Day 72: My first penny

               Hi guys, ok, still working.  Found inspiration yesterday with the help of some old friends.  I think I should be spending more time looking for inspiration than boring myself to death with old books. I'm learning a lot of stuff but it's not usually applicable. 

            The bird carried behind it in a stream of metallic black a bundle of wire.  It looked like a long string of worms, and Jim questioned what a bird would do with something like that. 

            He sat down at his workbench and tried to get back to work, but it was no use.  He first had to straighten the place, still piles of nuts and bolts askewed and arranged messily.  The green light flashed on his largest machine, and he didn’t notice till the darkness spread from the window. 

            It had become synonymous with the building, a button on the top he struck with the broom suddenly pushed it into motion.  To be activated, it has to be struck hard and quickly with a broom or other bristled object, a wire had been crossed and he thought it would still use the pat-on-the-top mechanism.  Jim got into frenzied paces and created inventions he had no idea how to use, machines that took shape after he awoke from his work-induced trance. 

            There was a round machine on wheels that succesfully shined everything it came in contact with.  It cleaned all of the dirt from under Jim’s nails, polished the wood floor to a reflective glow, and heated the shack at the same time.  Now, it was broken, in a noncircular pile with metal spires like slinkies curving out of it.

            Roger drove faster, the country roads with no speed limit signs.  He pulled up alongside the old red brick school building, its structural integrity ensuring it would be there for generations to come.  There were no blinds on the window of the only classroom, one giant rectangular window open to the entire side. 

            There were five other kids in the class, each perched in a circle on the bearskin carpet.  The chalkboard behind Mrs. Lapointe had cursive letters written on it between dotted chalk lines.  The giant stuffed polar bear under the American flag by the window lurched forward for a siesta. 

            “Daddy’s here.”  Mrs. Lapointe greeted Roger by talking to his girls.  The rest of the kids turned and wrenched their necks upwards towad Roger, the one with the suspenders waving spasmodically. 

            Roger checked his watch, it was leaving time.  Mrs. Lapointe always creeped him out, she seemed like a schoolteacher straight out of the 1950s.  He remembered seeing black and white news reel videos of students during the war, and she’d be the one standing at the head of the class.  It was the only school close enough to drive through, and the building was nice, he just felt like an alien.  And, she could see right through him, she could tell he was a stay at home dad. 

            “Alright children, get your things.”  She ushered Patty and Sandy over to the coat rack, where they equipped their backpacks and coats.  “Working on grammar tonight, grammar and syntax.  It’s lesson 11 in the work book.” 

            “You hear that, girls?”  Roger hated calling them “the girls” but thought it made him sound fatherlike in front of the teachers.  “No more Dora, no more coloring books until that’s done.”

            “It will take us mere MINUTES to finish all that!”  Sandy said when they were out of ears drop of Mrs. Lapointe, who was now kneeling next to the kid with the overalls.

            The green light of the machine got greener, until the green was so dark and opaque that it looked like an emerald.  The hole in the ceiling where the bird had borrowed the piece of cable from gave way to a sturdy metal infrastructure that bulged uncontrollably from around the outside wall.  It felt suddenly like he was inside a giant bag of popcorn.

            When he opened the door, a gust of air left the shack.  It wasn’t hot or cold air, just air, and he wondered if it had some sort of intangible quality to it.

            “Ok, I know it has an intangible weird quality to it.”  He said outloud to himself.  The door still easily opened,  and when it did the façade of a wooden garage was lost forever.  He was standing outside of what had faded into being out of random chance, a robot head with flashing green eyes.  It had a long antennae coming out of the top of its head and hummed at a pleasurable frequency, and then it began to speak.

            “John, it’s John right?  Oh, no, I mean, Jim.  Jim.  Let me tell you what I do.”  The robot head began.  “You created me a long time ago, and you forgot about me.  Do you know how many of your other inventions have uses that you have never dreamed of?”

            “You have to keep moving, robot sir.  You have to keep on going to the next thing, I can’t stop.  I didn’t know how to activate you.”

            “Oh me, don’t worry about me, I’ll activate when the time is right.  The time is finally right now for me to be activated, to become your house.  You will live inside of me, and I can let you know what to do next, does that sound good?”

            “First thing, you are made out of metal, so you might attract lightning.  Secondly, are you going to be loud and rattley the entire time?”

            “No sir, I’m airtight, and I can tighten myself up.”  With this, the robots face stiffened as if constipated and his walls blew themselves out again, then rebalancing in form as a perfect square.  Places where there were bumps were completely flat again, to Jim it seemed like a balloon blowing itself up.  “Look, too, I can produce heat for myself, like a little oven.  I’ve been here all along, didn’t you wonder why you didn’t get cold?”

            Jim stood with his arms crossed and shivering wetly into his long underwear.  He shook violently with the cold, and suddenly the robot offered him a gust of warm air like a jet stream. 

The robot flashed pictures of Jim’s old friends, recounted his earlier exploits, and showed a short video montage with wipes, fades, captions, and interviews with celebrities.  Robert Downey Jr. said he remembered Jim from high school, and that back then they had been friends.  Prince showed pictures of him and Jim cooking beans together at a summer camp. 

“This is all not real!”  The robot said.  “You programmed me to do this.”

Then, it showed some real stuff.

Hey this isn't that shitty.  It's shitty but yeah the contexts are starting to make sense.

            

Day 71: Things will get serious

OK today will be better than yesterday.  Minor setbacks, minor setbacks.  Setback has earned its place in the canon as a compound word.  Well, it's early in the morning, let's get this done and get out there.  Working on willpower today through sheer force of will!  My cold is coming back.  Come on brain, get on board!

Starting to think of poor people alternatives to the things I do.  I'm not as frugal as I should be, especially at a time of year like now when I should be buying other people presents.  I really want to go out to SportsWorld and buy running tights/pants, but I think instead I should go to Value Village and buy sweatpants.

            Necessity, as they always say, was the mother of invention.  Jim would go to sleep, and whatever he needed for his experiment would either appear to him in his sleep, appear to him when he woke up, or become possible to him in the infinite knowledge that the subconscious possesses.  Or, that’s what he was sure of as he told himself.  And it usually worked.

