Day 86: Intrepid Dynamism

            I think I might let this thing run its course and become something different.  Maybe I'll do daily essays, or pop culture rants.  I could use it to organize events, or review 2 star movies.  The 2 star movies I review could get separate 2 star scores, explanations of how good of a two star movie it is (for being a two star movie).
            I need to go out and eat something.  Maybe I should go to the grocery store.  Boring.
           In the last two weeks I've discovered the absolute joy that is proofreading.  It's an instant source of improvement in this thing that I'm trying to get good at.  Not that it doesn't help to just write every day.
           Also, discovered that you can have a conversation with yourself.  I'm probably the last one to figure that one out, though.  You can think of the things that bother you and write them out, and then proofread that.  You can proofread the newspaper.
           Lesson I've learned about my own writing #1! (I wonder if a lot of people have this problem):
           Do not introduce machines or mechanisms which you (I) understand.

          Other thing I should have learned long ago about relationships/life:
          Nothing is about me!  It's always about the other person.  People like when things are about themselves.  It's a paradox, but that's only until someone lets it end naturally.  Or, it's about eventually figuring out what someone wants you to be and then acting like that, so you're duplicitous.

            

           “When do I get to see Mr. Grey? “  Jim asked, the room freezing.  No one dared look up from their notepads. 

            “Are you sure you’re asking me that?”  The attendant stooped down, talking over his glasses.  He gestured at the other men in the room, whos masses were little more than bundles of air.

            Jim contemplated this for a second, chewing the nails down to the cuticle on his pinky finger.  Suddenly, his mind was far away.  “Who are you, anyway?”  Jim asked, throwing his hands in the air.  He flashed a doubting look at Roger, who had one eye closed completely.

            The man snapped his fingers and a chandelier fell, the candles on it already burning. He snapped them again and they were in a cave by a gorge, Roger salivating like a grown up baby.  A waterfall lent its ambience to the scene, it looked too natural to be manmade and too perfect to be natural.

            “I’m Mr. Grey’s right hand man!”  He broke into what could have been a musical number.  “You’re not here, you should know that.  You have been to the hospital before, but you won’t be now.  This is all your mind putting this back together.” 

Each time he snapped, the pictures changed.  With a click, they were in Madrid.  Another crackle of the fingers landed them in ancient Egypt.  A group of slaves sold each other braided hair.

            “Wake up, Jim!”  The man yelled in Jim’s face, and Jim stared up to see the slideshow still going on.  A group of students were led in by a bearded man wearing a flannel shirt, denim jeans, and sporting an especially creepy pony tail.

            “Sit down.”  He said shortly and sternly to a pudgy kid who refused to relax.  The kid sat on his knees in the chair, his blubborous features bouncing. 

            “Open heart surgery,”  The instructor said, waiting for the rustling to stop.  He flashed an angry look at the pony tailed man.  “Some older people need to get pacemakers put in.  So we put them in.  It’s not pretty.  It might be a little out of these kids.”

            The teacher insisted that the slide show continued.  He sat with his arms crossed, trying his best to look serious.

            Some of the kids didn’t enjoy the slideshows of people cut open on tables.  One in particular pulled a knit cap over his eyes, whistling, humming, and shaking violently.  The tallest one leaned back in his chair sucking his thumb, but his eyes glued up to the screen.  Jim watched anxiously, afraid of where this dream sequence may lead him.  He waited for his mind to catch up to his body.   A clatter of steel toed boots clicked through the hallway outside, silhouettes flashing past the lit window.  The noises rebounded endlessly through the corridor, the echo seeming to get louder and then turning into the screech of a door opening.

            “And this next one is what it would be like if you had no oxygen on the moon.”  He revealed a bright red pulsating humanoid mass that lost liquids in a five shot sequence untl it disappeared completely.  The air was sucked out of each blood vessel with a pop, like bubblewrap.

            “You’re still studying in space.”  Jim said to himself.  A montage flashed through his mind, in which he saw himself shaking hands with Mr. Grey and receiving his diploma.  Next, he was in space studying in a bubble orbiting a space station.  Then, with the help of three other space workers, he used a giant rectangular cue tip to clean the lint from an outerspace belly button.  A few men were lost, but overall it was a good day.  They all sat around the microwave for heat and cooked Hot Pockets inside of it for sustenance.  They used their hands to remove the greasy pouches from their wet paper sleeves.  The attendant was there then, standing outside watching the security cameras.

            “Are you remembering now?”  Mr. Grey’s disembodied head asked from somewhere.  “Now do you get it?!”  It popped into three smaller bubbles, like a camera taking pictures from different angles. 

            Jim woke up in a cold sweat where he was sitting, covered in space particles floating overhead.  A frozen laugh flew past with its agreeable edges and saccharine pointed tongue.  A candle lit itself at the edge of the universe.

            “Machines acting up again.”  A man wearing an engineer outfit pulled a long level that came out of the ground.  The furnace burnt brightly behind him, grey matter spewing from it and dissipating like dust in the air. 

            Another engineer came in, thumbing through an oversized manual.  “It says here if we… if we…  Well just pull that lever.”

