10 posts tagged “writing”

Sorry about the whole "lack of news" thing, but I've been noticeably swamped with midterm work, sorting-out-my-life work, Suite101 work, and Jenny work. So here's a few awesome updates of stuff to come!

I've been setting another ramblog aside for quite some time now, and I'm probably going to be posting that in the next week or so (over my spring break).

I have three short stories in the works for class, as well as a full version (yeah, that's right, I'm finishing a large story) of On Self-Sabotage that should be up by the time May rolls around.

My movie is all ready to go minus a few crew members. Filming is going to take place on the week of May 20th, before I go to France for the summer.

I am also trying to be a film major! How exciting!

I'm writing out four or so more articles on Suite101 in the next week. Before that, however, you can read my older articles here, here, here, and here.

Also, there are a few exciting new albums coming out soon (or already out) that everyone should know about!
Already out!

• Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, Thirteen Blues for 13 Moons
  
• Gnarls Barkley, The Odd Couple
• The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely

Coming out!

• Wolf Parade, Pardon My Blues
• Death Cab for Cutie, Narrow Stairs

All of these seem pretty promising, and I can't wait to listen to them! Also, The Mars Volta keep playing a new song live, which I'm intrigued about. Oh yeah, and Panic at the Disco has a new album, but the only exciting thing about that is they've matured enough to take the ridiculous exclamation point out of their name.

-blake

James Blake

All in the Timing

            Jackson and Jillian sprinted into the bedroom of Jillian’s house, throwing the door open so that the intricate brass doorknob smashed into the wall carelessly. Jillian threw herself onto the bed, sweating and panting, as Jackson grabbed the knob and slammed the door behind him. Resting his back on the light pine door, Jack slid down the frame, resting his elbows on the knees of his jeans and putting his chin on his fists. Still breathing heavily, he looked across at Jillian, spread-eagled on the bed, her heaving chest matching his breathing patterns. She was beautiful; her dark brown hair sprawling out in all directions, her slightly ripped little black dress exposing smooth cream-colored skin, her bright blue eyes staring up at the ceiling in shock and awe. Even the tiny cut on her left hand, which was caused by a splinter only a few minutes ago, managed to appear dainty. Staring at the open wound, Jack noticed a small red drop on the white sheets. It was still bleeding a tiny bit. He slowly rose, pressing his back against the door for support. It had been a long day, the both of them were exhausted, but the night had just begun. Jill’s azure eyes followed Jack as he stood up. He grinned at her reassuringly as his mind raced in worry. Were they going to be okay?

            “What’cha doing?” Jill asked as Jack crossed the room to her.

            He gently held her hand as he brought it to her sight. She raised her head slightly to see what he was doing, and then frowned slightly at seeing her hand. “You’re still bleeding,” he whispered, caressing the injured appendage, “I’m just going to run to the bathroom and get something to wrap it up.”

            “Okay,” she replied. Jack stood up, but Jack knew there was a problem. After going out with her for two years and seven months, they knew each other well, almost too well.

            “What’s the matter, babe?” he asked softly, kneeling back down.

            “It’s just...” She paused as Jack searched her azure eyes. “Is the door locked?”

            All signs of tension in Jack’s face eased out as he gave her a genuine smile. “The front door and all the windows are locked, honey.”

            “But what about the door to this room?” There was a slight panic in her voice, but Jack ran his fingers through her hair to comfort her.

            “I’ll get it right now.” he calmly said as he stood up again and crossed the room. He twisted the lock, and they heard the faint metal click. Jill smiled across the room at him and his hand instinctively but casually went into his pocket. The small, clichéd-to-death velvet box was still there, as was the diamond ring inside. Tonight had been stressful, to say the least, Jack thought. At the very least, this would go to go according to the book, even if it killed him.

            Jackson turned around from the door, realizing that he had been fondling the box in his pocket absent-mindedly. Jill hadn’t noticed; she was now sitting upright on the bed, looking at the framed pictures of him, her parents, and her best friend she kept on her nightstand. In the silence, Jack heard a faint sound which could only be the breaking of glass, and he quickly cleared his throat over it. Jill turned to him, and he smiled nervously. He didn’t think she heard anything, but you could never be sure about these things.

            “What was that?” She asked nervously.

            Dammit, he thought. “Hm? I just cleared my throat. You’re being paranoid, honey.”

            “Sorry,” she said, her face still wrinkled in worry.

            Passing her on the way to the master bathroom, Jack bent down and gave Jillian a quick kiss on the forehead. He crossed the rest of the way and cracked open the door. The lights were still on from when Jillian was getting ready to go out, and the bathroom didn’t appear to change in that fifteen minutes. He threw the door open the rest of the way and walked in. Pristine and white, from the ceiling to the floor, with five mounted lights irradiating the room with artificial sunshine, the bathroom was a testament to how neat Jill could be. The towels were on their racks, the shower curtain was drawn, and the tiny curtains partially obscured the frosted first-floor window. Jackson shook his head, chuckling to himself, as he searched her cabinets for possible bandaging material. She would make a great housekeeper, as tidy as she was. If only he knew the method to her madness.

            “Hey honey, where do you keep a first-aid kit or something like that?” he called out, rummaging through the cabinet on the left.

            “Oh…it’s in the far side of the right cabinet. It should be close to the door.” Jill replied. She sounded strained, Jack thought to himself. He grabbed the first aid kit and opened it next to the sink. As he searched through for bandages, Jack heard a distinct scraping sound, accompanied by soft grunts. Grabbing the gauze, he poked his head back into the bedroom to see Jill pushing the dresser across the wall to block the door. She turned her head sharply as Jack made a questioning noise, and sighed audibly in relief.

            “You scared me, Jackie,” she said, pushing the dresser until it made a thump against the flower-print wall adjacent to the door.

            “What’re you doing?” Jack asked.

            “I just—I guess I—I mean—I—I thought I heard something, Jackie. I thought I heard a thump.” Her whispers were frantic, and Jack quickly walked across the room to embrace her.

            “No, no, you didn’t hear anything,” he said, as she squirmed in his arms. “Now come on, let’s get you to the bathroom and we’ll bandage you up.”

