The Elaborate Machine

 Mike woke with a start with his back against a cold wall.

The world around him was pitch black, the kind of darkness that feels thick and syrupy, the kind that seems to ooze over you and stick to your skin. He gasped deeply and felt the blackness fill his lungs, no air, just blackness. Immediately he gasped again, and the panic that comes with such overwhelming darkness began to settle in as he gasped a third time. He kicked is legs out in searching agony.

Where was he? What was this place? Where had he been? What was going on? A million questions formed a long ribbon of accumulating fear from his mind that stretched out and seemed to wrap itself around him like a snake, squeezing at his ribs, tightening with every new panic-ridden question.

He gasped again.

He had to find the air. He knew there was air hidden in the crevices of the dark, and he just needed to calm himself down to find it. “Breathe,” he told himself. “Air first, then everything else.” He closed his eyes and covered his face and tried to imagine the open ocean, but his mind plunged him beneath the waves into unknown depths haunted by strange and horrifying creatures. He gasped again, and tears burst from the corners of his eyes. He imagined a green field with deer and rabbits foraging lazily in the sun, but again his mind tricked him as a thick curtain of darkness fell hard on the landscape, and even with no stars in the sky, he could feel the night covering him, close enough to touch. The only thing that seemed to work was imagining pinpoint holes of light in the darkness, tiny bubbles of air that he couldn't see but had to be there. In his mind, he shrunk himself down to the size of the bubbles, stepped into one that seemed brightest, and finally was able to breathe slowly and deeply for the first time in minutes.

Breathe...

He stayed like that for some time, huddled against the wall with his hands over his face, trying to shake the blinding terror of his situation. He pushed aside the questions, sometimes waving his hand in front of him to physically swipe at them, until he was sure he was breathing at a somewhat normal pace, but the terror hung over his heart and wrapped around it tightly, occasionally squeezing gently to remind him that it was going nowhere.

Mike finally opened his eyes and found that the room was still as black as ever. “At least it's not even darker,” he thought, a glib attempt to make himself feel better by trying to keep some good humor. The wall behind him felt rough like stone. Where on Earth was he? Where on Earth was there a place like this? Was he in a cave?

“Hello?” He shouted into the blackness, expecting to hear a distant echo. Instead he was confronted with a sound similar to singing in a shower. The space was much smaller than a cave, in fact it seemed to be about the size of a closet. He felt a hard squeeze on his heart as though a belt had been tightened a notch too far, then closed his eyes and covered his face again to fend off the encroaching claustrophobia.

In spite of the terror, Mike realized that he could not sit there cowering forever, that he needed to find out more about this strange place, this terrible situation, so he slowly got to his feet, keeping his back against the wall. He reached out in front of him and, to his relief, found nothing. He reached out to his left and his fingertips grazed a wall, to his right his hand barely grazed another wall, both apparently stone. He reached above him, the ceiling was about a foot above his head. He felt around him, looking for cracks or doors in the walls or ceiling, and he found tiny crevices where the walls fit together. He tried to wedge his fingers into the cracks and pry, but they were too small. He pushed against the ceiling, but it was rigid and immovable. Finally he knelt to check the ground for openings. Here he was surprised to find the ground smooth and warm, a marked departure from the cold stone walls and ceiling. In fact, the floor felt more like wood.

He shuddered in the darkness. Could that mean... No...

Was this place made by someone? Some person?

Where the hell was he?

The terror tightened another notch, so he took another deep breath and collapsed back to the ground. His mind raced: what is going on? What is this place? And the fear rose up in him as his mind ran in furious, ever-tightening circles. He rocked back and forth trying to calm down, but instead flung himself madly at the ground and began clawing at the wood and screaming for help. He felt his fingernails bending backwards against the floor, finally chipping and breaking, but even this could not stop his mad pleas, but the closeness of his voice as it bounced around the tiny chamber only increased his panic. It came back to him sounding alien and horrific, and soon began to feel like a hundred close-packed voices fighting desperately to overtake him. He stopped screaming and clawing and frantically pushed away from the spot and back to the wall. He let out a final tiny whimper of “help” then let the tears burst forth. His insignificant whimper was stopped dead against the cold stone.

