The Way I See It

Even though it's sort of been a while

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:44:19 GMT

The Housekeeper

A late-model Honda, piercing green in color and skirted with dirt and dust, crunched its way into the gravel driveway. Inside the adjoining home, a pale yellow light flickered and went out. “Fuck,” said the driver. “Fuck.”
She briefly considered putting the car in reverse and going back to where she had been – out, at the home of a man she’d met not that long ago, a man she never thought she would see again but would have liked to, and did. Her keys were still dangling from the ignition. She hadn’t switched off the car yet. Her house key, the only other key on the ring, hung down from the ignition, lonely and glinting in the low lights of the dashboard. She turned off the ignition, sighed, and opened the car door.
She knew exactly what she’d find in her house – a man, a little older than thirty, sitting on her couch amidst the piles of unfolded laundry, accompanied perhaps by an empty bottle of red wine which she’d left out and hardly had a drop of but had intended to. She didn’t know why he always switched off the light before she walked in. She had an idea that he felt like an invader, that giving himself away before she could even walk in the door smacked of perverseness. Just an idea, though. He probably didn’t like to feel like a creep, she thought, and anyway, being discovered alone in the dark suited him.
She turned the key in the door and pushed it open. He’d brought in the mail – strange, but for him, nothing out of the ordinary – and even recycled the newspaper that sat untouched on her front step every morning. She’d never bothered to terminate the delivery. She just let it come, day-in, day-out. And just as the paper boy tossed it on her doorstep every morning, so too did the man inside bring it in and toss into her garbage can.
He didn’t say a word as she stepped in with high heels clicking against the wood floor. She pulled off her shoes and threw her purse onto the counter next to the pile of unread mail that the man brought in. She knew he never read the envelopes. Of course, they looked unread, still tucked snugly into the tabloid-sized advertisement which seemed to always read the price of a twelve-pack of Diet Coke and featured General Mills cereals. He could have gone to the trouble of putting them back the way he’d found them before a jealous perusal, but she could tell that he didn’t. He didn’t need to. She knew he just sat there, alone and drinking, and in a way it frightened her more than any invasion of privacy would.
It was late – close to midnight, anyway – and she could have easily just gone to sleep. A nice evening out did that to her. Being with that other man made her calm, docile, no longer troubled by the worries that usually made her toss and turn at night. She couldn’t bear to think that if she did somehow manage to fall asleep in her home, the man inside would still be there, on her couch, drunken wide awake and staring at the wall. His inactivity unnerved her and made her cold inside. She knew she had to say something, and she knew that sooner or later he would leave.
“That was my last bottle,” she muttered. “I was saving it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Quit drinking my wine. You can do whatever you’d like with the newspaper but if you don’t leave the wine alone I’ll change the locks.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’ll hide the key somewhere you can’t find it.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll give him my key and you can try to wrestle it from him.” She knew he could never do this. The man she’d been out to see was fitter, more able-bodied than the fragile shell of inebriation that sat before her. He was protective and strong, nothing like the man on her couch. The opposite of the man on her couch, really.
“I thought maybe I would put some of this laundry away for you.”
“I have to sleep tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Do you understand? I have to sleep. You need to get the fuck out of my house.”
“Okay. I just can’t drive home like this.”
“I don’t care. And why should you? You don’t have a car.”
“Yeah.”
“And even though you can still barge into my house whenever you feel like it – ”
“Hmm?”
“ – I’ve only got one key for the car.”
“I remember,” he said as his hands shook, “the day we picked out that car. Sunny and warm, so warm we didn’t want to wake up.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s what happy was. For me anyway. Just snoozing. That was all. A little nap.” He put his hands through his hair and straightened up against the couch.
“You really need to leave.”
“Why did you paint it green?”
“My bedroom?” She sat across the room on her small leather love seat.
“The car.”
“The car was green when we picked it out. We picked out a green car. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Was it green?” he said, accidentally knocking over the empty wine glass that sat on the table as he brought his hands from his head to his knees. “Wasn’t it…”
“Wasn’t it what?” she asked impatiently.
“Red. It was red.”
“My car wasn’t red. My car was never red – my God, how much have you had to drink tonight?”
“What if I can’t sleep anymore? Just because of that morning. Will I die?”
She was sick of him. “You know, it’s funny you mention sleep. I was going to do that sometime tonight.”
“Can you sleep?”
“Whenever you decide to get out of my house, yeah.”
“I mean, when I’m not here? When… when he’s here?”
“We don’t do much sleeping. But when we do… believe me.” She stood up and walked toward him. “We both sleep like rocks.”
His gaze seemed to get lost in her wall and she took the empty wine bottle to the kitchen and tossed it into the garbage on top of the day’s newspaper. She fetched a glass from her kitchen cupboard and filled it with water for lack of anything else to keep her from him. When she had finally drained it and returned to the living room, he was taking her laundry from the piles. She watched as he gently took her clothes and draped them on his arm before neatly folding and stacking them. He seemed so sober then, with focus and purpose.
“I can do my own laundry.”
“I know.”
“So why don’t you leave my clothes where they are?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re an impossible –” She almost said man but didn’t.
“I’m sorry. Can I stay long enough to put these away?”
“Will you leave if I say no?”
“Only, you won’t do it yourself. The clothes were here yesterday.” He looked her up and down. “So was that dress. You look nice.”
She sat down again on the empty loveseat and rested her head upon one of its arms. When she closed her eyes, giving in to her fatigue but never thinking she could fall asleep, he was walking toward her bedroom with a stack of folded shirts gathered up in his arms. She must have dozed off, anyway, because she heard a clang and suddenly the stacks of laundry were all gone and so was the man. There wasn’t an empty wine glass on the table anymore.
She walked into the kitchen where the man was quietly washing the dishes that sat dirty in her sink for the past few days. The clang she’d heard was his drunken attempt to hang the wine glass from the hooks at the bottom of her kitchen cupboard.
“Damn it,” she said out loud.
“You slept.”
“Unbelievable, I know.”
He picked up a frying pan she’d used to make scrambled eggs one morning and filled it with warm soapy water. He took a Brillo pad and scraped out the yellow-white that stuck against the pan’s surface.
“I don’t think I can sleep anymore.”
“It doesn’t seem like you’ve been trying.”
“But I woke you,” he said. “When I put away the glass, I woke you, didn’t I?”
“You’re obnoxious.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you, but my hand shook and I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”
She looked at the clock. It read one thirty-seven. She looked back at the man who had finished with the frying pan and moved on to the spatula. “I can’t believe you still don’t have a job. You’d make one hell of a housekeeper.”
He stayed silent.
“But I’m not hiring,” she said. “And I want you to leave so that I can get some peace and quiet.”
“You’ll sleep.”
“Here’s hoping, yeah.”
“Do you think it will be warm tomorrow?”
“It’s the middle of January.”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
She felt her eyes begin to droop again. Her body ached for a good night’s sleep. She just wanted the man to leave her in peace, as he usually did after a short time, but now he seemed intent on leaving her home spotless. She didn’t know what to do apart from not making any more messes for him to clean.
“When will you leave?” she asked.
The man’s eyes reflected cold and distant as they stared out the window toward her driveway and porch. The bulb which hung outside above her front door was bright enough in the darkness of the night to bathe her car in pale fluorescence.
“The car is green,” he replied. “Why did I think it was red?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s green like your eyes. The dust even gives it the same flecks of brown.”
“Just don’t wash it, for God’s sake.”
“I won’t.”
She went and sat at the small kitchen table which was pushed against the wall and tried to make herself more comfortable by resting her head on her shoulder.
“I’ll call him,” she said, her eyes closed. “I’ll call him and he’ll come over and he’ll stay all night if ask him to.”
“I know,” said the man.
“He’d come and he’d wash my dishes and he’d fold my laundry and he’d buy me a new bottle of wine and he’d tuck me in to bed.”
“I believe you.”
“And if I wanted him to leave he would.”
“I know.”
“And you would leave because if you didn’t he could kill you.”
The man kept scrubbing the dishes.
“I could tell him to break your neck and he would do it for me.”
He set a cup down on a towel on the counter to let it dry.
“And he could do it. He’s strong.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not lying. I’ll call him if you don’t stop cleaning my house.”
He didn’t say anything. He just kept scrubbing.
“And you know what? Fuck you for finishing off my wine.”
“Who bought you that wine?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Think.” She still couldn’t remember.
“I don’t know. He did, probably.”
“He didn’t. I did.” She remembered that the other man had poured a glass of white wine for her during their time together earlier that evening. “Because I know how much you prefer red to white wine. And how excited I was to know that when I went to buy the bottle.”
“God damn you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I just want to sleep.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that but you’re still here.” There was still a large portion of the dishes left unwashed. “I’m calling him.”
She left the room and looked around and then came back to the kitchen. “What the hell did you do with my phone?”
“You left it on the bed. I put it on your nightstand so that I could make your bed.”
She stomped back out and walked into her bedroom where the wireless phone sat in its charger. It was hardly ever there and it often died on her. When she picked it up now it was fully charged. She dialed the other man’s number and listened as it rang. Then a young woman’s voice on the other line and she threw the phone at the wall and the battery came out. She stomped back out into the kitchen.
“He’s coming and if you don’t leave he’ll kill you. I’ll tell him to kill you.” From over his shoulder, she saw the porch light flicker and through the tears in her eyes the car almost looked red for a moment. It stopped flickering and the light went out.
The man finished washing the last plate and turned around to look at the woman. “I should replace that bulb. He won’t be able to find his way down the driveway with the light out.”
By now she was no longer trying to hold back tears and he held her in his arms and she sobbed. “I don’t want you to go,” she said.
“I know.” He carried her to her bed and tucked her in before taking a fresh light bulb and screwing it into the porch light socket. And even though he finally went to sleep on the couch, more soundly than he had expected, the next morning was warmer than any other he could remember.