            Roger found the house in an ad placed in the classified section of the paper.  “Good deal on a house, should go check it out!”  He told Miranda, who pulled her black shaul around her face and whisked him away to the car.  Without the GPS, they never would have found the place in the woods.  Roger insisted on staying because he didn’t have the nerve to look for other places, and knew he should get the girls settled in as quickly as possible.  They were already missing enough school.

            Jim had gave them a quick tour, insisting he had a big business meeting to get back to.  Roger assumed he had some sort of awesome setup inside of the shack, that it wasn’t just a dingy shack like it appeared on the outside.  A don’t judge a book by the cover type of thing, similar to the way he was judging Jim.  A bearded, scrawny middle aged man in a red long sleeved T-shirt and 5 oclock shadow.  Jim joked that if he were able to grow a beard, he’d have a giant one.

            Roger discovered Jim’s complicated surveillance system on accident.  Beyond the fur carpet that he loved to use as a sled to slide around on the linoleum floor, there was a bookshelf which was curiously not set into the wall.  When sliding around on the fur carpet, the bookcase shook and turned thirty degrees to its right, revealing a hidden room which wasn’t very hidden at all.  Inside there was a giant screen covering an amalgamated box with enough wires popping out of it to account for fifty or sixty TVs.  The screen was separated into a 5 by 5 grid, with the entire outside woods surveyed in thirty foot squares.  The singularity of Jim’s mind amazed him; there was no sort of security system for the house, the surveillance didn’t extend to the inside of the building, and some of the cameras were arbitrarily focused on trees.  The specificity of the trees was lost to Roger, but he assumed Jim had some reason for picking those ones in particular.

In his complete confidence, Jim hadn’t worked hard to hide the modifications he had done to the house, just put things in front of them.  The medicine cabinet in the bathroom mirror covered another medicine cabinet, locked like a safe and embedded into the wall fixture.  There was no lock on it, and when Roger pried it open he found it completely empty, shrouded with dust and spiderwebs.  There was a trap door in the laundry room, fitted with a lock that had three different key card slots and an eye scanner.  

“Great, this nut thinks the apocalypse is coming.”  Roger thought to himself.  He kept the cynical thoughts to himself, outwardly always wearing a crooked confused smile across his tired face.  Still, the thought of having somewhere to escape to in case of emergency was a comforting thought.

Jim had went “all-in” now, he would no longer be distracted by wandering aimlessly around his house when he had trouble thinking, destroyed his personal computer with dynamite to prevent himself from distraction, and his productivity level had strangely fallen.  Now, he spend most of his times waiting for his machines to do things, and when they took extra long he would prod them with sticks and chastise them with self deprecating indulgances.

Roger invited Jim in to have a look at the surveillance tapes with him.  Jim took his cleats off by the front door, rapping them against the frozen ground to remove clods of dirt that formed around each spike.

“Nice cleats.”  Roger wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Standing higher helps you learn faster.”  Jim said, channeling the air of a young Newton.  He pointed an index finger adroitely into the sky.

Jim surveyed the place like he hadn’t been there before.  A lot had changed, however, water color pictures covering the walls, the spinny chandelier in the TV room to the left had been fixed, there was a TV in the TV room, Miranda’s awards and service medals decorated the newly added mantle.  Jim looked at every object with his hands behind his back like he was checking out an expensive car, and he’d look up at Roger each time with his eyes narrowed and head bowed forward, like he was peering over a pair of invisible librarian glasses.

In the surveillance room, in the box 3^rd from the bottom left, the little men could be seen chopping one of Jim’s favorite trees down; Roger assumed because it had a camera focused on it that it’d be one of his favorite trees.

“Well, that’s what they do when you set them free.  They habitate.  I guess they couldn’t figure out how to get to town.”  Jim had created these pocket sized humans before, eviidently.  “Last time they separated into two different groups based on pigment and ate each other alive.  The winners committed ritual suicide.”

Roger was apalled, but it was time to pick up the girls.  He escorted Jim out of the house, jumped back into the Subaru and flew off.  Jim rushed back into the garage, angry at himself and Roger for getting him away from his work.

A bird had flew in through the open door of the shack and was setting up a nest of metal fibers in the top right corner of the wall.  This just couldn’t be, what had Jim done to deserve this?  He swatted at it and jumped, pushing himself up slightly higher and accumulating splinters by using his hands against the shacks walls.  He grabbed a broom and swung it at the bird, and it flew wildly around the shack, Jim smashing his own contraptions with a bloodlust taking over his face.  The bird was finally gone after a full minute of thrashing, and Jim would have to get to work immediately to sort it all out.

Not quite writing as much as before.  I had my brain down to a steel trap before this cold kicked my ass, now I can't get myself to focus as much as before.  2:30 to 9:00 in retail sucks.  I plan on quitting but someone find me a better job.  Internship somewhere!

Day 70: Trucking along

Let's keep this thing going.  I might have lost a little direction over the weekend, yeah.  Now it's Monday and this is serious business.

I better figure out something to do with myself during these winter months, it's already snowing out there.  I'm going to drive myself crazy with loneliness reading alone, but that's no biggee!  What do I expect?  Every day I spend exclusively reading I feel more in touch with the "outside world" again.

            Roger would push his way out of the house, carrying the girls backpacks, a thermos of coffee, his keys n his mouth, and somehow locking the door behind him.  Even on the weekends, Jim would be sitting tinkering the day away.  The car was parked a city block away from the house the garage had been off limits since Jim started to live in it.  Roger fumbled the backpacks a number of times, the girls insisting on not carrying anything themselves.  He laughed and pretended the bundle was extremely heavy and that he was a circus strongman, picking each foot up like the legs weighed hundreds of pounds.

He threw the bags in the trunk of the car, putting the thermoses and lunches into the cupholders at the front of the car and then opening the girls doors for them.  Sandy had a bandaid under her eye from when her glasses broke and nicked her, Patty dressed just like Dora the Explorer.  They piled into the Subaru Hatchback, Roger incredulously checking the rearview mirror as they left.  The tree vanished, the house vanished, the sharp turn onto the dirt paved road would have alluded him if it wasn’t for the sign post that tipped them off to the cabin.

