blue collar world were pretentious pseudo-adults.  The subtlety of character and simplicity of manners and behavior had never appeared important until he started watching for characters, trying to recreate daily life.  The burly barrel chested almond skinned man dragging the wire bird cage down the street was once just a weirdo, but now it turned out he was real, he was chasing something, there was meaning in what he was doing.  It could be rationalized.

He pictured himself in a new place.  A one bedroom, a studio, something inexpensive.  He had to prove to himself he could live independently, and could see his wings growing feather after feather, extended metacarpal, splayed and flattened biceps, the natural beauty that goes along with suffering transformation.  Self-adoring beauty moonlighting as discovery, which would no doubt give weight to new experiences and meaning to draw from.  In his superficiality, he still perceived meaning as a bottomless well, which you could draw water from which had no implicit significance, it would provide mental stimulation and artificially enhanced experience for temporary amounts of time, but it was not drawn through an irrigation system, there was no water wheel, there was no one tending to this well. 

He imagined himself a village of hardworking folk, this water being what they needed to exist, they had to recycle and renew this resource which was there in abundance.  The men in the village woke up at six, this resource was more potent when gathered out of their comfort zones, but the creator secretly doubted these men to be slackers and only efficient in his own imagination.  He would go there in the morning, and each man would be asleep with a straw hat over his eyes, laying back with their arms behind their head by a running stream.  Some would be chewing on stalks of wheat (or whatever their equivalents would be in his own world), content with the amount of work they had already done.  “This is hard work!” He’d call out in a self-deceiving tone, immediately questioning what hard work was or who it would benefit.

Each day presented moments that were ripe for creation.  He tried to demystify the concept which remained ingrained in his head like a railroad spike, that at the moment the geniuses of the world created their geniuses creations, let’s say The Rolling Stones “Satisfaction”, that for some reason it was this hallowed, sacred moment which was ripe for creating music.  The band made the creative process possible for themselves by establishing a consistent creative process which eventually created the expectation for success, Keith Richards did not allow moments to slip by like fish in the stream when they were starving.  They were here to catch fish, and they would remain here standing vigil until there was continued success, or atleast a product.

His friends were the idols of his previous group of peers.  Like a handful of sand, the only fine grains that remained at the end of the scoop were stuck in between his fingers, uncomfortable and unappealing.  Frozen in that moment, he could not remove those fragments or he’d be standing alone, but he could not unfreeze himself to wash those hands.  The adult, responsible thing would be to dust his hands and retreat from nature, but become a hermit at such a young age?  The logic and sense of music was gone, too.  It was a motivator, but also a soundtrack for boring, unimportant daily routines. 

Forming and influencing the behavior of this small village was an attempt to improve.  Setting out the groundwork, creating this world even inside his own head felt like progress, something to be built off of.  The men of the village improved at siphoning the well for its purest energies, they would excavate the well completely over time, appoint a foreman, their sons would continue in the trade, untapped potential formed mountains which would far outlive this generation.  The men started to build shanties and shelters underneath the ground, in an act to show solidarity to their overseer who they only assumed had to exist.  Even if this person did not exist, the work was becoming meaningful and rewarding.  Although the reward liquid didn’t sell as an export, it sustained the colony. An occasional tourist would cringe and wipe their mouth after tasting its bitterness, but he might remember that taste later on for nothing else but inability to forget it. 

The women of the village worked to exorcise ancient demons through discipline and work-for-the-sake-of-work. The children of the village sprouted out through stalks in the ground instantaneously, the plant would grow into a hollow wide appendage and dark black bodied balls with red caps would rest like turtles flipped onto their backs between rows of crops.  They would attempt to grow long, weapon-like arms unless kept pressed down into the earth.  Rows of stables were lined with the adolescents of this new species, who grew bulky veiny haunches that reduced them to verticality in form.

Just getting to a thousand isn't enough but I'm obsessive which seems to be the opposite of disciplined.  I need to manage my time more wisely.
Looking for better jobs.  Economic times or whatever.  Better just keep the mind sharp with reading and doing this all the time.  It's not work if you enjoy so work until you enjoy it.  Or one of a million epigrams.  Damn it, what was I going to tell you?  Oh, when you notice subtle progress being made on anything, on the minor scale of reading every day and getting your bookmark further in the book, or even more minor scale of learning a new word and attempting to use it, it feels like there's a little progress bar on your person somewhere that keeps ticking away with the little hourglass.  Technology should slowly make us more machinelike.

Day 34

                  Start writing again today!  I overslept and I might not have a chance to get this done.  I was overambitious with the alarm clock so I must have woken up and turned it off without any awareness of what I was doing.  Now I've got an hour and a half to do this.

                 Edit:  Now I finished this after work right before the cutoff.  Go me.   Thought it turned out ok though.  Finally got something to happen.  Sort of described it.  Atleast kind of getting the concept.  It's like cooking from scratch.  I know Bronco is probably completely two dimensional to you guys, but I have a general idea of who he is and it seems like he should be able to handle himself in these weird situations.  Weakest part was the Mr. Haisley thing yesterday, but at some point I am going to have to write about a guy meeting with his boss at work, so I might as well get the shitty ones out of the way.  Hard work and dedication?  Yeah.
           Plus, it's only day 34.  Let's see how day 68 looks compared to this.  You gotta start somewhere.

               

            He combed through the obituaries with a steaming cup of cocoa and a pair of readinglasses that still had the tag sticking out from the top.  The peered over the paper from his corner table at Pancake Variety House, seeing cheepskate dads and their unhappy families eating unholy piles of fluff.  Bronco, wearing his Denver Broncos jersey and NFL champions hat, looked more suspicious than he realized.  The waitresses were discussing their prospects from the safe overhead fluorescent lights of the hostess station, he had been there for hours already and was inadvertently making a spectacle of himself.

            “More coffee?” A waitress made her rounds, Bronco pushed an oversized mug out to the edge of the table like a prisoners bowl. 

            The hotel was on the other side of the block, standing there like a stable for purebred horses.  It was a more upscale joint,  Bronco felt like a sore thumb around its inhabitants and preffered this cross the street vibe.  It was past two-thirty, the sun was peeking between its cloud hands at it’s domain below.  All the old people were out running errands, the bus stops were littered with them. 

            “Is that your car?” An important looking restaurant professional asked Bronco.  Concerned, Bronco looked up.  “Yeah.  What about it?”  He said.

            “Just admiring it.”  He said in an ominous tone.

            “Yeah, it’s a nice car, yeah I know it is.”  Bronco folded the paper against his hand.  Suddenly all the eyes at the bar were focused out the window at Bronco’s vehicle.  “What?”  He asked petulantly.  “Some unwritten code against guys like me?”

