WWHSTD?

If the going gets tough, ask yourself this:
What Would Hunter S Thompson Do? Olde Bouyah. x

A journey; helicopters in the heat; a decision is made

With a shudder and the sound of gears grinding, the old Suburban leaped into action. Well, at the very minimum, the behemoth started moving down his aging father’s long driveway. Giggles escaped from the back of the SUV as one of the two sets of girls whispered to each other about the only male, besides the driver, a young boy, who was sitting in the passenger seat, oblivious. Eight people bounced along the final unfinished gravel section that terminated in the local highway on their way to the mall.
There were to be found six sets of shrill, high voices set to giggle, while one pair, deep or soon to be, lay silent. It seemed, to the young boy, as if the two sets of three girls were competing for his attention, but he could not be sure.
It had not been until earlier that week, when he had been playing with action figures at the side of the pool with some of his younger cousins, that he had first become aware of a certain pull, a subconscious shame and arousal that came upon him when he glanced over, from time to time, at the gaggle of bikini-clad girls his age diving and swimming in the noon sunshine.
Now, sitting next to his uncle, shifting on the hot leather of the seat, he realized his ears were again turning red, and felt his shoulders scrunch forward, to act as walls against the attention he was getting from the rear of the vehicle.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, saw the boy’s shoulders bunch up, felt tension rise in the car at the same moment that the girls’ giggles soured, and they shut up. I’d better have a talk with this boy, he thought, run some things past him about what I think I know about females. Glad those girls shut up, there’s only so much I can take, and the mall is still a half hour away, he thought.

Sweat poured off of his brow, through the stubble on his chin, to indiscriminately bombard his loose cotton shirt. The air conditioning had decided to quit about ten minutes into the traffic jam. Smoke rose ahead, and an ambulance had roared past, sirens blazing, a few minutes before, so he guessed they were coming abreast with whatever was burning. Based on the speed of the ambulance, and the helicopter he was just beginning to hear, over the din of the latest pop diva, played at high volume on insistence of the princesses in back, he surmised that the accident was indeed serious, and that lives were at stake. He figured they had about another fifteen minutes until they cleared the ‘jam, then another fifteen until they reached the mall.

The boy relaxed more as the sun heated up the car and the heat sapped the girls’ energy reserves. After a few minutes, he hazarded a glance back at Her. She had not spoken to him since they arrived for the family reunion, unlike all the other girls, who wanted to know living in California was like. Just like anywhere else, was his answer, which, without fail, caused minor swooning and fanning of the face, and sent girls turning their heads together and whispering.
But She had not seemed interested in the least, had not even apologized when she accidentally kicked his GameBoy into the pool. Her nose turned up into a riot of freckles, and her chestnut hair shone like kelp when it was wet and ohmygod she is looking right at me, he thought, and jerked his head back around to stare forward, awkwardly pointing at something ahead of them, hoping to draw attention from his ruddy ears.
“I see it,” the driver said. “It’s a Huey. Looks like someone got pretty messed up.” The older man looked over at the boy, smiled quickly, then turned to check on the girls in the back.
“You ladies doing alright? I know it’s hot, but we should be there soon.” Only one of the girls, the one his young friend had been checking out, looked directly at him, and smiled weakly.
That’s the girl I would have picked, too, to have a crush on, he thought. Can’t they just hurry it up and shovel up whoever they managed to drag out of that burning heap and fly him off in that shiny new ... He sighed. The heat was getting to him, sapping his patience along with his humanity. Deep breath, there we go, let the body cool itself down.
“Only a few more miles to go, ok guys?” Nothing. Silence from the back, from shotgun.

The girls beat them to the entrance, for the most part because the two weren’t running. The driver yelled across the shimmering heat of the parking-lot for them to wait, asking them to regroup once they got inside the door.
“So, which one is your favorite,” he asked the boy, heat seeping up through the soles of his sneakers, “which one has got you by the balls?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Uncle T.”
“Once we make sure everyone knows the meeting times and areas, let’s you and me go for a walk, cool?”
“Cool,” replied the young Californian.

They sat, at the only bar in the whole mall, looking at each other over frosty mugs of beer, real and root. The older man polished off a glass of water, slamming it down carelessly on the table.
“Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. I couldn’t help but notice that every single one of those girls in the car on the way here was dying for you to talk to her, for you give her the slightest bit of attention. Yet you sat up front, scrunching yourself up, and pointing out of the window. But at one point, you seemed more embarrassed than anything. What does a kid your age have to be embarrassed about?” Shit, I asked him too many questions, he thought.
Seeing confusion cloud over the kid’s face, sensing fear rising in the lymph-nodes where the boy’s jaw turned toward the skull, saw his mouth moving as a dozen different answers fought for approval and vocalization. He decided to start over, keeping it simple.
“Alright. You know what? Forget everything I just said. Let’s keep this simple. Do you like any of the girls you’ve met so far?”
The boy smiled a big smile, and said ”I really like Angelina. Is she your girlfriend or is she your wife? Are you going to marry her?”
“I like her too, but I’m not sure if we’re getting married. Ok, so you like the girl I brought, but what about the ones a little more your age, huh? What about the girls sitting in the back of the car today, you like any of those girls?”
“Well ...” the boy began, looking off to the side, his shoulders slumping. After a moment, he looked back, briefly meeting the older man’s eye before buying his face in the sweet foam of his float.
The older man sat patiently, took a sip of his beer, and checked out a waitress walking by.
“Well ...” the boy continued, setting down his drink, foam caked in the corners of his mouth, “the thing is, there’s this one girl, she has freckles, and she doesn’t like me, plus she kicked my GameBoy into the pool, and she never even looked at me until today, and ..”
“Slow down, champ,” the man said, ”what’s this about her not liking you? Did she say so?”
“Not really,” the boy responded, looking down at his drink. Mumbling, he continues “but every other girl has been asking me all kinds of questions about where I live, and been really excited about talking to me, while this girl, she’s so pretty, and seems nice, and I’d really rather talk to her than all the other girls, I just know it, but she hasn’t come over yet.”
“I think I understand. One time, there was this girl, named Lynn Crumbling, who I was crushing on like a motherf ... anyway, she was hot, and the day before my birthday party, I handed her a note on the bus, but she didn’t come to my party. I think it still affects me today.”
The kid had been looking off in the direction of a gaming store, and didn’t notice I had stopped talking for a few seconds after the fact.
“Look, kid, I didn’t bring you here to lecture you, but maybe what you should do is make the first move, just go in guns blazing, dazzle her with, well, with ... do you have anything you can dazzle her with?”
“I can play the piano, sort of,” the kid said.
“That’s better than nothing, but doesn’t really help us right now. Tell you what, let’s go track down the girls, and then you can talk to her, right?”
“But won’t the other girls get upset,” the boy asked, panic sneaking into his voice, “what if they don’t talk to me after that?”
“That is what it boils down to, kid. What do you want more, to have all these girls all over you, or do you want to make it happen with the one you really want to talk to? Your call.”
For a moment, the boy sat, watching the remnants of his drink settle in the mug before him.
“Want another,” The older man asked, raising his had to flag down a waitress
“No!” The boy said, loudly, more so than he had hoped. “Let’s go find them. I’ve made my choice.”

An annoyance; fond memories; a shock

The man would simply not stop complaining. From the first time we met, now four years hence, when his favorite topic was how he’d be getting the short end of the stick, once his divorce went through, and the “life-draining hag” was out of his life, until now, today, a Wednesday.
For days on end I was forced to listen to Ulysses D. Thurgow III, rant on, in his pseudo-optimistic way, about how much life, in general, sucked.
Forced, you ask? Why forced? Could I not have simply walked away, stopped up my ears, put on headphones, or something?
No. I chose not to take any of the countless opportunities to act, for one simple reason: he is my brother. Not by blood, no. Ulysses D. Thurgow, III is my wife‘s brother, adopted shortly after he was born. The chasm that separates him from the otherwise gentle, strong-willed genetic offspring of Dorothy and Ulysses Thurgow, II, is quite obvious to anyone close enough to the family, who nonetheless love this perpetually complaining man.
“You know the problem with the city council?” U III asks. “U III”is what I call him, but not to his face. Sounds like “you three”.
I do not respond, pretending instead that I didn’t hear the question.
“Well let me tell you. The problem is that they sit there, bleeding the retirement coffers dry, making themselves and their friends rich, and what will happen to them? Nothing. Maybe a fine, maybe some parole. Some little guy like me, on the other hand, gets caught riding with traffic, going with the flow, you know ...” here he stopped to look at me, squinting his eyes, hoping, it seemed, for some sign on my part, that I understood, that I was on his side “Anyway, you get a guy like me, not really speeding, and ...”
“You were going ninety five, Ulysses, in a fifty five,” I say.
“But that’s not the point!” My last comment seems to have rattled him a bit. He seems to be running scared, I can see sweat bead out his pores, so closely packed is the elevator in which we stand. “The point is that I was in a hurry and there were at least two or three other people going as fast as I was. Why didn’t the cop pull them over? Did he not see the stickers saying I support cops?”
“That might have pissed him off even more,” I mumble to the woman standing next to me, who I can tell has been listening to us, based on the way she stands.
“What did you say?” Ulysses asks.
“I said, I think we just missed our floor. Does anyone know what floor we’re”
“Second, going up,” a curt, almost angry voice, nearly shouting, conveys from a line of suits in the front. Must be enjoying this little talk U III and I are having.
We were picking up my wife at the airport. My wife had insisted I stop by and grab Ulysses from his job, two business parks over, and take him with me. Otherwise he would have sat on a bus for three hours or something. As we exit the elevator I make eye contact with the woman from the lift. Somewhat tall, fit, exquisitely business-travel-dressed, half Chinese, by the looks of it, she gives me a once-over, and a little smile, lingering just too long for it to be innocent, just enough for me to remind myself that I am married.

