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.