I Regret
Give me my room to breathe,
Allow me some silent peace,
But I will be there when the time comes,
Because I know all we have is love.
So I shall succumb to my worst habits
And I will have many a dark day
But I’ll seek you out for laughing
And I’ll try so hard not to chase you away.
I think it’s obvious I see no hope on the horizon
And the world weighs heavily in my thoughts
So my contributions aren’t always constructive
But we’re better facing the future together than not
F TW was the song of the Summer here in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Even those not singing it couldn’t deny it was a catchy tune. W began the year by being left by his wife. Then, he found himself chastising residents for looting shortly after George Floyd was killed, insisting that they had forced him to leave his dying mother’s side. It’s unclear why he needed to return since he promptly did nothing. After a few months, he brought himself to finally attend a protest and intentionally got tear gassed by federal agents for a photo op. He got himself in some of that sweet, sweet national liberal media air time. He nearly managed to win re-election during the primaries, but, failing to do so, he proceeded to break campaign finance laws to win himself re-election in the general.
Shortly thereafter, W began threatening people trying to stop with an eviction with as much force as necessary, but was forced to do a 180 when they managed to raise enough money to buy back the house for the family. In that time, he swept a homeless camp knowing that people could not be in two places at once. But the thing about T W is that he can occupy two completely different places at the same time. He is anti-racism, but chastises anyone calling out racism. He is concerned about people losing their homes while ensuring people are properly evicted. He is an environmentalist who won’t go any further than the businesses that fund him will let him. In short, he is a liberal.
“I thought you died”
Like I said before, I hate working, but spending all day at work with my mind wandering helps me have inspiration at the end of the day - although many times I am too tired. Anyway, so it was getting late on December 12th and I kept thinking I need to write something and then I thought how I’d been writing a few things and it got a little later and it really felt like why the hell am I going to stay up until dawn just to write something I probably won’t even like and then I woke up the next day and thought ‘did I write something last night?’ and I checked the website and I didn’t and then I thought ‘I definitely need to write something today then’ and then I didn’t and then today I kind of almost thought the same thing. I thought taking vacation days would free me up and I would write, but I just watch movies and shit. Anyway, I decided to try to crack something I have been trying to write in the last few of these - which is the other thing: I got to that point where I am just writing the same thing over and over and never getting it right and it’s not really interesting to me and each time it’s a little different, but not any closer so it’s not rewarding.
Your favorite filmmaker signed the Polanski letter. Your favorite rapper is a corporate sellout. Your piles of unread books grow higher. The walls are closing in.
I think I have to kill my darlings with that Polanski letter line and I don’t think I have a good use for the Harper’s letter thing at this time. Maybe that thing I wrote about P Monch was something I should be doing. I really really really really really need to try to write something tomorrow, but it is agony trying to fit in writing I don’t want to do late at night.
“So you’ve given up on your attempts at creative short stories for… whatever this is?”
Well, my friend texted me to submit something to his zine and there’s definitely not going to be room for a fully fleshed out short story and this kind of naturally started coming out somehow. This is pretty much what I used to write like and I’m beginning to see how I was able to craft my sentences in a way I liked. It is a shame I can’t write the way I like while telling an actual, interesting story though. Anyway, I’ll probably send him the first thing I wrote, but because the pressure put a bit of a fire under my ass I am trying to use it to get as much creativity out as I can while I can by lying to myself that I am going to manage to write anything else I would like to submit (considering how much I don’t want to submit any of the other things I wrote so far.)
“Well, then I guess I’ll leave you to it then…”
I read once that Pharoahe Monch keeps rhymes for five years. I don’t have that patience and, so far, haven’t managed to keep what I’ve written organized in a way where I could find a particular sentence from five years ago. I’ve got about ten different Word documents with final between one and five times in the file name and maybe a few As at the start to put it at the top alphabetically and I have to look at the last edit date to figure out which is which and I can’t recall if the piece of writing was in the second to last edit or the last edit and I also don’t remember if I finished the zine or stopped just before finishing because I didn’t know what to do with it or scrapped the whole idea, but took about half of the content to create a different zine. It’ll probably save me some embarrassment when I die.
I fluctuated between trying to kill my ego via honesty and killing myself via alcohol for several years. I never officially gave up, but it’s disheartening not to fail for so long. All I have are my habits and, ironically, they’re the reason that they’re all I have. Would it really make any sense to just ship on the belief there’s a better boat, but it won’t arrive until it needs to rescue me from drowning?
What a feeling to feel nothing but shame in a world so shameless. I think I once wrote that being self-loathing and self-absorbed are synonyms. I don’t remember if I ever said that to anyone.
Don’t Think You Go There Twice
Somedays you pay slightly more attention to a Tove Lo song you’ve used too frequently as background music and are delighted by the graphic nature of a phrase, same for those Nocando songs from before he changed his name and took his entire discography off the internet. Other days, Nikola Šarčević lands a line you had forgotten was coming and you almost double over.
Revisiting well-loved books and it’s hard not to feel discouraged. You could never, in a million years, craft that fucking sentence. You almost want to track down Marcos Giralt Torrente to chop off his head and examine his brain, at the very least you’d stop being envious. You try not to think about how what you read were translations because that would only confound you more. On the one hand, you will never put out something as boring as Paris. On the other hand, you will never put out anything as beautiful as Paris.
Unlearning is harder than learning and when the only thing that stops the daily mass shootings is a pandemic in which the police will still shoot you in the back and the government will still execute you because hundreds of thousands dying won’t sate the blood thirst of the greatest country on Earth, the only path forward is diving headfirst into an alternate reality or eventually succumbing to the desire to tune it all out and watch old television shows. From sea to shining sea, minds are racing while trying to figure out how to escape during a pandemic while freedom for others is feeling the air on their lips and nose. I’m just trying to pry a life preserver from my Millencolin albums.
All my favorite bands are three or four or maybe five heterosexual white men and I whole-heartedly endorse the kids taking a shit on my grave someday. Respecting your elders is the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled. If you don’t have anything nice to say about the generations brave enough to try what you wouldn’t then there’s no need to say anything at all.
I don’t really understand what the youth are doing and I don’t believe I am supposed to. What I do know is what I was doing at their age: playing my role as a nail that doesn’t want to get hammered back down into the wood. I’m Justice Stewart in ‘64, stop asking me to explain things to you. I’m hanging on by a thread myself. I am using deductive reasoning to determine that the kids are alright because you and me aren’t and they aren’t like us.
Your favorite song is by a rapist. Your favorite filmmaker signed the Polanski letter. You get all your news filtered through signatories of the Harper’s letter while you rant about “safe spaces.” What’s not connecting?
