Day 71: Things will get serious

OK today will be better than yesterday.  Minor setbacks, minor setbacks.  Setback has earned its place in the canon as a compound word.  Well, it's early in the morning, let's get this done and get out there.  Working on willpower today through sheer force of will!  My cold is coming back.  Come on brain, get on board!

Starting to think of poor people alternatives to the things I do.  I'm not as frugal as I should be, especially at a time of year like now when I should be buying other people presents.  I really want to go out to SportsWorld and buy running tights/pants, but I think instead I should go to Value Village and buy sweatpants.

            Necessity, as they always say, was the mother of invention.  Jim would go to sleep, and whatever he needed for his experiment would either appear to him in his sleep, appear to him when he woke up, or become possible to him in the infinite knowledge that the subconscious possesses.  Or, that’s what he was sure of as he told himself.  And it usually worked.

            Roger found the house in an ad placed in the classified section of the paper.  “Good deal on a house, should go check it out!”  He told Miranda, who pulled her black shaul around her face and whisked him away to the car.  Without the GPS, they never would have found the place in the woods.  Roger insisted on staying because he didn’t have the nerve to look for other places, and knew he should get the girls settled in as quickly as possible.  They were already missing enough school.

            Jim had gave them a quick tour, insisting he had a big business meeting to get back to.  Roger assumed he had some sort of awesome setup inside of the shack, that it wasn’t just a dingy shack like it appeared on the outside.  A don’t judge a book by the cover type of thing, similar to the way he was judging Jim.  A bearded, scrawny middle aged man in a red long sleeved T-shirt and 5 oclock shadow.  Jim joked that if he were able to grow a beard, he’d have a giant one.

            Roger discovered Jim’s complicated surveillance system on accident.  Beyond the fur carpet that he loved to use as a sled to slide around on the linoleum floor, there was a bookshelf which was curiously not set into the wall.  When sliding around on the fur carpet, the bookcase shook and turned thirty degrees to its right, revealing a hidden room which wasn’t very hidden at all.  Inside there was a giant screen covering an amalgamated box with enough wires popping out of it to account for fifty or sixty TVs.  The screen was separated into a 5 by 5 grid, with the entire outside woods surveyed in thirty foot squares.  The singularity of Jim’s mind amazed him; there was no sort of security system for the house, the surveillance didn’t extend to the inside of the building, and some of the cameras were arbitrarily focused on trees.  The specificity of the trees was lost to Roger, but he assumed Jim had some reason for picking those ones in particular.

In his complete confidence, Jim hadn’t worked hard to hide the modifications he had done to the house, just put things in front of them.  The medicine cabinet in the bathroom mirror covered another medicine cabinet, locked like a safe and embedded into the wall fixture.  There was no lock on it, and when Roger pried it open he found it completely empty, shrouded with dust and spiderwebs.  There was a trap door in the laundry room, fitted with a lock that had three different key card slots and an eye scanner.  

“Great, this nut thinks the apocalypse is coming.”  Roger thought to himself.  He kept the cynical thoughts to himself, outwardly always wearing a crooked confused smile across his tired face.  Still, the thought of having somewhere to escape to in case of emergency was a comforting thought.

Jim had went “all-in” now, he would no longer be distracted by wandering aimlessly around his house when he had trouble thinking, destroyed his personal computer with dynamite to prevent himself from distraction, and his productivity level had strangely fallen.  Now, he spend most of his times waiting for his machines to do things, and when they took extra long he would prod them with sticks and chastise them with self deprecating indulgances.

Roger invited Jim in to have a look at the surveillance tapes with him.  Jim took his cleats off by the front door, rapping them against the frozen ground to remove clods of dirt that formed around each spike.

“Nice cleats.”  Roger wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Standing higher helps you learn faster.”  Jim said, channeling the air of a young Newton.  He pointed an index finger adroitely into the sky.

Jim surveyed the place like he hadn’t been there before.  A lot had changed, however, water color pictures covering the walls, the spinny chandelier in the TV room to the left had been fixed, there was a TV in the TV room, Miranda’s awards and service medals decorated the newly added mantle.  Jim looked at every object with his hands behind his back like he was checking out an expensive car, and he’d look up at Roger each time with his eyes narrowed and head bowed forward, like he was peering over a pair of invisible librarian glasses.

In the surveillance room, in the box 3^rd from the bottom left, the little men could be seen chopping one of Jim’s favorite trees down; Roger assumed because it had a camera focused on it that it’d be one of his favorite trees.

“Well, that’s what they do when you set them free.  They habitate.  I guess they couldn’t figure out how to get to town.”  Jim had created these pocket sized humans before, eviidently.  “Last time they separated into two different groups based on pigment and ate each other alive.  The winners committed ritual suicide.”

Roger was apalled, but it was time to pick up the girls.  He escorted Jim out of the house, jumped back into the Subaru and flew off.  Jim rushed back into the garage, angry at himself and Roger for getting him away from his work.

A bird had flew in through the open door of the shack and was setting up a nest of metal fibers in the top right corner of the wall.  This just couldn’t be, what had Jim done to deserve this?  He swatted at it and jumped, pushing himself up slightly higher and accumulating splinters by using his hands against the shacks walls.  He grabbed a broom and swung it at the bird, and it flew wildly around the shack, Jim smashing his own contraptions with a bloodlust taking over his face.  The bird was finally gone after a full minute of thrashing, and Jim would have to get to work immediately to sort it all out.

Not quite writing as much as before.  I had my brain down to a steel trap before this cold kicked my ass, now I can't get myself to focus as much as before.  2:30 to 9:00 in retail sucks.  I plan on quitting but someone find me a better job.  Internship somewhere!