Open Your Eyes. Start the Adventure!

The dream was strange. He was lying in bed with a sensation almost like he was floating, but could still feel his weight on the mattress. It didn’t feel the same though. Lighter maybe? He imagined that’s what sleeping on the moon would feel like. He wiggled his toes happily.

Little non-existent needles poked into his skin. It didn’t hurt, only tickled, and gave his fingers and toes the feeling of being mildly shocked. It felt warm, tingly, and fuzzy. It felt like being tucked in as a kid. The feeling slowly crept into his arms and feet, and further up and into his body. After an excruciatingly blissful few moments, the needles and fuzz embraced him. He vibrated in place on his bed and wiggled his toes some more. The lamp next to his bed shut off and the medical equipment that he didn’t even notice in his room stopped their incessant beeping. Weren’t those supposed to mean something to him? Something important? No, that was when he was awake. He didn’t need them now, he was dreaming.

The lamp was out but there was a glow in the room. Was the sun coming up already? No, the window was as dark as ever. It was night. He was sleeping. And dreaming apparently. He rolled his head around trying to find the source of light, a pale bluish glow that seemed to radiate from the walls themselves. Slowly he realized it was him; a glowing ball of energy on the bed tingling his entire being. He raised his hand and it was radiant like a full moon beaming onto freshly fallen snow. In December, it was obviously December snow.

It all faded into another deeper sleep and there was nothing.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. It was his heartbeat saying it in his chest. He had heard it his entire life but never noticed it before. It almost sounded like a woman’s voice if you listened hard enough. There was nothing to do but to listen, so he listened. The voice became clearer: Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! The voice was gentle, more asking him if he’d like to wake up, coaxing him to open his eyes, than being a strict order. She said, “Don’t you want to wake up? You’re ready to do this. You don’t think you are, but you are. Open your eyes. Start the adventure!”

After an eternity of nothing that passed in an instant he opened his eyes. 

There was still nothing. The room was black and his eyes saw nothing. He blinked a few times to ensure his eyes were actually opened and they were. He sat up, or tried to sit up, but all there was was a sensation of movement like he was floating in a pool. He moved his head to the left and right but it only moved his consciousness around. He went to move his arms and there was nothing to move. He felt around for his body but not having arms made this a pointless gesture.

He lowered his consciousness down a foot or two and there was no bed. He shot forward ten feet and there was no wall to stop him. He traveled further and no matter where he went there was nothing.

There was nothing but he never felt alone. All around him were people — things, spirits, entities — that were just like him. In the silent and still nothingness around him he made friends with everyone. One Black Thing smiled and laughed at him as if it told a joke, or if he was the joke, and then he laughed along with it. A vibration rang out amongst all of them: You’re the joke! And I’m the joke too! And what a funny joke it all is!

Love, passion, humor, wisdom, yearning, and longing, every possible mix and matched mismatched emotion was around him. He was nothing but he was nothing with all the other nothings around him and he was whole. He was fine. It all made sense. What made sense, he didn’t know, but it made sense. He was there amongst all the things he loved.

WAKE UP!

This time the sound was an alarm clock mixed with angry yelling. “Wake up! You need to get your ass ready for school! It’s already 7:15 and you’re going to miss the damn bus again! And I’m not being late to work again because you woke up late!”

She opened her eyes, rubbed them, and smashed a button on the alarm clock. It was 7:15 — 7:16 now — and it was going to be a rough morning indeed. A flood of memories came back to her in the early morning sun. She had a paper to turn in for social studies. And they were going to learn fractions in math soon. Ugh, all her friends were scared of fractions. And maybe she’d play with that one cute boy during recess if only she could get the courage to do so. Maybe that could wait until tomorrow though…

As she sat up something clicked in her brain. It was only a flash — something she had forgotten about, something really important — but it made her think. Did she forget one of her homework assignments yesterday? Did she leave her art supplies strewn about the living room? Did she forget to do the dishes? Feed her pet doggie? No, it wasn’t any of those but, dang it, she just couldn’t put her finger on what was tickling her memories.

Before she stood up she wiggled her toes and giggled.

Urban Exploration (Part One)

The old factory sat downtown against the river clustered amongst the other abandoned buildings. They didn’t mean anything anymore, relics of an economy long forgotten but whose ghost still remains in America. Everyone in town knew of them but not directly. In memory they only appear as vague and ghostly shapes around the peripheral of actual memories. Countless wedding pictures and social media posts show these ghostly, grim structures hiding in plain sight across the river, but nobody takes notice.

The factory wasn’t special — just one of many — but it was the one we scouted out one weekend night and it became special to us. It was perfect as far as abandoned factories go, tucked away from the main streets, dark and secluded with the street lamps far away. As we wheeled to the side of the building we noticed that the windows, while boarded up nearest to the ground and shattered higher up, were not that high. We’d just have to find a way to get up to them. Riding around to the opposite side of the building we discovered a tree growing, one large branch probing directly into the building, with the single plywood sheet smashed into the interior. The tree was leaning towards the opening almost as if it knew we wanted a way in.

She climbed up the trunk, carefully grabbing the few branches to access the window while I watched our bikes. No one was around so I took a drink of our mutual vodka and waited for her report.

“It’s fine,” she said as she clicked on her flashlight and peered through the smashed window. “It leads to a small room and there’s a table right under the branch.”

“Very cool,” I said.

“Are we doing this now?” She asked.

The alcohol was coursing through both of our veins, I could feel the pull of the adventure, but we could wait. And we should’ve waited. This evening was meant to be an aimless drunken bike ride and only in the midst of the factories had we talked about exploring one. We were just poking around, seeing what could be accessed, and had lucked out; we actually found one to plunder. There’d be other days to explore the abandoned corpse, there was no rush, and next time we could prepare.

“Maybe we should come back next weekend. We could bring some supplies or something.”

“Come on, chicken shit. What ‘supplies’ do we need anyways? We have our phones for lights, and climb up here and give me the vodka. Let’s do this!“

She had a point. Maybe I was only being my hesitant self? Another way to pass up the adventure and succumb to my anxiety; adventures are always in the future for me. I took another drink and climbed up after her.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust from the dim light of downtown to the utter darkness inside the factory. I turned my phone on and shone the light inside. My eyes followed the bright circle of light as it darted around the room. There was a table a few feet below the window strewn with old papers and file folders. The back of my mind vaguely noted that none of these papers were printed. Handwritten scrawl all over the pages, numbers and codes that ceased to have meaning to anyone alive except some old retiree living somewhere in the world.

We both climbed down onto the table and then to the floor. Filing cabinets lined one wall while desks took up the rest. All useful machines, typewriters, phones, and whatever else had been in the room had been removed. Papers covered the floor and a few broken lamps layed sideways with their bulbs smashed and glass glittering in the pale light.

An old wooden door led to a hallway that ran in both directions. Across from us was another “office room” (at least this is what we called it). This room was the same as the last, littered with the same cryptic papers and trash, although the far wall was all dusty glass. We walked up and peered into the blackness of the factory floor. Some large machines remained, old, decrepit and long being useful to anyone. Our lights didn’t shine far and we didn’t know what the rest of the floor contained, shrouded in a darkness that the little ambient light from the few holes in the roofs couldn’t dispel.

We walked down the hallway and entered another room along the outer wall like the one that led us inside. This room wasn’t totally dark. A solitary oil lamp sat on the floor. We both looked at each other and crawled our lights around the room. There was a pile of blankets a few feet from the lamp in a corner of the room. It looked like another heap of junk, except that it moved.