Typing with one eye closed to see straight as my brain slowly begins to shut down. Prying words from some mysterious fount deep in the recesses of my brain while the world sleeps. Chasing that high from years ago when I could craft a sentence I was proud to flaunt. But the years keep coming and the subject matter stalls until I’ve got multiple zines attempting to use words to describe something that requires a different medium entirely to even touch upon. I’d probably be able to think straight if the rappers quit expatiating in my ear, but the rockers and pop stars aren’t much less verbose while I use Google to search for words I’ve forgotten. At the end of the process I have nothing to show so, if I removed the beats and melodies, I might as well get enough sleep.
My affection for people dissipates like clockwork yet I am still in awe of what now feels like a past life. I don’t long for what could have been or marvel at what sowing toxic masculinity has forced me to reap because, while I’m far from a fatalist, the end result feels like the way things need to be.
I don’t read as much as I’d like, but sometimes I revisit old books and realize I could live a thousand lifetimes and cut everyone out of my life and I’d still never manage a paragraph like those. Constant television consumption probably doesn’t help, but if I cut that out of my diet I would simply sleep three times longer.
As I attempt to re-watch “Home the Smithers” on a scratched library DVD, I won’t defend nostalgia. I know living in the past is a form of soft suicide, but Chuck by Sum 41 still rocks and there are worse ways to go out than rotting my brain on a third viewing of the Irishman while briefly forgetting that going about my business during a pandemic is “the new normal” and not even attempting to tackle the plethora of Pandora’s boxes we’re opening with no regard for the consequences.
I’ve never checked with a doctor if my brain is wired wrong, but nearly everyone else seems to be living their life wrong. I am not delusional enough to believe I am living my life correctly, but of the two different kinds of “wrong” lives we lead, everyone else’s seems agonizingly unpleasant. I watch and wait for the rug to be pulled from out underneath them and can’t help but feel that it is going to hurt so much worse for them when everything crumbles. I’ve been mentally preparing at least.
There’s a misconception that my worldview is one of apathy, but I care more than nearly everyone I know. I really care. And the thing about really caring is that this country breaks you early. All the true believers whose only real belief is that they are the true believers will grow to an age where the idea of realizing they’ve been hoodwinked would be too painful so they’ll go all in on the most uninspiring something something… I’m going to sleep. I think this one got too self-righteous. I just had that first phrase that I had in my head that I wanted to write something with.
Okay, the truth of the matter is… yes, I started writing at work. The prayer really doesn’t have anywhere to go. I tried to work on an expand the movie theater one, but the main reason I am not writing an haiku and then watching a DVD is because my friend wants me to submit some writing. So now I have a deadline and I need something not entirely terrible written - and then I have to fix it to make it better. So the pressure is on.
Mid-Life Crisis
“I know how to tighten the cold hard fist of my heart. I don’t remember how to open it.” - LMJ
I’ve been telling this little joke to myself while trying not to talk to anyone, ‘the thing nobody tells you about your 30s is they start in the middle of a global pandemic and, shortly after, the President of the United States of America and many members of the Republican Party attempt to stage a coup.’ I didn’t say the joke was funny.
It gets harder every day to live the life I know I should. Like Uncle JImmy said, “you can’t tell the children there’s no hope,” but I never developed much of a poker face and while my lips aren’t the loosest, they aren’t guaranteed to keep ships afloat. I spent my 20s trying to drink myself to death or maybe I’ve become a historical revisionist because being suicidal is at least an explanation if not an excuse for my bad behavior.
Time somehow drags on excruciatingly slow while simultaneously slipping through my fingers and if I stop and think about it too long I think I already missed whatever train I was intended to board to go anywhere. I’ve made many acquaintance, but my desire to keep anyone around wasn’t as strong as the need to keep a safe distance. Or maybe that’s my revisionism again, who’s to say it was up to me whether they stuck around?
I want to be more kind, to be a better person, but I’d rather not have people bothering. When I was younger and short and not particularly adept at sports or any sort of lothario, I wanted so much to be tough. But as I age and watch myself hurt people almost as if its second nature, I wish I hadn’t tried so hard for so long to be this side of the binary. There’s that revisionism again: I’ve never tried hard at anything.
Still, the shame and wondering why I was occasionally the butt of a joke here or there set me on this course. Did you ever look around at the group you’re in and wonder how everyone got their roles because you never agreed to the part you’re playing?
I wanted to be a writer back when I was in high school. Now I’m far too lazy to put in the work. But at the time, I was too ashamed. I feared vulnerability. I still do. But I still want what is forbidden. But then the gears in my skull start turning and like some fucked up distortion of a chess prodigy, I think three steps ahead and change my mind.
“I suppose you’re going to write a haiku about diarrhea and then call it quits to watch a movie…”
Nope, I sort of wrote on my phone at work and so now I’ll probably ruin it by revisiting it in a new mindset, but that solves the issue of my mind going blank when I sit down at night to write something.
A Prayer for a Gentler America
Oh lord who art in Heaven, let my Amazon packages arrive by Christmas Eve. Let the eyesore homeless encampments be swept from my sight, pandemic be damned. Let all police officers know they are appreciated for all that they do that keeps us so safe whatever that is. Let racial harmony commence and let Democrats and Republicans respect each other again. Let the essential workers not get the virus and force their businesses to shutdown while they all quarantine. Let the protests end for they are not the answer.
The Reprieve of the Theater
I won’t miss my friends if I never speak to them again and what a relief to stop drinking myself to death in bars that have become death traps during the pandemic. But I catch myself longing for the silver screen. The only thing that can quiet my neurotic brain. How I dream of the day when I can once more melt my mind on multiple matinees. No more Netflix streams interrupted by the urge to check Twitter/check my bank account/check Patreon/check OnlyFans, and - less and less frequently - check Facebook. Or see if Tumblr is still dead. Or Google something-I-don’t-need-to-know-but-worry-I will-forget-if-I-don’t.
God, just give me a little celluloid, an excuse to leave the house. I have abandoned reading entirely as it is impossible to focus long enough to finish a single sentence while the Earth is on the precipice of annihilation and all “the grown ups in the room” don’t appear to intend to react in any meaningful way. I lie awake at night in bed with a pinball bouncing around inside my skull, but a movie would ease my worries just long enough to rest. I miss the stories, sure, but oh what a pleasure it is to drift off to Polish or French dialogue. The couch will have to suffice for now, but now I long to go somewhere where no one can reach me. How I yearn to calm my nerves even with a comedy film wherein all the jokes fall flat. The next time you call my name, the next time you ring my doorbell, the next time you call or text, I hope I won’t be available to respond.
I have never wanted to write less than I want to write tonight
“But tomorrow you’ll want to write less than you wanted to write today - and you are less than a third of the way through the month.”