He breathed again, he had lost track of time. How long had he been here? Days? Weeks? Or worse, minutes? He peered out into the darkness, but the room had taken on a shape in his mind. The shape of a box, the shape of a coffin, the shape of death. He didn't understand, he couldn't find the point, why had someone made this? Why had someone put him here?

Slowly he realized that there seemed to be only one direction to go, and while he was undoubtedly meant to go in that direction and possibly to his death, he also determined that he did not have any other choices than to sit and wait for starvation, or likely more immanent, suffocation. There was only forward. There was only death.

He breathed again.

He got to his feet and reached out his hands to touch the walls at his sides. His fingertips stung as the raw ends pushed delicately against the rough stone. He didn't think he could run in the darkness, despite his mad desire to do exactly that, but he thought that going slowly and paying close attention, he might be able to find the traps that may have been set for him. He began inching forward, sliding his feet along the smooth wood floor, paying careful attention to every extremity and trying to notice even the smallest differences. As he pushed forward, he began to relax. There didn't seem to be any traps at all that he could feel. He pressed onward.

Soon he realized that his arms had started to slacken, that he was still able to touch the walls but the walls themselves seemed closer. The room seemed to gently taper, sharing another similarity to the shape of a coffin. He stopped, and his heart beat hard against his chest. “If it gets too tight,” he thought, “I can just turn around. I know there's nothing behind me, my only hope is ahead.” So he started again and continued further into the stone wedge which only got tighter and tighter.

Eventually he had to turn and begin squeezing sideways down the narrow corridor. His hot breath bounced off the wall and back into his face, and still the heavy blackness filled his lungs like liquid. He pressed on, still feeling as though he could make it a little further and holding out hope for an opening or a clearing.

Finally he could go no further. He reached out desperately, but only found more stone and tighter spaces, so he resolved to turn back and think of some new plan, or at least wait to die in relative comfort. He began sidling back from where he came, but found something new and startling. The wedge of the two walls seemed to switch directions with him. As he struggled further backwards, he felt the walls tighten again. It made no sense, but that was nonetheless the reality.

Perhaps forward is the only way to go, he thought as a manic and desperate fear once again began to take hold. He switched direction again, but again found the walls had read his mind and tightened even further on him.

Rabidly, he tried backwards... tighter.

Forwards... tighter.

Backwards... tighter.

Now the terror accumulated into a lump in his throat. He was trapped. He began to scream again and pounding the walls as his screams reverberated back into his throat having no other place to go.

Dr. Millner took another sip of his wine, watching his invention at work with the other spectators sitting in a circle around the huge machine. In the center stood his masterpiece, a towering behemoth of pulleys and gears wrapped around several huge stone slabs. A malevolent glee took hold of him now, as it always did, as he watched the gears slip, the pulleys pull, and the muffled sound of desperate fear bursting forth from the machine, but he knew the best part was still to come.

This was really his favorite bit, the building tension. The suspense growing and growing.

He took another sip of his wine and held it on his tongue indulging in the bouquet of flavors before finally swallowing it.

Click went the gears as they pulled the slabs closer together and the muffled screams grew more urgent and plaintive.

Click again and the satisfying crunch of bone could be heard echoing throughout the room mingled with screams of agony and, he liked to think, defeat. It would not be much longer now, he smiled as the struggling between the two slabs intensified.

Click...

Click...

Click, click...

Click, click, click, click... All the while bone crunching and desperate, almost clawing, screaming.

The screams had finally tapered off into a barely audible whisper through the stones now. Dr. Millner had begun to take another sip of wine when a final click was heard that silenced the voice at last. He stood and walked over to his machine, and there he bathed in the applause of everyone there.