            They worked at the lever for a minute to no avail.  The second engineer crawled next to it, eyeing it from up close like a pool shot. 

            Jim and Roger remained suspended in the slug.  The slugs face suddenly warped, and it consumed itself slowly.  Otto tugged from above the hole, and they flew back into the room the same way they had exited.  They entered the booth with the door closed airtight.  Roger dusted himself off and sprung to his feet, a fear spreading across his face as he saw Otto charging into the machines gates. Jim stood fiddling with the dials on the machine in reverse slow motion until that energy had run its course, and then stared back at the door.

            “Ok Otto, you win.”  Jim said, opening the cage before Otto would forcefully pry it open.  “Why didn’t you want us going in there?”

            “It’s theoretical.  It’s not supposed to work.  You don’t exist in it.” Otto shook his head like he just saw two oversized possums jump into a mincemeat maker.  He laughed with a southern drawl and then became more stern.

            Otto produced a magnet with a chain linked through it, and held it in front of Roger and Jim.  “You fellers just couldn’t wait.”

           

         

         

Day 85: Natural Negativism

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            A muffled skirmish was going on down the hall.  The squeeky wheels of an old chair roughed up the marble floor underneath it, accompanied by the stymied protests of two tired orderlies.  Somehow, the man with the wheelchair had won the skirmish, and a chair came flying between a swinging door in the long corridor at the far end of the waiting room.  A bird rattled in its cage in the managers office, which sat in an alcove behind the secretaries desk at the front of the room.  The attendants that were dealing with Jim and Roger ignored the actions of the man who burst into view and then around in a semicircle.

            He pushed his way past Roger, who pulled his knees to his chest like a little egg.  He was wearing a faceless mask, and doctors chased him with stun guns, afraid to touch him.  He laughed inaudibly and moved perpetually.

            They wheeled Roger and Jim in the opposite direction.   Roger appeared asleep with his eyes open, and Jim was reduced to the manic state of his manic depression.  The clock on the wall ticked loudly, the fluorescent lights flickered and bathed the hall in an innocuous glow from above.  The cackling fiend on the opposite end of the hall was gone because their fields of vision were reduced to what was directly in front of them.

            “Couple of stragglers.”  A man walking behind the surgical mask wearing orderlies pushing the wheelchairs said.  He had brilliant blue eyes that were firmly squinted like the crinkles in an orange.   “This one might be antiepileptic.  He doesn’t look like he made the transition well.  Reminds me of the guy from last week, his ears started bleeding next.  We’d better get him into testing.”

            They were wheeled into a waiting area that was dotted with signs that implored them to stay silent.  The man disappeared behind a partition that wasn’t quite as tall as he was, Jim listening with a feigned ignorance.  A counselor type of guy dressed in street closed walked up slowly, like approaching wild animals.

            “Do not be alarmed if you don’t know how you got here.  Jim, it’s great to see you again.”  He extended a hand and shook Jim’s, who looked up at him with a confused uncertainty.

            The man behind the partition talked endlessly.  “The experiment was a failure.”  He said to a person that was shorter than the partition.  “We need to get them out of here.”

            The man who had done the balancing act with the slug was pushed on a gurney past them, his hands frozen little statues of hands.  He looked like a wax statue, the expression on his face a frozen anguish.  The attendants looked at each other knowingly across his sprawled out corpse.

            Otto called from somewhere, the phone he was trying to reach not fully manifested in the temporal realm.  Jim could feel the presence try to make itself known, he understood its desire to be heard.  He tried to remember what Otto had said or been about the first time he contacted him with little avail.

            Jim checked his pockets; he wasn’t carrying anything.  His legs twitched as he wrestled with them to move from his own volition, they wrestled against themselves like rubber bands.  He pulled himself out of the chair to his feet and fell flat on his face, catching himself awkwardly on his left wrist.  He rolled over and squeeked, pushing himself up on his side.  The man that shook his hand helped pull him back up to his feet.

            Roger’s act of resistance was less pronounced.  He turned his eyes back in his head, like he was trying to look through the back of his skull at Jim laying on the floor behind him.

            “Let’s go for a little walk, shall we guys?  Or shall I say I’ll push you along. Paul, I’m taking them for the tour.”  He called to the man on the other side of the wall.

            “I’ll need one of those, too, yeah.”  The sound of objects clashing with a metal tray rattled.  “We’re not removing the brain or anything.”  His head popped out of the other side.  “Yes, that’s fine.  We have a lot of preparation to do.  Have them back here… later.”  He disappeared again.

            Jim rose up and pulled each leg in a sequence of steps like they were made out of led.  He lunged out for Roger’s chair, which handily worked as a sort of walker. 

            Jim pushed him silently, the chair cascading over the shiny floor.  A man with a dangly security badge pushed past them, smiling and nodding as he passed.  They passed rooms on both sides of the hall ith bed ridden guests.  A priest held the hand of a gigantic man who looked like he had binge eaten his way into the room. 

            “These are the ignorant souls who don’t wish to pry themselves off of their hospital beds.  They don’t want to see the bigger picture, they are stuck in an endless cycle here.”