            Bronco stuck around for twenty minutes to prove he wasn’t afraid or uncomfortable.  He stared at the clock furtively, fighting back as much of the coffee as he could.  He wasn’t a coffee drinker.  He left four dollars on the table and got up to leave.

            Getting into the car, everything inside the pancake house had gone back to normal.  He thought he must have violated some unwritten law about sitting too long.  Or maybe an important person needed that booth.  Twenty seconds later, he was out on the road.

            Pushing the front door open slowly, there were no signs of commotion or action coming from the inside of the room.  He checked the answering machine, no new messages.  He relistened to the one about the guy sending the other guy over, and tried to piece together what reaction the voice on the other end would have to knowing one of his men disappeared under Bronco’s watch.

            Opening the fridge, Bronco grabbed six cans of Busch Light by their plastic rings and cleared a spot off on the couch.  He flipped the TV on.  The basement door loomed across the room, enormous in its presence.  He pictured what he knew to be behind it, his head pounding with disbelief.  He pulled the envelope Mr. Haisler gave him out of his jacket pocket and set it on the table, he wasn’t in the mood to go to the litigators.

            Three beers in, the characters on TV sitcoms started to get more friendly.  The newsladies winked and told their stories tongue in cheek, lurching forward and lecherously breathing into Bronco’s space.  His favorite sports teams were all playing, although none of them had been scheduled for that night.  He kicked his feet up and sat back on the long purple couch, feeling genuinely good for the first time in weeks.

            Bronco’s eyes closed and opened and closed and remained shut.  The street lights came on.  A drop of invisible moisture fell in a constant stream on the bridge of his nose.  He dreamed he was being skipped in line again and again to get onto the magic hippo ride.  His tiny friend gripped his jacket resolutely, staring up at Bronco with his upper dental arcade over his lower lip.

            Bronco jumped to his feet, threw a throw pillow across the room and caught the couch behind him with an oustretched backwards hand.  He stood on tiptoe for a minute, startled by a sound he thought he might have heard.  The wind swept the shutters against the side of the house, the front door towered like an obelisk.  He had ran out of beer, he realized, looking in the fridge, which looked especially clean because it was empty.  There was cheese in the door.  The microwave clock repeated 12:00 infinitely.

            He squeezed a frozen burrito out of it’s plastic encasement onto a plate and threw it into the microwave.  He watched it spin as the timer counted down, but got dizzy and had to steady himself by looking down at his feet.  There was a loud squeek from the upstairs room with the red chair.  He stared at nothing in particular, trying to dull his sight so his ears would work better.  There it was again.  A fast rustling sounded like visible damage to his stairs.  At the same moment, through the window Bronco swore he saw a tree which was visibly getting taller and shorter in rapid succession.

           He grabbed the phone off of its cradle on the wicker table and phoned his sister.

            “Arty?”  She asked, bewildered.  “Arty, it’s past 2 in the morning.”

            “Sis,”  Bronco didn’t correct her that he was now Bronco.  “Some weird things are happening here.  I don’t think it’s just in my mind.”

            “Are you drinking again, Art?”  She asked, wiping her eyes.  “Art, it’s ok if you are.  But I’m sure it’s just the wind.  It’s getting really windy out there.”

            A bump gurgled toward him through the darkness, and a sound as if an ottoman was being dragged across the floor sent a bassy timbre into the carpet where it disappeared.  “Sis, I gotta go.”  Arty briefly felt nostalgia after hearing her voice.  She didn’t protest as he hung up the phone, only saying “Goodnight, Arty.”

            He crawled across the basement floor to the bottom of the stairs.  The chair was no longer in the middle of the room, and a thick mist hung in the upstairs like a rainforest.  The stairs appeared to have been pulled through a funhouse mirror while retaining the optical illusions.  Bronco sat prone.

             

Day 33

hard·scrab·ble

   [hahrd-skrab-uhl] Show IPA

adjective providing or yielding meagerly in return for much effort; demanding or unrewarding: the hardscrabble existence of mountainside farmers.


           Read my first one and yeah I'm better.  I might be better in the way a brand new toothbrush is better than a two month old one, but still that's better alright.  I'm going to get more driven and ambitious in upcoming months.  It sounds like an excuse but I believe I need that comfort level first.

            Bronco pulled up to the secure lot with his headlights beaming through the big gates.  It looked like a scene straight out of Mad Max, and Bronco did his best to slick his hair back with a can of pomade and a long-handeled black comb.  He saw the Old Bronco for a moment in the rearview, before his hair snapped back to its original position and he looked into his own eyes.  The determined, grim look on his own face was encouraging; he wasn’t faking it.

            The wooden frame of the horsewire fence squeeked as it was pulled back on its track.  Two mustachoed, sunglassed men glared through the windshield of the car intently as their hands mechanically worked the gate.  Bronco spotted Mr. Haisley through the window of the employee lounge, staring out on his domain like a demented king.  He had a proud, majestic look covering his face like he had recently accomplished something. 

            Bronco was immediately accosted by the two men as he stepped out of the car.  He stood in a T-shape to instill a sense of cooperation, and smiled up at the booth.  The men gestured at him to empty his pockets, which he did, a handful of lint, change, his wallet attached by a chain to his belt loop, a toothpick, an ID badge.  “He’s clean.”  one of the men called out, statuesque.  One of the men opened the door to the lounge, and after Bronco entered, fumbling to put his belongings back in his pockets, they stood sentry by the door.

            “What is it this time, Bronco?”  Mr. Haisley said, working his hands tirelessly at the wheels of his chair to turn it towards the door.  He stared over a pair of bifocles which looked deliberately perched on the end of his pointy upturned nose.  He looked like a proud lion on his last legs, sitting here in his element.  Bronco squeezed the ID badge in his pocket, unfamiliar with where it may have came from.

            Bronco straightened a picture on the wall, eyeing the paper accomplishments in their plastic frames on the wall.  Certified Owner, Class-A License, Bachelor of Science.  Of course, it all signified nothing.  He was a garbage man.

            “Those purple things are back,”  Bronco said, staring out the window at a machine coughing up square shaped clusters of compacted garbage.  He turned slowly, anxiously, afraid of Mr. Haisley’s reaction.

            “They are back?  And didn’t you take care of them, yet?”  Haisley ventred impatiently.

            “Well I did what you said, I grabbed a bat.  Only, there was one this tall,”  Bronco gestured with his hands, followed by a bad impersonation of a lurching beast.  “It ate a guy coming to repossess the house.  The little ones worked with it.”