This is all true. There’s no way to kid myself that I am writing even lose to 31 short stories. But I will write something each day.
“That doesn’t sound very promising.”
I’ll write something complete - or maybe I’ll write a big ol’ chunk of a story that I write more of the next day. The whole idea of writing something and posting it every day is decent for accountability if anyone was reading this, but it’s stupid for getting results. I am stopping myself from writing a novella because I feel like I need to start and wrap up a story every night.
“So you are going to write the first chapter of a novella?”
No, I am going to write another poem. I’m going to write a haiku about how much I don’t want to write anything. I can’t describe the feeling I am currently consumed by, but I just want to be done with writing already. I think having lower expectations will help me not avoid writing until it is late and then the excuse because that I want to go to sleep. I mean, I actually want to watch a movie tonight, but some nights I want to go to bed. And if I had watched this movie earlier rather than fretting about fitting in time to write, then I could be going to bed soon. So either it will be beneficial or it will blow up in my face and my output will become increasingly worse.
Was I born this way
Or did I become lazy
Through lack of effort in life
That feels like too little and it was actually hilarious how I couldn’t really say what I wanted to say.
“So you’ll keep writing?”
I’ll write a few more poems - not haikus, I don’t like the structure. But these are going to be low effort poems. It’s like I said, my philosophy professor made people write 3 short stories because people stressed out so hard when it was just one. So two more poems with no pressure.
A dragon is a dragon
As long as it doesn’t drag on
Life expectancy is key
We’re all going to die
Even dragons
Yeah I said it
That was low effort even to me, but weird.
Feed the world
Shelter the world also
Stop bombing the world
And gunning down the world
“The world” is possibly the wrong phrase
I mean everybody living on it
And everybody means every “body”
Animal and human harmony hooray!
These all feel particularly lazy. I really didn’t enjoy writing those previous poems yet. I want to study the forms of some poems written by actual poets one of these days. So I guess I’ll throw that onto the heap of things I keep putting off working on getting better at to tackle at some point this month. But there are 3 poems.
She woke up, it was dark out. Was it the middle of the night or had she slept through the day? Neither would be too shocking. Sometimes one falls asleep into a deep sleep, the kind that makes you drool, and by the time they awaken, the day is gone, but they are fully rested. The problem, though, is that one finally has enough energy to really be productive, but they need to be prepared to go back to sleep shortly or risk getting incredibly off-schedule. The alternate possibility is that she had merely woken up shortly after falling asleep and it was still night. Then she had the option of going back to sleep or potentially getting up and being productive, but she would need to be careful not to stop up all through the rest of the night without going back to sleep or the upcoming day would be hell to get through.
She decided to get up and have a look around. She went to have a drink of water.
This is fucking awful. I started with a few sentences. Oooh, I’m writing about a woman for once. What else can I do different? How about if the main character is a cat? Then I decided that would be the big reveal. Nothing I wrote about keeping a schedule applies to a cat as far as I am aware.
“So you’re going to just stop?”
I’ve had poetry on my mind and I don’t write poetry, but the thing I want to be good at again in getting that pristine sentence structure I used to have in my writing. A lot of what I wrote was pretty short, but I would go back and tweak until I liked how it read and it didn’t matter if it was a snap shot rather than a story. I don’t know if I am in the same mindset to pull off that sort of writing that lends itself to having a beautiful rhythm. But what I do know is that it is boring me to tears to try to write this garbage so how the fuck is someone else going to want to read it? Why would I get good at writing boring things? Yes, yes, I should try to practice different things, jump face-first into my weaknesses, but if this is the result, there’s no point.
“So you’re going to just give up for the night? Or you are going to write something else since you barely wrote anything so far?”
Well, I am pretty lazy, but I’m actually kind of mad about what I wrote so far. I spent a ton of time avoiding it and then writing a tiny bit and then avoiding it. I spent too much time to delete and start over. It’s there as evidence that I tried.
“So what are you going to write now?”
I think I’m going to write the dumbest thing I can conjure.
Pooping his pants wasn’t something he liked to do, but everyone expected him to do it. After eating someone else’s cooking, it was a show of appreciation to shit yourself in front of them. If you couldn’t shit yourself, then perhaps the food had caused indigestion.
He could not believe, growing up, that everyone else did this without complaint. It was so uncomfortable to have shit in your pants. And it increased the frequency one needed to do laundry. And you have to do your laundry on the extra soiled setting.
After about twenty years of shitting his pants like everyone else, he finally moved out of his parents’ home and was free to carry himself the way he saw fit. Of course, it wasn’t his parents who were the problem. They raised him the way every other child in society had been raised - shit your pants, don’t be rude.
So when he moved into an apartment by himself, he was able to finally avoid dinner parties and people cooking for him. He saved money by not eating out at the restaurants which was preferable to him because all of the good restaurants smelled like hundreds of people had shit their pants in the dining areas - because they had - and the restaurants where people had withheld their feces, as an insult to the staff, served bad food. More importantly, he avoided forging relationships. It didn’t start this way. He tried to befriend people in his life and then make up excuses when they invited him to have a meal with them. But eventually, they would be insulted by his absolute refusal to dine on the food they cooked. At some point, he realized that it was just easier to not befriend anyone.
He knew how it would go. They’d get along great until, one day, he’d be invited over to their home for dinner. He’d make an excuse. At this point, he’d gained a reputation so sometimes the single excuse was enough. He could see the look in their eyes. It was a look of betrayal, “oh? you feel that way about me too? I thought we were friends.” Sometimes it was how it used to be, he would make an excuse and they would accept. Then he would make another excuse and another and around the fifth one, they’d start to suspect something was up. And they would eventually stop inviting him over. Along with that, they’d stop talking to him in general.
As a result, he kept mostly to himself these days. He lived a somewhat agoraphobic lifestyle. But, of course, he still needed money. So he went to work at the dog food factory. In the breakroom, people would sometimes look at him weird when he didn’t shit his pants after eating lunch - trying to figure out if he was too humble or if he had such low self-esteem that he didn’t even praise his own cooking. But people left him alone, they weren’t friends with him.
One day Amelie started her shift at the dog food factory. He saw that twinkle in her eye. She was so young and not beaten down by life yet. But with youth comes inexperience. About halfway through her shift, he saw the dog food machine she was working on getting clogged and she seemed completely obvious. He looked around for a supervisor to assist her, but none were on the floor. It had been so long since he had interacted with anyone in any real capacity that he wasn’t really sure how to tell her she fucked up, but “friendly.”
“Uh…ummm… UHHHHH… your machine!”
“What?”
“The dog food processing machine, you have a jam.”
“Um, how do I fix it?”