I met my wife at a bookstore, where I was working, at my parents’ place on summer break. She lived on the other side of town, in what I always thought was a bad side neighborhood.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for a book ... help me find it?”
At that very moment I was on my knees, restocking the science fiction section, and started to tell her to go find one of the search-kiosks, where she could find anything she needed. Just as I was about to start, I saw, looking through my legs, a perfect foot, wearing light sandals. Whipping around into a crouch, too quickly (I scared her and knocked over a stack of books), I managed to say
“Sure, uh, hi. What was the name of the book you were looking for again? I’m sure I know where to find it, just let me know what genre.”
“Slow down, book-boy. Aren’t you going to clean up these books you spilled? Plus, I didn’t name any book, just said I was looking for a book.”
For the next two hours, we wandered the bookstore. she would think up names of books, and we’d go try and find them. If we did, we’d read the first page to each other, back and forth, trying to make each other mess up. We laughed and talked about everything, but, thinking back, those two hours were a blur. A perfect, sun-lit blur filled with her tanned stomach, long brown tresses. Finally the manager flagged me down, over by Ancient History, to tell me that the store would be closing soon, and that I could go home.

Words fade in, vision collapses back to reality, and I realize Ulysses is standing far too close to me, and see in my peripheral that we are both blocking others’ view of the arrivals monitor bank.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you feeling ok? Can you hear me?
“Hello? Are you ok? What are you so worried about?” Ulysses asks.
“Not worried, U, just thinking,” I say, looking over his shoulder, across to the hallway window, not sure why.

In the fading twilight, against a backdrop of cotton-puff clouds exploding with red, orange sunlight, the second port-side engine lights off, one last time, separating itself from the wing. The pilot feels it, fighting to keep the plane steady, the stick bruising his thighs in its wild jumps and starts. From his vantage point at the window, Taylor Underwood watches as the second engine ploughs back, through the wing, shearing it off, about five yards out, igniting what little fuel is left inside. He sees the plane begin to twist, turning upside down, so close to the runway. Next to him, Ulysses stands and stares, disbelief and shock fighting for pole position on his face. The plane makes it three quarters of the way around and slams into the runway, cockpit first. The rest of the plane crumples like a squashed soda-can, the tail whipping around to gouge a huge chunk out of the pavement.
After two hundred yards, what’s left of the plane comes to rest to the sound of sirens, fire-retardant foam spewing from three fire trucks.
“Wait, what flight was that ...?” I ask, turning before anyone can answer, walking calmly, a void widening in my gut, seeping into my heart, which knows the answer already.
I check the flickering screens, vision blurring. Hardly able to breathe past the lump in my throat, I find the flight my wife was on United flight 239, Los Angeles to Atlanta, arriving 1830 on the Arrival screen.

An animal wail fills the waiting area. A young boy, shocked and crying, but not sure why, turns briefly toward the noise. He sees a man, crouched on the floor in the middle of the large hallway he and his Mom crossed to get to the window. The man is crying and shaking, too, but he scares him. Another man, a fat man, is standing next to the man on the floor, looking like he doesn’t know what to do. He begins to look around, and sees the young boy. Scared, the boy buries his head in his mother’s soft hair.

Ruminations, doubt. A pep talk

How much is the toil of one man worth? How much do you pay someone for doing a job? Who determines what is enough compensation for a job done, and when it would again be reasonable to inquire into the matter?

What is the meaning of this consistent apathy toward women. Typically, I have squandered nearly half a dozen opportunities this past month, two involving the exchange of telephone numbers. Many revolve around my stubborn refusal to either believe what the girl is telling me, or find any interest whatsoever in what she is saying for longer than a few minutes. After that it’s all show, going through the motions, flight-reaction kicking in, quickly overriding the urge to stay and fight it out, figuratively.
What else, when looked at from a certain point of view, is the courtship ritual? What has it become, say, perhaps, since the 1950s, where the ideals and morals of American society began to shift for real, loosening to one, tightening to another degree. Today, now, it’s a race to get into her pants, even if she’s nice, even if she’s not that kind of girl. Sure, every once in a while, you’ll come across a girl, at a bar, in Southern California, who is truly only there because of INSERT FRIEND’S EVENT, but, even if she’s married or has boyfriend, if you and she happen to be at a bar at the same time, you have a fighting chance of having sex with her.
And each and every chance I’ve got, this past month, I’ve pissed away. I even have women coming up to me, even hitting on me, and it just phases right through, like fog over a live wire, except maybe reverse. So much potential energy sitting there, out in space, and this gaseous mass just runs right into it, leaving maybe the slightest bit behind, but for all feasible accounts fully intact so short after its run-in with potentiality.

I am frustrated. I have read hundreds, but not thousands of books, in my life. I have been exposed to some of the best storytellers humankind has to offer, Chaucer, Herodotus, W. Gibson, Plato, Stephenson, Dickens, Gaiman, etc., and can not compile a simple forty page piece of semi-decent material, because I find myself burnt out after spewing thoughts onto a page for twenty minutes.
I need an outline. I need a clear, concise breakdown of the players, in the story, what they are doing, why, where, and to what end. I must sit down and write the framework, ignite the holy fire, finish it up, save the day and get the girl. I know this, and have attempted now three times to complete a decent skeleton. As suggested, I believe the most expedite path toward actually understanding how this is done, is to have it taught to me. Do not despair.
Of course, I can stumble around, finding my own way along the forked, dismal cowpaths, the broad, shining avenues of the storyteller. Certain forces, quietly, inside, work to dissuade me from paying to have an established method of writing quality literature placed before me, when I can simply read voraciously, writing out the framework of my favorite writers, toying with their ideas, filching their best devices, their most successful literary bridges, the choicest modi operandae. Filch away, olde boy, snatch and steal, take what is not yours and make it something no one has ever dreamed about. The Holy Fire is but a small flame, yellow, burning faintly in the center of my pectoral cavity. I just saw it, in front of the mind’s eye, barely flickering, like the pilot light on a gas stove, hidden away in the bowels of the beast. With the right maneuvering, the twisting of the proper dials, the right tools disposed, that small flame can become a howling inferno, an unstoppable, blind force of purest will, purest might.
I fear this flame. I fear the success it can bring, should it be fueled. Now, for a few weeks now, I have come to terms with the notion of failure. I fancy, now, that failure is in the eye of the beholder, resting next to beauty and success.
Every single action I undertake can be seen as a failure. Getting up in the morning, going to work without eating anything, can be seen as a failure to follow the simple suggestions of nutritionists the world over to stoke the engines, get things moving, lose weight faster, burn future intake better, have more energy more often, live longer, be more alert, et fucking cetera.
Success means I got out of bed in the first place, having passed out in a drunken stupor not two hours earlier, by some miracle heeding even one of the three separate alarm clocks.

I choose success. I choose to view the chaotic swirl of events, of stimuli, that is life and look at it as the positive progression from one spot to the next, one perfect frame of being, ever passing through the fulcrum point of quality, to the next.
Pretty much, suck it up, stay neutral but forward looking, mind that which has already come to pass, dig in behind your chosen principles, maintain an avenue upon which to retreat to new or better principles, should they present an overall more feasible or simply better MO.

T. A. Edison tried over one thousand times to invent the lightbulb. Finally, at the debut of a working prototype, he was asked if the end result was worth so many frustrating defeats. He responded to the affect that had he not stumbled down the path of the thousand mishaps, he would never have reached the final destination, success. So buck up, olde boy, and go for a run.

Ah yes, two and a half miles in twenty minutes. But, twenty minutes of yoga, a hundred pushups, throughout the day. Not spectacular, but getting there.

Five Men in a Bar, gloomy

The room was dark. Not the kind of dark you find in horror movies, not the kind that could be hiding something. This room was dark, almost out of spite. In the corners, hidden in darkness themselves, there was absolutely nothing scary, in fact, nothing at all. Here and there, one could find a table, lit by a single candle that only shed its light onto its resting place’s circular top, not a photon escaping. There was some form of overall light in the room, coming in from cracks that had opened in the plaster and straw walls, cracks the tavern keeper had been too lazy or poor to cover. Not that it rained that much here, but it’s just not good to have holes in your walls.
Three of the four customers sitting in the place were locals. No one else really came around, except for the average tourist, one of which happens to be the fourth customer to wearily settle himself down on a hard wooden stool by the bar. The tourist, who had just come in off the dusty street, only now, his eyes adjusting to the dimness of the place, sees the dark sheets nailed over the windows, and the cracks. He also notices the dimness, listlessly clinging to whichever piece of furniture, heel of bread, or shoe happened to be closest.
Stifling a yaw from a hard day of touristy things, the stranger leans in toward the bartender, while reaching into the right jacket pocket of his tan windbreaker. He pulls a small dictionary out of his windbreaker and begins leafing through it as the local men sit, content to watch the potentially amusing encounter. There are cliffs, located a few kilometers outside of town, down the old mule path toward the ocean, that can get windy this time of year, one of the locals thinks, that must be why the tourist wears a windbreaker in this heat.

