Day 59: My goodness!

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

All work and no play makes me a terribly terribly dull boy.  Right now.  More excitement going on.  I might have to start switching off days from doing useful things and doing fun activities.  Something like that.

Day 58: Yellow

              So a little while back I read the book, "The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime" (I don't know if I should have put a comma there but I'm working on it), and the main character who has an unspecified mental illness hates the color yellow.  In high school, I used to eat mustard as a trick to make me throw up.  The first time I realized it did this was the first time I ate mustard, I went on a road trip with my then girlfriend Sam to visit my best friend Kefka whom I met online, and at a Denny's he convinced me to try it on a french fry.  Maybe it was just the Denny's french fry that made me throw up?  Anyway, now I can't eat eggs alone or it has the same effect.  So, I wonder if I've used the power of "autosuggestion" to extrapolate my color based food problem, or if I'm imitating the character in the book, or if I just have an unspecified mental illness of my own.  Yeesh.  Onto the more writing.
             I think it's where I live that's driving me crazy.  Or maybe it's the internet.
            Also, getting a cold just in time for Thanksgiving.  I want to get carried away and make this writing thing an obsession, but if I do that I think I'll raise the probability that I get "burnt out" on it sooner than later.  So 1667 words is good enough for me for now.

            Atleast he got to go to a good school out there on the east coast.  The religious academy they had him going to in Nebraska was a duplicitous academy.  All the fake goodness they could muster didn’t change it.  The kid wasn’t learning anything, although he could say his fifteen rosarys a day with ease.  But his wife had insisted that private school education was better than public school education, in any case.

            The phone rang off of its hook at the station.  Charles’ father had been calling for him, where he got the number no one could know for sure.  It was all the same because no one answered the phone.

            The Cedar Harvest Festival was that Thursday.  The town left its residental portions unattended, lit candles and watched fireworks.  They drank beer from the first light of the morning, all institutions including government were closed, the people from the asylum were brought down in a yellow bus.

            The quadriplegic swore he had seen a staircase pouring out of the great beyond before.  They moved him from a modified rotunder onto a wheelchair, despite his protests about how he preferred to be on the bed.  It was when they shifted him upright into the chair that he caught his first glimpse of the staircase off in the distance, and immediately insisted he be taken to see it.

            “Alright, there’s a little more work  to do down here and I’ll see you at the festival,”  The chief said as he hung the phone up on its mounted station on the wall.  The orderly knocked on the outside of the door and pulled it open, the wheelchair with their quadriplegic friend on it in the middle of the living room.

            The chief couldn’t remember what the quadriplegics name was, but he thought it was either Cyrus of Billy.  It didn’t help that he had “achy brakey heart” stuck in his head on an infinite loop, or that he remembered an episode of Walker Texas Ranger where Chuck Norris saved a bus of wheelchair bound pals who were hijacked by an evil terrorist and taken as hostages. 

            Luckily, Donny the assistant didn’t leave the Chief hanging.  The affable orderly with the sideburns leaned in to talk to the chief.  “Cyrus here says he wants to check out the stairs, says he’s seen something like it before.”

            “Say, you want to see the stairs?  What do you know about it?”  The chief whistled and leaned through the doorway.  The orderly backed into the hallway, sheepishly smiling with his hands locked in front of him.  He stared at his watch, twenty more minutes were left on his shift.

            “You get out there and have fun, I’ll take care of the rest of this.”  The chief said, a fixed confident look on his moustache.  He looked around the office aimlessly for a second to check if he had forgot anything and flipped off the light switch.

            Cyrus didn’t notice when his foot ran over gnarly branches, or when his knee slammed into rocks.  Each time, the chief sighed and promised not to do it again.  At a point, he had to put his sunglasses and visor on when the beams got too bright to continue, and the quadriplegic again did not complain. 

            The stairs looked bigger than ever from far away, but as they got closer the Chief saw they were the same old stairs.  A nest of possums had nestled a new home underneath, the young litter as cute as the older couple was ugly.