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grass is always green

Paris is a strange city. Not because of its art or its history, not because of its Bohemianism or its cafes filled with suits, not even for its nightlife and empty streets. Really it's because of a sublime mixture of all of these contradictory things. Paris is one of those rare things: a real dichotomy hidden behind a false one.
Paris is a city of duality manifest: simultaneously ancient and new, conservatively liberal, exotically familiar. This is why all the expatriates disappear to France, or at least that was my reasoning. Paris is so far away and yet so close to home, one is separated from everyone but not by the distance one had expected.
It's a dim life I live, camped in a hotel with countless philosophy books (my sole possessions that I could not wear) surrounded by the old wood and masonry while outside my window, a raging city was surging. I may have been lost, but I wouldn't let me tell myself that. I was there, and I was going to be found. I would make my stand there, build my fortress against loneliness and my own broken heart, and I would build it out of the words of the great existentialists: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
God I was dumb. Not that I'm any smarter now.
I impoverished myself so that I could live according to the laws of literature. One smokes because the cherry of the cigarette will keep your hands and face warm, one doesn't keep a bed because you need to sleep as close to the radiator as you can during the winter, one writes because one has no other recourse to speak. Give up everything you own, keep your books and paper and pens, move to Paris and become one with the great world that has already passed. Live in your work so that you can live at all.
This was my first summer, autumn, winter, and spring and I spent the better part of all of them hungry and destitute confined to a room no bigger than my American kitchen, trying to sell articles that I thought would change the way people looked at the world and only ended up selling movie reviews. This was my first nine months in Paris until the day I finally looked out the window and saw a world outside...
Mine was not a subtle change of philosophy (for an existentialist, it rarely is... always have to be so dramatic), rather it more or less happened in an instant: A cold morning found me leaning against the window above the radiator, a blanket draped over my shoulders to trap the cold against my body. My window faced another brick and mortar hotel, like my home, the kind of place where cabs would stop in the middle of the afternoon to drop off high profiles dressed like low profiles for their affairs. Also like my home, a place where starving artists could do what they do best. Starve.
Until this particular day, the city had been a massive blur of people and art and beauty, antique buildings being weaved around by the newest luxury cars. One sees everything, writes about the whole, and understands nothing. This day was the first day I focused. And when I focused beyond the blur (perhaps what caused me to focus in the first place) I saw a woman's leg, delicately arched in the windowsill in the hotel room on the third floor directly across from my own. It was dark, and looked smooth (though at a distance, who could really be sure) and it was clearly in view from the right buttock, partially exposed, to the slender arch of the foot. Beyond it, one could just make out a sketchpad being scratched on with a piece of charcoal.
As a man, one is bound to stare at such a thing. There is a romance inherent in the body of a woman that can be accentuated by hiding the rest and making known only a part. One gets lost in the curve of the thigh, the dimple at the knee, the gentle arc of the visible tendons, and the wrist as slides back and forth over the sketchpad, slowly filling it with lines and shades.
At this point she was a symbol for me. A beautiful goddess who could not be mastered, could never be owned completely. Beyond approach, beyond humanity...
She finished her sketch, which again from that distance could have been anything, and began to stand up. As she came into view, I took in the slender hips underneath a colorful dress (presumably floral print) which fell down to cover the thigh. I followed the length of her back until it ended in a tastefully tattooed neck, partially covered by a dark splash of brunette as she turned her head and revealed a Romanesque profile.
I remember, I was just about to close my eyes to retain an image of the goddess across the way, since I figured that what I had already seen was the last gift of this I would receive. As my eyelids extended, I heard a crash: taking a misstep, she had fallen out the window.
From the third floor, she first landed in her own windowsill garden, then ricocheted off that to the second floor balcony, where she bounced around and broke a window, exposing one of those high profile trysts who immediately began screaming and just generally freaking out. Upon breaking the window, she had also become entangled in a curtain which had somehow completely covered her entire torso. Now she fell headlong from the second floor into a laundry hamper on the ground. Still confused and possibly extremely frightened, she stood up and bolted down the street (still covered in the curtain) until she ran into a cafe. Here the curtain swept a candle off the table and caught on fire. Apparently sensing the heat, she began running in an ever-widening spiral until finally she ran into an inattentive waiter who was listening to an iPod and carrying a large pitcher of water. This splashed both of them well enough to ruin the iPod and extinguish the fire. The young waiter was incensed. All in all, I'd say it was not unlike a Benny Hill sketch.
As I rushed down to help her, the city seemed much less blurred. I took her to the hospital where they mended her broken arm, and I learned her name was Gen short for Genevieve (which, don't mention this to her, always sounded more like the name of a Pomeranian to me). I asked if there was anything I could do.
“Could you bring me some music to listen to?”
So I ran to the music store and bought an album I had always liked. When I came back, we listened to the album together and I wrote a review, and as the last scratches of my pencil were lain upon the page, I'd realized that with the fall of my goddess had come the fall of my romantic ideal of a goddess. She was just a girl now, a girl with a broken arm who was upset because she wouldn't be able to draw until it healed. My romantic idealism of Paris, France, Love, Life, the World had diminished into a real vision of these things. My philosophy was no longer entrenched in books and existentialists and an ideal way, but was now more or less just the life I was living, and the person I would become. I was suddenly happy with the world the way it was, and I was no longer struggling because of the ideal being somehow unattainable. I realized that the unattainable was just the difficult, and therefore most worthy, to attain.
Now if only I could get rid of this pretentious ass prose, I should be able to write something worth reading.
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maybe i don't want to write like that...

