Untitled Document

Archives November 2005
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January 2006
February 2006
September 2006

Friday, September 29, 2006

Scrap: Unrelated

This is an odd sort of a scrap insofar as it's not actually the character this blog deals with, primarily, but I needed a place to stick it :)

Everything you had ever seen on TV or in movies indicated you should have felt a distinct high. Instead, you simply felt certain there was a Papermate Fine Point stabbing you between your sixth and seventh vertebrae. Sitting up on your elbows, you surveyed the room and were privately grateful for your disdain for office kitsch. Less clean-up.

"That was..." you started to say, kicking aside a stack of neon post it's and reaching for your discarded sandal, but you couldn't think of a way to end the sentence. Awkward might be a term you would use, but "good" would be making no cameos in the tale when you rewove it for Lauren over drinks later. Disappointing, on the other hand...

"Yeah, I felt it too."

If every girl has a few great stories about bad sex, you would never know how to define Nora. You met her on the stairwell of your dorm building in your sophomore year and, while you had never been fast friends, when you were feeling down, Nora was always good for a pick me up. Walking into the bar, you shook the rain from your umbrella and scanned the room for her. She was sitting not entirely alone at her favorite table in the corner. After introducing her to your own special Long Island Iced Tea recipe one particularly tragic evening, she drunkenly confessed that her predilection toward this particular table was based entirely on superstitious belief that remaining at the site of the worst date of her life would bring her to the man of her dreams. You refrained from mentioning that the table by the men's room at a sports bar was likely to bring her many men, none of whom would be Mr. Right.

"Gin martini, please," you asked, smiling at the bartender. You never quite understood why a sports bar would miss the opportunity to employ perky 22-year old college drop out, but had yet to find a real reason to complain. Normally, you'd be thankful just to find someone who knew the proper method of applying Vermouth to a glass but your relationship with Simon had crossed beyond that of patron and proprietors nephew on several occasions.

"Extra olives?"

Simon would never have forced you to endure this morning's misguided attempt at spontaneity.

"How long has it been raining?" Nora asked by way of a greeting as you pulled out your chair.

"How long have you been here?" you inquired in return, raising an eyebrow. She lifted her glass in congratulations to your remark and grinned. "Ah, well. At least tell me how far behind I am?"

Within 15 minutes, she was up to speed on your life and you could already feel the comforting effects of honesty and alcohol creeping into your fingertips. "Maybe the people at All My Children know something I don't, but having sex on a solid oak, executive desk is seems like a let down to me."

"Don't blame the desk!" she exclaimed, reaching for a bowl of pretzels on a neighboring table. "The desk can't help the fact that you're a prude and that beau of yours lacks stamina. The desk did the best that it could. It's the two of you that couldn't make anything of it." For a few seconds, silence fell - at your table at least. Across the bar, fifteen muscle bound, testosterone junkie, he-men grunted their approval - or was it disapproval? - at someone named Hernandez. You stabbed an olive irritably and slid it in your mouth to avoid responding. "All I'm saying is, if you're not into this guy, he's probably not worth training. True, it would be a service to the next woman who has to date him but that's her problem."

The truth of the matter was that you knew she was right and, as always when someone else was right, you were determined to ignore it as long as possible. When your Human Resources director offered to set you up with her friend Christian, you smiled and proceeded to make every effort to squirm out. When she insisted, you agreed to see him once, assuming you could be so dull that, at the end of the evening, he wouldn't be able to call you a cab fast enough. Little did you know that this man would have remarkable patience for the inner workings of the latest UNIX server structure. At the end of the night, he gave you his raincoat, walked you to the door and kissed you on the hand. For as disinterested as you were, you couldn't bring yourself to tell him no when, with pleading, pathetic eyes, he asked if you wanted to get some coffee that Wednesday.

Nearly ten dates later, here you were - wondering how you'd ever gotten into this mess. The realization made you reach for your glass.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Scrap Six: Sanskrit

Following instructions was never your most well developed skill. Surely, at some point in your life, succeeding must have been something you did, but any shred of personal honor had long since gone the way of Sanskrit - heavily studied but antiquated and irrelevant. For now, it appeared that your destiny was to live the hollow shell of an intelligent human being - whoring your intellectual capacity for the peanuts they called wages. Strangely, that comforted you.