            Jillian followed Jack to the bathroom, looking behind her all the way. She swore she had heard a thumping noise, but it did seem to have stopped. And Jack was acting extremely strangely tonight. He wasn’t panicking like she was—at least not outwardly—which wasn’t like him at all. She had always thought Jack got worried easily, and in a situation like this, he should be pacing like normal, wringing his hands, or something. But he was calm, cool, and collected. She felt bad admitting it, but she didn’t like Jack when he was like this. She had always been somewhat attracted to his worrisome nature, and after going out with him for something like three years, she knew when he was acting strangely. She hoped he wasn’t going to propose to her or something; that would just be awkward. Talk about bad timing…

            She trailed behind Jackson into the bathroom, watching him closely as he took the bandages out from the first aid kit. Why did they decide to go out tonight? Jill lamented to herself. She jumped up onto the marble counter and put her head back on the mirror as Jack worked with the bandages. If they had just stayed inside, they might have been able to avoid this whole mess. If they had stayed indoors, they could have had a nice little dinner, watched a movie, and maybe even had sex. Jackson might have even acted normally. But no, they had to go outside and see—

            “Hey, you need to work with me,” Jack gently chided. The bandage was half on her hand, and Jack was looking at her expectantly.

            “Sorry.” There was silence for a brief second, but then both of them turned to face the bedroom. A soft thump was emitting from behind the door. Jack cleared his throat softly, and then closed the bathroom door. The thumping continued as Jack grabbed the shower bar.

            “Sorry,” Jack said as he grabbed the towel rack. Dismantling it from the wall, he took an iron bar and jammed it between the door handle and the cabinet. “You understand.” Jillian nodded dumbly.

            They sat in silence as Jackson finished bandaging Jill’s splintered hand. The thumping resumed, muffled and methodical almost to the point of madness. Jack grimaced as he tied off the bandage, and crossed the room. Standing there, with his back to the window, he grabbed Jill’s undamaged hand. She hopped off the shiny countertop and landed on the shiny floor, her back to the door, wondering what he was doing.

            Jack was making up his mind. His hand slipped into his pant pocket again, and he sighed at the same time as a particularly loud thump made the couple start. “Jillian,” he started, grabbing the box from his pocket and holding it nonchalantly in his right hand, “you are without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

            Jack got down onto his knee, opening the box to reveal a quite-expensive looking diamond ring. Oh God, Jill thought, that ring must have cost him at least two months’ pay. Why now? Weren’t there more important things to deal with?

            “Jill, I…”he paused, choking on his words. A flicker behind Jackson caught Jill’s eye, and she opened her mouth, “I lo—”

            Just as Jillian screamed, pale gray hands crashed through the window and grabbed Jackson by the back of his head. The moans of hundreds of them drowned out Jill’s screams as at least a dozen arms connected to mindless bodies held Jackson in an undeath grip. Jack grabbed onto the shower curtain, which ripped as the zombies dragged him out the window. The thumps behind Jill became louder, and Jack was almost halfway out the window, but she was paralyzed with fear. The mass of ghouls tore into Jack’s extremities, and he finally started screaming his lungs out.

            “Jill!” he screamed over the moans, “I love you!”

            But she just stared, her mouth agape, at the bloody velvet box on the floor as Jackson was pulled out of sight and the iron bar in the handle behind her began rattling.

No, the above title wasn't referring to anybody's fifteen minutes of fame--although that would probably be appropriate for this particular post--but rather, it was referring to the fifteen minutes that are left before I have to run to class.

Sorry for the brevity here, and you can insert your own joke about being witty, but I just don't have time like I used to.

Someone one told me a very simple statement recently that really changed how I look at things. I was talking to her about my general lifestyle and what I do for fun. I mentioned that my hobbies are primarily writing, composing music, and filming, although I do some acting on the side. She then looked at me and said "Those are your hobbies? James, most people do those things for a career." And you know what? She's right. I do way too many things that aren't just hobbies; they're careers. Whatever happened to the days when I found Dungeons and Dragons, or video games, or riding bikes fun? They've disappeared, and instead, I've tried to make a hobby out of at least three things that will inevitably consume my life. So I might cut down on that, and stick with casual writing, filming, and acting. Yeah, I know that doesn't sound like much of a change, but I'm pretty sure you'll notice some changes in my writing around here. This isn't going to be my "project" site anymore, because I don't want my life to be one giant project. That might work for another friend who shall remain nameless but really needs to learn about David Ives or shut up, but it doesn't work for me.

So I'm going to make a more casual outline of what I have planned for the upcoming 20 days:

• At least two short stories
• At least three links to published articles
• Nothing on my current movie other than vague updates
• Star-Nosed Moles on a Sailboat (it's taking forever to get and chop up; for that I greatly apologize)
• At least one ramblog (I already have it outlined, but I'm too lazy to type it up at the moment)

That's it. I'm not being entirely unambitious, but basically you should expect a lot more casual writing from me, as opposed to the vigorous work that I had struggled to put up with any sort of consistency.

Take this post for example. It's a nice, quick overview of what I'm working on, and if I wasn't so damn crunched for time, I'd probably take a few minutes out of my day to talk about my life, check in with myself, and check in with you beautiful people. Unfortunately, I now have four minutes left to write, so I am going to wrap this neat little package up.

The final statement: I now have an official job. It's with the writing site Suite101.com, and it's a freelance writing job that I happen to like very much. I plan on writing at least one article a week, and my first article got published yesterday evening. I'm working on coding a widget for it (with the help of a friend who doesn't know he's helping me yet), but I'll post the link to my newest article at the end of this post.

And with that, I'm shit out of time. So until we next cross paths, stay classy.

My Newest Article
My Suite101 Profile

James Blake

Sounds of Sex

            Timothy Oakes woke up alone and with a headache. The alarm clock next to the bed calmly showed 2:22 AM, shedding a bleary red light on its cheap mahogany nightstand. Timothy sighed and massaged his temples, focusing on the white lights bouncing around the insides of his eyelids. He actually almost enjoyed travelling on business; he could deal with most of the irritating side-effects. It allowed him a small respite from his stay-at-home wife and two constantly crying children; that he could deal with. It allowed him to visit new places and befriend people more interesting than his pasty, pretentious boss; that he could deal with. When he wasn’t in meetings, it gave him a freedom he had lacked since middle school; that he could deal with. But the jet lag, he moaned inwardly, the fucking jet lag. That got him every time. Jet lag gave him headaches and insomnia when he travelled from one time zone to the next, and the hustle and bustle of Düsseldorf was similar, but nowhere near Los Angeles. It woke him up in the middle of the night, laughing at Timothy and his inability to cope with time.

            But it wasn’t the jet lag which woke him up, Timothy realized as an “Oh God, YES!” roared through his hotel room like a clap of thunder. He blinked and abruptly stared at the rough plaster ceiling in awkward confusion. Did he just hear—?