“Here,” he said as he hit the POWER button to turn the machine off. Then he reached into the exit door and pulled out a biscuit that had lodged itself at an angle.
“Should be good to go now.”
“Thanks.”
He didn’t say anything. The interaction was over. The problem was resolved.
“Hey, what’s your name? I’m Amelie!”
“Fuck,” he thought in his head. “I’m Frederico,” he said aloud.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Here we go again,” he thought as he walked back to his station.
***
As he was leaving to head home at the end of his shift, Amelie ran up to him.
“Hey, thanks again. I really don’t know what I would do if I lost this job.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Here, let me buy you dinner to thank you.”
“Uh…I don’t really go to restaurants because they smell like shit.”
“Well, of course they smell like shit; everyone is shitting their pants inside of them.”
“Yeah, I don’t really like that. It smells bad.”
She lowered her voice just a slight bit as she responded, “to tell you the truth, I always thought it smelled awful, but nobody else seems to care.”
“I don’t really understand this custom where we shit our pants all the time.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty gross. I personally try to avoid doing it as much as possible by eating my own cooking alone.”
He smiled, “would you like to come try my cooking? No pants-shitting required.”
“So this is what you wrote instead of the cat thing?”
Yeah.
“And you’re happy with it?”
Well, the stakes were pretty low when I said that I was going to write the dumbest thing possible, but I think I accidentally pulled a nugget of truth out of all the pants-shitting stuff.
“And what is that?”
Well, I don’t know if I did it justice, but just the whole idea of this guy closing himself off from the rest of society because he’s too scared to speak up about his apparently unpopular opinion that people shouldn’t shit their pants.
“I can’t wait to see what you write tomorrow. That is sarcasm by the way.”
Nothing measures time
Quite the way
That I look back a few years
And cannot fathom being so head over heels
For anyone
Let alone someone who is a complete stranger now
I fear
I have yet to be house-broken
Or perhaps I was trained right
But went feral at a later date
Are my missteps something I am capable of correcting?
Or is my brain wired entirely wrong?
Was I doomed from the start?
Nature or nurture
Every failed relationship haunts me
And I hold onto that as evidence
When I start wondering if I’m a sociopath
Again
But if I never do better
Am I something better?
“Are you just going to write poems for the rest of the month because you think they are easier?”
No. I read this great quote from a writer, I don’t recall which one, who was asked something along the lines of what the greatest detriment to creativity was and the response, from the writer, was capitalism. And while I agree with that sentiment politically, the reality is that going to work keeps me in a routine. So instead of coming home and thinking about how I have to start writing soon-ish, I am already at home all day and then it was like 10 PM and I decided to watch Judge Dredd and about halfway through I realized I was fucked because I still had to write something for the day. And then when it was over, I thought how nice it would be to go get warm in bed and read a book for the first time in a while, but - no - I have to write something. Then, I spent like an hour dicking around on the internet because I didn’t know how I was going to write something short tonight because I know my stories just go off into endlessness and then I have to wrap it up quickly when its been like 45 minutes and I am sick of writing.
“Well, are you at least proud of this poem?”
Sort of. I think I had something there in the first verse and then I kind of just let it flow and it ended up in a different direction which is okay, but I think that first verse doesn’t match the others, but I’d have preferred sticking more with the direction of how it started. But then I wrote a short story about time travel then the poem about time travel so I feel kind of like a dork to write another poem about the passage of time. It’s not really interesting, but its probably the easiest way to evoke some emotion and get things going.
“But now that you’ve written two poems you don’t particularly like, will you stop and write more short stories?”
I cannot guarantee that, but I would prefer that.
“Here you’ve gone on longer writing this conversation than you spent writing the poem, why not put that energy all into a short story?”
Well, like I said the other day, it was like pulling teeth writing something straight forward and it only really started getting going when I just started writing an argument between the characters… And I guess the other thing is - and this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but - when I came up with this creative device of myself interjecting into my writing, I actually thought I had stumbled onto some creative brilliance and was so excited to see how great things would evolve from there, but then the next day I wrote a story without interjection and I realized that I employed this element way too early in the month and now I feel almost as if I am forced to include it in a lot of the writing or come up with something even more bizarre and fourth-wall breaking because just think about how terrible it would be to have this collection of short stories with a normal one, then the author starts arguing with himself in the middle of the second or third one, then the stories just carry on like a normal collection of stories after that.
“So you’re just to stop writing poems and write straight forward stories that don’t include large sections where you explain to yourself your own mindset while writing the story? That is exactly what I wanted and the only reason I interjected to begin with!”
Well, that’s great to hear because I was just thinking about how I was probably going to have to find a way to write myself killing you as the only way to put an end to this terrible ‘creative idea’ to lose this burden.
“How’d it go yesterday.”
It was like pulling teeth, but I managed to write something relatively straight-forward, narration-wise.
“But then the ending kind of… you can kind of see that you kind of rushed to wrap it up.”
Well, the thing about writing short stories is… I don’t remember how long those stories I used to write for that philosophy class took. But I still had a work ethic back then because I was used to the concept of ‘homework’ and now I just want to sit around and do nothing. And I read collections of short stories or even One Story magazine and all the short stories are like 20 pages long. My stories were maybe 5 pages. I don’t think I rushed to wrap them up either. But now I start writing and realize ‘oh, wow, this is going to go on for an eternity’ which I guess is good for someone trying to produce something of substance - which is ironically because every time I try to write a novel, nothing comes out - but with this idea I had to write a short story a day, I don’t know how to rush the start and then do a normal length ending to balance it out so it seems doomed for quickly wrapped up endings.
“Well, today is the first day of the month you weren’t at work and then you don’t have to work tomorrow either - it’s the weekend - so now that you have more time, I’m sure you can write something today that isn’t rushed.”
Actually, I slept in, went for a walk, then watched a couple episodes of the Twilight Zone, then watched three movies and now it is almost 1:30 in the morning so I was thinking about writing a poem.
“A poem? You don’t even write poetry.”
Not really, no. I mean there’s that one I started, kind of lost my train of thought about, then tried to wrap it up later and had lost the headspace I was in, but I still ‘published’ it on this website. I was emailing a songwriting I am a massive fan of a day or so ago and may have been a bit too forward about not fully grasping poetry so it’s been on my mind…
“And your reaction to telling someone who loves poetry that you don’t ‘get’ it is to then turn around and write a poem because you think it is ‘easier’ than writing a short story? The egos of white men…”
Well, thanks for not interrupting my story yesterday anyway…
“Work on somehow not rushing your endings.”
It took everything in me to not kill him off. I was going to have the guy say that the time-traveler would be injected into him and the whole thing was a plot to just murder him. But I was starting to see a pattern of killing everyone off emerge.