            “I ain’t gon to do you two any harm.”  The chief assured with his hands clenched in karate chops in front of him, like he was negotiating with a terrorist. 

            He touched Cyrus on the shoulder and he began to howl.  The chief released the chair and stomped around like he was trying to put out a fire. 

            “I’m sorry I’m sorry I just want to get out of here I’m sick of looking at these damned old stairs.”  The chief reasoned with him.  “You see them, ok?”

            With some difficulty twisting it against the dirt, the chief pushed the chair out of its position of rest and away from the trail.

            “I still wanted to look at it.”  Cyrus beseeched.  The chief rolled his eyes behind Cyrus’s head and swung the chair back around. 

            Cyrus sat wide eyed at like he was staring at a lost idol.  The chief resisted its charms at first but became mesmerized as the minutes scrolled by.  The possums watched them with the eagerness they watched the stairs with.  To them both, this luminous reflective flight was just a mystery.

            “Have you touched it, chief?”  Cyrus said with an abnormally high inflection.  The chief himself had not touched the stairs, and he explained that many others had but they just passed through it like touching a rainbow.

            “Psychology says rainbows aren’t real.”  Cyrus said.  “Rainbows are just light, they can’t even be proved to exist.”

            Chief thought about this for a second and walked out from behind the chair and laid a hand on the stairwell.  It didn’t give, but as he tried to climb on he slipped back off of it, his lower body dangling and upper body unwilling to pull him up. 

            “Well I’ll be damned.”  The chief said.  “It’s really a staircase, now.”

            At the office, the chief called the fair and insisted someone come watch after the paraplegic.  They sent someone after two, a barrel chested older man with no wife or children.  He was grateful for the responsibility.  The chief waved to him as he backed his truck out of the long gravel driveway, turning the car into drive.

            A little ways down the road the Chief found the sporting goods store run by a highschool friend.  He preferred when people didn’t know his name, and had started this new life as “chief”, so he cringed when he opened the door and heard Daryl Simmons call.

            The place was furnished with tall bare metal shelves, covered in varieties of nails, hoses, gauze, wrenches, divets, plastic bags with washers in them.  A greying man sitting in a stool opposite Daryl with his elbows on the glass display case spun around to look back at the Chief, and when he didn’t immediately recognize him turned back forward and started fidgeting with the buttons on his jacket.

 “Chauncey you old louse what are you doing in my goddamn store.”  Daryl called in an uproar.  He sprung to his feet and swung his body around the counter with calamity.  This was Chief’s tight end, the guy who had missed that block and let that giant linebacker crush his collar bone first with the palms of his hand and then onto the grass.  Even worse, he had knocked the ball loose.  Chief watched from his back as the scoreboard changed to “Home 17 Away 20”, in those big LED block letters.

The smelly sounds of REO Speedwagon contaminated the store.  Chief was sick to his stomach, all the bad memories spilling into his head at one time.  He straightened his elbow as much as possible as he reached out for a handshake, Daryl’s grip being much more solid and hands more rugged and refined.  Chief was pulled forward into an awkward embrace, one used by Daryl only to display his dominant physical prowess, and Daryl would only allow him to escape an arms length away.

“I need those spiked hiking boots.”  Chief pointed with an outstretched arm while standing stiffly upright.  “I need some rope too, and a helmet.”

Daryl guffawed and nodded complacently.  “Take’em.”  He said, with a shit eating grin.  “All those dropped balls I had, all the blocks I missed, let me do you this one favor.  You aren’t planning on climbing the empire states building in a bee costume are you?”

Chief gave a perfunctory laugh and saluted Daryl, collecting what he needed off of the walls.  “I can bring it all back when I’m done with it.”  He called as he crossed back out to the truck, but Daryl had went back to his conversation with the derelect at the case. 

“That son of a bitch,”  Chief snarled through his teeth as he threw the plastic bag full of equipment into the back of his truck.