We gasped and stared at each other in the dim reflected light from our lights. Eyeing the pile closer we noticed there was a shaggy head of hair peeking up under the covers. The bum coughed, rolled over, and tucked himself into his nest, apparently still fast asleep. Our senses came back to us after this initial shock. We noticed the pipe of empty cans and bottles of beer and alcohol as well as a few cans of food. Ravioli. Beans. Soup. Old bread and fast-food bags also littered around the nest.

We nodded to each other and silently left the room, retreating back to the windowed office room.

“That scared the shit out of me. I didn’t expect anyone to actually be here.” She said.

“I about pissed my pants. But it is an old factory. There’s probably homeless people all over the place.” I said. “Should we leave? I think we should leave.”

“No. There’s this whole building to explore, we can’t leave now. He’s sleeping anyways and didn’t notice us so we’re fine. We’ll just be very quiet, okay?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Gimme the vodka; stop hogging it.”

I pulled the bottle out and we took drinks from it.

“Well, you ready?” She asked.

“Sure. Let’s see what…”

Footsteps on the floor above us and we froze. It didn’t sound like a single person either, maybe two or three. They didn’t seem like they were scared of making noise either, their footsteps being confidently loud and booming in the silent stillness of the building.

“How about now? Are you ready to get the hell out of here?” I asked.

“Let’s wait. Maybe they’ll…”

The footsteps moved across the ceiling above us and down a flight of stairs in the distance. The sounds echoed from the end of the hallway looming in the distance.

We shut our lights off and hid up against the wall next to the doorway. If anyone looked in our room maybe they’d miss us?

Her courage was greater than mine. She peered around and out of the doorway. There were three people, one carrying an oil lamp and the other two had, well what did they have? She couldn’t clearly see.

They stopped at the room with the bum, and a voice spoke up. “Will he work?”

“Yes,” another voice replied.

“Do you think he’ll fight?”

“No. He’s passed out drunk. Get him.”

The figures walked into the room and we heard rustling and grunting. A raspy voice seemed to be mumbling and questioning something and was silenced by the sound of fist against flesh. There was more mumbling and grunting, this time with an edge of pain to it.

“Good. Get him upstairs.”

The figures helped the bum limp his way along the hallway with something held to his neck. It could only be a knife. The footsteps faded into the silence of the building, into the silence of the night, and once again transformed into those threatening steps on the ceiling above us.

“We’re leaving now, right? Let’s get out of here. Fuck all of this.” I said. “Unless you’re still bold and courageous for some reason.” I was joking; I wanted to leave.

She grabbed the bottle out of my pocket and took a drink bigger than I’d seen her do thus far. “Let’s check it out. Why not? He’s in trouble, it’s obvious, and maybe we can help him.”

“What kinda trouble do you think he’s in? They can’t rob him, he has nothing, so…?”

“Come on. Let’s go.” I followed sheepishly as she led the way through the darkness towards the stairway.

The Restaurant

(This is an old story I’d written maybe five or six years ago. I figured I’d post it and maybe that’d get me motivated to actually write some new stuff?)

“Well.” I took a sip of my beer. It was a Stella; this place always has Stella on special. It was a special so frequently I assumed it was because they couldn’t sell any. To me it seemed more like a permanent clearance sale than a proper ‘special’. Either way, Stella is classier than Bud Light (or is it Bud Lite?), so let it be a perpetual special – I didn’t mind saving a few dollars. I took another sip.

“It’s something new and something I don’t understand yet.” My friend Jeff looked around while he thought. We were at our typical hangout where once a month, more or less, we go out for food and drinks. It was a typical restaurant with the typical fare of burgers, steak, and chicken dishes, usually visited by families, couples, or friends/groups celebrating events that aren’t worth celebrating. Jeff and I were a couple of guys sorting things out, not like a couple on a date with their trivial matters or people “celebrating” some mundane event. Nevermind that our “sorting things out” never actually sorted anything out.

“You’re good at all sorts of things.” Jeff said. “Why would you decide to write?”

“It’s new and artistic.”

“You’re a good artist already. You used to draw, and you can write decent music. You could do those instead of trying to write can’t you? Build on your current skills rather than learn new ones.” Jeff is endlessly curious. Not so much curious about new, unknown things, but curious about the task at hand, the current pressing matter. He won’t go out of his way to learn about some topic on the news that he doesn’t understand, but if someone close to him brings up a topic, he analyzes it like a detective would analyze a case.

“I don’t know man. Writing seems…more mysterious – less dictated by formula, more creative in a way. I mean art, such as painting has tons of mystery to it, but telling stories, or fiction, with just words, seems crazy. That it’s so mysterious makes it even more interesting to me. But you know what Jeff? I have no fucking clue what I should write about. Like how do you just sit down and write a fucking story?”

Jeff thought about this but didn’t have to think long. Music was his life, it was his art, and putting writing and music together was a natural marriage; songs tell stories too. I knew where his line of thought would take him.

“Well, don’t you just write about what you know? That is what I usually read in all the musical biographies. They write about what they know. You know Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” right?”

He knew that I was aware of the song. I gave a quick affirmative nod. It is one of the best songs ever written.

“That is a classic song, and it’s more or less a narrative about his bar playing days. He wrote about what he knew and it was a hit.”

“Well ok, but what the fuck do I know?” I laughed. “I lead a boring life, I have a girlfriend, I work, I smoke weed, hell even sometimes I lift weights at the gym. I’m not complaining about anything, ya know I’m happy, but my life isn’t exactly story material. Maybe I should write about waking up, doing the same thing everyday and then…going to work? Fucking that would be a wonderful book, huh? I could write about being stoned and confused by music lyrics but that’s been done millions of times.” I took an aggressive drink of my beer and shook my head. “It’d be the most boring damn book ever. If anything I’d write a book about nothing, because life is pretty much nothing to write about.”

Jeff laughed and said, “A book about nothing? That’s what Seinfeld was. Well, not a book but a TV show about nothing.”

Dammit, Jeff, such a sharp person. In trying to go on about life not having anything to really write about, being about nothing, he brings up one of the best (if not THE best) show ever created. I dropped the point before he had to prove me wrong.

“Yeah, Seinfeld was a show about nothing. And somehow they made it good.”

Taking a drink of his margarita (yes, margarita), Jeff jumped right into his analysis. “Seinfeld was good because it was about nothing. I mean most people, including myself, feel life is nothing. At least partly. But Seinfeld took these nothing moments that we all know and understand and made it relatable and funny.”

“And without a strict plot too, right?” I added, trying to play an active role in the conversation. I always assumed a story would need some form of structure and a story without a plot seemed like a terrible idea.

“Well,” he paused and plotted out what he was about to say, “the show did have a plot in each episode but no real plot tying the shows together. They had their separate jobs that we constant in a season, but outside of that, you’re correct, there was no plot.”

I sighed. “But it was good. Now I can’t do the same damn thing, even with a story. It’d be a blatant ripoff.”

“Thats where you need to put your own flavor in.” Jeff instructed me.

I drank some more beer, finishing my glass and setting it on the edge of the table so the waitress knew I wanted another. She quickly and silently brought me another drink without me even being aware of it. My last beer was number two, a 20 ounce glass, so really three and a third cans of beer. Cans are the definitive measurement of beer consumption and 40 ounces equaling 3.33333 beers had been established a long time previous. I was feeling good.