And this one I wrote for Linker

Late Coffee

Dusk was falling outside the diner. Hazy reds and browns filtered through a line of trees which separated the diner from the nearby park, while overhead a grey mass of heavy rain clouds gathered. Passersby strode lazily down the sidewalk, standing up a bit straighter and tightening their coats around them as a cool wind blew past the diner’s clean windows.
Inside, a man hung his brown coat beside the door and sat at a small table in a dark corner. He slouched in his chair, tired and impatient. The waitress walked toward him, asked if he would be dining alone, and handed him two menus. The man wasn’t hungry. His eyes were grey and drooping and his face was hollow.
He chewed his fingernails when no one was watching and tapped the table with his thumbs. Beside his plate sat a white mound of torn up napkins, growing larger with each passing second and threatening to come crashing down at any moment. The man sat up and looked at the door to watch another man with similar features walk past the unoccupied bar. In the kitchen behind the bar, the waitress dropped a pot of coffee, cursed, and motioned for the busser’s help. The new man slid into the empty seat at the grey-eyed man’s table. Outside, it began to rain.
“You’re here,” said the hollow-faced man. “It’s nice to see you again, David.”
David didn’t reply. Instead, he brushed the stray napkin pieces from his menu and began to read it. His stomach grumbled and groaned. The waitress, having cleaned up her mess, approached the two men with a notepad and pen.
“What can I get the two of you?”
“I want the parmesan chicken,” said David. “And a cup of coffee. Black.”
“Have you had the parmesan chicken before?” asked the waitress.
“No.”
“It’s not very flavorful. People have complained. Can I recommend something else instead?”
“No, you can’t. But you can tell your cook that his food would probably taste better to his customers without your critique.”
The waitress nodded, embarrassed, and looked at the other man.
“And what would you like, sir?”
“Just coffee, please. With some half and half, if you have it.”
“Not hungry tonight?” the waitress asked.
“Not tonight, no.”
“I’ll bring out your coffee right away,” she said, taking away his plate and silverware. The two men were left alone, David staring blankly at a wall and the other man at David.
“You knew you would have to do this eventually,” said the man to David. “She was getting old. She was sick, and she was tired.”
David said nothing, but instead watched the people outside as they walked past the diner windows.
“Can you believe that waitress?” David asked, finally addressing the man. “Of course the parmesan chicken is going to taste like shit, with that kind of introduction. If this were my restaurant, I’d fire her.”
The man didn’t reply, and instead continued tearing napkins into pieces. “She only ever tried to be nice to you,” he muttered.
“Who, that waitress?”
“Mom.”
“Look, Chris,” David said. “I’m as torn up about our mother as you are. Really, I am. But I’ve got a job now. In the city. It’s hard to keep coming back here without running the risk of getting canned.”
Chris stopped tearing up paper and rested his face on his hand.
“We can’t all be artists, you know. I can’t just drop my easel wherever the wind carries me and paint myself a pretty picture. I’ve got people to meet, deals to set up. I do important work now, in the city.”
“In the city,” said Chris.
“It’s an eight-hour drive,” said David. “Gas prices are going up, my car is in disrepair because I hardly ever need to use the goddamn thing. And these city women, Chris. They expect you to make a sizable down-payment just to get into their skirts.” David eyed the waitress as she wiped down the diner’s windows. “Not at all like the women here. It’s a waste of my money to come back.”
“It wouldn’t have killed you to stop by a few times. She talked about you constantly. You were her favorite.”
“She smothered me.”
“She loved you.”
“She wanted me to stay in this dead-end place. I had to get out, Chris. I had to.” David slumped back in his chair and rubbed the fatigue from his eyes. “You moved away as soon as you could, too. Your feet itched the same as mine. Can you really blame me for wanting to leave?”
Chris sat and said nothing.
“And where the hell is that coffee?”
David looked around for the waitress. Chris stared at the table.
“And so you waited until she was gone before you finally came back. Were you afraid you might see something that would make you stick around a little longer? Keep you from your job? In the city?”
“Chris –”
“At night, she would cry out your name while she slept.”
Chris stared at David, who looked down at the table. The waitress came with a plate of parmesan chicken and placed it in front of David.
“I’m so sorry about the coffee,” she said. “We had to start a new pot. Busser dropped the only hot one. I’ll bring it out as soon as it’s ready.” She walked away toward the kitchen.
“Useless,” David sneered, taking fork in hand and cutting his chicken into large hunks.
“It would have made her so happy just to see you one more time. It was the least you could have done.”
“I’m sick of talking about it,” David replied, simultaneously chewing his chicken. “The point is that I’m here now. I almost didn’t bother at all.”
Chris said nothing as David forked piece after piece of chicken into his mouth. After taking in a large chunk, he began to cough. His face turned blue. He waved his arms and pointed at his throat. Chris did nothing. Finally, David’s arms stopped moving. His face hit the plate of chicken, spilling marinara sauce around the table.
Chris stood up, reached for his wallet, and threw a twenty dollar bill next to the mound of torn napkins. He walked toward the door, put on his brown coat, and walked out alone into the rain. From outside the window, he watched as the waitress brought a steaming pot of coffee over to the table, saw David lying in a pool of sauce, and dropped the pot, shattering it into hundreds of pieces all over the diner floor.

No Subject

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:50:33 GMT

This week was nice, mostly in that it felt unconventional and strange but also in that I didn't spend the majority of it alone, and even had a lot of fun exercising.

Like I said, unconventional and strange.

I wrote this poem for English. It was supposed to be a free verse, but isn't.

Inside, Below, and Above

Inside the sky sits a sliver of darkness,
a crevice carved out of the stars,
and whether within
a figure ever finds found,
we’ll see it just left of red Mars.

Below, on a beach on each every man’s Earth
sits sprightly a spirit of white,
and though thoroughly throttled
by decay and demise,
he figures it’s still worth the fight.

Miles above, a man high on a mountain
strides stoically, stops, and then stares
out across the terrain,
pensive and sane,
considering none of his cares.

Somewhere between sits a boy at his screen,
tip-tap-typing away all his thoughts.
While the words all appear,
and his thoughts become clear,
his mind starts to wither and rots.

There is way too much crap happening this week, like a math test on Wednesday and an impending release date for the newspaper for which the Flipside pages have not even been started, in addition to the normal crap which normally takes up too much time. I'm starting to not care about what gets done and what doesn't, which I guess is senioritis, seeing as we've only got six weeks or so left. This year has gone by fast.

Oh, yeah, I got a Facebook profile. MySpace got a little too ad-heavy, so I figured it was time to immigrate and cause the same problem at Facebook.

Next weekend's events are confusing to me. Will someone explain them? I have to write another poem now.

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:45:02 GMT

The mouse feels like a brick in my hand. Likewise, the keyboard is almost totally foreign to my touch, and I keep mistyping things and going back to fix them.

Kauai was pretty awesome, though I don't think that comes as any surprise. The week went by like a shot, probably because my dad packed in a million things to do. Our place didn't have a TV, and I don't know if anybody has figured this out yet, but TV fucking sucks. I read through three books by the time I got back, started a fourth (Frank Herbert's Dune, though inevitably I gave up on it temporarily as dense sci-fi isn't really suited to places like Hawaii), though didn't do any homework the whole time. Gonna have to do that tonight. I feel really behind now but... I also don't care. I feel like some sort of curtain has lifted for me, and I don't feel like wasting any time. To me it seems justifiable to just let everything else just sit until I'm ready for it.

Went hiking, kayaking (which I should do more often), snorkeling, swimming, and primarily just sat on the beach outside our place reading or writing something. The place we stayed was nice, though I quickly learned that the guests staying in the room near to us in the building were going to be a problem, their toddler-aged daughter knowing only one word and shrieking for the rest. They left before we did, and to replace them came some twenty-somethings from the East Coast, New Jersey I think, who spent the first night blindingly drunk and the others in a kind of hangover-induced, perpetual silence. Seems like the people on the island were pretty sick of tourists by the time we got there, too, since a lot of places had their spring break a week before ours. There was this really cool coffee shop though, called Java Kai in the little town of Hanalei near where I was staying - I ended up buying at least ten ice coffees just because they had music like Thievery Corporation in their CD player and really nice places to sit and look at the mountains. We were supposed to go on a boat trip to the Na Pali Coast on Monday, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the world... I saw the tip of it doing a little bit of the eleven-mile hike that leads there, and it looked fantastic. This swell came through and the company had to cancel the trip.

Hate airplanes... on my flight home, the only thing to do was watch "Miss Potter" and I wanted to walk out it was so terrible. Night flights really blow when you're tired and you can't sleep, I just caught up on that before coming online for the first time in more than a week. I hate the internet too, I think. I might become a Luddite, only I'm really lazy and can't be bothered to write stuff down longhand.

Gonna do some homework. I'll be back at school tomorrow.

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Mon, 09 Apr 2007 07:00:12 GMT

Today I was playing Wii Boxing with my nephew, and he was trying to knock out a computer opponent that looked exactly like Jesus. Quite perceptively, he told me that the reason he couldn't knock him out, and the reason why he kept getting back up, was because today is Easter. He's a smart kid.

