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

I know that all two of our readers have been wondering, "When are these guys who pump out such great stories going to finally get a .com?"
The answer to that question is both, "Really?" and "Today."
Hop on over to Ladytoast.com to check out our sweet stuffs! Read more...

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...

The General's Labyrinth

General Luciano Bravada was 35 years old when he commissioned the labyrinth to be built. The war he had fought since he was 20 had made him paranoid of the world around him. Constantly, he would look all around to find the assassin hidden in his periphery with a dagger, a murderer waiting to plunge into him and claim the war victory for himself. The trees themselves became lethal killers in disguise. Finally, when walking down the open beach, he formed an idea: if I am in the open, he said to himself, I am exposed; I shall, therefore, remove myself from the open to the closed.
Soon thereafter, the carpenters began work on the elaborate labyrinth which was to keep him hidden from the enemy and keep him safe for the rest of his days. They used the sketches Luciano himself had drawn as a design plan: they depicted several tiers hewn into a hillside, one entrance and one direct center which would be where he would spend his days, and an endless maze of dead ends, booby traps, trap doors, twists, and turns. So convoluted was the maze that the carpenters consistently had to ask to make sure they were holding the sketch correctly and building the labyrinth to the general's liking.
They worked fast, and soon, the labyrinth was well underway. About this time, some of the carpenters began to notice that the general had taken to staying the nights in the labyrinth. Confused, they questioned him -
- Why do you stay in the labyrinth?
- It shall be my home.
- What about food? Water?
- I have eaten enough. I have drunk my fill.
- How will you ever get out?
To this question, Luciano simply smiled and walked back to the center of his labyrinth. He had an ingenious plan to guide him through his maze, and he knew that the key to his labyrinth was keeping the secret of his guide to himself. Otherwise, the maze would become completely useless. After all, even this carpenter, as congenial as he is, could be a spy. And even if he isn't, everyone is a spy for the right price.
He would have to let the carpenters work another week before he could start his work on his map. They had to be far enough along that he would never catch up with them, so General Luciano stayed to himself in the center of the labyrinth as the carpenters continued the work around him, making his world more confusing with every cut of the knife, sealing him off more effectively with every portal opened. All the while, Luciano scratched notes into his notebooks and felt the growing warmth of complete safety.
A few days passed, and the general checked the carpenters' progress: they had three outward spirals and were starting the fourth. Luciano concluded that he could begin his guide safely without meeting any carpenters, so stealing a chisel and hammer, he went back to the center and began his work.
He turned to the wall on his left, placed the chisel at the top left corner, about an inch away from the ceiling, and striking it with the hammer twelve times carved, “I” into the wall. He stood back and observed it. It was sloppily done, the vertical did not meet the horizontals exactly right, and it was by no means straight up-and-down, but it was the beginning. The first word of his life, the word that occupied his every breath. “I” is the beginning of every good story, and so it was with the general.
His plan was to carve his life into the stone walls, starting at the center and spiraling out until it finished at the exit. He would cover every wall in scratches, showing every advance, every downfall, every merciless pain he had endured, along with every happiness. He had also developed a multitude of untruths to mislead anyone who tried to seek him out. The idea was simple and cunning at the same time: since the end would be at the door, some assassins would think that being a scholar of the war would be enough to get to the center of the maze and kill the general, but as they went deeper into the caverns, they would find themselves trying to piece together the general's childhood, even some things which only the general himself knew about. They would inevitably fail, either by giving up and trying to find their way back, or by making a wrong choice and finding themselves caught in a trap of some sort, and there to spend the rest of their miserable days.
Taking up the chisel once more, General Luciano began carving steadfastly, with burning determination. He pounded his childhood into the wall, the death of his mother, the abuse of his father, his desire for his sister. He continued, letting his life blood flow onto the walls in vivid color. Page by page, his life began to take its form. He covered wall after wall, floor to ceiling, with his burgeoning lust from his youth, his philosophies, his induction into the military, and at every wrong turn, he would carry into some falsehood, just true enough to lead someone who didn't know to their end.
Meanwhile, the carpenters continued to build outward, always a spiral or two ahead of the general, who soon became phenomenally quick in his work. The labyrinth became more and more confusing as it stretched further and further outward. Some of the carpenters even became lost while working on a section and were never seen again. This led many men to believe the maze to be cursed. They began to think that it was a plot by the general to watch even more innocent young men die in his service, at his command. So a group of them hatched a plan to seek out and kill General Luciano.
Setting out one night after everyone else had gone home, they delved into the dark stone corridors. After passing two outer spirals, they began hearing the incessant pounding of the general. Thinking it was a ghost, or the curse, they ran off in different directions. Only one was ever heard from again, and he was found nearly starved to death three days later. He had stumbled into a work area at midday and immediately collapsed to the ground. He muttered something about the curse of the labyrinth, about how the maze draws a person in and destroys him by changing pathways and misleading them. But his throat was parched, and his body was weak, so none of the men understood what he meant. They all thought it was the effect of having been so badly deprived. He was clearly in no state to reason.
So the carpenters kept building and finally finished the labyrinth and went home.
And General Luciano kept carving the words of his lifetime into the stone. He was now far into the war years, telling tales of deceit and clever strategy, cunning and strength. He told of the young boys he'd seen die around him, and the old men who looked at him with their blue, blue eyes as they whispered a last breath. Wall after wall, he told his story, stories of love and loss and dreams and crushed hopes, until he finally came to his paranoia, the enclosing and entrapped feeling of knowing that there is an assassin so close to you. There simply must be one, behind this tree or that wall, plotting, waiting for the right moment to pounce and destroy the man who had destroyed so much, the General Luciano.
He tapped his dull and well worn chisel through the inception of the labyrinth and the commission to build it,until his life and the maze became so entwined that he could not separate one from the other. He finally arrived at his current age, 67.
Chisel in hand, he carved his final sentence: The rest is the labyrinth, nothing more and nothing less.
Here he stopped, for the first time in nearly 30 years, and looked around to find himself not at the exit of the labyrinth, but within arm's length of the beginning of his story in the center of the labyrinth. That first crooked “I” glared down at him, harshly contrasted to his now nearly perfect handwriting.
Shocked, he took out his sketches and went over them. How had he gone wrong? He had paid close attention to every detail, at every turn making sure he had gone the right way. He followed the map looking closely once again to make sure he had followed every turn correctly, walking down the corridors, left then right, into the darkness and out again, upstairs then down. He followed the map straight through, double checking to make sure the carpenters had not somehow made the maze wrong. He could sense that he was getting into the outer-most spirals, and he was nearly to the exit. He looked up and saw the door and started sprinting to it, overjoyed to find the way out. But when he turned into the portal, he found only the center again, the end of the story to his right and the beginning to his left. The only thing left for General Luciano Bravada to do was wander his labyrinth and go back over his story to try to find where he went the wrong way.
According to legend, he is still doing just that.
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First Date at the Electro