            The man showed them a slideshow, situating their chairs next to a row of spinny office chairs at a circular table.  He shut the blinds of the windows, twisting the rod attached to the end of the white blinds.  The projector purred and the fan on its side fired up, blowing cool air directly into Roger’s nose.

            “Here’s how it starts.”  He pressed a button and the next slide flipped into focus.  “You’re here.”

            A map of the premises flashed, with a red dot in the center to signify their location.

            “The moats on this end,”  He pointed with a baton.  “The dragons here.  No, no, I’m just kidding.  No one has ever escaped from this place though, and I don’t know if you want to try.  We’ll let you try.”

            He mixed some vacation photos in with the more straightforward presentation.  It became pretty apparent he was just trying to waste time to Jim.

            “We’ll have to show these two to their rooms, soon.”  A head poked through the doorway, which stood ajar.

Day 84: If there's a day where I don't make my thousand...

              It'd be today! 

             
              Congratulations to me for it.  Day eighty-four and we're still going.  Deep breaths, guys.  I need to recognize myself daily as an accomplisher of tasks!  I should give myself a fake award.  This is all slightly sarcastic.  But not sardonic.  Surreptitious.
              Here's the part where I write about the cathartic elements of writing and how doing this helps me keep my identity that I've forged of being a writer.  It's all true.  I should have had that identity at Day 28.  In development.
              Oh, one other thing.  "Show, don't tell" works in real life just as well as it works in bullshit fiction.  I reread yesterdays and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.  There was atleast some sort of strand holding it together.
              I lost a day, I know I did.  I was doing other things.  Things that I think are more importance than this, even though this is something I'm investing all of my free time daily in.  I wonder what that thing was.  I am kind of upset I lost a day though, so I'll just pretend it never happened and publish this one as Day 84.  Next week on Day 91, it will have been forgotten by history entirely.

             Letter from my future self to current me:
            You're at the point where reading is more important than writing.  Get the writing done every day, but read more.  You're bridging the gap between your writing and their writing by reading.

             Jim beckoned Roger to follow him into the shack.  Roger turned to see Otto falling right onto him, his arms wide and long like an unscrewed vicegrip.  The boarded gate to the entrance snapped as he pushed it open, giving him a severe red scratch on his abdomen

            The chickens stood around in the yard, officiously wandering and poking their beaks into the desert.  They skidded around on the outside of the shack like worshippers.  Jim pushed one behind him and Otto ran into it, stuck on the wrong side of a cattle drive.

            Inside the shack there was a machine that looked like a silver egg.  It had a thick plate window on the outside and power chords connected to it like I.Vs, running into an underground passageway.  The steal grates of the floor allowed gusts of wind to emanate upwards with the sound of an industrial fan chopping at the air below.  An incubation chamber sat on the far side of the room that looked like a tanning bed with hothouse lights over it.

            Jim pulled the squeeky shitty door behind him after Roger ducked inside, it sliding acutely on its upper hinges.  Otto pried it open with ease, but it was too late, they had jumped in his machine.  It disappeared in a fracured black blip, like the invisible blackhole behind the backstage curtain of the world.

            Jim found himself in a funnel.  He looked at his hands, they stretched backwards like strands of white light.  Roger was at the end of the tunnel, struggling like a kid who couldn’t swim against the time current that was pulling him headfirst into an icefishing hole.  The light refracted off of the prisms that contracted it, continuing on endlessly in streams of light at first and then snapping abruptly into focus.

            “Time elevator.”  Jim said.  His words echoed off the walls like tennis balls, each sylabble traveling in a line of bumpy air.  The sound of his voice sounded like it did when it was recorded.  It immediately reminded him of a failed invention he had spent years attempting to visualize that had the intended use of calling his future self.  However, when the phone was answered in the future, his future self was sucked into the past, and the only way he knew this was conjecture.  A machine he used to intercept transmissions from the past had recorded an image of a version of himself who appeared older, that seemed to be unhappy with his self of the future.  Since then, he was careful not to screw with time in the way he was presently doing.

Otto stood at the top of the time vortex, looking like the Brawny paper towel guy.  He was soon overtaken with duplications of himself, spawning enormously into a squadrant that dissolved into its own omnipotence.  Then, the outside world was just a checkered pattern.

            Jim righted himself to his feet when his mind finally adjusted to the time tunnel.  The chaotic wavy tunnel developed boundaries as his eyes adjusted, although he knew it hadn’t been his eyes but his entire brain.  Roger struggled at the far end of the tunnel, gurgling the pockets of oxygen that had found their way in between dimensions. 

            Jim walked past Roger at first, his feet feeling like they may collapse back into the time river at the drop of a hat.  He felt like a water bug sitting on top of a lifeless pond.

            Overhead lights cracked on and Roger sat up, no longer constricted.  They were inside what appeared to be a giant translucent slug, its distinction from a snail being the lack of a shell.  Another set of overhead lights powered up soundlessly, and they could see a second thin membrane on the outside of the slug.  A crowd of spectacled men in white coats watched in silent awe.  Turning back toward the tail of the thing, Jim saw that the creature they were in seemed to be mounted on the hand of a man in black pants and a white wife beater.