            “Fuck yes, yes, YES, YES!” a feminine voice thick with German accent cried out from the room above Timothy, who winced at the grunts, screams and accompanying thumps as he realized what was going on in the room above him. A man loudly groaned a few seconds later as Timothy looked down despondently. Of all the rooms in all of the hotels in Düsseldorf, he moaned inwardly, examining the uninteresting bed. The faint red light from the alarm clock spread to his linens, which were twisted haphazardly around his still-dressed figure. The sounds of sex continued above as Timothy was left alone with his thoughts. What do I do now; he asked himself as the woman above him yelled, “Fuck me harder! Harder! Harder!”

            The anonymous man in the upper room groaned again at the same time as Timothy when the latter party untangled himself and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Sitting at the edge with his stubbly chin on one fist, Timothy contemplated on possible courses of action while lifting his black dress pants to scratch the thick hair on his shin. He didn’t really want to be anywhere near the copulating couple, but it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. His eyes flickered around the room, consciously avoiding the reflection of the mirror in the bathroom. He didn’t really need a reminder of how badly he needed to shave. He was first drawn to his suitcase, a sullen black thing with his initials engraved in plastic gold on the side (his middle name was Walter). He’d never bothered to unpack, and his matching briefcase was next to it, the two of them silently tempting him. He wondered whether or not it would be worth the trouble to check into another hotel. While trying to remember whether or not there were even any other Marriotts in the area, the bed above him creaked and shrieked, mocking its users’ ecstasy. He shook his head as a wry smile finally crept across his face. Two years ago, he thought, he would have appreciated being in this situation; he might have even found it funny. Maybe he would have even encouraged the fornication going on upstairs. But now he found himself sulking on a strange bed with a headache, annoyed that he was awake at two thirty in the morning. What had happened to him?

            He had finally grown up, Timothy thought bitterly as he rose from the bed, running his hands through the tangles in his normally-combed-back jet black hair. He crossed the room to the mini-fridge, wondering whether or not to have a drink or two, although he already knew the answer. Hell with it, he decided, squinting at the blinding bare bulb inside which reminded him that it was the middle of the night. It was perfectly acceptable to knock back a shot; his old self would have approved. He had no meetings scheduled tomorrow until the afternoon, so a drink or two was perfectly acceptable. As he examined the contents of the mini-bar, he settled on some foreign scotch he had never heard of. He took out a few three-euro shots, which he then neatly placed on the nearby counter as he looked for a glass. He found a few cheap crystal glasses by the plastic ice bucket as the room above him once again reminded Timothy that he was not alone. He poured a shot into the glass, and raised it in a toast to the room above him. Clearing his throat, he hoarsely muttered, “If only my night could be as good as yours.”

            Timothy put the other bottles in his pocket and walked to the full-length window which dominated one wall of his room. Opening the curtains for the first time, he noticed two things. First, he saw how strikingly beautiful the German city was, even in the dead of night. The Rheinturm tower stood out like a cheery monolith over the river, the light sculpture on the side displaying, he guessed, the time. All of the light in the city was reflected off the river, which even at night seemed to be a beautiful blue. But after a few seconds of gazing at the city, Timothy’s eyes were drawn to the second thing: a small balcony outside his second-story room. That certainly wasn’t in the room description, he noted, sliding open the window, which he realized was actually a sliding glass door. Thank God for being a corporate monkey, he thought, letting the cool breeze from the river run through his thick, dark, tangled hair. This would allow him to get some respite from the show going on upstairs.

             The last of his first shot went down easily, burning the back of his throat a little bit as scotch tends to do. He coughed a little bit and looked down at the street. As most other cities he’d travelled to on business, Düsseldorf was awake for all hours of the night. But as opposed to American cities, there was no honking, no yelling from the streets, and no obnoxiously loud music blaring from clubs. That was why Timothy preferred European cities; they were just generally more welcoming. Hell, he thought, pouring himself a second shot; it wasn’t just Europe. Every other country on the face of the planet was probably friendlier than America. But still, the minimal noise from the outside world and an extra wall didn’t mask the sex that was occurring upstairs. Another “God yes!!!” erupted from the room, and Timothy chuckled to himself as he sipped his drink. They get points for loudness, he thought, but they’d certainly be criticized for lack of originality.

            Timothy set the scotch down on the railing briefly as he started laughing at that thought. It had to be some sort of irony, he thought. Those two were having loud, audacious, ear-splitting sex up there, but the best they could think of was ‘God yes’ and ‘fuck me harder’? That almost seemed like a crime. And speaking of crimes, it was strange that there had been no noise complaints as of yet. Maybe Germans didn’t care about such things. Maybe they were just sounder sleepers than him. Maybe there was some unspoken credo to just buy earplugs and deal with it. Or maybe he’d just had some unusually strong scotch to drink; Timothy decided as he finished his second shot and set the glass down on the cold cement floor this time. It was well-deserved scotch, at least. He’d had a fairly hard day, and it made his headache temporarily go away. If only it would make him tired enough to go back to sleep!

             By all rights, he should be tired. He had gotten no sleep on the plane from LAX, nor had he dozed off on the connecting plane from London. After the planes, it had just been one long shuffle; first from the airport to his hotel room, then from his hotel room to his company’s building, where he moved from meeting to lunch meeting to meeting to dinner meeting before finally heading back to his hotel at about ten. But for some reason, Timothy was wide awake and half-alive, if mildly intoxicated. The meetings had all been terrible, too. Nobody had said anything of any importance; it was just one big corporate cluster-fuck. All of the people from the German branch had just been trying to impress him and his colleagues, and everybody at the meetings knew it. But for some reason, Timothy and his colleagues from elsewhere in Europe hadn’t really said anything; they just sat there and politely pretended to pay attention. It was the same at every international meeting; no, it was the same at every meeting he’d ever been to in his entire life. It was only ever just a bunch of people in suits saying nothing in particular and wasting everybody’s time in the name of capitalism. But there was one man at the meeting, Timothy remembered suddenly, who wasn’t like the rest of them. Looking over the railing at the sidewalk not thirty feet below him, he thought of that guy who had come to the meeting in a ruffled brown button-down shirt and khaki pants. He had just sat there and raptly listened to everything everyone had to say, Timothy vividly recalled. He asked invasive questions in a British accent, and was intelligent to the point where it visibly bothered some of the higher-ups. At the time, Timothy was taken aback by the man, but looking back on the meetings; the strange man had probably been the only one in the room with any common sense. And that included Timothy, whose eyes were suddenly drawn to the left end of the block.