God, she looks fantastic. Her hair is loose, her white sparkled dress is tight, her curves are emphasized, she just looks really great. And she’s smiling, and that helps so much. When she smiles, you can at least imagine that she’s having a good time. It makes the night go a lot easier.
I picked a dance club to take her too, that way there’s an absolute minimum of talking. I can’t hold a conversation with people I’ve known my entire life; I can’t imagine having anything to talk about with someone I just met, thought was attractive, and asked out, no matter how much she’s smiling, and how cute she looks. Even if I was being tortured and interrogated about what I did yesterday, my responses would be monosyllabic at best. So dance club, it is. You get her there, you move your body a little, and next thing you know she thinks you’re the best thing since toasted bread. And you’re in. No conversation required.
I pull her up to the bar and tell the mack, “two.” The eyes he gives her makes it clear he knows that I mean, “be a doll, and put a roofie in one.” She looks fantastic. The mack knows the score. Or he knows me and knows my score. He pours her a stout something-something and dilutes mine a little so I don’t make any stupid mistakes. The International Conspiracy of Men: This Hand Washes That Hand. Thanks, mack.
The music blares some hideous so-and-so with a backbeat. It’s so loud you can’t even really hear it, it’s just muddled vibrations through air and you can only pick out the slight treble here and there. Still she leans close with her drink in hand and says something completely inaudible. This is another reason to opt for the club on a first date: if she wants to talk, the only way is to get really close, licking your ear to get her point across.
I scream, “what?”
And she gets right in my ear saying something like, “I really like this song,” or “I’ve got a sexy thong.” Then she takes a coy drink and flits her eyelids at me. She puts down all the road signs: playing with the hem of her dress as it inches up her white thighs, drinking quickly and keeping eye contact as she puts it away. She even pulled down the front of her dress to expose her dragon tattoo on the leftmost of her exceptional cleavage. The mack paid her no mind, just let her do her thing, he’s done his part.
“You’ve got a lance?” she yells.
Yes, ma’am, I think. “What?”
“DANCE! Want to dance?” Dancing is a beautiful thing. It’s legitimate public eroticism. She bumps and grinds against you just like you would at home in the throes of a sexual revolution. The hormones rage harder than a middle school church camp. Strippers don’t do as much. Prostitutes barely do. It’s all about the contact and the emotion that goes with it. Strippers and prostitutes don’t really have a leg up in that field of contact and emotion.
So we go to the dance floor. And she’s fantastic. She wraps her arms around my neck and pushes her hips into me, smiling a little lecherously. She pulls my hair. She’s rough and I can tell she wants me. And I mean, I’m not one to complain. I mean, right now, I’m fighting my primal instincts off with a baseball bat in my brain. I am closer to violent rape than I’ve ever been before.
Then it happened: Scandal’s The Warrior started playing, and she did that squeal. The “Oh My God This Is My Favorite Song of All Time” Squeal. Her short blond hair became a flurry of motion as she shook her head with incredulity. There are so many things wrong with her excitement at this song.
Firstly, her excitement is what most people call “girlish.” It expresses an immaturity that usually accompanies 16 year olds.
Nextly, the song is a pop-feminist ballad. Patty Smyth yelling the battle-cry “I am the Warrior” and “I’m the heart you’ll win, if you survive.” It’s roughly more discouraging for the female gender than the women’s suffrage movement would have been if it had been lead by Rosie O’Donnell.
But most importantly (and disturbingly) was what she was going to do. The song had only just started, but already she was grabbing my tie and pulling me center-stage. I had no reason to know what was going to happen, but I knew as soon as I saw the reaction to the song. I knew she had a dance. I knew she had a plan.
The first verse played through without a hitch except for her idiotic jumping and headbanging, I forced a smile to conceal my disgust. But it was coming to the chorus. I dreaded the chorus with every fiber of my being because I knew exactly what she was going to do when those words came. Then, like a gunshot in an otherwise healthy evening, it came:
“Shootin’ at the walls of heartache,
Bang! Bang!
I am the Warrior!”
And she did it. She did exactly what you think she did.
“Bang! Bang!”
And she made the guns with her hands.
One for the left. One for the right.
Bang goes the one. Bang goes the other. And my forced smile melts like ice cubes on the sidewalk in Egypt. But she loved the song too much to notice that the evening had been utterly ruined by innanity.
I think the mack must’ve seen too, because as we left later that night, he gave me a look that said, “I’m sorry buddy, I thought she was a good one.” I responded with a sad, “I know” gaze. I walked her to my car, with her drunkenly shouting, “Bang! Bang!” intermittently. I drove her home, all the while with the radio on full-blast, trying to purge the foul sounds and sights from my mind. But there she was, making guns with her hands and Bang Banging left and right.
She said she had fun as I dropped her off. I told her I’d better not stay, what with church in the morning and all.
And as she walked to her door from my car, through the rolled down window I heard her shout, “I’m the heart you’ll win, if you survive.”
Slam it into drive and leave her behind. Sex is good, but not that good.
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I'm Gonna Miss You, Pal

