Day 63: I Heard it Through the Grape Vine (Active Voice)

Basketball is back and I can't think of anything else again.  I'm going to drive myself crazy.  Reading examples of Active Vs Passive Voice is more fun than it should be.

Trying to get through this whole big red book called "Warriners Composition and Grammar."  It feels like taking a course with a nun.  They try to make it seem fun, but it just isn't.  There's nothing fun about grammar or sentence construction; grammar is bad but sentence structure is even worse.  I'm actually already getting a ton out of this book.  It's good stuff.

I'm going to go run on a treadmill like a rodent for awhile and get my head big.  This cold will not go away.

41,367 words in.  Then I read this thing and learn from my mistakes while simultaneously reading this nerdy grammar thing and learn from what I'm supposed to do.  No one should think this is fun!  Yeah, it is fun, actually.  Having a project rules.

Other note to self:  make joke about obscurity and irrelevance of female athletes

            The dead red bodies appeared outside of his dreams.  He walked the street at night, scared back into the nearest building by the brightness seering out from above each street light.  He questioned his identity and the dying man flashed into his mind as he stood outside of Sal’s old timey hot dog hot spot.

            Sal was crouched behind the desk in front of an adding machine with white paper flowing out of it, a calculator on the other side, and a stapler in between.  His attention was focused on a boxing match on the little TV hanging perilously from a bolt or two on the far window.  A tabby cat pestered him, walking across the counter and rubing its ass into his burly Popeye arms; it’s food dish was empty.

            A latino youth with oversized cauliflower ears took a drubbing on the right side of his stomach at the hands of a man who should have been in prison.

            “Now that man’s a killer!”  Sal said with conviction.  “Hey, kid!  Ever seen a guy like that?  Looks like he’s trying to kill that other dude.”

            Charles responded with a sheepish laugh.  “I didn’t know people even watched boxing.  I haven’t seen it since Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear off.”

            Sal nodded and went back to the fight.  The latino guys pit crew wiped matted sweat off of his bulbous dome.  They yelled at him in an inaudible foreign language.  The smell of hot dogs drove Charles crazy, and he devoured four of them like a last meal.  Sal looked upset that Charles made the order and gave him ones that had been sitting out.

            Charles had lost track of time again.  His universe had shifted off of its axis, he pictured the dead man sitting in the middle of his room.  Maybe he should get a trunk to keep him in, and spray him down with formaldehyde or shove his body into a metal trunk.  He’d then roll the trunk down a hill, similar to the way Chucky gets killed in one of those Child’s Play movies.

            But he didn’t do this.  He stayed with Sal, they watched the fight, he found himself rooting for the guy who’s head kept changing shape.  It was like trying to iron out a protruding fiber in a air mattress, that hole would just manifest itself in some way on the other side.  Or, like giving someone a lobotomy, when that would just create all sorts of different problems.

            “Say I just killed a guy, hypothetically.”  Charles turned around on his barstool after witnessing a particularly vicious punch turning the latin fighters head to scar tissue.  “Say I… punched a guy so hard that his head came loose.  What do they do with that guys body?”

            “You talking about boxing?”  Sal asked.  “I think they carry him out on the stretcher, drive him straight to the morge.”

            “What if they can’t take him to the morge?  And isn’t that murder?”

            “Yeah, that’s murder alright.”  Sal stared up blankly at the screen.  The referee was trying to separate the fighters, like a child trying to separate a domestic dispute between his parents.  He could make him swing in less direct routes, but he’d keep swinging.

            “Why’s he hate that guy so much?  He looks like he’s for sure trying to kill him.”

            The streets were empty and a series of taraxacum seeds floated by in the air, like somewhere a beautiful girl stood blowing them into the wind.  That’s what Charles thought of, anyway, as he spun his stool completely around and stared out Sal’s front glass window into the street.  He suddenly felt captive, stir crazy, and paranoid.  Dropping a couple of singles on Sal’s counter out of his Spongebob Squarepants wallet, he rushed out the front door.

            A red car drove by, and a block further it went past again.  Charles felt like he was being watched.  He thought of his high school sweetheart that drove the Red Volkswagon Beatle; he thought of her every time he saw one since.  It wasn’t a Mazda, so that was ok. 

            He found the Mazda dealership downtown.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to find.  All it took was a phonebook.  He asked if a guy named Dave had bought a car, and the guy at the desk insisted he be more specific.  Then, he said on second thought the records were confidential and that he wouldn’t tell him even if he knew Dave’s last name.

            Charles rode the bus home, sitting between a guy with a radio coming out of his head and a man with an interesting story about yogurt.