The girls sat in the back, they were inseparable.  They talked in their hushed aboriginal language, discussing matters that Roger wouldn’t be able to make sense of even if he paid close attention.  He dropped them off at the school in downtown Rockford, getting a polite “Thank you daddy” as they jumped out onto the curb, and Patty reminded him school was out at 2:30.  Every day was a fresh adventure, it wasn’t like he had been doing this for 3 months since Miranda went on her expedition.

            He checked the mail as he drove back up, singing along to an Emerson Lake and Palmer cassette in the Suburu’s tape deck.  The mail from yesterday still sat there, he retrieved it after manually cranking down the window, a stack of past due notices, credit card fliers, and subscription renewal notifications. He was subliminally influencing the girls with his music, although he doubted they heard it at all.  He was clinging onto his favorite bands like his identity depended on it, he wasn’t sure how to be a dad when his wife was gone.  The car came roaring back into the driveway, his heavy burdens gone momentarily. 

            “You gotta be willing to swing and miss, you have to keep swinging.”  Jim was repeating to himself behind the closed wall.  The sparrows chirped constantly in the tree standing between the building and the garage.  He laughed under his breath at the sheer ridiculousness of Jim, nonplussed by the little men he had been keeping in the cage. 

            Jim left the shack for a minute with a huge coil of extension cable, unraveling it behind him as he went up behind the house.  Roger was sitting at the table, trying to figure out what to make the girls for dinner.  He had embraced his guilty obsession of watching day time soap operas, he left them on as background noise at first but now wanted to know why Denise would let her father take the baby with her back to the ranch.

            Jim shouted loudly, it was success again.  He had a false positive atleast once a day, which usually resulted in the racket going on outside getting louder for awhile and then fizzling out in disappointment.  He pulled the drapes shut, went out to check the mail once every couple of hours, and generally just checked his watch every few minutes. 

            At a quarter after noon, Roger stopped depressing himself by looking through the bills.  All of the nice looking, watermarked letters were made out to his wife, all of the mass circulated ones to him.  He stepped out into the backyard, the clothesline with the string of pins hanging white sheets off of it, the birds perched on the supporting fence.

            “Last week I was awesome, this week I suck, what’s up with that?”  Jim said, with the pieces of his robot sitting dejected in front of him.  “You know, I’d appreciate it if you knocked, Roger.” 

            “Sorry I let your little men run all over the place.”  Roger said, not genuinely sorry, but looking for a stomping block to start talking to Jim about.

            Jim listened stoically, and demonstrated a mouse trap kind of device he had setup.  He pushed a button which looked like a Jeopardy clicker, a fan hanging above them powered up and released shining phospherescent balls that hung in the air like bubbles.  He reached out and caught each one on a extended fly swatter, adding them to a jar where they didn’t pop.  It was marked “Food Bubbles” on the side, and Jim inserted a few of them into his nose.

            “Those little guys, they’re pretty good with language and teamwork,”  Jim said, Roger distractedly looking at all of the other seemingly useless objects in the shack.  “They probably went out to town and found real jobs, maybe got a house together.  I didn’t like keeping them in the cage much but they seemed kind of mad at me.  I hope they don’t come back with weapons.”

            The day came and went, Roger stared at Jim doing his work.  He was perplexed as to what Jim was doing the whole time, this perplexion transformed into genuine interest.  Jim combed the hair of a long pipe that was covered in hair and it spit out a silver mucus that he immediately threw away. 

            “The cord that’s attached to the house keeps the air from escaping that pneumatic tube.”  Jim said suddenly, referring to a tube that started on one end of the ceiling and popped out of the other.  Roger nodded, thought it over, and then nodded again.  “If the air gets out of the tube, it’s no longer the special genius air that keeps me stable and secure inside the garage.  The outside world offers too much variety for a genius like me.”

            Jim had once left the house for a day, and when he got back all of his good ideas had left his brain.  He had to start over from scratch, throw everything away.  He couldn’t leave for supplies, he had to figure out ways to conjure up equipment for experiments from thin air.

           That's all I got guys.  Shitty day.

Day 69: Christmas time

                Ok so yesterdays brainstorming session was a disappointment, to say the least.  I needed to keep my story moving forward at a decent pace, not fall right on its face right away and then describe boring stuff.  I get that.  So let's do that today.
               Two hours, go!

Do I like this brainstorming thing? 

Reasons to be on journey:

Lost dog

Won sweepstakes

Meet favorite author

Safe deposit box(?)

LOVE

New job (boring)

Calls to action:

Kicked out of house

Nuclear fallout

Immunity to disease

Find cellphone

Extortion

Girlfriend leaves him

Bomb strapped on chest (obviously)

Pinocchio “real boy” syndrome

Characters, partners in crime:

Group of fishermen

Painters who are out of work

Spies

Armless war veterans

Think I’m just going to start and see what happens, like Ray Bradbury says

            The gears whirred and stopped, blue lights shooting out of the cellar window like a Pink Floyd light show.  Jimmy disconnected the power strip with the toaster, coffee maker, TV, and drills attached to it.  Then, he climbed up on the work bench and disconnected the neon signs, the room illuminated with the synthetic blue glow.  He pulled a switch and the power turned over to auxilliary, the thing that looked like one of the things they catch ghosts with in the center of the room shaking when its light was off and then rumbling again, shooting its lights all over the place.

            “They told me I’m crazy, they said it wouldn’t work,”  Jimmy talked to a poster of Einstein he had hanging on the wall.  He had the whole series of genius posters outlining his nuts-and-bolts mad scientist shack; Isaac Newton giving a thumbs up, Galileo Galilei with a constipated look on his face staring directly at a fern plant being pumped full of Dr. Pepper, George Bernard Shaw, and David Crosby with his best moustache.  “I’m crazy, right?”  He looked at the box, which was still shooting lights but not doing much else.  He willed it to shake or spin, but it sat there motionless.

            Every time a pedestrian passed their silhouette would walk across Jimmy’s walls, like some kind of shadow ritual.  “C’mon, c’mon!”  Jimmy repeated this mantra to himself, his invention starting and restarting like it was turning the keys within itself and the engine wouldn’t take.  It seemed like it was trying to rip an iron mask off of itself.

