I wouldn't want the four people who read this to get bored, especially since my last post was largely nonsensical.

Well, almost all of it was quotated without appropriate documentation. Also, if you're not listening to "Fat-Bottomed Girls" by Queen when you read the post... well, it's largely nonsensical.

I apologize for the lack of electronic information from me. check out Yoshville for some stuff. He's got some great arguments, and if you want to learn about anything, just reply to his posts.

I'm working on a screenplay right now, and so have nothing significant to add. While you grapple with the fact that I've got nothing for you, ponder this:

Where are all the good men dead? In the heart, or in the head.

Yeah, it's not my line. Fuck you. You're just supposed to think about it.

Are you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh! Down beside that red firelight.
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin world go 'round.

This post is for Monica Lewinsky, Alisa Walters, Lisa Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Onassis, and all the ladies whose names may have already been lost to the great beast of time. Mostly for Alisa Walters, because I feel her contributions to the world in a very real, and legally binding sense.

This song is for all the fat-bottomed girls.

You ladies make it all worthwhile.

Oh! Won't you take me home tonight?
Oh! Down beside your red firelight.
Oh! And you give it all you got.

Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round.

GET ON YOUR BIKES AND RIDE!

----

And I couldn't have said it better myself. When a man works a job he hates, and tries to manage everything else in his life. When he's exhausted, and when he still tries to do the things he feels he has to do. Not for any base instinct, but because he feels an obligation to himself and his reality. The only reason is a fat-bottomed girl. One more time? You're right.

I was just a skinny lad
Never knew no good from bad
But I knew life before i left my nursery
Left alone with big fat Fanny
She was such a naughty nanny
Hey big woman, you made a bad boy out of me.

Hey hey.

Are you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh! Down beside that red firelight!
Are you gonna let it all hang out?

Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go round.

I would like to thank everyone on the feedback about Firmly Disenchanted. I really want to flesh out that story and finish it. However.

I have to put it on the back burner for now because I want to tell a different story. This other one started as a screenplay, so I'm attempting to finish it in that format. Honestly, I haven't worked on the screenplay in a couple of days (i mean really worked on it), because my life keeps getting in the way.

Right now I've just got the beginning and the tenative end.

It's hard, but I want to see it through until it is finished and I can show it to someone who's willing to read a 100 page script. I want to be able to show it to that person unabashedly.

This might take a while, but after it's finished, I want to finish "Firmly Disenchanted."

Here's a transcript of the beginning of the script:
----

Ext. Afternoon. Establishing shot of a largish, white house on the corner of two streets. Cut to the sidewalk in front of the building, again to the front door, again to the interior. (3 fast cuts, each one zooms in slightly with a broken up, jagged feeling, almost as if someone is teleporting thirty feet every few frames.)

Int. Afternoon. A disheveled living room has shoes, jackets, grungy socks and taco bell wrappers littered on almost every surface. Seth appears to be sleeping on a couch, with an aerospace engineering textbook open over his face, while Nate is working (playing poker online) on a laptop.

Nate screams and flails his arms: FUCK. Fucking shit on a . . . fuck. FUCK. What the fuck. Fucking... (he begins to trail off and sputter, forming only a few more real words) Who the fuck does that?

Seth doesn't move, but from under the book he says something inaudible.

Nate (tersely, without looking up from his computer): WHAT?

Seth lets the book fall to the floor as he sits up.

Seth: I said, "How many finals do you have Tuesday?"

Nate: Is it...? (he looks up from his computer and glances around) What day is it?

Seth: Sunday. It's Sunday. How many?

Nate: I don't know, two maybe. (gestures to his computer) This fucking asshole...

Seth: Maybe you shouldn't play the game if it gets you so strung out. Just drop it if you can't be Zen about the shit, you know?

Nate: Fuck you. Do you even know who I am? Agriculture infuriates me.

Seth: Ri-ight. How many finals do you have?

Nate: I dunno, I'd have to check my ... (he starts looking around without getting up, moving shit around near him, but making no significant progress). Fuck, where are my syllabuses?

Seth: Ballpark it. Ten. Two. ... Less?

Nate: Why are you crawling up my ass about this? Like one, maybe. (he starts looking around again) Where the fuck...

Seth: I have five. FIVE. So I need my fucking sleep. Oh, and it's syllabi, by the way.

Nate: Who's the English major here? That's how it's pronounced, number boy.

Seth: Whatever.

The conversation stalls, Seth closes his eyes and Nate goes back to his computer.

----

It goes on from there. Comments? You can click on the comments link at the end of this post, OR hit up the tagboard. The possibilities are almost limitless, if limitless is three, and almost limitless is two.

Anyway, after that conversation the characters decide to go to a coffee shop. It's self-important drivel really, pretentious as all hell, but I'm going to finish it. Once the plot is finished, I can make the rest of it better.

It takes so much patience to fill in all the dots between the beginning (which i've been working on) and the end (which i've been thinking about), because I have found that I absolutely cannot just write it chronologically. When I'm writing it I have to jump around and write whatever conversation I'm thinking about, so it takes a lot of cutting and pasting to get something that flows.

Anyway, it's late and I'm finished working on shit for now, because I have to work a job I don't give a shit about tomorrow. I guess I just wanted to squeeze a little more time out of my day off.

Good night kids. Don't work too hard for anyone but yourself.

Nate

I just read "Firmly Disenchanted," again, and I think it will be one of my better stories after being edited.

It's basically about a Political Science student that instigates a social revolution in the United States of America.

Anyway, I think that the thing people really disliked about the story was the obtuse way it is told. It is an interesting story, but I had too much fun with the language.

You see, the main character's name is Firmly Proctor, and I personally find his name hilarious and love making puns with it. Other people don't find it so funny.

Honestly though, it amuses the shit out of me.

Anyway, this is me deciding to edit the Firmly story. It was originally called "Firmly Goes and Gets Some," which is an inside joke with a person I've never met. She's an author in the twin cities named Emily Carter who published a book titled "Glory Goes and Gets Some."

I think her writing is very, very good. Chick stuff, but still awesome. Pick it up if you waste your time watching soap operas, if you want to see some fucked up relationships and personal delimmas, without all the bad acting and commercials.

Oh, if you like that kind of stuff, I also recommend Jonathan Franzen. His characters are so flawed that you can't like any of them, but it's really fun watching them fuck each other over. Again and again.

So, this post is mostly a reminder to me to either continue the plot of Firmly Disenchanted, because the intro and the conclusion match, but the middle of the story, where everything happens, is much, much shorter than it needs to be for the story to make sense to a reader.

Also, editing the story would be good, because the language is like muddy poop in parts.

If you're interested in the story by reading this post, you can find it in the archives, I think it's got a title and everything, or I could just link it here.

It's about 22 pages double spaced. Email me if y0u require a word .doc and I will send it.

TAG THE TAGBOARD!

Post comments!

Good lord, someone has to be reading this. I want guilt and or sympathy posts.

*begins to cry* You bastards!

I'm werking, and the place is dead, so I've been writing a rough draft of a fiction piece.

Here it is:

Christine dreamed herself into a different universe. In the dream, she opened her eyes.

Immediate knowing assaulted her consciousness. She grappled with it for a few moments, and when all seemed lost, scored a late submission hold for the victory. Control of her senses, and the ability to interpret their input rushed to meet her like friends and family after her wrestling match with knowledge.

Knowledge was a fierce opponent, and she knew that the more information it held, the more fiercely it would fight her. All of this is beside the point though. We want to know exactly what knowing assaulted her, and why, not the intricacies of ego destruction and belief systems.

Chris knew that she was in an alien universe, a foreign world, she was dreaming it, and it was wonderous.

Her visual cortex told her she could see a certain wavelength of light, indicating an endless field of grain refracting the golden color of a setting sun. She could see the sun setting behind an ocean of grain. The wheat, or other plant-structure, looked like a three dimensional audio-track of her favorite song. The very motion from the faintest air movements brought great crests and valleys. Everything was working perfectly.

The wheat waved to her like a beloved relative welcoming her home. She was home. Stalks trembled and bent in the slight breeze, sheparding the golden waves of light from the sun.

She had one thought for a long time: Oh my God. This is so beautiful.

Only one real word came into her mind.

Harmony.

But the thought she had wasn't exactly a word. It went farther, deeper into her brain. Her language called the feeling 'harmony,' but she knew that any language would have a word for the concept she was thinking about. It was an idea. Of perfect beauty. Of a beauty so immaculate, that one could spend eternity looking for the flaw, spend twenty million human lifetimes trying to uncover the naked ugliness it was hiding, and never find a single thing wrong with it.

She said, "Harmony."

The sun disappeared and the moon rose. The moon set and the sun rose. This rotation began to speed up to her perception, until the two celestial bodies became a godly blur in the infinite darkness beyond.

Time became malleable, but Chris did not shape it. She wished it would slow down, that the rotations the sun and moon would slow to a pace she understood, but she did not try to stop it herself.

How much time was passing in each second? Was she still asleep? Had she dreamt? What was the dream, and was it important?

Chris had no illusions about only forgetting unimportant information. If that was the case, she reasoned, her language wouldn't have had a word for forgetting. What would be the point if it was unimportant in the first place?

What was important? The blur? In the unique location of time-space she was in, differences between things became insubstantial, faint, unimportant. Then, completely insignificant before disappearing altogether.

She began to panic, though she hadn't been the least bit afraid before. Difference between herself and everything else was something she was used to holding as truth. Looking through the amalgam of energy around her, she was unable to differentiate where anything ended or began. Everything was essentially the same.

What made her special?

She couldn't think of anything, and began to scream.

Her apartment in Dallas, Texas reverberated with the sound, and when she found herself back in a reality that she recognized, she forgot the dream.

Sleep wrapped his arms around her again, shushing her over-evolved, over-achieving thinking organ. The organ that never thought about Chris. The brain began sorting things, slightly cross that Christine had panicked and woken up the lower levels of herself that needed reassurance in a chaotic universe. They were too simple. They would never understand. The brain filed the dream away in the section Chris had no access to, a place she would never see them.

There was still something fundamental, at the core of her being that the brain couldn't sort out.

Couldn't find it, and didn't know what it was. There was something, though, beyond the science that explained her. Her brain knew the science that explained most of her actions, but she continually surprised it, as she had done when she woke herself up.

Maybe it wasn't really there, this imaginary thing that kept her brain from understanding her entirely. But the brain had to admit, that there was evidence to support a theory.

----

Anyway, I haven't proofread that story, and I just wrote it. Keep in mind the fact that I'm at work.

I apologize for my shittiness.

Fuck.


---

This is the second draft, but I'm not going to update what I wrote at work. Meaning the stuff after the story and before this paragraph. It's there, and I'm going to leave this here when I do a third draft. If you've read the story in it's entirety before but not read this... try reading it again, I added a whole paragraph!

I'm gonna go do something else for now.

Sometimes, when I look at a blank page, nothing pops into my brain. This is one of those times. I could write about how I've been reading HP Lovecraft, and how it amazes me. Cephaisis is my favorite story so far, though the journey to unknown kadath was excellent as well. Just the balls this guy puts onto the paper, and after you get the impression that he really might know the answer to life, the universe, and everything and is expressing it to you in this story, right after that happens, the main character wakes up and goes back to work in everyday London.