Chief went through the A&W stand by Bear River to get a shake and mostly to oggle Debbie, the lolitan checkout girl.  On this day she ran the front by herself, in the back there was Ralphy, a tubby hippo of a man standing with his black polo sleeves rolled up and hairnet pulling his eyes back like a shiatsu. 

As Chief’s truck thumped loudly up the driveway and pulled into a spot closest to the front door, she hollered back at him,  “Son of a bitch ain’t even going to the fair.  How does he always know when I’m here?”

“Want I should kick his ass?”  Ralphy asked pulling his rubber gloves off.

“Nah, that’s ok Ralphy.  Sweet of you to offer.”  Her face snapped back into a smile as Chief pushed through the door with the giant cartoon bear on its inside-facing window.  He pretended he wasn’t coming in just to hit on Debbie, and it was true, he wanted a shake to take his anger out on. 

“Well how are you doing today?”  He asked with tardy tact.  “I’ll take a vanilla one today, dear.”

By the time he got back to the staircase, it was already getting dark out.  He hummed a sweet “More Than a Feeling” as he lugged his equipment behind him with two hands into the woods. 

The stairway glimmered a faint purple and he threw the spiked boots on, tying the rope around his waist and to a nearby tree.  He was perfectly oblivious to the fact the rope would do him no good if he were to fall.  He yanked on the dingy red helmet and had completed his transformation to Global Guts contestant.

Supplementary Day 57

This is my "Dear Diary" one again,

First of all, everyone I see that's the same age as me still registers with me as being older.  Well, not everyone, peers and friends don't count, but if it's a stranger usually if they look like they're my age I think they're older.  Forcing myself to be friendly and talk to people lately, just random people in random occurrences.  Gives me a lot of random crushes on people.

I wrote an email to one of my favorite writers today, Dan Kennedy of McSweeney's fame (probably not fame), and he already got back to me.  He said:


"Thanks! My only tips: do it as diligently as a bad habit, worry about what your readers get out of it more than you worry about what you're getting out of it."

 So that's a good point.  Stop writing for myself.  Different authors are constantly conflicting.   I was reading a psychology text book again today, and one of the more interesting points is that people can be saying the exact same thing and have different meanings.  So, I have to try to picture this little funnel on the outside of my skull pouring into an imaginary brain hole, where the extension distills whatever it is that's poured through.

Other interesting thing is that all knowledge is superfluous.  We don't need to know anything, other than some basic laws which are common sensical more often than not.  I got a couple more lameass self help books today that I'm reading, but more and more I'm finding the tones of the author offending.  It's like they're writing to that guy from your high school that goes to the mall with his older aunts and they try to set him up with nieces of their childhood friends.  You know the one I'm talking about.

So the point to learning has to be learning for learnings sake, which makes me want to slow down and reassess how I learn.  Considering that writers (authors) say to read everything twice if you even want to pretend to understand it, which might only apply to fiction writing, I think I'll read everything twice the first time.  Writing is a quantitative experience but reading is a qualitative one, is what I think I'm getting at.  You're going to write the same thing whether you struggle for twenty minutes to come up with it or if you just let it get out.  Or, if you just get it out, it might snowball and become this ephemeral burst of rational-minded-reflexive-wisdom instead of this ugly preplanned prepackaged bullshit.  But, I'm just defending and rationalizing the way I do it as opposed to the way other more experienced people do.

Anyway, I'm writing for my audience now I think.  I'm going to go scare the shit out of myself in public situations that I should be attuned to by now.

Day 57

So I thought I knew what the work relaxation don't think thing meant!  I thought I did.  Now it's becoming work stress freak out like it was.  But the good news is I'm up early, so I can dick around on the internet and take years to get started.  MacMillan's grammar or whatever should help me get it going.  I'm going to try to use a semicolon successfully today in my writing; I will try to use a semicolon.  Just watch for it, I won't advertise.  

So what happens to a character when he realizes he went crazy and runs into the woods?  Let's brainstorm.  Luckily Hurley from Lost is going along with him, although he'll just turn out to be a two dimensional fat guy character eating slices of cheese between pieces of paper like a sandwich. 