I wrote another story, it's behind this link:

Jim the Bum

Jim the bum was having an exceptionally nice day. In the span of only four hours, he’d found three cigarettes which had only been a quarter of the way smoked, half a sandwich made exactly the way he liked it, and even enough change to buy himself a cup of coffee at the nearby Starbuck’s. He’d had better days, of course. Days from when he wasn’t a bum – any day from when he wasn’t a bum, really – were the days he remembered fondly, but even Jim knew that to look back on the better times is to turn a blind eye to the good times ahead.
Before losing all of his money to an alpaca farming scheme gone awry, Jim had been a car salesmen. The middle-aged man had no qualms about talking people out of their hard earned money, but as his own current predicament clearly evidenced, he also had no problem being talked out of his own. Having lost all of his money breeding alpacas, this was no longer a problem. Jim never had more money than he needed, and often didn’t even have that, scraping by on less than what he considered the bare minimum.
And so, that day, out of his constant need for money, it was with breath which smelled like a mixture of smoke, turkey, and black coffee that Jim did his daily begging. The bum felt particularly persuasive, the side effect of a satisfied nicotine habit and stomach full of turkey. He felt as though he could talk a nun into going to a death metal show with him, and if a nun were to come by, he would probably give it a shot. It wasn’t a date with a nun he was after, though. It was money.
He slept on a bench outside a grocery store, it being a prime place for catching people with change in their pockets or even just food on their person. Although Jim was homeless, he was not without his dignity, and the bum quickly learned that the richest hobo was the most socially engaging hobo. He brought a degree of civility to his begging, showing his target that the man they were looking at was not a stinky, unshaven, forgotten dredge of society, but rather a sociable and self-assured dredge of society.
After finishing his cup of coffee, he scribbled some numbers on a scrap of paper and started in on a man who looked about his age, maybe slightly younger, around thirty. The trickiest part of the business of begging for most is figuring out how to hook your intended benefactors, and this was the aspect of homelessness in which Jim had immediately excelled. He knew how to rope in a person, and this was exactly what he did as the man walked out of the store and past Jim’s bench.
“Jesus,” said Jim to the man, standing up and stopping him with a hand to his chest. “Would you take a look at that fine piece of ass over there?”
Taken aback, and with Jim’s right hand pressed firmly on his chest, the man stopped in his tracks. Jim took the opportunity to lower his hand and point it toward a young woman who was loading groceries into her car. She was good-looking, and if she wasn’t a model or an actress, she could have been.
“Excuse me?” said the man. “Look, I don’t have any change—”
“Did I ask for your change? I said, look at that woman. Watch her load those bags into the back of her car. The way she bends down to pick them up out of the cart. I bet you wouldn’t mind helping unload into her trunk, would you?”
The other man was noticeably uncomfortable. “Well, I suppose if she were to require my assistance, I would have no choice but to help her put her groceries away.”
“Uh-uh, guy, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, wouldn’t you like to get to know a girl like that?”
The man looked at his watch impatiently, as though it would somehow free him from the situation he was in. He pondered just walking away, but he couldn’t find the nerve to just leave Jim standing there without at least listening to what he had to say. Jim used the resulting awkward silence to his advantage, peering at the man’s hand and taking mental notes.
“I see you don’t have a ring, there, buddy.”
“I’m not married, no,” replied the man.
“Damn shame. Handsome guy like yourself, you’d think the ladies would be crawling all over you.”
With that statement, things became a lot more uncomfortable, and the man, who was neither attractive nor covered in crawling ladies, suddenly began to wonder if the bum was gay. He didn’t have to wonder long.
“You ain’t a queer, are you?” Jim asked the man, continuing his questioning of the man’s personal business.
“No, I’m not gay, and I’m not really comfortable talking to you about my love life, either. Goodbye.” The man began to walk away.
“Hold on a minute. What if I told you that I could give you that woman’s phone number?” The man stopped. “Come on back here.”
The man walked back to Jim, stupidly caught up in his con. “How would you have that woman’s phone number?”
“She gave it to me. Told me to call her, said that she volunteers at the food bank and can get me some food. Who gives a shit? Point is, I’ve got a beautiful woman’s phone number and you’re single and straight.”
If he’d wanted to keep twenty dollars, the man should have walked away. The man was pathetic, though, and, being a pathetic man himself, Jim knew this, and Jim capitalized on this.
“I’ll give it to you for twenty bucks.”
“Twenty bucks?!”
“Can I please direct your attention to the woman again?” He pointed at the woman again, who was almost done putting away her groceries. “Like I said before. Twenty bucks.”
The man was obviously struggling with his inner demons. There was no guarantee that getting her number would help him, as he couldn’t just call her out of the blue and ask her out on a date. Then, as most pathetic men do when presented with the possibility of time spent with an attractive woman, he began to form a delusional plan in his head. He would call her up, say that he got her number from someone at the food bank, and ask her about volunteering. Then, from there, he would get to know her better, eventually asking her on a date and having his way with her. It was a perfect plan.
“Twenty bucks, huh?”
Jim began to smile. “Twenty bucks and she’s all yours.”
The man pulled out his wallet and handed Jim a crisp twenty dollar bill. Jim handed him the scrap of paper he’d written the numbers on earlier and shoved the twenty dollar bill into his pocket. The man walked off towards the parking lot, ogling the woman as she brought her cart back to the front of the store. Jim sat back down on the bench.
When the woman walked by Jim again, this time back toward the parking lot without her cart, he called out to her.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Thanks for the cash.”
The woman looked confused. “I’m sorry? I didn’t give you any money. I don’t give anything to beggers. If you need something, you should get a job and pay for it.”
Jim just smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re so right.”

Gonna leave for Kauai tomorrow night, I'll be back for school on Thursday of next week.

Popcorn... candy corn... movies... soda pop... fire escape. What did you think?

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 04:14:59 GMT

I'm exceedingly pleased that there is only a minimum day of school between me and spring break, along with all of the great stuff that's going to entail, like Easter dinner, Kauai, and everything else. So pleased, in fact, that I was inspired to write a story about a landlord who eats his tenants when they don't pay their rent. Joy!

Room and Board

“The sun is sitting beautifully in the sky this evening,” the fat landlord said to himself as he chewed through the gristle of his former tenant’s arm. “The way it hangs like a red balloon, oozing orange into the horizon. Simply remarkable.”
He’d always fancied himself a bit of a poet, and in between chomping on the chewy morsels of his old tenant, he rattled off flowery figurative language, taking advantage of the chipper mood a tasty dinner invariably gave him. “Almost to die for, wouldn’t you say, Dave?” He addressed the large plastic tub behind him that contained the raw remains of his hacked-up neighbor. “I jest, of course,” he said to what was at one point a man called David. His terribly clichéd and hackneyed remark, notably untactful and unoriginally usual, was just another product of the joyful mood his dinner put him in.
A small terrier ran out of the sliding glass doors of the man’s third-story apartment onto the small patio where the man was enjoying his meal. It barked its shrill, abnormally high-pitched bark, and the man’s eyes shifted from the skies to the dog. “What do you want, Byron?” inquired the man. “Did Daddy forget to set out a place for you? Oh, tsk, tsk…” The landlord reached into the plastic tub with a large pair of barbeque tongs and pulled out a blood-soaked hand for his scruffy companion. “There you go, puppy,” he said in an apologetic tone. “And when you’re all finished, you can play with the bones.” Byron barked again, seemingly unsatisfied by the fat man’s offering. “What is it, boy? I thought you loved the hands.”
From inside his apartment there came a knock on the door. The fat landlord took the folded napkin from his lap and wiped his lips. “Now, now,” he said to Byron, “who could that be disturbing my dinner?” He pushed back the chair and stood up. He was wearing a nice suit, made up of a black vest, a crisp white shirt, and a tie with a particularly classy pattern. His belly protruded from the center of his torso and pushed out the buttons of his vest. He squeezed through the opening of the sliding glass door, closing both it and its curtain behind him, and stepped into his poorly furnished and decaying living room.
The place looked like it had never been dusted, and around the dimly-lit room sat various empty food containers, pizza boxes, and beer bottles. An old television, its screen cracked in two places from the struggle with David, sat face up on the floor next to its stand, and in the corner of the room, a phonograph piped Miles Davis tunes through the apartment as the record wobbled against the needle. The landlord walked over to the record player and lifted the needle, scratching Davis’s frantic trumpet solo into a punctuated silence. Another knock sounded against the landlord’s wooden door. “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” he said while self-consciously wiping the rest of the former tenant’s blood from his lips and running his fingers through his thin, graying hair.
The landlord reached out for the doorknob and turned. A flood of light rushed into the room, changing the apartment’s hue from yellow to white, and standing before the landlord were two men in black jackets.
“Excuse me sir,” said the man on the left, noticeably younger than the man on the right. “We’re with the San Francisco Police Department.” The two officers flashed their badges while the landlord’s chubby face remained stony and unaffected. “We’ve had a disturbance call for this apartment. Apparently, your neighbors heard something that sounded like a chainsaw coming from here a few hours ago. May we come in?”
The fat landlord smiled at the two detectives. “Most certainly. That is, of course, if I may see a search warrant.”
“Well, now that you mention it,” said the older detective on the right, taking on a smug grin, “we’ve got our search warrant right here.” The detective took and unfolded a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to the fat landlord. It was signed by a judge and dated just a couple of days after the landlord’s last tenant went missing under similarly mysterious circumstances. The fat landlord’s forehead began to sweat.
“Ah… yes… well, I’ve only set one place for dinner, so I don’t think you’ll be able to join me this evening.” The landlord attempted to shut the door in the detectives’ faces, but the younger man managed to get his foot in the door before he could do so.
“I’m going to ask you to step out of the way, and then I’m going to have to ask you to let us in.” The fat landlord hesitantly obliged, stepping out of the way and pulling open the door.
“Of course, officer. You’ll pardon the mess, I hope – I haven’t yet had time to clean.”
“Don’t bother. We’ll have forensics in to do it for you. They love a good clean, ain’t that right Detective Carter?”
“You’re damn straight. They’d have this place cleaned spotless in no time.” The landlord stood stoically next to the front door while the two detectives looked around. Fortunately for him, aside from the mess of empty containers and the broken TV, it didn’t quite resemble the type of mess the detectives were looking for. The landlord had taken care to scrub away David’s blood and had gotten rid of the chainsaw he’d used to cut the former tenant into pieces. The sliding glass door that led to David’s final resting place in the landlord’s plastic tub was behind the door’s curtain, hiding the tub from the detectives’ notice.
“I don’t see anything, Detective,” said the younger policeman to the older one. “Nothing but this broken TV. Care to explain how that happened, mister?”
“Ah… yes… well, what can I say? I’m a clumsy man. I knocked it over while I was trying to turn it off. Actually, that could have been the noise that the neighbors heard.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” said the older detective. “You tellin’ me you accidently knocked over a twenty-seven inch TV screen while you were tryin’ to turn it off? And that when it fell over, it made the sound of a chainsaw? Excuse my French, guy, but you’ve gotta be fuckin’ joking.”
“But I don’t own a chainsaw,” said the landlord. “What would I do with a chainsaw?”
“That’s what I aim to find out.” The detectives continued their search of the apartment, going through the various rooms, making sure one of them always had an eye on the fat landlord who stayed stationary all the while.
After a few minutes, the detectives became impatient and disheartened. Their search was proving fruitless, and they were fed up with the landlord’s disaffected confidence. With their final searches ending without their preferred and intended results, the two detectives reconvened in the landlord’s living room and the younger one shook his head in disappointment.
“Looks like it’s your lucky day. We didn’t find a goddamn thing. Sorry to disturb your dinner, mister.” The older detective’s face suddenly scrunched up in an inquisitive expression.
“Dinner? What dinner? I don’t see your dinner anywhere in here.” The fat landlord began to make an excuse.
“Ah… well, you see, I was just finishing up as you walked in…” Suddenly, a shrill bark sounded from the patio as Bryon noisily scratched at the closed sliding glass doors. The landlord’s face went white as a ghost.
“What the hell is that? You got a dog, mister?”
“No. I don’t know what that could be. Anyway, you were just leaving, weren’t you--” The scratching continued, interrupting his frantic attempt to send the two detectives away.
The younger detective moved toward the door. He pulled back the curtain, and, after their eyes had adjusted to the sudden flood of natural sunlight into the darkened living room, all of the men looked toward the apartment’s patio.
Behind the sliding glass door stood Bryon, a severely mangled human hand in his teeth dripping blood onto the concrete ground as he sat waiting for the detective to open the door and let him in. Behind Bryon was the tub filled with David and a small dinner table set for one.
The two detectives stood dumbfounded as they found themselves staring at the heinous and disturbing scene on the patio. The younger detective, closest to the glass door and green from inexperience and deeply disgusted, vomited. The older detective simply stood there with a shocked look on his face.
“Ah, yes. There’s my dinner. Like I said, I’ve only set the table for one. Then again,” said the landlord to the two detectives, “there’s plenty to go around.”