With the tiniest of starts, the local man realizes that he used to love the cliffs, but hasn’t taken the time to go, these past few years since starting at the new Ford factory in town. Maybe I will go, with my wife and our son, the local man thinks to himself, when I have some time off from the factory. I will buy my son a fine tan windbreaker, too. I will lean with him into the strong wind, and we will lean out over the side together, and nothing bad will happen to us. His mother will be afraid, but we will look each other in the eyes, my son and I, and we will laugh.

Seeing his friend start, the second local man glances toward his cousin, the bartender, who, he knows, does not mind dealing with the tourists that come to the area. He, too, remembers the cliffs, but has no desire to go to them, as there are more tourists there, more rude, unfriendly people, like the ones that treat his wife poorly, should her cleaning cart get in their way. The second man’s wife works at one of the big tourist hotels, just a few villages down the coast. There is talk, the man knows, at city hall, visible just barely through the cracks in the wall, of selling public land to a group of investors, so they can build a hotel halfway down toward the cliffs. Saddened by the thought of so many loud, smelly tourists in his small town, he smiles, thinking that his wife could take a job in the new hotel, so she would be closer, so they could spend more time together.

Floorboards creak with the first two steps our third man takes, bringing the halting conversation at the bar to a stop, his two companions snap out of their reverie, and turn to face him. A reluctant shadow still clings to his boot, it seems, returning to the gloom as soon as the tourist starts with that puzzled look many people get. The third man strokes his beard and strides over to the bar, to stand next to the puzzled tourist.
After a split second’s hesitation, he decides not to tell the tourist that he is not welcome in this place. He does not show the man his knife, with the sole purpose of slashing up a few limes of course, or shout him out into the blazing heat. He does not beg the man to leave his town as it is, does not explain to him the delicate balance that holds the community together, or how cracks are showing in the once-solid facade.

Turning to the bartender, the bearded man laughs. He laughs until he cries, then he has drinks poured for every man present. Now they all laugh.

Hassan @ work & GF

“Hassan You are late. Why can you not be anywhere on time? I thought your mother and I raised you better than this.” He can be very quiet when he needs to. I am clumsy to have let him sneak up on me in my daydreaming. I know he’s angry, not just being a dick because he can, because he’s talking in Arabic, normally exclusively for home use. He’s probably stressed out because of the large number of customers I see looking up for the first time around the room.
Hearing someone behind him, Hassan answers in English, “Of course, father. I’ll be sure to doublecheck the toner cartridges, right away.” He turns to the middle aged gentlemen who had walked up behind him,
”Welcome to Kinko’s, sir. Is there any way I may assist you?” Hassan asks.
“Yes. I was beginning to wonder if anyone worked here. I’m looking to have some flyers printed.” The man, wearing a business suit, with briefcase, wheels to follow Hassan, already on his way toward the far side of the store.

It is late, mostly, when he returns home from helping his father at the store. His mother knows Hassan can make his way home without incident; and is very proud of him for working so hard. She herself does not work outside of the home, but cooks and keeps things neat around the house. Hassan’s mother, for all purposes, and most any point of view, raised the children.
“Tell me, son, how was school today? What are some of the things they taught you?” His mother always asks him these types of questions, because she loves him, he knows, and because she is truly interested.
“I had a math test, which I’ll get back tomorrow. We discussed a reading of American history, starting with the Civil War, leading up to WWII,” he pronounces this dubya dubya too, much to the annoyance of his father, who has just taken a seat at the dinner table.
“Hassan Speak proper English What will people think of us if they hear you talking like this?” His father speaks in Arabic, his tone carrying both disappointment and anger.
“Father,” Hassan, answering in Arabic, “all of my friends say it like this, I do not see the problem.”
“The problem is that you do not listen to your father And you were late to work today, did he tell you that, Mother?”
“It was only a few minutes, and I helped the customers the moment I walked in the door,“ Hassan tries in his defense.
“Hassan, you know that is not a valid excuse,” his mother says, not looking at the boy. “You will let us know, what your score is on test you took today, yes?”

Later that night, long after his parents had gone to sleep, Hassan stands in the kitchen of their second floor apartment, having avoided the noisy spots in the hallway floor, passing the room vacated by his brother and sister. His sister had left not long ago, for college in northern California. He missed them both, and was beginning to notice more scrutiny and less tolerance from his parents.
Dial tone. He punches in the numbers that will ring Samantha, on her cellphone. Her father works at Northrop Grumman, her mother works a register at the local Vons, where Sam packs groceries after school.
“Hello?” She was speaking quietly, which indicated to him that her mother was still awake, most likely in the living room, which was right next to Samantha’s room.
“Sam, it’s me, Hassan.”
“Hi, baby. What’s the matter?”
“What do you mean, what’s the matter?
“You sound upset, is all,” she says. Since they had met, that first day in eighth grade, he could keep nothing from her. “Listen, Hassan, I can’t talk. My mom is still up. Let me call you later. Bye”
Dial tone, once again.

...

The short repose from cubeLand, all of three days to myself, the first extended weekend since February, is alien. It felt weird, Monday morning, my subconscious activating auto-awake mode at around 6:30, without an alarm, without any other driving force than fear of getting to work late.
Giddy with the prospect of so much time to myself, to do everything and nothing, expanding works in progress, reading as much as I want, blowing up Germans in the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, I turn around to find no time left. It has flown, too quickly, through the floodgates of unbridled exuberance, pouring out onto the sun bleached sand, pissed out on the shirttails of the last Budweiser. I loved every second of it.

“Some people would kill for a body like this,” someone close to me said recently, referring to himself. I laughed till I doubled over at the waist. The conviction in his voice, the reality of living with someone who is, to the core, so in love with himself, so convinced that he is right, all the time, that everything he says is true, and that he can order people around like servants, is fascinating.
I have been for the past four years attempting to remove myself from feelings of pride, from the idea that my accomplishments are to be touted, attempting in stead to let them shine for themselves, regardless if anyone is watching or not. Fuck, I hope no one is watching, most of the time, so they don’t see the remnants of pride wash briefly through the stormfront of my emotions, the vast copula of my imagination.

File access is becoming more and more easy. I am training myself to remember nearly everything anyone says, creating a mental image of that person, an avatar of sorts I can call up to help me remember important things about that person, to make them feel more comfortable and to facilitate conversation. I can look at a car, burning past me on the freeway, and actually see wild apes clinging to it for dear life, ripping chunks of plastic off of it as the driver takes evasive action, to throw them off.
Like a hologram projector- game I saw once, with my brother, of a cowboy fighting space creatures, kind of like that scenes constantly play out in the curved dome of my imagination. The bottom of the curve starts at eyeball height, with the main backdrop starting its curve about four feet out, coming to its hazy conclusions at the edges of the peripheral. Scenes from days past, from movies, short clips of past girlfriends, convulsing in orgasm, visualizations of hundreds of scenes from scores of books, my interpretation of an author’s ability to describe a given situation.
If I need a two ton anvil to fall on someone’s head, it busts out a few ceiling tiles, an old florescent light, to accordion the offending party.
But does everyone have this projection booth? Does everyone compare a given situation to various life experiences, video games, comics, literature, science fiction, movies, snippets of conversation, the pattern of chewing gum vs fractured pavement, a baby’s tired wail, the smell of a much-used dumpster?
I doubt I am special, doubt these three I call mine own, my daimons, the howling beast, antagonistic trickster, calculating demi-philosopher, I will ever truly call my own, lest they overwhelm me, lest I utilize their strengths too often, and fall prey to their weaknesses.
Regardless, as I do not look to compete with others, so no other will be able to compete with me. Something for the kids. X

A man and Woman; to Greece; love making

His right hamstring extends farther down than the left as he strains to find the right angles and positions in downward dog pose.
She steals a glance, stifles a smile at his visible effort to make his body conform to an unfamiliar position. Her smile is not malicious; she loves him for working so hard on something that comes so easily to her.
He will smile that same smile, in church, his voice clear and bright ,while she struggles trying to out-sing the group of blue-haired ladies who always seem to have arrived just before them. They are side by side, her heels rest easily on the floor behind her, his clear a few inches.

On the way home, later that night, they speak quietly. Excited at his increasing flexibility, they also speak of their upcoming trip to Greece, planned for later in the summer. They speak of having children.
What a good father he will make, she says, just as he is thinking the same thing about her. What a perfect mother she will make, he says. The couple talks about how cute their babies will look, but do not discuss when exactly they plan to begin having any.
At home, in the dark warmth of post-coital bliss, he cups her face in his hands, calls her by one of his many pet names he has for her, and is content.
The woman listens to her husband’s breathing, and, hearing it become regular and deep, knows he is asleep. Getting out of bed quietly, she reaches to turn on a small lamp, but a sudden break in the clouds lets in enough light from the full moon for her to see. She turns to the side, looking at her naked body in the mirror, running her hands over the soft skin of her stomach, wishing for something to be growing inside. She stands there, knowing she should go back to asleep, and, after admiring her slender physique one last time, does.