            “The house is too valuable, Bronco.”  Haisley said, reaching behind him into a satchel slung by a beige strap over the back of his chair.  “How much do you need to buy it back?”

            Bronco hated accepting Mr. Haisley’s money.  He knew the guys outside would come looking for him when he failed at staying afloat again.  Even if there were no strings attached, there was something unmanly about taking handouts.  Still, he thought hard for a second and asked:

            “What about the dead guy?  His car is in my driveway.”  Bronco thought outloud.  Ideas flashed through Bronco’s head.  Just push the damned thing into the gully, if no one had came looking for him yet.  The client had probably already shown up and left. 

            “If you’re finished brainstorming and scratching your balls,”  Haisley said.  “You take this check to the mortgage brokers.”  He wrote in swooping lines, bringing the pen down like he was sewing.  “You tell them I sent you and that you’re not happy about the foreclosure.  You tell them when I ask for more time that it means just that.  I pay my bills.”  Mr. Haisley tore the check and placed it in an envelope, which had a card and a series of notes inside.  “There’s a number on the card in the envelope, call it after you’ve secured the deed.  And the notes are for my lawyer.” 

            Bronco was disinclined to do the laundrylist of busy work Haisley prescribed to him, but this time he thought it would be better to avoid the heat.  He’d have to find a hotel, he thought to himself, although each time he pictured the purple guy in his mind he saw a smiling, magnanimous human face.  “Thanks,”  was all he could muster, the overbearing old man shifting his chair back toward the window with a loud squeek.  The goons tacitly responded by opening the outer door, and Bronco knew it was time to go.

            Tucking the envelope into his other pocket, Bronco tussled with his jacket for a moment looking for his car keys.  Letting mild frustration get the better of him, he felt anger building up inside of his hands like he wanted to punch something.  He looked at the two fat headed goons, who were staring at him impatiently to get out of the driveway so they could close the gate, and thought he could probably take them.  He remembered his girl, Rhonda, had dumped him for losing too many fights as a bouncer at the toughest saloon in the city.  Bronco was overly ambitious back then, he would have fought Mike Tyson had you given him the opportunity to get in the ring with him.  Now, he was more aware of the limits of his abilities.  It wasn’t about fighting fair, or fighting dirty, it was about sheer force.  You weren’t giving him something to think about, you were rearranging the contents of his mind.

            Bronco found the jingly set of keys stuffed under his wallet in the opposite pants pocket.  The anger quietly subsided, and he had the presence of mind to wave to the goons, who looked at each other and then back at him.  He propped his elbow up on the plush leather passenger seat and backed out of the junkyard. 

Day 32

i·ma·go

[ih-mey-goh, ih-mah-] Show IPA

noun, plural -goes, -gi·nes  [-guh-neez] Show IPA.

1.

Entomology. an adult insect.

2.

Psychoanalysis. an idealized concept of a loved one, formed in childhood and retained unaltered in adult life.

ESPNs Streak For the Cash is back to humbling people the way it used to.  We had winners the last two months after a drought of 13 months.  Now no one is getting past 21.  Good.

Day off!  This means I have to read a whole book.  Yup.  I could be spending this time doing something more productive than that, but also doing something much less productive than that.  Althought I am aware that I do have the time to read a whole book and no other obligations, so atleast that will put me in my place. Logically I'll let it slide.  Going to see They Might Be Giants tonight, so if anyone is around just holler.

My own dilemma took shape in attempting to make my brain want to write, which is that I can't stay up late and wake up early.  And I'm always hungry.

            Bronco removed the baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger trophy case, next to the ottoman and the red vinyl chair.  The room wasn’t as dirty as the rest of the house, Bronco had spent the vast majority of recent nights sleeping in the big squishy chair.  He felt like a child in the glovelike hand of the chair, but during the day it could have been a throne.

            The gentle susurrus of the leaves falling outside gave way to the blustering explosions coming out of the exhaust pipe of the realtors car.  It had to be the realtor, the house was in on a side street, a private setting in which each neighbor was the length of a football field away from each other. 

Bronco peered through the faux wood vertical blinds, his hulk of a Mustang taking up much of the driveway.  He chuckled as the irritated pencil neck steered his car half onto the grass and half on the driveway, and then bouncing itself into position at the pull of the parking break.

The rustling outside of the door continued.  Bronco forgot about the loose thing in the house.  Walking tentatively down the stairs, gripping the bat with two hands on the taped handle like a broadsword.  The rotors on the ceiling fan were slowly spinning, and Bronco could hear the rustling of papers as they settled into new spots.  The basement door was still open, but the front door was locked, no windows were open. 

The doorbell rang.  Bronco squinted as he peered through the fisheye peephole, an older man with a bowler hat, a two piece suit and a briefcase stood looking at his watch.  “You’re early!”  Bronco called from the other side of the door.  “Come back in 20!”

Bronco raced to the basement steps, the incessant banging of the man filling the house.  It slowed down and the intensity died seconds later, the man in the bowler hat had gotten ahold of himself.

Bronco went down into the dungeon, hitting the swinging light with the door again.  It glistened dimly and buzzed, like a firefly struck with a flyswatter.  He threw the bat down next to the tunnel and exchanged it for the shovel, but peering in front of him he noticed that the carrots were gone, the bowl was flipped over and he could see beyond where the darkness used to end.  Crawling into the tunnel on all fours, he found that, firstly, he couldn’t squeeze all the way through, and secondly that everything on the other side was glistening with a purplish hue.  Bronco pulled himself out of the hole with a reverse manuever which to the average onlooker would have been like the wriggling of a fish.

He heard muffled screams from outside followed by a snap.  Moments later, a mansized purplish creature with a green mohawk sauntered down the stairs one stair at a time, dragging the carcass of the man in the suit behind him.  After some deliberation, Bronco switched back to the bat.  At the bottom of the flight, the creature looked over at Bronco, dropped the body with one arm and saluted Bronco, then picked it back up.

Bronco inched his way towards the stairs, tossing the bat aside to avoid any suspicions.  A group of tiny purple people emerged in a stream from the wall, and the big purple one shrunk back to normal size.  As a group, they pulled the man in a bowler hat through although he did not fit, bending him and twisting him to whatever shape necessary.  He became crooked with a series of small cracks.

Bronco tugged on his coat and retrieved the keys to his car from the right pocket.  On the shiny oversized keychain, an 8 ball and a bottle opener shaped like a bottle dangled, along with the ignition key for the Bronco.  He was halfway through the door when the dilemma of whether or not to seal the basement door struck him.  There were two-by-fours, a hammer, and nails in the garage that he had planned to use for renovations when he came into possession of the property but hadn’t gotten around to.  He thought he better not make these things mad, if they had forgiven him for his earlier transgression.

