Day 104 The Ex-Hex

Pet names reflect the stupidity of their culture.  And by this, I don't mean terms of endearment.  I mean the names of pets.  Or maybe it's not stupidity, it's indifference and apathy.  Or maybe empathy.  I don't know!

Grabbed from the middle of one of my stories.  The bolded parts are things that I want to happen but I will probably be too lazy to write.


         There is something humiliating about being a disciple. There are great men out there, but the objective is to be like them, not to worship them.  You want to work with someone, not for them.

“I guess… a dog dying in there after pressing itself against the side trying to escape?  Little did it know that it was a “pull” door, not a “push” door.”

“What did you notice about time in this metaphor?  Did the leaning seem to take place over any specific period of time?”

“No, just a long time.  It had to have been long enough to make the door bulge.”

“So, in other words, the predicate necessitates the action.  Even when we don’t know who our subject is.”

“That’s true, I think.  But what is it supposed to mean?”

“Metaphors don’t necessarily mean anything, their soul purpose is to create context and reinforce atmosphere.  Life is a juxtaposition.”

Jerry came to all at once, and lifted his head off of an elevated platform.  Lights bounced off of the mirrors behind the bar, the two stools next to him were open, but overall it was a crowded place. 

“Rosco?”  Jerry asked.

“Your buddy ain’t here tonight.”  The bartender leaned over the bar with a hand washing the inside of a glass. 

“When did I get here?”  A few chuckles from down the bar.

“He don’t remember, go easy on him.”  The bartender said.  “You came here with some girl at quarter after eight.  Looked like you two were having a great night.  Ring any bells?”

Jerry stood up and dug through his pockets, retrieving a white handkerchief and wiping his face with it.  “No, I can’t say I remember any of that.”  His watch was spun around on his wrist, and he twisted it back to face forward and checked it.  “Wouldn’t really matter what time it was, what day is it?”

A new customer, a lady in a green dress, had entered with a peacock’s strut and the bartender was gone, welcoming her.  Jerry grabbed a hand full of pistachios from a platter on a foldout table and shoveled them into his mouth.  A creepy looking extremely tall guy shot him a hostile look.

The TV was airing repeats of a sitcom, Malcolm and the Man.  Malcolm was a talking dog, and the man was a professional lawyer who took care of the dog after a series of mishaps made him its caretaker.  Unlike most talking dog shows, it was a widely known fact that Malcolm could talk, and people didn’t pay much notice to it.  As a matter of fact, he had developed a reputation as a real jerk.

“Marty.”  The man’s real name was Marty. 

“Yes, Malcolm?”  Marty said, popping a few ibuprofens.  He gritted his teeth and wouldn’t look over.

“Look at me, Marty!  For God’s sake!”

Jerry remembered this one.  This was the episode where Malcolm and the Man had “jumped the shark.”  They had a brief sexual encounter, and the guest director took the script in a different direction than the screenwriter had intended.  Jerry remembered, as a kid, that it seemed like Malcolm and Marty had some real chemistry, and it hadn’t been so weird that they crossed the line.

Soon, it was eight in the morning and the darkness had become midnight blue.  The whole world seemed to be passing through a blue lense as Jerry sat at the bus stop, a wicked hangover just a good nights sleep away.

Everything was the way he had wished it would be a few months earlier.  This beautiful girl, working behind the sheet of oxidized glass with the perforated hole for talking.  She had been there every day when he showed up, and she was there every time he left, yet he had never had a real conversation with her.  He didn’t know what to say, and most of the time when he tried to start a conversation he’d bury his confidence level lower and lower.

Then he was sure she was hanging out with him as a friend, and that was all he could be.  The first date fizzled instead of sizzled, truncated by the fact that she invited three groups of friends, each one couples who were either married or would be married.  There was Rachel and her husband, Erin and hers, there may have even been a baby involved. 

She’s an outsider like me, he remembered saying to himself.  He couldn’t help but talk to himself in stressful situations, something which in earlier days he referred to in himself as disassociative personality disorder.  He read books about it and the cases were always more severe, some people watched themselves go through their entire lives with complete detachment.  Then, where was this emotional longing coming from?  Was it as much a desire to be one with his own body again?

The couples shared a lot of beers.  That was fine, he could have more himself.  He ordered a different kind every time to feign that he was testing flavors and being an all around connoiseur.

“I can’t help but feel like yesterday wasn’t such a good day for us.”  Jerry said on the phone, between breaks of watching Malcolm and the Man.  She sighed wistfully, and seemed completely oblivious to the phone conversation concept.  She must have been completely removed emotionally, just as he was removed physically.  Unfortunately, those two sides couldn’t combine and form one worthwhile whole.

He always expected some kind of substantial breakthrough, some definining event that would cause a paradigm shift and reinvigorate the world around him.  Getting older was more of a realization that the only way you can change life is through a series of small things, because change needs to be a persistent series of events, not just one unprecedented one. 

“I don’t think so.”  She said, and then there was a long pause.  Jerry rolled his eyes on his end of the phone, staring at the large pause symbol in the corner of the TV screen.  “I watched this show earlier today about contimination in the Mehkong river.”

He wasn’t stuck, she was.  He was the willful sailor letting himself be sucked into the whirlpool, and in the center was this island, which even if he reached he wouldn’t be able to live on.  It lacked all of the proper outlets for communication, sometimes the seamonster would spring out of the rapids and make the whole area seem lively, but even that monster was losing its’ scales by the chunks.  He’d probably let it swallow him alive, but what choice did he have?  She was a beautiful woman.

Why would she only talk to him about TV shows?  Was she that humorless?

“Well what’s going on in the Mehkong?  Old seamonster up to no good again?”  He asked.

“You do this every time.  The Mehkong is a real river, a lot of people depend on it.  If it matters so much to you that we are an item, you are missing the point.  The world out there needs each of us to do all we can do, it has no room for couples.”

Jerry figured this was the inevitable speech.  She had been through her romance phase a long time ago.  He’d have to keep kicking himself now for bringing it up.