Last weekend was one of the most interesting of my life. First my hard drive crashed and I was forced to use my limited computer knowledge to repair it to avoid buying a new one, since I am broke to the point that bums should be giving me money out of pity. A three day project which ended in success I am happy to say.
Then my dad wanted me to drive two and a half hours through the wretched Oklahoma terrain to assist him in planting this year's wheat crop, something he has never asked of me and even swore not to ask of me and which is made all the more ridiculous by the soaring gas prices and my aforementioned poverty.
Then I helped my best friend pack things into a U-Haul so that she could drive away and out of my life.Unthinkingly. Just trying to be a nice guy. I help her desert me. What was I thinking? Why would I facilitate the vanishing of a friend?
The rest of my weekend has been filled with her absence. She was someone very special to me, a confidante, a pal, a buddy with whom worry and dreariness sort of melted. When we occupied the same room, the only other thing that could fit was our love of each other's company.
I don't want to be misunderstood, here. She's happily entrenched in a long-term relationship, and the thought of her leaving him for me never crossed our minds. It just wasn't like that for us, we were a different kind of close, not the kind that really would or could work in a boyfriend-girlfriend setting. And I think of all the things about her, it's that particular closeness that only we shared that I'm going to miss the most.
Our love for each other's company. Just hanging out in the morning eating grapefruit smothered in sugar while her bird, a slightly vocal cockatiel named CeeCee who happened to adore me, hovered overhead, perched on the ceiling fan and looking down at us like she was waiting for some sort of signal to come join. Just forcing her to watch my hideous cartoons and comedy shows and read my sadistic comics and tolerate my general malaise. Just following her around while she was taking pictures and occasionally stealing her camera to capture my own bits of art. Just laughing about McCain. Laughing about Obama. Laughing about laughing about McCain and Obama.
Even our hideous and stubborn discourse on the nature of satire, which ended in nothing but hard disagreement. These things, all of them. I'm going to miss the hell out of her.
When I met her, I was just starting college. A good Christian boy from a good Christian town. My eccentricities were on full blast to preserve my fragile frame, my own personal security blanket. Most people remember me as the guy who pointed to his nipple and said that he was from there (my right arm extended out made a crude, impromptu image of Oklahoma: the arm forming the panhandle, and my body, the rest of the state. My hometown is located roughly above the right nipple), but she remembers me as the guy who wanted to see a dead hobo in a fountain. This, as is often recounted, is her first real memory of meeting me.
Basically, to explain my dead hobo thing: All too recently, a hobo had been found dead in this fountain we passed by on the way to a school outing. I remarked on the morbid romanticism of a dead hobo in this gaudy fountain, saying it was picturesque or something to that effect. The instant reaction was, my what a strange person. Most everyone else cut my chances of being friends off right there, but for some reason, she didn't.
We started spending more and more time together, me and my polar opposite. I was a good Christian boy, she a good Atheist girl; my dad raised beef and I was ravenously carnivorous, she on the otherhand was violently vegetarian; I was morose and morbid, and she was happy and life-loving. Polar in so many ways, but our friendship really worked.
After the first year, I made lots of mistakes and we ended up drifting for a year, but we came back together very soon, started hanging out again, even moved in next door to each other so we could wake up, walk to class, come home, and eat breakfast and talk about how ridiculous our teacher was. Then we might pack up her cameras and go hiking (which I had hitherto detested) or go to this crazy hotel liquidation store on 23rd.
This place is filled with insanity and repetition. Walking around in there is like walking through a surrealist film, couches on top of couches, rooms full of thousands of copies of the same painting, a large wooden fish attached to a tacky light up tableau waterfall which all together looked like it had spent some time in a Chinese buffet restaurant. There's a look to it, a feel that is entirely indescribable. There was also a cement room with walls lined with the X-bottoms of chairs, stacked to the ceilings, and the light flickered like some horror movie. The room itself looked like it might have been used for interrogation by the intensely foreign owner who was not a little frightening. Here she took some amazing photographs of various things. They looked like fallen Roman pillars.
I spent Saturday morning packing her things and moving them out, piece by piece she emptied her apartment. The couch I had so often passed out on, the table we would eat apple pancakes at, the desk where we would watch new installments of The Onion News Network. Everything left for the van and I was left behind to vacuum.
And my best friend was gone.
It later dawned on me that I would have to do this more and more as I grew older. That people will come and go from my life and that I will have to pack their things for them, because I'm a good guy and that's what I do. My buddies will get married and leave me behind holding the bag as they move on to a more fulfilling relationship with a spouse, and I'll help set up their new home. And then one day, they'll start dying and I'll go to their funerals. Everything I will ever get close to will leave me behind: friends, family, children. They will all go on to something better than I can give them. Just like my cat, who also left this weekend to find a better life far away from me. No one stays, everyone leaves.
And I'm sure there are people who feel the same way about me.
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Out of Her Misery