We both sat there thinking of our conversation and where it should lead next. I thought of writing what I know (being typical everyday stuff) and Seinfeld’s masterpiece in turning the trivial into something special. Every artform I could think of built itself on its creator’s personal knowledge. Chekhov was a doctor; anyone could tell this by his stories. C.S. Lewis was a passionate Christian and is why Aslan was basically Jesus, Orwell had some career in analyzing politics or something and it was obvious that he hated communism, Twain knew of the river and slavery, Vonnegut was in Dresden and most likely abducted by aliens…all of these are evident upon reading their works. I found one exception, one of many it seemed.

“Ok. You say they write about what they know, right?” I set up the statement for Jeff to agree too, so I could present a counterexample. A quick flash of Socrates standing in a robe flashed in my mind.

“Yeah.”

“What about…uh…the dude who wrote Lord of the Rings? What the fuck was his name? Tole-key-an? Tole-i-kan? Something like that. I mean did he know trolls, kings, dwarves, and elves? It looks like he just pulled Middle Earth right out of his ass.”

“I seen the movies when they came out and haven’t seen them since.” That had to have been quite some time ago, my drunken self concluded. It was too hard to anchor the movies and their releases to a year, especially since I’ve watched them many times since. “I’m guessing he just used his imagination and created something new. And I bet if you dug deep enough into his stuff you’d find something relatable to what his interests were, or points he was trying to get at,” Jeff finally concluded.

He had a point. I bet if I reread his stuff again I could find something that brought the story back to his own life in someway. I nodded. “Yeah…yeah, that is a good point.” Maybe I would do that sometime soon. Too bad the book takes forever to read.

I thought for a moment and took a drink. Jeff pretty much escaped the point I was trying to prove. My drunken mind moved on quickly as if not wanting to dwell in silence for very long.

“You know what else would get me? Ok, I just read The Hunger Games, you haven’t read them or seen the movies have you?”

“Nope.”

“Well it’s a trilogy, and it covers, like, obviously three separate stories but they all tie together, like a story arc I guess. But if I wrote the books I wouldn’t know where to end the thing at. Life doesn’t really end. Katniss, she’s the hero person, she doesn’t just ‘live happily ever after’ after the end of the book. Shit in Panem – uhhh, the setting of the story – sorry Jeff, will just keep going. It’s not like shit happens to her and then she’s done. But the books are done. They finish, because they have to end. Where do you put a book’s ending when nothing really ends? I’d end up ending the ‘trilogy’ with about 20 books where the last five she just gets old, gets Alzheimer’s or some other incurable disease and dies not remembering a thing. And her grandkids hate her for being bad at technology or some other reason.”

Jeff laughed, obvious taken by surprise at my alcohol-fueled rant. He quickly recovered for his chuckle and regained his words. “I guess it’s the same as any other forms of art. You write a song and it has to end somewhere. Personally, I would end it after the main story is over. It’s obvious and exhausting when a story just keeps going on and on and just drags. I actually think it’s rather obvious when a story is supposed to end.” Jeff seemed to be losing interest in my writing curiosities while I found the topic even more fascinating the further we talked and with the more I drank.

One example jumped into my mind from high school. It was one of the two or three books I remember from way back then: the mandatory books we had to read. “Like Huckleberry Finn? Mark Twain didn’t know how to end it so it was just Huck and Tom and their slave buddy – Jim? – hanging out in a shack for months or something. Wasn’t that how it went? At least that’s what I remember. But like let’s say I write a story about us in this restaurant, where and how would it end?”

“That would be a boring story.” Jeff chuckled and took a drink of his girly drink. Damn right it would be a boring story, but what happened to the ‘write about what you know’ idea? I know us drinking and talking about random stuff; couldn’t that make a story?

“But really how would it end?” I laughed, joking around with him although being a bit more serious with my question. I knew it would take a long time to find a halfway decent ending and wanted to see what terrible ending he would throw out with some prompting.

“I have no idea, maybe you could make some people break in to rob this place…” Jeff suggested. I smiled, suppressing a laugh as my mouth was full of beer. Jeff was off to a hilarious start and my imagination quickly gave visuals to his words. I imagined the two of us with Tommy guns, wearing hats like the mobsters wore in the 30s, and pumping the walls of the restaurant with lead as we fended off the never ending army of robbers. Luckily I was able to swallow my beer halfway through my thought. “…and we save everyone. We become heroes and…”

“Is there anything else I can get for you guys today?” The waitress, as usual, did a wonderful job at sneaking up on us. Me and Jeff looked at each other, I tallied up my beers, and feeling satisfied gave a slight shake of my head. Jeff also felt the same; we were here quite a while and it was time to move on with our day. 

“Umm, nope. We should be good.” Jeff said. I usually stayed quiet and let him do all of the official talking.

“Well here’s your check guys. There’s no rush and you let me know if you need anything else, okay?” Our waitress said as she left the check and walked off. It’s amusing and pathetic to see a waitress blatantly being kind, sweet, and even flirting simply to earn a tip. It’s about as subtle as a good analogy about being subtle. Luckily, this girl today seemed genuinely kind to us with no ulterior-tips motives. These are the people that get the best tips.

I sighed. Our tasty food, intoxicating drinks, and good conversation were obviously over. I had about half a beer left and drank it down in a few large gulps. “I’ll get the check.” I figured I’d be nice and treat him this time.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, you can buy next time if you want.” I dropped a 50 dollar bill on the table giving our waitress around a 25% tip. I told myself, knowing it’s a false hope, that if I tipped like this I could change the world for the better.

“Alright. I’ll get you next time.” Me and Jeff put on our jackets. “Hey, about an ending to a restaurant story, we could just put on our jackets and leave.” He laughed, obviously joking with me. “Nah, I’m sure you’d come up with a better ending than that.”

“I sure hope so, that one would be awful. Sorry buddy. Well,” I sighed again, vaguely aware how stiff my legs were and how full my belly was. “Let’s go.”

We stood up and walked out of the restaurant.

Fear and Bagholding on Robinhood: The Wave of GameStop

Note: Another Reddit shitpost. Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘wave speech’ from the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I changed a bunch of the text to fit the narrative from the whole GameStop fiasco from January 2021. The original text has that feeling of failing on a large goal, a dream for a better world, that you almost did something to affect history which actually seemed fitting with how trading forums, including r/wallstreetbets seemed to view GameStop’s meteoric rise, and crash, within a week.

All poetics and retrospection aside, it’s meant to be a joke.

Strange memories on this nervous night on Robinhood. Two weeks later? Three? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Wall Street Bets in the middle of January was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of loss porn or memes or 💎 ✋or 🚀 can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and YOLOing in that corner of your wife’s boyfriend’s basement. Whatever it meant…

Tendies are hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “tendies” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of all the autists and retards comes to a head in a long fine short squeeze, for memes that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty threads—or very early mornings shitposts—when I checked WSB half-crazy and, instead of cashing out, aimed my big $1650 Robinhood account towards GameStop at $325 per share, wearing cummed-stained shorts and a ramen-stained shirt…chucking rent money into AMC at $16 per share, not quite sure what my exit strategy was (always stalling at the sell button, too autistic to take profits while I fumbled for more YOLO money)…but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I traded I would come to a place where people were just as retarded and 💎 ✋ed as I was: No doubt at all about that…

There was madness in any stonk, at any hour. If not across GME, then in AMC or BB or NOK…You could strike tendies anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Boomers and Hedge Funds. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our autism would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of GameStop, a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than a week later, you can find a steep chart on Robinhood and scroll back, and with the right kind of autism you can almost see the high-water price—that place at $500 per share where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The Map Boy: A Tale of Forbidden Love

Note: A bit of backstory is required here. I haven’t written anything in a long time and this would appear to be a totally random mess of shit to just plop up here. So let me explain...