The character gets so close to complete understanding that we as readers feel as though we completely understand something. Then, that character wakes up. The entire, 120 page story was a fucking dream. I didn't know you could even DO THAT.

In fact, I know it's considered bad narrative style. You are not supposed to leave things open to your audience, you wrap it up into a neat, little pre-digested ball of information that you've figured out and tie the bow on it (that's the conclusion part of the story-arc).

What you DO NOT DO, is write a novella, where the character begins to go insane and die, then whoops! it was all a dream, the character wakes up. He has a life in the reality we know of.

There is no more story after the main character in quest for unknown kadath wakes up. That's RIGHT where it ends. And it's absolutely beautiful.

It's, it's just that it's the perfect expression of aesthetically pleasing reading. The kind that gives us pleasant thoughts, and something that leaves us thinking. It was beautiful.

I don't mean it was well done or cunningly crafted. Those are different qualities a story can possess, it was beautiful, in the most basic definition of the word.

Pleasing. His stories ease the stress involved with the very FINITEness of my existence, using their absolute beauty like a soothing balm. I know you didn't tell me to put on the balm. But I put on the balm, and honestly, it helps. It feels better now.

I can't explain it any better than that, but if you've ever wondered what it will be like after you die, read some Lovecraft, he's got a better idea than the current leader of Catholicism. Which, in case nobody has told you, was a fucking NAZI in his youth.

Maybe I think being a NAZI would prevent you from leading a religious order.... but I'm no economist.

Maybe I'm rambling. Mitch Hedburg is dead, and I feel that loss much more personally than I feel the death of Pope John Paul IVXIVIX or whatever the fuck letters go after his name. Was he the ninth? Twentieth? Does anyone give a fuck? No. I feel bad for saying that, but I think that the Catholic Church is an anitiquated institution that has no fucking bearing on the conditions people are trying to survive.

Though the former pope did some nice things, which I honestly don't know a damn thing about, I must say: Thanks for trying.

I do know that birth control pills still send you to hell. And God, and the Bible.

Good night.

Proofreading is a bitch.

Alright. It's way past due. I'm adding a link to Yoshville.

It's a great site, and since the guy does his own code, I'm calling it a site instead of a weblog.

Anyway. It's in the links page now. I've got a post about something right here though, so hold your curiosity about yoshville for a second.

I've been thinking a lot about genetics and selection lately. Evolution. Particularly the evolution that created Homo Sapiens Sapiens, because it is such a unique and interesting animal.

It is, in its own collective and recorded existence (which it calls history) an absolutely unique animal. Personally, in all my years, I have not encountered an organism that behaves the way humans (as they call themselves) behave.

Now, there are certain animals and bacteria, and even more primitive forms of life such as RNA viruses and such, that possess behaviors humans routinely exhibit.

Several examples of this can be found. My favorite example of a simpler organism that shows something about human behavior is yeast.

What we call yeast is a name for a number of single-celled fungi that are, in reality, separated into several of their own subgroups. It is an organism that Homo Sapiens Sapiens utilize for an interesting ritual that will be explained later (see section 17, "Getting Tanked and Loving it"). Most cultivated yeast belongs to the genus Saccharomyces. The yeast called "Brewer's Yeast" is Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

There is a quality which all of the things Homo Sapiens sapiens call "yeast" share. One interesting thing about this same quality is that all Humans share that same quality.

This quality I speak of is a behavior, and will be my final point for the night. First we need to understand how a delightful substance called "Beer," is formed. Three things are absolutely required for beer: yeast, an oat or grain (This is what gives the beer flavor, anything you've got laying around will work though. I think. I'm getting sidetracked, but I think you'll want to make a sort of wine or more heavily distilled liquid if you don't have a grain or an oat or barley or something.), and something for the yeast to eat. They like sugar. Sucrose, anything. They just love sugar, and will eat the shit out of it day in and day out.

Yeast will eat whatever sugary substance you put them in a container with. They're only one cell in size, but they absolutely love to consume. They will eat and shit until there is no food left (when they go into hibernation) or they all choke on their own shit (and die).

Yeast shit is called Ethanol, and it has an intoxicating effect on humans. It loosens their control over themselves. Being restrained in a society such as they are, humans have an unhealthy amount of self-control. They like the relief yeast shit gives them.

Ethanol, or yeast shit if you prefer (I know I do), is poisonous to yeast. Every animal's shit is poisonous to it. The solution every animal has is that it is adapted into a system that keeps its population under control, because every animal will eat, reproduce, and shit until it kills itself (within the geographic location this portion of the species is located) unless controls are imposed upon it.

Humans have removed the controls set in place to keep them from exterminating themselves.

There are two options for Homo Sapiens sapiens now that they have recognized the exact size of the bottle they are trapped on. They must learn to limit themselves, or they must concoct an escape plan to flee their cage.

--

The sad part, is that the second option only prolongs the extinction of the race, because unlimited growth and consumption has to end sometime. I think.

I've heard the universe is big, and sometimes, I really hope it is.

Einstein said the only neverending things were the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn't positive about the universe. Unless population growth is reduced or eliminated, we may learn (as a species, not individuals, this will happen after we are all dead) which is actually larger.

Until we know how big, and can travel it in periods of time shorter than our lifetimes, let's all take it easy on the consumption and propagation, OKAY?

If your genes are too fucking stellar to pass up, throw them in.

ONCE. That's all you get.

Maybe the universe truly is infinite. Once we know that, we can go hog wild. If the universe is infinite, and there are no other species like ourselves, then I don't see a problem with all the FUCKING that's going on right now.

However, if the universe is infinite, and human expansion continues unabated, contact with a sentient life-form alien to Earth is exponentially more likely than you might think. I'd be so audacious as to call it probable. If that ever happens, bad things will follow.

---

Sapiens, we need to get our shit together.

Do it! Right now.

---

I'm too tired to proofread this anymore. Nate.

For a link regarding the inherent flaws in Right Wing Politics, click here.

Thanks to www.yoshville.com for the argument.

Spoken Word/Oratory:


This is your life.
Good to the last drop.
It doesn't get any better than this.

Sometimes we forget this simple fact, and we live unconsciously.

If you never knew that you were alive.
I mean really knew it,
you've always been dead.

Before it happens,
you'll probably look back and take stock of your life.

Leave your livestock alone and remember:

This is your life.
Good to the last drop.
It doesn't get any better than this.


This is your life.
It is right here.
All you have to do is open your eyes and look at it.


The scariest part is figuring out what you want to do before you die.

It isn't a list.
It isn't an opinion poll.
This is one,
simple,
question.

And you have to know the answer.

But first thing's first: Imagine you're dead.

If you were dead,
right now,
what do you wish you would've done before you died?

Why aren't you doing it?

We are the middle children of history, and all middle children have to find their own way.

----
This was inspired (though I certainly don't consider it inspired, I'm only saying that some of the phrases and all of the ideas came from somewhere) by Daniel Quinn and Chuck Palahniuk.

Thanks for reading. Please send questions/comments/blasphemy/small children/complaints to absh0005@umn.edu or click on the 'Email Nate' link.

Moderatly humorous tagboard activity.

Here is a transcript.

Jon: Nate, get on AIM, we got a WC3 tourny.

Cephaladon: I saw the PBS documentary, "The Elegant Universe" It Rules.

Anti-Tasha: Tasha, you are very attractive.

Anti-Tasha: In fact, Tasha, you are so attractive that I would buy you a library of magazines.

Anti-Tasha: Well, half of a library.

Anti-Tasha: Oh, what the hell. I'd get you an entire library of magazines.

Anti-Tasha: Well, I'd buy them for you if they were good magazines.

Anti-Tasha: But then I would have to ask myself (as I don't know you) whether form or content is more important, or some combination of both?

Anti-Tasha: If you value content, then I'd buy you a library of magazines with good content in them.

Anti-Tasha: On the other hand, if you value form, then I'd just buy you some flowers and point out their prettiness.

Anti-Tasha: But if you're an all-in-one woman, and value equally both form and content, then you get Cosmo.

Anti-Tasha: If Cosmo got boring, I hope that you would let me know. I could get you so many other magazines!

Anti-Tasha: Wait! Come to think about it, I would have given you an entire library of magazines, so you could pick out your own reads!

Anti-Tasha: You know, I've given it some thought, and I've decided to take back my offer of the library. I think that I'd be better off finding somebody else. Goodbye, Tasha.

Anti-Tasha: Nate, do you like magazines? ;)

HOLY DOGEATING DOGSHIT ON A STICK!

Check out those pictures. It is amazing.

So. I wrote today. I worked on a little comedy, a little fiction, and a little pretentious drivel(I have to get it out somehow). I don't really have the text handy at the moment, so I'm just going to re-write a joke I thought of today, since this site is supposed to be about my comedy.

If you don't think things written in here are quite funny, then just keep looking. If you don't think this next joke is funny, just trust me that it is utterly hilarious, and when this joke--that I will re-write later in the post--was performed live, it nearly killed five people.

I'm saying that a lot is lost in the translation.

I was just kidding, I'm not going to re-write the joke right now. I know, I know, you didn't really care. That's why I'm spiting you like this. It wouldn't be spite if it wasn't just an empty gesture.

Just so you know though, it was about bears. And really, really fucking funny.

Fuckers.

I'm currently trying to get my life back on track. This isn't the forum that I use for explaining these kinds of things (what's wrong and what I'm doing to change it) so I'll leave it at that.

Suffice it to say that something's been wrong and I'm working on fixing it.

I'm not going to go on about this, but I wanted to explain my lack of posts.

I'll have a story (probably unfinished) posted soon, or some standup that has been written but has yet to be performed, or something funny in general before the week is out.

I haven't forgotten you, the humor-seeker, the barrel rider, the riddle master. This isn't livejournal, so keep that in mind when I don't post for a while. I've been dealing with shit, and it's the kind of shit that you really don't care about.

Now, I will try to write some musings and things that are worth reading.

If you ever write fantasy, you have to realize that the poems in the world you're writing about will require much more work than the story itself, because you suck at poetry.

Mitch Hedberg was a shining star that everybody loved. His comedy was the magic kind. The kind that everybody liked. This made me angry at times, because I consider myself to be much more intelligent than some of his other fans, but now I realize that the single accomplishment of pleasing everyone who heard his acts was probably the most amazing facet of his abilities. Let's not even go into the acts themselves.

I feel like an asshole saying this, but comedy has lost a luminary. Mitch, perhaps it means nothing to you now, but you are missed by people you never knew of.

Do you like american comedy? I like american comedy. I like american comedy, baby.

Hello people. I apologize if my theories about us being parts of a gigantic candy bar rubbed you string theorists the wrong way.

But enough of that, I've got a mini update. It's a character study, basically, just a short fiction piece with one character, that tells a little about him or her. Here it is.

Maxwell pushed the orange button on the machine. It ceased blinking after a faint click echoed through the once-silent hallway.

Thwack. The cup fell into its designated location.

Pluddop. Foaming, steaming, jet-black liquid hit the bottom of the Styrofoam.

Then the familiar noise of liquid slapping liquid began, as the coffee substitute filled the cup.

Maxwell looked around, though he knew what he would see. The hallway was dark, with a faint lamp illuminating small, private islands of tile every seventy feet. It was also empty, the enormous hallway, though Max had become used to emptiness in an alarming number of ways. Just as he thought, the only comforting sight in the entire stretch of nothing was the vending machine in front of him. Of course, the only thing comforting about it was the gentle glow it gave off. A singular irregularity in the entire wing, interrupting the splotches of light from the florescent lamps, it was comforting to him.