            Jimmy had rented out the house that sat on the adjacent side of the lawn, purposely becoming ascetic.  The cot and minifridge in the far corner were his kitchen and bedroom, the hat rack was his walkin closet.  A man should be completely consumed with his work, he thought to himself repeatedly, even saying it outloud in the mirror when he woke up.  When he wakes up, that work would be right in his face, he would have no choice but to face it.  Still, he missed the amenities; no plumbing, hot water, he had to take the walk of shame up to his past house and knock on the door to use their bathroom or take showers. 

Jim refused to keep a set of keys, even when Roger the new tenant told him he was crazy.  Every time someone called Jimmy crazy he’d insist, “That’s what they said about Sir Isaac Newton,”  or “All the geniuses go crazy at some point.”  But this was the moment of truth, this is why he went to Radioshack and spent what was left of his life savings on that electric generator, the Honda EU6500isA - 5500 that sat in front of the garage door stoically, as if to say “Do your worst, Jim, I can handle it.” 

From the house, Roger and his youngest daughter stood by the window watching the lights flashing.  Roger insisted his daughter not be near the windows, so they came outside, and a moment later Jim heard a knock on the door.

“Are you almost done for tonight?  You know, if you did this during the day the lights wouldn’t bother anyone.”  Roger pleaded in his most diplomatic tone.  He was tired of having to ask Jimmy to turn off his halfassed inventions, his gratitude for the house was waning.

“It’s about to work,”  Jim said, although he wouldn’t disclose what it was supposed to do.  “I can’t cover the window, you know this.  You saw what happened to my pillow.”  The pillow was unrecognizably tattered in his Peoria Wildcats novelty garbage can.

Roger’s daughter had ran back inside the house, and he pounded on the door like he was posting an edict.  “End of the month, that’s it.”  He said sternly as if he caught Jim with his hand in the cookie jar.  “And if there’s any more blue lights going on could you face it away from the house.”

“Fine!  I’ll be out of here by then, way out of here.”  Jim assured himself, staring defiantly at the door through his chemistry goggles.  He defiantly left the faceless sufferer facing the porch.   When he knew Roger was gone he added, “I don’t yell at you about your stupid kids and wife always running around the house using the oven.”  He snickered to himself, focused wholeheartedly

Jim stared down at the tired machine, the “on” switch trying diligently to undo itself.  As if it had given up and submitted to Jim’s will, it spit up a tiny little man in suspenders and a bunch of nails and then started shedding pieces as it spun.

Charles lunged for it and hit the off button, being struck in the face by nails on the way but none of them hard enogh to embed themselves in his skin.  He grabbed the little man who was covered in pink goo and removed the brick from the top of the terrarium under the window.  Opening the plexiglass top, he used the little man to shield himself from spears and arrows fired by the similar men inside.  He quickly put the brick back on top, the tiny men cursing at him in an undeveloped foreign tongue.

His experiments teetered on the line between excitement and dread.  He couldn’t tell if he was excited anymore, or just obsessive.  This was the fiftieth time.  The little men had eaten one another, they worked out some sort of system, all he knew was that it seemed like their numbers never changed regardless of how many his machine produced.

He shook the contraption, lifting it off of the ground and holding it by his ear.  The regulator was still in place, it wasn’t the same machine it had been last time, although it produced the same result.  He looked at the fork, contemplating stabbing the thing and electrocuting himself in the process.

The men in the cage held up a sign to the side, written in a foreign language they must have created themselves.  It was an ordinary terrarium, decorated with ordinary terra cotta plants and wood chips.  There were eight of them in all, frizzy haired bearded little men who had came seemingly from nowhere.

The door swung open, knocking the auxiliary generator over.  “Are you about done?”  Roger had changed into pajamas, wearing the sleeping cap part of the ensemble. 

“Do people really go to sleep wearing hats?”  Jim asked perplexed. 

“What the hell is that?”  Roger pushed past Jim, stepping over the generator which spilled some sort of black fizzy liquid onto the cement.  He took the cinder block off of the terrarium and let the guys loose one by one.

“What are you doing?!”  Jim yelled in his most angry voice, which wasn’t that angry at all.  He was happy the guys were leaving, although he did want to run over and stomp on them for some reason.  One with a particularly long beard flicked him off as he took off through the garage door.  Roger held him back, and Jim gave up easily.

“The machine is supposed to pump out a yellow one for every 12 white ones I get.”  Jim explained.  “Not yellow as in asian, no, they start to grow these pearls out of them.”

Day 68: END OF FIRST NOVEL

Finished it at 49,903 words.  If I continue to do a novel a month, even though my idea of novel of course it a big series of shit not happening.

I saw 30 Minutes or Less, or whatever that movie was called, in theaters.  Just now I saw a preview for it.  I just noticed how lazy of writing it is.  First of all, (hear me out here), no pizza place uses "30 Minutes or less or it's free" as a tagline anymore, and it's unclear whether they ever did in the first place.  What that is is a way to add urgency to a completely boring ordeal of delivering food.  On top of this, they put a bomb on the main guy, this means he's also forced to action.  That just seems like the easiest way to get anyone going.  On top of that, the love interest happens to be the main characters best friends sister, and she happens to live within walking distance of his friends workplace, and he has to admit he's in love with her because not only is he going to die from the bomb but she's going to move away.  That's the laziest writing there is, it's all forced circumstances.  That's lazier than my writing, and they have actors and a huge budget to pull it off with.
          I should extrapolate this and write a persuasive essay, and maybe watch that movie again but probably not.  Also, Asiz Ansari is pretty funny but comic relief also seems like an excuse to avoid real story.  Done with that.  I'm going to try to figure out some stupid concept like that to write about this month, maybe a guy has a disease where he'll only live one more day?  Or he loses his job under false pretenses and has to kill his boss for some reason?  That's another one, the classic Strangers On a Train ripoff, Horrible Bosses, where one of the bosses (Jennifer Aniston) literally plays no part in the story at all other than via late night phone calls after the initial premise. 
          Have to continue on my bitching tirade.  The reason my generation of writers sucks is because they don't like conflict, I'm pretty sure.  Think about current seasons of the Simpsons compared to older ones.  It started off much funnier because it was a family drama, and it said something about the world we lived in.  There'd be episodes that were uncomfortable because Homer was a bad parent, or Bart would be in the hospital, or Bleeding Gums Murphy was dying, etc.  You had an investment in the characters, and the dilemma they were facing is what the jokes would be about.  It wasn't just a series of shitty pop culture gags, and although the episodes wouldn't always resolve cleanly or adequately the driving force would be the plot.  I used to hate plot and conflict too, but I'm thinking I have to become involved with it in real life as well as writing to gain "experience."  This is the postmodern world.
          Writing book (Warriners) suggests that I write expository essays about things I care about.  Also suggests that what I "know about" and what I "care about" are the same.  So I should figure out a conclusive point to make about... stuff.  Let's start to care more guys.
          Ok anyway brainstorm brainstorm brainstorm.  This time I'm going to at least come up with a stupid premise and let it run, and I'll be nice enough to include my brainstorming here for whatever superior writer that's reading this.