            “It’s the same as icecream!”  He insisted, speaking of yogurt like he was a gold rush era miner going to California.  “Yessir, I’m going to get off of this bus, I’m going to get some of that yogurt, man, I’ve never had yogurt like that.”

            Charles listened to his continuing diatribe and watched the decadent ruins of the inner city pass.  Everything was cold and grey, like a colorbling artists dystopian vision.  The bus driver wheezed like a broken vaccuum cleaner.  A tired mother with her brightly dressed children read an article out of the newspaper to them.

            The bus passed the site where the previous Pulp Enterprises was, before the explosion.  The media hadn’t given it the coverage he had expected, but nobody had died, and there was only distant blurry satellite footage of the building going up.  Now, it looked like a caldera.  He stood up on the seat cushion to get a better view, the driver letting out an irksome squeel of annoyance.  A fox ran out of the hole and looked both ways at the height of the precipice before continuing in a hurried, guilty fashion onto the street.  The bus hit a bump and Charles sat back down, the yogurt man saying, “OK, where did I leave off?”

            The yogurt man departed when they reached the outskirts of the city.  A little yogurt shop at the end of suburbia.  He held his backpack over his shoulder with one hand, not letting the strap come down to rest.  He looked like he’d collapse and kiss the concrete.

            Charles’s Sunday was coming to an end.  The sun was setting and he was walking down the streets like a lonesome bum.  A couple was sitting on the bus stop, the spiky haired girlfriend staring up at the overtired big nosed chap in the hooded sweatshirt.  Their feet weren’t touching the ground, like they were floating on a piece of debris in the ocean.

            Charles sighed and removed a cigarette from his inner coat pocket.  He let it while he continued to walk with difficult, eventually stopping and using his hand to shield the wind.  He bit his lip and it started to bleed, then almost instantly got fat.

            He went through the building a different way again, attempting to change perspectives.  Passing the laundry room, Charles noticed the fluorescent lights flickering and the endless drubbing cycles of the washers and dryers.  A tenant who looked unfamiliar to him emptied garbage bags of clothes into the washer and then transferred the contents of the washer next to it into the dryer.

            Back at home, Charles was hoping Dave’s body had just somehow disappeared.  It wasn’t that easy.  His eyes had become wider, locked open like he was being forced to stare at the ceiling.  The phone rang, Charles didn’t answer it.  He turned on the TV but paid no attention to it, tracing a circular path around his apartment.  A pile of papers sat next to his computer on his desk, the calendar insisted he had a presentation due.  He ate a bowl of Cinammon Toast Crunch for dinner, avoiding his reflection on the different shiny surfaces in the kitchen.

            He laid in bed that night, throwing a tennis ball off the ceiling and catching it.  The rhythmic bouncing was able to keep his mind off of his damnation for awhile.  When he stopped throwing the ball, a darkness would fill the void the ball left.  He debated whether he liked the door better open or closed as he laid looking straight up at the ceiling, deciding to compromise for halfway open. 

            The middle of the night is a great time to take care of small chores.  He finally unloaded all the boxes in his closet, crushing the boxes flat and taking them out to recycling.

            “You’re procrastinating.”  He said said to himself in the mirror.  “Everyone else is out there doing something, you’re doing nothing.  This doesn’t count as being productive.”  He wondered how long life would take to go back to feeling normal.  Or how long it’d take him to get used to his new job.  A couple of months, give or take.  But would it really be normal?  Or would he be a different person altogether.

            He drank some vodka and made some phonecalls.  His buddy Thomas got promoted to a better security guard job at a more prestigous organization and was moving away for good.  That’s alright, thanks for your time, he thought of saying.  He might have said it, it didn’t matter.

            When he got drunk enough, he figured he’d do something about the body.  Just get really drunk, let that take over.  It sat like an effigy in the middle of the floor.  It kept getting bigger, more prominent, each time he’d look over.  He continued to drink alone, a televangelist on TV asked what he was doing to save himself.  He waved the bottle at the guy, unappreciative.

            It was four in the morning, he was still drunk, time was passing quickly because he didn’t want it to.  He checked his closets and kitchen for the sharpest knife he could find, some were sharp but weren’t very big, others were big but not very sharp.  He started to ask google what the best way to dispose of a body was, but stopped in mid sentence.

          Note from future self to me:  Next month, do each day as a chapter, or at most every two or three days as a chapter.  You have noticed retroactively from reading "The Dead Zone" that this seems to be the way Stephen King does it.  Also, pick more general themes and create bigger conflicts.  Have characters that have to disappear for awhile to do other stuff, or have other obligations, or whatnot.  Have people get into positions where they have a lot of responsibility, and do the research involved about the jobs you assign to these people.  Other note to self:  Get better job