Day 40! The big 4-0

         You naysayers were probably thinking that I wouldn't make it tonight, or that I couldn't make it tonight.  I ran 6 miles on my injured ankle in 40 degree weather, too.  I could have spent that time working on this shitty book.  You can revise as much as you want afterwards, though.  That'll be a lot more work than it was to even write in the first place and I doubt however good I may get that my stories will ever make logical sense.  But that's alright no one needs logic anyway.  I still firmly believe a good story is one in which nothing happens but you like the characters.  Or, to extrapolate that, that if you like the characters nothing has to happen, you'll keep reading anyway.  Of course, my characters suck, BUT!  I'm practicing until I trust my brain to write on its own. 
         I think you can train your mind to do whatever it is you want it to, but people just don't work very hard.  We'll see on day 80.  You already have noticed marked improvement by now even if you hate me and think my writing sucks.  By now, it sucks LESS.  Just keep sucking less until it's tolerable, and then keep being less tolerable until it's good.  This was a warmup.
          Also, today, first two times in a long time that I caught myself doing anything automatically or without thinking about it in years.  I think this is all therapeutic and I'm digging myself out of my ego/grave.  It's scary when you lose control (scary because it's the right adjective), but I think that's called trust or something?  I'm drawn strongly to reading science/cognition/brain books and letting this thing try to comprehend itself, but I absolutely have to finish IQ84.  My dream is for the day where I walk in somewhere without being completely conscious of everything that is going on, where I can just operate automatically.  I still feel like I stand out, like I need to entertain people, like the action centers around me, and it freaks me out to be quiet or subdued.  I remember telling an exgirlfriend that I'd love to just be quiet and not have to say anything.  So now I'll type it.  To myself.  For awhile.
  
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Thomas Jefferson

Love you, Tommy J

The essential thing is not knowledge, but character.

 I should really get better at making characters.  I'm going to have my characters be more daring and do the things I know they want to do instead of being scared like a little wimp about it.  Then, let's see if that translates into real life.  Life should most likely imitate fiction, theoretically.  B+1=2.

            The secretary caght Charles on his way out of the building and handed him a little black case.  It was embroidered with gold thread and sealed with two metal clasps and a keyhole.  I was some sort of miniature briefcase. “You forgot to take this”, he seemed to say with his eyes, and Charles didn’t say anything because he was happy to be leaving.  He tried to exit through the revolving door, which did not turn, and the secretary went back to his desk and sat taciturn, unwilling to assist with information.

            The stairways were each blocked, with key code access required to get through.  The elevator still worked, but Charles saw no reason to get more lost in the building.  He exited via the giftshop, which was connected to the chapel.  It was a dead giveaway with a candlelight vigil going on.

            He returned to the car carrying the little black case and Anne was asleep in the backseat.  He roused her by slamming the door as he sat down on the drivers side.

            “I threw out a lot of you crap,”  She said as she sat up in the backseat.  He saw no problem with this because he couldn’t remember what he had in the backseat.

            “This is what they sent us for,”  Charles began to toss the black case into the backseat but thought better of it and caught it with his other hand.  He held it up to his ear and shok it, hearing a crackling noise on the inside, and immediately regretted it.  He imagined it was probably full of expensive vials which held microbacterias for experiment, or a key made out of glass for whatever reason.

            “Well let me see the thing,”  She grabbed it, turning it around and checking out the lock.  “If this is some sort of proxy,”  She said, screwing with the clasps.  “Pulp is a fucking moron.”

            He turned the key and the car sputtered to life.  Deliver the suitcase and everything will be peachy, he thought to himself.  Then I can just blend into the background again.  Maybe they’ll let me watch till I get an idea what’s going on there.

            “…Do you mind stopping back at my place?  I forgot to water the azaleas.”  Anne asked, cordially (which was suspicious).  Charles remembered the last girl he had in the car, she tricked him into taking her to her ex boyfriends house and meeting her parents.  Charles made great impressions on parents, he was submissive, subservient, and respectful. He reacted mirthfully and nervously to uncomfortability and awkward moments, and often felt people mistook this for genuine pleasure.  He shook the ex girlfriend’s dads hand, made small talk with her mother about the copy of “Anne of Green Gables” she was pawing through, and ingratiated himself to the family dog with the pleasing aroma of his pants.  Being a lonely bachelor, he cooked a lot of meat on a forman grill, and the smell seaped into the porous wood of his shitty apartment walls.

            Charles panicked but followed Anne’s directions to her house.  She lived in the nicer part of town, there was no angle parking, a variety of trees, parks that didn’t have to take down their basketball hoops at night.   The moon and stars were visible at night here, or atleast they should be giving the felicious placement of streetlights.  He thought about the amount of money he would probably be making if he kept this job, and how that kind of money would allow him to buy a house in this neighborhood.  The houses looked like plastic igloos, like there was nothing underneath except maybe a few geraniums and couches.  A house was only a house when you felt like you belonged in it, or owned it.