Biggest trick is to find someone to write about who is more exciting than me.  Some quote from Mark Twain about comfortability ruining everything. 

Brainstorming:

They turn his cable

He has ran out of his “nest egg”, money after moving out that he had accumulated

Situations that would add urgency:

Can’t check powerball numbers

Internet connected to cable?

They’ll find out he is out of money because cable is switched

Friends think he’s reliable, has it together

Has to face silence in earnest

Things that could happen to this guy:

Discovers box in attic

Starts spending a lot of time in attic

Has to decide what to do with his dog

            “Is it working now?”  Hank called down from the top of the roof, screwing with the satellite dish with the tried and true method of shaking it until it worked.  He had the sneaking suspicion that it had finally been shut off, it was months since he had paid the bill and even his “pal” at the cable company couldn’t stretch out the service any longer. 

            “No, just fuzz.  Come on man, goddamn it, the game is starting.”  Arnie called with cupped hands over his mouth from the lawn, shivering in bare feet and Peoria Wildcats shorts.  “If you had cable atleast we could just switch it over to regular TV, you had to get the stupid fucking thing where nothing works unless everything works.”

            “If you don’t like it you can go home, you worthless vulture.”  Hank called down, his fluffy blue slippers slipping on the roof shingles.  He steadied himself by grabbing the dish, which made the picture cut out completely.  He heard a loud groan from inside, the fuzzy snow on the screen turning into a black stretchy rectangle.

            One of Arnie’s meathead football player friends wearing a plain white trucker hat pushed through the front door cursing under his breath and gave Hank the two handed impatience gesture.  He pulled a Marlboro out of his breast pocket, placed it between his lips and struck a kitchen match against the cement walkway.  He stood silently, watching Charles and shaking his head disapprovingly at intervals.

            Charles screwed with it again, repressing the sudden urge to rip the thing off of the roof and cast it down onto the lawn.  First the car breaks down and I don’t have the money to get a new tire, then the spare doesn’t fit.  Next, my parents split after 37 years.  Then, these ingrates invite themselves over.  He didn’t have time to think out each thought independantly, but jumbled together they grinded in his brain on a continuous cycle.  They were facts, he was a grown man and he had to start facing the ugly truths of real life.

            “I’m out of here.”  The muscle head stated to himself loudly for everyone else to hear.  He stomped out his marlboro under his heel on the sidewalk, leaving a skidmark of ash on the sidewalk.  He climbed into his green Oldsmobile, fired up the engine and ignored Arnie’s affable waves.

            “Yeah, I bet I need a new one.”  Hank set his feet back behind him and slid down the roof to where he had the ladder stationed.  “You can get up here and try if you want but I’m pretty sure it’s done for.”

            Hank climbed down the ladder, seeing through the window the group of random acquantances switching the Xbox 360 on.  The skinny one with the eyebrows put on the headset, the fat one with the glasses stood up from the couch and instantly forgot what he had stood for, sitting back down.  Officious diplomatic Arnie went back in before Hank reached the bottom of the ladder, and soon they were all sucked into the TV. 

            “You know you guys can all go to Willies and watch it,”  Hank hung his windbreaker on the banister after pushing through the door.  The place stunk, ash and smashed cans covering the surface of the living room, staining the white carpet.  Just a few years ago I was making the money to afford this place, Hank thought.  I could atleast still take good care of it.

            “Did someone say something?”  The one with the headset joked, eliciting a line of chuckles.  Hank went around with a garbage bag, collecting beer cans, fast food wrappers and occasionally blocking the screen to protests. 

            “You guys are wasting your lives,”  Hank said, feeling like the native american with the tear on his cheek in the famous PSA.  “Atleast sports have a sense of camraderie, you guys are just… forget it.”

            They paid no attention to Hank, who looked around for his vaccuum.  The sudden urge to clean consumed him, he couldn’t get his head clean until the place was clean.  He wiped off the coffee table under the framed duplication of Monet’s Bridge At Giverney, took the carpets outside and shook them out, swept the hardwood floors in the kitchen.  He turned the radio on and navigated through televangical preachers and Republican pundits, eventually reaching the game.

            The voice of good old Teddy Hunter described what was going on in the stands, his own difficult day arriving to the stadium, a conversation he had with an old friend who just passed away, and then finally said a couple of things about the game.  Hank was born and raised a football fan, but now it was all just nostalgia to him.  It reminded him of his youth, when Teddy Hunter was a much more articulate and focused anouncer and when his dad would sit with him and his brother by the fireplace, insisting that history was being made.  They listened as Dougy Arnold decimated the rival Bighorns secondary, securing a pass in the endzone which Teddy famously called, “The big one.”

            Now, Teddy Hunter called every catch The Big One, it had been trademarked and put on T-Shirts.  No one listens to the radio, my TV is out, and before long he was going to have to sell the house.

            Hank pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and listened to the game.  He thumbed through the classified section in the newspaper, dejected by any mention of need for experience immediately.  He opened the fridge, the milk had gone bad, he instantly recognized the smell.  He tossed it out and it hit the bottom of the trash can, there was no bag in it and the milk poured into the bottom of the thing.  There were repeated shouts from the living room, it almost sounded like they were reacting to a football game, but a group of audacious men engaged in competition usually had the same ferverous reaction to whatever was going on.