“I’ll call you later, I have to think about what you said.”  He hung up with ostensible thoughtfulness.  Jerry crossed into the bathroom, body hair sprinkled liberally from every surface area. The blinds were tilted horizontal, and he twisted the curtain rod to correct this.  He turned on his heel and stepped on the scale, he was up another five pounds.  He looked at his profile in the mirror, the stomach was making its way out past the pecs again.  He thought he had been exercising and eating properly, but as the old adage goes results don’t lie.

He was mad that he lied about having to think about what he said.  He tangled the cord around his arm and let the phone dangle

There was a time when he would be mad at her, and then after calling he would be unable to keep that vitriol up.  It seeped out of his head and corroded all of his organs, being absorbed completely by the time it reached the abdomen.  And he felt it like a little goblin in there, rearranging the cupboards.  He eventually willed himself to stay angry,

Jerry called his friend Colin, who had a completely different frame of mind.  It wasn’t necessarily a fresh perspective, but it was a different perspective.

“You’re doing the complete wrong thing if you’re trying to draw ultimatums, get her to… um… capitulate.”  He was eating a sandwich or something, and was almost impervious to listening.

“What you really need to do is get her to let her guard down.  When she feels like everything is fine, and maybe you got it all together… um… she’ll start coming to you.  Then it’s really… uh… “careful what you wish for.”

Jerry had a lot to say while Colin was talking, and before he talked Colin, but once Colin finished talking he decided it’d be better to just be happy with the fresh perspective.

“Are you coming out later?” 

Jerry was not coming out later.

Work, he reminded himself.  That’s the only way you can rise above this.  He flashed back to Sha-Ram, they sat across from eachother on a long wooden peer overlooking a brimey lake.

“You can only work, that’s all there is to life.  If you’re ever stuck, the answer is always work.  You decide what you’re good at, what you want to do, and then you work.  Think of it as when you are gone.  The only possible legacy you have is something you worked very hard on.  For some men it’s family, some can’t avoid their fates.  Some have to do what their fathers did, others fall into the wrong crowd and tread water for their entire lives.  The only thing you have is what you make, and what you make is what you work at.”

Jerry shook his head and laughed, laying propped up against the stucco wall in his twin bed.  He remembered how overly simple it seemed at the time, although Sha-Ram always insisted the most profound facts are the ones right under your nose.

It’s never that you’re too good for someone, but it might be that you work too hard for them.

Jerry’s dad would say he was proud of him with the lack of anything better to say, just like in a failed romantic relationship when “I love you” becomes the drastic, constantly repeated platitude that you throw like a pebble into a thick darkness.

There was a woman crying upstairs, but as Jerry put his ear closer to the wall he couldn’t tell if she was actually laughing.  80s music Jerry didn’t recognize pulsated through the nearly bare trees, some black female singer going on and on about “what it would be like to love you.” 

Jerry wrestled with the heavy “pull” door in his lobby, and retrieved a stack of periodicals sticking from the crudely crafted wood compartments across from the dull silver mailboxes.  He flipped through pictures of couches on the ultra thin garbage quality paper.

“That’s not going to fit on top of your car.”  His friend Mark said, as they stood at the side of the road.  Jerry lowered down and tried to move the big leather piece of meat by himself, scraping it across the concrete with a dumbening sound. 

Cop is poking around in his garbage, around house

The streetlamp flickered and the dark alleyway was more dark momentarily.  Then it came back on.  Jerry walked up to the window, and noticed a shadowy figure by the overstuffed green garbage cans.

Quitting a shitty job to move to a slightly less shitty job where you get paid more.  But you don’t have as many friends at the shitty one.  Conversations with friends involving talking about how you will miss so-and-so because of some stupid thing that they did (show not tell)

He wore his little plastic security guard badge safety pinned through the terry blue cloth over his kevlar vest.  The kids passed him without saying a word for the greater portion of the day, to them he was an authority figure, an adult, no fun.  It was worse when he tried to be friendly, it usually made him feel like an undercover cop.

The checklist on his clipboard functioned as a

Some terrible situation presents itself and he can’t get ahold of her.  But when he finally does she insists everything is fine, to expose the true nature that she does not care at all about anything, not just him.

Day 103(?) Work!

I think I have the work part down.  Then it goes

Relax
Don't think

Then there's the optional step which is

Increased Work
Increased Relaxation

Talkin' bout zen. 

“Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”
“There is no failure unless one stops.”
Ray Bradbury

                I stole that from some website but who cares?

               Minor rant here to start out.  I have a problem with these comedy actors who decide to try serious roles.  Will Ferrell in Everything Must Go, Maya Rudolph in Bridesmaids (which is a comedy, obviously, but not for her), Jason Segel in Jeff, Who Lives at Home.  You guys are allowed to be funny in dramas, it seems like your idea of playing characters is to act exactly the same as you always do except not be funny.  It's like your spirits have been broken.  You should find a balance like Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, or Whoopsy Goldberg.  

              Second minor rant!

              I am starting to empathize with the villains in Disney Movies, Musicals, and whatnot.  Where it's always the guy who has went through the proper channels, is able to provide emotional and financial support, and is admittedly a little possessive of the girl that he is sort of kidnapping.  I know how it feels to be precarious, the whole "me against the world" thing, which is usually more of the role the villain is in than the hero.  The hero usually has the support of the people, the love of the girl, the potential to be successful, let's face it, the heroes success and the villains downfall are both equally inevitable in most movies.  Take Aladdin, for example.  Or Moulin Rouge.  This is what it feels like dating any girl who has dated a guy before you, like there's no romantic love or emotions, and you are more or less forcing your square peg into the square hole.  Even if you want to kill that guy that's could appear and steal the girl at any moment, you're not going to do it Mr. Villain.  You're pathetic and all of your strength, initiative, and control of the bureaucracy is going to leave you single and alone, or worse (dead).

            That's my whole minor rant.  On to the sort of fiction!

          

Everything was the way he had wished it would be a few months earlier.  This beautiful girl, working behind the sheet of oxidized glass with the perforated hole for talking.  She had been there every day when he showed up, and she was there every time he left, yet he had never had a real conversation with her.  He didn’t know what to say, and most of the time when he tried to start a conversation he’d bury his confidence level lower and lower.