To pass the time, he drank the imitation coffee and looked down the hallway without blinking. As the seconds faded to minutes, the hall began to transform. It became a river of blackness, with uninhabited islands dotting its stream at uniform intervals. Perhaps the Gods that made this river had a thing for symmetry. As the river came closer to its delta at the security desk, a small city sprang up. This coffee machine, it was the last stand of civilization against the raging waters.

But it was being swept away. Slowly, ever so slowly, erosion was wearing it away. The buttons that were once neon shades of orange, pink, and green were coated with the slime of a thousand hands. The lights from the city were tarnished, yellowed with age and the acid of the air. It fought with a resilience only mechanical objects serving a consumer economy can manifest.

Max walked back to his desk, surveying the security monitors he had neglected, and the magic image of the hall disappeared. Until his next cup of coffee.

I don't normally update the setup of this whole shebang, so I figured I'd notify you: You can now post comments directly from the main page. This is not a huge deal aesthetically, but in terms of function, I'd like to think it's a substantial improvement.

Please utilize this new feature that advances in technology have allowed us! Also, it would be prudent to have something to say about the post in question before commenting on it.

God, I hope I spelled shebang right.

If I've got this right, things work like this (though I admit, I'm no economist):

We live in a universe that is almost entirely empty space. The emphasis here goes to, "Almost." The universe is an eternity of nothing, punctuated by a very (relatively speaking) small, yet still infinite number of somethings.

That's the macro end of everything. On the other end, things work like this:

Inside everything, way, way down, there are molecules. Air, water, mescaline, brown shag carpet, everything. Molecules attach to each other (one way or another) and make (capital S) Stuff.

Creepy? Yeah! Then even deeper than that, way way way down, there are atoms that make molecules. Now, these atoms have little electrons and gizmracks and other words that don't really mean anything. All these little words are charged one way or another, and they buzz around. What do they buzz around? Well, it's strange, but they buzz around a lot of nothing. The majority of space in atoms is empty.

SO! We're made of mostly nothing (except some buzzing somethings and smaller somethings that are surrounded by nothing), living on a something in a sea of almost entirely nothing.

I guess that's why I find it funny when people say:

"There has to be a reason for all of *This*!"

This what? There isn't much of this. Maybe the this that is was an accident.

So, the planets of our solar system revolve around the sun in a similar pattern to electrons around the protons and neutrons of an atom. Some day, and some day soon, we're going to really *need* to face the fact that this solar system is an atom in a candy bar that's been on the shelf for WAY too long.

Nate

I just overheard this conversation in a New Line Cinema boardroom.

"Now, about Blade 7..."
"Whoa, aren't you getting ahead of yourself, Roland?"
"It's gonna take money."
"What?"
"A whole lotta spending money."
"What are you--"
"It's gonna take plenty of money, to do it right, child."
"You've been snorting peyote again."

Why I hate almost everyone.

This is me being a jackass. Interested? Read on.

That's right, I hate just about everyone, because virtually everyone is a greedy, ignorantly malicious, selfish, halfwit. I really feel like a jackass saying this, but it's got to be said. In fact, I feel like such a jackass that I'm going to outline (purely for my own use) how to not be a greedy, ignorantly malicious, selfish, halfwit.

1. Listen when people speak.

This is somewhat important. Of course, nobody has anything interesting to say anyway, but let's just look past that for now. The problem is that nobody thinks anybody says anything interesting, so nobody listens to what anyone says and reflects on it, perhaps (now this is extremely unlikely) allowing what has been said to fuel their own thinking (much more unlikely).

2. Share.

Don't be a dick. You have a sandwich, and someone doesn't. Give them half of your fucking sandwich. This extends to many things. Perhaps even beyond sandwiches. It's not that anyone is entitled to what you have, but the majority of the time, you're not really entitled to it either. Of course, you know, if you don't have parents, and raised yourself by eating bark and nuts and shit, then maybe this doesn't apply to you. On the other end, if you're reading this, you have a computer, and somewhere along the line, I'd wager someone helped you with something.

3. Keep your promises.

Hey, you know, is it really that hard? Fuck.

4. Don't vote for Republicans.

I don't feel obligated to defend this statement, and if you disagree, do us all a favor and die (That's right, us, not me, I'm speaking collectively because more people exist than just me. Novel concept, I know).

5. Take a very small amount of time every day, and do nothing.

This can be much more rewarding than it sounds. Use your imagination with it, sit on a chair, sit on the grass, sit on a bed. Fuck, lay down if you want. Let your mind pick up where the lackluster stimulation of your surroundings lets off.

6. Pursue something.

Anything.

7. Give a nigger a break.

Empathy is a key word here.

I need to go to fucking sleep.

You have the impression that what you're experiencing is a dream. The room around you is small and squarish. Disturbingly indistinct, with a table and a chair and a window without a pane. There is a door, but it seems so far away, as if it isn't really an option anyway. Why would you leave? You want to be here, don't you?

Besides, it's dark outside. Nobody goes outside at night. Of course, your memories disagree, bombarding you with one midnight excursion after another. After a few moments, the memories fade into darkness and mist, and you're left with the grim certainty that nobody goes outside at night.

The door is closer now, and who would've noticed? Either you walked to it, or it just snuck up on you. In the way that dreams confirm their own logic, you hear a deep, apocalyptic snarling from the door.

An apocalyptic sound can only happen in a dream, but you hear it and understand the implications. You back away from the door, just as it explodes in a shower of door-parts.

And there, right there is the biggest wolf never imagined. It can't fit in the room, but the wooden walls seem to swell and breathe, accommodating it. Welcoming it. You're on your back, on the floor, and you don't know what to do.

That's only natural. The orange eyes aren't natural, though. They're huge, the size of softballs, and they flicker with the light of a sacrificial pyre. Hungry.

Just as the massive teeth close around your head and neck, you think about everything that wasn't a dream. You think about how you should've done something, how everything you had was a waste, and how this shouldn't be the end. But it is.

I am a roleplayer. You might be wondering what this means. This means that I pretend to be something other than myself in every avenue of my life. Sure, I play dungeons and dragons, but that's really not what this is about. I'm so dissatisfied with everything about me that i believe a little escapism is in order almost all the time.

For instance:

When I play first person shooters, I don't just try to win, I get into the characters.

In counterstrike, I have buttons mapped to say things like:

"Yes, and we have destroyed your world commerce structure as well!"
"We will force you to use your heavy ordinance on unsuspecting countries, and you will be obligated to remanufacture them."

Yeah, I guess it's really not funny. It's not just my text speech though, it goes much deeper. Depending on my random team assignment, my play style varies widely.

As a Terrorist (capital 'T' please), I rush blindly into likely ambush areas firing blindly. I do not use the exceptional accuracy of the AK-47 in short bursts to my advantage, but rather, I attempt to shoot as many bullets as possible in the short 5 minute rounds.

Planting the bomb is paramount, if we merely kill the infidels sent to stop us, what good have we really done? The will of Allah is the dismantling of their oppressive machine, not merely the deaths of a few soldiers.

On the other end, as a Counter-Terrorist, I use my surroundings to my advantage. I take great care to keep my hostages alive, as my mission is their safe return to loving families and democratic, freedom-enriched lives.

Sure. Call me a "camper." What you don't realize is that I must protect the bombsite. Deviating from my mission objective is a folly my superiors would not take kindly to. You fucking ragheads.

Noob.

So.

I can't sleep.
At the same time, I really can't think of anything to say that's worth reading. It's a problem that permeates society, though. We've all got the ability to get published (I've got a button for it under this text input box), but we lack the skill to articulate anything meaningful.

Yeah, the internet is a wonderful thing, much like the invention of cordless and cellular phones. It's good that people are more reachable. I think. Cellular phones and the internet seem to be obtusely congruent. What we have is a massive amount of people who want to be the minority. I'm not the first person to say that it's impossible for that to happen.

Why then, upon realizing the sheer impossibility us all acheiving their hopes and dreams, do we try?

Well, because we BELIEVE in ourselves.

"I know I can do it."
"Everyone I know thinks I'm the best at *whatever*"
"I'm the next American Idol!"

Right now, I feel obligated to inform my reader (thanks mom!) that perhaps this rant has been brought on by American Idol. Yeah, I've been watching it. My girlfriend has a huge hardon for the damn show, and there have been a few specific moments that stuck out at me.

Specifically, watching people calling everyone they know on their cell phones to tell these people that they know that they've made it through another round.

I need to parse it myself, to try and find the meaning there, but it really struck me.

It could be that these fucking wastes of DNA have cellphones as a disillusion that they would ever NEED to be reached.

"What if my producer needs to get in touch with me? What about my lawyer?"

I say without restraint and with full confidence of my own correctitude that nobody auditioning for American Idol needs a cellphone until they win the useless competition and discover how hollow their lifelong dream has always been.

I hate everything. Especially when I see myself in these utterly pathetic misanthrope fuckers.

Here is a very short piece of fiction I wrote just after the last presidential election. It's called, "Let Them Have Pudding".


He surveyed the empty street with paranoid, glazed eyes. Clear. He ran across. An air of readiness surrounded him, yet it carried with it the smell of incompetence. His boots on the broken glass and soggy newspaper made his passage across loud, nerve-racking even. When he arrived at the next alley, breath left his lungs, and relief crept in.

A voice behind him said, “You shouldn’t have come here, George.”

At first, George was scared, terrified, but slowly recognition seeped through his simian brain.

“Ken, I think they’re on to us.” he said, eyes wandering, he pulled a cube-ish package from his coat pocket.

“It’s not safe for you here. Are you insane, man?” Kenneth said.

George drew a spoon from his front pocket. Kenneth gasped. After George applied the spoon to the package, there was a popping noise, followed by the familiar noise of someone opening a single-serving pudding snack.

“Great scott!” Ken said, “Think of your career. Your career! Sweet Christ, you’re throwing it all away.”

As George ate the pudding snack, a look of ecstasy spread through his body. He had lost the prejudice to distinguish between flavors. He could only describe them as “good.” Ken was still whispering in a fierce voice.

“I’m telling you, what if you’re seen? All hell, that’s what. We can’t be seen together, it’s not safe for you to keep coming to see me.”

Kenneth Lay finally pierced through George W. Bush’s defensive, pudding shell.

“But… I love you, Ken.” George said, turning to face the man.

“Don’t start on me again,” Ken said, “you know how I feel. You have a country to lead. You won this time. Good God, you won, man.”

George ate the pudding like a prisoner at an Iraqi prison camp. He ate it fast, but savored every mouthful, with every taste bud enraptured.

He said, “Do you want some of my pudding?”

Ken sighed, “Yes, of course I want pudding. That doesn’t change—“

He was silenced as the sticky, sweet gelatin was forced into his mouth. The spoon even tasted good, and Ken couldn’t resist. He could feel the “W” engraved on it with his tongue, he could taste the oxidizing silver, but mostly the pudding. He sucked on it eagerly, until he was sure there was none left.

George said, “Okay, now you do me.” He handed Ken the pudding cup and his silvered spoon, opening his mouth and closing his eyes.

Ken cleared his head, once he had a spoon in one hand and pudding in the other. He said, “George, you know this can’t work. I love you, but I won’t let you ruin yourself for me.”