The car tore around the lane, up steep hills in a flurry, braked at the bottom of the inclines with elegance and grace.  Bronco would live in this puppy if he had to.  He drove past the office he used to use, back when he knew what he was doing.  He flicked the building off, a man in the window of his old office looking out at the blue and red mustang hauling ass through the plainstreets with a hypertrophied finger out the window.  Bronco scoffed that there was already another man in his office, shifting his eyes between the road as seen through the narrow viewfinder of the windshield and the familiar sites of the street.  Humans in this area stayed inside their houses for the most part, the closest grocery store up by the Interstate a good 10 miles.  The common ritual was to buy in bulk, filling cellars and pantries with goods like an ice age was coming.

Bronco stepped through the doors of his old stomping ground, The Jungleroom.  Where there used to be nary a resting spot, even during the day, now there were two or threes older men with giant steins in front of them.  At the bar, no one turned around to see who entered, Bronco’s popularity wavering with his bravado.  Autographed pictures of TV stars from the 80s lined the outer walls, framed in plastic and hung with screws. 

“John Willbury still work here?”  Bronco inquired, shoveling a handful of peanuts from the bowl at the bar.  The patron raised a finger in the air, he was in the middle of counting his register. 

“Ok, what will you be having?”  An unfamiliar face turned toward Bronco, not pleased with his imposition.

Note to self:  On days where it feels like I can keep writing, just keep writing.  Because, there are other days when it's impossible to keep going or even reach the finish line.  Duly noted.  My writing sucks today I'm unhappy with myself.

Day 31

Turned in my grad school check.  Hopefully I can get in.  I'm trying to wake up earlier and do this stuff, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning if possible eventually.  Still can't wake up before 7 if my life depends on it.

This one isn't as bad because I got into a rhythm at one point where it kind of unconsciously wrote itself.  And I think that's what we're going for, really.  Where you can hear what you're saying and you don't hate it, and it keeps coming.  If I had more time there'd be a lot more here.

            The armchair rested by the head of the outdoor pool.  Bronco sat staring at the “For Sale” sign on the law, tempted to chop the thing down although he knew if he could just take it down the whole thing would be easier.  His hatchback Ford Bronco sat in the driveway, his namesake, a purple blur that appeared to always be in motion.  It hovered over the cement, like a wild tiger which was only sleeping standing up with it’s tensed muscles ready to spring into action at the signal of the smallest danger.

            Bronco opened the basement door and hit the light which hhung from the string.  It illuminated the dust particles in the air and gave the whole place a cavernous feeling.  The dingy mildewed little shack was dwarfed in size by its basement, after the lengthy excavation process Bronco had worked tirelessly at.  He saw his pickaxe and mounted flashlight down on the wall, still impressed with himself in the way he had used duct tape and gorilla glue to fasten the thing in succinct focus on the tunnel he was uncovering.  Mounds of dirt which was a dark black on the bottom and almost dry on the top covered the ground on both sides of the wooden flight of stairs, obscuring the dimensions and shapes of the walls behind them. 

Clearing the cobwebs from the tunnel, Bronco filled a dish with carrots and lettuce and left it at the hole at the end of the corridor.

“Here pretty pretty pretty,”  Bronco cooed in his most affable of voices.  He coughed, clearing his throat, as his voice grew gruff due to his smokers cough. “Cmon goddamn it.”  He growled.

It was Bronco’s fault the creature wasn’t coming out.  He had dug too far, directly into its home, and when it implored him to stop with a firm hand in his face he had kicked it in the teeth.  It disappeared through a tunnel of its own making which met up with Bronco’s tunnel, and Bronco assumed it had made its way undeground to an organized town of some sort.  There was a civilized streak in its eye when it glared up at him with the imprint of his boot on its cheek, and after stubborn weeks of self righteousness he decided to make amends.

Bronco sat waiting by the hole sitting facing the stairs when he heard the phone ring upstairs.  He let it go to the answering machine, retrieving a lighter and a Pall Mall Red from the pocket on his leather jacket, and as he puffed the thing without steadying it with his hands he heard:  “Uhhhh, Mr. Bronco, this is Steve from the office.  We have found an interested buyer in your property.”  (Probably want to tear it down and turn it into a parking lot) “We expect you to be on your best behavior when he comes by, our realtor will make an appearance a half-an-hour beforehand to discuss… ahhh… logistics with you.  He asked I be stringent in demanding you are out of the house when the clients arrive, you may want to find something… ahhh constructive to do.  He’ll be there at two oclock tomorrow. Thanks Mr. Bronco.”

            The sounds of a phone being fumbled and then slammed onto a hook along with exhaustive sighs turned into a dial tone which then faded out.  The answering machine ran to the end of its tape and he could hear it flip over. 

“If I had a cellphone, I probably would have answered that”  Bronco snickered to himself as he kicked the mud off of his steel toed boots.  He left the tray of carrots by the entrance way, not noticing a hand reaching through and grabbing a handful of carrots as he ascended the stairs.

             Bronco’s abode was littered with garbage; half empty Michelob Ultra cans, pizza boxes, newspaper.  The surfaces of his half circle table in the den was covered with manilla envelopes.  Flipping a chair out from under the table oh one leg and recklessly plumping himself down onto it, he flipped on the TV.  As the tube fizzled into focus, the sound of some televangelist’s prattling was already into focus.  “Turn your life around!”  He called.  “Do not let the lechers change in you what is really true, and good!  Be good on your own, I don’t need to be standing up here telling you what you should already know!”

Bronco appreciated the stern talking to.  He flipped through his folders, audits and tax forms and lawyers letters lined each.  They were separated into months, and as so Bronco could relive the crumbling of his business from the early stages of pestering cajoling from their transformation months later to insistent demands.  It was the devil, Bronco was sure of it, the way the voice in the print mutated and began to show its true self the more Bronco attempted to will it to do otherwise.

A woman hadn’t been over in months.  He couldn’t recruit the coffee shop waitress to sit on the roof with him and the BB Gun after he let the house become such a mess, the For Sale sign on the front lawn made it easy to dismiss all of his big talk.  He resigned himself to eating the greasy hamhocks and chitlins from the diner up the street with the Platinum Delta Card in earlier years he swore was a contingency plan.  Now, the card was only helping him let himself go.

Bronco raked the lawn, trimmed the bushes, and cleaned up the pizza boxes into a neat pile.  He imagined a younger version of himself watching from between two large trees like Mustafa’s disembodied head, turning away each time he looked up pleadingly for advice or consolation.  He sighed as he lifted the top of the dumpster, inserting the contents of the tied yellow garbage bag into the side marked Garbage Only.  “This is garbage,”  He thought.