Then he was sure she was hanging out with him as a friend, and that was all he could be.  The first date fizzled instead of sizzled, truncated by the fact that she invited three groups of friends, each one couples who were either married or would be married.  There was Rachel and her husband, Erin and hers, there may have even been a baby involved. 

She’s an outsider like me, he remembered saying to himself.  He couldn’t help but talk to himself in stressful situations, something which in earlier days he referred to in himself as disassociative personality disorder.  He read books about it and the cases were always more severe, some people watched themselves go through their entire lives with complete detachment.  Then, where was this emotional longing coming from?  Was it as much a desire to be one with his own body again?

The couples shared a lot of beers.  That was fine, he could have more himself.  He ordered a different kind every time to feign that he was testing flavors and being an all around connoiseur.

“I can’t help but feel like yesterday wasn’t such a good day for us.”  Jerry said on the phone, between breaks of watching Malcolm and the Man.  She sighed wistfully, and seemed completely oblivious to the phone conversation concept.  She must have been completely removed emotionally, just as he was removed physically.  Unfortunately, those two sides couldn’t combine and form one worthwhile whole.

He always expected some kind of substantial breakthrough, some definining event that would cause a paradigm shift and reinvigorate the world around him.  Getting older was more of a realization that the only way you can change life is through a series of small things, because change needs to be a persistent series of events, not just one unprecedented one. 

“I don’t think so.”  She said, and then there was a long pause.  Jerry rolled his eyes on his end of the phone, staring at the large pause symbol in the corner of the TV screen.  “I watched this show earlier today about contimination in the Mehkong river.”

He wasn’t stuck, she was.  He was the willful sailor letting himself be sucked into the whirlpool, and in the center was this island, which even if he reached he wouldn’t be able to live on.  It lacked all of the proper outlets for communication, sometimes the seamonster would spring out of the rapids and make the whole area seem lively, but even that monster was losing its’ scales by the chunks.  He’d probably let it swallow him alive, but what choice did he have?  She was a beautiful woman.

Why would she only talk to him about TV shows?  Was she that humorless?

“Well what’s going on in the Mehkong?  Old seamonster up to no good again?”  He asked.

“You do this every time.  The Mehkong is a real river, a lot of people depend on it.  If it matters so much to you that we are an item, you are missing the point.  The world out there needs each of us to do all we can do, it has no room for couples.”

Jerry figured this was the inevitable speech.  She had been through her romance phase a long time ago.  He’d have to keep kicking himself now for bringing it up.

“I’ll call you later, I have to think about what you said.”  He hung up with ostensible thoughtfulness.  Jerry crossed into the bathroom, body hair sprinkled liberally from every surface area. The blinds were tilted horizontal, and he twisted the curtain rod to correct this.  He turned on his heel and stepped on the scale, he was up another five pounds.  He looked at his profile in the mirror, the stomach was making its way out past the pecs again.  He thought he had been exercising and eating properly, but as the old adage goes results don’t lie.

He was mad that he lied about having to think about what he said.  He tangled the cord around his arm and let the phone dangle

There was a time when he would be mad at her, and then after calling he would be unable to keep that vitriol up.  It seeped out of his head and corroded all of his organs, being absorbed completely by the time it reached the abdomen.  And he felt it like a little goblin in there, rearranging the cupboards.  He eventually willed himself to stay angry,

Jerry called his friend Colin, who had a completely different frame of mind.  It wasn’t necessarily a fresh perspective, but it was a different perspective.

“You’re doing the complete wrong thing if you’re trying to draw ultimatums, get her to… um… capitulate.”  He was eating a sandwich or something, and was almost impervious to listening.

“What you really need to do is get her to let her guard down.  When she feels like everything is fine, and maybe you got it all together… um… she’ll start coming to you.  Then it’s really… uh… “careful what you wish for.”

Jerry had a lot to say while Colin was talking, and before he talked Colin, but once Colin finished talking he decided it’d be better to just be happy with the fresh perspective.

“Are you coming out later?” 

Jerry was not coming out later.

Work, he reminded himself.  That’s the only way you can rise above this.  He flashed back to Sha-Ram, they sat across from eachother on a long wooden peer overlooking a brimey lake.

“You can only work, that’s all there is to life.  If you’re ever stuck, the answer is always work.  You decide what you’re good at, what you want to do, and then you work.  Think of it as when you are gone.  The only possible legacy you have is something you worked very hard on.  For some men it’s family, some can’t avoid their fates.  Some have to do what their fathers did, others fall into the wrong crowd and tread water for their entire lives.  The only thing you have is what you make, and what you make is what you work at.”

Jerry shook his head and laughed, laying propped up against the stucco wall in his twin bed.  He remembered how overly simple it seemed at the time, although Sha-Ram always insisted the most profound facts are the ones right under your nose.

It’s never that you’re too good for someone, but it might be that you work too hard for them.

Jerry’s dad would say he was proud of him with the lack of anything better to say, just like in a failed romantic relationship when “I love you” becomes the drastic, constantly repeated platitude that you throw like a pebble into a thick darkness.

There was a woman crying upstairs, but as Jerry put his ear closer to the wall he couldn’t tell if she was actually laughing.  80s music Jerry didn’t recognize pulsated through the nearly bare trees, some black female singer going on and on about “what it would be like to love you.” 

Jerry wrestled with the heavy “pull” door in his lobby, and retrieved a stack of periodicals sticking from the crudely crafted wood compartments across from the dull silver mailboxes.  He flipped through pictures of couches on the ultra thin garbage quality paper.

“That’s not going to fit on top of your car.”  His friend Mark said, as they stood at the side of the road.  Jerry lowered down and tried to move the big leather piece of meat by himself, scraping it across the concrete with a dumbening sound. 

Cop is poking around in his garbage, around house

Day 102: Not much more time

I have to do this one quick because I need to leave in 3 minutes.  This is the beginning of a Zombie/Paranoia type of thing I'm working on.  We'll see where it goes, it's just an elaborate setup at this point.