I never like killing animals. It's not something I enjoy doing. But it is my job.
I'm in one of the most loathed occupations in the world, certainly the most hated in the vet clinic. I mean, when it comes down to it, nobody wants to kill animals. It's just something that... well... it's just a thing. In the 5 years I've been doing animal euthanasia, I've been kicked by children, punched by grown men, snubbed by countless women, scorned by PETA (even to the point of property vandalism when they found out where I lived and decided to throw animal corpses tied to bricks through my living room window), and my right thumb cut off by a punk rock guitarist who screamed, “Try killing defenseless animals now!” as he was being dragged away by mall security.
“I'm left-handed,” I had said sullenly, picking my severed finger off the ground, and the look of utter dismay flooded over his face as though I had just killed his dog. It was the exact same face I'd seen thousands of times. Deal with that face. I dare you. Deal with it once, and then understand that I have to everyday.
Animal euthanasia is the worst job in the world.
I do it because I know that it's best for the animals at a certain stage. It's worse for them to continue living in overwhelming pain that will never get better than for them to simply fall asleep and never wake up. I believe this, and that's how I'm able to keep doing this hideous job, day after day. I do it for their good.
But this time is completely different, and honestly, I can't quite put my finger on why. I brought this dog in myself, a Border Collie about a year to a year and half old, blood red on white on black, breathing heavy, more like gasping. Not moving a muscle, barely making a sound, but looking at me like I was Jesus come to take her home.
She looked at me like I was some sort of angel. Like I was hope, I was everything she needed to be okay, like if she never saw anyone ever again, it would be fine because she would have still seen me. Her eyes were glass in the deep black of her hair and deep red of her slowly caking blood.
She looked at me like I was a savior, but it was me who made her like this in the first place. I hit her with my car. It wasn't her fault, I just wasn't paying enough attention. She... was just there, in the wrong place at the wrong time. I heard her head hit my bumper, and at that moment, I knew I had killed her. She might as well have been already dead. Unfortunately, she wasn't.
I carried her into the Clinic, blood washing over my hands, coating my shirt. All I could feel was her breathing, and how it matched my heartbeat: too quick.
I laid her on the table and checked to see if she had a collar with a name or anything. No. She was alone in the world, no friends, nothing. We were more alike than I had thought. She kept starting at me. I think I was all that she could see, but I believe that she saw me with perfect clarity.
They brought the syringe for me. This is what we do when there's a dying animal and there's nobody to call, after all, we're not a charity case. We can't save animals that need saving just to do it, we have to do it for money. When there's no money, there's no surviving.
She and I locked eyes for a long time. She looked at me because I was all she had, and I looked at her knowing what was coming and wishing someone, anyone, else would do it. But it's my job. This is what I do.
Her breath fogged out on the metal table. Like she's breathing smoke.
I took a breath and drew some pentobarbitol into the syringe. Tap the needle to get air bubbles out, more out of habit than for any purpose, and slid the needle into a vein on one of her front legs. All I had to do was push the plunger and she'd go to sleep, her pain would disappear, and maybe somewhere in doggy heaven, she'd be happy and playful again. All I have to do is kill her to set her free. But I couldn't stop thinking, “Haven't I hurt her enough?”
Her breathing was heavy but consistent, her bloody chest heaved with the effort to continue, but it was all so mesmerizing. I couldn't move. Locked in a trance, I was frozen, her frail body draped in front of me waiting for me to do something... anything.
If only she would stop looking at me. If only she would break eye contact, I could finish this. I could end it. My thumb is on the plunger, the needle is in the flesh ready to overload her system with barbituates... but I don't think I can do it this time. I don't know if I can end this... even if it is best for her and best for me. The pained look in her eyes only beckons me to stay my hand just another second or two. Maybe she'll be fine, maybe I'm misinterpreting the signs. I know I'm not, but I'm telling myself anything to keep her here. But why? There's no special connection between me and this dog other than the whirlwind romance between her and my fender.
But still I freeze. Looking at her and knowing I could save her from her pain by moving my thumb an inch, but not being able to bring myself to do it for some reason. Some reason I'm not certain of.
I just don't know if I can end this.
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The Great Equation

Ok. So here goes.
The Earth is a planet, spinning on an axis, roughly spherical. The particles of the Earth are not connected, but more like compressed, simultaneously being held in by the magical force of gravity (more than likely caused by the Earth’s massive core) and the being repelled by the equally magical centripedal force (more than likely caused by the rotation).
We think it’s all one big ball, but it’s just particles orbiting the center. And those particles have electrons that orbit nuclei. And beyond that, who knows how many orbiting bits.
To continue: The moon revolves around the Earth which in turn revolves around the sun which in turn revolves around a super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Revolution by revolution by revolution, so is it safe to assume that the pattern doesn’t stop there? There is a theory that there is one point in the center of the universe, super-massive as hell, around which everything else turns. One single stationery point which exercises it’s own gravitational pull to give the universe a sembelance of order.
Now imagine that there are some masses near the stationery point. Can we safely assume that these masses will be dragged faster toward the point, colliding with it and eachother and making it even more massive, thereby adding to the gravitational power of the point? Making it able to pull in more and more mass from further and further out, eventually causing the universe to collapse in on itself.
This is called the Universal Collapse Event (UCE), and this would not be the first time it has happened. Remember the Big Bang? The sudden explosion of matter? According to scientists, this is what happens after a UCE. This is not our first universe. Nor will it be our last. Who knows how many we’ve had or will have.
Scientists have estimated that the next UCE will take place in another 900 billion years, but I’ve done the math myself. Measured the dense microwaves eminating from the center over a few years, seen the exponential growth on a day-to-day basis, carried the decimal and the universe ends today. At approximately 2:30, the gravity of the center will become so great that the galaxies will start colliding as they begin their speeding toward the one stationery point. Andromeda collides with the Milky Way collides with Erratz-13 and so on until we reach terminal velocity (at this point, we’ll already be dead, of course). Then it’s reset and it all starts over again.
2:30 this afternoon. That’s when I’ve estimated it starting. That’s what my math shows. Most scientists are off by 900 billion years. I assume they just don’t know what they’re talking about. That or they want to preserve the order so they aren’t telling anybody.
Most scientists would start getting depressed about this, thinking, “But there’s so much we don’t yet understand.” Not me. I think I get it. I mean, I know where they’re coming from. I used to be the same way: even human nature, which is a purely human invention, is a mystery. We fight wars we don’t understand for people we don’t know for rights or land we’ll never have. We work jobs to pay for things that we wouldn’t need if we didn’t have jobs to start with.
But, I got past all that and realized it’s all something we’re not supposed to figure out. I caught on that projectile motion, fluid motion, quantum mechanics, and everything is part of an equation that explains it all. And that equation also explains why such-and-such girl doesn’t like you, why this guy smokes, why this war is happening in wherever where such-and-such person is getting shot. Even the location on his body where the bullet enters and whether or not it goes out again are part of the equation. Everything contributes to everything, the universe is a clock with billions and billions of little parts. That’s why we can’t find the equation to explain it all. Right now, there are trillions of variables we can’t see, because the whole universe gives a little; however, as the UCE occurs, the variables will diminish with the universe.
That’s why I’m sitting at this table looking up at the sky, waiting for the world to end: so I can spend that last bit of life finding the equation, albeit greatly diminished to only a few variables. I know I can’t publish it. I know nothing will come of it. But I just want to know.
I watch my cigarette smoke in the ashtray, the smoke clouds whisping upward, floating toward the sky slowly in a way that only cigarette smoke can.
My prediction is that when it all starts, time will speed up greatly. In fact, time has been speeding up since it started long ago, but soon it will speed up exponentially. Of course, no one will notice since we’re in time-space with everything else, nonetheless that is my prediction. The smoke will continue to float, but were I able to observe it from outside the accelerating timeframe, I would see it burn up almost instantaneously.
At 2:28, the television starts the breaking news: the Andromeda Galaxy crashes into the Milky Way, an incident that is supposed to happen hundreds of billions of years from now. The news anchors call into question all of the various predictions of scientists. I smile, knowing that before the scientists will have time to rebut, it will all be over. I look back at the sky and wait for God to hand down the Great Equation. Read more...