lately, i've taken up the pen once again, trying to scribble out a review for the newly famous, incredibly awesome rap collective odd future wolf gang kill them all. i'm trying this out for 2 reasons:
1. i am so excited about this group that it makes me puke regularly.
2. i want to see if i can.
having dropped my once/week writing regimen, i've lost an outlet of expression. i need some place, some medium, to share who i am and what rattles around behind my eyes, and dropping my blog took that away. i need that back.

so i tried my hand at writing this review for okc.net, a blog about the local flavors of oklahoma city and how awesome it can be (+ some more stuff, obviously), spearheaded by a few friends of mine. their writing is insightful, lucid, generally just good, and i appreciate that about my friends.
but i'm not sure if that's what i want to write.
i wanted to publish on okc.net because of the wider audience and the new experience of having an editor (liz, who is the most amazing person alive), but the more i write about odd future, who i'm genuinely excited about, the less i want to write. it reminds me of my day working for the school newspaper in college. it went something like this:
"hey brandon, can you write up a quick thing explaining that you can talk to the campus police about getting rid of parking tickets (or something like that)"
"sure! (crap out a page which is largely fictional narrative but which almost gets the point across) here!"
"uhhh... this... this is not going to work..."
i rewrote that article about 4 times, and never quite got a handle on what they wanted.
then there was the time i was at aeronautics camp, and the counselors wanted us to write a short essay about what it was like to fly in an actual airplane. i asked if it could be fictional, and wrote a page and a half about michael jordan jumping up to grab a kid out of the airplane and slam dunk him, killing the kid (who was a real kid in my group) instantly and graphically. i had no idea why the counselors hated me so much.
the same thing is happening with okc.net, just in a different way: liz wants something that meshes with the style of the rest of the blog, which is generally very insightful and exploratory. i just want to tell people how awesome i think odd future is.
but i want this to work!
so i rewrite, and come up with a new, insightful, exploratory piece which investigates the nature of the music and why people are intrigued by it. it discusses the darker nature of man and feeding the monster inside everyone. some of my friends love the rewrite, but all i can see is how contrived and pretentious it feels to me.
despite the new piece being an exploration of how the music actually makes me feel, it no longer says what i want to say: this group is so freaking cool i just want to explode; everyone and their cat needs to hear them say insane things about how fun rape is.
i wonder if i'm just not cut out to write for other people, to the goals that they're looking for. maybe i just don't want to write about my emotions and the social fucked-upedness of the world as a whole in the breadth of a music review. maybe i just want to say, "check this shit out, it's off the hook."
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Getting a Job and You, Chapter 3: The Interview

Times are bleak: the economic downturn has left literally hundreds of Americans without jobs, most of those hundreds (if one is to trust the news) high level executives who have not had to interview for a job in 30+ years. Not only are they old and recently bankrupt with no clue even how to feed themselves without a nurse who costs 12 G's every six weeks, they are at a huge disadvantage in the job market: their skills are honed but limited, and most of them probably wouldn't know how to apply for a job if you bit them... with a job.
I, on the other hand, am a young and experienced job applicant. In my 22 years, I've successfully applied to thousands of jobs ranging from Astronaut to Agronomist.
I've interviewed for positions I didn't even know how to pronounce, and have always exited the interview with a promising, “We'll let you know.” Therefore, as a service during these dark times, I'm going to convey some “Job Interview Tips and Tactics,” which I have picked up over the years. Use them, and I guarantee you will leave a lasting impression which will last...
“Job Tips And Tactics”
an exposition by Brandon Stauffer
writing as Patterson Patterson