At that he dropped the pudding cup on the ground and fled into the night. It spilled, in slow motion, catapulted across the wet pavement. George screamed a screamy, pain scream.

“NOOOO!! MY PUDDING!”
Then he ran back to his big, White House

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? Yes, quite. Quite a while. I've got another rough story completed. Feel free to email me with comments, constraints, etc. It's not quite as long as the last one. This one, I think is mostly finished, but there are still a few errors in it, which I notice every time I read it.

She can... Touch me... all over my body. That's not the story, just the violent femmes. Ok, here's the story. Again, much like the last one, paragraphs don't make the transition, and neither do italics, or anything of the kind. Just pretend it's there, I've manually doublespaced the area between paragraphs, but going through and finding everything that should be italicized is beyond even me. It makes for a confusing read, I know, when characters are thinking and it should be in italics, it ends up looking like I just shifted perspective, but you gotta fight through that shit. I still love you guys. Good luck. Here's the story.

***
Firmly Disenchanted


And so this story starts, as most self-proclaimed good stories do, with the events leading up to the moment that changed everything, and concerns itself very little with the events transpiring after that same cataclysmic, monumental change.

The night was dark. Of course the night was dark, but it was a darkness that demanded narration in an active fashion. There are few nights in which the darkness is set loose and given such a free reign as the night whereupon this story begins. The darkness behaved like a mastiff relieved of its leash, barking and tramping about in a generally malevolent fashion.

Firmly Proctor sat on the rough, wooden pier and appreciated the night’s darkness. He had high cheekbones and almond shaped brown eyes nestled in an inoffensive face. More interesting things could have been said about him, from his tousled hair with the irreverent cowlick, to his bare feet, which were uncommon in a city as large as New York.

He was elated because he felt as though the mastiff was concerned with him, though he knew it to be untrue. The imaginary dog's job was making everyone feel as though it was angry with them, but it was only really interested in barking and making a bother of itself. Firmly was not elated, on the other end, by the tar and glass stuck to the hewn cedar boards beneath him. He was somewhat annoyed, in fact, as it was a painful experience sitting there.

This particular pier, however, was the only one he had found that was abandoned, so he put up with the tar and the glass shards. He needed a place to sit every night, and contemplate what he commonly referred to as, “Killing my-fucking-self.”

Now, this statement may seem to come somewhat out of the blue–that is, it may be surprising and unexpected–but in a narrative-logic kind of way, it must be known. This is because the behavior spoke volumes of Firmly’s personality. He said the above statement often, using it to answer a variety of questions, including questions that it didn’t seem to exactly relate to. In fact, he had just said it, in a manner of speaking, a few hours ago. To be more specific, he repeated the business about killing himself to Denise Orchards while they were at work. The whole affair happened like this.

Denise Orchards sat down on the floor next to Firmly Proctor and began again her efforts to bed him. He stood behind a register that rested on a counter, and the entire affair of the register and counter blocked her from the view of anyone who might, completely by accident, be in Mary’s Virginal Sex Emporium. One would describe all customers as arriving completely by accident because anyone who happened to be in the store, save the employees, pretended to not know where they were, and these people would frequently seem to just happen to think about making a purchase while they tried to leave. It was the only retail store in New York City that ran an entirely accidental, yet very profitable, business.

Denise said, “What are you doing tonight?”

Firmly kept watching the empty shop, and said, “Thinking about killing my-fucking-self.”

Denise had heard this a lot.

“So you’re busy, then?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess, though that would imply me doing something.”

“I suppose it would.” She paused, “Want some company?”

“Not especially.”

Then she surprised him by breaking their routine. He had expected an uneasy silence following his response, which was standard, but she spoke. This deviation from the status quo annihilated his composure, it stopped the cycle he had found himself in for years, where everybody said what he expected and reacted to him as he thought they would. It may seem like a small thing, an insignificant change, but it rocked Firmly like a stoning in ancient Jerusalem. Her comment went even deeper, resembling a minor on methamphetamines. It initiated a holocaust of composure and composure-resembling-states-of-being within his psyche. By the end of the night, there would be few stately, resigned, composed, or content feelings remaining in his mind. Although he never claimed to be happy, which is unsurprising given his obsession concerning his own death, he found himself in an altogether new and frightening world. Damn woman. She ruined everything he had, as women are wont to do to men when they find one who believes he is in control.

“Where, exactly, do you plan on doing this?”

Firmly said nothing while the world spun at amazing speeds, yet an incomprehensible force somehow kept him attached to the surface of it. For the first time in his life, he could feel the sheer speed at which he was hurtling through space and time.

“Are you deaf, Firmly?”

He saw a way out, a glimmer of something promising through the chaos. Were he a bit more careful, or even–one might say, alluding to his earlier, personal holocaust–composed at this juncture, he would’ve realized it was not in fact a way out, but a trap.

He said, “Yes, I am. Stone-fucking-deaf. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

She said, “Liar. That’s what you are. Just a—.”

“Nope, can’t hear you. I don’t know why you keep talking.”

“You can hear me.” She said, “Because you’re responding to what I’m saying.”

He said, “It’s probably just a coincidence.”

After Firmly finished his sentence, Denise Orchards stood up and pulled a six-inch, black rubber dildo from a display on the side of the register. It was a strange thing, that surrogate penis. The weapon was within such easy reach because Mary, the owner of the store, had decided it needed a special place near the register. As was stated, it was black, but to clarify the previous description, only the haft of it was black. A perfect candy apple obscured the portion that should have held a mushroom-shaped tip. The apple on top was perfectly edible, though the product came with a warning, written in many languages, that actual insertion of the device was advised against. Warnings being as they are, unconcerned but stern and multi-lingual, it also warned against eating the black section in as many languages.

In the common manner of frustrated women with no recourse save violence, she thumped Firmly on the head with it.

“Ouch!” he said. Seeing the trap for what it was, he realized the impossibility of convincing someone that he was deaf. The pretense was more difficult than he thought, given his decent hearing and the candy-coated thumping devices within easy reach.

“That’s what you get, you insolent prick. Will you speak like a civilized person now?”

“Fine, just don’t hit me again,” he said.

“Where do you go to think about killing yourself?”

No recourse remained save truth, so he opted for it, sullenly, “Pier 217.”

“I see. I’m expecting that you do, in fact, have a place of residence?”

He hated the way she made multiple statements, yet made them sound like a single question. Firmly hated everything about her, from the enticing way she sold fluffy, cherry gelatin, or stainless steel handcuffs, all the way to how she carried herself around in front of him, not exactly trying to sell him anything, but at the same time trying very hard to make him want to have it.

“Yes, you’d expect correctly, though I’m not sure that’s exactly possible.”

“You’re not sure what’s exactly possible?” she said.

“To expect something correctly,” he said.

She knew from previous experience that arguing finer points like this would get her no closer to her goal. The many ways Denise loved and hated complicated men could fill a warehouse with text, so it must receive only cursory attention, lest one get distracted from the narrative at hand. “Why don’t you just kill yourself at home?” she said.

He looked offended. “Because I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to think about killing myself.”

“The point still stands, though.” She sighed, continuing. “Fine, then why not think about killing yourself at home?”

Firmly stood his ground, saying nothing.

“Look,” she said, “all I’m saying is that it would be more comfortable to think about killing yourself in your house. It’s cold outside, and more so on the pier, I’d expect.”

He looked at her, finally, and for the first time in recent memory.

“Tell me something else you expect.”

“I expect you’d be an amiable person, if you weren’t such an asshole.” And with that she went to tidy up the butt-plug section, which had been ravaged by a gaggle of drunken businessmen. They had laughed at the impossibility of such items. Of course, over the next week each of the men would come in alone and by accident, and then accidentally, on a whim even, purchase the new wall-mounted number. The one that plugged into an electrical outlet and had a four-inch diameter at its widest point. Denise figured the selling point was the international adapter, and had written a note to Mary communicating this.

Being trapped as he was–that is, within a story–Firmly was forced to revisit his conversation with Denise while it was explained. He was compelled, as it was narrated, to relive each painful moment of his perceptions changing and the events that caused that change. Of course, he had no idea that this flashback of his was not of his own design, but was, rather, a narrative convention employed to explain a bit about him.

Firmly snapped himself out of his reverie with a slap across his own face. He was here to contemplate suicide, not the finer points of Denise Orchards. It was doubtful, in his mind, that she possessed any points he could, even in passing, refer to as “finer.” Coupled with that, he wasn’t sitting here to contemplate selling what everyone in the world pretended not to want.

Except the French, maybe.

I wonder what French sex-stores are like? He thought.

Immediately, Firmly slapped himself again.

Stop thinking about work, he told himself. In fact, fuck work. There’s something very wrong with everything, when a man can’t come to an abandoned pier and regale himself with his own demise. My mind’s all, “think about this”, and “consider that”. Unacceptable, really. It’s all Orchards’s fault. Ever since she changed the way things should go, I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of anything.

As if proving his thought to a congregation of skeptics, he fished a penny out of his pocket and threw it into the water. He found that he could not, in fact, discern which side had landed facing up. Determining this, he nodded, satisfied.

Then another thought came into his mind, unbidden and not precisely welcome, like a strange, bedraggled tomcat sneaking into a tidy living room. In the manner of rowdy felines, this cat invariably advocated–and initiated, one should say–the complete obliteration of any tidiness said room once possessed. If this same cat were to have the word “why” shaved onto it, with a question mark following the last letter, the comparison would be complete.

Why? Firmly thought. Why do I contemplate killing-my-fucking-self?

He had to admit that no answer was presenting itself.

Firmly slapped his face again, when he realized he was not thinking about killing himself in any way. It disturbed him that he was thinking about why he thought about killing himself. He forced his consciousness to be linear, to focus. It complied, after attempting to distract him with other shiny, bauble-ish thoughts.

I could do it, lean forward a bit, fall into the water. I don’t think I’d make it back up here, but even then, hypothermia being the bitch that it is….Maybe I do this because it’s the only way I can imagine anything changing.

He made to slap himself as his mind drifted, but he noticed something moving.

What’s all this, then? he thought in a British accent.

A number of people were approaching the abandoned pier where Firmly Proctor sat. A great number of people, in fact, who had flashlights and glass containers sprinkled amongst them, glittering like salt, as if a restaurant patron had decided they were a dish that looked far too healthy.

Firmly wore a look of studied apprehension, much like a man who’s own doom has just sat down next to him, planning to share a light lunch.

He decided that the best course of action was to ignore the event, whatever it might be coalescing into. Ignoring the raucous crowd approaching him, he studied the sea. He hoped the coalescence would leave him largely unperturbed. Perhaps, he allowed himself to hope, it wouldn’t coalesce into anything at all. These hopes were soon thrown, arm in arm, into the water of the harbor. The damn thing was coalescing into something, something much more definitive than the damned thing that it currently was.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said a familiar voice Firmly had last heard attached to Denise Orchards. He hoped that it had recently become detached, and perhaps belonged to a new owner. That, of course, would mean that Denise Orchards had not used the knowledge she obtained from him earlier, and also not decided to invade his sanctuary. Like the others, these hopes were thrown into the water where they promptly drowned. The time for ignoring was past, and the time for actively discouraging was at hand.

Firmly turned and appraised the flock of pedestrians walking toward him.