“Well, maybe my criticism is paying off a little then.”
Baby Hitler
Thinking back on my youth
It feels like the world began collapsing in my early twenties
But I was never great at paying attention in history class
And the internet is less forgiving than those text books
So now I spend less time wondering when it all went to hell
And wonder if it ever wasn’t
If you could take a time machine back in time would you kill Hitler
And receive accolades
If you ever managed to explain what you stopped?
Or is there a less substantial moment to revisit
That started it all and so much more?
And what of everything that doesn’t require a time machine?
We spend our time convincing ourselves we would have been on the right side of history
But can’t be bothered to lift a finger for a stranger
American exceptionalism or a close cousin has blinded us to our shortcomings
Because nothing is ever as bad as the way historical moments are presented once we finally decide to collectively condemn them
“Well, do you feel like you accomplished anything with this cop out?”
No, not really.
“But you’re going to stop writing for the night now?”
Yeah, it took a lot of time and energy just to try to figure out what the hell to write a poem about. And by the end of it I realized it’s basically this short story idea I never really fleshed out about a guy in present day who is completely dismissive of everything going bad politically while he builds a time machine to go back in time to kill Hitler.
“Maybe you should have wrote that instead.”
Hindsight is 20/20.
Awakened from a deep slumber, he felt a strong sense of foreboding. The unease in his gut was so powerful that he was unable to fall back asleep so he lay in bed, paralyzed by dread. But what had woken him up? Was it a noise? He couldn’t recall. Was it possible that his own concern had woken up? Was he scared before he woke up or did he only become consumed by fear once he had woken up?
The following morning was awful. He’d slept only a few hours. And while one can get some rest simply from the act of laying in bed, there is no restorative power to do so with a troubled mind. He was more tired than before he’d slept. Bleary-eyed, he arose to shower, brush his teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast - standard morning fare. Then he was off to research mimeography.
Many people asked him what he did for a living. He told them he was a researcher, tried to keep it vague if he could. It was hard to explain that his job wasn’t really “researcher” and the reason he was spending years researching mimeography. It was somewhat convoluted and he didn’t fully believe in the work, but a job was a job and, for some reason, they wanted him. The aim was, once he had mastered the use of a mimeograph, he would be sent back in time to when mimeographs were still in use to make a copy of a letter written in that time. He had not been given many details about the letter he would be copying. One step at a time, they told him.
The most bizarre part of the job is that they didn’t get him an old mimeograph to use or build him one so he could actually practice using one a few times to make sure he was prepared for the task. Instead, they had him reading about mimeographs and how they worked, learning all he could so he would be able to use one when he was sent back in time. He didn’t complain because he was being paid and, as noted earlier, he didn’t much care about the end goal of this project.
He was about six months away from the projected date when his employers felt confident he could be trusted to go back and make a copy of the letter. He was feeling like he’d learned everything he possibly could about mimeographs and was beginning to get frustrated he couldn’t get his hands on one to actually do a test run so he could know he was ready. Hypothetically, he wasn’t barred from tracking down a mimeograph and practice, but his employer wasn’t going to get it for him so that would be money out of his own pocket. And, ultimately, he didn’t care if he somehow did fail to make a copy of the letter - the mysterious letter.
It must have been an important letter considering how much money they were spending preparing him. He sometimes wondered why they didn’t simply do it themselves; they wouldn’t need to pay themselves to research the mimeograph. But he put those thoughts into the part of his brain where he his thoughts about why he wasn’t getting hands on practice got locked away. Ultimately, if they wanted to pay for him to do things this way, it wasn’t his job to point out that it wasn’t the most effective or affordable way for their task to be done.
Once he arrived at work, he pulled out the Big Book of Mimeographs to look at some photos of the machines (again) and Baby’s First Mimeograph because he had noticed his boss always seemed particularly happy to see that he had a book “on deck” to look at next. All the books were provided and on a shelf a few feet away from where he read them so it was ridiculous to think having a second one ready to read meant much, but his boss seemed excited that he appeared to care about the task so much to plan ahead on with a follow-up book. He had no intent to read Baby’s First Mimeograph (again) for reasons that should be obvious from the title along with the reality that he was unlikely to do much research looking at the photographs in the Big Book of Mimeographs. At this point, he’d look at all the books so many times, it was impossible for him to read them again. He just looked at the photos as art, appreciating the composition and such. He was surprised his bosses were having him research for multiple years considering that they had only provided about a dozen books for him to use for research. But, once again, that thought got locked away in the back of his mind. Money is money.
While they had been somewhat secretive about the letter he would be copying, they had been extremely nonchalant when he’d asked about the time-travel. He’d almost felt stupid for having asked with the way they’d responded. But there response had worked because, despite being bored to tears by the books, he didn’t actually spend much time thinking about how being sent back in time would work.
Suddenly his boss burst into the library, if you could call a room with a dozen books in it that. He was startled out of his daydream and tried to push Baby’s First Mimeograph forward on the table a little so it would be noticed. But his boss wasn’t paying attention to what books were out.
“Today’s the day!”
“What?”
“The board has discussed it and you’ve researched enough. You are ready!”
“The board? What bo- today?! I might be ready, but surely I should get a little bit more notice that I am about to be sent back in time. I mean, don’t you think?”
“If we had warned you, you would have told the people in your life. And we can’t have any loose ends.”
“But I’ve been coming here for years now. I know I signed a confidentiality form, but I’ve definitely let a few things slip to a person or two in that time.”
“Yes, but you didn’t let it slip that today is when you are leaving. Because you didn’t know… until right now.”
“I mean, it’s suddenly sounding like you don’t trust me. If you don’t even trust me, why did you hire me out of all the people in the world to do th-”
“You just admitted that you’ve told people about this project a moment ago.”
“Yeah, I might have said one or two things, but I kept it vague.”
“Perfect. So anyway, follow me to the room.”
“Come on. What if I have some things I need to get sorted out before I go back in time? What if I have affairs to resolve? I mean, we’ve never discussed this before, but how long am I going back in time for?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long am I going to be gone on this trip for?”
“It’s not really a trip. You’ll travel through time to get there, but I wouldn’t call it a ‘trip.’”
“I feel like you’re being ominous…”
“Well, I mean, you’re asking things like ‘how long’ and you are worried about making sure things are all sorted out in your life like it matters if your life is a mess when you go back in time and never return again.”
“What?!”
“We don’t have technology to send you forward in time. And even if we did, they wouldn’t have that technology back in the time we are sending you and it is so far back that you can’t just live in that time until it is invented because you would die of old age - I mean, you will die of old age waiting for it. You will go back in time and when you are back there, you will continue aging until you die and the technology will not be invented before that happens.”
