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.