“Kickass place for a party, Denise,” a boy said. Firmly would later describe him in a speech, as a boy who was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.

Narration being the tricky practice that it is, Firmly did not know he would be giving speeches. In fact, he would be very drunk through most of them, but it is important that it be known right now, that they do occur at some point in this trick-some narrative. The course of events that led to him giving these speeches is what interests the story, not the speeches themselves, or the events following them. Though the speeches and their aftermath will receive cursory attention in the section affectionately called, “The Conclusion.”

Firmly looked at the people, with shock and horror. It was shock and horror’s first audition for Firmly in quite some time, and neither of them wanted to ruin it. Shock almost won the day, until horror pulled Firmly’s lips apart, making him gape. They both reluctantly agreed to a draw. Earlier in the year, shock and awe might have battled at this same set of circumstances. However, the military operation of the same name had forever prevented the simultaneous appearance of those two emotions on Firmly Proctor’s face.

Two people seemed to be carrying an ice chest, which they set down near Firmly, while the rest set down flashlights, gas lanterns, and brown bags containing, he assumed, glass bottles containing, again he assumed, alcohol.

“What’s all this, then?” Firmly said to Denise, more for a lack of anything else to say than for his desire that these people leave.

“This is drinking,” she said, gesturing at the bottles and ice. “And everybody, this is Firmly, the guy who wouldn’t be such a cock if he didn’t try so hard to be a cock.”

Everybody knew their collective name, since they nodded to Firmly after the introduction. Firmly set about being the biggest cock he could imagine, which, considering his place of employment, was simply, staggeringly, very, very large.

“Go away?” He said, knowing he shouldn’t have phrased it as a question. Firmly was simply not at the top of his game.

Denise firmly ignored him. When he said nothing more, she handed a fifth of clear liquid to him.

“This the guy that’s going to kill himself?” one of the everybody said.

Firmly took the bottle and looked at Denise, willing her to explain the whole thing: he wasn’t going to kill himself, but liked the feeling that he could change something about his situation. He didn’t recognize the difference in his outlook, but had he thought about killing himself earlier in the week, his reasoning would have been that he liked to think about it. He knew she would not explain it. She didn’t, and, simultaneously, Firmly lost the will to act like a big dick.

“Yeah,” Firmly said, taking a slug of liquid character-growth from the bottle in his hands. Now, that may seem to be an obtuse description of alcohol, but the inebriation alcohol could afford happened to be exactly what the story ordered.

“There you go. Lighten up, Firmly,” Denise said.

“I can’t lighten up,” he said. He took another drink. The fire assailing his esophagus was happy, bouncing around like a child in a playground made of sparkling candy. It wasn’t a sensation he was acclimated to.

“Why?” she said, referring not to the narration, but to his statement. She felt that progress towards bedding this befuddled, enigmatic man was finally being made, and had no idea how the alcohol meandering towards his stomach was acting.

There was a lengthy ceasefire in the conversation. Bottles were opened, imbibed, and set on the pier only to be picked up again so that the process of drinking them, setting them down, and opening new ones could be repeated. To illustrate exactly what kind of pause in dialogue this was, one could continue describing what occurred. Instead, let’s just assume the pause very closely resembled a cease-fire between two battling armies so things can get moving again. It should be noted that after this period Firmly was well down the road called intoxication, and didn’t know where it ended.

“Like what?” he mused aloud. He realized he hadn’t mused aloud in a long while, but pushed that thought aside. The impression that these people were only here to watch Denise talk to him would not go away, until he threw alcohol at it. Then it did leave, sulking at the concept of social lubricants.

Denise thought he had forgotten, and said, “Yeah, like what, specifically, won’t let you lighten up?”

“Change, mostly change. ” he said. He didn’t know where that whole change thing came from, though a tomcat was batting around the thoughts of an immaculate living room and it wouldn’t leave. Unlike his previous thought, it did not leave when he threw alcohol at it, but looked at him with an expression that said, “Oh yes, there you are. Now what was I on about? Ah, that bit of houseplant. Quite.” It seemed to look at him in order to properly ignore his presence.

“And?” she said.

Firmly said nothing, and unknowingly allowed his narrator further wordplay involving his name.

Denise was confused as to his meaning. “What kind of change do you mean? Change for a dollar, or change as opposed to static-ness. Oh, there has to be a better word for not change.”

Nobody could think of it, however.

Firmly said, “I’m not sure which one I mean. Pocket change never bothers me, until someone asks me for ‘spare change,’ and then I get all broken up. Well, that only started happening today, but it seemed that everyone wanted spare change today. I think, ‘I can’t change anything and this asshole wants me to give him what little change I have?’ How can you even have change? Just a silly notion, change is something that happens, right? Except it never does, nothing changes. Did you know that every single, real social revolution has eventually reverted to old policies?”

“What’s a social revolution?” she said.

“Hmm,” he said, “a social revolution is one of two kinds of revolutions. In a social revolution, the social class in power changes. Like, from the rich to the poor, for instance. The other kind is a political revolution, where nothing really changes, the people in power shift around, but the same kind of people are still in control.”

“Uh-huh.” She said, uninterested. Something seemed to be getting preachy, or resembling preaching.

“So all I’m saying is when people ask me for spare change, I wish there was some change for anyone. The thing is, though, everything that changes, I mean actually changes, changes back.”

“It’s funny that those two words are the same, but mean different things,” she said.

“It’s not funny, it’s fucking tragic.” He said.

“How is it tragic? They’re just words, we would’ve run out of them if some weren’t spelled the same.”

He said, “Because something should change.”

“Jesus, Firmly, lighten up,” Denise, who was a militant atheist, said. It was a measure of her frustration that she used the name of someone who many consider to be their lord and savior. Had she been near a rack of apple-topped sex-toys, she would have grabbed one and brandished it under his nose, threatening him.

He spoke before she found something to hit him with. “I will say that the main thing that bothers me is that I don’t understand how the whole thing works. You know, I went to college, just to ‘get’ it. The whole interaction of humans shouldn’t be so fucking complicated. And you know what else? I don’t think anyone gets it, I mean, really knows how the whole system works.”

“You’re not making any damn sense,” she said.

“I’m drinking. I’ll consider it a privilege granted to me, temporarily, by the great deity ‘Ethanol’.”

“That,” she said, “makes sense.”

And so the conversation continued, in a sparring match sort of way, with silent observers, who did occasionally whisper between themselves, long into the morning. Firmly asserted his viewpoint that things are unintelligible in the world, and that they should not be this way. It was decided at some point, that he should run for public office. The campaign slogan would be, “Fuck, I don’t know,” which was a phrase that saw much use throughout the night. And thus began the Firmly political movement.

This whole turn of events may seem strange, given the unassailable fact that drunken decisions rarely amount to more than hours at work undertaken with hangovers, but suspended disbelief is a much-overused convention for a reason. It works. Just keep going, and nobody’s the wiser. That said, it was an important night, one that decided the political structure of the United States for generations to come.
Of course, it would not be right, given the structure of a story like this, to end here, so rest assured, things have not ground to a stop. This horse is not yet glue. It is merely in the process of becoming glue, in the way that all things are progressing toward their end result. The end result of all things, it is worth remembering, is not glue, mostly just the end of horses.
Then, realizing this is not finished or over, someone must explain the political climate of the country this narrative takes place in, so that this grandiose change can be understood.

Volatile is a very good word to describe the politics in the United States of America at present. Another good word would be unstable, if one were writing about this in a political journal, which is not the case at the moment, so scratch that. Good words to describe it are in particular abundance, but one could become easily distracted attempting to describe this complex situation in one word.

Using many words, one could sum up the current state of things, like this:

The political stratum in the United States of America resembles the unrest felt at many corners of the globe. The Great Leader has firm control of the institutions governing the people, yet only a tenuous grip of the people themselves. A mind swath poll–that is, a poll conducted by scanning the thought-sensor installed in everyone’s brain–conducted a month before Firmly Proctor got drunk after work indicated that 0.0002% of Americans approved of the Great Leader’s performance. This statistic included the leader himself, who hadn’t sufficiently prepared for the brain probe, and was queried during a period of self-doubt. The feeling that things were vastly wrong with the structure organizing and overseeing human affairs was palpable, much like the day Martin Luther said to the Catholic Church, “Fuck off, you bastards.”

As fortune would have it, and fortune would have it, because fortune is a lusty glutton and will have anything it can get its grubby hands on, Firmly was a great public speaker. He wasn’t just charismatic with a public address system. He knew crowds, knew how they think, act, re-act, and generally crowd around in places. Firmly worked their prejudices, passions, and all the other things that humans base their decisions on. Denise was usually around. When asked about what office he was running for, and about her, the answer was, “Fuck, I don’t know. Vote Firmly!”

Firmly gave speeches and more speeches. He spoke to crowds of people that wandered into his political rallies the way they had wandered into his previous place of employment, completely by accident. Camera crews showed up at pier 217 at some point along the line, where most of his speeches took place, and filmed it, hoping to run a short story about insane people who were both local and political. Halfway through his speech, the news team decided they would Vote Firmly.

That was how it happened. Everyone voted Firmly, including the Great Leader, who forgot that he had abolished elections 12 years earlier. Voting for Firmly Proctor just made so much damn sense. He didn’t know how to fix anything, but now everybody knew that nobody knew how to fix anything. They knew that nobody could fix everything, and that anybody could ruin everything. That’s what the American people voted for.

His first day in political office, he–that is Firmly–abolished the United States government.

He said, on national television, “My fellow Americans, you’ve all voted for me because things are so unintelligible in this damn place, when they really shouldn’t be that way. I was once asked if I had any spare change. Today I have change, so I say this to every American: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, and don’t pay for anything. It is my belief that if we do this, something will change. My first declaration as Great Leader is to fire, outsource, lay-off, downsize, and generally get rid of everyone working for anyone. Senators, judges, all you guys, go home. I would expect resignations on my desk, if I had a desk anymore. I’m fired. Hey, you news guys, get out of here. Turn that thing off.”

Nobody at home knew whom he was talking to. Perhaps he was just messing around, giving a speech in his bathroom, and some mischievous news team filmed it. Firmly, however, was talking to the camera crews. Disappointed, they turned their cameras off. Broadcasting stations followed suit. At that moment, televisions in all parts of the former great nation, which the former great leader once controlled, performed that great, cinematic ending. The ending where the picture gets very thin and horizontal, then sucks itself into the center of the television. Right after that, it rebounds on itself, just before disappearing entirely. As every television in the country winked out, the people of what had once been a nation started figuring things out for themselves. They walked out of buildings that ranged from architectural brilliance to carefully applied mediocrity. The people walked outside, and blinked at the sun. It was bright, and hurt their eyes.

And to hell with the expectation that Firmly Proctor and Denise Orchards become entangled in a web of mutual affection, because that’s another story entirely.

***end***

The state of being called, "Hangover," doesn't effectively describe what I was this morning. Naturally, several hours, glasses of water, and aspirin later, you could've used 'hangover' to describe me. Now that I think about it though, why do we call them hangovers anyway? Why not something that applies, like, "Fuck you, don't talk to me." Example.

*ring ring*
Actor 1: Uh... Hello?
Actor 2: Hey good buddy, how about that party last night.
Actor 1: Fuck you, don't talk to me.
Actor 2: That good, huh?
*click*

I should mention that they're actors not because this is a sketch, but because I hate actors. Another phrase that would work well is, "Temporarily Dead." Eeeeeexample:

*ring ring*
*smash, and other noises that resemble a phone being destroyed*
The next day:

Boss: Why weren't you at work yesterday?
Employee: I was temporarily dead.