“But - you are asking me to copy a letter for you on a mimeograph. How am I going to get you the copy of that letter if I don’t come back?”
“Well, haven’t you seen movies where someone back a long time ago hides something somewhere and it is preserved over the years until someone in the present finds it?”
“No, I don’t think so…”
“I’m not sure if I have either, but I don’t know how else I would be able to come up with that concept unless I saw it in a movie. That doesn’t matter. Just hypothetically, we have that concept if we were having you copy a letter for us and while it might seem like a slow way to get ahold of a copy of the letter from your perspective as you age through the years, from our perspective, it would instantly be in the agreed upon spot the moment you went back in time assuming that you were successful in your task - yes, I must have seen this in a movie at some point. But we aren’t actually having you copy a letter on a mimeograph.”
“Then what are you having me do?”
“Go back in time.”
“But then why did you have me studying mimeography for years?!”
“Well, we needed to keep you busy while we build the time travel machine.”
“Why didn’t you just wait until you had built the machine and then hired someone?”
“Well, we also wanted you to feel like you were a part of the process so you would care and be gung-ho about getting sent back in time.”
“But I wouldn’t have felt like a part of the process as soon as I found out you were having me do busy work for years because the research doesn’t matter.”
“Well…hmm, you do have a point. Either way, what’s done is done and now we need to get you sent back in time.”
“But why?”
“We want to see if our time travel machine works.”
“But how will you know if it worked?”
“You are starting to feel like you are stalling, but you are also raising some decent points. I guess maybe it would be best to have you make a copy of a letter on a mimeograph to leave it somewhere for us to find so we know that you did go back in time. See? All your research did serve a purpose.”
“What letter would you even want a copy of?”
“Well, that is a difficult question. We’d need to be positive that you left it, of course. I guess maybe you should write us a letter and leave it for us to find…”
“And you want me to copy the letter I write on a mimeograph?”
“Well, no. I guess there would be no point in making a copy when you could just leave us the original. Anyway, quit asking so many questions and stalling. It’s time to send you back in time.”
There once lived a little old man. That’s how these things always start, “there once lived…” That’s why those Ludmilla Petrushevskaya collections all have those titles.
“STOP! You’re doing it again!”
What?
“Last night, around 1:30 AM, you told yourself - as you gave up on even starting a story are churning out a few paragraphs of shit about some alt right guy that you weren’t very confident was, in anyway, accurate and was probably going to be hard to create a story for and, as you went out of your way to say all the ways he had not been radicalized, was probably going to fail to be sufficiently critical of bigotry - that you needed to not do this cute narrator shit. You were going to practice writing as a non-partisan narrator.”
No, that’s not what I said. I said I wasn’t going to take on the views of the character I was writing about. I barely started. How do you know if this little old man knows about the Petrushevskaya English translations?
“That’s what you meant, though, you were going to be a normal narrator. Now, on the second sentence, you start commenting on the story.”
Who the hell are you? Why are you interrupting my story?
“I am you from last night. Or I am you in the present, that’s the only way I can communicate with you currently is if I am also in the present. But I am the part of you that is calling you out on your bullshit.”
But by doing this and interrupting the story, you have gone and made these even more non-normal narrator by essentially creating two narrators - and last night, you (or me) said to cut out the part of the writing where I just waste time and to start writing an actual story right away and your interruption has completely stopped that from happening. I was literally three sentences in and I could have written a great story that had action right from the get go and I would have been a ‘normal’ narrator.
“You were three sentences in and it was clear you were going to do weird narrator opinions and such and ruin the story and, more importantly, you were going to avoid the intention of those instructions from last night which was not so much about writing something decent, but about changing things up because a pattern was forming and these whole ordeal is about getting you some practice so you can be not ashamed of what you are currently writing like you used to be for a bit.”
Man, I don’t need this shit. I was just thinking about how it was Thursday night and tomorrow was Friday - the weekend - and I could finally relax and then I realized that I have to fucking work this entire month because I decided to commit to writing something for every single fucking day for an entire month. And that’s not he attitude to have so soon into this. Especially after how little I managed to bother yesterday, the second day. But I sucked it up and say I should follow through on this commitment and maybe, just maybe, I will get somewhere in life if I start making an effort and don’t be so lazy. And I took the advice from you (or me) from yesterday and didn’t wait until Midnight to start trying to write something. I started at like 10:30 or something. Maybe 10:45. I opened the webpage and then I might have checked Twitter again. And then I start writing my god damn story and you immediately interrupt me and criticize me.
:”Carry on then, but if you actually believe that this level of commitment is sufficient to get anywhere in life, you need your head examined. You are successfully, so far, committing to writing every day, but you are failing to commit to writing rules that you laid out for yourself less than 24 hours ago.”
Shut the fuck up! I’m getting back to my story. No more interruptions from you. If I’m too quirky in the narration so be it, if that’s what it takes to put out words, there are worse things in life. That’s what editing is for. I am-
“Editing? You aren’t editing this shit. You know that! Don’t lie to me (or yourself.)”
Well, that may be true. I am definitely only committing to writing, not editing. But the point is I am getting into the practice of writing everyday. Once I have that done and I am able to manage to put words out, then I can fix whatever I write later - even if I am not going to fix this later. I remember the times that I wouldn’t write for weeks or maybe even months and I would tell myself when I got a spurt of creativity at 11 AM at work that today I was definitely going to write something when I got home and then almost 12 hours later I would be home and had dinner and maybe goofed off for a while and I forced myself to sit down and write and my mind would go completely blank. I had finally gotten myself to open a Word Document or webpage or whatever and I could not think of anything to write because all I wanted to write was just complaining and I knew that was not ‘writing’ - that, at best, was journaling and that was not what I was intending to do. So this writing, however imperfect, is at least ‘creating’ however loosely that term may be being used by myself.
Anyway, leave me alone and let me write my story. Maybe it will turn out good or maybe it will turn out bad. (Have I managed to write all this because I drank a thermos of caffeinated tea that I took home from work at 10? I often drink one when I get home around 7 or maybe 8 and I don’t usually have this level of energy as a result. It is also possible i am managing to write this much because while it is technically two characters arguing, it is pretty much just me journaling - writing large chunks describing what I did last night while writing or how I am now writing sentences about how I drank some tea about an hour ago. Still, words are words. I hope this comes across like Mario Levrero and not self-indulgent although I bet many people would think that Empty Words was self-indulgent so who is the accurate judge? I wish I could write stuff like Halle Butler.)
As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted… (One last intruding thought - and it should be noted this is not the ‘second narrator’ whose words are found in double quotation marks [I hope that is the way to describe those type of quotation marks,] but rather ‘thoughts’ of the main narrator that are not part of the story he is telling - all of these words, whether they are good or not, certainly must make up for cutting things short last night.)