The Aegean sea glistens in the distance, just beyond the dry scrub covering the top of the small hill they have just climbed. She can see that his feet are dusty from the climb, and can feel the powdery soil covering her own. They stand there, holding each other, looking down at the twisting streets of the small town, at the winding alleys and small outdoor cafes that they have grown to love over the past week, and are at peace. There is no need for words, for fear that they could shatter the perfection of Them at that moment in time.

Later that evening, in the clear light of the full moon, after a dinner of fresh seafood, bread dunked in olive-oil and garlic, and fresh greens, they make love three times. Neither of the two notice how often they make love, up until the moment when the rising sun blinds them at the moment of orgasm.
The sun is high when they awake, and they are famished. They are also late for their flight, and just barely reach the gate, carrying one last packet of food from an ancient street vendor named Ander.

The woman awakes, nauseous again. After the second day of vomiting, she makes an appointment with the doctor for the next day.

“Please have a seat,” the doctor says in a soothing tone. Panic shoots up her spine, the hair standing out on her neck and arms. “We have done some tests, and discovered the reason for your nausea these past few days.”
“Well, what is it,” the woman asks, ”can you give me something to make it go away?’
“It’s not that kind of sickness,” he says. ”Please, it’s nothing bad, stay seated. Mary, you’re pregnant.”

Hassan, late to work

Leaping over the short stone wall, I quickly duck behind the tall hedgerow that borders the old woman’s garden, through which I just took the shortcut. Without the short-cut, I either have to go up, or down, a short set of stairs, and I’d much rather hop a wall under danger of being lambasted by some ancient old biddy than have to do that.
I am fourteen, perhaps too short for my age, but that runs in the family. My parents came here from Iraq, leaving just after Saddam took power, in ‘79, to come to this country. I have never even been there, never set foot on Persian soil, and am as American as they come. Sure, some kids give me shit about being from Iraq, because it’s been in the news more, call me Saddam at school, but I have enough other kids to hang out with, as well as a minor reputation, that no one really does much about it.
One time I got into it with Jimmy Nelson after school, when he and two other kids jumped me just as I about to leave the park (another shortcut), calling me diaper-head and camel jockey. They each got in a few punches, before I got really scared and started swinging. One of them crawled the four blocks to his house, told his Mom he fell off of a friend’s bike. Since then, I really haven’t had too much trouble, even with most high school kids.
But back to the current situation. I am late. I know my Dad’s going to be pissed. He bought the franchise to a Kinko’s, back when they first got here, with money his mother gave to him and my mom. I help out the tech guys, who really aren’t that good with the machines. Mostly it’s me showing them how to set up new networks, debugging the copiers. I reload paper, work the registers if its really busy, stuff like that, most days after I finish my schoolwork.
My grandmother refused to move when my mom and dad did, said she couldn’t leave the village she had known all her life, but gave them as much money as she could. It turned out to be enough for the franchise, and to cover expenses while they were getting set up. I came around a good time after that, the third of four kids, my younger sister now walking with me to school in the mornings.
Officially two minutes late. The calendar reminds me it’s a Wednesday, and Wednesdays are always busy. And my birthday is coming up. I don’t mind birthdays, except for my Aunt Lila, who smells like her cats and qata'if, a type of fritter. But I just wish people would just give me money, so I can buy a cellphone, keep in touch with my friends, take Samantha Higgins out to the movies, for some heavy petting. Dark brown hair, slightly upturned nose, swim team, mostly a complete bitch. Perfect.

“Hassan! You are late. Why can you not be anywhere on time? I thought your mother and I raised you better than this.” He can be very quiet when he needs to. I am clumsy to have let him sneak up on me in my daydreaming. I know he’s angry, not just being a dick because he can, because he’s talking in Arabic, normally only for home use. He’s probably stressed out because of the large number of customers I see, looking up for the first time around the room.

cubeLand vexations

My aspiring beard itches occasionally. It is a welcome “fuck you”, I think, to the corporate acceptability standards. I have reached the point, once again, at which I can truly say I am no longer vested in the company.
I have reached and passed the point of caring, of truly giving a shit about my job. I continue to perform as professionally as I have in the past, perhaps more so, but do so with the underlying resolve, the underlying knowledge that my time at the company is limited. A dozen emails sit in the inbox, two reminders from the calendar telling me to harass someone else about this or that project. Emails go back out, detailed inquiries flit away to different departments, but only following an accurate, brief file-check of the hardcopy.
I’m on top of it. Wait, what is the problem? Oh, send me the information and I’ll sort everything out for you. I know, I got it together. Come on, we’re Operations!
Can’t stand that guy. Not that he’s a bad person or anything, it’s just that I always feel like he’s talking down to me. Your basic schoolboy bitch: all growns up and ready to wield his meager superior status over me, convinced he is my equal or better because his fucking title is longer. But that is just me fluffing me. Maybe he’s the next Oppenheimer.
The walls run red with the blood of younglings. My vision hazes over, quickly, from the edges inward, redness encroaching in a narrowing corona, while little triangular adrenaline glands atop my kidneys start pumping.
Bloodlust rises in my gut, in the cupola of my imagination, and I grab the neck of the nearest gamer-nerd, one of about a half dozen motherfuckers who have been grabassing and discussing strategy about the game currently underway, right next to my cube. I have asked them to be quiet in the past, in more of less kind ways, but this is enough. My voice reaches a shout before the last and most oblivious gamer-nerd realizes he should shut the fuck up.
“Guys, I’m trying to work here. Do you think you could maybe,” I talk louder, straining to keep my voice calm, from letting the violence seep through, brought on my one of them turning to resume his redundant discussion, ”keep it down, I can’t concentrate on my work because of the volume. So, please, keep it down.”
What I wanted to say: ”Yo! G-Pat, Shut the fuck up. No, really, dude, you have both excruciatingly poor delivery and think that you’re one funny motherfucker, laughing at your own jokes about some intricate detail you discovered that can win you games. I’ve been grinding away for the past six hours on four different projects, and for four of those hours, you guys have been standing around switching between jerking off and backstabbing each other. Could you take your stupid fucking game and take it somewhere else?”
But NO! Not in corporate America, fucking cubeLand. Besides, that’s just what those fucker want. Someone to point their finger at and say “he’s not a team player, we were doing something work related!” Turn things right around on you they would. Great fear you have. Fear leads to the dark side of the force. Failed I have.

What really happens is that I force the disturbance to the back of my mind, burying it under layers of classical music streaming realtime from DR Klassisk (upper right hand corner NETRADIO), which brings the added bonus of news broadcasts entirely in Danish, a fascinating language that runs at times foreign, at times familiar to ye olde language processors in the prefrontal cortex, or wherever those wily bastards choose to populate.

Worse is a boss who wants to make everyone happy, and who reiterates the need for good interoffice relations, the need for our team to appear approachable to everyone. Of course I understand the necessity of this, and people don’t seem to hesitate approaching me with questions, the answers to which can be found in the forty-page manual I wrote to keep track of everything our team does throughout any given week. However I don’t see the need to tiptoe all the time.
Sometimes the easiest and most efficient solution is to tell someone what they are doing wrong and suggest alternative methods for doing it right. Fuck, everyone in the fucking company says hi to me, and I’ve spoken with all four hundred on at least one occasion, if only exchanging hellos. I am confidant to a dozen, pest to departments, befriender of the ninety eight pound weakling, chest thumping and chick scoping buddy to the jock.

I am everyone’s friend, and friend to none. He who can disappear, without a trace, by time you’ve turned around from ordering the next round. He who has no objection to sleeping with female coworkers.
Ah, self-inflated narcissism. It feels good to look at yourself from that angle, and is surprisingly addicting. I wonder if that’s why I see it every day, especially at home. :)

Man and Woman

Night creeps up on two figures, sitting, cradling each other, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Their bellies are full of homemade lasagne, served to them by an ancient Mexican woman from her own stove, and they are happy, as they sit there, saying nothing, savoring the moment together.
Far below them, waves pound a dark beach, erasing the traces of hundreds of feet, spreading seaweed in cryptic patterns.
The man looks down, at the last seagulls wheeling toward their evening berths. The woman, instead, stares upward, at the dancing and shifting patterns of the sunlight against cumulus clouds far overhead, growing dimmer as the earth completes its rotation.
He looks up from the beach, just as her gaze is lowering, and, for a moment, their heads are level, their eyes meet. Old friends they are, as well as lovers, but that only occasionally, and now mostly to strengthen the already strong bond they share.
The man loves her. He sees in her that same openness he saw when they first met, and loves her for never losing it. He knows she embraces every second of the day, every single occurrence with the eyes of an infant, not judging, not thinking about right or wrong, but simply taking things for what she sees them to be, and acting.
She loves him. He has always supported her, in small and large ways, even when she wanted to start working again, so soon after their third child. She cannot imagine life without him.

The sun has not yet risen when the woman starts from her sleep. Staring at the ceiling, she listens, trying to locate the noise she knows wasn’t from her dream, and rests her hand on her husband’s arm, comforted to know he is by her side. The man lies trembling on his side, shaking, his breath laboring in and out of his lungs.
Alarmed, the woman jumps out of bed, hands groping for the lights. His skin is ashen, his eyes close. His breathing seems to have stopped, and as she crouches next to him, offering quiet, comforting words, she hears one final breath escape.