 

            “Jimmy is still out there?”  Juan said, startling back to consciousness.  He upset the bandages on his right arm, the blood soaked right through.

            “Relax, Juan, they’re going to know we are in here.”  Aunt Susan stared directly into Juan’s eyes with raised eyebrows and helped him back down onto the cot.  He looked like he had just woke up from a nightmare.

            Barrett brandished the big 12 gauge pump shotgun like a club, the casings littering the floor on the other side of the door. 

            An occasional arm scraping against the ouside of the room kept everyone from getting comfortable.  Juan was the only one who got any sleep.

            Afraid to leave apartment because he’s read “the book” which actually turns out to be a huge volume of books.  This comes into play when lay people make uneducated comments about the world, where he has to bite his tongue instead of correcting them.  Even for just saying middlingly intelligent things he feels their hostility start to rise, and has to quell it with sports talk.

            One year earlier:

            Juan stared out of the window, the doppleganger pedestrians wandered the street like mindless vultures.  Some of them paired off in twos, like Aristophanes’s story about the two halves that seek each other out.  Human nature seemed inherent, even in these mindless creatures, and Juan pulled his blinds shut in disgust.  He thought for sure that when the closed them the people on the street would immediately stare up at his window, he could picture them out there with their beady eyes struggling to stand in one place, perpetually lurching.

            He heard whispering from the apartment across from his, their window was open with the white and blue blinds shuffling in the air.  Or maybe it was the wind whistling through his drapes, but he heard the wind playing tricks on him again.  He put on his headphones, John Philip Sousa blustering away with his noisy ensemble.

            Juan checked the door to make sure it didn’t let in a crack of daylight, checked the wall fixtures for secret cameras, and blew dust off of a thick volume called “Of Being Human.”  He had just left off on the section called “paranoia.”  He imagined someone cracking a joke about the irony of that being the title of the section he was reading and laughed, an uncomfortable between the teeth kind of laugh.

            Paranoia was this concept that had been written out of the books, lost in history.  The theory, as far as Juan could gather, was that if you didn’t have a word for something it didn’t exist.  He was sure it was what he was feeling based on the sound of the word, and the countless illustrations that perfectly illustrated the situation he found himself in.  Reading about it would only made it worse, as he flipped back to the dog eared page and then slammed the volume shut.  A siren blared like a bee off in the distance, and he tucked the book back into the spare linen sheets in his shabby armoire.

             

 “Typically at its worst when you spend a long time alone.”  It said next to a picture of a characterization of paranoia, a little purple dinosaur with the covers pulled up to its eyes sitting in a room with all of the blinds pulled shut. 

“Damn, all alone.”  He thought.  As he shut his eyes and sat back in his leather Lay-Z Boy, a crow squaked on the windowsill.  It squaked again and again, louder and louder, like it was trying to make sure he didn’t sleep.  He heard a tree branch scrape against what seemed to be the ceiling, but being as he had a neighbor upstairs it was neither a tree branch or the ceiling.

He thought the phone was ringing.  It was just a nightmare.  “Phew, just a nightmare.”  He said, wiping a giant glob of sweat that looked like George Washington off of his forehead and placing the damp washcloth across his face.  He suddenly imagined the washcloth getting very heavy and threw it off against the wall, and it slid down the wall to the floor like a slug.

Nights passed, Juan’s stocked fridge had diminished to baking soda, eggs, and old Chinese Food.  The old Chinese Food was next, he decided, he could just microwave it for hours and it would be edible.  The hot sauce might disguise the old cardboardy taste.  Others were wandering around on the other side of the door, he scoffed as he heard footsteps, but the great reality of it was that he would have to leave soon to replace his supply.

The TV was on, and Juan watched it from the reflection in the mirror across from it.  It was a news show, and the man inside had shifty eyes, Juan knew it was only his mind playing tricks on him but it seemed like he could see through to the other side.

“Next at 10:  Shut aways and the detrimental effects they have on society.”  Juan switched it to cartoons.

Part with high pitches squeeking noise that turns out to be his friend who can also make that noise.  He has learned recently how to do it, but remembers going on a roadtrip with the friend years ago where he tricked his dad into thinking they had a flat tire.  Why now why here?

The dusk had spread across the sky outside.  Out on the street, the lamps flickered and cast a yellow over the sidewalks, the embers of lit cigarettes

He reached for the phone and it started

            Juan knows what he has come from, he is hypervigilant, can’t sleep at night because the slightest thing wakes him up.

           

Day 101: Still in business

The only time you fail is when you label yourself a failure, and all of that malarkey.  It's true, right?

"But we should never forget that what we call complicated or wonderful is not at all wonderful for nature, but quite ordinary.  We tend to always project things into our own difficulties of understanding and to call them complicated, when in reality they are simple and know nothing of our intellectual problems." 

Carl Jung Instinct and Unconscious
 
 

            It had been weeks since the garbage men came.  The pizza boxes started to coalesce into a rubbery cardboardy substance, the moldy old cheese disintegrating into flakes on the grey tray inside the box.  Alfy couldn’t smell any of it, as he gazed over the mound in his cereal bowl at the TV he spent the last of his savings on.  The 90s comedian with his bushy hair and obnoxious ex girlfriend spoke the audience on his sitcom.  Alfy’s older brother had bought the complete boxset of the show for the family, at the time it was originally airing Alfy found it completely unrelatable.  A single man living in a one bedroom apartment with the precarious lifestyle of making money from making people laugh, acting like that was his sole source of income.  You’re making this show, Alfy thought, you are ignoring the fact that you’re making this show.

            Alfy pulled the drawstring on his sweatpants tight and rolled up in the red recliner he rescued from the street, the empty pillow on the opposite side of the room still indented from where the dog used to sleep.  Old Yelper, as he had so cleverly named it, was forever memorialized in a tribunal frame, a thick pink border with “bow wow” and pictures of paws outlining it.  The picture sat in the middle of his mantle, and the pose of the Great Bernards face greatly resembled the cover for Beethoven 2, but his own pockmarked face looked nothing like John Ritters.  He couldn’t help but think about how sily it was that they named the dog in those John Ritter movies after the great composer, maybe some people had gotten used to it, but not Alfy.  It made him sad each time he looked at his departed dog, as it  always reminded him of John Ritter.