I've been pretty happy lately. I think it's just because of the weather and the fact that my college plans are pretty much set now, and that everything is just going right for some reason. School is going by really quickly, graduation is coming up fast. That's pretty exciting, too. I'm glad that I'm going to get to study writing in college, and that it's going to be a new experience, and that I'm going to meet new people. That surprises me, but in an uncharacteristically pleasing way.

Just as a side note, anyone who is a fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Mr. Show (or both, as it is for a few of you) show check out the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters site and click on the link that says "I Love Movies," 'cause it's a video of Bob Odenkirk as a film critic asking Dana Synder (the voice of Master Shake) some questions about the movie. It's hilarious.

Since I'm not probably not going to post anything else for a while, I'm just going to wish an all-around happy Spring Break to everyone, and I hope you do a lot of cool stuff with cool people. If nothing else, see the ATHF movie 'cause it's coming out on Friday the 13th and it's going to be awesome.

Should really get a Twitter for stuff like this

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 01:22:49 GMT

You know your life has gone down the tube when you feel proud of a spreadsheet

Sorry for the typical "senioritis" type sentiment but

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:35:14 GMT

Things will be so much better when they become more unexpected.
Or worse. The unexpected part will make everything worth it, though.

I'm kinda worried that I'll be just as surrounded by the same types of pieces of shit that I loathe at college that I have been at high school. Inevitably there will be annoying people, especially since there are people at Santa Cruz that already annoy me just from reading their shit in the newspaper... I need to give people more of a chance sometimes, but seriously, that naive, militant, misguided spirit of rebellion and alternativeness in general really ticks me off.

Spring is awesome, Sonoma County looks so sick when all of the flowers are blooming... my allergies are kicking my ass, though...

I'm going to Kauai for Spring Break, that's going to be so cool, I loved Maui last time I was there and Kauai sounds even prettier from what I've heard.

I've written plenty of things in the various interims/times of not posting here, I think I'm going to keep them to myself for a while so I can polish them up a bit. I've got to have a portfolio/collection of stories for the writing concentration at Santa Cruz, so I've got to get some stuff together anyway.

A little bit more than two months until high school graduation. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!

Does anyone know when UC San Diego is announcing admissions decisions?

Just a quick word

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:05:58 GMT

I hope Rube Goldberg is burning in Hell

I got into Santa Cruz

I want school to be over

and that's all.

Gotta love that creative marketing

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 03:40:05 GMT

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the bomb! Erm...

What a world we live in

Paradise is a furniture store somewhere in Rohnert Park

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:57:42 GMT

I went into this furniture store today, and I realized something about them that I've never really noticed before: they're the perfect place to live. Think about it. You'd never get sick of your furniture, because anytime you do, you can just move to another side of the store and sit on a new couch. It's decked out with the nicest HDTVs, because, well, they're trying to sell entertainment centers. Perfect. Not only that, but they've got video games set up in this place so that kids won't get bored. Score there, too. And because this was some grand opening event, they had this concession stand set up with a ton of shitty food to eat right in the middle of the store. You could barricade yourself in there for hours and never get bored. Plenty of beds, plenty of styles to choose from... it's fantastic.

Do you ever see people walking around, doing their day to day stuff, and just wonder what's going on in their minds? What sort of incomprehensible force is driving their activity, their wants, their thoughts and feelings? How they came to be doing the same thing as you, in the same place as you, at the same time as you? It's amazing to think about if you find yourself at all inclined to.

Imagine living in Queensland right now. They've got a drought so bad that they've had to resort to drinking waste water. Or in Lebanon. The people in Beirut can't go outside at night right now because of the revolt that's going on. The fertility rate for Japanese women is about one child per mother, slowly dropping - they just saw their third outbreak of the bird flu over there, and scientists are worried that it's going to mutate into a form that would make humans susceptible. Meanwhile, Stateside, what's going on? Well, we're protesting the Iraq war. The people here aren't really in it, since if we were we'd be over there or they'd be over here. Obviously we're affected, but only indirectly due to a loved one's involvement. So what else is there. American Idol, I guess. We're so wonderfully oblivious to the shitty stuff that's going on around us. Anything that doesn't immediately affect our well-being is out of sight and out of mind. Bad shit can't happen to us, because, well, it just doesn't. Nothing really shitty, mind you. Not revolt, or drinking sewage.

I'm including myself in that accusation, since all I can really seem to think about during the day is how cool living in a furniture store would be, or which video game I want to play next, or what movie I want to see, or what story would be cool to write if I made the time (which I have plenty of, but am too lazy to acknowledge with anything even remotely straining).

Do you ever get sick of living weekend to weekend? I don't. I think it's great. The worst day of the week is Sunday, not because it's actually bad but because it's so damn bittersweet. You can sleep in, but eventually, you've got to do some homework, and then that's it. Show's over until next Friday night. It sucks. That's where I'm at right now, the end of Sunday night, coming into Monday with the knowledge that I've got to go to school and pretend to learn stuff and be around shallow, empty people who would love to shit all over my sundae.

Solitude and escapism work well together for me because I can be so blissfully ignorant and entertained. I don't care that all the shit I think up isn't real, there's no one around to tell me otherwise so it doesn't matter.

Gonna go lay down and listen to Miles Davis play the trumpet. He's dead, you know. Immortality is celebrity, in my honest opinion.

I'll be the talk of the town

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:37:36 GMT

I can already tell I'm going to have a hell of a time dealing with the UC system for four years... somehow they "misplaced" my SAT Subject Test scores and are "investigating" where they went. And then I'm supposed to want to go to their schools... to, of all things, learn. They don't have a course for not losing shit apparently. Now I have to wait and see if they can dig them up, otherwise I'm gonna have to shell out another twenty bucks that I don't even have to get them resent.

I know, my life is so hard.

I got a Wii last weekend... it's sweet. Totally worth waking up at 4 A.M. on Sunday for. Wii boxing is making me like Rocky VIII, and I can already tell Zelda is going to occupy about 95% of this weekend. I should get a couple more controllers and have a big Wii Sports tournament. I'll be the talk of the town!

It's weird to drudge up old memories, so that's why I don't. Or try not to, at least. But sometimes they're forced on you and you have to realize that you were an idiot at one point, and it's a bittersweet sort of feeling. It's good to know you've grown, but then again it's disheartening to know that you were once more foolish than you'd thought at the time. At least you forget after a while.

I like staring off into space. Not space like, space... well, I guess that's cool too, but it's not what I mean. What I mean is just sitting in a desk at school looking at the ceiling or the wall or maybe even your shoe. School goes by so much faster when you don't acknowledge its existence.

I'm just rambling now. Isn't that annoying to read, someone admitting that they're rambling? I'd rather they ramble.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force... ASSEMBLE!