She sits now, on the bed next to him, tears raining onto his face. A wail escapes her. Uncontrollably, panicked, she cries, the sudden void unbearably large, his sudden absence simply too much. Her mind spins, her feelings churning through disbelief, utter despair, joy, weightlessness, crushing agony.

She cannot bear to believe he is gone. Cannot fathom not having him at her side. Lying next to him, with a broken heart, she wills herself to live no longer.

BURFDAY

Thoughts strain to find each other as my body slowly kills the hangover. It kinda sucks hanging out alone on your birthday, but I live far enough away from my group of friends that I have but don’t talk to enough that it makes it hard to motivate, then there’s the issue with drinking and driving, definitely not a good thing.
Progress talking to the ladies is good too, getting better with the bullshitting, better feigning interest, keeping them talking, not being too negative. Plus I fucked up my phone last night, dropped it or something, screens are out, can’t see anything, but it still works as a phone. It sucks because I want to have the text messaging feature and can’t stand not having coverage here, should just switch to t-mobile. Or should switch to a siblings’s service, so that calls are free, at least to them.
I realize that certain things make me happy, like staying in contact with friends, but if I don’t stay on top of it, things deteriorate. Fuck. I’m not so worried about being a year older, not depressed about that, but kinda down on myself for not making better use of my time. I realize that I really don’t like it when I’m judged, or when I feel like I have to answer to someone when I’m talking to them. There is trying to help someone because you care and there is grilling someone about how they are progressing, then making fun of people when you don’t see them operating at motivational levels you believe you have achieved. But fuck that too, throw down next time it happens, push back, let them know you don’t appreciate it, that it changes the relationship.
Should have taken it a bit slower last night, wouldn’t feel this hung the fuck over, would have more enjoyed Episode III for the second time, no euphoria, except for the younglings part, and that sometimes scares people. Forcing myself to do this, to record my thoughts and impressions of a day past, a day spent on two wheels, fine sand, glued to a movie screen, and talking with strangers and friends. It all seems so important, every detail, and yet so trivial, like I’m ready to say fuck it to a free lunch just so I can see how it feels to do so, because I can. Lovely.

Honor

Honor. Honor is what has made great men the subject of tales since the dawn of human existence. It is the foundation of human society, the invisible, intangible bond that ties each one of us to the other. Some people call it love, some compassion, but I, full of piss and wind, prefer honor.
To paraphrase from Pirsig, honor is that fleeting notion, at the very point at which one makes a decision, indeed at every conscious point in life. The decision to act honorably is akin to the very iron atoms on the tip of an arrow that split the air in their passage; at point along their passage, they fulfil the exact purpose, without question, for which they were created. Similarly, the shaft and ferrous metal leading up to the atoms at the very tip represent the experiences and underlying person who you are, or think you are, while the very tip represents the fulcrum point that is every moment of life, every decision made.
Decisions are tricky to lock down. Is it my decision to breathe? Physiologically, my unconscious nervous system is programmed to breathe for me, and only through training can I learn to control it, to channel my breathing for energy or to negate stresses exerted on the body. My decision to have a few drinks tonight to ring in this twenty eighth year of my life is a decision I make consciously. It will hopefully not adversely affect those around me, and will ring in this semi-momentous occasion with a dampened bang of sorts, a loosening of the thoughts, the tongue and the cocker spaniel ( ;) to any ladies who may be reading, besides my sister). But my decision, each and every day up until a few months ago, NOT to write, not to be creative or express my emotions, NOT to become an active smith of lies (all tales and propositions are lies from one point of view), at least not on paper, now seems utterly absurd. Absurd in the sense that this release allows me to speak my mind, even if few people hear it, allows me to bury some hatchets, get the poison from the day out before it sets in.
I believe that far fewer poisons have been allowed to encroach on my person since I made the effort to seek the positive point of view, since I listened to myself giving commentary during a conversation, maintaining self awareness and actually thinking “How does this sound to other people.” I was very surprised to hear myself buddying up to people a lot, taking their point of view more often than offering my honest opinion or offering a rebuttal to their statement. Fluffing people like this certainly maintains a status quo of sorts, makes a lot of people like you because you take their side, but I would argue that it is not the honorable thing to do.

In my humble opinion, it is honorable to contradict, or voice an opposing view, at any point in time, regardless of the other members of a conversation, if you are convinced you are in the right. This is arguably one of the most difficult and tricky things to do, as it is very tempting to mistake other impulses, such a vanity or greed, for honor. Honor is all powerful, a person’s most treasured known trait, that neither torture nor hardship nor even death can take away.
It pervades our daily existence, from using turn signals to escorting spiders out of a crowded room, from sticking to your guns when three a-holes mistake your Soviet-era-style shirt for something racist, all the way to telling the one person outside of your family you love the most out of any of the dozens that have come before her that based on her decision to call off your relationship, and due to extraneous circumstances you cannot accept her back nor promise to wait.
Honor is nearly impossible to explain, as it is a quality someone possesses, not an item or title. It is so fragile that to grab after it is to lose it, but the grows out of a succession of seemingly minor choices made from an honorable frame of mind. Honor is quality. For more on Pirsig, click here. To the drinking posts. X

Lamentation and Description at work

A dinosaur chews its way through the neck of a wounded plant eater, lying utterly at the beast’s mercy. A lei, received a dozen months prior, hangs from a crook in the swivel-seat, rolling office chair. Hunter S. Thompson looks down from the wall, benevolent, ever-suspicious, my eyes track movement in the hallway between my cube and that adjacent, occupied by a man I would have died next to, had we been born in Sparta, twenty five hundred years before, a man whom I would entrust with my life, and who hopefully thinks the same of me. It is the single young woman, so transparent in her attempts to manipulate those around her.
I keep her at arms length, allowing my caution and attraction to show in equally small measure, but enough to keep her guessing. She has a luscious behind, seriously nice piece of tail, if she is trying to play everyone off against each other, the married ones in particular.
An apple seed sprouts, off to my right, in green artificial sponge I received from a dear friend and better sister, during tumultuous times, its once vibrant flowers faded, long since trashed. As I cannot tend a garden at home, might as well flex that verdant thumb at work.

I coil the rubber sting around four fingers, interlaced, its fluid filled ball on the business end dangling just below the hand. With a flick of the wrist, it flies out, the string unfurling, extending five feet horizontally to within an inch of the main slacker’s face. The move I practiced for a year, with heavier keys on a shorter string, whilst walking home, up Cortez hill, coming up empty handed again, form a night out in this doubtfully finest of cities, looking too hard for some prune tang. He is the main slacker, watching TV, at his desk, with his boss standing behind him, not caring in the least if he’s reprimanded.
Not my problem. I do have to look into getting a laptop, though, can’t stand the immobility of the desktop, don’t really value processor speed or graphics card.

A jar of peanut butter and a few slices of bread are stacked on the left, out of sight of all but the most persistent and invasive visitors to my fine cube, this outpost of mine in vast Cubeland. For I know that its borders do not end at the walls of this office, but extends far into every other stifling and soul-strangling arena in the corporate domain. I yearn to escape, to throw down these walls, to mount the heads of my adversaries on the walls, warning future generations of the fate of those who would cross my path. ENOUGH

All I speak of, it seems, is this place. Those confines, where I learned so much, honed my skills, sacrificed so much time, so many young years, drained out. It finds itself into my head, my dreams, I have friends there, but must maintain those outside as well, ENOUGH.

Sunday, Hung-the-f-over

What it boils down to, pretty much, is that you rep your shit. It really doesn’t matter if you’re right, or wrong, because who is the fucking judge of that? Who can honestly come up to you, and say that you’re wrong for doing or saying something, when they themselves have done or said something similar, or at least thought about it.
Sometimes, you gotta kick someone in the stomach, if he’s repping some SM singer guy nonstop ‘cause he’s drunk, and you’re tuning him out, but he’s starting to get upset because he’s crazy about this guy, and starting to get in people’s faces about it, and no one cares, really, except for him, about this singer guy. You laugh it off, ignore the fool, but the guy with the tats, and the scar going from his forehead to the base of his skull, he’s getting pissed, ‘cause the fool pushed him when he dissed the singer, so he goes and kicks the fool, about to throw down, fucking kill the little bitch, you saw the knife.
Sometimes, in that situation, you just back your boys and rep your set, ready to throw down on the fool, to beat him within an inch of his life. To save face, to show your boys that you can hang, no matter how weak or illogical that may sound, because, when you boil it down, when you take that last breath, do you want to know that you did good to people, that you bent over backwards so that no one got hurt, or that you threw down and stuck to your guns. Or that you beat the shit out of some guy, just out of principle. Not that it really happened, but it was damn fucking close. That fool almost went to the hospital.
But what I’m working over here is the underlying tendency, on my own part, to try to appease, to try to work with the other side, but that puts you in the middle, allied with neither party, prey to all. So, no matter what, pick your side and stick to it. Skin that smokewagon, and see what happens. No one likes a bitch, or a turncoat, even if it is diffused by the negligible importance of the issue at hand, fuck it. You feel so much better if you choose a route and see it through, if you have an opinion and don’t sell it out to another idea, if you can walk up to someone and they can tell that, while you’re not closed to other ideas, you’ll rep your shit, and maybe think about what they were saying, and change your mind, but for that moment, when your neck was on the line, you said “by no means will you convince me that my opinion is wrong, or that I should retract my previous comment. If you or someone else hurts or tries to hurt me because of it, bring the fucking pain.” Anyone who breaks your nose after that, will respect you for life, will be your friend, because he knows, no matter what happens, as long as your position is clear on a matter, you’ll rep it to shit and back.
Sometimes, you get so drunk with your friends, and you made the fucking conscious decision to do so, that you pass up the blond trying to get in your pants, which would have been fruitless anyway, what with you being so drunk and limpdick that her orgasm would have been assured, but never yours. Still, it’s fucking unusual to tell a girl,”listen I’m here with my friends so I’m going to turn around and walk away and maybe I’ll see you later.” She ate it up, and was mine for the rest of the night. At least till I got too drunk to stand on my own. Olde Bouyah.

