Day 59: My goodness!

It's Thanksgiving!  Things are looking up with that girl that I have the crush on.  It's funny how you only need the tiniest reassurance to feel awesome all day.  I watched that Simpsons episode yesterday where Homer and Marge meet, and he pretends he needs a French tutor to get her to come over to his place.  That's what I call persistence!  All signs point towards that I just need persistence, always.  And I think that's the secret in Napoleon Hill's book even though I've moved on now to less pseudo-sciency type of stuff.

Other thing!  I remember a couple of months ago (literally) before I "turned my life around" (by starting a stupid bad writing blog :D ) where I thought how I wished I was ignorant and ignorance is bliss.  Now that I'm more "interactive-ey" with my environment and a "proactive member of the work community", peoples opinions become much less ambiguous, or maybe I read into them more.  But, now-now (as in the present-present), I think maybe I'm still ignorant while thinking I'm not ignorant because I'm less ignorant than before, and maybe there's some level of keen understanding that I don't understand.  If I keep on an upward motion, maybe I'll be like that awful moment in the third matrix movie where (spoiler alert) Trinity flies in that shitty little ship out of the water and sees the world for what it "really is" for a moment.  Hopefully it will be climactic.

Other thing!  Happy to announce I'm not one of those people who will dodge eye contact when I run past you because you're old and nasty looking.  Now, I smile at everyone (thanks Dale Carnegie!)  The biggest difference is that now I spot the people who look away the way I used to, and I notice the other people who smile stolidly back, and it's like we're in a club together.  If it was easier to define why you want to be on the "smiling" team rather than the "frowning" team, even though neither group could easily be defined as necessarily happy, I'd try to explain it.  But it's just one of those things like George Gonis says, it's about being a good guy and being moral in a society where everyone is douchebags, not to show you're above everyone else or that you are a condescending nose-look-downer, but it's just harder to do.  It's about doing what's harder to do to show that you're not broken, because no one wants to hang out with broken people (other than other broken people).  Overcoming shyness, on the other hand, is a completely different story.

Also, since following other dumb self-help book advice of trying to make things be about other people and not myself, I have noticed some notorious "thread stealers" on facebook.  These are people that make some stupid comment on your status update (pithy little things, I realize), and suddenly your dumb little joke is about them.  So, now I get why I don't want to be one of those people (unless the joke is hilarious and provokes more jokes).

This part should be amended and separated from my 1,667 words a day part, I know that.  As Dan Kennedy (THE Dan Kennedy) told me, "work at it as diligently as a bad habit."  Way to say it, Dan.



            Chief could see the fireworks shooting off in the distant sky.  He heard them broach the air seconds after they would go up.  The possums scurried away as he threw his first spiked boot ono the landing. 

            He pushed back his negative thoughts.  He was missing the crab crawl, the three legged race, the armchair quarterback.  Those goldfish in the little bottles weren’t going to throw ping pong balls into themselves.

He pulled his legs out of the staircase like they were made of led and genuinely wished the spikes were just a few inches shorter.  He was hoping at some point something would come flying out of the sky or down the stairway that would make him thankful for the enormous spikes, but then he might have to abandon the boots all together.

The trees dwarfed Chief’s size, and the stairway dwarfed the trees.  When he’d repeatedly fall face first into it he’d rise with the caustic smell of rotten melon in his nose.  He’d recognize that smell anywhere, from the time as a five year old he found that thing in the icebox and dug right into it with a knife and fork.  There were plenty of fresh vegetables and fruit surrounding it, but his fascination with the biggest thing in the produce box drew him into it.  At the time, he didn’t even know what rotten meant; it still smelled edible, maybe a little odd but edible.  As he climed the next stair, he was far enough from the solid earth below to obscure all visibility.

“And for what, a stupid kid?”  He said to himself, shaking his head.

From on top of the stairs a head poked from the submerged depths.  It was nothinf more than a lump on the landing, eyes slightly less alive than this staircase. 

At the same time, Charles sat above in a rocking chair, somewhere up there.  He thumbed through volumes of comic books, he had read them all practically.  This was the final Spiderman.  The issues transformed infront of him from one to the next, his eyes darting with an insatiable appetite.  He ate enormous quantities of Gushers fruit snacks, the purple guys looking on in disgust as he bit into each phegmy capsule. 

“It’s what he wanted, what am I supposed to do?”  Red said to Purple at his misappropriated gaze.

Chief reached for the top of the landing with reckless abandon, the strap on his helmet falling over his eyes and not really obstructing anything.  Still, he thrashed about like a hose with too much water force coming through it.  He pried the helmet loose and let his lukewarm sweaty helmet hair pour out down his back.  The stood up before a bountiful world of long purple nothingness.

A structure stood far off, where the lightning came from.  It looked like the cover of Night Castle by Transiberian Orchestra, a silhouetted generic castle.  He thought of himself as the metalhead rocker ala Iron Maiden or Blind Guardian, the long haired man transported back to a barbaric ancient world with only his rock to accompany him.  He thought of his tape player with the Cream cassette in it back at the station, and regretted having to do this without any musical accompaniment.  The fireworks were on eye level now, and he stared down the stairwell and became immediately nauseous.