            After 20 minutes of freezing from the chill on his little mid-living room island, he rolled himself up onto his ankles and then pushed his hands to full extension off of his knees.  He pulled the blinds free from the window with a starchy hiss, revealing the ripe odors of a sunny day.  The power lines were perilously close to his outside windows,  but even as far as power lines went they weren’t prime real estate.  The crows chose instead to sit on the powerlines across the street by the bakery, enjoying the savory smells of decadent chocolate they would never enjoy.  He averted his gaze from the sun pouring through the window and looked back with a squint, nearly able to make out the stink lines emanating from the pile of garbage in the dumpsters below. 

            Clicking on the web browser, the little wireless bar thing showed a secure connection. 

            “C’mon, I’m signed on as a guest, look!”  Alfy appealed to a benevolent God who would provide him with everything he needed.

            The browser repeatedly showed him so kindness; he wouldn’t be checking his email or Facebook any time soon.

            The list of “needed things” in the spiral notebook on the coffeetable was growing.  He added “internet” and “broom” to the list, becoming increasingly aware of each crumb he allowed to reach the ground.  Life became a series of preventions rather than action, living alone the things that you wanted to do and didn’t want to do became clear.  He imagined his sensibility as a tangible thing, like a metal detector, that followed him as a gauge in front of his eyes.

            He swung the door to his apartment open with ostentatious gumption, poking his head out from his hooded sweatshirt and down the hall.  He assumed most of the tenants were at work, because that’s what it seemed like people would do during the week.  A faucet occasionally squeeled overhead, reminding him of the boilerroom in the hotel in The Shining.  The phone rang with text messages intermittently, occasionally companies he hadn’t researched called with offers for jobs he wasn’t interested in.

            “I guess I could relocate.”  He told Deborah from accounts receivable.  “Boise?  That sounds fine.”

            He finished his writing for the day, a fluff piece about a Russian factory worker named Drago.  At night Drago would return to his single bedroom apartment above the steel mill and smell the red hot rising outside the windows.  He was insular, unspoken for and unapologetic, he was that nieve young man who still wanted to make it.

            Drago could never finish his story, even after repeated readings of inspirational quotes from such famous figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Napoleon Hill.  “To Conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.”  Drago read this and then would include unsavory details about his every day life.  Alfy felt fine about including these unsavory details because he was writing about Drago, not about himself.  “Drago felt immature for masturbating five times a day.  Most of the pictures he had saved on his desktop were of girls he knew from highschool.” 

            “No, that isn’t something I should put in there.  It doesn’t further the plot.  We already know about his character.”  Alfy deleted that part.  He wondered what he should do that day after leaving the apartment.

            He scratched his chin pondering whether it was necessary to change the names of the characters in his Drago story.  He took a sip of the lukewarm coffee from his ironic coffeecup, which was for a small real estate company in the area.  A self defeating inclination was to not change the names because no one would ever read this terrible story anyway, but then he reminded himself that if he were to have that attitude no one would ever read it.

            The phone rang on the mattress, the bad echo surrounding him with the tetris themesong.  He thought he was lonely, but when the phone rang he realized there were plenty of people whom it was better to be lonely than to talk to. It was Jerry again, every time it was Jerry, the delusional stoner college dropout who had recently decided he was a musician.  Atleast I’m better than Jerry, he thought to himself, atleast I’m writing this story.

            The phone rang again moments later and it was that sweetly retarded asian girl that would text or call every day unrelenting until the end of time.  Maybe he should set Lizzie and Jerry up, he thought, and then he felt sick when he wondered if he wouldn’t be jealous in that scenerio.

            Ch. 2

            He loaded the garbage bags onto the shakey four wheeled mover.  The bed sank to one side, and he stood across the room by the door like eyeballing a picture on the wall.  It didn’t look like it leaned at all, although each time he laid down on it he coud feel it sink and try to roll him off.  He imagined in his sleep attaching new pieces of wood to the bottom of the bed to prop it up, but now in his waking state saw that the box spring was only propped up on one side.

He ruffled the pillows and lifted with too much energy to get one side up.  He spotted his green Colonial Raiders hat was under the mattress, and with great effort he grabbed it in a swooping motion and shook it out.  He pulled it onto his head with two hands, straightening the bill out and immediately bumping into the dresser.  He pushed himself up with his back against the drawers, hearing an abnormal sounding crack in his back region.  He straightened out and was relieved not to feel any more pain from it, although the crack still presented an ominous health related image.

The lid of the garbage bin clacked ontop of the pile of cardboard and garbage.  The garbage was suddenly gone, like the work of some sort of garbage fairies that appeared during the night.  The cute girl across the street looked at him over a pair of sunglasses, her face absolutely covered in them.  His front door key didn’t work again and he had to go around the back, which wasn’t embarassing because he had to check his mail either way.

Finishing his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he turned the public access painting show off.  The noon sun reflected off of his Sears painting of the dancers and the top of the TV.  It was ending, either way, the artist had used his turpentine and multiple shades of grey to create the sky reflecting off the gorge. 

“I use a lot of paint the first time so I don’t have to keep reapplying it to the canvas.”  The balding mexican man proclaimed.  Alfy thought about getting a canvas and paints of his own and participating in one of these exercises, but as it was he had a list that was pages long of things that were more important.  The numbers were next to each item he could have used for the house.

Alfy snapped the metal clasp of his suspenders onto the black polyester pants.  The silenece only bugged him when he had just woken up, at which point he felt like rushing out of the house and finding anything to do in the real world.  He straightened out the ruffles in his pants repeatedly but when he let go they became just as ruffled as before. 

There was a message from the guy at the hardware store, he must have missed the call when he was taking out the garbage.  He was calling about the third shift job.  Alfy crossed his fingers for the job, putting on an act of busyness whenever the phone rang.  He knew better than to answer it on the first couple of rings.  He tried to call back and reached an answering machine, hanging up right after the beep of the machine. 