So he could find a hatch in the woods.  A hatch is something, because it's not a house, it's a hatch.  So it wouldn't be like him finding the house, which is what normally happens in my goddamn story.  Or finding a motor vehicle.  We still do have no concept at all of where he is in the world, I'm sure about that.  I do want to put this whole story together and just see how ridiculous it reads.  Some of the best stories just go on and on forever with no discernible intentionality.  Right?  RIGHT!  Show must go on says the self deprecating host.

Thinking of taking the TOEFL or whatever it is and going to teach overseas so I can just read and write and no one will bug me.  I do wish people would bug me, though.  Foreigners can bug me.

            The fat man talked to himself in a Wallace Shawn voice.

            “Escaping into the woods?!  Unprecedented!  There’s nothing in those woods!”

            Charles ignored him and scuffed his way around the underbrush looking for an entrance.

            From a window somewhere Mr. Richardson watched Charles out there, at it again.  He thumbed through a file that had a picture of Charles running away from the camera, with “Runaway” written over it in thick black Sharpy.  A gorilla sat in the room with him, probably, considering the lesson learned.

            The big man rustled through the brush like a plastic bag.  His stubby legs only carried him as far as his tiny alligator arms could build momentum.  They swung like pendulums and his mouth moved like a windup doll.

            “Do you think you’re the first one to escape into the woods?  I’ve been escaping into the woods for years!  I’ve been running away before you were crazy!”

            Charles shifted some branches and disappeared into the inner stomach of natures lair.  The fat man hustled after, removing a flashlight from his fanny pack.

            “You’re going to find the utility shack and you’re going to think it’s something more important than it is!”  The man called after him, Charles pioneering the dark trail with a flashlight shining onto his back.

            Sure enough, Charles came into contact with the outhouse-esque utility shack, trying his key in each locked box inside.  He fiddled with the riding lawnmower with his hands, unable to get the thing to budge at all.

            “You need to open the door to get the mower out!  But, it’s basically a beacon.  You get the mower out and they won’t let you graze out here any longer.”

            Charles might as well have been sleep walking.  He slammed the gate to the utility shed, and it rested slightly open.  The moon called him a lunatic with its big bright intrusive face.

            He knew he wouldn’t see Dave if this big boy was around, so he considered this to be the best time to be out exploring.  He grabbed a long thin stick to lead the way with, brushing it along the trail as he walked.

            The fat man managed to push around him on the trail and stand in front of him with arms spread wide.  He scurried around like a cat in a bathtub.

            “You’re going to be wandering aimlessly all night.  If you want me to just show you the entertaining things out here, I will.  Don’t expect any of it to be meaningful, though.  It’s just stuff.”

            Charles nodded and sighed.  He followed the fat man’s terribly slow pace impatiently. 

            “Here’s where they have the eggs,”  He pointed at a hen house.  “No hens, just eggs.  They never cleaned them out.  This area is strictly for the patients.”

            Charles saw a series of cleared out fields, each with structures standing in cleared out fields on the inside.

            “Someone used to live out here, yeah.  We’ve been through all those buildings, nothing in those buildings.  You’re doing what we’ve been doing.”

            Charles saw a slightly larger building with a glowing light inside and his ears perked up.  The fat man shook his head and laughed when Charles ran past him and began peering through the windows systematically.

            “Can’t see anything inside, even with the light!”  Charles called with an exclamation point.  He stubbed his toes on a loose shank of wood, the toeless slippers not protecting his feet.  He found a way in through a window that was already broken.

            The fat man took a seat in the middle of the grass outside the window.  He pulled his legs underneath him and sat in a pretzel, removing a bag of peanuts from his sweatshirt pocket and cracking the shells.

            Charles rummaged inside, testing his key on everything with a keyhole in it.  A counseler with a flashlight caught up to the fat man, who waved him off.