Thunderless lightning flashed playfully across the still sky.  The Chief might have peed his pants a little bit.  The sprawling purple majesty reminded him of a neon miniature golf course, the one he went to that time at the giant mall outside of Chicago.  It was impossible to see where your ball went when you hit it, because on that day the new management bought a full box of non-neon golf balls.  They were going to use them up, the angry manager shouted at his crestfallen half-retarded ball jockey, before they were going to get any new balls!

The rope reached the end of its length, and this was a rope which ordinarily was used to secure bungee jumpers.  He was passed bungee jumping length.  He retached the rope with little difficulty, he hadn’t tied the knot very securely around his stomach in the first place. 

The lightning shook him again as it penetrated directly through this purple layer of sky, striking the ground soundlessly.  A warning shot fired past his ear; ball lightning.  He was precariously unarmed, it was really unexcusable. 

“Hey, that’s ok!  I don’t even have to be here!  I’ll go back down right now!”  He called out, waving an SOS which was supposed to be a white flag.  He turned completely around and turned around again.  The staircase was nowhere to be found.  It was as if he had stumbled into a house of mirrors, suddenly his eyes weren’t functioning correctly.

The stars were still there, and he deducted from the placement of the moon that he should keep walking in the same direction.  His foot met with what seemed to be an edge to the map, and he tensed up into a stick and fell backwards.  The ankle bent in a way it wasn’t supposed to, but he pried his spiked boot out of the ground blissfully and was almost inclined to kiss the ground underneath him.

A few yards away from the edge, the castle appeared to him again like an evil spectre.  A blue orb shined from its highest tower, remitting and pulsing in a constant cycle.  It was getting bigger, or closer, or bigger, or lower.  He followed it with his eye as it descended the tallest spire like it was a spiral staircase.

Chief dropped his body onto the purple plane and undid his spiked boots like they were rollerskates.  He fuddled with the laces in a madman’s haste and when he finally did pull the right shoe off it took his sock with it.  The left one came off more easily, like a Chinese fingertrap. 

“Quit screwing around.”  He said to himself, jumping to his feet and wobbling for a moment before securing his position with a Taekwondo pose.  He pulled his socks back up as high as they would go, over his beige rock climbing pants, and started in a dead spring toward the castle.

The sprint turned into a slide each time he would stop, and he felt like he was on a newly buffered dancehall floor.  He gritted his teeth as he slid, trying to resist getting sucked into the fun.  The castle got closer and closer, and the blue light got less and less blue.  It was taking solid shape and thusly blending in with the darkness. 

From closer up, the castle was colorful and vibrant.  Its stoney fortified walls were a vibrant grey, flags bearing a chimera flew from the windows.  He looked up disbelievingly, the purple path seemed to invisbly condense and become a walkway.  He could almost see a red carpet sprawling out between the front gates like a lions tongue.  The purple terrain vanished when he crossed the portal into the castle. A hand attached to an invisible body waved him in through a slitlike window from near the top of one of the dual towers.  It was the third of four windows, the wave a creepy wavelike motion that was more like a dare than a friendly greeting.  The pointy red tops of the towers reminded him of gnome hats.

Chief thought maybe he was just crazy for thinking he saw that blue ball of light transform.  This place is atleast real, he thought.  Now that I’m here by it, anyway.  Back there on the path it was nothing more than a fantasy, but here it’s clearly a giant Victorian castle.  He rubbed his eyes just to make sure, though.  From here, he could see the lights and tiny little ant people surrounded by the black and white striped circus tents.  He couldn’t help but feel sort of cool for being up here, it was a unique experience that most of these people would never believe him about.

The drawbridge rattled toward the top, the chains that were holding it up rattling in perpetual movement due to their slack.  He cautiously approached the front gate, suddenly wondering what he was doing up here at all.  He thought of the day he got this job, that oath he had signed, the pledge he did in front of the stodgy bigshots at the real hospital.  Truth be told, the tests should have been a lot harder, and he was sure his peers had done more work than he had.  He read on the sylabus at the beginning of his service regime that he was going to have to do community service, which he dodged, and that he was going to write a statement of intent, which he winged.  I’m in this for fun, I’m up here just to have a good time!  He assured himself.

A sudden growl at the end of the bridge behind him turned him around.  A creature with a tail that looked like a giant snake and the jaws of a giant feline rubbed its front paws on the long red carpet like a bull getting ready to charge.  It reminded him of his ex wife, and he laughed at this thought before snapping back into the direness of the situation.  Running through the front gate, he closed the flimsy wooden doors which were splintered into tiny pieces seconds later.  The lanterns on the wall burnt like they had just been lit, a excruciating fire engine red.

He scrambled up the stairs, taking a moment to appreciate the high-arching hallways, the beautiful checkered floors, the tartans hanging on each wall, the friezes adoring the bottom of the stairs.  This place is so nice they have artwork on the bottom of the stairs, he thought.  The creature became stuck at the bottom of the stairwell, unable to get its fat head through the doorway completely.  It whimpered and hissed, flames spewing from its long curved tongue.