Over the four days of the election, a bunch of us were addicted to the r/politics election threads on Reddit, and these became rather unhinged into the late hours of the morning. You know, a bunch of drunken and anxiety-ridden redditors binge-watching CNN waiting for any election update we could find. In this horrendous atmosphere some strange things started happening. The entire sub became thirsty over any news reporter that took up working the late-night hours of the election. People started to become bored and created their own wild narratives about the presenters. The most noteworthy is the ‘saga’ between Map Boy (Phil Mattingly) and Chris Cuomo. Between these two professional newscasters reddit started to see ‘sexual tension,’ as if Cuomo and Map Boy had some urge to be together and make passionate love during the 2020 election. This turned into a full-fledged meme and Map Boy seemed to be a temporary celebrity.

So drunk on Friday I decided to actually write some bullshit fanfic about Chris Cuomo and Map Boy. I wrote two ‘chapters’ totally out of no where and I found them hilarious enough to post. Yes, they’re stories, yes, I’d written them, but obviously there isn’t much ‘deep artistic inspiration’ going on here. Enjoy!

Part One

Chris Cuomo had been working at CNN for a long time. Taking part in the grind, reporting stories he didn’t care that much about but faking interest at whatever he was tasked with. It was a decent job with decent pay, but somehow seemed to lack the passion of what he thought reporting would be like.

And then the shitshow 2020 election happened.

There he was one day…The Map Boy. He didn’t know his name — some random young hunk that had to take over after John King had to go to bed in the early morning hours of November 4 — but something about him intrigued him. He couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. Map Boy’s way of shyly not holding eye contact with him, or maybe his attempt at dominance while still cowering in fear around Cuomo, a fake display of masculinity that Map Boy just couldn’t hold to. Chris found it strangely appealing.

Maybe this was the passion that Cuomo was missing in his job and in his life. But yet, here he was right here in front of him playing the Magic Wall like a classical instrument of old. A young master of his domain, and Cuomo wanted to learn more about Map Boy even if he didn’t understand why.

Cuomo knew his wife wouldn’t understand his blossoming feelings. The mystery — why do I feel this way? — and the intrigue of it all. He wasn’t sure what Map Boy stood for, but it was something magical and something that he had yearned for his entire life…

Part Two

And one day, in the wee hours of November 7 (not that anyone knew what day it was by this time), something happened.

It was something small, one of those tiny and insignificant moments in life that seems to speak to the beauty and depth of it all, something so small that Cuomo didn’t realize it at the time and only had importance in retrospect.

“This, right here,” Map Boy said fingering his magical wall delicately, “Is Delaware County. We’re expecting….” and Cuomo drifted off in a daze. Those fingers. His artisanal skill mesmerized him.

But there was a problem. Map Boy was fingering the wrong county, caressing Allegheny County instead. It was an honest mistake, both of them being delirious from the endless sleep-deprived hours reporting on the endless election.

Cuomo, being the dominant one of the team, pointed this out.

“Map Boy, I think you’re pointing to Allegheny County, not Delaware County.”

Map Boy glanced at him and instantly broke eye contact. “No. This is…this is Delaware County, Chris.” He fingered the map seductively again.

“No, Map Boy, Delaware County is over here.” Cuomo reached across the Magic Wall, moving ever closer to Delaware County and Map Boy himself his hands quivering from lack of sleep, caffeine, or anxiety;  he didn’t know why he was shaking. Map Boy, drained of sleep, reflexively moved his hand downward to shoo the unwelcomed visitor away from his Magic Wall. And then to Cuomo’s surprise, as they touched skin, a lightning bolt landed in his brain. In his heart. In his whole body; they touched for a fragment of a second. Time stopped. It was just him and Map Boy. Together in the world. Nothing mattered anymore and any worries about counties or ballot totals vanished instantly.

Map Boy and him locked eyes, only for an infinite split-second, and moved their hands apart. It was the first move of an avalanche, nothing that either of them could stop or control, but it was in motion. And nothing could stop it…

Therapy

“So what brings you in today? What’s going on?” She smiles knowingly behind her glasses. A plus six-foot-tall lady who towers over me while walking or standing. Luckily sitting down we are closer to peers, but not really. Her: The Help, The Knowledge, The Cure. And me? Utterly Fucked Up; a flawed and defective human unable to function at a basic level in life.

“Well,” I sit back and think. I pick at my fingers nervously. I shake in my usual way although a bit more driven by anxiety over the situation. “Well, I think…I think I struggle with depression.” She raises her eyebrows and nods, allowing me to continue on. “I hate my life. Something is wrong. Something I’m not consciously aware of. Others seem more…functional than I am? If that makes sense. Everyone seems okay with life and…I’m not.” I shrug and smile the smile that I always wear when talking about serious topics; a mask which I happily wear to drive away the inevitable pressing questions. If anything life is a joke and you need to be able to laugh about it.

And was I even that dysfunctional? I didn’t feel depressed or suicidal at the time. No, I had taken the first important steps to getting help and that meant I was probably not depressed at all, right? Not dysfunctional. I felt fine at the time; the depression was false. It was a lie. I was looking for attention, something like the school shooter’s desperate attempt at asking for help, the bridge jumper’s way of screaming to be noticed, but if I made the effort to find help didn’t that imply that I was functioning at a normal level? Was I a fraud even coming here and talking to her?

Something about the last two months stirred in my mind. The haze, the blur of it all. Sitting in the yard drunk off of ten beers and crying didn’t seem right — normal people didn’t do this (or did they?) — but everyone was unique, right? Maybe it was normal. Or that I was normal and everyone else was fucked up. And was debating jumping off a bridge in the early morning hours after work normal? Probably not. Something in the past few months caused me to make the desperate phone call for help, even being as socially awkward as anyone could be. The phone call itself was the sign that I needed help. I couldn’t even call the internet company to negotiate a lower monthly bill, so would I really call a number hungover and jittery and tell them I suffer from depression and that I Wanted to Talk to Someone? No, I probably wouldn’t. But I did, and this was a sign. A symptom of desperation. Maybe I did need help after all.

She peered at me through the glasses daring me to go on; there was always more to the story and everyone was hesitant at first. Please tell your story Defective Human and I’ll listen; it’s what you’re paying me for, her eyes said.

As if acknowledging her silent cues I said, “Okay, fine. I, uh, I think I hate myself. I hate everything I am. I know I’m supposed to love myself and I totally agree with it in theory…but I don’t. I don’t like me. I don’t want to be me. Sometimes I want to scratch my skin off and escape to another body — the same ugly bastard greets me in the mirror every morning — because I just can’t take it anymore. I overthink everything. Everyone hates me: at least I think so. I’m pretty sure of it actually. And I have nothing to offer the world. I don’t have any gifts — nothing that makes me unique or special — and I hate myself.” I put another fragile smile on my face and shrugged. It’s all a joke, everything is a joke. Maybe I got that from my dad.

She cleared her throat and looked at me from the clipboard she was violently scribbling notes on. I imagined what it said: Total nutcase, crazy, lack of self-esteem, possible alcoholic, severe past family issues, bipolar like no one else before, anxiety, fear of social rejection, McDonald’s after work? Maybe. But no; Taco Bell sounds much better!

She smiled knowingly over the glasses again and finally said something. “If you could take a stab at it, why do you think you feel this way? What specifically are you unhappy with in your life?”