            “He’s ok, I’ll have him back in a little while.”  The fat man stood and whispered to the man with the clipboard.  The man with the clipboard didn’t look happy about it, but departed with a last stern look.

            Charles found a stairwell that looked strangely familiar, and attempted to disbelieve it.  It carried on higher and higher into the corner of the house, each stair seeming to rise higher than the last.  He shut his eyes and turned in the opposite direction, trying to get back to the window he came in from.  Spiderwebs brushed past his arms and as he came close to the dingy walls of the little shack he inhaled dust, it felt like breathing in the cover of an old book.

            He turned around and still saw the staircase, much larger than the rest of the house.  While it was physically impossible for the stairs to exist, they were there nonetheless.  He wondered what the fat man outside would see in its place, or whether he’d see anything at all.

            “Everything alright in there?”  The fat man called in, his head peeking through the window, still munching peanuts.  “It’s getting about time we went back, you know…  Shit.”

            Charles was gone up the stairs again.  The world at the end of the staircase was more significant, more real.  His real life felt to him like being a secondary character in a Jane Austen novel, he was simply providing conflict for the main performers.  He wondered how far he had traveled to reach the hospital, maybe he had been there all along.  Maybe the job wasn’t real, Anne wasn’t real, Mr. Pulp wasn’t real.  Either way, he had disappeared down the upward rabbit hole all over again.

            The fat man pushed his girth through the window and fell through unceremoniously.  Curiously, he noticed a sky-black stairwell ascending out of the wood.  Where it should have made contact with the roof there was no roof or no staircase, it simply vanished into thin air.  The fat man scurried over to the bottom of the case, evil faces popping out of the bottom of it and receding.  He outstretched a foot onto it to test it and it disappeared as he placed it down. 

            As the sun began to rise through the window of Charles’s new room, a group of directors gathered out by the shack and brainstormed.  The mustachoed head doctor held a clipboard with a pen attached, and they talked about excavating this stairwell.  The orderlies acted as Yes Men, nodding and smiling at everything the head doctor said.

            “I’d like to commence this meeting by saying there’s no explanation for what’s inside of the shack, no logical explanation at all.”

            The elderly nurse tried to see through the window of the shack, spotting the red herring of a staircase. 

            “That infernal thing has no place in our real world!”  She cried, pouting loudly and feverishly. 

            The director ignored her pleas.

“First we should really destroy the shack, if no one has any objections.”

            The old man who had lived here since he was a younger man kept his mouth shut. 

            He called a local construction crew who said they could make it by the afternoon.  It was a staterun organization, and it was prestigious to work for the local government. 

The construction crew’s enormous truck pressed onto the main road in the mid afternoon.  It was sunny, the wind on its best behaviour.  An unallowable, ridiculous noise began to emit from the bulldozer as it fired up.  A steam whistle emerging from its side sirened into the air with urgency.

“This is the building you want out of the way, right?!”  The man in the hardhat yelled.  Everyone was wearing hardhats, each one understood the possibility for falling destroyed objects.  “Staircase in the middle of the building needs to be excavated?”

The shack disappeared with a crunch like broken bone.  The sarcophagus crumbled and all that was left standing in its glory was a black stairway that seemed to carry on forever.  It looked like a rainbow, its surface at once reflective and luminous.  The gathering of people standing at a safe distance from the destroyed building gaped upward as the monolithic molding revealed itself layer by layer.

The workers took their time to leave, fixing glances over at the monument like a beautiful girl at the bar.  The moustachoed man raveled and unraveled his moustache around his index finger.

Each person tried unsuccesfully to mount the staircase.  The leaves on the trees changed and no one had succesfully climbed it.  The fat man and the moustachoed man sat at its base in lawnchairs, and soon the entire group from the hospital moved their daily activities into the vicinity of the staircase.  The quadriplegic attempted to crane his head to look out the window but it would not move.  They left him alone in the middle of a room with his bed as its only furnishing.