The Mistress

Sitting in the small, cramped and beige hotel room in this city I've never been to before, the drugs my campaign manager gave me are starting to take their effect. I watch the room bend and shake around me, look down at my speech and it's just five blank pages where I could swear there were words a second ago. He said it would be like this at first.
What did he call it? Demitrol? He said they used it to put cats under before they put them to sleep, so it would be mild enough on a guy like me that it shouldn't affect my performance today at the press conference, but it should numb me enough that I stop thinking about the other things going on while I'm talking.
“Relax,” I hear him say from some unseen corner in the room. I can see the sound waves from his voice, but he's nowhere. Logic says I must be breathing heavy or doing something to incite that, but I have no idea what. I can't feel a thing at the moment.
I'm not usually drugged during my speeches. Usually, I'm vibrant and thoughtful and passionate when I speak, but today I can't keep my mind straight.
Why? Because I'm damned.
Somebody somewhere in the world had to say, “Women are the downfall of man,” and that man must have been a politician. He must have been Cicero. He must have been in the same position I was in: she loves me too much, she can't stand me being married, she threatens, and now, she's got the leverage. Poking holes in condoms is the lowest of blows.
But I can't blame her. The truth is, I love her back. I want to leave my painfully pushy wife and move in with sweet, young, beautiful Jenn with her body shaped like an hourglass instead of like a pear. I find her more appealing in every way: she's smarter, more fun, more beautiful, funnier... there's very little about her I don't like. Except how much she can't stand seeing me play charades with this other woman, can't stand my facade.
It's not her fault really, she's a very real kind of person. That's why when I told her I couldn't divorce my wife for political reasons (for 784th time), she found a way to snap me out of it. She knew I wouldn't take the initiative, so she did. She just wanted to show me how stupid I was being, how false I was being.
She even told me she would never vote for me because she knew how much of a liar I was. God, I love her.
Demitrol apparently starts soft then hits hard. My campaign manager saw it coming and had a trash can set up for me to vomit in, my suit jacket hanging far away in the closet, my tie tucked around my neck in the back of my shirt. I miss at first and get a little on my shoes, and an intern is immediately down to scrub them down, tearing off my shoes and starting a deep cleanse while another violently puts my feet in another pair. All while I continue vomiting.
That bitch. I can't believe she would put me in such a bizarre place on purpose. An affair is one thing, but a child is another. An affair is heresy. A child is proof, undeniable, ever-present. She's incriminated me, dragging me down to the level of an adulterer. Who would trust a man whose own wife can't even trust him. Jenn was a slut to start off with, basically throwing herself at me at a local bar. She took me home the first night. I had never been that easy. But a fight with your wife, and a few beers later, you're ready to make all sorts of mistakes.
I can't believe what she's putting me through. How dare she! I agree to keep seeing her for 2 years, and now, at the peak of my career, she pulls this junior high shit on me. I'm lucky I have a great campaign manager who doesn't crack under pressure. He stands by me, and will do anything to help me. He's a great guy.
I feel myself being hauled to a mirror, but at the moment, all I see are vague colors that might be objects or rooms or people, or space ships for all I can tell. My hair is being scraped and plastered to the right, my tie is being straightened, my jacket being slipped on, one arm at a time, but all I can see is white light.
Then like a switch, clarity. I find myself in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, ready for my speech. Except I'm not wearing my reading glasses yet. They're in my pocket.
The campaign manager came up with the plan to take care of her:
Step 1) Abort the child.
Step 2) Ship her to France.
When the election is over, Step 3) Send for her.
That's the plan he told me, which sounds pretty reasonable. Happily ever after, safe from the complications of public rebuke. This would not stress out Woody Allen. So why am I on Demitrol?
Because I know my manager too well, and that is not his real plan. That's the Disney version he told me so that I wouldn't be distracted. But I know that it's easier to cover up a cadaver than a living person.
The words have come back to the pages of my speech, filling a neat little 9 ½ x 7” space on each piece of stationery. I bundle them together and begin my walk downstairs, surrounded by an entourage of young, ambitious cut-throats.
As we arrive downstairs, the press becomes an intimidating blob of black and white flashes. They sit sweetly in their chairs, yelling for their turn to speak to the man of the hour.
I am introduced. There is a flurry of applause.
Thank you. Thank you.
I begin to read my speech.
I'm on Demitrol because at this very moment, men in black suits are breaking down the door of my mistress's loft apartment, paid for by the Political Action Committee. They are breaking her door down to tell her that they are taking her to get an abortion of my illegitimate child. That is what they tell her, and that is what they told me, but that is not the truth. She will be bound, gagged, murdered, and her body tossed somewhere deep in the ocean where my campaign manager will be glad to bet his life savings she will never be found. Technically, that's what he's doing anyway, betting his life savings she'll remain a secret forever. I believe that this is an accurate metaphor for the state of our nation today.
Wild applause. I start wondering if I'm saying these things, or just thinking them behind the veil of my actual speech. At the moment, neither would surprise me. Read more...