            A figure in a light beige windbreaker caught his eye; he was the only person Timothy had actually seen on the street thus far. The…man, he guessed, seemed to be waving at a taxicab which was turning onto the hotel’s block, headed towards Timothy’s vantage point. As the man in the windbreaker hailed the taxi, it suddenly turned its light off and sped down the rest of the street, its red tail lights bidding adieu, or more appropriately, auf wiedersehen. That guy has a hell of a nerve, Timothy thought of the cab driver; apparently assholes aren’t entirely unique to America. The man in the windbreaker, seeing the taxi try to make a getaway, grabbed a small briefcase at his feet and started running after the cab. Of course, the taxi neither cared nor slowed, and by the time the man had reached the entrance to the hotel the taxi was out of sight. Timothy sympathized with the man from his railing, and was about to inquire if the man needed him to call a cab when he turned around and Timothy caught a glimpse of him.

            The man had caught a glimpse of Timothy, too, as he unzipped his windbreaker and threw down the hood, bending over to catch his breath. His shaggy brown hair looked naturally uncombed, and it slightly obscured his eyes. As was Timothy, the stranger was quite unshaven, but his style looked to be purposeful. Panting, the man noticed Timothy, and quickly pulled up, his piercing blue eyes suddenly making Timothy feel odd at best. The man threw back his head, laughing loudly and sharply. “Well this doesn’t look pathetic or anything,” the man said in a British accent, “I guess I should stop smoking to avoid further public embarrassment. Don’t I know you?”

            “Yes,” Timothy replied, although he knew he didn’t need to. “We work for the same company; you were at the meetings today. Sorry about…that.” He added, gesturing to the area where the taxi had disappeared into the Düsseldorf dark.

            “Don’t worry about it,” said the man, gathering himself and looking up at Timothy, “I’m just surprised that asshole cabbies aren’t unique to Liverpool.”

            “Yeah, I had somewhat of a similar thought.” Timothy said and then awkwardly paused, wondering what to say next. The two men looked around in silence, groping for meaningless chit-chat, when suddenly a third party joined in.

            “Oh! Oh! Oh yes!!!” screamed the woman from the room above Timothy. There had been a lull, but the two had apparently decided to go at it a second time. They certainly had a knack for timing, Timothy cynically remarked.

            “Uh…” the man cautiously interjected, “Is that—are they—”

            “Yes,” Timothy interrupted, “yes it is, and yes they are.”

            “Oh.”

            A silence fell upon the two again, although the setting was by no means silent anymore. Timothy contemplated how warm he felt inside and how interesting this strange man was without even really saying anything.

            “I’m Timothy.” He said feebly to the stranger, in an effort to rekindle the conversation.

            “Jack,” replied the man with a smile, “it’s short for Jackson, if you care. Nice to meet you, Tim.”

            Tim? That was a new one.

            “Would you like me to call you a cab?” Tim asked, hoping for some reason that Jack would say no.

            “No, I think I’ll be fine for now. I’m not really tired; I dunno why I was looking for a hotel in the first place.”

            “No, me neither.”

            There was another silence, although it was significantly less awkward compared to its predecessors.

            Tim coughed, and then for reasons he did not fully understand, asked “Would you want to come up for a drink or two?”

James Blake

Chateau d’Yquem

            I sat in my grandmother’s car for a little while longer; letting it idle in her driveway as my hands ran over the white plastic bag in my lap. Inside the bag was a package my grandmother had made me get from CVS, its contents alien to me. Modest Mouse was playing on the radio in a futile attempt to stop me from crying and my tears fell down to the plastic, making tiny impact noises as Issac Brock sang to me and me alone. “Your body may be gone, I’m gonna carry you in/In my head, in my heart, in my soul.” I coughed a little bit, which halted the flow of tears for the moment. “And maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both live again/Well I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, don’t think so.” I looked at her snow-stained backyard, its state of disrepair covered by a tattered white blanket. What part of my impulsiveness thought it would be a healthy idea to spend fifty dollars and a weekend on this? I was eight hours away from where I should be, an emotional plane crash trying to cheat death with a woman who might not even recognize me when I walked back into her bedroom.

            The situation wasn’t just sad, I thought, mentally preparing myself for what would probably me my last journey into my grandmother’s house. It was pathetic, in a way. A year and a half ago, she was teaching me how to play bridge on a card table we brought to the private beach behind her house. She was smoking; she was always smoking. She had a cigarette in one hand and her cards in the other as we watched the tiny swells of Lake Erie crash on the beach. Then when the summer swells stopped, she stopped smoking. Just like that. I remember my dad telling me one day after he got off the phone with her while watching McLaughlin, their Sunday morning ritual. “There’s something wrong with your grandmother…” he told me as I half-listened to him through headphones, “she woke up today and didn’t feel like touching a cigarette.” I remember looking up, and not knowing what to say to him. I settled with an “Oh.”, but I felt much more than that. I think that morning was when I knew that she didn’t have too much longer. She went to a hospital after that; there they found the ulcers and the cancer after the ulcers. From there on in, all my family could do was pray. I couldn’t do anything.

            Of course, she was too much of a self-proclaimed ‘tough cookie’ to seek help and fight the disease which was tearing her apart. She tried chemo for a few months, but then just quit. I forgot the particulars, but there was some incident with a nurse that ended in my grandmother threatening to “give her one right between the eyes, cookie!” She’s been practically bedridden ever since, eight hours away from my home. But when my cousin sent me a message on Facebook at 11:03 PM last Tuesday to tell me that she didn’t even have a month left to live, time didn’t even seem relevant. The following weekend, I was transferred from train station to train station as my wallet got thinner and thinner. I probably didn’t even have the money to make it back home, but that was the least of my concerns.

I finally took a deep breath and shut off her car, silencing whatever bile decided to muddy the beauty of the song that had just finished. Opening the door, the plastic package in my lap crinkled obnoxiously to remind me that it was there. I sighed, wondering if this package would be enough to save her life. I scooped it up and shoved it in a pocket of the corduroy blazer she bought me last Christmas. She was pleased that I wore it when I had arrived not even an hour ago. But now, would she even remember that she bought it for me?

            The hard snow announced my arrival as I trudged up to her front door, pulling the key from its place under the mat. Opening the door, I was greeted with the same unfamiliar scent combination of old and death that I had left, but I noticed a subtle undertone of grapes as I climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. This would be hard for me.