Rise and Fall of Potential Romantic Entanglement

The crowd parts, my heart is calm, the cool night air surrounds me, enveloping me like a shroud, as I flit through the moderate after-work crowd. Although there is a group of people from my work inside, sitting around a few tables they pushed together, I can’t stand it inside for longer than five minutes, the closeness of the walls and low, hacienda ceiling too much after a day in cubeland, after the discipline and forced efficiency with which I approach my daily tasks.
Stepping outside, I instinctively begin the process of thinking about having a cigarette, but let it die in its baby ... holy fucking shit. Dear God, I say aloud, seeing her tense, just a little bit, barely inside the place, walking past the palms, the light glancing off her skin, the modest top, jeans from a casual Friday, and hope to dearest that she’s averting her gaze because of me.
She didn’t even see me, at least I don’t think so, maybe just walking in, from twenty yards, but certainly not close enough to know that I’m a scumbag teabaggin mother- hold on, no more self-flagellation, even verbal. Not cool. Ok. Game fucking on, game on. A friend exits the place, oblivious to my presence, as he’s on his cellphone, most likely with his lawyer, settling his divorce at six on a Friday? Dude, what the fuck? Good, keep your mind off of her, but don’t forget about her, for now, always keep her just inside your peripheral, even through the palm-fronds, seeing her with her back to you, with three work of normal friends, by far the prettiest of the group. Some initial glances from that table, but something about the way they sat and turned at your arrival screamed boyfriend, married and not wearing it, or just plain voracious.
Not a bad thing, for sure, but not really what you want to get into right now. Now this new one, hotter than most chicks you’ve seen in the past week, and pure, you know, fucking angelfood cake all the way up those thighs. Don’t. Don’t fantasize, not about the poontang, not about the pot o’ gold, that’ll put the rapist glint in your eye. Remain neutral, neutral to her powers, to her charms, to the seamless top, her skin making a smoothe transition from uncovered to under the shirt, no rolls or forced flesh, oh shit. Staring, now, and one of her mates just glanced over. Good and bad, depending on her mood, if her friends think you’re hot, wether one of your friends comes out any time within the next thirty seconds, forcing you into action preemptively. Good, another one looked, turning back to whisper something to the table, she tenses again, just a bit.
That guy is back up on karaoke, the old one in the tight leather pants, singing his heart out, hamming it up to a level embarrassing to everyone within a sixty foot radius can almost feel, the sitting multitude unable to simply tune him out or go inside, pretending to take a piss, trying to get out of the blast radius of this wrinkled ladies' man.
Somehow, he’s trying too hard. But fuck it, at least he’s up there.
There, a half-turn of the head, she bringing you into her peripheral, you noticing it out of yours, pretending to be interested in what your friend is saying, how he’s gonna get hosed on his breakup, who’s gonna get what, et fucking cetera. You’re listening, and will remember, and are actually paying attention, because it’s good if you’re talking to someone, immediate good karma, you’re approachable, and you have a reason to turn your back to her. There. Fight the urge to run inside, to take yourself out of her mind completely. Let her doubt whether you were looking at her, or if you were really just watching the older woman give Cheryl Crow's latest her all, the glow of her early twenties, just for an instant, shining through the sun-wrought wrinkles of her fourth decade.
Eyes, someone’s eyes on your back. Confirmed, your buddy just looked, the angle indicating right at them. “So let’s not talk about that mess any more,” he says. “Maybe those four could cheer us up!” Shit, he’s talking about the hottie and her friends. May have to go in early, stall him until you can find the right moment. Ah fuck it. Fast and loose, right. Reference the entertainment, ask what song they think you should sing, stand off to her right, so she’s forced to look up at you, will make you appear bigger, powerful, even for a split second.
Enter stage right. “It looks like you four fine young ladies would be an excellent judge on this subject, so I’m just gonna go ahead and ask.” First line, off without a glitch, they look interested, waiting for you to continue. “My friend and I here,” indicating with a slight of hand, ”aren’t quite sure if we should sing a duette, which could appear a bit strange, especially if I sing the female part,” they laugh, fucking splendid, “or if we should just go up there solo, each on his own.” She still hasn’t looked at me, good and bad sign. Chaos will determine, if this next move goes right. Her friend, in front of me, begins to speak, just as the other two turn their attention to my wingman, forcing her to either completely ignore me, or, no, she shifts, and gives me a look, just to let me know that she’s giving me a look. I like this girl already. And we are in.

The last of my work companions has left, the regular crowd has begun to arrive, older hopefuls filling the vacancies, having a good time, but seeming to be doing so out of some drive to do so, just under the surface aware of the slight awkwardness of the situation, and I’m paying too much attention to the older people coming in.
Maybe you could say I’m more of one to strike hard and fade away, into the night. I’m not so great on the long haul, and this girl likes me, enjoys talking to me, and seems genuinely interested in what I have to say. Her larger friend is slowdancing to some Eighties ballad that guy is singing, with my friend, and I feel the urge to cut loose, to jump on the bike, burn ninety down the freeway. Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, light touching of the hand, good. A positive tilting of three girls’ heads inward, conferring, you’d like to think, about you. Megalomaniac. You lost your momentum, and are getting tired of talking to her friends, whom you have embroiled in conversation, running wing for yourself, all the while giving her just a little bit more attention, keeping her friends, who aren’t bad looking, on the edges of their seat. Perhaps that is why she is acting a bit bored, you’re giving too much. Maybe she’s just really a bitch, but no, that’s not it. You can’t treat her with more respect, just because she’s hotter than her friends, that won’t do. Turn it, slightly, start focusing, there, a light touch on her friend’s leg, shift peripheral so she’s not even in it.

Now it’s time to go. You’re still in work clothes, and have gathered your various things from their various hiding places, and really can’t stand talking to her friends, anymore.
“Are you leaving us,” you hear her ask, snuck up behind you like a thief, to rob you of an anonymous escape. “Sometimes, it’s best to leave when it is sweetest, and speaking with you has been my utmost pleasure.” Laying it on a bit thick, eh, old boy? She buys it though. “If you have to leave, I wanted to at least say goodbye. My friends have had a lot of fun tonight.” “And you haven’t”, I ask, teasing her like I should have been the whole night “perhaps we could meet, at some later time, and make sure your and my friends aren’t the only people we can have a good time around.” Too complicated, maybe. You’re not even sure if that made sense, sadness kicking in, showing in your eyes. You are tired. Her look says that she’s not quite sure if you mean straight-up fucking, or dinner, or something else. “... Could I have your number? So I can call you, to get together, you know, what we were just talking about.” God, man, you’re fumbling for words so badly, she can’t NOT think you’re cute. “Sure,” she says, “ and the pen springs to your hand, then back to your pocket, with a scrap of paper that shows her name, a number, and nothing else. You smile, a tired smile, looking into her eyes and, as you turn to go, realize that the opportunity to kiss her had come, and gone.

A dozen scraps settle in an empty wastebin as an engine coughs to life, a mind numbs, gods of travel receive their praise, and you depart.