The Somnambulist

We had been married for years, happily, lovingly, and simply married. We would work our respective jobs, he at the library, me teaching high schoolers proper grammar usage and writing skills, then we would come home and see each other and be overwhelmed with the happiness that comes with knowing that all day, all this person wanted was to see you. We would watch obscure movies while drinking red wine and eating macaroni and cheese before falling asleep on the couch in each other's arms. We really had a beautiful relationship that, in my mind, completed us as people.
But lately he's developed a habit of disappearing. Not literally disappearing into thin air, but rather mentally vanishing, like taking a leave of absence from reality. He's still here, but he's not on the same plane with me anymore. I suppose it started when we were both 28 years old.
I came home from work, but he wasn't anywhere to be found. I figured he was going to be home later, so I cooked macaroni and cheese for both of us as was our Friday evening wont, but he still didn't show up. Worried, I decided to see if his car had shown up yet, and strangely enough, it had. It was sitting in our driveway in all of its blue and chrome glory, present and imposing, intimidating because it had apparently driven itself into the driveway because my husband was missing completely. In a fit, I leapt out the door to see if I could find him, and I doubt that I would have if it weren't for his shoes and socks tossed haphazardly at the foot of our tree. My eyes craned upwards to find him curled up on a high branch with his pants rolled up staring intently at a book. I called his name, but he didn't respond, so I ran to the foot of the tree to get closer. All it did was make me feel farther, more distant than before. He was so high up through a bramble of barren branches, farther away from me than the sky. I called his name a few more times, but always to no answer, so I decided to climb up after him.
I worked my way up the tree, cutting myself here, scratching myself there, slipping, tripping, nearly falling time and time again, but I struggled on with determination to reach my husband somehow. Soon, I was within feet of him. I could reach out and grab the book away from him. But there was something in his eyes: an intensity that seemed alien and far out of place, which I had never seen before. I reached out and touched his leg, whispering his name while I did it. When he looked up from the book, he was at first shocked to see me. Or rather scared, his glance held more fear than surprise. What's more, it seemed to be fear of me, not of heights or location.
My first impression had been that he had for some reason climbed up there specifically to read, but reading the book was only a part of his state. Really he was all things entwined together: reading a tattered copy of Once and Future King, not wearing shoes or socks, being at this altitude in this tree specifically, ignoring me, and whatever else was going through is mind. Eliminate one, and the rest comes crashing down.
He started shaking with fear, and when I reached out to help him, he cringed, sliding farther away from me. I watched him fall from the top of our tree through all the helpless branches and straight to the ground, where his leg broke from the fall.
When he awoke in the hospital, he said he didn't remember any of what I said he had done. He didn't remember being in the tree or falling out of it, just driving home from the library and waking up in the hospital. The doctor listened almost half-heartedly to the report, then decided that my husband was probably sleepwalking.
I protested, “But he's never sleepwalked before. Why should he start now?” To which the doctor replied that there could be any number of reasons for it. Stress. Family history. General confusion. Any number of reasons. Then he left the room so my husband could heal.
That was the first time I saw it: him living a distant and separate life, living a dream. But it hasn't been the last time. I see him lost and far away all the time, sitting on our porch, on the couch, even driving in the car. He adopts a placid but intense visage which doesn't exist in the real world, but somehow does in his world. He seems to look through me. Not constantly, but many times. And there's nothing I can do about it. And I feel helpless.
But more than that, I feel left behind.
I see him perched high in the tree, or playing in the playground, completely unaware of what he's doing, and I imagine his freedom. The world peels away leaving only him and his imagination and what he wants to do, and it embraces him. But he always goes alone. He never takes me with him. And I can't help wishing that I was sick like him, that I was degenerating slowly in my mind like he is so I could join him, if only once.
Instead, he sits beside me, miles away from where I am. And I know that if I touch him, he would wake up. So I don't. I watch him live in his world from mine, and pray that he comes back, if only to say hello. Read more...

First Date at the Carnival

The carnival for our first date was all lights and electricity. I knew it was just my heart beating faster, but I felt the lights shining brighter, and the people felt warmer as we walked through the Earthly star system to the soul of the world. I told him this and his short, quaint laugh filled me from top to bottom with the love I was ready to pour out for him.
“Yeah,” he said as his eyes strayed away from mine towards the heart of the night. I could tell his thoughts were somewhere else, and I hoped that he was dreaming, like I was. Dreaming about the world and the future and this moment right now. I knew he was distracted by the dream we were living because his only responses were monosyllabic at best. But I would not hold that against him. Tonight was ours, and I was his, and he was the world's.
We went to a booth where he told me he would win a “really big stuffed animal” for me. A this booth, you squirt water from a gun into a clown's mouth and make a little horse run across the big plastic board. I saw the metaphor for our lives instantly unfold. I was the horse – oddly enough, my power animal – and he was shooting the water to make me go faster and faster, reaching for an end to my means. Reaching for a goal: the “really big stuffed animal” (clearly a representation of God and Heaven). And upon reaching the goal, he would smile, holding the water pistol aloft, and we would hold God and Heaven in both our hands and the world would end, drowning us, as he drowned the clown, in symbolic Water of Love.
“Power animal?” he said, with a raised eyebrow. Curious about my world and my reality, he was distracted enough to not win the grand prize, but headstrong enough to win 3rd, which allowed him the choice of a small crab or a box of pencils. He asked which I wanted.
“The small crab,” I said with gusto. “The box of pencils is a bad omen. Sharp ends, you know.” Again, I could see his curiosity bubbling, but he said nothing as he turned and started walking away.
“How about a Haunted House?” he whispered not facing me, which had an extremely sensual effect that I was not expecting. His nonchalant attempt at indifference made it clear how much he wanted me. Even the juxtaposition of his apparent coldness with the looming possibility of a haunted house, which would make me cringe and huddle close to his endearing chest, was extremely sexy to me. So we walked to the haunted house and heard the chainsaws running somewhere within and I turned to him to let him know that the haunted house was like my heart: chamber upon chamber and the people pulsed through it searching for an exit or something to believe in behind the masks and chainsaws. But only we'll know that we're the real spirits, and as spirits, we float through the ravines of the world coming together at the center where we'll stay forever.
Then I reached for his hand and I felt our fingers entwine like a metaphor for our souls. I felt fireworks from nowhere, I felt blood rush to my head. I felt existence crushing in on me. And then he broke off, saying that he didn't feel like “doing the haunted house anymore.” I understood. I don't think I could have taken much more joy either. The overwhelming flood of emotion that had come with our hands touching was like a soliloquy of our souls.
We walked silently, pensively toward the true heart of the world, the center of the universe that spins with all the fury of an out of control solar system: the ferris wheel. Its lights and motion lit and moved the entire world, it was an engine of hearts, a disc of unthinkable wonder, where, when your seat stops at the very top to allow new people on, the universe of possibilities opens up to you...
So it was as it creaked to a halt with me and him perched closer to the stars than anyone else on Earth. Alone, miles from Gaia, feet no longer touching Terra Firma, he leaned over and kissed me. His hand moved to my breast and I told him I'd never felt the fabric of another person's soul until this moment.
As my comment settled in, he leaned back to his side of the seat, a look of shock and aghast sealed on his face. Obviously, he had seen the beauty of my statement and didn't expect something so perfectly right to come from me at that exact moment. But the world is full of surprises.
After, he walked me home, and I paused on my front porch and poised for the good night kiss, but being the gentleman he is, he declined. He said “see you later”, and I watched him as he vanished into the cold darkness, but I was not worried because on his lips hung the promise of later, and despite the suffocating darkness, that promise will live forever. Read more...