            “Netticut?” I called to her, in a slow march. I had always called her Netticut, but I never really knew why. My mother told me that it was because she was originally from Connecticut, although she was actually originally from Czechoslovakia. I liked Netticut’s story better; she told me that one summer when I was an infant, she was telling me about her life in Connecticut during our annual visit to her Lake Erie abode. As I sat there listening to her story and not comprehending a word of it because I was too little to even dress myself, I apparently blurted out “’Netticut!” It was my first word, an abbreviated state. Or so her story goes. My father tells me that my first word was “dad”, or “dada”, or some generic garbage like that. They might have the tapes to prove it, but I’ve always liked Netticut’s version better.

            “Netticut, it’s me,” I tried again, my voice reaching out to her, “it’s Jake. You there?”

            “Jake?” Her frail voice rung out like a brilliant flash in a pan; it started out as a quick crescendo then quickly faded. Then she mumbled something else, but I couldn’t tell what.

            “Hold on, I’m on my way upstairs.”

I walked up the rest of the ancient staircase and started down the hall to her bedroom. The walls were all off-white; a by-product of about seventy years of cigarettes. I paused by the cherry chest of drawers in which she stored spare towels. There was a new addition to the tabletop; placed on top of an uncomfortably white doily was a particularly unflattering picture I had taken of her a few years ago on the beach. She was asleep on her antique metal beach chair, a still-lit cigarette hanging from her limp hand. In her other hand dangled a copy of The New Yorker, open to some unnecessarily complicated article that she wasn’t reading anyway. Her mouth hung slightly open as her Keanu-Reeves-as-an-old-man sunglasses obscured her closed, wrinkled eyes. She was snoring too, but a picture wouldn’t tell you that. It also wouldn’t tell you that my laughing while taking the picture made her wake up, and that after she realized what I did, she almost threw my digital camera into the lake. I guess you just have to be there to understand some things.

            It’s kind of like how you wouldn’t understand why my stomach suddenly lost its bottom when yet another scent entered my nostrils. For the first time in a year, I smelled cigarette smoke in that house. I picked up the print off the table and quickened my pace towards Netticut’s bedroom. I didn’t know what I expected to see in there, but it definitely wasn’t what I got. My grandmother was sitting upright in the bed in her sullen silver nightgown. An innocent brown paper bag sat on her nightstand, as well as a smoking ashtray. The cigarette in it was still lit, but it was virtually whole. Netticut was looking at the ashtray sadly, a black match still in her wilted hand. Her gaze flitted up to me in the doorway, and she smiled a sad, tired smile as she nonchalantly dropped the match back into her wastebasket. I gave her a fake one in return so she wouldn’t worry. We sat there in our absurd masks for a few seconds, the silence disturbed by the faint crackling of the cigarette.

            “Hey,” I started, but then had to clear my throat. “I thought you stopped smoking.”

“Oh, I did,” she began, drawling slowly in a way that was most unlike her, “I just wanted to know if it was for a good reason or not.”

I chuckled nervously; the morphine was finally getting to her. “And what was your verdict?”

“Oh, they’re not for me anymore,” she said, feeling my unease and speaking more rapidly, “I think I’m just going to let this one burn out.

 “Ah. Well, I just got back from the store.” I continued, unconsciously making my coat pocket crinkle and taking the package out. “What did you want with this, anyway?”

            Netticut looked at me in utter confusion. She didn’t remember. “What did I want with what, exactly?”

            My face fell. “Never mind,” I sighed, and then brought the picture I found into view. “I didn’t know you kept this print.” I said, really smiling just a little bit.

            “Oh Gawd!” she croaked hoarsely, laughing in a tone that made my feet curl. “That thing?! I thought I got rid of it forever ago, but it was lying in the back of my closet. I found it earlier today.”

            I grinned; for all the radiation and morphine in her, she was starting to act fairly normally. This was a good sign. I swung the plastic bag around in my hand lazily, trying to think of something to say. Anything.

            “Jacob,” she interrupted softly, using the name I only heard when being punished or formally addressed, “has your father ever told you about the family wine tradition?”

            I hesitated for a minute, and then shook my head slowly. Was this the drugs speaking, or her? “No, Netticut. You never told me about it…what’s the tradition?” I asked, sitting down on the bed across from her

            “Well,” she began, “for as long as I can remember, our family has had a tradition of buying wine when a child is born. My father did it for me and my sisters; his father did it for him, and so on. What they do is they buy the best wine that has been made in the last year. No budget; you should spend as much as it takes to get this wine. And then, they keep it until the child becomes an adult.”

            I was looking past her now, out the window and into the backyard and the snow and the lake. My hand was now inside the plastic bag, idly fondling the smooth tube inside. Where was this going? “What do they do then?” I quietly asked.

            “When the child leaves the house,” she continued, “the parents give the kid the wine. We call it the birth-wine because—well, it should be obvious. It’s just a silly name. But the child gets the wine with the explicit instructions to drink this wine on the day of their death.”

            I froze as Netticut reached towards the ashtray. Her hand went straight past it, though, and to the brown paper bag. Lifting it like an Olympian, she brought it into her lap, where it clinked and sloshed ominously. I watched, staring in amazed horror, as Netticut carefully pulled an already-opened bottle of 1925 Château Mouton Rothschild and laid it to rest aside her on the bed.

            “Netticut,” I stammered like an incompetent jackhammer, “that’s an amazing claret, but why—”

            “Your father thought the tradition was a load of crap,” she interrupted me, cutting me off with her hand and her words. My father thinks a lot of things, I thought, but most of them don’t mean shit. “When you were born, he told me he was too busy with your mother to get you a wine. So I ran out for him, and I got a birth-wine for you. It’s in that bag on the drawer behind you.” she said, gesturing. “You don’t have to ever drink it, but please at least take it with you. It would make me happy.”

            With her free hand, Netticut fished around in the paper bag for a wine glass. Pulling it out and pouring out the deep red liquid, I found myself wanting to throw up. She took a sip and I felt faint.

“It’s a very pleasant wine,” I heard her say, “not too dry, and not too sweet either. Very aged…like your old grandmother here.” With that, she laughed and continued to drink.

I stumbled to my feet, the blood rushing to my head. This was all so, so wrong. I could hear the lake laughing at me a half mile away from her; she would probably never see it again. Her room seemed to lean in, and she smiled innocently at me, her lips bloody with the Château Mouton. I ran my fingers through my hair, dropping her package to do so. It clattered to the floor, and rattled as it rolled out of the snowy plastic. My eyes followed the tube and abruptly stopped on the label. I didn’t believe in him, but I felt like calling for Jesus Christ.

“What are those?” Netticut asked me, pointing at her bottle of sleeping pills that landed neatly on the floor.