            A long drum roll sounded and the audience gasped in anticipation.  The slug seemed to come to life, its feelers unraveling and twisting like a Peep in a microwave.  Blue fluorescent lights snapped on, bathing the slug in a dreamlike hue.  Its head stretched upward and took the shape of an avian creature, the globulous middle section stretching into two gracile wings.

            “Mr. Grey, Mr. Grey, Mr, Grey.”  A monotone chorus started from the audience.  An invisible TV monitor urged them to become more excited, a disembodied white gloved hand floating and gesturing enthusiastically.  A man with a white paper hat sold hot dogs out of a tube that looked like a hot dog. 

            A spotlight shone on the mans face.  His sweaty brow and shiny face were exacerbated beyond exertion, he looked like he could collapse at any moment.  A group of paramedics waited anxiously behind a blue hospital curtain, the leader of the group looking focused and intense as they crouched in a semicircle.

            The slug had transformed into a swan, and the swan was now melting into a larva of sorts.  Roger struggled with a swimming motion against the inside wall of the sculpture like a cat in a plastic bag.  The whole thing smelled like hand sanitizer, and felt wetter than watter.  It soaked right into Roger’s skin, the whole arm feeling limp and satiated.

            “Presto!”  The magic man said, and his face turned from a grimace into a davinare smirk.  Jim and Roger felt their bodies slowly becoming warm, and the insides of their eyes filled with light.  The slug disappeared, and they were standing in a bright white room, fully redressed in hospital garbs.

            A doctor instructed two orderlies to seat them in wheelchairs, and they insisted it be so.  Roger immediately sat down and his head lolled to one side, drool gathering on his shoulder. 

            Jim straightened out the curled sleeves of his hospital gown.

             
           

               
             

Day 83: Patented Move

Concentration concentration concentration.  That's all.

Noticed lately that people like me better than I like myself.  And I definitely like myself.  So this is weird.  End of emo rant.

Writing is getting better!  Not that it's necessarily going anywhere, but my focus is improving and my "minds eye" is something which may have come into existence.  Pretty sure you can just will anything into creation.
            I apologize to everyone for the quality of this one.  No, I don't.  It's short, what more could you ask for?

            A steady line of ducks emerged behind the first one, each becoming larger and more brightly colored in visual accordance with the previous one.  The yellow sheen of their coats resembled shag carpeting.  They showed little alarm for the bulging chains, the straining wood, if it hadn’t been their cause all along.           

Jim watched with a raised eyebrow.  He imagined an enormous mother duck type of duck in the building pumping these out.

            The door of the shack flung open and Otto came storming out, his boots falling in thunderous thuds.  He looked like a giant trying to stomp out a forest fire.  Roger was inside relaxing with his plate of ribs he had heated on the stove, standing pensively over the sink.

            “Still working on the stem cell physics stuff, huh?  You old rascal, I thought you gave it up.”  Jim said, watching Otto use his enormous arms to gather up the ducks like dribbling a giant furry basketball.  “I thought after you left Grey you were just going to be a man of the land.  As it is, you’re a lot like me.”

            “Didn’t hide it very well?  Well, we’ll get into that.”  Otto said.  “Help me push these little bastards back inside.”

            The birds started chirping, a quiet golf clap at first growing louder and more aggravated as Jim and Otto tried to shove them back towards the shack.  Otto scurried around, grappling like a professional wrestler.  Their sizes were fixed now, but Otto refused to acknowledge the fact they wouldn’t fit back in the tiny mousehole sized crack.  Roger stepped out onto the grass, nervously gnawing at the hunk of meat.

            “Go back in the house, get me my rope.”  Otto said, armdeep in the yellow muff.  His head faced the opposite direction, sprawled out with his legs back like he was trying to push a car out of a snowy situation.  “We gotta tie these suckers up.”

            Otto let go of the chicks to see what they’d do.  They all stared up at him and Jim, confused and derelict.  He tried to compress one back down to its original size using his hands like a vice, and it squashed out flat like a pancake.  When he released it, it popped back open into a ball and walked around aimlessly again, like a balloon with legs.  Jim watched as the chains snapped like elastic bands, and the smaller shacks door squeeked open.

            Roger had returned inside and was looking around the house for rope.  He checked under the couch, stared up at the ceiling, and was by all practical standards ineffectual.  He stared up at the wooden chest in the bedroom, the inevitable end to his journey.  It was curiously quiet outside, the chirping had lulled down to an agreeable level.  He gripped the metal banister and proceeded up the stairs.

            Otto’s doorless room was basically a giant bed orbitted by a dresser, a bookshelf, and a hole in the ceiling that passed for a skylight.  Roger hit the light switch next to the door, and an overhead light buzzed on with the sound of an old fashioned tube TV.  He crouched down and lifted the bed, pulling the crate out from underneath with great difficulty because he could only get two fingers through its metal bearing.  He thought of those moms who use adrenaline rushes to rescue their babies from underneath debris.