The first step is to get your foot in the door. Usually sending in a job application over the internet or delivering your resume to the employer works, but if both of these fail, putting your actual foot in the door works just as well.
However, if you're going to use a resume, use it right. Make sure you follow these tips:
- Use colorful paper which will catch the eye and say, “Look at me! I am a fun person and just the one you want to hire! Thank you for your time!” Make sure the paper has a theme, for instance, if you're applying for a teaching job, make sure it has giant clip art pencils and misspelled words scrawled on it, but if you're looking at an office job, try giant clip art pencils and staplers. Whatever the case, you pretty much can't go wrong with giant clip art pencils on your resume somewhere.
- Make it interesting by using different fonts for different categories!!! (Also exclamation points!!!) (Always three!!!)
- Bold every third word. This is an old trick which helps draw attention to your resume, subtly.

Those are the three main things to remember for a resume. As long as you have those, you're sure to get an interview.
Now the interview process can be nerve-wracking for some, but the key is to channel that inherent nervousness into a positive... channel. Using the bathroom beforehand also helps.

PRO-TIP:Wait until they're ready to see you in their office, then ask to use the bathroom. This lets them know that you're just a regular person who also uses the bathroom, starting you off on common ground. You can start the interview off on a casual note by discussing this common ground. Unless your employer isn't a regular person who also uses the bathroom. Then I don't recommend this.

Now you're in the room. The key here is to make the interview as intimate and memorable as possible. Think of it as a sort of date wherein you want to make the best impression possible. So there are a few to-do's here to make sure you get started running in the right direction:
-Sit as close to the employer as possible. You don't want anything in between you to disrupt your flow of communication. He may ask you to have a seat on the opposite side of the desk from him. This is one of the first screening tests: don't let it happen! Tell him you would be more comfortable sitting on his side of the desk in a chair next to him. If he refuses, cite religion. This also lets him know you have a good moral character. In fact, cite religion to start with.
- Now that you're sitting on his side of the desk, turn your chair to where you are facing him and, now this part is extremely important (meaning job or no job important), maintain unbroken eye contact with him. Start when you sit down, and don't stop until you are actually outside the door. Eye contact means respect, and employers know that better than anyone. Do NOT break eye contact for any reason WHATSOEVER!!!
- Put your hand on his thigh. This opens a physical pathway of communication and makes the whole interview more intimate and memorable, and those two things are the keys to getting a job. Your hand on his thigh is completely necessary and useful in many ways which I will enumerate shortly.

What you may not know is that the interview process is typically very boring. The employers have to ask the same stupid questions to the same basic people for days on end before finally selecting one candidate who could just as easily have been picked out of a hat. Most candidates are trained to sound exactly the same in an interview.
“What's your greatest strength?”
I work well with others.
“What's your greatest weakness?”
I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
You do not want to be perceived as a dummy like everyone else. One who mouths the words that are fed to him by some unseen puppetmaster. You are an individual! And you need to convey that in the interview as much as you do in your ever day life! There's only one major tip to consider here and that's:

Start with a joke. And continue with jokes throughout the interview process. The key with jokes is that they satisfy the two factors of a successful interview: intimacy and remembrance. They bring your employer in on something that you two alone can share, and trust me, he won't soon forget the person who came into his office and, when asked, “What's your greatest weakness?” responded, “Chocolate Cake!” Sharing a laugh is like sharing a wife or girlfriend. Both sharers are let in on something secret and special that gives both parties great joy. Jokes are the way to get jobs. But I can't make your jokes for you. You are an individual: express yourself!