            “Bones.”  He said to his Deforest Kelley poster.  He shook his head and steeled himself again, rising up to the store.

            The sweet sounds of Hall and Oates filled the room with their cheesiness.  Daryl Hall sung about Sarah smiling, and Alfy thought of his long lost Sarah.  He knew she’d call again, she’d be back on the phone soon, he corrected himself when he thought otherwise.

            Out on the street corner, an older man passed again.  He craned his back in a 45 degree angle, and it looked like he had just thrown it out. 

            He picked up the receiver and called the city, a number that was saved into his phone as “the city.”  The yellow pages sat under a pile of clothes on his wooden floor. 

            A red light flashed accompanied by a blurt of siren sledge.

           The secret to living alone is allowing yourself to get more excited about things than you normally need to.  This is especially important when you are completely alone, let’s say someone goes on a trip for a couple of weeks.  You have to become fully immersed in things, and not gloss on the outside.  Lucidity may be compromised, but when you’re caught in your own mind is when you are the least lucid of all.

           “Well she speaks to me directly, she knows who I am.”  Alfy explained, tangling the corded phone line around his finger.  He watched the TV with the giant green “mute” embossed on the bottom right corner.  A small asian woman was using enormous strength to manuever a duck into a tall black pot that looked like an Abraham Lincoln style stovepipe tophat.

            Now that he was done talking about the weird recurring dream he had been having,

            Talking to dad on the phone after you don’t hate him anymore because you don’t have to live together:

            The phone rang halfway through its sentence before he picked it up. 

            “It’s those goddamn Sousa marches, that kid is listening to them turned up so loud.”  Alfy’s dad yelled across the ottoman to Alfy’s mom, his hand ostensibly shielding the phone.

            The dishes were stacked up in the sink in a neat pile.  The doorbell rang and Alfy put the phone down.

            “Where are you going?  I finally get you on the line and you are gone.”  The phone hollered as he walked away.  It bounced ineffectually off of the lead paint covering the arched doorway.  Alfy shut the door behind his buxom friend Pam.

            Alfy picked the phone up with two fingers and hung it up, a tinny voice hollering over the line.  She stood with her back arched in the doorway to his bedroom, Alfy’s heart pounding with anticipation. Pam popped a lucky wad of gum. 

            “So they let me off early.  It’s been a long day, I’m exhausted.”

            Alfy wondered why she had come over at all.

            “Either way, I’m happy to see you.”  He couldn’t help but get all aw-shucks around her.

           

            Alfy was writing a story about a guy writing a story about a swear jar millionaire.  The guy had started a website where honest people could contribute a tax deductable sum for each time they swore, which he somehow managed to get ahold of himself through some elaborate embezzling scheme.  Alfy was too lazy to figure out how the embezzlement scheme would work, and this is where he was stuck in the story.  He thought of having the main character in the story being stuck here too, but instead had the main character in the main character of his stories story be stuck at this point.  The main character in his story, on the other hand, knew exactly how to describe the racket.

He waited for his phone to ring, it didn’t.  He picked it up and opened the cheap flip screen, the background picture of Count Chocula staring up at him.  He clicked with his thumb a few times over her name, hit the green call button and immediately hit the red no call button.  He checked the call history, the little green symbol that meant “outgoing” next to her name.

Those little rocks they use to fill up the walkways between houses were especially red this morning.  The trees were crawling with small animal activity.  The squirrels teased each other with distant looks in their eyes, passing acorns back and forth with no urgency.

“It’s finally next Friday!” Alfy had waited patiently for two weeks for it to be next Friday.  He was the type of person who was a lot more functional when he had something to look forward to.

Day 100: 100 days of this

I probably should proofread everything I write before I send it.  Oops.


 

Coffee that was left in the coffeemaker was still warm and I had to decide if I should make new coffee or drink it.

Jerry was back in his apartment.  He stratched right above his ass as he pulled the cabinet with the coffee stuff in it open.  The sink leaked, but he didn’t pay for heat or water.  Lifting the coffee pot out of its station, Jerry noticed that the coffee from earlier in the week was still warm.  He swirled the contents of the pot and held it up to his nose, and it still smelled aromatic, like it had just been made.  Jerry moaned as he looked up at the filters and coffee, and then back down at the pot.

“It’s coffee time.”  He said to himself , a little shocked how his own voice sounded.

Some genius coffee machine maker must have thought of this, he thought.  It must reheat your coffee at the last minute, right before you’d not want it anymore..

A voice went off in Jerry’s head.  “Hey don’t you be drinking that coffee.”  It was an unfamiliar voice.  It sounded a little bit like a softball coach.  Jerry pictured a fat middle weight white man who may have done some amateur boxing at some point.

“You’re never too young for salt and pepper hair!”  Jerry said to his reflection, genuinely impressed by his salt and pepper hair.  He ran his hands through it upward, tilting his head into the low hanging bathroom light.  Exiting into his dormitory, he sighed, and wondered if he had really been that stressed. 

Jerry was suddenly back on the tall wooden stilts, it could have been years earlier.  The yogi who sat across from him, Sha-Ram, was long since deceased.  He had choked on a fish bone.

“There is no implicit meaning, it’s all subjective.  Take, for example, this dog house with the door bulging out.  It looks like someone has been leaning against it for years.”

With this, he stood up and gestured with an open palm at the dog house.

“When I said leaning against it for years, what did you think of?”

There is something humiliating about being a disciple. There are great men out there, but the objective is to be like them, not to worship them.  You want to work with someone, not for them.

“I guess… a dog dying in there after pressing itself against the side trying to escape?  Little did it know that it was a “pull” door, not a “push” door.”

“What did you notice about time in this metaphor?  Did the leaning seem to take place over any specific period of time?”

“No, just a long time.  It had to have been long enough to make the door bulge.”

“So, in other words, the predicate necessitates the action.  Even when we don’t know who our subject is.”

“That’s true, I think.  But what is it supposed to mean?”

“Metaphors don’t necessarily mean anything, their soul purpose is to create context and reinforce atmosphere.  Life is a juxtaposition.”