            He pushed the sliding door open to the porch, stepping out back onto the patio.  This was the part of the house he regretted investing in.  At the time, he envisioned many cheery barbeques taking place on the spacious veranda, he hadn’t yet considered the pain in the ass of cleaning a pool.  A supine valley stretched into office buildings, an artificial slope covered in astro turf.  The neighbors on his left and right had less extravagant yards, but each had great tall wooden fences that made their dwellings feel like castles.

            Hank called the satellite company, his payments were overdue, they couldn’t take his word for it any longer.  His friend wasn’t working for the company anymore, he had been fired for reasons they wouldn’t provide.  The snooty operator sounded like they revelled in the power of this job. 

            He watched the manmade woods from his patio chair, staring at the dark blue hue of the pool.  Some sort of plant was springing up from the top like it was a giant petri dish.  Leaves fell off of the oak tree above him in an endless stream, aiming for the pool but mostly falling short.  Hank could hear the game from inside, the Wildcats were already down by fourteen, a couple of rushing touchdowns.  Teddy insisted on mispronouncing the opposing quarterbacks name, insisting that the G was silent in Gagne.  The frivolity of it all hit home.

           

Day 67: Halfway to Day 134

Some mornings you just need a wake up call, it's true.  Did you ever notice that when anyone calls you in the morning they think they woke you up?  No?  It's just me?  People assume I sleep late?

Well, listen up, palsy walsies.  I'm up by 8 every morning, this is when I watch Conan. 

Warriner's English Grammar and Composition is going strong, but I'm pretty sure it's a "workbook" so just reading it won't get the most out of it.  I can have a fictional class and come up with a fictional teacher who is going through it with "the group", (that I am part of).  Then I can have to read my homework assignments in front of class.

PS:  Todays is fun.  I think I'm going to let this goddamn story end, eventually.  Tomorrow I'm wasting my day off reading through the whole damn thing.  I doubt I will be able to finish it though, considering it's so long.  I have advertisements.  Just sayin'

I went out till 2 in the morning so this is hours late.  But I'm still doing more today.  I think I'll "start a new one".

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            Charles and Chief emerged on the other side of the tunnel in a connected rolling ball, the stairs shaking and shedding bits of stone as the arm up above pounded into it.  Dave’s head could be heard faintly howling.  The apartment was a mess, the kitchen cabinets all flung open with a box of oats emptying onto the linoleum, the TV tipped over but still turned on, a hole in the wall that led directly into the carpeted hallway where the enormous flying trident once was.

            Chief swept a pile of plaster off of the couch and had a seat.  Charles rose much more slowly, his ears ringing like a bell.  Pulp was pressed into the wall across from the TV like he was a framed picture, his upper torso compacted with his arms and legs crammed into it.  The sirens whirred out in the bittersweet daylight.  Through the trident shaped hole in the wall Charles could see a trident shaped hole in the wall of the next apartment building; a tunnel created that looked like someone was shining a rectangular transparency beam.

            Chief looked like he wanted to fall asleep, but his nerves were tight and he sat stiff on the couch.  The stairs remained where they had been, not purple but just ordinary, some of their ornamentation eroded off.  The hallway creaked, the monster surely still standing at the top humbled but undefeated.

            The fire department attended to the building a block away first, the old wooden mansion creaking noisily.  Small fires had broken out along the tridents path, electrical fires that sparked into the air like invisible demons. 

            A secret service team descended immediately onto the trident at the end of the block, covering it in a tarp and wrapping that tarp in white cloth, lifting it with attached wires to get underneath.  It was whisked away by black helicopters, suspended in the air like an emergency rescue mission.

            The police captain lamented Charles’s loss at the door with cap held at belly button level, not unlike if his daughter had died.  A forensic specialist sprayed everything with white powder, insisting Charles vacate to the hallway, while a group of interns set up a three dimensional camera.  A trainee and the deputy stood at the bottom of the stair well, the deputy with a knowing look on his face like this was somewhere in the protocol book.

            “Big stairwell.”  The trainee said, squinting indignantly.  The deputy looked at him approvingly.  “Bet it we went up it we would find something important.”

            The moustachoed deputy laughed like he was being tickled pink.  “Ever seen one of these before?”  He asked, forehead scrunched up in appeal.

            “…No”  The shy newby pawed the ground.

            “Could be anything up there, anything at all.  Closest thing we’ve seen to one of these is a secret ladder one time, that one just took you up on the roof.  Guy on the roof threw his old shoes at you, then you took him into custody.”

            A thunderclap sounded from the top of the stairs.  The forensic scientists and interns continued to comb for clues.  A particularly absent minded agent tripped over the old man’s dead body, screaming like an arachnophobic in a spiders nest when he turned to see what it was.

            “ANOTHER BODY!”  He called out in horror.  The captain shook his head, the rest continued their work nonplussed. 

            A SWAT team charged up the stairs, the trainee looking on with palpable intensity.  Charles watched from the hall with Chief, they attempted to warn the Captain who shook them off. 

            Charles was taken in a separate car from chief to Police Headquarters, where they first took a picture of him from the front and then the side.  Charles was happy this was all out of his hands.  Chief was discharged quickly when he said he just wanted to help, and saluted Charles on the way out.

            Charles sat in a cell, hanging his feet off the side of a smelly metal bunk.  Moments later, a swat team pushed the enormous monster through the door frame, it stretching its arms in resistance but the giant handcuffs fixed over its hands preventing much resistance.  It kicked one of the six SWAT guys subduing it, and they came down hard on its ankles and legs with night sticks, bringing the thing down to its knees.  One of the guards stood with his arms open in its face and spat in its little red glowing eyes, all the time Charles hoping they wouldn’t throw it in the same cell with him.

            The salvage was going to be a long one up those stairs, the Captain told a lineup of officers.  We’re going to call in a cleaning crew first, someone get him the yellow pages, then we might think of calling an excavation crew.  Until then the building would have to be under manual surveillance twenty four hours a day.

            “No, he didn’t even put up much of a fight.”  Charles overheard from the cell.  The cop pals sat over a pair of paper plates at a table, munching on turkey sandwiches and bags of Bugles.  The one with the skintight wifebeater talked through his hands. “You know, none of the big guys ever do.  They get so used to being tough they don’t realize our muscles are for real, functional.  He looked like he was at the weight room, but not sparing.  For show, is what I’m saying.”