Anyway, just a thought. Today is actually an important day in my yearly calendar, because it's Alisa's and my anniversary today. Creepy huh? I can't give any more details right now, on the off chance she'll check my site before I pick her up.

Stay off the sauce kids.

So, in a drastic maneuver involving a small amount of drinking, I did some stand-up last night. It went swimmingly. For those of you that don't know what the adverb 'swimmingly' means, it means 'well' or 'good' depending on usage. That's not a webster quote, but I think you'll find that it will suffice.

The best part, in my humble opinion, of my act last night was my heckler. She was a girl, and she was really drunk. Every other time I've performed, hecklers have fucked my world. I would lose my train of thought, forget jokes, generally get flustered, etc. This time, however, I gave it to her. It was like the pent up rage at every heckler I've ever seen or heard of bubbled out of me in this stream of witty insults (some original, some not.) There are two specific instances that come to mind, though there is a third I'll explain in greater detail. I should probably preface this by saying that I might have provoked her. The story goes like this: Her band went before me, and they kept asking for encores. The vast majority (at least of people around me) wanted them off the stage. I had been waiting for 3 hours to do my 7ish minute act. This is how open-mics work, I wasn't pissed about this. I mean, it's like 15 more minutes when I've been waiting all night, you know? I was trying to grasp the balls it would take to ask the audience to ask you for an encore, and then when nobody says anything, to keep playing WAY (Is that emphasized enough? I don't think so), WAY past your allotted time. So the first thing I said on stage, after "Hello Dinkytown!" was "Let's all give a big round of applause for pretention. Yeah, come on, give it up, pretention everybody." Some people got the reference to the assholes ahead of me, some didn't. Anyway, enough prefacing. Moving on.

I was doing a bit about Jesus (well, it's not really about Jesus, it's really about something else, fuck I'll just write out the bit) and she shouted out, "What would Jesus do?"

The bit goes something like this: Jesus is credited with saying, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth." I don't really know anything about that, but I do know one thing the meek won't be inheriting: Social Security. Because it's all gone, and there's nothing funny about that.

But in the middle of it, she demands that I answer, "WWJD?"
I said, "Jesus would shut the fuck up."
The crowd rather liked it, but I think it would've been better to say something a bit more whimsical like, "Jesus, what would Jesus do? Well, are we assuming that he's here, and listening to my act, like the rest of the audience, or just what would he do in general. Oh. You hadn't thought it through that far, well, by all means take a few minutes, then interrupt me again when I'm trying to tell a joke that depends, very much, on pacing and timing."

Anyway, I said that jesus would shut up, because it was the first thing that came to mind.

Well, that really pissed her off. In the middle of my bleu cheese bit, she started yelling, and I (yes, I'm ashamed of it) ripped off one of my favorite lines from Mr. Show, "Look lady, I don't come down to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth."

The crowd loved it (now I'm getting to the third thing she did, after which she shut her mouth), and she got angrier. She walked up to the stage and was swearing at me, and I was swearing back, and she tried to take the mic next to me (Lo and behold, it wasn't on.) Then I moved aside and told her and my mic, "No, take this one, you are funnier than I am."

She said something into the mic about Dave Chappelle being better than me, "Dave Chappelle would kick your ASS!" I think that was it. I thought, "Yeah." The fact that she doesn't know that Dave Chappelle has about 10 years of life on me, and likewise has been doing comedy about 14x as long as I have made the statement very funny to me. I'm assuming she didn't know, because if she did, she would've known that it wasn't a very good insult.

Then they cut the mic out on her. That specific moment was one of my best ever. I just need to not get so worked up over hecklers. I mean, I kind of had to shout, to override her voice (the sound system there sucks) but I shouldn't have kept shouting once she got on the stage. I dunno, you live and you learn. One of the best shows I've done at a place where people don't come to hear comedy. Swimmingly. Quite.

Hey kiddies, I'm pretty sure everyone that is going to read the below post already did, so let's go ahead and bump it down. Let's be sure though... yep, my mom already emailed me, so everyone's read it. Thanks to everyone for the kind words about my fiction.

I'm working on another story at the moment, it'll probably take me several weeks to finish, as it's just a wee baby right now. More details on that later, but think: Trans-Galactic Gargle Blaster, and you'll at least be heading in the right direction.

Oh, and buy every Douglas Adams book you see. I just finished his final (and posthumous) publication, The Salmon of Doubt. It's an amazing read. I logged on to Amazon.com as soon as I finished it and spent over $100 on books he recommended in the course of his own. My regret is that I was never able to recognize what a sheer genius the man was while he was alive.

On a much more personal life-ish note, I ingested a heroic portion of psychedelics a while back. While you might think, "Shhh, haven't you heard of a little thing called the MotherFucking Patriot Act?" I don't really give a shit which FBI agent is doing unassociated online research at the moment, because I'm done with drugs. I know it sounds funny, but I'm not breaking their laws anymore, so fuck 'em.

The trip itself, in retrospect, reminds me of two quotes from Zoolander. I can't find direct quotes, so forgive me.

1. My friends and I have been dropping acid and sunbathing with spidermonkeys off the coast of Madagascar for the past two weeks, changed our whole perspective on shit.

2. So my rope slips, and I start to fall. Then I think,"Haven't you been smoking peyote for 10 straight days, and couldn't part of this, maybe be in your mind." I was right, I've never even been to Mount Vesuvius (spelling is hard.)

Yeah, so it was a singularly life changing experience that I wouldn't be able to repeat, and wouldn't want to, because it was the worst night of my life. On the other end, I'm glad it happened, because I've finally been able to stop trying to control everything and just let go. Of course, just saying it like that sounds incredibly trite, but I can't summarize it in any way that Chuck Pahlaniuk hasn't already. At the very point that I knew, and didn't fear that someday I was going to die, and accepted it, EVERYTHING changed. And it is prefereble to the way I was living.

Happy Trails, I've got some work to do.

Holy shit! An update. Wait for it... wait for it...

Blam. This is a 21 page fiction story I just finished. It's going to take a long time to read if you happen across it, but I have no real fear that anyone will actually read it. If you are, however, hopelessly lost in this wealth of information we lovingly refer to as 'the internet,' don't worry, we'll take good care of you. Oh, and please forgive the format errors, but I don't have the time or the energy to re-indent everything. I am putting in the page-breaks that didn't make the transition from Word though.

On a different note, before we get started. I just turned 21. I have officially discovered that I have all the requirements of a writer. I love to drink, and I love avoiding writing. Cheers!



Subcutaneous [beneath the skin]

I’m sitting here, in a pissant Mexican restaurant, eating a soft-taco. It’s almost a fast food joint, almost a restaurant, but neither. The food reminds me of a restaurant, but the prices are low enough for migrant workers to eat heartily and not worry about how much money they send home to Mexico. I’ve got two bean burritos and a soft taco, wrapped in wax paper, sitting on an aqua tray in front of me. You can purchase food here with either relevant currency. It cost me $2.13, about double what the Mexican in front of me paid.
It doesn’t bother me. I’m not even hungry, I’m paying the swarthy man behind the counter for some time. Time to think. I’m trying to keep a low profile for a little while, until at least part of this shitstorm blows over. It’s hard to keep a low profile when you’re carrying so much fucking money. Everyone you meet wants it, and knows you have it. Every pair of eyes in the restaurant is burning a hole in my briefcase. They know.
I sit back and make myself chew slower. They know nothing. I’m fucking golden. I watch a little Mexican girl take a newspaper from the rack next to the front door. The door is glass, just like the front of the building, as if it was transplanted straight from a strip mall. This little girl must be around six years old, with jet-black pigtails and squinty brown eyes that contain some sort of mischief way, way back inside them. She sticks her tongue out at me so forcefully that it makes a noise. My mind churns so fast I almost hear it clicking.
Everyone here must know. They’re all working for them. They put her up to this to distract me. The Feds found me. Any second now, the windows will implode in a shower of tear gas canisters and flash grenades, and I’ll die choking and blind. I can fucking feel it coming. I hunch down as the paranoia threatens to overwhelm reality. The bean burrito I was eating squirts into the tray. Oops. I must look like a feral rodent, with my eyes darting around, gripping a mess of brown beans and flour in two paws, chewing every bite like my only goal is to swallow it before I die. Calm, I have to be calm. I take a deep breath and sit up straight, wiping my hands on a napkin.
Cynthia, what I’m calling the Mexican girl, stops making faces at me as her mother walks up and scolds her in Spanish. Cynthia’s mother rips the newspaper out of her hands and puts it back on the rack. Still speaking too quickly for me to follow any of it, she storms back to the family’s booth with Cynthia in tow.
I’m finishing my last bean burrito when a cop walks in. He holds the door open, blinding anyone who looks in his direction. I don’t look. All talk in the restaurant stops.
Nobody who eats or works here wants trouble from the police. He knows that patrons with green cards are rare in El Burrito Dallas. They know he knows, but as long as they cause no trouble, and build highways and corporate skyscrapers for less than minimum wage, he’ll let them stay.
He lets the door close. His belt jingles as his tactical baton, ammunition, handcuffs, keys, and pistol bang against each other. I pretend to chew, while my left hand grips my own weapon hard enough to kill a small mammal. He’s wearing standard blues with big, fuck-off mirror shades covering most of his face. It’s like he looks at the room with his moustache, then proceeds to the counter of the establishment. After he arrives at the desk, he hikes his pants up, back over his hips, but below his rather formidable gut.
He has papers in his hands, and gives one of them to the owner-manager-cook of El Burrito Dallas.
“Put this up in your window. Comprende?” He says the last part with as little Spanish as he can muster. What a fucking cowboy.
This first generation entrepreneur knows that giving trouble to the police means that his restaurant will be shut down, and that his children will have no chance at a college education. He nods vigorously.
Officer Wimble turns and hikes his pants up, and in seven steps, he’ll have to do the same damn thing again. He’s carrying about fourteen pounds of gear on his belt alone, and it’s threatening to drag his pants to his polished boots and deposit him firmly on the floor. Wimble begins to walk away from the counter, then spots me.
At the same time, my eyes dart to the paper he just gave the restaurant owner, and I see my picture on it. I try to think faster.
He doesn’t know. He’s with them, but he doesn’t know what I have. Then why the fuck is he walking towards me? He knows I speak English. Let’s run with this idea, Jack. I continue chewing, with only my right hand visible, holding the ass end of a bean burrito.
He heads over and stops, hovering over my table. I look up.
“Is there anything I can do for you, officer?” Sweeter than your mother’s apple pie, I am.
He eats it up, “I’m looking for a white guy, five-eleven, ‘buck fifty, brown hair and eyes, wanted for triple homicide.” I try not to recoil from my description.
“No sir, I haven’t seen anyone. You know, about forty-seven percent of Caucasian males are five-eleven. Honestly, though, this isn’t a place where many white guys hang out.” I said too much that time. I don’t want to kill him.
“Hmm,” he says, “Never heard that before. What brings you to this neighborhood?”
I had a big fucking beard yesterday, now I look nothing like myself. “Never heard what? That most white males are around five-eleven or that not many white guys hang out on this side of Dallas?”
“I’m asking the questions here, son. What are you doing in the neighborhood?”
“Nothing really. I was on the way to pick my girlfriend up, and I decided to stop and have some food. I hate showing up to her place hungry.”
“Your girlfriend lives around here?” he says, tipping his shades down on his nose. That move is in some law-enforcement textbook, I swear. He wants me to think he doesn’t believe it. Amateur bullshit.
“Yeah, Maria lives 3 blocks north, on 15th.”
He pushes his sunglasses back up his nose. The sound that issues from his face is a sniff, but it has a definitive ‘honk’ quality about it.
“Thank you for your time citizen. If you see anything suspicious, please call your local police station. There are phone numbers on the bottom there.” He sets a sheet of paper on the table, tapping the bottom of it with his index finger. The paper shows my face.
“Will do, officer.”
He begins to walk out, but as he stops to hike his pants again, he says over his shoulder, “By the way, Jack…”
I turn around and say, “Yeah?” Before I realize what a mistake that would be. It’s hard to not respond to your name. After it’s out of my mouth, he sees my face as I realize what a mistake it was. I panic with my mouth still open, as an expletive leaps from between my teeth. “Fuck.”
My H&K forty-five is out of my suit coat and on ‘fire’ mode as recognition spreads across his bovine visage. He moves like frozen pork fat. He turns sideways, as he was trained to do, but can’t get the pistol out of his jingling and jangling belt. It’s snapped in.
“Stop that, shitsmear.” He stops fumbling with the clasp on his pistol, and then gives up, deflating like a used sex doll.
I see movement from the family booth and I drop my burrito as I pull a 9mm from my belt, pointing it at the booth. Cynthia isn’t there. It’s a family with three boys, and none of them have pigtails. The mother is forcing the boys under the booth, shielding them with her body. I’m not going to kill anybody this time. What the shit is going on? Wimble is still here, but the girl I gave a name fucking vanishes? Fuck.
I hesitate, but nobody notices. My two pistols are at a forty-degree angle away from my body and I say, “Calm is good. This will be over in thirty four seconds.”
I indicate with my forty-five pointing at the fat fuck in blue. “You. Back up until you hit the door, then stop. If I don’t like the way you move, I’ll put a bullet in your sinus cavity. You’ve read my sheet, so don’t fuck around.”
He nods and backs to the door. Someone is scared shitless by the smell permeating the restaurant. I pocket the nine-millimeter in a pants pocket while I lift my briefcase from the floor. Careful with that, Jack, they’re worth nothing broken. Then I walk over to him, put the .45 on his frontal lobe, and pull the trigger.
Oops.
I try to dodge the spray as I step out the door with my gun inside my suit.
The sun is bright, and I shield my eyes from it as I locate my car.