I mentioned earlier about the importance of your hand on his thigh. Let me go a little more in depth, as this is the single most important thing I have to share with you.
The subtle motions of your hands are the physical communiques your employer needs to really understand you and want to hire you. The smallest squeeze or tickle could set off the neural impulse that says, “I must give the job to this one.” So how can you properly utilize this most important of tactics? There are several options to consider:
1.Squeezing -
Use a gentle squeeze both when you share a laugh at one of your jokes and when you want to convey something that you feel makes you good for the position. This way, the employer will have a sense memory of both the good times you shared and the critical moments of the interview where you made it clear the job could easily be yours.
2.Tapping -
Again, use this whenever you really want the employer to listen to what you're saying. It's often a good idea to use this in conjunction with squeezing: get his attention, then make the memory stick.
3.Working your way up -
For the more intimate moments of the interview, move your hand closer to his genitals. Not too much, but certainly noticeably. This will let the employer know that you look forward to a close working relationship with him, also when added to the unbroken eye contact, this tactic can be lethal (where lethal means you will most assuredly get the job). Now are you beginning to see just how important the physical contact can be?
4.Corporate ladder (ADVANCED INTERVIEWERS ONLY!) -
If you're reading this, that means you're probably only a novice interviewer, so you definitely shouldn't try this, but I thought I would mention it anyways to give you a taste of what you can do when you've reached a more advanced level.
During the more playful parts of the interview, use your index and middle finger to make a hand representation of a little man standing on his thigh. Then make your “little man” walk up his leg by making a kind of scissor motion with your fingers.
Say, “Looks like he's CLIMBING THE CORPORATE LADDER!”
You will share a hearty laugh and will simultaneously achieve the intimacy of working your way up. This action can be prolonged by walking him back down the other leg and saying, “OOPS! Looks he's gonna go AROUND THE WORLD!!!”
This is a handy trick because it accomplishes so many things at once, but as I said before, I would not recommend this to a novice.

Thank you for reading this basic course in job interviewing; however, it should be noted that I cannot officially guarantee that this will land you a job. In these dark economic slumpy times, they are looking for more than novice level interviewing skills for the best jobs.
But, if you listen to my 10 cassette tape series, “Getting a Job and You!” or watch my instructional DVD, “The Things You Can Share During a Job Interview!” I CAN guarantee that that job will be yours!
I CAN guarantee that YOU will be the best CANdidate for the job! If you do those things I just mentioned.
Thank you for your time!


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The Dead Painter

The painter was famous for his vanity, or at least that's what the critics all said. Ever since he had been a teenager and first picked up a brush and tried his hand at art, he had grown rich on nothing but self-portraits. His first exhibition, age nineteen, had been in a small loft apartment where alcohol was poured freely and drugs were shared. His first line of cocaine left his nose bleeding that night, and he had taken a picture of his drug-ruined face and painted it the next day.
Then his face was brown and youthful and strong, and the drugs had made his eyes red. A critic who had seen this painting had said, "There is blood here. More than is seen. There is blood beneath, as well." Many times he had been offered countless sums of money for this painting, but instead he had decided to keep it. It was the first painting he hung in his private gallery.
Now an old man, the painter moved about in his gallery, purveying the ruined landscape of his life captured in these images. The gallery formed a spiral toward the center, starting with his earliest paintings on the outer rim, and moving to his later paintings toward the center. In his meander through the dimly lit rooms, he could trace his entire world: his changing perception of art, his changing perception of beauty, his changing perception of self. He took it all in, starting with that first one that he had kept, with a bloody nose and eyes widened by cocaine, a look of surprise or shock or awe plastered on what was his innocent visage.

He had only painted self-portraits his whole life. Never a Van Gogh landscape or an O'Keefe flower, a Picasso table or a Magritte pipe, a Degas ballerina or a Toullouse-Latrec harem; although, many critics said that the painter had emulated each of these in turn. And maybe he had, but never with a purpose. When asked, he had said that he only painted what he knew, and what he knew best was himself.

He walked by a few early works and stopped at a charcoal he had done when he was twenty-five. In the foreground was a woman wrapped in his bedsheets, frozen in a pirouette, in the background a mirror portrayed the painter steadfastly drawing on a tablet, staring not at the girl nor at the tablet, but directly into the mirror.
The painter remembered this drawing very vividly. The first exhibition where it had been displayed, there had been a great deal of talk about him being portrayed in the background in one of his drawings. This was easily his most successful piece that night, and he had planned to sell it for top dollar.
By this time he had grown out of loft apartments and was now in the business, showing his work at the trendiest art galleries in the region: this one was in a basement painted entirely blood red with extremely bright lights behind the walls that made the room seem to glow, to be illuminated somehow within.
He had brought a leading critic to that piece, hanging exalted in the middle of the room, and had asked what the critic thought. The painter had smiled with foreknowledge that the review would be gleaming, and it was, but after the critic had finished his deconstruction, the painter, whose smile had faded into a grimace, had torn down the work with such violence that part of the wall came with it suddenly filling the room with a blinding light. Bathed in the light, he had announced that all offers for the drawing were null and void, he would keep it for himself.
The next day, he broke off his engagement to the dancer in the drawing and painted a portrait of a miserable, bloodshot, tear-streaked eye which he titled, "My Sorry Self."