FUCKING CUBELAND

The mind recoils in terror.
Emotion runs wild, attention unable to stay its course, this level of awareness, perhaps due to the fact that I am reading an account of one of the greatest generals ever born. He led his Macedonian brethren to the fringes of India, from the Hellespont, and seemingly combined all aspects of areté, leadership and wisdom into such a short span of life. I look back, comparing myself to this masterful king, and feel so very small, insignificant with my extra forty pounds, my desk job, the feeble passions that arise, too often foundering at the walls of insecurity, at the broad sea of doubt. but doubt is only verified in its existence if you verify that it exists.
I find it incredibly hard to create if I doubt myself every step of the way. Shit. I am my most harsh critic, looking at my words, second guessing every bit of sentence, the structure of the whole string of words, and it comes up wanting. Why? These past few days, even tonight, I was full of happiness, neutrality, conversing with an old friend, catching up on each other’s lives, but now I am back, back to that level. Can my feeling of self-worth depend on the dripping faucet of self-doubt I felt when trying to add to the story, when trying to flesh out the background of the antagonist, the necessity driven woman, seeking salvation, even at the cost of others? God, I read these words, I can feel the drive draining out even now, standing in the book store, intimidated by the sheer volume of work, by the knowledge that my contribution is so small, that every attempt I make to come up with a story with my own ideas, is frustrated by the ideas, by the visions of others whose stories I have read. I know that I can write, I know that the story is sitting there, but is forcing its way out through a small opening, like a huge funnel stretching up into my imagination, and every thought I have sits at the top, hoping to find its way out through the nozzle.
Do I revile sitting in front of a monitor, as it is what I do for ten hours a day, receiving emails, checking files, requesting art approvals, coordinating rubberized mat purchases, having to tell some girl who’s been lending money out to people because our company decided not to pay people this month, even though the owner just bought a 35 million dollar apartment in NYC, checking on wire transfers, explaining templates and naming conventions to outside parties, crossreferencing manufacturer and retailer websites, calling out discrepancies in shipping requests, managing third party expectations, updating procedural manuals, while most others I see have the time to kick the fuck back and play card games for four hours a day.
Fuck yeah I’m bitching right now, because I’m fucking tired and want to write, but can’t stand to sit in front of a monitor any more, and can’t seem to find the courage to just quit, lay it all on the line, fuck the transitional period, just fucking quit and have to write to live, have to earn my fucking keep with the blisters forming on my fingers as they glide across the keyboard. They are fucking flying now, you know why? Because this shit is ingrained, because I send three dozen emails a day, mostly while doing something else simultaneously and get paid half of what the average fucking bloke needs to be able to live in this city, because it’s my fucking choice to get up every morning and burn my ass through traffic to glue it to a desk for ten hours so that everything runs smoothly.
So the raise I’m supposed to get will barely fucking cover inflation, but god fucking forbid it the company tries to bump someone’s pay by more than six percent, red flags all over HR, upper management raising eyebrows, who the fuck is this guy that he needs to get this much of a raise anyway? Oh that fucker. The one who’s highly visible, seems on the point of boiling, but channels it into multitasking his way into a corner, then getting himself and five other people where they need to be to see eye to eye on whatever project they are working on. Oh, but I did start at ten bucks an hour, driving a fifteen year old car that I didn’t take enough care of to make it last, and here I fucking am bitching and moaning about how much some guy isn’t paying me, knowing full well that if I don’t abort fucking mission soon that I’ll look up, age forty, wondering where my chances went, discounting my dreams to write fucking stories on a boat off of San Luca or something.
Who the fuck has time to read books anyway? Who the fuck, from mine and subsequent generations, who is fairly fucking hep and has some form of social life, sits down with a book and reads the fucker from cover to cover. I myself start wavering at about page thirty, start getting fidgety, looking to see if there’s something else to do. SO WRITE FUCKING THIRT PAGE BOOKS, SELL THEM TO FUCKING KIDS ON CAMPUS WHO WANT A QUICK STORY, FUN AND EXCITING, OR SADDER THAN ALL HELL, THAT WILL LEAVE THEM WISHING THEY HAD ANOTHER. Or just broadcast your idea on an anonymous webpage, hoping that someone will think “hey that’s a fucking good idea” and make a mint.

make the mint yourself, goddammit.
Make it. You got straight A’s in grad school while not even enrolled, can write like you breathe have endless imaginative qualities, and the discipline and drive to do it.

Lay it all down. Fuck cubeland. Write about how much it sucks, about the office romances about the simmering almost-fucking that accompanies two opposing bodies in the brief encounter while passing the printer. It’s fucking hard, but it’s hard that is fun. Why waste your late twenties slaving for the Man. Fuck that. You want to be forty with a bad back from sitting on shitty chairs all day finally in some management position? I don’t think so. I don’t think the holy fire burns for that young man. I think that the passion is sapped by the mindless drudgery of cubeland. And so the fuck what if you take snippets of pieces of others’ work and bind them together into a story. Do you think Shakespeare came up with all his shit on his own? No but he had genius, and genius lurks, at the edges of the mind, in cohorts with his good friend insanity.

FIN ...X

Release, story resumes, with omissions

The power, the finality of words, never ceases to amaze. Running along, punching my way through powdery sand to escape the encroaching waves, Poseidon churning the sea just off to my left, I say it aloud, in the dimming light of another sunny day in California, to the glistening seaweed, bunched up, a welcome hazard on an otherwise fairly monotonous run.
I do not yell, as the notion, long known to me, hidden beneath a veil of self-doubt and pity, finds its way out with a whimper. “Let her go”, I say, meaning initially the hottie jogging in the other direction, instantly applying it to her. I realize that I should just let her go, let the notion of having her again as a girlfriend, the urge to wait for her, shunning new potentials, burying myself in doubt, the desire to separate myself from the reality of singledom, live in a fog of deception and a poorly-focused mental picture of who I think I know her to be, whom she very well no longer may be, all these things I find myself letting go.
One by one, these weights fall from my heart. When I arrive home, it is as if I had jogged around the block, left knee tingling a bit but still a solid mile of asphalt running without any significant pain or discomfort. Self-diagnosis, given a fairly good understanding of the self, one’s pain tolerances and the minute communications the body provides us with that hold the clues to many if not most physio- and psychological problems.
I now find myself more lost than before, with more weights on my heart, perhaps supplanted from the realities of financially-struggling bachelorhood into my fogged lense of heart-broken existence. Perhaps I’m just full of shit, and have no idea what the hell is going on, but at least the false, detrimental hope for a mending of wounds and realignment of our two selves has been given up for dead, one month now after our parting of ways, the forced schism of our love.

Ah fuck it, I’ll do the fight for free.

Burning sunlight awakens him into the pain of hangover, faint dreams extolling the alcoholic blunderings of a dimly remembered month. Sitting up abruptly in bed, he realizes that this is not his house. Fuck, he thinks, look around. OK, there’s a female passed out on the couch, seems like she moved there hastily during the night.
The clock reads 6:18 am, early enough that the other partygoers will most likely not see him leave, ducking out the back entrance he reconnoitered on one of the few semi-sober moments of the past week. He realizes that he had done so for this exact moment, this bright morning, alcohol still coursing through his veins, still legally drunk, but clear of mind, lucid from the hour of drunk sleep he collapsed into. He is looking to exit through the kitchen on his way out, and therefore passes through the drawing room, where he sees blond hair spilling up over the arms of a somewhat soiled loveseat, attached to the body of a girl he is convinced he slept with at least once in the past week.
Name, name, ah fuck it. There are more important things to do, he says to himself, now that this time has passed, now that he can escape in mystery. They may think he wandered off in the night, and fell off a cliff, into the dark ocean far below, but then again, he would have been too drunk at any point during the past seven days to even be able to leave the house, let alone scout a way around the fence, short in length but considerable in height, that had been erected thrown up around whichever gated community this was.
The ocean was a nice reference point, with his face pointed squarely in the opposite direction, he eventually finds his way to the guard house, and somehow convinces the gentlemen there that he is merely a good, tax-paying citizen out for a stroll, and does not need an armed escort to the edge of the property.
“Not an escort you say?” They want him to leave very badly, as he is obviously drunk, and standing just slightly to the side, as if very weak. “Well hows about you open the gate, and I can see myself out.”
Their automatic weapons trace him as he heads for the cross street.
While never a captive of his previous hosts, his escape of sorts from the party that never ends will raise some eyebrows, will burn some bridges with people of That social mode, not that he cared much for Their ideas anyway. Too much intrigue, forced to sleep with just the right older women to even get invited to the Fortnights, as they call them, two solid weeks of any and every designer and pedestrian drug you can think of, including alcohol and fine hashish.
Planes, planes overhead, hot damn. Must be near the airport, he thinks, and where there are planes, there are car rental agencies, perhaps some that even still take cash. He’ll of course have to present some kind of proof of credit, just in case he manages to completely fuck up the car. But who ever plans to do that? It sometimes just happens. He calls a cab, and two minutes later is cruising along at two hundred kilometers in a bee line for what was once called, John Wayne International., now ubiquitously, even officially, known as JayDub. The compartment of the cab is large enough for two, can produce more seats if necessary, and has as decent cargo space, should it be needed. He tries talking to the computer driving them along, but only gets single word answers in reply, one “I don’t know, sir”, before calling it quits and checks his pockets. He loves to check his pockets, especially while working on a walking hangover.

Johanna steps out of the climate controlled maze she has spent the last four days traversing, the delay due mostly to quarantine drops, mandatory for travelers from the newly re-emerging Baltic region, breaths deep the air, traces of hibiscus and smog competing for attention, the sweet air of home. A cab comes screeching to a halt a hundred yards away, and she checks her timestamp:
7:10 am.
Not many travelers at JayDub, normally, this early on a Tuesday, but she is excited at the prospect of getting home as quickly as possible, fully certain she will find her son asleep in his bed, far from outside of the reach of a woman who up until six months before (she had done some research during her time in quarantine) had been chained to the ceiling of her cell for five hours a day under the her countries’ previous ruler’s of idea social and cultural realignment, which basically boiled down to torture, humiliation, rape, or at least according to what few eyewitnesses made it over the two story fences, past the robot sentries, and was not directly a puppet for the regime. You could tell those, she knew from experience, as they generally tried to jolly things up a bit with stories of a worker’s paradise, where everyone had a job, a house, and a vote.
Most of them broke after the mites, cleverly crafted and hidden directly on certain dopamine receptors, had been removed. Without the tiny machines tricking them into associating their memories of their homeland with happiness, and they saw things through the filter of critical thinking, shock hit like a ton of horseshit. Some went completely insane, some shrugged it off, some begged to have the implants reinserted.
Somewhat flushed from her short run to the cab, she sees that the person has still not exited, and seems to be embroiled in an argument of sorts with the onboard computer.
Something seems familiar about the man, and, as she rotates around the vehicle to get a better view, her heart flutters, palms go dry, then just lightly misted.
This is he, that wonderful, unapproachable ladies-man she had hated and loved at once in her freshman year of college, now almost fifteen years hence. With the new regenative techniques, he didn’t look much older, in fact wouldn’t look much older for another two decades, but that was beside the point. Perhaps he had a point of contact with their old professor, perhaps he could help her track down the one man, who, should her son’s possible captor be telling the truth, possessed the knowledge to cure her antagonist, get her son back.