On days the sky was clear, the staircase seemed to become part of a next floor at about a hundred feet up.  The spectators passed around a pair of binoculars, taking turns gazing up.  Planes flew by intermittently, not effecting the stairways constitution.

“Maybe we should build a big stairway next to this one, then we could see what was on top.”  The fat man said, inserting a checker into the top of his connect four.

“Yes, but what do we do when we get up there?  You just want a closer look?”  Returned the man who couldn’t take his eyes off of a calculator to make eye contact with other people when he was talking to them.

A bird chirped its annoying song, most likely a Top 40 pop tune.

“It’s a shame about Charles though, it really is.”  Mr. Richardson offered to no one in particular.

At night, the stairway occasionally dropped a phospherescent light that disappeared immediately into the ground below.  Attempts to catch these globulous lights would result in their immediate disappearances, like the popping of a bubble.  It reminded the mustachoed chief of the hospital of his son, she was off with his wife now on the east coast, but he remembered when the kid was young and the divorce hadn’t happened yet. 

           My spelling is getting better, there's no red squiggly lines anymore.  Is my writing getting better, though?  Yeah?

In honor of the fact

That Napoleon Hill says you should use autosuggestion to convince yourself you already have the money that you want, I'm going to write a letter to myself from my self-actualized future self.  It might speed up the getting-rich-by-feeling-rich-already-process. 


Here's the exact quote, which probably is illegal for me to copy and put in here:
"Do not wait for a definite plan, through which you intend to exchange services or merchandise in return for the money you are visualizing, but begin at once to see yourself in possession of the money, demanding and expecting meanwhile, that your subconscious mind will hand over the plan, or plans you need.  Be on the alert for these plans, and when they appear, put them into action immediately.  When the plans appear, they will probably "flash" into your mind through the sixth sense, in the form of "inspiration".  Treat it with respect, and act upon it as soon as you receive it."
(Hill, 70)

(I'd like to make note of the fact that I just cited something without being forced to for a class.  This is an English majors equivalent to using math in the real world)

Dear Myself in the Past,

          I see you there, reading all day.  Writing until you get done with your amount of words, but not for fun.  You aren't "work", "relaxation", and "don't think"-ing the way that you're attempting to.  If that were true, you wouldn't pay attention to the word count.  You certainly wouldn't have to turn off the clock on your computer so the time wouldn't bother you, or wake up earlier and earlier each day to try to "get it out of the way".
          I have good news for you.  You're going to have that money you are seeking.  That two million dollars that you arbitrarily picked.  You could have really set your sights higher, that's not even that much.  You will probably get it by winning a sweepstakes, or maybe selling that book (hey, if Stephanie Meyer is as popular as she is, anyone has a shot).  You probably feel like Homer on that episode of the Simpsons where he has the dream in which everyone is telling him about how genius his new invention is but they won't let him see it.  They think it's silly he wants to see it.
         Here's the other good news.  Me, now, in the future, has more confidence than you ever had.  Self-actualized just means "has money", by the way.  They'll try to tell you otherwise, but listen to me, because I'm you.  You'd probably believe anything I told you, wouldn't you?  Bet it all on red.  That girl you want to ask out, she's going to say yes.  Just do it. 
          As I'm sitting here at my private resort, dictating this into my state of the art computerized phone, I picked up drinking again.  All work and no play makes you boring, but it turned you into me, and that's great for both of us.  It might be torture, but it's going to be good in the end. 
          Let's see, what else do you need to know.  The Dog Who Fought the Dragon isn't going to be the hit you expected it to be.  Let's just skip that in your personal learning process.  Fourty-five out of fifty-two short stories will be a failure in your first year.  You're going to "get" characters more as you develop a purpose in your own life.  Your purpose being "writing" leaves you in as precarious a position as always, but you can (and will), build your personality around being precarious.  It is an identity.
          Oh, and, I have that money.  In spades.  It's just the product of hardwork.
           PS:  Read some Mother Teresa books.

           

Day 56: 56 Days

            “Don’t you ever want to stay in one spot, just settle down?”  The man laughed, putting his hand behind the passenger side seat and backing in a straight line over an imaginary road.