For the price of a cup of tea, you could buy a line of coke

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 06:47:23 GMT

Henry and Nothing

When people asked Henry what he was, or what he did, to break the ice in candid, unnecessary conversations, more often than not he found himself saying, with a slight air of defiance, simply “nothing.”
Henry wasn’t nothing only in the way that no one is nothing, that everyone is at no time in between definition and appraisal. What he was was unknown to him. He was a mystery even to himself, and in that way his very act of existence made him more of a detective than anything else.
But that’s not to say Henry spent a lot of his time solving himself, pouring over the clues, evidence, and crime scenes that made up the circling trails of his day to day. Almost forty, splitting his time between odd jobs that paid shit and sleep in an apartment that was shit, the man felt his hair turning grey for every minute he spent awake. He felt age work its way through his bones, strangling him like a cancer with each breath he took until one day it would finally choke him to death.
If there was one thing going for Henry it was his looks. No matter how much life seemed to kick him in the gut, he could always find a woman to help him back up. They were nothing special – barflies with too much deep red lipstick, baggy eyes, and lazy slouches. They were thin, but they were sick, and the worse life treated Henry, the more the women loved him. He knew they were empty, but he knew he was empty, and if it meant a couple free beers and fewer lonely nights, he would be the last to complain. He’d keep them around long enough for them to bring him back to his feet, and then he’d push them to the ground where he once laid.
Henry had dreams. He dreamed that someday he’d be a poet, someone people would revere for his philosophies and musings. He’d write things in notebooks, scrawled lines composed in drunken fevers, and the next day he would burn them with his cigarette lighter while he smoked. People used to tell him he had talent. He held onto those compliments like a child holds a blanket, warming himself with the thought whenever he felt depressed and questioning its validity whenever he felt like things were going too well. Things were never going well, but Henry was harder on himself than anyone else.
One day, he found work at the building of a local newspaper. He’d applied to be a reporter, hoping to put his talent to use and maybe get a respectable income for a change. The boss didn’t like the lack of experience and abundance of drunk and disorderly charges that Henry had to his name. Instead, he made him a janitor, and Henry spent weeks wiping the urinals of the piss of his would-be colleagues, waiting until he could finally work up the nerve to give the editors something to judge him by.
He found that to be the hardest part of the job. He hated what he wrote, and what he didn’t burn he kept hidden so that he would never see it again. The only thing he felt like sharing were the bullshit pieces, the stuff he wrote because he knew people wanted it written. He wrote editorials on the state of the city government, various local affairs… the kind of wasted crap that everyone but Henry seemed to care about. He stuck some pages from his notebook into an envelope and vowed to give it to one of the editors the next day.
He hadn’t the nerve to actually walk up to any of them and actually hand off his work, so it stuck it under the door of one of the editors he knew a little better than the rest. The editor’s name was Jack. Henry only remembered this because Jack was his favorite whiskey, and because sometimes Jack would talk to Henry in the halls about this and that.
Henry didn’t have much confidence that his action would prompt any immediate response from Jack. He simply did it to appease the guilt he felt when he’d call his dying father, who’d ask what Henry was doing. Henry still said “nothing,” even when he was doing something that his father might like to hear about, which was hardly ever.
To Henry’s surprise, though, that same day Jack tracked down Henry, who was busily scrubbing a toilet in the women’s restroom. He chivalrously and patiently waited outside the door until Henry was finished, not wanting to step into the opposite gender’s bathroom even though it was only occupied by another man. When Henry finally finished and left with his rags and spray bottles, Jack said hello and motioned at the papers which he found inside Henry’s envelope.
“This story you wrote,” said Jack. “This is some pretty intense stuff. How long have you been doing this?”
Henry was perplexed as to what Jack could have meant. Nothing in that envelope was even remotely describable as “intense.” Tame and banal, perhaps, but intense was not the word.
“What are you talking about?” Henry replied. “Which piece did you read? The one about the mayor’s new policies or the rise in bus fares?”
In his newfound respect for Henry’s intellect, Jack laughed and mistook his confusion for wit. “Nah, Henry, what are you talking about? This story you left me in the envelope, about the guy who sits in his apartment getting drunk every night and picking up random women from bars. Granted, the premise might be simple, but you say a lot of interesting things. This is good stuff, man. I’d kill to be able to write like this.”
Henry grabbed for the piece of paper that Jack held out above him like the Holy Grail. He looked at it closely, noting the way the words seemed to progressively slant to the right as it went down the page, and the burn marks along its edges.
Christ, Henry thought to himself, I put the wrong fucking pages in the envelope.
“This is hot shit, Henry,” Jack said while taking the paper back from him. “I mean, it’s got scorch marks it’s so hot.”
Henry felt annoyed. Angry that he’d let anyone else see his work, the work he cared about, he ripped the papers out of Jack’s hands again. “Sorry, Jack,” he explained. “There’s been a mistake.”
Too excited to care about what Henry was trying to say, Jack kept talking instead of waiting to hear his explanation. “Look, Henry, I’ve got this friend. He works on a magazine that publishes unknown talent. He’d take this story in an instant.”
This angered Henry even more. If there was anything in the world he didn’t want, it was someone reading his stories, and if there was anything else, it was having more than one person read his stories. He tore up his story and threw the pieces in the bin he’d used to dispose of the trash in the restrooms. “Forget about it,” he said. “I don’t want your friend to have my story. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
Jack watched Henry start to walk away, pushing the cart which held the bin holding the pieces of the story and the cleaning implements with which Henry worked. “You’re making a big mistake,” he said, trying to get him to come back. “Don’t you want to be something someday? What are you going to tell people in twenty years when they ask you what you’ve done with your life?”
Henry stopped walking and turned around to look at Jack. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll tell them nothing.”
He resumed his slow walk down the hallway, leaving Jack behind him and never again looking back.

I think the days I like best are the ones in which I do least. There's something in simple inactivity, or just unplanned, spontaneous days off that have an appeal which no other day can amount to. I've never understood why people feel the need to constantly be "out," as though they've attained some sort of status by surrounding themselves with other bored people. I'd much rather be bored alone.

Things are pretty okay, it was my mom's birthday on Friday so my family went to dinner and had some cake afterward. Tomorrow I'm going to hang out with Luke I think, go fishing or something. That's pretty much the extent of current affairs.

I really want to see Pan's Labyrinth, it's playing at the Rialto next Friday and it looks like the best movie ever.

That's pretty much it I guess.

What could you possibly be doing at this hour?

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:20:13 GMT

Meeting Saint Peter

Sunlight swayed through the windows of the slowly moving train like yellow curtains in a gentle summer breeze, waking a man whose arousal from rest came as a pleasant surprise. The sleep crept up on him, and with no thoughts to trouble his mind, the man found his dreams to be as elusive to him as a peaceful night’s sleep had once been. So it was that when he discovered himself entering this new place in a drowsy haze of restfulness, his head resting upon his briefcase and the train pulling into its station, he knew that by simply arriving he was rejoining with the scattered fragments of his former peace of mind.
The man found that his place of destination was almost empty; its solitary train station, a cracked, red brick shell covered in dark green ivy that clung to its walls as if the earth was trying to hold back some part of a time long forgotten, was the only building the man could see. Its citizens – all older, though none too much wiser than the man—strolled by on a sidewalk marred by the jagged, risen pieces of cement which seemed to be as restless and full of a desire to stretch as the people who walked upon it. They all moved in the same direction. Their faces were sullen: their eyes downcast toward the crooked ground they walked on; their mouths, blank holes from which no dusty sounds could creep, and where light could find no place amongst thick cobwebs; their ears, long shut to the sounds which tried incessantly to break through. They walked slowly, as if they had no place to go and no time to be there.
The man dodged his way toward the exit of the crowded train, explaining to those who obstructed his path that this was his stop. He left his briefcase on the train. He had no need for it anymore.
As soon as he had walked through the train’s door and stepped out onto the platform, the locomotive resumed its journey across the tracks and was out of his sight before he even thought to turn around and look.
Standing in the sunlight, watching the people walk by him on the cracked pavement, the man felt a warmth and rejuvenation that he thought he would never feel again. He reveled in it as though he was tasting some sweet dessert or drinking water in a sweltering desert. He felt as though he could live in the sunlight, forever comforted by its warm radiance.
The man finally pulled himself out of the light. His journey wasn’t over yet, and, looking to see where the people of the sidewalk were going, he noticed an immensity of brightness caged by pearly white gates. Before the gate and above them all stood a single, bearded saint, dressed in white robes and facing a line of long-faced and eager souls. In his left hand, he held a long and skinny wooden crucifix which stretched all the way down to the ground from the podium upon which he looked on at those beneath him.
The man walked toward the line, attracted by the shine which hovered behind the white gates. As he passed the sullen people by, he watched the saint upon his podium. His eyes seemed to follow the man as he pushed through the line toward his final destination. When he finally reached the gates, he looked up at the holy figure upon the podium. He watched as the figure nodded at him, smiled, and stretched both arms to either side in a welcoming embrace.
The gates seemed to part with a supernatural fluidity, and as they separated, the man felt himself being pulled toward it. The man made no effort to move, yet he was not being taken against his will. He found this sensation haunting, but, as he came closer to the light, was comforted by the ease of his motion.
He glanced over his shoulder and noticed that the light was closing around him, enveloping his form and warming his being with its emanating glow. The man could not help but smile as he found his heaven in a beam of golden sunlight.

Wrote a new story... dunno what prompted it. Every time I feel compelled to write something, I never know how it's going to turn out. I sit down to write one thing, and it comes out another. It's almost as though I'm not even writing, just watching things happen in front of me. So, a story about a guy waking up on a train (which I tried to write a few weeks ago, though it took place on a subway for some reason and, if developed further, could be the exact opposite of this story) and it turned out as a guy going to Heaven. It's more interesting to me that way, I suppose, then figuring it all out in my head and trying to wrestle it on paper. Concepts work fine like that, but when it comes to actually creating it, there's nothing more satisfying than just letting it find its own way onto the page.

It's also 2 A.M., and I'm not sure what significance the late night has to me writing stories but I can't seem to get anything to come out until after midnight.

I'm glad it's the weekend, I'm glad I don't really have much planned, and I'm glad that I can go to sleep now that I'm finished with this.

Goodnight.