Bronco was never going to wash his sheets, and he inserted himself between their starchy hardened layers like a vampire back into its coffin.  He stared at the ceiling holding the top of the blanket below his head with two curled biceps.

Day 30

This one's awful.  Sorry guys

 

            Don pulled the switch on the red rubber machine standing in front of him.  It resembled an old fashioned lever like those in a News Room.  The cylindrical tube shifts in a circular motion as a green liquid fills it.  Rising to fill the grey brick room, which already contained an old fashioned stove used for heating purposes.  The arms of the rose with the clanking of steam, and began alternating as the machine began swinging hectically around like helicopter rotors caught in a palm tree.

Don stood back.  A flash of light enveloped the room in a pink glow.  The others were still on the other side of the door, if this machine exploded this time they would be fine.  The gamma beams might eat through his own cells, and he wasn’t sure what this would do to him.  His face shone with a large vertical scar where a shattered piece of metal extension still protruded from his face.  His arms were also tenderized and scraped, with the skin taking on a dark red hue.  Still, he stood upright and bent forward, shielding his face from the light of the furnace.

          He touched the skin on the back sides of his hands, it felt softer than it had after the motorcycle accident.  Stooping down over The Bodyguard, he could see the snakebite holes slowly recede back into his neckline.  The snake itself had vanished, although this species of snake were more like leaches, latching on and pulling themselves in.    The Bodyguard propped his upper half into a sitting position, rubbing his eyes with the inside of his thumb and index finger.

            The shouting and banging on the outside of the door had stopped, as well. The Kripdoff robot could no longer be hear whirring, emitting its high pitched wind as it spun itself recklessly from wall to wall.  The sound of its thunderbolts were also a distant memory.  He glanced at The Bodyguard, who shrugged and tightened the gauze wrapped around his hands

            “Don,”  The bodyguard noticed the scientists presence.  “I thought you were dead.”  At the rattle of a turbine in the distance, he pullled himself up one knee at a time. 

            Don had seen when the bodyguard was thrown through this door, splayed out before him like a sardine on a cutting board.  The giant man had jumped onto the neck of the Kripdoff robot like a child on the shoulders of an adult, to be tossed off with brain rattling supremecy in the completion of the metaphor.

            Don pawed through his wallet, which was dwarfed by the size of his hands, and boomed:  “Fuckin robot took my cash.”  He looked behind the cash and saw that his pictures of his children were missing as well.  His credit cards were still there, as well as the number of Mitsy, a little blonde number he met a week before getting lunch while his car was in the shop. 

            The door opened easily from the inside.  It revealed the fact it was bent on its frame when Don pushed through, an eye extended from his head and attempting to survey the area behind the door.  He heard a sudden call from his right side, a voice that sounded familiar called out “Don!” And he turned and pushed the door on a ninety degree angle to the outside brick wall.  The basement looked larger in the darkness, in the low light the shadows were off limits.

            Don broke for the freight elevator ignoring the churning and sputtering hiding behind the dark.  The Bodyguard grabbed hold of the swinging elevator door and pulled it down behind him as they dove into the booth.  The machine in the boilerroom started its initial countdown stages.  Moments of silnce were intermittently interrupted by the cracks of woods, and the sound of batteries melting.

            The elevator let them off on floor level, where they entered a flat, tall but narrow hotel lobby hallway.  The Bodyguard hastily grabbed a dixie cup from the dispenser attached to the water cooler and refreshed himself by throwing cup after cup of the gurgling solution.  Don’s arms were turning a darker shade of red, some purple mixed into his pigment with bumps popping out like miniature anthills.  He held his Popeye forearms in front of him like a cat lying down.

            It wasn’t a suitable second for a break, as the conference room doors swung open and a birdlike automaton with reverse jointed legs bolted through.  Don and the bodyguard knew better than to look behind him as they crashed through the gift job.  Don wrapped souvenir T-shirts over his arms as the bird came crashing through the windows of the shop, the entrance a concave apex of a shell.

            The Bodyguard swung a stantion at the nearby bird thing, and it sprayed electricity from its shaking neck as its legs thrashed wildly.  The sound of a chopper sounded outside and they knew it had to be Dungent, the crippled engineer of the hotel.  He had rigged a pulley system that allowed him to fly when he operated the main piloting equipment with his hands.

            Don thought about the nuke back at headquarters.  He knew there had to be a way to harness the energy from inside the inactive bomb to get the time machine going again.  He had built the prototype before and was inclined to do it right this time.  The memory loss mechanism in the current time machine only provided lateral jumps through gaps in time, which would fuzzy Don’s memory.  The Body Guard may have been unphased, but he would switch into a primal mode in any extreme circumstances and he’d be as good as an animal. 

            They both hung from the lower rungs of the helicopter.  The Bodyguard dropped into a graceful roll and reached up to help Don, who’s arms were still in extreme pain from the second degree burns.  Luckily, the bodyguard was a gentle assistant with a keen understanding of empathy.  Don shook his head to acknowledge the copter pilot, and the coast seemed to be clear.

Day 29

FOUR PAGEVIEWS TODAY? You guys are a bunch of fucking vultures tearing me apart.

I love you guys.  I really do.

            The correspondence was on shaky ground since he accidentally let slip the tidbit about his plan for the eel farm.  Americans don’t look at eels with the same mild intoxication that foreigners do, and she was his harshest critic.

            Why do my ex girlfriends have to criticize my business ventures?  Thought Peter, unloading vat upon vat of salt water into an oversized opaque tub.  He lit a candle in the backwoods shack because the auxiliary lamp system had led to an overheat and a fire times before.

            He couldn’t figure out how to begin his letter.  “Dear Abigail,”  It started, which was a fine enough start.  He thought about whether or not to tell her of the foreclosure, his mothers sudden good luck in the stock trade, his brothers alchemy formula he had sold to a popular magazine.  He didn’t trust the way she talked to his older brother, it was distinctly different than the way she talked to him.  As a matter of fact, she treated everyone other than him the same way as each other, he stared with a furrowed brow through goggles at the contents of his still eelless tub.

            The eel guy said this was a sure thing.  If you can’t make money off of selling the eels as pets, an endeavor which sounded exceedingly implausible, you could fight them or race them at a local track.  The man at the circus smiled widely at this proposition and said to Peter, “You get the eels, the tracks here for you.”  The unfortunate part of this was that from the research Peter had done at the local wildlife reserve, eels aren’t particularly speedy or competetive creatures.  Dangling shrimp in front of them on a miniature hippodrome would have to work, he thought, crossing his fingers that eels were like greyhounds.