The woods were overgrown with pine needles, the smell of sticky sap clinging to the air.  The sun was more distant than usual, turning its back on this small section of Earth out in the country.

            “I don’t think I’ve really found a spot yet,”  Charles said.  “I don’t know if I’m ready to give up and become part of this world.  My head hasn’t caught up with my body yet, I don’t think.”

            He pictured himself still falling, turning to fit his posture and inserting his spirit in through the top of his head.  A mailbox with a black top sitting on a flag pole flew by, a carved wooden cardinal sitting on top of it.  He couldn’t make out the name on the box, or the next one, or the one after that. 

            “Well,”  The man sait, removing an enveloped that was ripped on one side from the pocket in the door.  “We’ve got your case file here.  The man you know as Dave gave it to me.”

            They weren’t enemies, Charles thought.  Sometimes you just have to kill for the sake of killing.  He was less certain than before how this world worked, what kind of etiquette and rules applied here.

            He shook the letter out of the envelope and opened it.  “Great worker, independent, resourceful, no known strength or weaknesses.  Ideal entry level ignoramus.  Has a degree in biology, state level university.”  He wondered as he read whether or not all bosses passed around this kind of information about their employees.  Big brother is always watching, he could picture his eyes staring over the distant mountains.  The letter continued,  “May be a slow learner, but by immersion will pick it up.  If he doesn’t, we have plenty for him to do.”  Enclosed also were the recommendation letters Charles had sent, and his resume.  He was these pieces of paper, he realized in a dull epiphone.  He was a piece of meat to be marketed and harvested, argil to be plied and molded, a cake gestating in a bakery oven. 

            “So where are we going?”  Charles asked, staring into the sideview mirror and cranking his window down with menial arm leverage.  The sense of urgency from jumping into a car with a man who he had just seen killed miles upward had already been placated and changed into languid indecision.  (The worst kind of indecision).  He stuck his head out of the window, the wind striking him coldly like a bathroom hand dryer.  He pictured himself a golden retriever with its head out the window, and he fancied himself better that way.

            “You’re going to have to keep moving, that’s what matters.”  His eyes glanced over as far as the rearview mirror and then back at the road.  He shook out his upper body, uncomfortable in his enormous coat as the car heater started to kick in.  “The man you know as Dave isn’t a man, and his name isn’t Dave.  I don’t know why the sick bastard told you that was his name.  He wants to take you with him on his journey, as far as I can gather.  He simply wants someone to tag along with him, and he’s not a bad guy don’t get me wrong, but you’ll start to lose time, and things will become even less clear for you.”

            The car crept up a series of dirt roads, carved into the woods like a thorn in a tigers paw.  The woods were trying to shake it out, but they needed assistance. 

            “Why did you show me this?”  Charles asked, shaking the paper back into the envelope.  “Why do you have this, in the first place?”

            “Lots of questions, huh?”  The jocular man allowed a wry smile to buoy itself over his lips.  “I wish someone would have told me these things when I started, it’s that easy.  Now I’m out here alone, finding niches to make useful service of myself.  It’s not better higher up, further away, you get out there and someone still wants to kill you, wants your spot.”

            They passed a graveyard, the weatherworn wire gate creaking to and fro in the wind.  A crow ate carrion somewhere inside, the corpses buried in their indiscriminate holds shuddered with unrest.  Somehow, the place still exuded a sanguine calmness.  Charles leaned back on the blue mesh seat cover, nervously rolling up his pants legs.

            “Nature gets you wherever you need to go.  Nature makes character, character becomes your nature.  All you gotta do is relax and take things in stride.”  The man nodded to himself, weighing his own words in his mind for truth.