“Nothing.” I said with finality, realizing that she wouldn’t need them anyway. It wasn’t worth telling her that she made me get them an hour ago. “I…I need to go out to your car for a second. I left my backpack in there.”

“Okay, Jake.” Netticut finished the last of the glass. “Do remember to take the wine with you.” Of course, I hadn’t forgotten.

“Yeah…” I said, grabbing the pills from the floor and the bag from the dresser. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” the morphine said through her, “I won’t notice a thing.”

I closed the door to my grandmother’s room, and slumped on the floor, sobbing into thin air as I looked at the orange-tinted pills. Why would she send me on such an errand? My world was spinning almost as much as the hallway; my first experience with death was enough to make me wish I was never alive. I had never seen somebody die before; never even known anybody who died before. Why now? Why her? I looked at the brown bag in my hands; by now, it had lost all of its innocence. What the hell? I thought to myself, and slowly excavated the bottle from its paper tomb.

It was a beautiful wine; a Premier Cru from a Bordeaux vineyard called Chateau d’Yquem. It was one of their Ygrec wines, very dry and very bittersweet, but quite alive. A great wine for the end of a meal, and I was getting quite full. I slid the pale yellow murderer back into its cell, my eyesight blurrier than if I had already been drinking. I sighed, and then coughed, but the tears didn’t cease this time. She would want me to be happy, I thought, and I want her to be happy as well. So I stood up and wiped my eyes, then set out for the kitchen in search of a corkscrew.

James Blake

Situation (Complete Fucking Bullshit)

            This situation is complete fucking bullshit, I thought to myself from the solitude of my roost. I mean, I don’t mean to sound pretentious or elitist or anything, but it really is. So I have decided that I am putting myself above this complete fucking bullshit situation simply because it is complete fucking bullshit. As far as being accused of elitism goes, I really couldn’t care less. The situation, being complete fucking bullshit, probably could not care less either. No, I think it enjoys being lower than me; sneering at me from where it writhes and oozes on the ground. It, it is a hideous mass of toothy deadlines and snarling requirements. It is on the ground, jumping up at me and hoping to catch me unawares. It is probably desperately praying at this very moment that it can snag onto something as insubstantial as my big toe or my talent in order to drag me down to its level. But I’m not going to be roped in to that complete fucking bullshit, no sir. As long as I think and breathe and type, I will not be caught. Me? I’m not on the ground. If I was on the ground, I’d be on the same level as this complete fucking bullshit situation. And since I am not complete fucking bullshit, I am not on the same level as this complete fucking bullshit situation. Therefore, I am not on the ground. Makes sense, right? I’m a goddamned genius, right? I should write books upon books of this simple, logical philosophy I have, right? At the very least I think I’m on to something, and that something I am on to is definitely not the ground.

            I am currently sitting on the bottom branch of a tree about thirty feet away from my room. It is cold and my hands feel like they are stumps incapable of typing, but I had to go outside. I had to go outside because I can’t think inside. Inside, it’s too bright, too loud, too…livable. Outside, it’s dark and wet and cold and I can finally think straight while perched in the branches of a tree like some sort of gargoyle. A literary gargoyle. A devilishly handsome literary gargoyle that preys upon the very things he writes. And right now, I am writing about this tree. As I type these words, I can feel the tree rustling around me. It’s not just the wind; it’s the tree talking to me. It’s saying something like, “Oh, thank you! Thank you ever so much for putting me in one of your stories! Does this mean that I’m famous now?” But it can’t be famous; it’s just a fucking tree. Well, not just any fucking tree. It’s hard to see—half because it’s dark out and half because my head is full of fuzz and fumes and coke and god-knows-what—but my Boy Scout instincts tell me that this is a fine specimen of a maple tree. It’s not all that tall and it looks rather weathered, but the branches are sturdy enough for it to do its job properly. Of course, its job is to adequately suspend me, a laptop, a few forty-ounce bottles of Magnum, and a six-pack of shitty beer above the ground without any of us dropping. And it’s doing a satisfactory job. That’s an A in my book, mister maple tree.

            But I have more pressing issues than some maniacal plant that’s bent on usurping my subject matter! The tree is not the protagonist, antagonist, or evangelist of this story. Not unless I want it to be. On first thought, I muse—adjusting my position so that my legs are no longer dangling haphazardly off the branch in a way that makes my crotch uncomfortable—that would make for an interesting story. On second thought, I retort, no it wouldn’t and you’re an idiot. It would make for an interesting tabloid article, my teacher would probably say, an interesting airplane story. And this world has far too few airplanes and far too many stories. But on third thought, fuck it. This situation is complete fucking bullshit, and it’s absurd to boot! Why must the tree suffer because of something the situation has done? The tree has not actually wounded me. Unless…

            I crack open another forty. The Magnum is starting to do the thinking for me, I can tell. I am becoming clearer in my thoughts, which means that soon I will put them into action. What was I doing? I was talking about the tree, yes. The tree has not physically harmed me, but mentally that conniving bastard could be sabotaging me as we speak. Why should I let it get away with that? I leap down from the branches, taking my booze and my technology with me and wincing at the shock of impact which is both physical and mental. I have sunk to the situation’s level (that piece of complete fucking bullshit), but I no longer care. I am desensitized by it. It means nothing more to me than this six-pack of beer I hold in my right hand. If I don’t let it get to me, it can’t do shit to me. The parallel between the situation and the beer stands pretty well, I think to myself as I run away from the tree. I stumble upon a rock as I’m running, which infuriates and enrages me in addition to tripping me. I gently throw my laptop and booze on the ground to pick up the offending and offensive rock. I study the rock; it’s about the size of my fist, and happened to be jutting above the ground at an awkward angle. It’s a pockmarked gray color, which makes it look like any other ordinary rock. This is a good thing, because if it was special I might not feel a strong compulsion to hurl it at the nearest object I can find. I wind up my pitching arm, and search out for something I can hit. Unfortunately for it, that nearby object just so happens to be an innocent bystander. In fact, it is a poor, unsuspecting maple tree that I vaguely remember from somewhere else, as if it came to me in a dream or shamanistic vision.

            But if I could control events already put into motion, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be throwing rocks at trees. The rock smashes against the tree and, making a satisfying clonking sound, skitters away to somewhere else in the forest where it can no doubt trip up some cute wild animals. I look closer at the tree, realizing that my throw did no real damage to either object. If this were some work of great genius (read: a story written by an author who was deliberately mysterious and enjoyed making English teachers sweat), one could infer that the rock was a symbol of my anger, careening out of control and lashing out at the first thing it strikes. The maple tree, of course, would symbolize this complete fucking bullshit situation; standing tall and strong while diverting any meager and pathetic onslaught I can pit against it. But this isn’t a work of great genius, so the fucking rock gets fucking thrown at the fucking tree, at which point it fucking bounces the fuck away and off into the fucking woods somewhere. Fuck!