            “What did you do for money before you started working with me?”  Charles inquired earnestly.  He was doing her a favor so he felt it was fair he could ask an honest question.

            “I’ve been working for Pulp in different capacities for years,”  Anne said, taking her hood down.  “This isn’t the first time he’s tried an experiment like this.”

            Charles realized now that she may have more grounds for thinking of Mr. Pulp as a fucking asshole.  Maybe he abused female employees, or he had reformed recently by finding God or the like.  A man watered his grass, holding a dripping hose limply with one hand.  A bell tower chimed somewhere and a V-shaped migration passed overhead. 

            “What’s up with Pulp?”  Charles asked, following Anne’s gesture into a right turn.  He eyed a parked cop car cautiously, making sure to come to a complete stop before performing an immaculate right turn.  The cop waved and smiled, and then turned sharply back in the other direction.

            Anne was reserved about the topic.  She screwed with the dials on the dashboard again, illustrating that she was cold.  Charles thought that girls were always cold, and now he was suspicious that they used it as an excuse to avoid answering questions.  “He’s not like any boss that you’ve seen in books or television, I’ll give him that.  Well I guess he is kind of like the guy from the Drew Carey show, except that guy isn’t as quirky in real life.  He’s committed to finding out things that no one cares about, or knows.  But it’s so hard to tell what he really wants.”

            Charles pulled into a driveway and Anne ran inside.  A dog was tied to a stake in the backyard, and kept walking around in a circle to avoid the sprinkler.  An older man stared at Charles through the window, leaning with a hand on his chin, showcasing his breathing apparatus front and center.  Through the brown and red shutters he saw Anne pass behind him and disappear into a doorway.  Not a car passed by behind him, and he resented taking the detour during working hours.

            He spent the next twenty minutes trying not to make eye contact with the old man, who stared intently with no remorse or shame.  He started to panic about getting onto Mr. Pulp’s bad side, and staring down at his watch he was not sure the amount of time she had been taking inside, only that it was too long.  The Y-shaped tree on the lawn twisted under a sudden wind, but when it resettled the sun came through its branches in a pleasant silhouette.

            She reemerged from the doorway in the same sweatshirt as before holding a ring of keys in front of her.  He could have sworn it was a ring of keys at first, but when she got into the passenger seat it was concealed in her sweatshirt pouch.  “I hate that asshole”, she said through her teeth and slumped back into the seat.

            Pulp had already left for the day when they returned to the laboratory.  It looked like an upsidedown horseshoe crab with the sun setting.  “You should have probably just left me at home.”  She said, stretching in the street.  Charles felt like a hard days of work was done.  He looked over at her, and looked away when he noticed the tiny portion of skin protuberating from between her black sweatpants and black sweatshirt.  The ridge of a white T-shirt was also visible, but Charles didn’t see this as he looked away.  By looking away, he only drew more attention to the fact that he had been staring.

            They went inside their place of employment, Charles carrying the tiny black suitcase.  He checked the wall directory, the list of employees and their offices was so long that they were all abbreviated.  There was more than one “Mr. P”.  Charles thought rather than leave this black suitcase in front of someones desk or bug Pulp with it at home, he would instead just bring it back in the morning.  Anne refused to acknowledge the dilemma, walking around the office in a circle with her hands in her pockets and making clicking noises.

            “Did you want to go get something to eat?”  The question shocked Charles himself.  He put his hand over his mouth like bees were trying to get into it and tried but failed to steel his gaze.  In the everlasting moment, he was thankful for the fact he blurted it out so carelessly.  He was sure his brain must have been aware that he was lonely and had no other plans.  He shook his head at the fact that he was this embarassed for making an accidental venture out of his comfort zone. 

            When he looked over at her, she was beaming, overly happy.  She had a smile on her face that looked like it was permanent.  He immediately felt sickened with himself for making such an innocent gesture, and resented her black sweatshirt.  It always amazed him how easy it was to step out of your comfort zone.  He breathed out through his nose and shook his head from side to side, and turned to exit.  He suddenly felt like he was transporting a monkey around.  He could imagine her ambling with her arms swinging wildly behind him. 

            She gave up all of her secrets in joyful chunks as they reversed out of the parking lot.  She complained about how boys never liked her as much as other girls.  How girls were offended by her unique style.  She didn’t make Charles feel particularly special, he gleaned that there was something attractive about him from her smile, but as he looked up at himself in the rearview mirror the man in the reflection looked annoyed.  He wasn’t giving her much of a chance, but he already felt that a wide valley separated them, and he hadn’t even implicated himself in the sordid affair yet.

            She jabbered away as he held the steering wheel like a weight holding him down.  He felt his good nature leaving him, his patience getting thin, his physical and mental self disbanding and becoming at odds with one another.

           Great!  Development!  This thing had better go places by the end of the month or I'll just start a new one the next month and hope that it goes somewhere.