Your advisor said you were a crusader and always had been. He, of course, advised you against this path. He claimed that, since he met you, he'd seen a change - insisted that you were stubbornly determined not to unleash your potential. (Words like "potential" always brought visions of violence to mind.)

Absentmindedly, you tapped out the world on your keyboard - enjoying its soothing click-clack.

P-O-T-E-N-T-I-A-L

An errant bit of chocolate chip cookie slid between the K and the L as you struck them together accidentally.

Once upon a time, you watched this word glaring back at you from a blue Word Perfect screen and the same suffocating feeling overtook you. Some might have seen this as a reassuring sign of humanity. You, on the other hand, jabbed at the backspace key with your pointer finger and watched the world - and it's implications - disappear.

Feeling far more exhausted than you had in months, you reached fro your lighter and drowned out the nights glow

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Scrap Five: Grief

[unedited raw]

Grief is one of those odd things in your life that can literally feel as though a weight is being dropped into your stomach. What's worse are the inane, everyday and entirely unpredicatable triggers.

As defiantly as you tried to shake any rememants of humanity and weak emotion from your visage, the claws of grief hung firm to your skin and you remained mortal.

Scrap Four: It All Tastes The Same

[unedited raw]

Appetite was something that came to you sporadically and violently in all things. So as you dunked your chopsticks into the pork fried rice of life it seemed only appropriate that you should be engaging in one of your rare social appearances.

Your “friends” weren’t exactly friends, as such. More, they were people who periodically inquired as to your status – not your personal well being, just the things that could be ticked on a census form. Your friends were one of the few aspects of your life that you finally had working properly.

Once monthly you broke your late-night research patterns and, instead of eating your dinner leftover and cold, indulged in the rare and fantastic concept of a hot meal. By the time the evening was over, you always regretted it and swore never to partake again. 20 minutes into the plum wine, egg roll and wonton course you were already scheming ways to get out of next month. They were discussing something inane and you couldn’t bring yourself to focus.

“Did you ever notice that the orange bits don’t taste any different from the green bits?"

Scrap Three: Time

[unedited raw]

You hated digital clocks.

Time, you’d always maintained, should be wiped out by darkness and the backlit LCD clocks of today survived darkness, power outage, flash floods, and, you were reasonably sure, the finger of god. Alas, noise – even the patient, precision ticking of a battery operated wall clock – rung loudly in your ears. Your apartment was, in the evening, one of the quietest places in the city. Only the calm whir of a case fan and the occasional cracking of leather or tinkling of pill bottles obstructed the silence and that was just ask you liked it. The less sleep you got, the more quickly noise, light and activity seemed to over stimulate your synapses.

Scrap Two: Aaron Beck

[un-edited raw]

Fuck it was the story of your life. You read somewhere that, on average, a child’s first words are Mommy, No, Up and Daddy. While you had no actual record of it, you were reasonably convinced that ‘defeatist’ must have been yours. How, then, you ended up in your line of work was one question that would have fascinated Aaron Beck.

Cognative therapy aside, you propped your slightly wilted salad up on the steering wheel and took another slug of coffee.

“Ah, the glamorous life,” you groaned, impaling a piece of arugala on your fork. Six months ago you discovered the keys to survival – shirk duties. Political strategy was one of your only true loves, so when your advisor cornered you in the hallway for what must have been the four-hundred and fifty thousandth time waving a declaration form in your face, a polticial science major seemed to make sense. Well, that and it was one of the check-box options.

Scrap One: Insomnia

[un-edited raw]

There are, in your estimation, at least 40 thousand sleep aids available on the market -from the hippy-dippy homeopathic to the high-class prescription types. As you stared at your kitchen counter, covered from end to end in half-empty pill bottles and silver foil shards, the ever present impulse to simply hit yourself over the head with a frying pan surfaced again.

Somnatrol. Dromias. RevitaSleep. Ambiatol. Melatrol. Serotonin Ex. Nutranetics Liquid Sleep. Seditol. Aluna. Somnex. Lunesta. Trazadone. Calmes Forte. Unisom. Tylenol PM. NyQuil. Benedryl. Imovane. You’d tried them all. Only your fiancé and general phobia of pills prevented you from mixing a cocktail of vodka, gin, and one of everything on the counter if for nothing else than the 30 hours of dreamless, relaxed sleep before your liver failed and your body shut down completely.