Lists

This morning was all-in-all pretty normal. I woke up, checked to make sure no one was beneath my bed before putting my feet down into my slippers, brushed my teeth until they felt clean (3 times on average, 4 this morning, not too outrageous. At 6 I get nervous), hopped on my bike and went shopping at the grocery store. No problems.
Maybe if I analyze in more detail:
I woke up at 6:52, glanced around the room to make sure I was alone and that all the doors were shut and locked and that the radio was off and that there was no hair left on my pillow and that the mirrors were not turned toward me. Had a look underneath the bed to make sure no one was hidden there. I used a special mirror on a hanger I had construed for the purpose.
By 7:05, I had unstuffed the paper in my shoes and replaced it with my feet, and I was off to the bathroom. A quick shower sufficed, which was good because I don't like enclosing myself in such tight quarters for very long. I brushed my teeth four times.
7:53, I'm out of the bathroom and pulling sets of clothes out of my closet. I knew that I was going out today, so I set aside an hour last night to pick out clothes so I'd be ready. I pulled them out of the closet, then out of their protective plastic covering I got from the laundromat and put them on. I tied my shoes with triple knots, making sure the first one was a square knot. That's very important, other knots can get really stuck if you're not careful, but not a square knot. It always comes apart easy. I put a travel pack of Kleenex in my pocket, opened the door to my apartment and used one to close it back. I went down to my bike which had three locks chaining it to three posts in the bike rack. This keeps other peoples' bikes from being too close. I wiped down my seat, handle bars, and pedals and began my second bimonthly trip to the grocery store to buy:
3 Jars of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter
2 Loaves of Wonderbread
14 Bottles of IBC Root Beer
3 Boxes of Solo Plastic Flatware
1 Gallon of Hiland 2% Milk (Exp not earlier than 2 weeks away)
4 Boxes of Moore Push Pin Thumbtacks
3 Spiral ring College Ruled Meade Notebooks
2 Boxes of Parker Ball point pen/pencil sets
14 Pairs of Hanes Men's underwear
7 Packages of Hanes Men's undershirts (2/pack)
2 Sticks of Oscar Meyer Salami
1 Tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Margarine
2 Bottles of Advil Pain Reliever Medicine
1 Hallmark Mother's Day Card (One that ideally says “Thank you for being my mom”) because Mother's Day is this month
My prescription
When I got to the store, I was immediately aware that Shelly was not there. She was not at the cash register where she usually is and she was not in the Women's Garments section which I could see from the door. I stood there for a second trying to think of what to do: Shelly is the only person I know who works there, and she always helps me and I'm always out of the store within 30 minutes which is good because I don't like being in crowded places for very long. But Shelly was not there, so I had to find someone else to help me. I craned my neck looking for Mr. Takanawa or Mrs. Blanchard or Mr. and Mrs. Starr or Dr. Pasternak, but I didn't see anyone I knew. Luckily, expecting a crowd, I had gone early in the morning when the crowd would be lighter, but there was still a lot of people milling around, and I knew that the longer I stood waiting for someone I knew to come help me, the more people would come to the grocery store to shop, and the more uncomfortable I would get. I felt my deadline. I had an hour max before it would become impossible to do anything. I looked at my watch: 8:25. So really I had 35 minutes before things escalated to a boiling point that I would not be able to handle and I would have to go home and I don't think I have enough things to last another two weeks until my next grocery store trip. I had factored everything to last for exactly 14 days, and while I always had a little bit of peanut butter left over in my last jar I would always throw it away when I came home with the new peanut butter. I started breathing heavy trying to think of what I could do to get out of this situation or how I had met Shelley in the first place like if I had talked to her first or if she had talked to me and whether if I had talked to her first if I would be able to do that again with somebody new or if she had talked me first if anybody else working would be that nice and I was thinking about my deadline and 9:00 and it being 8:27 now and I was still no closer to getting anything done and I was wondering if I should go home right then and give up but I also thought about my prescription and how I took the last pill last night and how I needed it right then but I couldn't get it because nobody would help me. So I decided this was important and that I would have to help myself so I went up to a clean looking cashier with spikey blond hair and his name was Greg and he finally asked me if he could help me and I said, “Yes, Greg. I need 3 jars of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, 2 loaves of Wonderbread, 14 bottles of IBC Root Beer, 3 boxes of Solo Plastic Flatware, 1 gallon of Hiland 2% Milk (Exp not earlier than 2 weeks away), 4 boxes of Moore Push Pin Thumbtacks, 3 Spiral ring College Ruled Meade Notebooks, 2 boxes of Parker Ball point pen/pencil sets, 14 pairs of Hanes Men's underwear, 7 packages of Hanes Men's undershirts (2/pack), 2 sticks of Oscar Meyer Salami, 1 tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Margarine, 2 bottles of Advil Pain Reliever Medicine,1 Hallmark Mother's Day Card (One that ideally says “Thank you for being my mom”) because Mother's Day is this month, and my prescription.”
Greg looked crazy at me so I told him everything again and he asked me to slow down but I explained that if I slowed down I would run out of time and it would be 9:00 and I would get claustrophobic which is where you can't breathe when there are lots of people around and I don't like being claustrophobic and I asked him to please help me. Greg still had a look of craziness, but then he changed it into a smile. I like smiles from people I know because I know that they are probably smiling because they are happy or being nice, but when people I don't know smile it makes me a little nervous because I don't know why they are smiling. Maybe they are making fun of me or maybe they're being conniving or maybe they're being nice. I made myself think about Greg being nice as he said he would help me get my things and get out by 9:00, and I didn't think about him being mean or conniving and that calmed me down a little, especially when he ran to go grab a cart.