Next slide, please

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 05:50:48 GMT

I always find myself sitting in really normal situations bored out of my mind and wondering what if some other condition was met that would make the situation funnier or more interesting. My first impulse is to use that to write a story or something, but I invariably forget and end up writing things off the top of my head instead of using things that I pick out of the day to day stuff. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, maybe I should carry around a notebook or something and have more reason to keep to myself while I sit back and write crap down.

Like, at this Financial Aid meeting tonight, the people doing the presentation were using PowerPoint, so they had a projector hooked up to their laptop. The trouble is, as neat as having that available to people during presentations is, they're always plagued by the same problems. At first, they can't get them to work, so instead of looking like some tech savvy individual, the person has to bang on the projector like a monkey until the thing finally starts up. Then they have to find fifteen dictionaries to stack underneath it so that they can prop it up to the right height. And once all that crap is over, the slides start and you realize how utterly pointless it all was because the only thing on the slides are pictures of either really generic people acting out what's written down or some cheesy clipart. And then, at the end, there is always this final slide that says "Good luck!" or "Thanks for listening!" that the person just totally disregards and uses to say their goodbyes to instead of explaining like the rest of them.

So basically, during this time where the woman is trying to get the projector to work, I'm setting this scene in my head of a meeting room, filled with business people in ties and suits all seated around a table waiting for one guy to give a PowerPoint presentation. The guy is trying to hook it up but he can't figure out how to use it, so he just starts pressing buttons and the whole time all of these random pictures from his hard drive pop up on the screen. Pictures of his dog, his vacation to Bermuda, this really cool dirtbike he wants... maybe some porn if you want to go the coarse route. And the whole time he's trying to do his presentation, so he's explaining each slide as it comes up.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I have trouble paying attention to anything but my brain. I like my brain though, so that really doesn't bother me at all.

Thanks for listening!!!!1

Captain's Log, Stardate 12.07.2006

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 03:35:48 GMT

Not much is going on.

I finished reading Pinball today, which was pretty good for the most part. Linker gave it to me along with a few other books, which I haven't really had time to even look at yet. I've got plenty to read though, and that's always good. It was full of all of this kinky sex stuff, at least half of it was detailed descriptions of sex clubs and the goings-on within. Kind of a strange book to get from a teacher.

The weeks approaching Christmas vacation are always the hardest to sit through, maybe even harder than the last weeks of the school year. You can tell that everyone is gearing up for the holidays and wanting to be elsewhere, and for some reason the mental vacancy of most people unites everyone in a common dislike of present surroundings. Maybe I'm the only one to notice that.

Hearing about James Kim was kind of upsetting, I remember watching him on The Screen Savers when TechTV was still around and hearing him on a couple of tech podcasts. It's a little disheartening to see so many people using his death as a reason to promote wilderness survival. I'm not saying having those skills is a bad thing, but it seems a little disrespectful anyway. The guy died trying to save his family, and people are trying to blame MapQuest just cause he had a career in technology. Not to mention it's so close to Christmas, and his daughters are going to have to grow up without a dad, and argh... it's just really sad.

I'm trying to be a more pleasant person than I have been before after noticing how unpleasant some people can be. There's nothing wrong with being nice, and whereas some time ago I took pride in being a sniggering, self-righteous, and arrogant anonymous-comment posting asshole, I'm now starting to see the virtues in taking the people around me as they are and not having unrealistic expectations of people, nor a will to change them. Sometimes it's better to just keep to yourself if you're unhappy with something.

Man, I want a Wii so bad.

In Memory of James Kim

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 02:18:08 GMT

You did what you could for more than a week to make sure your family would be survive, and even though in your brave and valiant efforts you were not able to find help, know that your wife and children made it out alive.

You will be missed.

Hooray for classic literature

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 04:56:30 GMT

I don't usually take the time out of what I'm doing to create an whole journal entry praising a book that we're being forced to read in English class but... I have to say it.

Heart of Darkness is mindblowingly amazing.

How could you not like it? Seriously. Ten pages into the book he talks about a Danish skipper being impaled by a little kid because he's arguing about an unfair trade of hens with the tribal chief.

I'm sitting there with the book on my lap, genuinely and ferverently hightlighting everything on the pages I see that I think is important, and I get to the bottom of them and look at the page again and it's almost totally light blue from my marker.

Books are so much better than people.

Sometimes I feel like The Boy in the People Shooting Hat

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:38:30 GMT

What the fuck is with this week? It's like every overconfident, snide, spoiled little shit has found some way to piss me off at every turn. I'm sick of everything at this point. It happens a lot and sometimes it's really amusing to notice for people, but Jesus Christ. I've been genuinely and incessantly annoyed for the past five days and I'm tired of it.

Maybe there are times in life when you're just supposed to hit someone in the nose because that's how it is. It doesn't matter what it looks like to other people, it's doesn't matter what they feel like after, all that matters is your fist connecting with their nose. The nose of every loud and obnoxious chatterbox in Journalism, all of those pieces of shit who sit around thinking of ways to make themselves look better than everyone else, every person I have to constantly humor because they won't shut up and I'm not man enough to tell them to. Every little thing is getting to me and it's adding up and I'm reaching some breaking point.

God damn. This 24-year-old college grad we had for a substitute in Physics, and his ridiculous air of superiority as he essentially sits there reading a skateboarding magazine, like he's babysitting a room full of kids. "I'm just here to get the paycheck," he says, "I don't wan't to be a teacher. I studied Journalism in college." That's where your fucking dreams go. Fourth period Physics, all over again. Except this time, you'll feel better 'cause you've got another seven years on the rest of the kids in the class. The bell rings, this fuck turns out the lights while I'm trying to finish up my work and when I'm still packing up to get out he says, "Hurry up, I've got to go take a piss."

There's no goddamn respect anywhere. People are so full of themselves, all they do is this self-serving macho bullshit. It's driving me up the wall.

It's that whole phoniness thing, the narcissism, the superficiality, the goddamn hypocrisy of everything.

And you know what? It makes me lonely. At the end of the day, thinking about how much I hate these people I see everyday I keep envisioning this person who is just right and that I can be with so I won't be alone. And I hate that part the worst, because it isn't real. I can bitch about the rest of it all I want and it won't bring me any closer to someone else who actually understands. It's like life is this annoying thing I do in between being alone, and the roles I play in them are totally different. I can't be yourself when there are so many other people around you trying to be someone else. I just get confused.

And I see all of these bitter adults, all of these people around me who are supposed to be shaping my future or something, and I'm obviously learning from example because that's what I'm turning into. A bitter adult. And I so desperately want to be something else. I want to be something other than bitter, maybe even something other than an adult. I just want to be and I don't want this bullshit cynicism, but what else do you make out of it all.

Honestly.