            The box was full of intertangled wires, each connected like bundles of nerves.  He pried them apart with a sickening plop, the area underneath full of foggy viscuous liquid.  He couldn’t make out the objects inside of the fog, and his hand slowly glided into the void as if by its own volition.  When he couldn’t see it, it didn’t feel like his hand anymore.  He felt something inside grab his hand, when he tried to grab something with his hand.  When he retracted his arm by the elbow, he saw he was holding a long strand of rope, and as he continued to pull at it more and more continued to come out.

            Jim and Otto stepped back into the house,  covered in yellow fur.  Otto’s arms hung like violent eels out of water.  He looked around for Roger, upon noticing him upstairs he flew up the flight three steps at a time.  He slapped Roger back with enough energy to send him sprawling in a heap into the wall, and grabbed the rope and started pulling.  His mountain man lumberjack arms worked at it, pulling rope until it became taut at the end, at which point a heave ripped it free from whatever it was connected to.  The box squeeled and a clear mist sprayed over the room, coating everything in an ambriotic layer.

            Jim disappeared back outside, and Otto stood in the center of the room with the rope stretched over both of his hands, like it was something that died.  Roger pulled himself up and pushed his palms into his eyes, his head spinning.

            “What was that?  You said you wanted rope!”  Roger said indignantly. 

            “This is rope to you?”  Otto said, and Roger looked in horror as the rope had revealed its nature as a long black tendon.  “You could never understand the mechanics of this invention, long story short its alien technology.”  Roger was horribly disappointed with this explanation.

            Roger had been distracted from his mission long enough.  Things were happening too fast.  He pushed past Otto and back down the stairs, and then out onto the gravel walkway.  An overpowering smell of burning took his senses by storm, a cloud of smoke rose from the seemingly empty desert in the distance. 

            Jim stood at the gate of the shack, facing Roger.

            “This is what we need, it’s in here.  This is how we get there.”  Jim sounded self assured and confident. 

            Otto stormed outside.  “You’re not going to be using any of my stuff, Jim.  The road ends here.  Both of you guys seem alright, it’s nothing personal, but I’m going to make sure you stay here.”

Day 82: Stephen King Occasionally Has Awful Dialogue

            Some of Stephen King's dialogue is the worst.  I don't want to take any out of context because that's what morons do.  But some of it's bad.

            My favorite adjective is "shitty".  It's a great descriptor.  Dialogue is definitely my weakest point, so I should talk.  Sorry, Stephen.

            Most often a "leap of faith" is more a "leap of rationality".  The conclusions to some arguments don't make any sense.  I'm mainly talking about politics.  I don't really want to get into it though, having too good of a day so far.

            All I needed was "more culture" all along!  I was crazy for not knowing that.  Nothing more affirming as some culture.  Reading this website, www.thoughtcatalog.com has been a good experience.

            The way Otto stomped around gave the shack an impermanent feeling.  He was like a bull in a china shop in his own house.  The amount of shit on the walls that should have fallen down by this point was perplexing, and the amount of value Otto put on his work was outrageously low.

            Roger picked up a framed five by five picture from the chunk-of-wood table with the mounted buck on it.  It showed Otto shirtless with a night and day farmers tan with his arm around a woman wearing a powder blue sundress, her face and head concealed completely by a straw hat and roundframed sunglasses.  Jim snatched it from his hand and set it back down on the wooden slab.

            “That’s Otto’s wife, we don’t want to remind him of her.  Things didn’t end well.”

            “Is she… dead?”  Roger asked.

            “No, she just left him.  Old Otto has a volatile temper, as you’d imagine.”

            (She’s going to be with Mr. Grey later on, that’s how it’ll turn out.  Writing this so I see it in the proofreading)

            “What are we doing here, then?  How is he going to help us, did you even tell him we were coming?”

            “That isn’t how Otto works.”  Jim laughed at the idea like it was absurd; a compliment to Roger’s sense of humor.  “You don’t call Otto, Otto doesn’t do you favors.  You get him riled up enough about something and he’ll help you like it’s his idea.  It’s called a “Long Con”, although I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

            A policecar flew past on the interstate, the gush of wind surrounding it sounding like a mist spraying over the side of the shack.  A meadowlark sung as sweetly as the wind through the trees.  Somewhere the robots gears grinded through the streets.

            Otto was presumably preoccupied with something he was finding for Jim.  He dug intensively dug through the box in his room like a kid digging through a toy chest.  Glancing down when he heard rustling, it appeared something in his living room was important to him. 

            The dead buck head was pointed in Roger’s directions.  The eyes couldn’t have been real deer eyes anymore, they were wide and bright white with dilated pupils.  They looked like cubed sour milk.  It peered pleadingly at Roger, either asking for help or attempting to convey a warning.

            Jim rose and went to use Otto’s bathroom, the outhouse.  Those cappucinos.  He exited through the front door quckly, in spite of Roger’s tacit protests.  Roger sat with his hands in his lap, back straight and feet firmly on the ground.  He could hear his own heartbeat, it felt like he was in a doctors office waiting for test results.  He wished Otto had a pet that he could play with, then immediately retracted this wish when he thought about what Otto’s pet would be.  The deer continued glaring.