Wandering still deeper into his gallery, he watched as his paintings progressed - or rather decomposed - along with his life. Here a painting of him with a whore, there a depiction of himself through an empty bottle, and eventually a particularly violent painting wherein he was stabbing a well-dressed man in the
middle of the street.
The well-dressed man had been a young critic who had idolized the painter from the first piece he had seen, also age nineteen. The artist had grown older by this time and embraced the chance for young and hopeful companionship. He had said that he saw a little bit of himself inside the young critic, like a flame that once burned within himself, "and which maybe still did." The critic was overwhelmed, and they spent a lot of time drinking together and discussing art and beauty and women. The painter grew fonder and fonder of his companion as they found their views had more and more in common.
One evening, the painter had the young critic over to his apartment, where they commonly drank and discussed, and the painter decided to show the critic a new piece he had been working on. He brought out the canvas and stood it in front of his television. The critic was breathless. He said that the piercing blue eyes of the painting were the most beautiful things he had ever seen, then the painter stopped him and kissed him and they made love in front of the bright blue eyes of the self-portrait.
When they finished, the critic turned to the painting and tried to analyze it, the painter kissed his back and neck where the brown hair faded into skin. The critic said, "It's so strange."
"What's strange?"
"You don't have blue eyes. Your eyes are green. Why did you change their color?"
When the critic left, the painter tried to correct the eye color, but after a few strokes realized that he had ruined the painting in the attempt. In a blind rage which bordered on an infuriated trance, he tore at the painting and when he finished, before him was a painting of himself stabbing the young critic in cold
blood.
The painter resolved never to see the critic again.

The painter finally reached the very center of the gallery where there sat a blank canvas, a chair, painting supplies on a nearby cabinet, and a mirror. He sat down at the canvas and thought about his age and his life and thought that before he died, he should paint one more thing. So he decided to paint himself dead.
He worked feverishly, mixing reds and blues and yellows to achieve an ideal palate, using long strokes, short strokes, he painted and his naked body on the floor. He painted every liver spot on his body, every tired wrinkle and imperfection. He made his skull, his neck, torso, arms, and legs and they all looked completely devoid of life. And he sat there painting until he was completely finished, which took more than twenty hours.
At the end, he sat back, hunched and exhausted, and looked at his final painting. He looked for a long time, and he was confused because the self-portrait didn't look like him at all.
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New .Com

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Plot is Really Secondary

“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said as he crashed through the oversized wooden double doors of Judge Krill’s chambers. “It might be very bad for business.”

Krill turned away from the girl he was molesting to admire the girl’s boyfriend, the hero, for making it past his overly extravagant phalanx of personal bodyguards. He had thought them quite invincible, what with the blinding drugs they were on to take away all thoughts except obey and fight for him. Krill was impressed and he said so.

“I’m impressed.”
“This has gone on for too long,” said the hero, tearing off what was left of his shirt to expose his blood and sweat soaked pectorals, rippling in all the fury of strained musculature. He was confident, but he also knew the judge’s extensive history: 15 years in KGB, 12 more in American Special Forces, and now, head of both the judge’s seat in the highest court in the land and the most powerful and ruthless crime syndicate in the world. Krill may look old, but you could guarantee the dude still packed a punch; you may not be able to see it, but beneath those black robes stood a body carved out of pure rock. The countless henchmen were nothing compared to Krill. They had all attacked him clumsily and always one at a time, consistently. They watched friend after friend fall in the heat of battle, but insisted on waiting their turn to take their vengeance. In addition, the drugs generally made them make poor choices. They were easy. Krill would be harder.