There once was a little old man. (Is that right? Is that what I said before? It was so long ago and it’s so far up on the page. I hope that’s what I said otherwise this is a continuity error and nerds love pointing that stuff out. But I think they mostly point that stuff out in movies, not books. It’s weird that nerds watch movies and don’t read books.) This little old man was a murderer. But that doesn’t mean he was a bad person. You don’t know who he murdered or why he murdered. And those are important factors to take into account before judging someone.
“Alright. Character development is important. Readers need a reason to care about the person they are reading about - hell, you need a reason to care about the person you’re writing about! With that said, your goal, currently, after writing these extremely long introductory sections the last few days - I am including things you were writing, but didn’t finish the day before you started this ‘December’ thing - is to write a story with things happening… so cut out the description of this old man. Put whatever matters in as the story moves along!”
Shut up! Leave me alone!
“Just do it!”
Who are you Phil Knight?
“No, that guy owns sweat shops.”
Yeah, I know. Fuck Nike. Nike and Intel spend massive amounts of money in our local elections and ruin everything.
“I agree, but please start the action.”
Fine. So this little old murderer went to the beach because he needed a vacation. Murdering is hard work.
“Story!”
Jesus Christ! Give me a little leeway. I just wrote one single sentence that wasn’t moving things forward. This thing can’t be completely cold. ‘The old man went to the beach. The old man saw a crab. The crab pinched him. The old man pinched the crab back to death. Crabs are super serious about murder - more so than humans - so they all got together and tracked the old man back to his home and pinched him to death.’ See how boring that was to read?
“Yeah. I see your point.”
So let me just tell my story.
“Okay, but…”
But what?!
“You’re not going to…”
What?!
“It’s just… you aren’t going to now write the story you just explained right then. Like you aren’t going to flesh that out into a big long story about crabs tracking down an old man and murdering him in his home because he killed a crab on vacation… are you?”
Well, I was starting to think about it.
“Goddamnit.”
It’s just, I came up with that on the spot and that’s the nature of these writing exercises or whatever you want to call them. I write without anything planned and see where the story goes and that’s what I did there. I just thought for a split second, ‘okay, he murdered the crab, then what?’
“Yeah, but everyone knows how it goes now because you just spoiled your own story you didn’t even write yet.”
Yeah, I’m kind of sick of writing again. I think this is the longest I wrote so far. 45 solid minutes? I don’t know. I might have wrote longer on the first one. I think the first night and second night, I would get a little bored and reward myself for writing a little bit and go look at other parts of the internet. This was mostly focused so it seems like a lot - plus the line breaks.
“But you wrote even less of a story than yesterday.”
Yeah, but I also wrote the entire story right there. Beginning, middle, end. Vacation. Crab-murder. Murdered by crabs.
“God, I know you think this is cute, but there’s no way everyone else doesn’t think you’re annoying as fuck.”
Well, I wrote something for tonight.
“Well, seriously, follow through - accurately - on some of those nights from last night tomorrow.”
Okay, but don’t interrupt me.
“Fine.”
You know what the weird thing is?
“What?”
I think, maybe ‘cause the tea or maybe because I started writing before midnight - and it’s still not even quite midnight - that I still have the energy and focus to write a little more.
“Then do it. More practice is better.”
Yeah, but when I wrote out the whole story, I did some quick math in my brain and kind of thought how fucking long it was going to take to get all the way through that.
“…”
And also I kind of struggle to write when I know what’s going to happen because it’s not interesting, I just want to get to the end and it seems like it’s taking forever. Finding out as I write is a lot more fun. But you know this because you are me.
He hated women though he refused to admit it. In his mind, he didn’t hate women, he hated “sluts” and “whores” and women who committed miscegenation or rejected him. Or if they just seemed too happy. He didn’t think women shouldn’t be happy, it was simply that he was not happy so why were these women happier than him. He would rather not get into the question of whether or not he believed that he, as a man, deserved some sort of priority over women on being happy because that sounded too explicitly sexist. It was simply that he was entitled to happiness and since he was failing to achieve it, why were these women succeeding? If one were to believe the liberal hysteria, these women had less “privilege” than him so they shouldn’t be happier than him - if they were not treated equally to him. They were the ones saying this, not him.
As for whether or not he hated other races, that was a little bit simpler. “Hate” was a strong word. He’d prefer just not to think about them. Hating them was thinking about them. Out of sight, out of mind. But since they weren’t out of sight, the least they could do is stop stealing white women from him. While he didn’t believe that people of other races had less “privilege” like the liberals said, he did believe that they were missing something. It wasn’t explicitly obvious, but he knew that, hierarchically-speaking, he was above them. And that is why it infuriated him that women were dating these men instead of him. And receiving some false sense of happiness from being in a relationship with inferior men.
He was not, and this is important, one of those crazy racists on the internet. He wasn’t on Reddit discussing these ideas. He wasn’t harassing people on Twitter. He certainly wasn’t on Stormfront or anything like that. People occasionally would try to mock him for being a fan of Ben Shapiro or some other “alt right” YouTube star and while he’d seen some videos by a few of them, he was proud to say he came to these conclusions entirely by himself. People, when he’d say something that hinted at his views, would have the idea in their head that he’d been “converted” or “radicalized” by online political commentators, but that was not the case. He may not have always had these exact opinions, but as far back as he could remember, he had felt upset at girls ignoring him for his non-white classmates.
The people who used to be blissfully unaware of the underlying implications of their interactions through out the day, who believed in all that happy-go-lucky color-blind garbage, and then became “redpilled” by some stranger on the internet were, frankly, dweebs. If his hand was forced, he’d admit it was a net positive to have more people believing what he believed - or something similar - but he also didn’t trust them to be “true believers.” It was a flavor of the week for many of them. Soon they’d be focused on some other thing while the white population shrank as a result of women throwing themselves at the wrong men. He would still care when Jordan Peterson was either too old to be “cool” anymore or maybe just dead because he was already pretty old.
NOTE TO SELF: start writing a little earlier instead of at midnight, right after you think of how nice it would be to go to bed “early”. On a more serious note, next writing: write something third person, but not like this where it’s all subjective and skews toward the character’s point of view. Also, try to hit the ground running on a story on one of the next few of these. It’s obviously easy to bullshit and write words in the way that you have been, but nothing happens and then you get sick of writing and want to wrap it up when there has been no action. Also maybe try writing a character you like so you don’t want to just kill them to end it. It’s a lot, but things to think about as you write 29 more of these. This is definitely not going to be a short story every night it looks like. That would be ideal. But it can be like that Kharms advice goes: write something every day even if it’s to write down that you wrote nothing or however it goes. Good habit to build in the last month of the year so then I can do New Year’s resolution bullshit about writing every day. And now look at how many words I wasted on this note to myself that I could have focused on getting a little more CREATIVE writing down for the night. Oh well. Time management some day hopefully.