            “So you said Mr. Grey kidnapped your girls, is that what happened?”  Otto called from upstairs, breaking the silence with a pickaxe.  The old house noises of boards shifting and groaning under his weight combined with the crickets for ambience.  “That son of a bitch.”  Next, he made a series of unintelligable growls.

            “He did.  Jim was living out in my garage and he created some crazy robot head.  The robot head let all hell loose, and they swept in and took them away.”  Roger said, feeling like Josef K in The Trial.  It was one of those tired facts that was brought up again and again, like he had been a previous lottery winner or a childstar.  Otto continued to dig, it was about five minutes later.  “You’re the guy has people over and just digs through a box upstairs?  You know how to find this Mr. Grey, can we get on with it already?”

            Otto chortled and gave up his search for a second.  “Someone with daughters should have a little more patience than that.  You’re just going to have to wait I’ll be back down in just a minute.  In the meantime, you can go help yourself in the fridge if it will put you at ease.”

            Roger shivered at the prospect.  He sat still for a minute, ignoring the offer, but his stomach started to quake.  At high stress times, his appetite was at his worst.  Everyone has a different nervous tic, some people clean, some people do laundry, others cry in the fetal position, he was an eater.  Before Sandy was born, he hadn’t slept more than four hours a night for the whole gestation period.  This is when he had given up all of his hobbies, his bad habits, cleansed himself of interesting quarks much in the same way his wife had changed her appetite.  He was ready to spring outside at a moments notice, bring the car around to the front of the house and book it for the hospital. Miranda’s disposition had remained cool all along, she became calm and tranquil like a dying person who accepted the pangs of mortality.  Instead, those drives often ended up being to fast food restaurants, or missions to fill the pantry with frozen foods and junk food.

            He pulled the refridgerator open with a sticky peeling noise.  Piles of meat sat on plates, with varieties of barbeque sauces filling the doors on each side.  It looked like a primordial proving ground, like these animals had been reduced completely to their delicious carcasses.  He didn’t trust the plates sitting out in the open the way the way they were, without the applicatioon of seran wrap, but still a particular plate of ribs caught his eye.  A microwave would have made things a lot easier.  As it was, he prepared a burner on the gas stove.

            Jim exited the dank outhouse and shook with a flaccid autonomy over his own body.  His skin had become pale and he perpetually felt like he had woken up from a cold sweat.  He stared at the shack; it was windowless from the back side.  He looked over at the smaller chained up shack, it was in a blind spot.  A baby chick walked lackadaisically out from the four by foured doors, stretching its tiny toes out as it walked.

            One of the more interesting things about doing this blog is I've been able to objectively identify what works better for me and what doesn't.  Like most people, I'm a lot more effective when I have a deadline.  I get a lot more done on days that I have to go to work.

Day 81: Driving round town with the girl I love

            Ok things are going alright!  Getting up and motivated quicker, that's called discipline.  Haven't hit that dreaded "writers block" yet, although I'm also not creating the levity I'm looking for quite.  It's an ongoing process that subconscious is a snake to be charmed.  I think I need to be more practical, and from a practical standpoint I should be writing more than I'm reading.  So let's supercharge this thing and write thousands of words a day, guys.  It's more important than anything else.  "The Magnificent Obsession" plus other stuff like that.

           Otto’s front gate swung open slowly with a humming sound when he saw the car approaching.  The sun scudded behind the mountains, brown light covering the desert in a thin strip.  There was plenty of vegetation but no cactuses, a foreign species of moss covering the road.  Dark crevasses shined in the sand like shiny armpits.

            Roger shut off the ignition and leaned his head forward on the dashboard, stretching his arms out beside it and twisting his neck from side to side.  Jim was spry, his mind shooting off synapses like christmas tree lights.  He pulled his arms inside of his parka and hopped out of the car peered out at the familiar gate with anticipation, like a meerkat out of the grass.

            “Who the hell is there?”  Otto called, shooting a warning shot from a hunting rifle up in the air.  “Whoever you are, I don’t’ want any visitors.  Shoulda seen the sign.”

            Otto was a heavyset bear of a man.  He looked more like a wild animal as he gestured animatedly at a generic “no trespassing” sign framed and mounted on a foot tall pike facing the house.  His stature was reminscent of Foghorn Leghorn, his top half looked like a bowling pin which was absorbed by the mound of jello which was his lower torso.  His head wobbled involuntarily as he approached, but his gun hand stayed steady.  The muscles in his arms bulged involuntarily, like they were a volcano that might explode at any moment.

            Jim ducked and covered his head, inching forward as quickly as he could while doing so.  He knew Otto was liable to start firing at any trespassers.  Roger panicked as he tried to get the key back in the ignition, scratching the wheel up around the entry point.  When he finally got it in, it was too late, he was already staring from a distance down the barrel of a compensatory rifle.

            “Ya’r better off getting out of the car, lemme have a look at ya.”  Otto said, a hint of sadistic joviality in his voice.

            “Of course this is one of your friends, of course it is.”  Roger said to himself, ducking his head into his lap.  He peeked up and watched through the windshield as Otto took a temporary break from harassing him to  ascend upon Jim. 