If nothing else, the sneaking fear that [G]god might be more than a mass hallucination prevented you from testing the bounds of modern medicine by taking more than one at a time. In all of your misadventures with religion you’d yet to find one that thought suicide was a cheerful Sunday night activity. Well, barring the crazy ones.

Settling on the trendy but effective combination of prescription pain killers and black coffee you downed both 12 oz mug and friendly white pills in a single gulp and padded back into the living room, bumping painfully into the pile of reference material you’d been disregarding.

Most chronic insomniacs watch television – or, at least, that’s what you’d heard. You, however, couldn’t bring yourself to switch it on, despite the late hour and the lack of anything better to distract yourself. Instead, you leaned forward, groping for your jacket pocket.

As cigarette smoke curled, disappearing into the residual neon streetlight, you stretched your legs over the couch cushions, and booted up your connection to the world, blandly anticipating the flood of junk mail and advertising about to burn your retinas. For all the things in life that, upon close inspection, became mundane and disappointing, the internet had yet to fail you. No matter how many hours you sat, chasing the elusive end, it never came. There was always a new stretch of undiscovered information at your fingertips. Tonight, however, even its enigma couldn’t hold your attention.

The distractions came more frequently lately and you found yourself, head thrown back, eyes closed tightly against the moonlight, fighting to drown the amorphous, nameless thoughts that threatened to surface. The well-adjusted might have explored exactly what it was that upset you – what trigger manifested itself in sleeplessness and addiction - but you considered it easier to ignore it until it went away. Taking a deep, despondent breath, you glanced at the unapologetic neon glow of the stereo clock and watched it’s numeric flashing. 4:02.

“Fuck it.”

Scraps Listing

One: Insomnia
Two: Aaron Beck
Three: Time
Four: It All Tastes The Same
Five: Grief
Six: Sanskrit

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Shadows

Four years ago, I met a man I didn’t know – arms folded, leaning against the wall of a hospital waiting room. I wasn’t there for him, or really even for the people he was there for. Four years ago, I was there for a friend who, a mere four months ago, I wasn’t able to support and, in turn, I was there for the stranger.

In August of 2002, someone I barely knew – a friend of a friend I met on a few occasions – was in a near fatal car accident. For nearly a month, I visiting the hospital occasionally, lending what support I could to what seemed like the most amazing group of people I would ever meet. A group of 15 – never fewer – camped outside those hospital rooms around the clock to bet there – not only for their injured comrades but for each other. They chain smoked, played cards and exchanged bitter humor to pass the hours – but they were all wearing their own fears inches beneath the surface.

Since that day, I came to know a lot of them. BJ, with his sweet disposition. Aaron and his, at times, high and mighty understanding of humanity learned in books rather than life. Nate, pension for the melodramatic or not – still a human being struggling to learn to survive. Beka, who tends to take gulps of life rather than sips, resulting in a lot of wrong turns and unnecessary pain.

Those are the ones I can speak of generally,. Those are the ones that I’ve watched at a distance these last few years. For the others, no amount of words strung together on a page could explain. For the rest, I have loved like no other – and loathed equally.

Colin, to whom I turned to on so many occasions – who misused my trust and turned a relationship I treasured into a weapon far more dangerous than any other. King, who I loved to the day he died and still love in each moment of my days – who betrayed my trust and then broke the souls of every person he loved.

And the stranger. The stranger who seemed to want nothing more than a human connection, hungered for a ground into reality – a tether on the tangible. I’d heard stories and gossip and I knew his name, but I knew no more than what he meant to my friend and what pain he was enduring when he looked upon the eyes of a familiar face that no longer knew his name.

Four years has passed since I watched in awe of a scene I could so scarcely believe. 15 and torn, yet again, from my psyche was any concept of faith or trust in humanity. But there I was, standing before people who were standing beside each other. They restored my faith for the flicker of a moment and when the lie finally went out, I no longer had my friend, but the stranger by my side.

He sought no more than a smile and a laugh – thriving on the happiness of those whom he loved, but he bore no malice when the smiles and the laughter became scarce. He carried the burden of a betrayal too great for any soul to manage without complaint for all it’s weight.

We moved on, the stranger and I, piecing together a life neither of us had ever planned. My friend faded from our day-to-day conversations – but never was forgotten. He returned, after a few more years and a lot more bitter memories, to fill the place that was always rightfully his.