Jerry came to all at once, and lifted his head off of an elevated platform.  Lights bounced off of the mirrors behind the bar, the two stools next to him were open, but overall it was a crowded place. 

“Rosco?”  Jerry asked.

“Your buddy ain’t here tonight.”  The bartender leaned over the bar with a hand washing the inside of a glass. 

“When did I get here?”  A few chuckles from down the bar.

“He don’t remember, go easy on him.”  The bartender said.  “You came here with some girl at quarter after eight.  Looked like you two were having a great night.  Ring any bells?”

Jerry stood up and dug through his pockets, retrieving a white handkerchief and wiping his face with it.  “No, I can’t say I remember any of that.”  His watch was spun around on his wrist, and he twisted it back to face forward and checked it.  “Wouldn’t really matter what time it was, what day is it?”

A new customer, a lady in a green dress, had entered with a peacock’s strut and the bartender was gone, welcoming her.  Jerry grabbed a hand full of pistachios from a platter on a foldout table and shoveled them into his mouth.  A creepy looking extremely tall guy shot him a hostile look.

The TV was airing repeats of a sitcom, Malcolm and the Man.  Malcolm was a talking dog, and the man was a professional lawyer who took care of the dog after a series of mishaps made him its caretaker.  Unlike most talking dog shows, it was a widely known fact that Malcolm could talk, and people didn’t pay much notice to it.  As a matter of fact, he had developed a reputation as a real jerk.

“Marty.”  The man’s real name was Marty. 

“Yes, Malcolm?”  Marty said, popping a few ibuprofens.  He gritted his teeth and wouldn’t look over.

“Look at me, Marty!  For God’s sake!”

Jerry remembered this one.  This was the episode where Malcolm and the Man had “jumped the shark.”  They had a brief sexual encounter, and the guest director took the script in a different direction than the screenwriter had intended.  Jerry remembered, as a kid, that it seemed like Malcolm and Marty had some real chemistry, and it hadn’t been so weird that they crossed the line.

Soon, it was eight in the morning and the darkness had become midnight blue.  The whole world seemed to be passing through a blue lense as Jerry sat at the bus stop, a wicked hangover just a good nights sleep

day 99: Still back in business

Now I really don't know if any of this is good, but I am trying something different.  It's more of the writing for writings sake kind of thing, but trying to do it enough to get in the groove.  Usually about 5 hours is what it takes, but I don't have 5 hours.

 

“What are you going to do when the machine runs out?  You can’t reload the thing, and they won’t reload it for you if it isn’t out in the hall.  You’re going to have to put sodas in the fridge, like a reasonable human being.”

            “I am just going to put it back in the hallway for a day, that’s ok.  Then it’s coming right back in here with me.  Think of it, unlimited soda.”

            Outside in the hallway, the two masked guards took their breaks.  One removed his mask and the other kept his on, remaining completely silent.

            “I know it’s you in there, Marcus.”  The unmasked guard said.  His long red hair flowed elegantly, a cowlick in the front giving him plenty of volume, and he looked a little like one of the guys who dies in Braveheart.

            Marcus didn’t respond, standing stoically with a guardlike posture.

            “You’re on BREAK, Marcus.  If the Remingtons come through, they are going to think you are working.  They are going to make you go outside and shoot down one of those flying bird things again.  Or, worse yet, you are going to have to fix the bridge.  Me, I don’t have my mask on.  Look at me.  I look like I’m on break.  Because I am on break.”

            Sargeant Marx poked his head out of his office and craned his head around the door. 

            “Phil, shut it.”  He said.  He had an ostensible seriousness about him, and he slowly pulled his head back into the room.  Marcus turned around and saw something in the room that Phil couldn’t see from his vantage point.  The door shut.

            “Look, I’m not that mad at you about what happened… wait who was he talking to in there?”  Phil put his ear up to the door but heard nothing.

            “You think too much.”  The doctor said, pointing a little black stick at a wallsized chart.  He gestured indiscriminately at the white lines flying willy nilly on the black background.

            “Are you sure that’s what it’s saying?”  Jerry asked with furrowed brows.

            “That’s all it could mean.  This test discovers whether or not you’re thinking too much, and you most certainly are.”

            “Well, what am I supposed to do?  Now I am going to think more about the fact that I think too much, and that can’t be healthy.”

            The doctor scratched his chin, and fiddled with his stethoscope for a second.  “Lay back on the matt.”  He pulled a sheet of what looked like white register tape over the elevated platform and Jerry pulled himself up onto the table like a child mounting a pony.

            “This isn’t good either.”  The doctor tisked.  “You better close your eyes, there’s only one thing I can do.”

            When Jerry closed his eyes, he heard the doctor scramble and pry open a metal box.  His feet sounded like the tiny feet of a cockroach scraping on the bathroom floor.  Jerry tried to lift his head up and roll off the sheet, but he was suddenly accosted with a globule of freezing cold cream.  His eyes rolled back into his skull and he was gone, a light surrounding his complete darkness and transporting him up a waterfall. 

            Jerry thrashed the oars against the water with an unhuman urgency.  The rickety little canoe was splintered and the revolutions of the oars made circular indentations in their wells.  A young boy sat curled up on the other side of the boat, recoiling in terror at Jerry’s flagrant movements. 

Jerry shook his head and braced to regain control of his motor functions.   He noticed he could control his upper torso, and with great difficulty he extended that control over the rest of his body.  His arms grinded to a hault like a train stopping in its tracks, and he looked down at his arms which were now well sculpted on the delta.

He laid flat on his back and he could hear the seagulls overhead.  He sat up and looked South, as indicated by the overhead sun, seeing a thick fog which obscured where land probably was.  Jerry reached down to something metal sitting against his neck, and he found it was an hourglass on a chain link necklace.  It had all emptied into the bottom side.

“Don’t flip it back over!”   The boy cried, reaching a hand out toward Jerry and craning his body completely in the opposite direction.  Jerry dropped it and put his hands up in a “ok I will not turn that back over” gesture.

“You’ve been thrashing at the sea for hours,”  The kid stood up and inched toward him with raised eyebrows.  The boat started wavering from side to side, and Jerry pulled the kid down.