            The managers office attached to the shack looked like one of the fake lodges at a Six Flags or wild western themed photography studio.  Peter had simply thrown everything away from the surfaces of the desk, filing cabinets, and end tables.  He then repopulated the area with pictures of obscure family members he did not enjoy spending time with, to perpetuate the lie on the sign that this store was in fact a family run business. 

            The neon sign arrived in the next week.  "Pete and Sons Eel Sanctuary and Sanctorium” Pete in a bright green and the word “eel” stretched out so that both Es looked like curvy lines with eyes on the top.  The local entrepeneurs stopped by to give their condolences about having an eel store.  “It’s a tough economy,” The congregation echoed.  “I haven’t even opened yet,”  Pete thought mostly to himself but also outloud.  The knick knack store gave Pete a grab bag of scents and smells in bottles with white linen plugging the tops wrapped with straw bows, the grab bag itself being a basket lined with white linen with a decorative bow tied above the handle.  The korean barbeque sent it’s chef, a jocular surly man named Singh who showed a transparent desire to buy Pete’s eels which were too old to race.  Since none of the eels had started racing yet, his apparance was short and to the point; he dropped off a carry out menu and gave Pete a short grave speech about running a business.

            “Running a business not easy,”  Singh put a hand on Pete’s face.  “You do not just wake up and run business.  You have to run business before you go to bed, when you’re eating with your wife.  Not easy.”  He made his way back across the street in his long black rubber boots, trampling through the mud like a sumo wrestler.

            It had been a week and Pete didn’t finish his letter to Abigail.  She sent a few more in the interim.  She was back in school, she had got an assistant job at a TV station.  Pete remembred what Tina Fey said about people who worked at TV stations, something about them all being part of entertainment tonight style shows.  How in recent years, in addition to a news, weather, and sports segment many regional stations had picked up entertainment parts to their shows.  He couldn’t quite get his mind around what was wrong about working for local media, the superfluousness of the service didn’t elude him, but why was it that jobs were being created for this specific task above intellectual jobs like writing or literary criticism?

            He’d catch himself in these cycles of negative thought which, when they erupted, prevented constructive or thoughtful jargon from transmitting itself out of his brain and onto the paper.  Even his handwriting looked harsher than usual, his hand unbeknownest to himself gripping the pen a little harder, carving through the paper onto the desk like an epitaph on a gravestone.

            He reread his most recent letter with anxiousness as he sipped his morning coffee:

            “Dearest Abigail,

            The business hasn’t picked up yet but it will in time.  No one has done this kind of thing before.  You wouldn’t understand what kind of work goes into being a pioneer.  How’s it going at the station?”

            That’s as far as he got.  He rolled this one up in a ball and threw it into a recently emptied garbage receptacle.  If it wasn’t for taking out the garbage in the morning, which consisted mostly of apple cores and balled up stationary bearing the embroidered Pete and Sons family crest, he would have had nothing to do most days.

            The next day, when he had given up writing all together, he found himself at the Korean restaurant across the street watching the lobsters swim in a circle in a circular tank which was screwed into the bar.  Singh was a different man when he was working, it appeared to Peter, picking up ordinaty white children and placing them on his shoulders, smiling over at Pete from the kitchen as he snapped the necks of chickens or brought a meat cleaver down with a thump into the body of an indiscernible lump of meat.

            At the end of the bar sat a cowboy with a long grey braid under a cowboy hat, the hat sitting on top of his hair so that the shape of the top of his head was entirely viewable.  On the stool next to him sat a blonde dressed similarly, except with cutoff denim shorts and a shirt covered in pink hearts tied in the middle rather than overalls.  Each time Pete looked over, the cowboy would flash him an angry gaze and pivot a few degrees further in his direction.

 

day 28

Not exposure therapy but exposure.  You have to expose yourself to yourself as your toughest judge.  You have to find out what you can't do and what you can do based on your own truthful judgment, and then keep raising the bar.  You have to pretend there's an audience watching you and they can tell whether you're bullshitting or not.  And you can't allow your bullshit to be enough.

  *end me yelling at myself in the mirror*

                  The bus veered down the narrow belt-line of oaktrees, the consistent sound of branches snapping like a giant twisting the branches off of a tree.  The bus driver was walking on eggshells, convinced each one of these noises was a new scrape or scratch on the bus, and he was bracing himself for this horror once he eventually was able to scrutinize the damage more closely.  Mr. Aaronson sat in the seat behind the driver, studiously filling in a sheet on a clipboard with an ordinary Office Depot pen he fancied as one of the quill variety.  His wife sat next to him, long since giving up the urge to make him communicate or socialize in any degree, and now sat placated with a mindless smile across her tightly stretched mummy lips. 

The little CB radio next to the steering wheel howled as it sat precariously close to falling into the wheel well.  The kids at the back of the bus wrestled over a pair of binochulars that originally belonged to someone that wouldn’t claim them.  Hank, the one who was above average sized for his age, was delegated control over them by his followers, twin brothers Arnold and Allen (who’s parents Amy and Art had a sense of humor).  Hank stared amused through the binochulars at the trees in increased detail before deciding to chuck the thing out of the sticky halfopened window.

Dave let the fact that his binochulars were lost in the woods slide.  He took a deep breath to steel himself and turned the volume of his tape player up, along with a ritual readjustment of his headphone chords.  He thought of what his mother had warned him, “The kids are going to be exactly like they were last time, they will not respect you, they’ll hate you more for coming back”, but he insisted he would be fine, and she sat clutching the dog on the porch as he road off. 

There was a tacit understanding amongst the other riders about Dave’s presence.  He was “the guy who freaked out and took off” the year before.  A park ranger had forcibly brought him back like a grown cat picks up its cub by the neck, and he walked broken and defeated back to the bottom bunk he called home, broken and defeated as he heard the sounds of ridiculing youth outside the windows.  He stayed in this catatonic state for the majority of the summer, seldom leaving his quarters, which was not usually permitted by counselors except in the case of a camper who may kill themselves. 

His love for another campers girl, Isabella, had been outted.  Mean Charlie Green (a nickname Charlie had bestowed upon himself), found a series of Dave’s love letters stashed away inside his pillow case.  Charlie was a meddlesome and hectoring kid, aided in his establishment of infamy by the reputation of his older brother, a 12^th grader who was kicked out and sent to military school for widely debated reasons.  He may have gotten a hand job from that young TA (one of the kids may have just seen Rushmore), he might have been cooking meth with the recently fired science teacher (Breaking Bad), some believed he was a werewolf (a completely unfounded theory which didn’t explain expulsion… Teen Wolf?), or maybe he had planted a bomb in the teachers lounge (completely original).  Either way, this was his kid brother, who was, by popular majority, hot shit.