"Hey, wait a minute, I know you." She nearly jumps out of her skin at the voice, suddenly so close behind her. She had been so wrapped up in thought that she hadn't realized the cab is gone, leaving her alone, on an otherwise deserted pedestrian platform, with this man she adored from afar half a life time ago. "No really, I'm convinced I've seen you before, somewhere. You are, in fact, the finest, most pure and honestly attractive woman I've seen in quite some time!"

Whoa, tiger, he thinks to himself, don't lay on the charm too thick now, she might just fall for it. Damn this hangover. His internal censor must be swimming in a vat of Jack Daniels, somewhere past the medulla oblongata. Fuck it, what’s done is done, he thinks. “I’m Demetrius Oh, and don’t ask me to show you my Oh face, that’s just plain embarrassing.”

Demetrius, of course! How could she have forgotten? He seems a bit drunk, at least he smells that way, she thinks to herself, and it sounds like he’s been talking to mindless, drug addled models for a little too long; he’s barely making any sense, and is making some pretty outlandish suppositions.
Oh well, at least he doesn’t appear to be violent.

Upset and Aimless, Rob Roy

My fist smashes into the metal storage compartment at the same moment I say “Fuck”. I mean it, too. Two deadlines both due simultaneously, a simple task undone by another busy man, and a higher up waiting, on hold, for an answer. The hand strikes true, ring and middle finger square, solid smack against the metal, perhaps even denting it.
The pressure had become too great, I had let the bastards get to me, had let the Fear seep in through the edges of perception, twice in as many working says the rage blinded my vision, blood rage boiling just below the surface, contained, sent back to its proper quarter. What doth plague mine heart so? Is it some underlying tractor beam drawing me back to her, some reasoning refusing to let the notion of getting her back go from my mind?
Am I torturing myself, or am I simply going through the stages of withdrawal, as with all others, letting my mud resettle, allowing my mind to become clear again, as I was with her in the beginning, before I began to sense her underlying feelings of uneasiness, and began to adapt, began to slowly give up more of myself to try to appease her, effectively driving her farther away.
And yet they persist, periods of intense joy, of lucidity beyond compare, when all things spread out around me in a web, almost tangible, near maddening in complexity, the imagination stretching to its farthest limits.
I force myself to run, even while almost asleep at work, I realize due to lack of oxygen, or because of the fact that I’m sitting in a fucking cube, without a view of the outside, or the ability or time to step outside, go sit on the side of the hill and watch the workers tearing apart the once-lovely valley, opening it up for development, a new road that will cut commute times by 70 percent, that will bring noise and smog, and sprawl to this parcel of land, hewn over hundreds of thousands of years, millions.
But who the fuck cares, in the face of progress? I don’t, at least not enough to take action, to join some local committee to protect those vanishing areas of San Diego yet untouched by human intrusion.
Enough, I cannot concentrate with Rob Roy playing in the background.
Movie past, let us commence.
Small things infuriate me. My boss, coming to speak with the two of us on the team, aware of the fact that I am upset, that I am frustrated on account of my workload. He leans over me, clapping my shoulder, saying, “if your raise paperwork comes through, and it’s lower than expected, I will weep with you.”
On the tip of my tongue, foremost in my mind, I am thinking “you’ll be weeping by yourself, if it comes through too low, because, as I’ve already told you, if my contribution is not appreciated at this company, I will take it elsewhere.” Oh but would I have said it, out loud, in front of the few others near enough to hear. Weariness and the training received for to maintain our team’s appearance as always-approachable, to-anything-capable individuals, keep my tongue at bay.
Motivation. It all comes down to that. It all comes down to having a gun at your head, creditors calling, to force you to make shit happen. I sense the approach of an event horizon, of a drastic reappraisal of the whole situation. I am deathly afraid of making it on my own, slave to no man’s idea, cubemonkey for none other than myself, free to shape my days as I see fit. But, will you be able? I have a talent. I have the urge, the burning drive to craft words, lies and truth, channeling nuance through twenty six keys, proliferating snippets of subversive text, lies veiled in truth, the edge blurring. Reality becomes harder to define, images from books, games, movies, flashing before my eyes, superimposed over what I know as reality, reaching out to friends, family, for some anchor in the face of this slow, boiling tempest.
Bring the pain.

Sunday, without a mother

I strain to follow the lyrics, the score from a fine movie, with a fine Scottish actor, the Russian anthem, a feeling of elation, memories of seeing the film for the first time, then dozens more times, all blending into one, becoming part of the underlying self, the known, the calculable happiness.
Incalculable remain further mood swings, further developments regarding comfort levels in public places, this ...
Change of music. Hunt for Red October soundtrack too distracting, too much RAM occupied trying to track the variations in tone dynamics, trying to guess where the composer was going, what mood he wanted to convey. The mind storing the music for future reference, at the very least creating reference tabs to subfolders of memory, music spilling out randomly at times, filling the consciousness, hurting the ears, the power of it.
The mind, playing back music at appropriate times, unless consciously called upon to repeat certain music files. In cases such as these, the conscious memory of the music is limited to favorite portions, to stalls, or crescendos, to a heart-wrenching chorus, while the unconscious memory, if acknowledged but not coerced, will play back whole movements, lightly humming in the background, shuffling through its repertoire.
Oh but could I scream what I hear, but could I broadcast the majesty of just the right note, violins skipping lightly downward to a rising horn section, would it better convey my emotional wellbeing at that time? Perhaps we should piggyback a receiver onto the old audio nerve, link it to a harddisk, wait.
If I hear noise, music in my head, it is not being transmitted from the eardrum up the nerve to the brain, it is isolated within the brain, and my daimon is tricking me into thinking that the music is loud, that it is beautiful, that it is the right music for that situation. So any external device will not pick up signal transmissions from the audio nerve, but an electrode tiara should be able to track the increased activity in a certain isolated sector of the brain, or scattered throughout the brain, as we are finding out, with the mind linking sounds stored in one area to pictures stored somewhere completely different.
Regardless, if that could be tracked, and software written to recognize the music in question, then it might be possible for matching music to be played through portable loudspeakers, given that the appropriate music is retrievable from a wet-ware harddrive, or iPOD.
Beethoven’s First Symphony, written when he was, please hold ... thirty years old, in 1800, is far more familiar to mine ears, and therefore far less distracting.
This is trick learned in college, when forced, due to lack of proper planning, to spend the whole night before a test, without sleep, in the school library, in hopes of cramming enough info into my brain to allow me to pass the test the next day, or write a fifteen page paper from scratch. The last year, when that wonderful person passed away, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played a significant factor in maintaining my sanity (I do believe I can whistle/hum/direct the entire symphony, start to finish, beginning at any point during the piece). Classical music, no choral pieces or signing, occupies the part of my brain that needs constant stimulation, that is always checking the surroundings, hyperalert, allowing the cognitive functions to go into overdrive, sucking up data like a sponge, or pouring words out humbly onto a page.
So much confusion, this past week, with the coup-de-grace coming late Thursday, with mention being made of the name of my recent girlfriend. Immediately, the blood sang in my eyes, vision going fuzzy at the edges, like the machine in Iron Giant, catching myself a few seconds later, vision returning to normal, bezerker-rage checked, for now.
Where do these feelings come from, whence does this rage flow? Outwardly, it flowed through my voice, to the visible delight of the surrounded revelers, a hundred faces fixated, caught in a freezeframe between refrain and melody, gasping with joy at a wanton pelvic thrust, raw emotion overloading the amplifier, pressure mounting in the ocular cavities, a blind, explosive performance in front of scores of strangers, a score of friends.
It is so very easy to lash out, in my mind, at couples happy, content, envious of their carefree looks, of their inside smiles, remembering a happy moment, perhaps a particularly explosive orgasm, but immediately turning the lashings back in on myself, for entertaining such base, selfish thoughts.
It has been hard to write, since the retelling of that defining moment, so many years ago, when I laid bare my soul, willing to let it all go, to make that final decision to end things early. Perhaps I am reluctant to feel that pain again, perhaps it is one wall of fire I must transgress in order to do while clinging to non-ado.
Weary, for reasons unclear.
I have come to the realization today that she most likely made her decision during a moment of rational thinking, then called for a retraction once her emotions kicked in, once we met, for the handing over of items left behind, in the brilliant sunshine of a Californian spring, an innocent meeting casting doubt on the value of rational thought.
In retrospect, I believe I said NO because I couldn’t bear to lose her again.

FIN