Some people believe I am depressed just because I don’t think anything good will ever happen and can’t recall anything good ever happening in the past, but they aren’t psychologists so their opinion is just as informed as mine and I don’t think I’m depressed. Depression is something that happens to others - like getting murdered. I am not depressed and I am not murdered. I don’t think I’ll ever be murdered. A depressed person would probably assume the worst and think they are going to be murdered. I think there is a non-zero chance that I will get hit by a car with the way people drive - with their cell phones out because they just have to text someone something right at that moment (no idea why that scenario didn’t come up nearly as frequently back before texting and cell phones existed) - and it’s possible that person will commit a hit and run. But I don’t think the person will intentionally try to hit me with their car and I’m not positive if I will die - I would need to research it because I really don’t know much about the impact of a car running into a human body. That would be murder, killing me with their car intentionally. And I don’t think that will happen to me because I am not depressed.
Still, people don’t like being around me much because I complain all the time. Some people comment on the weather or say some other inane bullshit to fill the silence. Saying some empty words seems worse to me that saying something I truly believe like people need to not walk side by side and take up the entire sidewalk especially if they’re slow. Sorry if you don’t want to be reminded that people do that because they are inconsiderate, but I genuinely believe that and I don’t think you can say the same about “looks like it might rain later.” And that’s how I found myself with so much free time to do whatever I pleased. That’s another thing I hate: people ask to spend time with you and then you suggest things to do and they don’t want to do any of those things and then their presence is just an inconvenience. It isn’t even that you can’t do the things you want to do, you can’t do anything because they don’t want to do any of the ideas you suggest and somebody has to come up with something.
So anyway, I was walking down Killingsworth, looking in store windows. Gentrification was changing the streets sometimes I would think I took a wrong turn because I didn’t recognize anything around me. It’s one thing for a store to shut down and another one to move in, but the fucking buildings get wiped away and there’s some shiny new one all of a sudden. It’s weird because it does kind of look “nice” in a clean way, but it also looks like “shit” in the way that a lot of rich people have no taste - they just want expensive things because they are told the value and the things, like the apartment buildings they move into, are actually hideous and weird looking. But this one building, it looked pretty gross and recently built, but the sign outside said the place was called “Handjob” and I had to see what was going on in it. That’s the new thing - a provocative name. You kick all the Black people out of a neighborhood and then you come in and open a business called “Tubgirl” or “The Reach-around Tavern” or something. But obviously it worked on me since I had to see what the handjob store was all about. I knew it wasn’t going to be like a brothel or something. It’s always done with a wink. It’s kind of weird because they try to be incredibly family-friendly. Like they don’t know what the name of their store means. They open some scented candle store and call it like “Two in the Pink and One in the Back Door” and then act like it’s just “zany” and not something that would have been censored on a hit single when it played on the radio back in the early 2000s. Anyway, I went into the Handjob store to see what they were selling and I guess I was hoping it was a Spencer’s Gifts type of thing where there is stuff to laugh at inside while the minimum wage employee glares at you because it’s obvious you aren’t going to buy anything. But the second I went through the door, it was obviously not a real store. It was empty. For a second my brain tried to rationalize it and I thought “well, I have never seen this store before maybe they’re still moving in” but then I realized that there’s no rule to open their store immediately. The store can take their time actually being set up before beginning business. So they wouldn’t just be open for business while they wait for the stock of whatever they sell to arrive. But it wasn’t just that there was nothing to buy in it, there was nothing. There wasn’t a register or anything. I started thinking about how I couldn’t even think of what a store normally has in it. I just take it for granted that I go into a store and it is normal. Sometimes there are clothing racks or shelfs, but different stores have different things and this place was a ghost town. There was a guy who I thought was an employee. But nothing else.
So I asked this guy what the heck the “Handjob” sold because I have been trying to curse a little bit less. I think people might put up with my negativity if I didn’t swear all the time. And the man who is built like a bouncer says “wishes.” He doesn’t even do the standard friendly customer-service type of “thank you for coming into our store” type of deal. I wonder if he would have done that “may I help you?” if I had spent a bit just looking around the nothingness. Obviously “can I help you?” is fake nice, it’s a way to tell you that they think you are going to steal from them so get something and get the fuck out. But I don’t think he would have even done that fake niceness. He just said the one word “wishes.” And before I can think to ask “why is a store that sells wishes called ‘Handjob’?” or even “what do you mean?” or possibly “if it is possible to actually sell someone a wish, is that even ethical?” it somehow slips out of my lips: “how much?”
That is how I came to give a big man in an empty store called “Handjob” $50. I really can’t explain how he convinced me to give him that much money for what sounded like a scam. But he was selling wishes so maybe he was a wizard. He didn’t look like a wizard, but it’s possible our depictions of wizards in the media are inaccurate though it is also possible wizards do not exist. He could have been a hypnotist although that wouldn’t explain why he was working retail - unless it was his store although if he was a decent hypnotist, he would have hypnotized some poor schmuck into working for him for free. But maybe he was an ethical hypnotist who didn’t want to have a slave so he just came in to his wish-selling store and worked retail knowing he was owner even if nobody else knew he was the owner so he was treated poorly as all retail workers are. Or maybe he told other people he was the owner, but didn’t tell me. If he did that, I am a little offended he kept it from me. But maybe he told people when they started mistreating him so the fact I don’t know if he is the owner is because I was so cordial. Anyway, without $50 and, theoretically, with a wish of some sort, I left the store.
With so many unanswered questions filling my head and too much shame to re-enter a store I just exited to ask them, I headed to cross the street and a car came out of absolutely nowhere and hit me. Hard. As I flew through the air, I could instantly tell that a bone in my leg was broken. I wasn’t sure what else was. And while I knew what a broken bone felt like, I didn’t know what - for instance - a punctured lung might feel like. I had no idea what sort of damage was done to my body by that car hitting me. And as my body headed back down to earth, I thought “man, I wish I had researched about what an automobile hitting a human body does instead of putting it off for another day like everything else in my life” and suddenly my brain was filled with so many statistics and footage of people being hit by cars and anecdotal stories people wrote on Reddit about being hit by a car or seeing someone get hit by a car that I was absolutely overwhelmed, I couldn’t even process all of this new information flooding my brain. It was knocking all the questions about the “Handjob” store out of my head because there simply was not enough room for all of this at once - at least not at the forefront. And as I was beginning to piece some of this research together, I died. It turns out that getting hit super hard by a car is really bad for a human body and it can kill a person.