Here's a story

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:05:45 GMT

Slurred Sagacity

The crisp, cool winter night seeped in through the windows of a bar on the corner of Fifth and Main, chilling the almost empty establishment and sending a shiver through the spine of the only sucker desperate enough for a drink that Wednesday night. He was a man about fifty, maybe sixty years old. Grey stubble hung from his wrinkled face like dust on an old car, chronicling the passage of time that took what was once in its prime toward its inevitable day of futility.
“Another one, would you please,” the old man requested, wanting to elaborate on what “one” actually was but too drunk to remember what he’d started with.
“Listen, sir,” advised the bartender, who looked to the drunk like a young college student begrudgingly working his way toward independence, “I think you’ve had enough.”
The old man laughed. “Enough. That just about says it all, Mac. That’s the nail on the fucking hammer if I have ever heard one.”
He’d never been a carpenter, the old sod.
The bartender shook his head and looked at his watch. He wanted to close early that night so that he could catch up with his girlfriend, who at this hour was probably already fast asleep. He gave in to the old man, splashing a small glass with whiskey and filling the rest with water when he figured his solitary patron wasn’t looking.
“There was a time when I could’ve owned this bar,” said the old man, oblivious to the requested glass that was resentfully clinked down in front of him by the barman. “The whole damn joint. Maybe even the place next door, if I didn’t like the neighbors.”
He took a swill of the watered-down drink. A fleeting look of nervousness passed across the bartender’s face as the old man squinted his eyes at the glass he held in his hand. “Can’t taste a fucking thing,” the old man complained. “Maybe I have had too much.” The bartender relaxed. “You see, kid, I was rich. Richer than a German chocolate cake, deep-fried and sprinkled with diamond dust sneezed out by Jesus-fucking-Christ and the rest of the bastards up there.” He sacrilegiously crooned “Ave Maria” and motioned toward the ceiling.
The bartender, opting toward the path of least resistance and conscious of the fact that his girlfriend probably wasn’t waiting anymore, decided to humor the old drunk. “You don’t say. And how’d you come to be so rich, mister? The stock market? Lottery?” The old man took another swig of diluted whiskey, spilling some down his chin and dripping the warmish liquid all over his dark blue jacket.
“Never took a chance I didn’t have to,” the inebriated miser stated as though it were a Twain quotation. “Too much risk involved.” The bartender was clearly annoyed, but the old man’s cantankerous and curmudgeonly stubborn way struck a chord in the remnants of the young man’s fading teenage affinity for sarcasm and subconsciously piqued the boy’s interest.
“So what was it, if you didn’t take any risks?” The old man scratched his chin and studied his young server with an unconcealed expression of nostalgia. The boy could have been him some thirty-odd years ago, standing at the mouth of the forked path of adulthood. He wondered if the youth’s choices would ever land him on the other side of the bar, where the old man found himself that night, wondering what to make of it all. He smiled a numb, drunken smile of sincerity.
“I made money the only honest way,” he stated with conviction. “I was born into it.” The bartender looked unimpressed. “And from the looks of things,” the old man continued, “I’ll be dead out of it.” Sadness suddenly overwhelmed his face, drawing attention to the pock marks and wrinkles that the general wear and tear time leaves on its travelers. The young man suddenly felt sorry for the grump, but he couldn’t exactly tell why.
“What happened to it all?” the barman asked, having now forgotten all about his own worries and enveloped himself in those of the drunken man in front of him. The old man’s eyes rolled back in his head as if to watch a smaller version of himself tear through old filing cabinets in his mind, throwing bits and pieces of his past to the floor while looking for the right folder and having little success in doing so.
“My life happened, kid,” the old man said without a whiff of condescendence. “I bought nice things, I went to nice schools, I drove a nice car, and then I settled down in a nice house. And at the end of the day, you know what I figured out?” The bartender wasn’t sure if he was meant to venture a guess as the drunken man took a few moments to answer his rhetorical query. “I wasn’t a nice guy. I never have been, and I never will be.”
The young man, now leaning on the bar with his elbows pressing the stiff, white collared shirt he hated to wear into the damp mixture of water and whiskey that didn’t find its way into the drunken man’s stomach, looked at the man with confusion. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“Few have,” lamented the old man. “Which is part of the problem, you could say. I don’t have what they call ‘people skills,’ if you catch my drift.” The young man’s mind floated to his first impressions of the wrinkled old whiskey sponge that sat down at the bar what seemed like hours earlier. He began to understand what the man meant.
“Hold on a minute. You’re not going to sit here and give me some bullshit about how even though you had every privilege in the world, you could never find happiness because no one got close to you and no one truly understood you.”
The old man laughed and sent an 80-proof mist of saliva into the air between the two of them. “If that was the case,” he said with a face still getting over the unexpected laugh, “I’d have killed my own damn self a long time ago and saved you the trouble of this conversation.” He pushed his fingers through his brown and grey hair and stretched his numb face across his skull.
Afraid he’d dampened the man’s willingness to continue his story, the bartender prodded him on. “Then what is the case?”
The old man’s expression went dead and cold. “I never gave a shit.”
“About what?”
“About whatever. You name it, I was apathetic about it at one point. Call it dissatisfaction, disillusionment, disgust, but for one reason or another, I’d always find a reason to disassociate.” The man rubbed his bloodshot eye with the leathery flesh of his palm. “I went through life dreaming that I was something else, somewhere else, and while I did the whole of five decades went by without me. I missed the train because I was too damn proud to buy the ticket.”
The bartender began to feel a true remorse for the creature that was bleeding out in front of him. He didn’t have the heart to try and comment on anything the man had said. He suddenly felt young and naïve.
“Anyway,” the old man said, picking up a pair of black gloves from the stool next to him and haphazardly shoving his cold hands inside them, “I ended up buying my way toward happiness. Things filled the void in me left by my withdrawal. And now, at the end of sixty years, my bank withdrawals have let me with nothing more than this.” He held up a crumpled five dollar note. “A tip, from me to you.”
He laid the bill down on the bar and stood up in a wobble of dizziness. The bartender tried to thank him but the old man interrupted before he could get a word in. “Don’t mention it,” he said, waving his gloved hand dismissively at the young man. “Use it to dry clean your fucking shirt.” The bartender looked down what used to be pristine white sleeves, now soaked brown by the man’s spilled Jack Daniel’s.
The door banged shut as the bartender’s last patron stumbled out onto the cold pavement of Fifth and Main, drunkenly quivering toward God knows where. The young man, ready to leave work and collapse in his warm bed, wiped down the bar and prepared to close up for the night. As he slid his booze-dampened arms through the sleeves of his thick winter coat, he paused and noticed that the five dollar bill, the tip the man had given him, still sat crumpled on the bar.
He picked it up and examined it. Above Abraham Lincoln’s head was a crudely drawn speech bubble, circumscribing the words “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
The young man stuffed the bill in his pocket and went home, and that night, as he settled down into bed, he held his quietly sleeping girlfriend closer than he ever had before.

What happens when a meaningless rant about the pointlessness of the "wireless" craze goes too far?

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 08:02:36 GMT

This.

Needless to say, the boredom that can often come with a vacation has set in, while the tryptophan from today's meal has, unfortunately, not.

Happy Thanksgiving, or what's left of it, anyway.

Tuesday night at the bible study, we lift our hands and pray over your body but nothing ever happens

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 03:19:48 GMT

Everyone who is reading this and even those who aren't should go and obtain Sufjan Stevens' Illinois because it's indescribably beautiful. Now that I've got that out of the way, here's the rest of it:

I sent in my UC application last Sunday. I sure hope they deem me suitable for receiving copious amounts of money from. We'll see, anyway.

I got this letter from the Kiwanis Club today saying I was the student of the month for October or something, and I don't really know what to do with it. It says I have to go to one of their meetings and say a few words of thanks, but I don't want to at all. If they want to make it look like they're reaching out to the community by picking some kid for some special position just because he has a high GPA, well, that's their deal. I'm just trying to get out of high school. So, no, I won't be coming to your luncheon to say thank you for picking me of all people.

It smells like Thanksgiving in my house. It's nice to know that by this time tomorrow I'll have eaten incredible food with the family members I don't get to see enough and sometimes cannot remember the names of. I'm working on that, though.

I didn't go to school today because I've got this shitty cold, that isn't exactly debilitating but I wanted to stay home anyway. I woke up when everyone was getting out of school. That gave me a good reason to smile when I got up.

I guess that's it because I really don't have anything else to say, except that I'm really looking forward to four days off and I hope that everyone has a great time doing whatever they're doing.

For Cory

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 03:07:29 GMT

A Bang at the Door

It began with a tap in the night. Then there came a knock, and finally a bang at the front door of Kansas born and raised Miss Jennifer Crenshaw’s two-bedroom home, where the twenty-year-old God-fearing woman slept in between shifts at the neighboring city’s hospital. She was training to be a nurse. It was a miracle that the bleeding man, who continued to desperately knock on her door, chose her house to flee to. It was one of those things that couldn’t just be a coincidence.
For his intents and purposes, however, it was. In a frenzied state of mind, the man had hardly made it up Jennifer’s long and winding rural driveway without passing out from loss of blood, not being able to take the time to decide whose house to run to. Her home was simply the closest to his now wrecked Ford automobile.
Beating against the door with his scarlet, bloodied hands sapped what remaining strength the victimized man had. His vision was blurred by fatigue. In between blinks the man watched a warm, yellow glow emanate from the window next to the door as Jennifer turned her lights on. He heard the door open and a woman’s gasp as he fell to the ground.
“Zombies,” the man croaked as he fainted atop Jenny’s welcome mat. “Zom…bies.”

Jennifer had misinterpreted what he said out of shock and surprise that a bleeding man had come to knock on her door at three in the morning, she decided. It was not “zombies” he had said. Clearly he was a foreigner, speaking some language Jennifer did not know.
Brushing off his last exasperated exclamation, she pulled the heavy man into her house and laid him on the shag carpet of her living room. She then shut and locked the door. As a nurse in training, Jennifer knew first aid well. Her inexperience rendered her trust in the knowledge she attained falter, so instead of applying pressure to the massive wound in the man’s neck, she went to the phone to dial 911.
Jennifer cursed her shaking fingers as she punched the three numbers into her telephone. As the tone indicated that the number was ringing, Jennifer tried to come up with what to tell the emergency services. She was still in a state of surprise and hadn’t yet had time to gain her composure. It turned out that she wouldn’t have to – a pleasant recorded voice greeted Jennifer, saying, “We’re sorry, all lines are currently in use. In the event of a natural disaster, please seek out medical assistance from the nearest emergency station in your area…” Jennifer’s concentration on the message was lost when she heard the bleeding man on the carpet gurgle and cough out blood all over her brown shag floor.
She tossed the phone in the general direction of its base and kneeled over the wounded man. He was going to die on her floor. She knew it, just as she knew there was nothing she could do anymore. She grabbed a rag from the kitchen and pressed it against his gushing neck. The blood stopped, but not because of the pressure she applied to his wound. It stopped because there was nothing else for him to bleed. She pulled away the rag and stood up.
She turned away from the man’s body and shoved her face in her hands. She didn’t know what to do next. She tried to call her parents. No luck. The lines were busy. She turned on her television, hoping to get some idea of what might be going on. A test card pattern consumed the television screen as she flipped through the channels. She would have gone for the radio next, but as she went to flip it on, the power went out. She was now abandoned in her middle-of-nowhere house with nothing but a corpse to keep her company.
Without the electricity, it was pitch black. Jennifer went to the kitchen and felt around for the cabinet doors behind which her flashlight was kept. She found it and flicked it on. Turning around to reenter her living room, the frightened woman pointed her light at the spot on the floor where the man had died. She gasped and dropped her flashlight as she saw that the man was no longer there.
She felt a sharp pain in her neck as something behind her sank its teeth into her flesh. Falling to the ground in an avalanche of pain as her attacker’s weight pushed into her back, she turned around to see the man who had died begin to rip into her with his bloody mouth. She passed out, and then she died.
Then she got back up. Along with the man, she clambered over to her front door, not able to figure out that it was locked. The two of them tapped at the door.
The tap became a knock, and then a bang on the front door of the late Miss Jennifer Crenshaw’s rural Kansas two-bedroom home.