            He was struggling to make an identity appear in himself like trying to grow a beard manually by sheer force of will.  He needed this identity so he could figure out what thoughts were positive and which ones were negative, what would be constructive thoughts and which would be destructive.  To form any kind of real knowledge at all he needed a bedrock to start from, like the base of a snowman, or better yet the snow.  He could start at entry level like he just had, sure, but that was like swimming against the current in a channel dug deep with no sides.  The explosion had been a lucky occurrence, not a disaster.  Mr. Pulp seemed lik a good boss, but his eccentricities would have prevented Charles from ever getting a grasp of the “bigger picture.”

            Tents stood on both sides of the road, and as the Toyota approached the inhabitants came out to the side of the road and waved.  They all wore tattered heavy clothes that at one time may have been considered gaudy or ornamental.  The man reached out of the window and beat twice on the side of the car.  “Nothing for you guys today!”  He called in a hum.  They continued waving as they disappeared like ants in the rearview mirror.

            They pulled up to the booth alongside a gate, a square shaped white box with a microphone pressing out of the open slit at the bottom of the window. 

            “Ah, Mr. Richardson, you’re finally back.”  The tollboth operator leaned into the microphone as he spoke.  He had an ambivalent air to his face which teetered on arrogance, like he knew he deserved a better job.

            “Mr. P is expecting you.  You can go right in.”  He pressed a button and the gate slowly pulled itself open.  A long gravel road led up and around an old brick rectangle school building.  The jutting black street lamps fizzled on as they arrived and it was immediately dusk.

            A muscled man wearing hospital scrubs opened the door of the car for Charles and stood looming over the cabin. 

            “I’ll show you to your room, mac.”  A female secretary watching from the doorway laughed when he said “mac”, like it was some sort of bet between them. 

“Can I get your bags for you, mac?”

“No bags to get.”  Charles said.

              “Nothing to worry about, mac, some people don’t have belongings to bring with them.”

            A fireplace crackled across the hallway, a group of older people sat watching a Charles Bronson action movie.  A couple of cute younger girls with shaved heads knitted intently at a table, staring contentedly at each other.

            The man showed Charles to a long hallway, the doors of five rooms sitting open.  “You’ll be staying back here.”  He said, touching two fingers to the numbered placard above the door.  “Feel free to look around.”

            The walls had been knocked out of the living room, load bearing pillars dotted the room.  Tables were set up in a way where the course through the room forced you to go between them.  A fat man with long braided hair played connect four alone in striped pajamas.

            The man who drove him here, Mr. Richardson, was outside talking to a female nurse.  He stood with his arms crossed looking up at her, she with one hand on her hip leaning against the scaffolding.

            Charles pushed the screen open and walked outside, at which point Mr. Richardson stopped whatever sentence he was in and walked up to Charles with a fatherly smile. 

            “We think you need to quiet down those voices that you hear in your head.”  He said.  “I thought I’d just come right out and say it.  You might need hours, you might need weeks, you might need years.”

            Charles thought himself to be relatively sane, he could have sworn lack of identity was a common problem with people in his generation.

            “Rest assured, you’re crazy.”  The secretary added in a congenial tone.  “It’s important you realize this and don’t fight it.  You need to reestablish an ordinary structure in your life.”

            That night, Charles dreamt that he was covered in a red shawl, wearing red sunglasses and staring through a red filter.  He saw an unreal version of himself, a hyperrealistic representation falling thousands of feet through the air.  Numbers gathered in his mind, repeating in an endless cycle.

            He woke up, unaware that he had ever went to sleep.  He pulled himself over to the mirror attached the completely empty cabinet and looked at himself.  His hair was different than he remembered it, lighter and thinner than before.  His eyes and facial features were slimmer and more resigned as well, the pronounced bags underneath contrasting to his sunken cheeks. 

            “I’ve gotta fix these things,”  He resolved himself to.  “I have to make a good impression.”

            Suddenly, an impulse to get away occurred to him again.  He pushed the door open, a light shining overhead from down the hall.  He pulled on a coat over his pajamas that he hadn’t remembered changing into and shoved out into the night.

            A light that he himself doubted really existed shone from the forest.  A head swung out of the building, which eventually became a whole body.  It was the connect four player.