I looked down at my shaking hands and thought for a moment. I looked out of the window at my parked car. I watched the clouds creep across the sky. I watched an old man hobble to his car. I wondered what he was suffering from. Was he too old to be a Vietnam veteran? PTSD? Scarred from the war fifty years ago? Or some other problem, maybe alcoholism to cope with the war? I scratched my head. My mind locked up as I felt her glare on my face. I fidgeted a bit to look casual. I looked at the scuff marks on my shoes. And why are there blankets and pillows on the couch I’m sitting on? Was I supposed to be lying down?

This seemed to be endless but I eventually came to a conclusion. I looked at her with a blank and helpless look and shrugged. “I have no idea. But four days ago I was, well, this probably doesn’t mean much, but I was…”

***

What I’ve learned is that any session that doesn’t leave you crying in a parking lot behind a fast food restaurant wasn’t productive. Some sessions you have don’t go anywhere. You should be okay with that. You’ll get there.

That was the comment she left on my social media page. The old “she,” the past “her,” not the new one. The new “her” doesn’t say much although I still crave anything from her. Four years later and the cycle repeats, stuck in a rut and unable to escape.

Although I disagree with her. The session wasn’t productive at all — I felt more lost than usual — but here I was crying in a park. Where was the fast food? Where was the enlightening moment? After finally getting help wasn’t I supposed to feel better? When was the magical moment supposed to happen? When was I supposed to be happy, or at least functional, in this thing called life? The more questions the therapist asked the more answers I lacked. I had no idea why I did what I did. My actions didn’t make any sense, especially to me. I knew other people to a higher degree than I knew myself. I have no idea why I’m writing this now at 1:05 in the morning trying to tie it all together: nothing makes sense. At all. Even the bare trees in February don’t make sense. Why were they there? I was seeing a fragment of the world in this tiny city in America, but was I even really here? It felt like a dream, a terrible dream, with time fixed that I couldn’t escape from. The dream was reality, the place you escape nightmares to find comfort in. But when reality is a nightmare what else is there for you to wake up in comfort to?

I thought of her for a bit randomly and without thought or reason. Maybe she was right. But maybe I didn’t care about what she thought anymore. And this made me more depressed somehow. And then back to my old habits. What does she think about me? Does she approve of me? Am I cooler now because I’m seeking help? Is it honorable to admit to your problems? Does she sympathize with my struggle? Is she impressed that I’m writing consistently now? Does she randomly think of me like I think of her? Or am I some past apparition that is just a ghost in her past, some fragment in her imagination, some shadow in her dreams?

And no progress. I am me with no escape. Thirty years of living with the same person and you’d think you’d grow to like yourself being stuck with yourself for so long. It’s the opposite. Every year I spend with myself I hate myself: my roommate of depression and gloom. He is stubborn. He is bitter. He is depressing. He can’t help himself. He is as ineffective at life as his mother and father. He is insecure. He is brutal. He has no self-esteem. He farms approval from everyone else and is pathetic. He can’t function in life. He lives at a basic level only surviving day after day just trying to pass time. He harms himself in some grand quest to transcend himself. He tries to escape himself despite himself. He wants to love what he hates which turns out to be himself and everything he is. And despite his best intentions he is inevitably trapped inside a prison that he cannot escape.

I looked down at my arm blurred by tears and started to scratch. Desperately trying to escape myself. No escape and only pain that I can’t avoid despite my dissociation. It’s always a part of me, the pain. And this is me. Stuck behind bars until I die. Escaping into reality that is outside the nightmare.

The Virus (Part Two)

Note: This is a continuation of The Virus (Part One). I orginally planned for this to be a two-part story, but it looks like it’ll be a three-parter.

Who is infected? Who isn’t? You can’t tell: treat everyone as a hazard. The six-foot rule? No, give people ten or twenty feet, as much as you possibly can because your life is at stake. The virus is small, invisible, and deadly. Walking corpses of the future pumping respiratory failure into the air with their still-functioning lungs. I picture the air currents and the wind stirring the invisible death into the air, swirling and making beautiful unseen vertices mixing virus and atmosphere together.

A man is riding his bike along my side of the road. I’m upwind of him, and picturing the air leaving his mouth and swirling around his cheeks and chin, around his neck, and into the slipstream he’s dragging behind him. He’s not a threat with the air currents today. Any death he might be carrying blows the other way and I’m safe. As safe as can be in this world at least.

The rest of the trip to the dollar store was uneventful, at least as uneventful as you could expect in these times. A few gunshots and screams rang out in the distance, punctuating the silence of our new world with reminders of the horrors occurring nearby. A drive-by shooting a mile ahead on the road I was walking along; I could see the car slow down and the crack crack of gunshots delayed by five seconds, and the small group of people walking on the side of the road fleeing and collapsing. I couldn’t tell if murder was involved from this distance.

And clouds of smoke rose up to the east, near downtown. More fires, more rioting, more unrest. It was all so uneventful that I didn’t pay it much mind. This was the world now.

Finally I arrived at the store, but as I reached the front corner I noticed something. Blood, a lot of blood on the sidewalk and road that led around the side of the store. The blood smeared towards the back as if someone was dragged away; the streaks leading around the back corner of the store.

My choices were laid out in front of me in a mere fraction of a second. Continue on into the store and pretend that I didn’t notice the blood, cower my head and flee, or investigate the scene. My heart started pounding and I began to shake with adrenaline once again filling my body. Fight or flight? Decisions had to be made even if adrenaline cripples logical thought. Before I realized it my knife was out and I was turning the corner to the back of the store. The choice was made, but seemingly not by me.

The path of blood led to the store’s dumpster area, a tiny fenced-in area to hide the trash the store accumulates daily. The gate was slightly propped open and the path of blood welcomed me through the gate. One new problem now; there was a second path of blood leading from the other side of the building, two streaks of blood from each side of the store. What awaited me along with the pungent smell of trash and refuse?

I slowly peered around the gate with knife in one hand and pepper spray in the other, my body permanently shaking from what might greet me. I was relieved to find two bodies, one with their neck slit wide open and one with a myriad of gunshot wounds in the chest. Relieved because dead bodies weren’t a threat to me, only a sign of a threat, a threat that wasn’t in my immediate area. The shaking still continued though; the mystery still hadn’t been solved.

A weapon, a gun, anything? The man whose neck that was slit open — both of them armed guards popularly employed to stop robberies and hostage situations in these troubling times — had no gun on him, with his holster strangely empty with the strap open. The other man, the one with the gunshots, still had his weapon. I quickly changed my gloves and took the firearm. It would serve me better than it would serve him. Crouched down, I noticed bloody footsteps leading to and from the dumpsters and back around to the front of the store.

Another conflict arose within me between fighting or fleeing, but the new weapon in my hand urged me on. I took a guard’s gun which was a crime itself, and what if I was charged for these murders? Nothing to worry about though, more crimes were more important to investigate even if the law could eventually catch up to me. Once all of this shit was over they could charge me. That was later, in the indefinite future, and I was determined to survive until that day.

Once again, before I knew it I was standing next to the double glass doors at the front of the store. The world was silent — too silent — and time seemed to stand still. I could feel the sun creeping slowly across the sky, my shadow passing as a sluggish sundial on the sidewalk. More choices — act or flee — but here I was: why run now? Everyone fantasizes about these do or die moments where logic doesn’t apply; what you think you’d do you’d never do and my intuition to flee was countered by this chance encounter to finally do something. Face your fate. Confront the demon in the store whose bloody footprints lead directly to his lair, because the alternative was boring everyday life. Escape it even if it means likely death.