“The second we get by another phone I’m calling the looney bin and we’re going to have you penned up for good.”  Roger threatened wistfully to himself, accidentally prying a little black metal piece off of the dash.

            Otto stood over Jim, placing a forklift of a hand on his back.  He lifted him up, and recognizing it was Jim patted the dirt off of his front side.

            “Excuse me, Mr. Jim.  You can’t be too careful these days.” 

            Jim laughed and put an arm around Otto, his giant gristly beard scratching against Jim’s neck.  Jim’s arm felt like a toothpick, like Otto could snap it off at any moment, and he towered above him with rambunxtious energy.

            “Bout time you got out from there.”  Otto stared at Roger through the windshield.  “You should turn off those headlights, I can’t see your pretty little face.”

            Roger begrudgingly exited the cabin, like a kid being sent to the principles office for something he hadn’t been responsible for.  He pleaded to Otto with open arms.  “All I know is there’s some guy named Mr. Grey and he kidnapped my girls.”  He paused between sobs.  “Jim let a killer robot loose.”

            “Ain’t nothing as shameful as seeing a grown man cry, clean yourself up,”  Otto said, removing a disgusting handkerfchief from his sweatstained front denim pocket.  Roger accepted it with reckless abandon, wiping sweat and tears from his glassy darkened eyes.

            “There’s the lieu,”  Otto said, pointing at one of two other monuments that dotted the property.  “Here’s my house.  That over there is the shack.  Don’t go in the shack, it’s all chained off for a reason.”

            Roger squinted and stared towards it, with Otto’s foreboding gaze fixing on him.  The shack was tightly wrapped with chains, looking like a sports injury wrapped to make the joint completely immobile.  A giant masterlock was wrapped like a bow through the chains; it seemed like a place that was dying to be broken into.

            “Come on in,”  Otto called as he walked back into his garage of a house.  He slapped Roger with two fingers on the back of the neck when he lingered staring at the shack, the sun now almost disappearing completely. 

            The place stunk of rotten cheese and formaldehyde.  A ten point buck head sat mounted behind a circular wooden table, leather couches flanking it on either side.  Unprimed wooden stairs without a railing led up to a single bedroom with no door separating it from the main room, the ceiling much higher than anticipated from the outside.  A small kitchen, more appropriately referred to as a nook, consisted of a rusted gas oven, a utility sink that jutted out of the wall covered in dirt and grime.  A layer of white sealant covered the layer between the wood and the insulation.

            They sat down after Otto gave the grand tour, which consisted mostly of a raised hand and a few garbled exclamations.

            “Hup.”  He pointed at the head of the buck, ostentatious as a man of his stature could be.  He insisted the guys sit on the couch when he went to tay care of something and then disappeared upstairs, although not really disappearing because he was still entirely visible.

            “He’s the only man Mr. Grey is scared of.”  Jim said behind a raised hand.

            “I heard that.”  Otto yelled down the stairs, lifting his shitty boxspring mattress with one hand and pulling a wooden box on wheels out from underneath it with the other.  “That grey faced drone might scare the ordinary man, but not me.  I practiced ripping tin cans to pieces with my bare fingers, I’ll tear that guys face off.”

            At this revelation, Jim noticed in horror that the garbage can sitting next to the couch was full of bloody tin can lids. 

            “He’s a nut, yeah, ok, he’s a little nutty.”  Jim conceded. 

            The revelation of a new, less quirky and more scary world dawned on Roger, and he suddenly thought about what Jim had said again.  The further away they went, the weirder the world got.  He wouldn’t admit Jim was right outloud, of course, but it suddenly made more sense.

            Jim admired the mounted creatures dangling precariously from the rafters.  The moose head above him looked like it might fall at any moment, he could have sworn he saw it twisting on its screws. 

 
            Man do I get lazy some days.

Day 80: Electric

            Positivity flowing!  Typing this while shaving with electric razor.  Electric razors give you perfect pitch, try singing while using one some time.
            Trying to get this done earlier and earlier.  It's down to a system.  We finish about 1,000 words and then proofread brings that number up to 1600-1700.  One of these days I really need to proofread that national novel writing month novel that I did.  You remember that one, loyal reader.  It's ironic because by saying loyal reader I'm talking to myself in the future, when me in the future is talking to me in the past.

          Letter from me in the future:

          Keep going you're only on Day 80.  You're gonna get good at this stuff and knock it out of the park before breakfast.  Also, I know it sounds counterproductive, but watch more movies.  It will give you a better idea how different variables and themes are introduced.  Always be studying!

          From the yacht,

          Future me with thousands of dollars

            I changed the font for effect.  

            He swung out a hand and hit the off switch before its rockets could fire off.  Even when it relaxed and fell back into a neutral position it still looked threatening, and Dream Roger worked with difficulty to turn it around in the opposite direction.

            In the meantime, Jim had accumulated quite a crowd with his anecdotes.  The surrounding booths had no choice but to listen to his stories, some people laughing and guffawing from across the way.