*page break*

Seventy hours ago, I was such a nice guy. I worked for the World Wildlife Foundation, and made a damn good living. I had this graying ponytail that came down between my shoulder blades and a fuck-all beard. I hadn’t shaved in years. I believed in my job, I wanted to save all the pandas and crocodiles and fuck. I can be realistic about it now. I was a desk jockey, a drone that wasn’t saving anything but a 401k. We thought we were making a difference.
Marcus, the guy who worked the cubicle across from mine, was probably my best friend at the time. Over the course of several months, we had both developed a substantial coke habit. Actually, I had developed a substantial cocaine habit, and he was my dealer. The way it worked out, he skimmed from the coke he got for me, and got high for free.
We were in the bathroom at work, doing lines on our lunch break. I was fucking livid, and I knew it was a bad idea to get high when I was pissed.
I took mine through a rolled up dollar, and asked Marcus, “You always knew, didn’t you?”
He took his line, so he could think of a response, “No fucking way. Jesus, I’m as surprised as you are.”
“That slimy fuck,” I spit, “I had dinner with him three weeks ago, and he mentioned the wildlife refuge. I was like, ’We can’t let that pig-fucker drill Alaska, Johnson, just tell me what to do.’ He just fuckin’ smiled and said, ‘Leave it to me, Jack.’ I think he was gonna try to get me in on it.”
“That’s fucked up, Jack.” Marcus said, calm as a Hindu cow.
“You had nothing to do with this?”
“No, I didn’t.”
I handed him the napkin with hasty scrawling on it. He looked at it like I was holding a dripping handful of toxic waste.
“The fuck is this?”
“You knew. You knew Johnson sold everything. Anyone he couldn’t cut out, he cut in on the boatload of fucking money. Our PAC was the biggest fucking opponent to drilling that oil reserve, and you just fucking went along. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Jack, let me explain—.”
“Shut up, you disgusting fuck,” I screamed. ”Did you eat paint chips as a child? What? What is the fuck matter with you?”
Then he got mad. “Who gives a shit about a bunch of fucking polar bears and fucking elk? Fuck, at least guys like us get a piece this time.”
“It’s not about the wildlife, it’s about not letting these guys get their way. Don’t you get it? We’ve never been fighting for the animals. We’re fighting against the retards that direct our species. We’re protecting Homo Sapiens, by protecting everything else that has to be there.”
“Get off it. You’re pissed because you didn’t get paid. It’s your same fucking complex. I was in ‘Nam too, you fuck. Yeah, yeah, I know, you can’t even say what you did. It's still top-secret. Bullshit. You’re a fucking hippie. How did that switch come about? You probably protested the whole damn war, and you haven’t learned a damn thing. Grow up, this is just the way the world works. Guys like us get trampled on when they make waves—“
At this point I stopped listening, mainly because I couldn't hear through this loud 'snap' inside my brain that meant something was broken and could never be fixed. I uncapped the pen in my coat pocket, and in one fluid motion, drove it into Marcus’ skull, through the left eye-socket. He started to scream at the same time I put my hands around his throat and slammed his head into the bowl of the toilet. I flipped him over while he gasped for breath to scream again, but then I started throttling him. As he choked on my fingers, with the back of his neck on the toilet bowl, he started to turn red. That exact moment was when I took one hand from his throat and put it back on the pen. He flailed like Michael J. Fox, twitching and writhing, trying to push me off. More blood flowed down his face once I severed the optic nerve behind his eyeball. In order to get my pen in further, I had to use the palm of my hand and put my shoulder into it. He stopped thrashing once it probed about three inches into his face.
I wiped the blood off of my face and hands with toilet paper from the stall. Marcus didn’t look good anymore, but I propped him up on the toilet seat, hoping nobody would look inside. I walked out, thinking. It didn’t take me five minutes to figure it out. The first part is always the easiest, and I was committed beyond repair by the bloodstains on my hands. I just hoped nobody would notice a quiet guy on the john for a few hours.

*page break*

I’m outside the restaurant. Wimble’s thinking-organ is splattered all over the glass door. His corpse looks like an anthill made of meat just inside. Where the fuck is my car?
All of a sudden, this girl, this little girl who looks like the Mexican girl Cynthia appears to my left.
She says something familiar in a deep monotone, “Lay your head down child, I won’t let the boogey-men come. Put your head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the water drops. Go back to sleep, waking yourself in this way is unhealthy”
I draw a pistol, firing three times in the arc my arm makes before it’s leveled at her. Three holes in the glass of El Burrito Dallas. Then I squeeze the trigger again.
What? I’m not a monster. She scared me. I don’t like little girls.
But I didn’t hit anything.
She’s gone. What the fucking fuck? You know, I give and give to a reality that I assume to be stable and then out of fucking nowhere a little Mexican girl can appear and disappear? I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Her words tickle my brain in a remembering way, but it all dissolves to a misty uncertainty before I can wrap around it.
“Pull it together, Jackass, you have to make this count.” I say.
When I look around again, my car is right where I left it, sandwiched between an El Camino and an El Camino. Weird.
I hear sirens in the distance now. I don’t have the time to be fucking around.
I get in my car. It smells like rot and ketchup, a fruity amalgam that everyone bitches about. It could come from the leak in the roof that gets mildew in the back seat. The smell could be the half eaten, Nitrate-free hotdogs in the passenger foot-well, and I guess it could even be my secretary’s feces, vomit and piss seeping in from the trunk.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here with the key exactly halfway in the ignition, just thinking. I have no time. Fuck, and you know what? The smell could even be a combination of the mildew, the secretary sauce, and the McDonalds. I never thought of that.
And it won’t start. It makes that pathetic crahng-crahng-crahng sound of an engine that won’t turn over. I lose it. I start to flail around, banging the flats of my palms on the dashboard, the fraying cloth seats, and everything else in reach.
“Fucking shit on a brick. FUCK!” And the car doesn’t even respond.
My secretary says from the trunk, real timid-like, “What’s happening?”
Why didn’t I gag her? Or at least fold up the seat that leads to the trunk
I shout at the back, “You know what hostages do?”
“No…”
“NOTHING. You’re a fucking hostage. Shut the fuck up.”
I talk to the car, which is just listening to our conversation. “C’mon baby, you can do this.”
I turn the key again. There’s enough juice for the radio to be active, and “Pet” is on by A Perfect Circle.
The lyrics fight out the starter cranking, “Don’t fret precious I’m here. Step away from the window. Step away from the window. Go back to sleep. Lay your head down, child. I won’t let the boogey-men come. Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the water drops.”
I can’t believe Cynthia’s parents let her listen to this band.

*page break*

I remember this one time, driving through Elmwood, this pseudo-suburb in Dallas, when my car didn’t start. It was raining bricks of water, the kind where you drive slower because you’re afraid the water will break your windshield. You can’t see anything through the giant pieces of water colliding with your windshield. It’s like having your wipers on underwater.
Elmwood has never been a good neighborhood, but we were seventeen and wanted to party. Elmwood’s Caucasian population quadrupled on weekends. When I think back on it, the whole thing was pretty disgusting. A bunch of pasty suburbanite culture-leeches taking their parent’s cars and driving to a place that knew how to have fun, because none of us did, otherwise.
I told my mom we were going bowling, which is what I always told her, so she thought we always went bowling on weekends. I bowled a 52 in gym class, the one time I was forced to play the game. I hate bowling.
But I would tell her this, and she would give me a curfew to ignore. Then I’d leave. I’d pick up all my friends, because none of them had cars, and we’d head south. We’d listen to whatever bands were getting the most press at the time. We were the people record companies loved. They sold it, and we bought it.
Anyway, this time we were driving. My friends were smoking pot. I think I was too, but I don’t remember. I don’t even remember their names, that’s how much I hate who we were. We were talking about how shitty our parents were, about “the man,” and about life, the universe, and everything. Mostly about how great we were. We were beyond useless by a factor of ten.
So I hit a puddle, and the back of the Gremlin got away from me. She hydroplaned across the street and the passenger side hit one of those massive light posts. All I saw was the dashed yellow line while we spun across the street. I guess we caused enough of a wave to clear that part of the street while we got royally fucked.
My seatbelt was fastened. Guess who else had taken the metal part of the buckle in their right hand and pushed it into the metal part in their left hand and tightened the strap before takeoff? Nobody. I’m not defending myself. I was high, and I was going too fast. But every time you get into something that moves faster than any human ever should, though, at least take the precautions listed in the operating manual.
I only remember this much about my friends. There were three in the back and one sitting shotgun, and my car didn’t smell so bad. Oh, and the one sitting in the front was female. She never stood a chance. The pole crushed her skull once her window collapsed into something resembling shrapnel. The three in the backseat were luckier, though only two of them survived. One of them was launched through the passenger window and his left shoulder hit the pole, which paramedics said snapped his spinal cord. The other two just sort of slammed into that guy’s lower torso, and he cushioned the impact for them. I tried to drive away, but my car wouldn’t start. The most tragic thing was that my greatest fear was what mother would say. How fucking pathetic can you get?
I never thought of this then, but I wonder about it now. When lemmings start throwing themselves from cliffs, do the ones in the back make it sometimes? I’m not asking if there’s ever a lemming who says, “Fuck this. You guys are all insane.” Because there isn’t a species on this planet that can break out of the cycle it’s in. What I’m saying is, you’ve gotta consider that there’s a cushion at the bottom by the time two thousand splatter on the rocks below. Critical mass aside, if there’s enough of you, maybe you make a pile high enough, and with enough soft tissue in it, that someone can survive. It worked for the guys in the backseat.
We had all the answers, and never knew the questions. I feel so close to finding those questions now.