Greg came back with a cart and said, “Okay, now what was the first thing on your list?” and I explained that I could only think of the list as a whole so I started rattling off the whole list again and he jogged off with the cart saying to, “follow me to the peanut butter aisle,” and jogging was pretty fun. As he pulled the Skippy's Peanut Butter off the shelf, he said that he felt like helping me was kind of like a game where the goal was to get me everything I needed and then checked out and out the door by 9:00. I liked that he wasn't grudging or anything. Greg seemed pretty nice. In 15 minutes (a new record time) we had gotten everything but my prescription and we were at the pharmacy and Greg was at the window saying, “I need to pick up a prescription for...” then he turned around to me and asked for my name. I froze because I didn't want to tell anybody new, especially someone I just met 15 minutes ago, my name and I started breathing heavy as Greg said, “They need your name to go get your prescription.” But the pharmacists saved me. Luckily they knew my face and went to the back to get my prescription, telling Greg that they knew whose it was and that it was no trouble.
The trouble started when they came back and they said, “Here's Mr. Wymer's prescription,” and they handed Greg the bag and he handed it to me like he hadn't just heard but I heard and now he knew my name and I started breathing heavy again. But he kept smiling and acting like he didn't hear anything so I started thinking maybe he didn't hear my name and as I checked out with him at register #3, I started to calm down. He put my groceries in paper sacks smiling the whole time and hurrying as well. When he finished and I handed him my cash he asked what time it was, so I looked at my watch and told him it was 8:49. “Yes,” he exclaimed, “we did it! With time to spare!” and he helped me take my things out to my bike. I had 3 bags, so like I always do, I put two in the front basket and one (with the milk) in my backpack, and I rode home, deciding not to give Greg and the fact that he knew my name a second thought.
But now, having arrived home, and having found the envelope slid under my door while I was gone, I know that I was mistaken about Greg not hearing my name. He had heard and he'd already told the Council of Anarchists and they had already tracked down where I lived and probably knew everything about me and he had probably told them everything about my shopping list and everything about my bike and what I was wearing and what I would be eating and what they could poison the next time I went shopping so that they could take my notebooks and they probably knew what I check when I wake up each morning and how many times I brush my teeth (3 on average) and they were probably planning something to get me and to kidnap me and steal my notebooks. My apartment is no longer safe, it has been compromised. After all these years of paying my rent with cash and staying off the grid, one slip, one instant where I decided to approach Greg instead of Latricia or Jennifer (who were both not as clean, but not as likely to have ties to the Council) and it's all ruined and everything is at stake.
I know what's in the envelope. I don't even have to look in it to know that it's an ultimatum and it says, “Bring the notebooks to us or we will kill your mom” or Shelly or Mr. and Mrs. Starr or Mr. Takanawa or Mrs. Blanchard or Dr. Pasternak or maybe even me. I feel horrible that I've involved them through my carelessness and I think through all my options.
I could run away but then they might start killing everyone I know to find out where I've run off to and my mom would know where I was because I have to send her the Mother's Day card and it would have a return address and if they tortured her, I'm sure she would tell.
I could stay and face them or give them my notebooks but then they would find out all the secrets I know from the codes that people put in newspaper advertisements and radio commercials and they would know all the government's secret plans which would put the government at a complete disadvantage, and they could put together the cipher and use it to decipher more messages. I can't let that happen because I'm a patriot.
I could destroy the notebooks and face them but then they would torture me and I would never be able to keep myself from telling the cipher, I would never be able to withstand the torture.
So I come to the only logical conclusion: I have to destroy the notebooks and kill myself. It's the only answer that extricates everyone and makes sure my notebooks don't fall into the hands of the Council.
I gather up all the notebooks, 1052 of them, and put them in a big plastic bag. I haul the heavy thing down three flights of stairs and hoist it into the trash dumpster, getting a little bit of garbage on my hand, but I don't wipe it off because this task is too important. I can't let them get hold of my notebooks. It would be the end of America. So I douse the trash in lighter fluid, which I had defiantly asked of my neighbor (I figured since they already know about me, there can be no further harm done), and I light the garbage on fire. As the heat engulfs my notebooks, I can see the plastic melt off and the flames twist around the tiny metal spirals. I watch as page after page disappears into fiery oblivion.
Then I go back up to my room and open my bedroom window, first making sure that one of their spies is not already beneath my bed planning on stopping me before I can jump out. Nobody's there, so I lean out and look down the three stories to the ground. It's 9:05 when I jump off the sill and into the empty air.

I wake up in a room I don't know, unable to move. My muscles feel heavy and I can barely move my eyes to look around and see that I'm in a hospital room. My mom sits on my right and beside her sits a doctor with large frame glasses that I can't see through when the light hits them just right. I can barely hear them through the drugs that they've apparently got me on, but the message is loud and clear: the Council has kept me alive to tell them the cipher and they have my mom. In my head I am screaming and running and tearing at the bed, but all I can do is move my right index finger a little bit and out of the corner of my eye I can see that the doctor is smiling. Read more...