            “So he thought by putting a hydrogen charged particle in the electron based carbonite…”  Jim made something up.  These people were eating it up, he thought of himself as a maestro in front of an audience.  Or, better yet, a conductor in front of an orchestra.

            The cappuccinos went straight to his heart, he could feel a warm sensation inside that was pleasant even though it might have been a heart attack.  His eyes ached, his arms trembled, but his resolve went unshaken. 

            “Roger, you’ve been out for a couple of hours,”  Jim playfully jabbed at Roger, smiling up at the crowd.  A few of the fan boys friends had joined him.

            “Is it true what they say?”  One of them asked.  He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a NASA T-shirt.  Thousand years in space.  Whatever that means.  “You could build a contraption out of anything in front of you, any time?”

            Jim eyeballed the table.  Napkin dispenser, forks and knives, overhead sound system, juke box.  “I could instill life on that napkin dispenser, yes I could.”

            Roger woke up violently with a placemat stuck to his head and gasped for air.  “We have to go.” 

            “You guys are a regular comedy duo!”  An oblivious old man laughed.

            Jim left a handful of wadded disgusting bills on the table, and they squeezed past the patrons.  Jim elicited cheers, and he held his hand up in the air in a Black Power fist. 

            “What in the world is wrong with you?”  Roger whispered in a stern bass, pushing Jim faster toward the door.  Jim tried to turn around and do a Nixon “I’m not guilty” pose, but Roger pushed harder and they were out the front door.

            Down the flat interstate that seemed to curve on as far as the naked eye could perceive, a grey dot came into view again.  It was traveling a lot faster than before, and Jim stared at it, transfixed.  He gripped the bike rack and let out a short loud whistle, Roger tugging at him to get to the car.

            “Check that out!”  Jim pointed, Roger turning his face slowly with horror.

            The Bully Bot had added a mobile apparatus underneath itself, its body resting on top of it like a Greek god being fed grapes.  The blue chrome apparatus had treads on the bottom, resembling a long glider of sorts..  The crowd gaped at the windows, all eyes on the road.

            Roger made a dash for the car, prodding Jim one last time before taking off in a bolt.  Jim stayed perched on the bike rack, nodding and evaluating his creation from afar.  It was suddenly larger, more adult; it had grown up.  “That’s something you don’t see every day.”  He whistled to himself and pushed off of the bike ramp with newfound vigor, the Subaru flying past him.

            The sun hazed over on the orange horizon like butter on a pancake.  The telephone lines stretched parallel to the road, crows resting furtively on top of the wires.

            The Bully Car Bot flew closer, tossing gravel and dirt underneath it.  It practically looked like Aladdin on a carpet.  As it approached, it slowed to a steadier pace, and looked at Jim, its face vacant behind retractable sunglasses.

            “Jim what the hell are you doing?”  Roger called out of the window of the Subaru, the car idling on the edge of the parking lot.  “I will leave without you.”

            It was only about one hundred yards away, Jim awestruck like it was a famous rockstar coming to see him.  The nerds came out of the restaurant when it was close enough to see the bot, the one with the backward cap turning it around to use it for its functional purpose.  The other two shielded their eyes, the mexican one’s giant eyebrows looking like an extension of his sideways karatechop.

            The tread collapsed underneath it as they pulled up, and BB jumped off of it like a skateboard.  It folded up into the shape of a blue robotic humanoid, not unlike a three dimensional bathroom sign.  The blue was vivid, like dark mountain glaciers, and it reflected into Jim’s eyes like it had been made to do so. 

            Roger scooted across the bucket seats with difficulty, his lower body remaining in the drivers side, and pushed the door open.  The door struck Jim in the lower back, which was great because it showed him where the car was.  He realized as he sat down in the car that he was nearly blind.

            He tried to attach the seatbelt right away with Roger’s urges, he ruminated aggressively as he pulled himself back up to seated position.  The blue robot was gone when he looked back, the Bully Bot strutting with casual urgency.  The original fan ran up to it, touching it and admiring it with a wide smile.

            “Stay away from it!”  Jim called, with no success.  Roger swung the car with a sharp right and continued down the road in the opposite direction, the fat fans scream coming from a distance.  Red sprayed up into the air like a fountain, and appeared to disappear as mist in the mirror.

            “It’s funny,”  Jim started, looking over at Roger who had a very grave look on his face.  “I don’t mean actually funny, ok, let me start over.  The further out we get into the real world, the more real things get, did you notice that?” 

            A police car came flying by in the opposite direction, sirens blaring and blue and red lights flashing.

            “That’s bullshit, Jim, and you know it.  This is the one most surreal event that has happened to me in my life.  Do you have family, Jim?  You don’t know how this is at all.  You feel like this is real because you are disconnected.  I was content with my boring life, I know this is hard to believe.”

            They drove on in silence, passing vast plateaus of nothingness on either side.  Occasionally a street sign would assure them the area they were in was civilized.

            “There!”  Jim called abruptly, gesturing at a shack off the road surrounded by tires and wire fences.  “That’s Otto’s place.”

            One of those days where, yeah the story isn't great, but I feel like this stuff is getting easier.  I'll get there just stick it out with me ladies and gentlemen.  The trick is to not go back to school.