Judge Krill’s chambers were a little on the gaudy side: mahogany everywhere, curtains flapping in a slight breeze coming from somewhere, a large open wood floor, swords on the wall, a globe the size of a small cottage, various other obstacles lay strewn about the room. Gaudy, but he could afford it. Up till now, only the hero stood between him and world domination through drug trafficking and assassinations of the line of presidential succession. He had killed the President and the Vice, now all that was left was the Speaker. And once the Speaker was dead, it would be over. Which is why he now had her tied up in his chambers. The one flaw in his plan was this hero, an ex-New York detective who had recently been a top Presidential bodyguard, and who was dating the Speaker of the House. He was there for the presidential hit, and he soon put all the pieces together through an arduous process of ass-kicking and evidence collecting. He now had enough evidence to bring down Krill, but that was never going to happen.

So he’d have to bring him down some other way. And that other way was killing Krill, hard.

Krill turned his back on the hero to remove his robes, exposing a smart suit and tie, then he turned back around and attempted one final option before killing the hero -

“You must be an amazing fighter,” he said. “But before you start throwing fists at me, I want you to think about something, namely what are you fighting for?”

“For freedom, for democracy…”

“But what does that mean? Freedom… Democracy… Love… they’re all just words. Words expressing concepts. Concepts which really mean nothing. Can’t you see?”

The hero looked incredulous.

“The things that really mean something are the vices: money, power, sex,” as he said this, he brushed a hand against the Speaker’s cheek. “We’re not so different, you and I. We both fight for something. Our ideologies. Our worldviews. We both fight to keep our world from crumbling around us. We fight to maintain what we believe to be necessary.”

He looked pensive, but still angry.

“The truth is, I’m getting old. After I’ve instated my empire, I will probably not last very much longer, and I need someone to be an heir. I need someone with ideologies, someone who’s not afraid to fight, someone who will protect my empire. Someone like… you.”

“But why would anyone want to protect an empire of crime?”

“Don’t you see? Joining the world into one world order is an end to war! To Hunger! To Strife! We can fix the epidemics in the nations with low GDP’s because we can share GDP’s! The third world will join with the first and we’ll change it. We’ll make it better! More beautiful!”

“But at what cost?”

“A few lives here and there of mostly corrupt politicians. But these lives pale in comparison to the lives we’ll save! Can’t you see it? A bright, new future.”

The hero paused to think. His next line better be a zinger.

“When President Michaelson stood on the docks in Brooklyn and looked out at the harbor, he pointed to Lady Liberty,” the hero spoke calmly and airily, “and he said, ‘This nation was built on her, and on the promise of her.’ The idea that people can be free, to live, to breath, to love. That’s what freedom means. And also he was my father.” It wasn’t the best line in the world, but at least he got everything in there.

Infuriated, Krill tried one more time.

“JOIN ME!”

“Join yourself in hell!”

With this, they launched into a brilliant trade of fists and kicks, each placing their attacks in a well-coordinated, nearly choreographed manner. Punches were blocked, landed, and returned. Grapples ended in a man being thrown like a horseshoe at whatever was around them. They took down the swords and began sword-fighting with the proficiency of old pros.

After a good couple of minutes of intense fighting, neither side gaining much ground on the other, Krill finally decided to try the fighting style he was best at: dirty fighting. He ran over to the Speaker and held her with his saber at her throat. The hero stopped cold.

“Who’s got the upper hand now?” said the judge maniacally. “Put down your sword.”

The hero thought for a moment before deciding to throw his sword at the judge in one last attempt to save the world. It went whizzing over his right shoulder. The judge laughed insanely, but then he heard the sound of the giant globe rolling towards him. The hero had thrown the sword into the globe, loosening it from its moorings and sending it crashing down towards Krill. As Krill turned to see his fate and feel the crushing weight of the world, the hero leaped up and pushed the Speaker out of harm’s way, getting his ankle caught slightly beneath the rolling globe and instantly breaking his foot. But at least it was all over now.

In excruciating pain, he crawled over to his girlfriend and loosened her ropes with his good hand. She embraced him and kissed him hard to show her appreciation, then she picked him up and helped him hobble out the oversized wooden double doors of the judge’s chambers. Out into the sunlight of glorious American freedom, the gloriously bright future, and a huge crowd which had gathered just outside the doors. Read more...