The first door opened quietly as I gently eased through it. And the second door? One of those damn bells to notify the store employees when someone entered. Even though I tried to open it slowly, the bell still jingled making a piercingly loud sound in the silence of the world. No sound answered the bell in return. Everything was silent, still, and oppressive.

But not totally silent as I discovered upon entering the store. Strange muffling arose from behind the counter. I stood there for a moment to gauge the layout of the store and listened for any sounds from the beast that might be lurking in here. Still and silent. Only the rustling behind the counter gave my senses something to latch onto. I glanced over and an employee was seated on the floor, gagged and tied up with the look of sheer panic on her face. She appeared unharmed and nodded her head towards the back of the store, with unintelligible grunts accompanying each motion. The beast was back there, she was saying.

More oppressive silence. It was lurking, hiding, stalking me. I crept forward with my finger on the trigger ready to defend myself and the helpless employee if I needed to. Creeping forward step by step until I reached the end of one of the aisles where I hid on the other side of the end cap. 

This time faint footsteps were heard. Cautious footsteps at the opposite end of the aisle. I looked around trying to formulate some plan of attack, some plan for defense, shoot to kill or shoot to wound? Too many thought racing through my head to make sense of anything. And…and above the door was a mirror: one of those spherical mirrors that allows you to see nearly the entire store in a tiny glass ball. Distorted perspectives but the human eye is sensitive to motion, and at the end of the aisle I was lurking at, a shape moved.

I waited until the shape was halfway down the aisle and peered around the racks to get a glimpse of whoever was stalking me. Gunshots immediately rang out in my direction, some missing down the aisle and shattering into the main door while others slammed into the shaving behind me. This man was unhinged, not even paying attention or deciding if I was a threat or not. Instant firing to kill, reckless firing, and my mind was made up: Kill or be killed. There was no reasoning with this person. Shoot first and enjoy your life if you still had it after time ceased to be frozen.

More creeping from the man towards me. I cleared my throat and said in a weak and shaky voice, “Alright. Let’s talk about this. Okay?” There was no reply besides the footsteps creeping towards me. In the mirror he was three-quarters of the way down the aisle, about fifteen feet away from my location. In the distorted mirror I could see his arm extended with the firearm poised to fill my body full of lead.

“Come on, let’s talk. I’m not a cop. I’m…nobody.” No reply. Unhinged. Unreasonable. Off the rails. And he was almost here.

I shot out from behind the endcap with my arms extended. The man with wild eyes seemed surprised, as if he could sneak up and kill me and I wouldn’t bat an eye or fight otherwise, the finger on his trigger poised, but I was quicker. Filled with adrenaline from the past ten minutes of stopped time, my body was as tense as a compressed spring, and at the tip of the spring ready to snap was my finger. The trigger jarred back and forth an indefinite amount of times before time unfroze and the moment was over. The man lay on the ground ten feet from me, slightly quivering extremities until all motion ceased.

And I realized I had killed a man. A fellow human being. Kill or be killed, right?

More footsteps sounded from the rear of the store, somehow quieter than the man’s careful steps moments earlier. I held the gun up again, unsure of how much ammo was left, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it. Bluff if necessary; the gun looked fully-loaded anyways. Recite the mantra again: Kill or be killed.

Around the end of the aisle shuffled a girl, maybe five- or six-year-old. She looked at me, down to the man on the ground, and then looked back at me. She walked over to the man and sat down cross-legged next to him. There were no tears or cries or shouts or curses, just a glazed look on her eyes. The same glazed look the man on the floor had.

“Da…daddy?” she asked the man bleeding on the floor.

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Anna of the Woods

Note: Hopefully my writer’s block is over. I’ve been finding a ton of inspiration and motivation lately: use it while I have it, right? This is a mostly fictionalized account of my time trying to live in the woods.

I was lost for sorts. Not physically lost but mentally lost. Lost in life. Depressed. A drunkard to cope with being lost. Being drunk lets you feel okay with being lost, with having no idea what you’re supposed to do, because it shrinks reality into the present. All you must deal with is the here and now and people are always happier when they pay attention to the here and now. The trouble only begins when you dwell on the past or look forward to the future, traveling the x-axis too far. Regret, anger, helplessness, dread, and anxiety all seem to come from either looking backwards or forwards too much or too desperately.

To find my place I set out for the woods. That was the plan. I was drunk again and it seemed like a great idea. I gathered all the supplies I casually thought about over the past few months in case I ever became crazy enough to actually do it. Cans of coup, a can opener, tent and sleeping bag, a few tiny cans of Sterno, rice, cans of beans, a knife, cigarettes, everything I could think of I put into my car and set out. And alcohol of course. And some drugs in the form of my trusty cough medicine dextromethorphan, DXM. Something to help oil the gears within my mind. Something to let my mind expand outward along the y-axis of whatever you’d call it. Space. Time. Peace. Nirvana. Whatever. I’d felt it countless times but it always escapes grasp.

I went to a local park; an isolated park, not too popular but also not totally forgotten. It was a popular area for disc golfers as there is a course there, but disc golfers are there to golf and not to hike. That was part of the appeal, to hide in plain sight in a park populated by disc golfers who didn’t care much for exploration in the woods. Up a path into the trees I went for a quarter mile in dark, then turned off and walked another few hundred feet. Located close enough to the path for convenience but far enough away that I was fairly hidden. It took three trips to haul all of the supplies to my new home.

I sat in the tent and cracked open a beer. The trusty thought that I always dwelled too much on reared its hideous head: So now what?

I texted some friends and no one replied. I tried to start a fire but the wood and twigs I could find were soaked from days of rain. Even the air seemed chilly and thick with too much water and a faint mist seemed to envelop the woods. Not that I could tell because it was dark; only the lights from the city reflecting pale off the clouds provided any illumination. The tiny candles I had did little to push back the ever present darkness around me.

I was alone. Utterly alone. I checked social media for signs of life and found only ghosts, only the faint images of real life that people wanted others to see. Memes shared, political opinions posted, happy family pictures and dinners. Picturesque to a tee. No, there was no life there at all, and if anything this made me more depressed. Trapped in my mind and isolated left me gasping for anything to hold onto. Some sense of peace. There was no answer from the woods. Only the scraping of tree limbs in the wind replied. Maybe a creature sounded in the dark, but they stayed far enough away from the deadly human trespassing in their domain. Silence. Loneliness. And the time crept ever so slowly. It was only one in the morning. So, now what?

I thought as I drank and made no progress. The same issues over and over. The same flawed person thinking their regular flawed thoughts endlessly. But maybe I needed to go deeper, really get down into the nitty gritty of my mind. Have an experience. Steal some insight forcefully from the universe as if it was mine by right. I popped open my cough syrup bottle and began to drink. The stuff was horrendous and I drank beer and medicine back and forth, desperately trying to clear my tastebuds from the twisted flavors of each of them.

I did some math about how much of the sticky, bitter stuff to actually drink. I came to about half a bottle, but as boozed up as I was wasn’t very confident in my math. Who the hell knew. I guessed. I’d either end up not feeling anything or transcending reality. The stuff tasted disgusting and after 75% of the bottle I gave up the whole project. I wasn’t feeling anything and it was time I tried to get some sleep. My math was probably wrong so I put the cap back on and regretfully laid down for the night.

Sleep. Sleep? No. Music. More infernal music, something I had heard in the past ages ago. Or maybe the future. I sat up and looked at the candle feebly flickering in the tent. And. Fire. Fire. That’s what was missing tonight. This morning. Time didn’t mean anything — the world simply spun and only us humans put meaning on it — and that was fine. Everything was fine. But, fire. Fire makes us human, right? There I was in the woods as a prehistoric human, nothing more than a caveman who happened to have a phone and internet with him. I didn’t have fire. Until I had fire I wasn’t enlightened. I could never be at peace living as a slovenly creature in the woods.