Dave’s paranoia prevented him from fighting back.  You don’t fight the cool kid to become cool, it’d just turn all of the other cool kids against you.  When it was widely reported, as was learned from his notes, that Dave was carrying a hunting knife and enough prescription drugs for a small pharmacy, he gained his own infamy as the crazy, unpredictable outsider.

“Is that that Dave kid?”  He heard a girl with red hair, a green raincoat, and black Lisa Loeb glasses ask her friend, as she peered from the inside seat directly at Dave.  She was excited enough not to notice that the only person sitting alone on the bus must be the one who was shunned by the rest of the community.  Her excitement reached a boiling point and she called out, “DAVE!”, falling over her well mannered, plain looking friend.

Dave smiled to himself turned toward the window.  Atleast he had an identity this time.  He knew he shouldn’t rely on the superficial image too much.  The bus came roaring to a stop in the middle of this thought, the driver standing up before anyone had a chance to exit and clambering out with an ardent urgency.  He pulled at his hair and said “Fuck” to himself in a rapid drawl.

The living quarters had been switched to a room which previously was used as a pool hall.  The original quarterrs were being fumigated, and the ceilings had to be replaced.  Termites had destroyed the wood and were installing a skylight which was circular and proposed a sidelong view of the woods.

Dave was installed in the bunk with the exchange students, kids who lacked any defining characteristics or histories.  It gave him a great chance to build new relationships from the ground floor up. Most of these kids were shy of each other, unable to find solidarity in their alterity. He knew the drill well, so he appointed himself a guide.

Mr. Aaronson was in over his head.  He had no clue how to entertain these kids for an entire summer alone, and he refused to concede this fact to his wife who still had utmost faith in his abilities.  The year before, he had a few gym teachers with him who were cut due to budget problems, and at the time he didn’t appreciate Rex or Spike’s contagious enthusiasm for throwing footballs around.  The kids can tell if you’re faking it, he thought as he attempted to organize a flag football game.  His first mistake was allowing the kids to choose their own team, resulting in a team of the biggest most competitive camp goers, and a team of all of the female campers, the squeamish weak types, and Mr. Aaronson himself who was weary of the violent actions which he was subjecting himself to.

Day 27!

It's about trying to reach that blackout point where words just start to appear on their own.  Where you wake up in the sitting position with no concept of what happened in front of you.  I need something to eat.  Then it's bullshit story time.

The voice presupposed Calvin was someone important.  He asked it why he remembered this number and didn’t remember much of anything else.  The voice on the other end laughed, unsure what to make out of this.  It asked him if he was a plumber, or some sort of city worker.  Calvin racked his brain for evidence of this, thought for a second about whether or not he had a toolbox, and couldn’t make up his mind one way or the other.  He felt like he was playing 20 questions where neither party knew the answer.

            “Do you know why you’re calling?”  The man asked curtly.

            “I had something to do with this number, once.”  The phone clicked and went back to a dial tone.  So much for progress.

            Calvin fell asleep in the early morning hours.  The dawn sun functioned as a night light.  He dreamed through a green diagonal filter.  He was walking down by the firefly pond, and he kept jerking back and away from an imaginary line he knew he shouldn’t cross. The crocodile had jumped out here, Calvin imagined.  It had removed the head of that guy in a snapping sidelong swipe.  His neck was 3 slabs of skin.  It bent the spine cavity in a direction where it leaked specks of juices onto the path like a wet pixie stick.

  It was a flashbulb memory was the last thing he remembered before he woke up in a cold sweat.  He rose in bed, arms crossed, like a practical joke which was “not funny” had been played on him.

            He was starting to become anxiously overaware of each hour of the day.  He realized how much time he had been wasting, although he couldn’t think of anything constructive to fill the time with.  It was becoming increasingly clear he should find a way to combat the white jackets before they left him without a place to live, but it was the others job as much as it was his.  In his barely lucid woken state, he wondered where the inhabitants of the floors beneath had went when their rooms were destroyed.  In his assumed inferiority, he had assumed they were all simply more resourceful than he was and had easily found new homes elsewhere. 

            Calvin rigged the elevator so it would open without the elevator there.  He did this by prying the doors open with a crowbar from the utility closet.  He thought of the different ways he could keep the elevator from reaching this floor, but then remembered the stairs, and remembered that he himself had to return to this floor so it were best he didn’t seal it off.

            Gloria came from the end of the hall when he sat kneeling in front of the elevator well, and he almost fell in.  His arms waved akimbo over the shaft like the falling dream, and a feeling of hopelessness spread over him when he realized his legs were ineffective tools for pulling himself up.  She grabbed his shirt, inadvertantly grasping a hand full of his back hair, and he felt more embarassed than scared at this point. 

He rolled over to his side like an infant that hadn’t learned how to walk yet, and saw a cross, stern face looking down at him.  All of the angles of Gloria’s face were exaggerated from this angle, her chin and cheekbones looked more rounded, and her bottom row of teeth protruding out like a small stone wall on the face of a planet. 

“Calvin!”  She said.  He was startled that she knew what his name was.  “Just what are you trying to do?”

He rose up ungracefully but quickly, concentrating his balance on one foot.  “Well… see… well… you know…”  She looked at him impatiently, like a mother who caught their child attempting to drive drunk.  “The gentlemen with white jackets are already on floor 17 and… well they’ll be here soon.”

“They won’t come here!”  She knew more than she was letting on.  Her cheeks changed from peach to red.  “They have already got almost all they need and they will stop.  Atleast that’s what DJ says.  Just what did you think you were going to do to the elevator, anyway?  I am not going to climb all of those stairs on account of you, Calvin.”

He turned into the blubbering fool he was trying not to be.  It was going to take him hours of yelling at himself in the mirror to work out of this haze.  His arms dangled in front of him and he fell slack, not inclined to defend himself because he no longer knew what he should say.  “Yes, ma’am,”  He conceded, starting to walk back down the hall. 

He heard her cursing him as he closed his door, and then the sounds of metal against linoleum.  “Don’t even pick up after yourself,”  She said.

            The floors in between him and the lobby were becoming ossified, a fragile brittle structure which appeared on the inside like gossamer bone.  Only, these men were human, and the process seemed to contain a spurious step which was omitted from the visual version.  He didn’t notice them working with the effectiveness of bees, spraying their own paper mache mixture on each side.