“Are you crazy?!”  That big vein jumped out in the middle of Jerry’s forehead.  “You’re going to tip us over!  I can’t swim.”

Jerry saw his own reflection in the water, and stretched out his oversized arms, as they grew into big pig turnips in the water below.  The kid sunk back to his original spot, wrapping himself up with his arms.  Long ovular shadows drifted casually in the dark water below.

Marcus listened to CDs he thought were intended for teenage girls.  Maybe that said something about hiw emotional maturity level, but mostly he resented that as an adult male he was expected to repress all of his emotions.  He kept his Taylor Swift going strong, he empathized with her hatred of her ex boyfriends.  Maybe it was that he hadn’t had a meaningful relationship since he was her age.  He sung with the windows open a crack, and occasionally had to avert his eyes when he’d see his own face in the rearview mirror.  He didn’t recognize the fragility or tenderness in his own eyes looking back at him, and the sort of squinty look on his face was more embarassing than the fact he was singing what he was singing.

“Listen, I have hours of instruction.  Why can’t you send one of your stooges?  How am I even supposed to know what this guy looks like?  Hours on this sea can transform you completely.” 

“It has to be you.”  The head monk looking type of guy put a big soft paw on his shoulder.  “They see one of the government officials, he is going to run for it.  This isn’t a tourist attraction.  He is coming here to study.”

Day 98: Back in business

My internet is back, so I'm back.  I'm going to do 1,000 words of what I have been writing lately until I run out of that, and then we're back to a new fresh 1,000 a day.  Either way, back in the business.

 

Don’t let your increased practicality make you completely boring.  Don’t think of being an adult as some sort of mold you are supposed to fit yourself into.

When are your interests important?  How do you know if your interests are important?

            The guys had spent the last two hours talking to the computer, its voice recognition software responding to their inquiries with suitable responses. 

“The computer can’t be programmed to know what you are talking about.”  Jerry said, staring across the room at the blue coated authorities with an expression that screamed “what?!”.  The lapel buttons and ribbons on the heralded Sargeant Marx looked like little trees as he turned and twisted the little machine around in his hands, like a bear trying to extract a kitten from a dresser drawer.

His protectors, two men adorned in robes and masks, persistently tried to wrestle the box away from him. Their hard plastic masks clicked against Sargeat Marx’s ridiculous shoulderpads.  He looked at them over his crossed arms and pulled the box even closer to his body. They stared on, letting him fiddle with it for another five minutes before restarting the wrestling process.

One of the electrodes in the ceiling burst and sprayed a red phosphorous onto Sargeant Marx, which immediately dissipated.  Sargeant Marx thrashed at his robe like he was covered in bees, and when he finally opened his eyes was satisfied that he wasn’t covered with anything at all.  Meanwhile, the box had ended up hurled across the room and was currently leaking some sort of black fluid.  Sargeant Marx’s robe settled around him like curtains in the eye of a storm.

The masked men looked at Sargeant Marx, who had a sizeable lump of red on the end of his nose.  They exchanged half crescent smiles, a tacit agreement.

“What was that?!”  The desk clerk asked, looking up from his half folded Cosmology magazine.  Sargeant Marx flashed him a look that said “get back to work”, and he shrugged and resumed reading his magazine. Half a picture of the hubble telescope was on the cover with the caption in big yellow letters, “Is there life on Mars?”

            Jerry rose for the dustpan and broom, shaking his head.  A brightly dressed concierge poured through the heavy chamber door in a huff, and it slammed behind him with such violence that the iron frame shook.

            Jerry dug through the cabinets, removing cobwebs with the back of his hand.  He reached inside the dark cabinet, his entire right arm disappearing up to the shoulder.  He pulled his arm back out with nothing in its grasp.

            “Do you know where we keep the cleanup stuff?  No of course you don’t.”  Jerry asked the entirety of this under his breath.  He took off his apron, which he used to wipe up the blood red dust from the floor.  The box continued to ooze on the opposite side of the room.

Five minutes later, the station returned to business as usual.  Three men in red hazmat suits picked up the box and inserted it in a plastic bag, a black stain remaining on the ground where it had been.

“…And we will continue our tour on the probiotics warehouse level...”  Said the concierge, gesturing ostentatiously in front of him at an invisible red carpet.  He bowed to the men in front of him, and as he did so the walkie-talkie on his hip buzzed and coughed. Flushing noticeably, he turned it off with a string of apologies.

            Sargeant Marx looked at him with a tilted head and no emotion on his face.  He picked up his cape as he began walking, purposely avoiding the invisible red carpet the concierge attempted to guide him on.  Masked men flanked him on both sides, both large men in their own right but nowhere near as giant as Sargeant Marx.  He walked like an ape, hunched over, but somehow with a straight back.  The concierge looked like a child walking three giant dogs.  

            “He is almost certainly dead!”  Jerry slammed his hand into the table.  The desk clerk looked up at Jerry, back down at his magazine, over toward the swinging door that opened and reclosed behind the four men.  He then looked back down at the magazine.

            “You just sit there all day, you don’t care about anything but your goddamn magazine!” 

            “…But there might be life on Mars, you see.”  The man shrugged and made fleeting eye contact.

            Jerry shook his head and rose, gathering his things in his arms.  He had a group of folders, his coat, his hat, and .  The doors to his quarters opened automatically and the overhead light dimmed, cables from the compartmental ceiling dropped holding his goggles and nose plugs.  The room began a reverse flushing process and filled with water, drains at each corner shooting jet streams horizontally.

            A carbonated soda from the vending machine rolled down its tracks and tumbled sideways into the retrieval slot.  Mr. Dundley picked it up it, wiping the top with his sleeve and popping it open.  It hissed a little bit and he calmed it with a circular gesture, his secretary pushing her rolly chair away from the table with fear.

            “If you ruin another one of my blouses with your soda addiction I am going to go to Mr. Palfrey about you, he’s my uncle you know.”

            “Isn’t she a beaut?”  Mr. Dundley said, shaking his head and whistling.  The machine sat between the door and the coat closet, making it utterly impossible to get into or out of the room without being bombarded by its presence.