In the tent I said aloud to no one in particular. “I want fire. I will make a campfire. If it’s the last thing I do, I will have fire.” I stood up, grabbed my cigarette lighter, a beer, hobbled a bit, and stepped out into the damp and chilly air.

Sticks. Wood. Kindle. Start small with dry stuff and build up to larger branches. Until you had logs. A self-sustaining fire. A fire hot and fierce enough to burn anything liquid thrown into it. Sure the branches were wet, but with a blazing fire they’d dry and burn like everything else did in the world.

I gathered my piles into categories based on how large the branches were. Twigs, here. And there, larger sticks. And here, branches. The only thing missing was grass, something small and dry that would easily light. But I had paper towels and a nearly empty case of beer; maybe that would suffice? I grabbed the towels, emptied the box, and started tearing the shreds of paper into smaller and smaller bits. I would have fire. It was the meaning of my life in the all-consuming present.

Onto the ground they went into a small pile. I then made a tiny tent of twigs and smaller sticks on top of the pile. I rolled up a tiny bit of paper on the end of a stick and dipped it in the liquid candle wax: a tiny homemade torch. It took fire easily. And this went into the bottom of the tent of twigs.

And fire! It smoked, glowed, sputtered, and then went out. I hopped onto my knees to blow on the remaining feeble embers only to have them die. I tried again. And again. And there was no fire. I was still a dumb caveman who’d never be enlightened and wise. I’d never cook meat, have crops, smelt metal, or build cities. Left in the woods to die and discovered thousands of years later like Homo Neanderthalensis.

I stood up, looked around, and nearly gave up. A tiny bush next to fire seemed to taunt me but I didn’t know why. It was a strange plant, a bush that was only a bush only when you looked at it. Because when you looked away and viewed it out of your peripheral it took on a humanoid appearance. This bush was something human, or humanlike, and it taunted me. It stood over my pile of sticks that refused to burn and made them refuse to burn. It’s name, because it did have a name, was Anna.

I stared at the bush again, knowing who it was (but not what), and said, “Anna, please let me make a fire.”

She stared at me silently, reverting into a form or a bush depending on if I looked directly at it or not.

“Come on. Why? Why do you do this to me?! I just want to make a fire.”

I set back to work. Anna wouldn’t stop me.

More timeless time passed and nothing happened. I came close, once or twice, where flames licked the sticks for nearly ten minutes before it smoldered into nothing.

“Anna. Anna, why?”

Reality came back in waves where I realized I was talking to a bush. A plant. Nothing more and nothing less. I was in the woods trying to build a fire and I couldn’t and I was talking to a plant. Begging the plant to let me make a fire. I felt like I was losing my mind. Nothing made sense. Who was Anna and why was that the plant’s name? Why was I stumbling around? Why did the bush appear so lifelike at times? My thought came back to an old Stephen King story I had read. Something about a hotel room that a totally skeptical guy wanted to spend the night in. And in the room he slowly goes crazy. The room itself was a malevolent being that degrades your sanity causing you to question everything. Until you lost it. Until you went mad. Until the room killed you.

And, what?

I remembered old stories about this park: many people in my city say it’s haunted. My cousin, a supposed ghost hunter, claims she’s seen ghosts in this very park on countless occasions. Right where I was trying to spend the night and seek some solace. There were no ghosts, obviously, and I was a skeptic. Maybe it was just her imagination? There weren’t any ghosts here.

But what if there was.

The woods did seem very silent and malevolent. And I was losing my mind. Was it that far-fetched to believe that I was surrounded by a horde of ghosts or worse, demonic beings that wanted to claim me as their own? I started to panic at the thought. Anna, the bush three feet from my tent, was one of them. A spirit of some long lost and forgotten soul who for some reason haunted in the park I was in. She probably died in a fire, which explained her stopping me from making mine. Even in death she was scared, or even protective of me. Or not. Maybe she was trying to drive me insane, to get me to hang myself off a tree? Or do something crazy. What would happen if I chopped my hand off with my hatchet? Where did that thought even come from? What would people think and say if I came out of the park after one day and had to be hospitalized and institutionalized for hacking my hand off? What if I was going crazy?

No. No way. It was the drugs. Didn’t I drink a bunch of cough medicine ages ago? But, what if it wasn’t the drugs? What if they only allowed me to perceive the unknown? As my mind raced I desperately tried to get a hold of it and keep it under control. Think happy thoughts. I gave up on the failed fire, got into my tent, and finished off the last few beers of the twelve pack.

I awoke a few hours later once again feeling lost, this time mentally. I questioned where I was and what I was doing there. Rain was soaking in through my tent that I was in, my sleeping bag was damp, and I was freezing. My head hurt — the familiar feeling of the hangover — and time would only make it worse. My mind turned back to the previous night which felt like a dream. The demons, the demons that weren’t there but seemed to be there at time, had haunted me and now they were gone. I opened the door to my tent and looked out. I was in the woods and I was certain of my place in space this time. Birds were chirping, the wind wasn’t blowing, and the only sound was the rain in the middle of the forest. Despite my brutal confusion and hangover, there I was. Maybe I wasn’t lost.

And Anna stood by the failed fire. Still a tree but as I looked away there was a person there. I was sober. I wasn’t high. But…the bush was a human. A person. A spirit. Something. I stepped out of my tent and grabbed a couple of beers to think about the situation. I didn’t feel threatened, just confused with this presence still there. After a beer and a half I walked over and grabbed my hatchet which I tossed aside early in the morning into a pile of mud for some reason. I wiped the blade off and it glistened as well as it could under the cloudy and dreary day. I walked up to Anna.

“Anna. You need to leave. You’re disturbing my peace. This whole thing, this whole adventure, was only meant for me to find peace. So, please leave.”

Anna stood there.

I sighed. “Alright, have it your way. I’m sorry.”

I swung as hard as I could drawing all the strength from my body. I waited for a cry or a shout or anything from Anna, but there was nothing. Just the dull plop plop plop of the hatchet striking branches over mud. Eventually Anna toppled over right on top of my aborted bonfire.

And as damp as it was the night before, and as much as it was raining at the time, the fire started to smoulder and burst into a large blazing flame. Here was my fire, here was my peace, here was me transcending my primal spirit.

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The Vacant Lot

Note: Instead of working on the actual “coherent” stories I’ve been trying to write, I’ve been reading the older stories I’d written years ago. They’re not too bad, and it’s fun to tidy them up a bit. This is one of them.

Without a clear goal or plan I turned left at this street and right at another. I was a free spirit, riding in whichever direction I fancied at the time. The way I took was dictated by emotion and past memory: I remember going down a certain street in high school, or a girl I used to know lived down a street which I blindly turned down. Memories were everywhere — the time was different and sometimes the scenery was different — but the memories still lingered in some way even though they were horribly nonexistent in the present.

I rode by the park we used to play football in, years ago in high school. I wondered if we would ever get people together to play again. Maybe as a ten-year, twenty-year, or even a thirty-year reunion. We could be fifty-year-olds trying to play tackle football at the old park we used to play in. I knew we wouldn’t, and at most maybe a friend or two would meet up someday and throw a football around for nostalgic reasons. But those games, no, they were forever gone. No one ever knew at the time we were playing the last football game that we’d ever play.