            The wimpier career fileclerk looked over astonished.  “That wasn’t just a normal guy though, you saw like, its head was a skeleton with flashing red eyes?”

            “They’re all the same in the eyes of the law, man.”  The tough one scoffed through his teeth.

            They were interrogating the big guy with Dave’s head in the next room.  The good cop bad cop routine seemed to be working, Charles heard them giving themselves pep talks in the hallway during intermissions. 

“So, a tough guy, huh?  Think you’re really big?”  Bad-cop said to himself, testing out different enunciations and word patterns.  “Real tough, real big, huh?  You think you can mess with us?  What were you doing up in that castle?  How’d you buy that thing in the first place?”

The door swung open and he rushed in, flashing a smile at Charles.  He could have sworn he saw his tooth shimmer in the setting sun.

They let Charles out to see his court appointed lawyer.  “This is looking very bad, Charles, very bad.  Three dead men in your apartment.”  Charles corrected him by holding up two fingers, but apparently there was a third he didn’t know about.  “Some very bad stuff going on up in that castle, Charles, very bad.” 

He leaned in, testing out the “give it to me straight” face he had worked on diligently in the mirror.  “I think it would be in our best interest to avoid the insanity plea, what with so much concrete evidence and all.”  The man fondled his sticky black moustache with his hairy hands.  Charles ate the four sections of a tuna fish sandwich in haste, not realizing how hungry he had been.

The two way glass for the monsters interrogation room prevented any visibility.  Still, he could swear he heard the thing weeping on the other side. 

“Wanted to kill your boss, right?  You hired THIS thing to kill your boss, didn’t you?  Now I’m putting the pieces together.”  The lawyer in the shabby suit rested for a short moment.  “Ooh boy, I’m not excited to see the newspaper tomorrow morning.”  He let out a whistle between his teeth, shaking his head.

Charles had nothing to tell the man.  He didn’t know how he looked any more difficult than Chief, how they could see him in cahoots with the demonic figure.  Each time he tried to talk his tongue would fall loose and dead like a pile of wet newspapers.  He was surprised they weren’t interrogating him in a similar way, it must have had something to do with his cooperativity.

He rose with Charles and led him to a payphone, instructing him just like in the movies that he had one call to make.  Charles was inexperienced with the rotary dial, but it was elegant in its simplicity.  He put his finger in the circular opening and wound it around a few times, although he was only killing time.  He had no one to call.

“He’s making his call, he’s over there.”  The lawyer pleaded with the officers, with little dignity.  “He’s going to be in here a long time.”

The man with the fish put the fish down on a table somewhere, retrieved a long knife to gut it with and removed the head and eyeballs.  He smiled into the camera as they took another picture, this time looking more approachable and paternal.  Dave’s disembodied head yawned in the far room, Charles stood at the phone booth trying to  recall any phone number to dial.

Pulp’s widow came in to see the man who had done it, not much of a man, a silent figure on a bench with an unassuming smile and halfassed rapport.  He made no effort to defend himself, he was suddenly in the place where he felt protected and important.  Chief would stop by eventually to regret stopping by, taking the five hour trip to the city.  The night fell and the officials all left him alone in the cell. 

Charles twiddled his thumbs and bounced his head off of the dry blue bunk.  He had plenty of time to get his story together.

            And that's the end of that one.  I'll read and revise it as time goes on.  This is yesterday technically so I am going to just start over for today.

Day 66: 666

        See my ads?  See them?  I have ads now.  That makes me feel pretty official, guys.
        Story was supposed to be done today, but instead I insist it will be done "soon".  I'm going to keep working it out until it's conclusion, here.  I didn't quit yet.  I'm writing a lot more than 1,000 words a day now ordinarily, regardless if a lot of it is any good.  I'm getting ready to proofread this sucker and revise it, then get to work on the next one.  I guess I'll give myself a couple extra days for that, should be able to get a lot of work done on Saturday.  Also, lots of people talk to you when you don't want anyone to talk to you.  This is the benefit of staying home instead of being a trendy coffee shop script writer person.
        
         Inspirational quotes from Mother Teresa:
        "If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we     have to keep putting oil in it. " 

          This goes out to the girl who knows who she is, that it goes out to.  Things are working out just fine with her, by the way.  I'm willing it to happen, and that hasn't failed.  PERTINACITY will get it for you.  Don't bother reading "Thing and Grow Rich", that's what the secret is.  He doesn't state it outright, but you're just supposed to demand what you want on a daily basis.  Yup.  Almost done with 2,000 words today, buds!

            Charles dragged the old man into his apartment by the slippered foot, pulling the door shut after he had him laying face up in his own puke.  He was faint and onmoving, but it still looked like he wanted to say something, his face frozen in mid speech.  It looked like he had just spit up an apocryphal part of his insides.

            The Dave Sword looked delighted, if it was possible for a skeletal face to have dimples and ruddy cheeks it did.  Charles could have sworn he saw a smirk rising across it’s tight lips, the spine tail maybe being slightly more straight than usual.  Charles reached to pick it up off the floor and it squirmed out of his hand, laughing a hearty sailors laugh.  It sprung away, flying around the room in an inch worms haste.  Charles stomped at it with his bare feet for a second, when he did make contact once the spiky spinal vertebrae disgusted and tickled him.

            It ran up the stairs, flinging its head up each like a grappling hook and then recoiling the neck bit like sucking a ramen noodle out of a dish.  As it drew itself up, it made a sickening slurping noise and a series of human sounding grunts.  Charles followed it onto the stairs, only realizing at the first riser that he didn’t have stairs, these were brand new.  The old man was hawking up something from his throat, convulsing in a series of spasmodic trills.  The stick had disappeared up the flight, looking back indeterminately at Charles down at the bottom of the staircase.  The flight went on further than he could see; a white light pouring down from the top like a funnel for sunlight.

            Charles cooked himself breakfast, ruining several eggs before managing to crack a few correctly into the pan.  He coated it with vegetable oil, probably using too much, and eventually had eggs.  Even he couldn’t screw up toast, and he unwrapped the state of the art toaster he had received as a house warming present.  The old man had gone quiet again.