            Calvin had found a small café on the other side of town where he would sit and drink small amounts of gin and eat walnuts.  There was a TV which would run on an 8 Volt battery, showing reruns of classic sitcoms on the emergency broadcasting channel.  He had no way to trim his beard other than a scissors and looked homeless.

            The rain began to fall, washing a mixture of soot and grime from the top of the unseen towers, or possibly just what was deposited in the clouds.  You couldn’t see the clouds from the sidewalk below, the sky was covered in an enveloping blackness.  Things looked a lot worse during the night.  The pedestrians started scurrying about like rodents, and a man with a moustache and glasses crabwalked across the sidewalk and slipped through the door of the café. 

Yup this one isn't good either.  I'll start a new story but I think eventually something will end up happening to Calvin.  If I drew it as a comic I think more shit would happen.

Day 26

First time I've had fun doing this, truth be told.  You want to immerse yourself in the dude you're writing about's world, because that gives you more to write about.  Not that it isn't all exposition today, but once you explain things it's easier for real things to happen.  I'm going to follow through on this story even though I don't like my main character much anymore because he's weak and useless.  I'm going to have to give him a gun tomorrow and see what he does with it.  Also, characters can't be too wimpy to talk to other people.

Reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time", it's a much better story before he tries to hammer home the maudlin point of the main character being retarded/autistic/whatever.  We like/believe the character enough before you say he's retarded, even though it's done sort of unsympathetically.  Do enjoy the fact that one of the things retarded people do is "hates the French", though.  He couldn't have done that on accident.


          Calvin recognized the noise as he sat there munching on potato chips and tuna fish straight out of the can.  It was someone trying to come through.  He could go into the room next door and investigate, but he didn’t know the guy in the next room.  He heard loud thumps coming from Gloria’s room.  He was jealous at first, but gave up on that feeling.  Following those feelings only gets you further from yourself, he remembered from one of his audiotapes.  While he knew it was only white noise, when he chose to believe the vast tomes of reconditioning he would pour into his subconscious night and day it would produce good results.

            He stood upright on the bed and put his ear closer to the wall.  The curviture of the ceiling prevented a comfortable position.  A squeal came from the room next door, and the strange vibrating thump on the outside wall stopped.  The room stopped trembling, he could hear and feel his mind working again.  He laced up his shoes, put the can of tuna away unclosed in the shitty hotel refridgerator and opened the door like peeling a bandaid off. 

            How long had this sound been going on for?  He couldn’t remember.  He went next door and knocked.  It must have been since he moved up there, but the first night he hadn’t remembered hearing it.

            A slender male with a short tightly rendered moustache opened the door.  He had John Lennon glasses on and was holding a volume of Readers Digest from the mid 90s.  It looked like he wasn’t aware any disaster had happened, any white suited gentlemen were reaking havoc on the building, any newer books had come out.  Still, he answered the door shortly after the first knock.  Calvin’s eye was drawn behind him to the window, where a long hook climbed over the surface in a screeching warble and disappeared to the floors above.  The blinds had been taken down. 

            Calvin pointed behind the man in the threshhold, standing in between the flower designed hallway carpet and the soft shaglike carpeting of the interior.  “What?”  The man asked indignantly, not turning around. 

            “Who are you?”  He inquired. 

            “I’m Calvin I have been living next door. “  They stood in silence for a moment, the man actively trying to put together what relevance these facts had for him. 

            “So…” The man said, pushing the door slowly toward Calvin.

Calvin put a hand on the numberplate and attempted to make eye contact, to be more direct in his detective work.  “Did you see anything?”  Calvin said.  “There was a loud banging coming from the outside wall of my room.  I have no window and only recently when it seems it might come through have I been concerned about it.”

            “Why did you pick a room without a window?”  The guy scoffed rolling his eyes, spitting out breath as he talked.  “Nope didn’t see anything, now if you don’t mind…”  He tapped the front of his Readers Digest and pushed the door closed.  Calvin let it shut.  He had finally met someone he was more active than.  He felt like maybe he wasn’t the laziest guy in the post apocalyptic world.

            He remembered reading the stories about dystopian worlds.  There was always an informal despotism, well it wasn’t always informal.  In his case, however, he couldn’t piece together who was on top of the illuminati triangle.  It was probably the guy in the tallest building, he thought.  One with security and a large outer membrane shell which would prevent his entry. There was always a group of underground resistance.  He thought that might be the white coat guys, but they could also be anarchists given the opportunity to rise.  The authority, if there was one, was not concerned with the actions of this group.  The only other things he knew for sure was, firstly, there was a large black ashen pile that he was sure was only the tip of the iceberg protruding like a witches nose poking from the back alleys of the city. 

He let his sentimentality leave him for a moment, and considered Gloria without the pangs of self doubt.  She might have been a real independent women, simply dating and making the most of what was left of the world.  He thought she must have been one of those people who is nice to everyone, even unsympathetic slobs like himself, which he knew was a way of keeping control in those situations.  She cultivated love wherever she found it, like the old retired widow in the backyard who waters the weeds and plants indifferently.  Her garden will be overgrown and irrepressible, but some of this plants were allowed to grow in vain.  None of the absurd monstrosities have earned any real favor,  they only have been allowed to proliferate under the careless callousness of their caretaker.

Now the musclebound jock with the black sunglasses, red tank top and shark pointed haircut was with her to draw her attention to the negative aspects of her behaviors.  He would eat these other plants alive, deliberately usurping Calvin’s unclaimed space.

Calvin found himself in the park at the phonebooth dialing those numbers again.  He looked around more eagerly this time, he was afraid his outlandish style would draw attention to him as a character, and perhaps the random folks he passed on his way around town would start to recognize him.  He was running the risk of becoming familiar.  He thought the façade of running errands may vindicate his person, but this was only a thinly veiled lie.  He wasn’t going anywhere, working on any project, performing any job.  He could only lie to himself.  He was still foundationless, unable to find a steady foothold to begin his climb. 

The phone rang three times before being passed through a security service.  “Thanks for calling Johnson International please hold,” A nasally woman secretary who may have been a recording or not said.  Calvin was poised to say something but the muzak flowed through the line.  He was thrown off guard by how much this tinny, reproduced version of Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” stood up, before long he was humming it to himself.

“Yeah?”  Suddenly Seal had been pulled out like the carpet from under him and his call was inconveniencing an implied authority figure.  He felt like he was part of something just for calling.  Although, in the back of his mind a dubious thought arose, hadn’t I been expecting a woman’s voice to answer?  Wasn’t this supposed to be an ex wife, an ex girlfriend, an aunt atleast?

The voice breathed impatiently, the heavy breath of nostrils.

 Splenetic is a good word for angry