The street I was on along the park also had other familiarity to it. It took a few moments of thought — some tying of the strings of my memory — but I finally connected the dots in my head: this was the street my ex-girlfriend and I had rented a house on. It was long ago, not terribly long ago — only a few years — but I was immensely changed since then, making it feel like ages had passed. I felt decades older and wiser even though I’d only gone around the sun two and a half times since. I had no goals or plans that day, so I continued on down the street. It’d be nice to ride by the old house and reminisce.

As I got closer to the house we had rented I realized something; the houses that were along this street were gone. I remembered years earlier there had been a flood, these houses which bordered on the creek had become lost causes, and the city moved to purchase and demolish them. Her and I were together when the flood happened, and being alongside the creek allowed us to see a large part of what had happened. We were on the higher side of the creek and our street didn’t flood; our house wasn’t afloat. Around us were houses seemingly boats in endless water: drifting in a lake that had appeared out of nowhere from the clouds and the rain one August night. The vacant lots allowed me to see the next street over, unimpeded by trees, houses, or any other obstruction and it seemed very strange. Only the creek which had caused the flooding was between me and the street to the north. The creek seemed harmless and nothing like the demon that I knew it could be if fed well enough.

I continued on and finally arrived where our old house was, but something didn’t seem right. I glanced back at the street sign to make sure I didn’t mistake what block I was on, and it was the block, but where was the house? The vacant fields of grass that had stretched endlessly also stretched into this area completely catching me off guard. And further down the road, the field continued. Had the city demolished the entire area?

I slowed and eased my bike towards the curb at the location where I thought the house used to be. There was the same, bland grassy field and nothing gave away the hints of the past. But here, along the curb, was a tree: a single tree between the sidewalk and the street. As I parked under it, I glanced up and felt something. It was a tree, a tree that was unremarkable in every way possible, but something in my memory moved. This was the tree I had parked under for years straight, never really looking up to examine it but seeing it so frequently made an imprint on my memory. It was a ghost, an image of a peripheral that etched its way into my mind. Never noticed but always there. It felt familiar, like an old friend or acquaintance, and I knew this was where the house used to be.

I looked at the field with determination and yearning. Behind me was slightly lower where a driveway used to be, and imagining the memory of the property fit like a puzzle to this sparse field with a creek in the middle of it. Here was where the driveway was, and here was where I put our garbage out on a Wednesday, and there was where the next door neighbors lived, and over there was where I’d sit on the steps and think about us and how we’d never work.

I frowned as I examined the vacant field some more. The memories were both good and bad and they randomly came at me with no rhyme or reason; they just appeared as ghosts of the location. 

I thought of the house, and where I happened to be currently. There was a pile of rubble of the old house somewhere and I wondered if anyone thought of the memories they held. There was a chunk of concrete out there in the world that I walked on daily, and a board of wood that creaked every time we went up the steps, and the walls that watched us smile, cry, scream, and yell as the days came and passed. They existed somewhere and in some form out in the world without anyone but myself knowing their history.

Reality slowly creeped back in as I stared into the air. I was standing there next to a field and, well, I was on a bike ride that day. Feeling the outside world pressing in on my senses again, I mounted the bike and kicked off from the curb that her car tire had rubbed on countless times. I imagined that maybe there were bits of rubber from her car on my shoes as I sped off down the street. But that was the past that was past and this was the neverending present and it was time to get on with life.

I moved on from that day, from that leisurely bike ride, without much conscious thought about what I had seen. Going to work, sleeping, eating, and generally existing were enough to fill my time, and I didn’t think of the lost house very much. But as much as I’d have liked to think it didn’t weigh on me, it must have, because my mind would somehow turn to the image of the empty field with the creek behind it, and it would seem to occur when I was alone, trying to not think of anything at all. As I tried to fall asleep, I’d see the field again, and sometimes the house that used to be there. I thought of her, and wondered what she was up to. The thoughts were never strong enough to give me pause, to keep me awake at night, or to make me think deeply; they would randomly appear and then after a few thoughtful moments, they’d drift away into the oblivion from which they came.

Check out my Instagram where I post pointless artistic pics every whenever I get around to it.

Or my other blog Everything Sucks where I blog about random topics.

Or Wattpad where I have a Morrowind fanfic ongoing.

Or my Facebook page where I don’t do much of anything at all.

Search for The Truth

At least I can give some background behind this mess of story here. Wattpad sent me a message about some 500-word contest for something called Home Before Dark. Luckily, I have no idea what it is even after writing my submission. The challenge was to…well, I’ll just post the message itself:

We’re reaching out to you because we’ve just launched a writing contest with AppleTV+, and we thought you might want to enter! Wattpad has teamed up with AppleTV+ and Home Before Dark to bring you an exciting writing challenge that encourages you to share your truth with the world! Just create a 500-word letter about a time you stood up for the truth for your chance to win a Mystery prize pack!

This was like a week ago. 500 words is nothing — about five measly paragraphs — and I had no fucking clue if I wanted to even try writing a submission. I suck at stories, especially stories with a purpose and a theme, so I’m about 99.5% sure I’m not going to win. But why the hell not write something? After about 25 minutes of writing and editing it down below 500 words I ended up with this story. Enjoy!

The world blurred and my thoughts shifted without any conscious effort on my part. They flowed like a river, in one shape initially, a memory of something fond, into the next shape, a hideous and malformed entity of the past. Fond memories naturally hold negative aspects. Loss. Regret. The ever marching force of time. Change built into the nature of the universe. What is real? What is true? What can you hold onto when everything shifts and morphs? Even the most sluggish river still flows and changes with time.

It was the drugs to be sure, a strange concoction of whatever I could find hours ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time, like everything usually does, but now there was regret. But still the regret flowed into other forms — my past self had decided this was the best place for my future self to be — and wasn’t there something I was seeking? The shadow of introspection and self-discovery hours ago loomed over me and shifted into regret, and then back again into hope. There was something to look for, some reason, some concrete realness to myself, and maybe I could find it

Bad vibes swirled around me, torrents of a bleak river grabbing my thoughts, thoughts of safety and fixedness and concreteness, and wrecked them. Anything I could find to grasp was ripped away from me before I could take solace. Nothing was fixed, nothing was firm, and everything was framed by mindset.

Then the crux of the problem finally reared its head: Was I even real? What did ‘real’ even mean? Real. Reeling away from reality, but there it was, staring me in my twisted and drugged up mind. And if reality was this question, that of even being real, what did that mean?

The thoughts drifted again without any power from myself and I realized the question was pointless to begin with. What we experience is real. If a person thinks they’re losing their mind: that’s their reality. That’s their truth. The outside truth of someone else — that they’re crazy — is not the Truth of the suffering person. A billion truths, maybe more, all swirling around and changing in every conscious being in the universe. A multiverse within a multiverse, a billion worlds, all unable to be explored by being self-contained. Beauty. Glory. Sadness. Regret.

My universe is chaos. An inability to hold onto thoughts, to form them, in the torrent of the river of time. I don’t even know why I do what I do. I have no idea why I write what I write. Adrift in the sea, river, ocean, air, whatever you’d like. A thought appears and I have no control over it. Where did that come from? And why did I take a ton of drugs? I’m a robot controlled by a program I didn’t even make. These thoughts aren’t my own; there are no thoughts to take ownership of. And…and now what? Now what?

Check out my Instagram where I post pointless artistic pics every whenever I get around to it.

Or my other blog Everything Sucks where I blog about random topics.

Or Wattpad where I have a Morrowind fanfic ongoing.

Or my Facebook page where I don’t do much of anything at all.