            I sit down dejectedly and take a mental inventory of what I have left to work with. Two forties down and I’m becoming surprisingly coherent. I might not need this shitty beer after all. I quickly and fruitlessly think to myself, staring at this nauseatingly white computer screen. I know what I am going to do, what I have to do, what I was predestined to do. I just don’t know why I am going to do it. Grudgingly, I look up to the cloudy-starry heavens for an answer to the most important question. I need some sort of reason to throw these beer bottles at this tree, don’t I? I mean, if I just up and throw the entire six-pack at the tree, it wouldn’t be a very thought-out or scripted gesture, would it? What’s my motivation?

            Then the alcohol retorts, what the fuck do you care? It’s midnight in February and you’re freezing your ass off while half-drunk and pathetically groping for ideas in that pitifully small skull of yours. You don’t need any goddamn motivation. You’ve been ranting about your quote-complete-fucking-bullshit-situation-unquote for the last X pages, and now you suddenly need motivation? Get a grip. Get a fucking reality check. Read my lips! You don’t need any fucking motivation to do anything. You just pick up the bottle, throw it at the tree, and repeat five more times!

            “Why thank you alcohol,” I mumble to myself, grabbing the first bottle that will easily relinquish its cardboard restraints. What the hell is this stuff, anyway? I wonder, turning the bottle around, befuddled. Oh yeah, I reminisce, I recognize the label from the other night. Black Chocolate Stout. A rather bitter beer, I believe, and the winter brew from Brooklyn Brewery. I remember that BeerAdvocate.com gave it an A-minus, but I didn’t think so. Fucking critics, I gripe to myself while drunkenly standing up, it’s a fucking beer. A bad beer at that, I decide; definitely not worthy of an A-minus. Who the hell did those BeerAdvocate guys think they were?

            “Fucking elitists!” I scream at the top of my lungs, launching the beer at the poor maple tree which simply sits there and takes it like a man. Or, to be politically correct, takes it like a person. No, fuck that, it takes it like a fucking tree because sometimes a fucking tree is just a fucking tree. All this goes through my mind as I see the first of six bottles sail lazily through the air and crash in mid-spin against the lower branches of the tree, shattering into tons of tiny pieces. I hope that some deer or bunnies come by and get injured by this glass so something else can feel my pain, I think as I pull up a second beer. Fucking wild animals not having any complete fucking bullshit situations to be aware of.

            Let’s see. The first beer I threw symbolized elitism and pretention, which is sort of hypocritical on my part but I really don’t give a fuck. I toss the beer from hand to hand, thinking what this one will symbolize. What about memories? I think, ironically remembering that I was reminiscing about drinking the very same brand of beer last night. Fuck, I decide, it works for me. At least I’m in agreement. I grab the problem by its neck, take two steps, and let the shitty beer fly towards the maple tree. It smashes into tiny pieces much like its predecessor, but I’m standing too close to the explosion. A piece of glass cuts into my hand, which reignites my rage.

            That fucking piece of shit tree thinks it can fight back against me?! I grab the third beer in a rage and, brandishing it like a baseball bat, sprint at the tree. Swinging it like I’m some demented Barry Bonds; I send a home run of glass shards flying all around me. So what if I get a bit cut up? This particular beer obviously symbolizes the pain I have to endure to overcome my scenario, and the alcohol in my wounds will sterilize them and get me drunk at the same time!

            After drinking the last of the Magnum—shotgunning the last half of the forty like I know what I’m doing—I saunter back for beers four, five, and six. There is no call for ceremony here; no need to impress. I have glass bottles, and they are going to add to the soaking mess of abstract art that covers the front of the maple tree, whether they like it or not. But there is a problem as I start to raise my arm: it won’t move. I am seizing up, yet I have no idea why. The logical answer would be the ridiculous amount of substances I’ve drank or inhaled in the last few hours, but since when did I ever give a damn for logic?

            “Fuck you!” I scream at everything, but nothing in particular; the words magically unlocking my arm and allowing me to throw beer number four at the tree.

            “And you!” I continue, grabbing another beer. I am losing a bit of my aim, but none of my steam. Beer number five cracks itself open on the side of the tree, making an explosive splash that is more on the surrounding area than on my canvas. But it’s okay. I am a god-damned modern artist. This entire fucking wasteland of a world is my canvas.

            “And you,” I finish, hurling the very last beer in the case. I throw it with a sense of finality, but I also throw it poorly. It misses because I am now more than a little bit drunk; crashing against another tree that is farther off than the original. “Fuck you all the way to fucking hell,” I scream out with firm finality. Then, calming down a bit, I look around. I am bleeding, I am panting, and I also appear to be very angry and very drunk. I shrug and turn back to my computer. Everybody makes mistakes once in awhile, and five out of six ain’t half bad. Grabbing the Magnum bottles to recycle, I look at the words I have typed on my computer screen. They do not appear to make any sense whatsoever. They also appear to be floating, as if on a sea of vodka. I shrug, delete the unfinished document, and walk back inside. What was I so mad about in the first place?

A short story I started. It's hard for me to write a lot at a time, so this is what I've gotten off a night of writing. It needs a bit of editing, but I enjoy the story. It's also based (loosely) off true events. No names have been changed just cos I don't want to. If you have a problem with your likeness being up here, tell me and I'll rename you.