The Luck of the Draw

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:31:53 GMT

The Luck of the Draw

He sat in a desk next to the classroom’s only window, through which stolen glances of the world outside tantalized his curiosity and drove him further and further toward thinking it was all just a waste of time.
The day he finally left it all behind was the rainiest day that winter, confining most activity indoors and leaving little life outside the classroom window. That day’s lecture was about physics, more specifically the motion of falling objects.
He noted the irony as he effectively dropped out of high school. No one stopped him when he walked out the door. “It’s his future,” would be their reasoning. “Let him.” Coincidentally, it was his reasoning as well.
At first, he didn’t know where to go. His habitual inclination was to walk home, so he did. His parents, away at their jobs, would not know he had left until he was far enough away that he was safe from being dragged home. He briefly considered leaving a note, but he did not know what to write, so he didn’t. He simply grabbed his backpack, into which he stoically placed a few essentials like clothing, a bottle of water, a couple of granola bars, and the few days worth of pills he had left on his counter. He left out the back door, with only his backpack and the fatal retrovirus which he acquired from a blood transfusion some years before.
With the sun behind the clouds and the rain beating down hard on his back, it seemed a dismal setting in which to begin the rest of his life. He knew he couldn’t change the weather, so he forgot about it, and as he did the rain began to subside and the clouds parted to let out the first rays of sunshine that day.
Though the rain had stopped, the wetness of the day left the suburban streets of his neighborhood hauntingly deserted as he made his way toward no where in particular. Empty cars sat along curbs where water was busily flowing into storm drains like a crowd running from a burning building. Swing sets sat unoccupied on the front lawns of houses where children lived, no doubt at that moment ready to get outside now that the rain had stopped.
Eventually, he found himself downtown, a typically bustling hub of goings-on which was curiously absent of any such activity. A few cars drove by – their headlamps cast light on the dampness which hovered like a cloud above the black pavement – but for the most part people had seemingly come to terms with being stuck indoors that day.
One man hadn’t, however: a bum, who, noticing that the weather had finally calmed down, took the opportunity to set up shop on the sidewalk.
His game was poker, which he played for money. A sign on the table he used to play cards on proclaimed him the best poker player in the world, and that he had yet to be beat. He eyed the high school dropout, trying to decide whether or not he had any money on him. He called the boy over.
“Hey, sonny,” he rasped in a voice clearly the result of some considerable amount of smoking. “Come ova’ here.”
The boy walked over. “Yeah?”
“You feel like tryin’ your luck today?” The boy pondered this a moment.
“I guess you could say that.”
“So, hows about a quick game of poker? You up to it?” The boy had played poker a few times, enough to know the basics but not enough to know the game as well as some.
“Sure,” the boy said calmly, already practicing his bluff. “Why not?”
“For sure why not. Let’s play. How much you got on you?” The boy checked his pockets. He had no money.
“I don’t have anything, actually.” The bum looked annoyed. Surely if anyone had any pocket money it would be a teenager. He eyed the boy’s backpack.
“What’s in the book bag?” he coughed.
“Just some clothes and other stuff I need,” replied the boy. “Nothing you’d be interested in.”
“Clothes, eh? You runnin’ away from home?” He asked his question with an air of nostalgia that made the boy question his decision to leave school and home behind.
“Yeah, I think I am,” the boy answered. He patted his backpack. “Just brought the essentials.”
“What’s the ‘sentials, ‘sides the clothes?” the bum asked.
“A little bit of food and a bottle of water. Nothing special.”
“That’s all?” The boy thought a moment.
“I’ve got these HIV pills. You probably wouldn’t need those.” The bum seemed to disagree.
“Actually,” he coughed, “I would.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” The bum seemed unmoved.
“Yeah, well. What’re you gonna do. Life’s unfair.”
“I suppose that’s true. So, I take it you could use the pills?” The bum nodded. “Then let’s play.”
They began the game. The bum dealt out the cards while the boy looked around. No one had come outside yet. The streets were as deserted as they’d ever be. The boy looked at the five cards he’d been given and knew immediately that he had already won. Somehow he’d managed to draw the luckiest hand in poker.
“You putting anything back?” the bum asked. The boy looked at his hand for a few moments.
“Yeah. These three.” He put the cards down and drew three more. The bum did the same with two of his cards.
“All right. What’a ya got?” The two put down their cards. The bum had won. “Well, I’ll be damned, kid. It’s like I said. Life’s unfair. Can’t have all the luck in the world.” The boy smiled and handed the bum the last of his medicine.
“Good game,” he said. He turned his back and continued his aimless walk from the life he knew, sans the medicine he’d need to survive.
The bum laughed as he held the pills in his hand. “Today must be my lucky day,” he remarked to himself as he looked at his winnings and watched the boy wander off into the distance. He pulled back his head and tossed the pills into his mouth.
He began to cough violently. The pills were lodged in his throat, preventing him from breathing. The bum was choking.
Trying to call the boy back, he managed nothing but a stuttered cough and a dry heave which caused more damage than anything else. His face began to turn blue as his consciousness faded.
“Oh well,’ the bum thought as he died. “What’re you gonna do.”

Another short story. I apologize if the formatting is messed up, this box doesn't seem to want to eat my text properly.

I never will grow older, because I drink from waterfalls

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 05:38:58 GMT

So much time these days is spent planning for things that may never happen. Small joys are taken from the idea that someday we'll stop preparing and start doing, but there's an inkling of doubt inside me that says that there will be no simple switch from what is to be to what simply is. Dreams do well in serving to ease unsure and troubled minds, but you have to wonder if they'll ever perform any other function, like, say, coming true. Growing up seems to be a huge set up for disappointment for a broad spectrum of people, and as much comfort looking ahead may bring, eventually the day will come when your plans are no longer excuses for an uncertain future and must be applied if they are not to be left behind.

While opening a can of soda today I noticed that Christmas is approaching, or must be, because on the side of the can sat Santa, immortalized in the aluminum, sharing a bottle of Coca-Cola with a polar bear. "Live, Give, Love," the can said, or something like it. I couldn't help but wonder who would win in a fight if the two of them had a disagreement for some reason. My money is on the polar bear.

Sometimes I can't help but think everything around me is so pointlessly average, so mundane and hackneyed that much of the time I spend is sitting around waiting to die. I can't say that with as much conviction as I'd like, because I realize there is (hopefully) a lot of life to live between now and then, and that sitting around waiting to die is on a voluntary basis and that if I want to I can do anything I want to pass the time. Liberty is a wonderous thing to think about. The ability living things have to do things on a whim, legal or otherwise, is a reassuring concept.

I like sitting in movie theaters. When the film starts, the lights dim out the rest of the world and rob you of your sense of sight toward anything but the movie. The THX surround sound takes reign of your hearing, your taste buds become addicted to popcorn, and all you can feel is the cushy seat beneath you. All of your attention turns to the story that's playing out before you, and you can step out of whatever you were thinking about before and let the film lead your thoughts. Escapism is, in my mind, the utmost form of bliss.

On a not-at-all-surprising, they-totally-saw-it-coming note, I am sick and tired of superficial social situations in which the only purpose of being with other people is to be with other people. For some reason, people are obsessed with being with other people, and while everyone has their need for social interaction, it seems that I just don't have the stomach for it most of the time. I can see through every superficial attempt to gain favor from one person by putting down another, the irritating enthusiasm with which people carry on pointless, self-serving conversations, and the reliance of just about everyone to fall back on predetermined stereotypes when they don't feel like having a personality. Hanging out with a large group of people is, for me, going to the zoo and hanging out in the chimpanzee cages. I wish I could sit there and throw my shit against the walls like everyone else, but for some reason I just can't. I could see people putting it down as my being an elitist asshole, but I'm not sure that's entirely true.

So people call my unwillingness to participate in social functions shyness or just lack of interest, apathy. It doesn't seem to stick, though, because at the end of the day I know there's a better, less understandable reason for it all.

Anyway... that is, perhaps a tad too verbosely, that.

Warm Scotch Fog

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 09:27:01 GMT

He awoke bloodied and bruised, floating in a sea of dead leaves and broken twigs. Frightened at first, too frightened to move, he slowly opened one eyelid and let bright yellow light blind him into vision. Trees obstructed the horizon, slicing the rising sun into a thousand slivers of golden clouds as it warmed the morning mist.
At first he heard nothing but the dull ringing of his battered eardrums, but as his sight gave reference to his senses, his hearing soon followed suit. Birds sang high-pitched songs, communicating to one another the helpless state of the poor young man lying in the forest’s underbrush. Their whistling cries, a hopeless symphony of sympathy, augmented his headache and drew his attention toward the dull pain that was becoming sharper with each second of consciousness.
The pain triggered a memory. He was chased. By what, he could not remember. Perhaps it was nothing, or perhaps it was something that he wanted to forget. More pain, sure to come later, might remind him. He did not want to remember.
Lying on his back, the immobile victim tried to move his fingers. Blood rushed to his left hand, which had evidently gone cold and numb whilst being stuck under his unconscious form. His fingertips felt cold and wet against the forest floor. He took a breath and smelled the fresh, clean air. It had rained the night before.
More memories cut through his pounding headache. Sprinting through the dark unaware of where he was or where he was going, cognizant only of the crinkling sound of sticks and fallen autumn leaves against the ground and the deep suction of wet mud under his feet, he struggled to keep his balance as the rain slicked the soil. Tripping on a rock he could not see, he fell into the black void of unconsciousness face first. The chase was over. He was to have died there, to have been ripped to shreds by whatever creature had pursued him. As he fell into sleep, he realized that the morning was to never come. But it did.
As his steadily awakening pain seemingly reached its apex, the young man cued his shaking arms to push him to his feet. They buckled under his weight as the tattered grey sleeves that covered them, clutching the damp and soggy rain of the previous night, clung to his goose bumped, pale skin. It was no use. He was too weak to move anything but his head, which he turned to look around him.
Dried blood caked the remainder of his grey shirt where the rain hadn’t washed it out. He was right the night before. He had died. Whatever it was that had chased the young man had killed him, letting the broken boy bleed red into the yellows and oranges of what was to be his final resting place.
Slowly turning his head what the last of his strength allowed, he saw the black form of a wolf silhouetted against the shimmering, sepia-hued light that passed through the tree-slit forest’s edge. The wolf turned to look at the boy, a helpless captive of the new morning’s brilliance.
The world turned black and white as the wolf approached his shivering prey. The grey haired predator growled and snarled in slow motion before sinking its warm fangs into the young man’s neck.
The pressure of the wolf’s closing jaw expelled a last breath out of the boy’s frail neck and, as he exhaled it, the wet breath turned to a warm fog in the frigid morning air.