He sat in front of the TV, his hair dishevelled, his eyes bloodshot red, and clicked on a Network Morning Show.  He checked over his shoulder every twenty minutes, the staircase is still there, yes, it’s still there.  The host droned about the weather, hinting repeatedly that a local entrepeneur would be joining him around 8:00 or 8:30. 

He rose and put the plate in the sink, unsatisfied with breakfast.  There was more to this cooking thing than met the eye.  He prodded and pushed at the staircase, concerned that it could not be real.  The stairs felt like real stairs, although the apartment above his would have had to cease to exist in order to accommodate it in space.  He fiddled with the overflowing garbage bag under the sink, removed the recycling from behind the stairs and gathered them by the door.

“Taking the garbage out, quick.”  He said to the weezing pile of old man.  He slammed the door behind him like there was a lion in the room.  He mulled the options over as he went outside, looking at the building from the highrise apartments across the street.  No stairs rising out of it to nowhere, his secret was safe.  He threw the bags in their respective containers, and thought he had better go back in case the old guy had woken up.

He ducked behind the brick wall of one side of the square apartment building when he saw an unwelcome sight, Mr. Pulp was walking toward the front door dressed in a blue Banana Republic suit, his eyes narrowed and lips pursed.  He was mumbling something to himself under his breath and continuously crossed and uncrossed his arms.

Charles ducked in through the back way and raced down the long corridor, past the framed portraits of indiscriminate older men, using a spin move to dodge the azalea plant precariously placed in the center of the hall.

            He was too late, Mr. Pulp had reached the hallway, there was no way he could escape the confrontation.  No way except for bullrushing past him, ignoring the shouts of his name, and locking the door behind him.  Pulp was a fighter though, he proved sturdier than Charles expected, and still spry and competetive in his ambiguous old age.  He reached a self assured strong hand out and engulfed Charles’s wrist, and Charles feeling like a wounded animal kicked and spat at him incessantly.  His strength was not where it had been, when unchallenged he could have went on as a walking automaton for weeks, but he had met a formidable match in his boss.

            Mr. Pulp subdued him by the shoulders, staring straight into his eyes with a sincere pain in his eyes.  Charles buckled and tried to squirm away, but he was as good as a child in Pulp’s grips.  The old man burst through the door to Charles’s room, a look of horror even more horrific than the one moments earlier on his face.  Pulp screamed, a shrill womanly cry, and the old man collapsed into them like a building collapsing.

            Charles burst out of Pulp’s grip and into his room, slamming the door behind him and scurrying up the stairs, at times running on his hands.  The staircase eventually lost it’s superficial appeal, its hue brightening, the floor turning purple.  Charles stopped and peered back down the hall, a citrus colored figure ascending in an orderly fashion up the stairs a step at a time. 

            A man who looked vaguely familiar ran dead on into the staircase, breaking down onto Charles in a frenzied dash.  He stopped when he saw Charles, looking upset and pissed off.  It was the mental hospital caregiver, Chief.

            “I don’t know what all this going on is, Charles, but I went up here to rescue you and suddenly a disembodied head and spine connected itself to the headless wandering body of a minotaur.  Or atleast it looks like it might be a minotaur.”  Chief stammered, out of breath. 

            The earth shattering bray of an inhuman monster called from the top of the stairs, the crackle of lightning shaking the world above as it happened.  Chief said something to himself about this being “Fucking crazy” and ran past Charles down the hall, as fast as he could in spite of his spiked boots and wobbily knees. 

            Charles peeked out of the top of the stairs like a rabbit looking for the giant behemoth tractor that would soon destroy its home.  A creature straight of his nightmares glared down at him, a towering mass of muscular Frankenstein body parts with the skullish head of Dave, holding a trident in one hand and a giant cinder block in the other.  It shot lightning out of its mouth, the transient world around it collapsing preemptively around its every step. 

            It turned its dooming gaze to Charles, and threw its massive trident down the hallway, grazing over Charles head like a William Tell trick, the creature swinging its hand in dejection after missing like it had thrown a bad horseshoe.  Mr. Pulp was removed from the hallway entirely, reduced to a symbol of his name, Charles didn’t need to see him to know that.  He was sure his apartment had come crashing down around the rest of the building, and wondered about the structural integrity of the city block. 

            He turned and headed down the way he had come from, as the monster leaned its body over and reached an enormous hand down after him like it was trying to steal candy out of a vending machine.  Charles closed his eyes and backed into the wall, half expecting it to open a portal to a different world.  The giant arm clasped around him, prying him off of the wall with the nails on two fingers.  Charles grasped at the air, a futile attempt to break free.  He could see down the tunnel behind him as he was lifted back up, Chief hadn’t deserted him completely yet.  Mr. Pulp was nowhere to be found, most likely dead.  The trident stuck out of the end of the hall, the walls bifurcated near the end with curved stone spreading where the tines pierced it. 

            Chief looked up at him, horrified like a deer in headlights.  He manically looked around on the stairs for something to stab the monster with, coming upon a chunk of brick eventually that crumbled when he tried to pick it up.  The monster had trouble removing its arm from the tunnel, it flexed the shoulder like its muscle suddenly spasmed, and it couldn’t open the hand or else risk dropping its prize.

            It squeezed Charles hard, but the pressure didn’t break his bones.  He was in a bit of discomfort, although it wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought it would be.  He thought of a child throwing a fork, the muscles were showy, hands soft and smooth and underdeveloped.  Dave’s spinal head hung by a thread from the top, twenty feet up, completely unable to see what was going on inside the tunnel.  Charles started tickling the hand that was grabbing him, and it suddenly squeezed down harder breaking a few of his ribs.

            Chief found a better rock, a darker sedimentary rock, and struggled to lug it up the stairs, at first running and then breaking into a heaving jog.  He knew his spiked boots would come in handy at some point.  He dug the rock into the monsters pinky fingernail, ripping the cuticle open and spraying a mist of brown blood that looked and smelled the rusty sewer pipes.  The pinky released but the other fingers remained contracted around Charles, he himself clutching his stomach in and reaching his hands over the index finger like the bar of a ride in a rollercoaster.

            This made the monster realize it could lift Charles out and continue to grip him with only two fingers.  It was a delicate maneuver and the hand wasn’t up for it, and he rolled back down the stairs, striking Chief and taking him along with him.