*page break*

Crahng-crahng-crahng.
Crahng-crahng-crahng.
“Come on you piece of shit.”
Crahng-crahng-crahng.
Turn the key. Don’t pump the gas, or you’ll flood it.
Crahng-crahng-crahng-thrack-thrack-thrack.
And just like that, it catches.
I say, “I fucking told you, Alice! What did I fucking tell you? We’ll make it out of this yet!” My secretary doesn’t respond, but that’s okay, because I told her not to talk. I don’t want to listen to other people speak anymore. I’ve heard enough. I’m not going to figure any of this out by letting people explain
My automobile squeals out of its parking space as I apply the pedal, stripping paint off of the El Camino to my left. The sirens are closer. I skewer my foot on the gas as I shift to second. The head of the shifter got lost somewhere, and the threading digs into my palm. I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’m hauling ass through a few back streets littered with bums and alleys where trash hasn’t been collected in months.
“Alice, don’t be scared. I’m trying to save you. And not in that creepy Jesus way.” Relief at the car starting uncorked a stopper somewhere, and shit just starts pouring out of my mouth. “You just have to trust me. I know that’s hard to do, from everything that’s happened, but I’m trying to save you from them.”
Another Perfect Circle song is playing, it must be triple-dose-Tuesday or some shit. The trick to getting away from the scene of a crime is to get a few blocks away, then slow down. My car’s a different color than they think, so unless someone runs my plates, it’s easy like Sunday morning. It took me almost three hours to spray-paint it this afternoon.
“I’m hungry.” Alice says.
Fuck, I forgot to get her something.
“What did I tell you about hostages?”
She doesn’t say anything. She always was a quick learner, but how she found out about Marcus, I’ll never know.
“Like I was saying.” I pull into a busy street from an alley, like some asshole who just got his car out of a garage “You’re locked in this culture, Alice. Do you really want to be a secretary for the rest of your finite life span? Well? Answer me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s what I’m trying to save you from, and that’s what would’ve happened. You would’ve worked for some jackass after they canned our entire department. Johnson was doing it, you know. Then you wouldn’t have been a collective secretary, but is that even a step up? At least, you would’ve worked for this jackass until arthritis or carpal tunnel or some shit made it impossible for you to type and answer phones all day. Then, unless you hitched up with some other fuckhead who could support you, you’d be out of a job. Nobody will take care of you, you’ve got to do this on your own.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t try to understand,” I take a left, into a merging lane for the George W. Bush turnpike, “Just listen.”
She doesn’t say anything. Thatta girl.
“When you were in college, did people ever have those conversations where they talk about how smart they are, and they talk about the stupid kid in their classes? You can answer this one.”
“I think so.”
“You don’t wanna think. You wanna know. The kind of conversation I’m talking about was on the back porch, smoking cigarettes, people talking about what scores all their friends got on this specific standardized test and how the world sucks and everyone’s stupid except the people they know. Have you been there?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. That situation sums up human existence. Homo Sapiens are on this planet, and they’re the smartest organism on the planet. I’m not going to tell you butterflies hold infinite wisdom if we could only speak with them. Humans are the smartest, and they spend all this time reveling in their sheer intellect.”
She’s silent. I can’t tell if she’s thinking about it or afraid to speak.
“The bottles of beer your friends were drinking, you remember those?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how people make beer?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s genius. They take yeast. Yeast is a fungus that feeds on sucrose. Sugar. Sugar is in every plant, because plants, by definition, take water and sunlight and turn it into sucrose. Every organism needs sucrose. Now, depending on the beer, you take hops or barley or whatever. What matters is this: You use a plant, usually a grain. With me so far?”
“I think so.”
“Do you think or do you know?”
“I know.”
“Okay, so they take these plants and put them in a bottle with these yeasties. The yeast chow down on the plants. They eat the sucrose, and they shit out this strange compound called Ethanol. Ethanol is alcohol.”
There are cops all over this fucking freeway. They’re moving in and out of traffic, topping 120 mph. No sirens, no lights. Everyone is watching them, and going 10 mph under the speed limit. Myself included. I’m sweating.
“They keep eating the sugar until there is so much Ethanol that they drown.”
“What do yeast breathe?”
“I don’t fucking know, I said listen.”
I wait for a response for a couple of seconds.
“The point is, they can’t breathe alcohol. They eat sugar and shit alcohol until they all drown in their own shit. Collectively, we are a yeast colony trapped in a bottle we call ‘Earth’.”
She doesn’t say anything. She knows what I’m going to say.
“We’re trapped in a bottle, and we’re about to drown in our own shit.”
I look around the traffic, which is always horrible, then I say, “Okay, Alice, there are some things you should know.
“First, I killed Marcus, Johnson, and some other people. I’m not proud of it, but there are omelettes and there are eggs, and the masses are hungry for breakfast. I also stole some things. Ironically enough, I stole eggs.
“After I killed Marcus, I went to every zoo that we sent a California Condor egg to as part of the Condor rehabilitation program. I said there was a mistake and got them all back. I’ve got 8 eggs in this briefcase.”
I pat the briefcase affectionately, but she doesn’t see it.
“And we’re going to sell them.”
“Why? I thought you wanted to save the animals.”
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Oh, and shut up. Quiet hostages are living hostages. I’m trying to save you, but you’re one of them until then.
“I stole the eggs for two reasons. One: The investigation, when they don’t find the eggs, will uncover the vast amount of money flowing into that corrupt shit hole. That’s my last attempt to get our current society to fucking work. Two: When that doesn’t work, I’ve got another plan. Before we go into that though, I have to explain something else.
“This culture you’re living in doesn’t care, which we’ve discussed. Basically, our species has seceded from the natural order and created our own, and ours isn’t any better. We’re killing everything on our planet. Everything. Yeast in a bottle, baby. The planet will survive it, but Homo Sapiens will not.
“Daniel Quinn puts it better than I can. His theory goes something like this: Cultures based around consumption, when there are six billion seventy-ish kilo creatures on a planet, isn’t just destructive, it’s suicidal. And we’re going to fix it.”
She says, “You are an insane person. You’re fucking cra--.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP! I’m not finished.”
“What we’re going to do is exploit the system that’s going to destroy me. I had to rebel against it, and nobody can break themselves out of the cage they’re in. I had to, they’ve been lying to me for fucking years.”
“All I can do is let you know what you can do before I die. You’re going to take these eggs and go into hiding. Inside the briefcase are a number of people I met in the service. They know people who will buy the eggs. You sell them all, and live cheap in a country where the capitalists won’t find you. When the time is right, and you’ll know when, you find someone like I found you. Someone that wants the bad men to pay, and you do something like this.”
I think she’s crying, but why, I can’t imagine. Sometimes the sun hurts your eyes when you get out of the cage. I cried for hours after I killed Marcus. I didn’t cry for him. I didn’t.
“Just make sure they understand these things. We are not going to be rich. We’re going to rally enough money to fight them with their own system. My notes from Economics are in the briefcase as well. As long as there isn’t a substantial change in the NYSE in a few generations, we’re going to use their money to bring the whole fucking thing falling down. And before it does, we utilize the system to seize control. I can’t tell you how to do that, because I don’t know what will happen. We’re going to die, but we’re working for something. This isn’t a job. This is what we’re working for.
“Got it?”
“I think so.”
“Are you going to do it?” I say. “This is our chance. Just remember that we are not them. Always remember that.”
“Y—yeah,” she says, “Okay.”
There are too many fucking cops on the highway. I take the Jupiter Road exit. When I see the tollbooth, I swear. “Oh shit.”
I can see metal glinting from the passenger seat, and while I’m in line, I lean over and start rummaging through the garbage. Nickel, nickel, dime, fuck pennies, quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter. Hah! I think it’s a buck-twenty at this exit.
The flustered clerk doesn’t give me a second glance through his mat of curls that hang like you’d think of vines from a decaying building.
I say to Alice, “Around the corner is a motel, and I’ve got a room for you. Don’t stay for longer than fourteen hours. I’ve got some food, hair-dye, and other things you might need in the backseat. Take a taxi to Oklahoma City and call the first phone number on the list, he’ll get you a new I.D. and a car. Then to go to Canada or something.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got several likely contingencies covered in there too. I’ve been busy these past few days.”
I pull into the Motel 6. I got a room here when my car was still wet with red paint. I take a look around, and it’s clear. There’s a privacy fence on two sides, the back of a gas station on one, and shuttered windows of the motel on the last side. I remember this place, it’s the kind of place that fills up every night with johns and prostitutes, then empties every morning. The girl that died in the accident, we had sex in the room I rented for Alice. The only beverage in the Coke machines is Diet Shasta Raspberry-Ginger-Ale. What can I say? I love the details, I guess I’m just an old-fashioned romantic that way.
I open the Motel door, then go back to the trunk to retrieve Alice. She’s still in the fetal position, and looks damn good, considering what she’s been through. What a fuckin’ woman. Once I throw her over my shoulder, I hot-step inside the room, where I set her on the bed. Then I get her supplies and the briefcase. Now it’s time for the moment of truth, I close the door and bolt it.
“Don’t move, Alice.” I say, and retrieve a pocketknife from my pants. She almost screams, but keeps it in her open mouth. I bend down and cut her loose of the duct tape and zip-ties.
“Look at me.” And she does. “Do you understand what you have to do?”
“Yes,” she says. I hear steel rebar through her sniffles, and I see concrete under her red-rimmed eyes and matted hair. She’s got it.
“Now, I’m going to say this until you understand it.” I say. “The assertion that capitalism is either an inevitable or efficient form of structuring human society is based, not on facts, but on an apathetic resignation to the status quo.”
She didn’t get it all. I say it four times, until she repeats it word for word.
“Don’t just memorize it, know it. Write it down, and remember that just because other structures for human interactions on a broad scale have not worked, doesn’t mean they can’t. We need to keep trying.”
She writes the mantra down.
“Goodbye, Alice.”
“…Goodbye, Jack.”
I step out of the door, with seven bullets, two pistols, a pocketknife, an empty wallet, a black suit without a tie, and the biggest smile I’ve ever worn. Cynthia takes my hand, and it seems perfectly rational, natural, and right. I step outside to find my death. I have time to hope. I have time, for the first time in my life, to hope that we can do it. As I drive out of the parking lot, I’m elated. I didn’t do my job this time. This time, I worked for something.


And there it is. Hit up the tagboard.