In the end, I don't know if this indescribably muddled emotion is about my friend or the stranger or both, but I do know this - at twenty years old, you aren’t supposed to know the ending. An outlook and a sense of sophomoric omniscience, of course, but nothing more. At the age of twenty, I know enough to know that I can’t tell you the end for the stranger and I, but the end for my friend was recorded in scars across so many souls.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Strange Dreams

All right, so i'm dragging myself out of a warm, comfortable bed to make this post but i can't seem to get it out of my head.

We all know that i'm famous for odd dreams. There was the one where my mother turned into a deranged witch who was trying to kill me - all of this taking place in a church not but two blocks from my house or the one where my grandmother tried to convince me to cross a street and I got stuck in a the rolls of a steam roller. This one was stranger still but I can't help the nagging feeling that it holds some sort of significance that I shouldn't let go of without a little bit of further examination. And, no, i'm not one of those freaky dream interpretation people. Some dreams are trippy - some dreams have very obvious meanings and some mean nothing at all but this one - this one was just strange.

It started out segwaying from an unsettling but common dream about King - a homeless man - slightly retarded and in his mid-20's was wandering the streets when a total stranger stopped him and handed him two tickets to a sporting event. For some reason I was attached to both of them - not in any familial sense but I inherently liked both of the characters. From there, it embarked on what was only seconds of synapse firings but what seemed like hours of this young man looking for his friend - an elderly homeless and slightly retarded man that was something like a father to him since he'd ended up alone and on the streets. Upset, cold and alone, he couldn't find his friend and went to the sporting event by himself. When he got there, he found an envelope taped to his seat - it had a winning lottery ticket in it. There was a some inane sequence that was still adorable where he went to buy some winter clothes for himself and find the stranger. It was another look on the appreciation he held for the simple things in life. Parcels purchased and crappy but thrilling apartment purchased, he went off to search for his friend again, only to find him dying in his cardboard home - product of old age and the cold. In limited time, I can't really seem to convey the exceedingly simple beauty both the process of his reciept of this great gift and his calm, wiser-than-his-years acceptance of the death of his only friend.....

Dreams rarely affect me this way but, for some reason, this one got me. So, ya know, nutso :)

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Farewell

Farwell to my fallen comrades in arms. We weren't fighting a war for justice, peace or freedom – we were fighting just to live – to survive. We feel too deeply, love too hard, walk with the sorrow of one thousand sunsets and look mournfully upon it’s daily rising armed with knowledge that one thousand more will pass and still we will carry our swords and our scars. We fight our battle based on intellect and empathy against an amorphous entity. It grows and changes, turning youth into soldiers – leaving behind it a wake of bodies without souls. Souls that were too wounded to go on winning – wasted by the burden of their plight. Wealthy deserters and conscientious defectors they call us. We abandoned them, they scream. We took our talents and our skill and hid them away and in that they are right but it was not for deprivations sake – it was for survival for it is only our talents and our skills that are of interest. They care not for how deeply we feel or how intimately we understand. They cannot comprehend and refuse to try the impact of 10,000 screams. The mind is a miraculous entity. It heals – it carries – it builds walls and war zones. It contains memories and holds hostage that pain that only a truly powerful mind can know and when it can no longer sustain the blows, there is no outcry – only the adage that it is a fine line between genius and insanity. Where we know that in truth, there is no line. Genius breeds insanity in a world where our talents are demanded of us as payment for oxygen and our protests are heard as condescension. And so I make another tribute to my fallen comrades – another shot glass on the mantle - and I unsheathe my sword for the sake, not of myself, but of the little boy who carries their legacy.

“I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide.
I cry when angels deserve to die.”

For the record, death has not cleaned up your reputation any. You’re still a piece of shit, King. Moreso, now that you left the rest of us to do your dirty work and clean up your mess.

Monday, November 28, 2005

Welcome to Soul Fragments

Several months ago, HPFF opened an Original Fiction archive that I admin. As it stands, I still haven't posted a single thing there.

So after much pestering from a lot of people who are more than used to kicking my ass into writing, this project was begun.

Welcome, in short, to Soul Fragments. The project is a mess of sorts - a combination of things I wrote on purpose and things I rambled into existence. The intention, in the end, is to use all fo these bits to devleop a cohesive piece - without losing the rawness of "in the moment."