The Ride

    “…And they gave us seven days to renounce our wicked ways. Too late to make amends, ‘cause we both know how this ends,” were the first words I recall hearing after I came out of that god-awful acid trip of a box that people insist on calling American fast food. The pristine white walls alone were enough to make my head spin, but the food…oh, the supremely subpar quality of the greasy burgers has the capacity to fully incapacitate even the best of men. Since I was not the best of men (and a longtime vegetarian), the filthily clean place had its way with me and sent me reeling. It was worse than acid, this thing called reality, and I was lost in a trip that seemed like a mind-fuck that seemed like a trip for quite some time. But that’s not the point. The point is that the first coherent memory I had of that night (or plausibly ever) were those fucking words. I didn’t know where they came from at first—they could have dropped out of the fucking sky and I wouldn’t have realized it— but then it dawned on me that we were listening to music. We? Where the fuck did a ‘we’ come from? I was too busy stumbling around in the midnight parking lot of my own soul to notice anyone walking with me towards someone else’s black Honda Civic. So it was with great surprise, but without any disdain, that I realized the mass of living flesh to my left was in fact, my friend Adam. Adam? Who was Adam? I had stumbled upon this particular poor sack of a man when we were both fourteen; while he was busy stumbling into an eighteen-year-old. For no reason whatsoever, we stuck to each other as if we were in some shitty buddy movie; him the easily irritated, randomly violent, unintentionally comedic Jack Nicholson and I the nose-driven, shaggy, ‘cool dude’ Owen Wilson. But the fantastic thing about our friendship was that we saw through all that bullshit. We were two tiny, pathetic souls looking for some way to justify our existences, and we found that justification through each other. Adam: the man who received main-ual (en français) sex while five feet to the right of me on the very day we met. Adam: the man who told me that my first girlfriend was the most beautiful woman on the planet, then put his money where his mouth was soon to be. Adam, who cursed at me and nearly fought me the first time I smoked pot, but got fucked up with me every subsequent time. Five years ago, there were no signs leading us to best friendship, and there still weren’t any that night. The only signs we could see were the White Castle propaganda which was burned into our eyes and minds for the rest of eternity. Our eyes. Four eyes. Two people. Adam. Me. Thank god I’m with him, I remember thinking to myself. I’m sure as hell not going to drive anywhere.

    “…We had one foot on the gas and one foot in the grave. Everyone was laughing when we said we had it made.” Right…there was still that fucking music. By then, we were already in the car, and I had realized that he had been walking on my left for a specific reason (that is, alleviating the burden of driving). Wait, shit. How could the music have been playing before we got into the car?

    We sat in the car for a few minutes, letting Tomas Kalnoky’s voice bounce around in our skulls and trying to get our bearings. Looking around, we suddenly realized who we were and what we were doing again. Or at least, I did. I kept getting a creeping suspicion that Adam knew all along and he was feigning it to make me feel better. The near-silence was stifling. None of us could speak above the music we just weren’t capable. I wasn’t capable.

    “So what are we doing tonight?” Adam asked, adding, “It’s only 10.” With one fell swoop, he broke the beautiful silence and shattered my thoughts as effectively as a bullet. That particular silence was replaced with a new, less comfortable one as I tried to come up with an answer. What were we going to do? I had no fucking clue, but I did know what I didn’t want to do. I was almost off my rocker from the fast-food run that seemed days ago; the night would not end well if any more shit like that was involved. Thankfully, Adam broke the awkward silence first, probing my thoughts for me.

    “You want to get fucked up?

    Yes. Yes I did want to get fucked up.

That's about half of the story right there. Like I said, it's going to be a short, slice-of-life-y. Like if Hunter S. Thompson decided to write Ulysses. Or at least a chapter of it.

-blake

I can't even pretend that you are my friend
What has happened to you and I,
and don't say that I have changed, 'cause man, of course I have.
Are you far too depressed now even to answer the phone?
I guess you just want to
shave your head,
have a drink,
and be left alone.
(Is that too much to ask?)
"Cato as a Pun", by Of Montreal

“The Absurdity of it All”

By James Blake

1.

            6:25 A.M. I think today is going to be a bad day. I’m writing this entry three minutes late and I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet. Lazy today.  Too lazy to even write complete sentences, apparently. My alarm has been behaving oddly lately. Sometimes it doesn’t go off, sometimes it goes off early, and sometimes it goes off late. But when I check it, it always says it’s set for 6:30 A.M. I hope it’s not broken; I really don’t have the time to find out if there’s an alarm clock repair shop anywhere nearby. Who would run an alarm clock repair shop anyway? I suppose if nobody else did, one could make lots of money by opening a store and eventually holding an economy-crushing monopoly in the alarm clock repair industry. Maybe I should look into that particular field of business more…or maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and should just get my clock fixed. Maybe it’s haunted. I hope it’s not haunted, because then I’d just have to go out and buy another one. Then again, buying a new one might be cheaper than sending it to the repair shop and it will definitely be easier than trying to find said nigh-unheard-of alarm clock repair shop.  So I guess it’s settled then. I’m going to go out and buy a new alarm clock, right after I go to work, meet up with Perry and Kim, and maybe have a few drinks. It is a Friday, so I guess I could hold off on buying the alarm clock and maybe get a little bit drunk. No, I’ll buy the alarm clock after work; I don’t really want to forget about this and be late to work on Monday. Paulson already uses anything as an excuse to yell at me and I’d really not like to find out what he would do if I legitimately made a mistake. Oh wow, it’s 6:40 already. I should have been done writing this entry three minutes ago! How do I get so caught up writing in this little book?  I guess it’s off to shower, eat, commute and work then. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have a better grasp on the alarm clock situation.

            Indeed, it was only six forty in the morning, yet Daniel E. Wolfe already had an accurate forecast of the day to come. He had been having troubles with his alarm clock for the past week or so, and for no good reason. Yesterday, it had sounded his favorite station, NPR, at five thirty in the morning, sufficiently rousing him. Strangely enough, he couldn’t fall back asleep after that, although he did make a mental note that whoever hosted All Things Considered had a voice like butter… The day before that, the alarm rang as soon as Daniel set it, but it just wouldn’t stop. After trying to silence his clock for about seven minutes, Daniel gave up and just turned the alarm off, using his cell phone alarm instead, which was not an enjoyable experience. Cell phones seemed to have a habit of being shrill and annoying, no matter what “relaxing” ringtone they were set to. Even more unusually, on Tuesday (when everything started malfunctioning) it didn’t ring at all, even though—Daniel checked this three times before giving up—the alarm light was stop-on-red and the alarm time was set for 6:30 A.M. Daniel just considered himself lucky that he happened to wake up at six twenty-five for no reason whatsoever. Normally he could sleep until noon, a hobby that many of his friends found queer, as his punctual demeanor seemed wont to rise early. That morning, however, he just couldn’t seem to go to sleep at all. It was all very strange.

Things this week just happen to be happening strangely, Daniel noted as he got out of bed.  Are people acting strangely, he queried as he went through his mahogany-stained bureau, or is it just me? No, he thought with white shirt/black pants/red tie in hand, it’s not me. I am being completely normal. As always. He took his four-and-a-half steps into the bathroom, pondering as he turned on the light, flicking it twice to ensure that everything lit up without a flicker. Clothes off, watch off, water on, waiting twenty-three seconds before getting in the shower because it could never heat up properly. Nope, he reassured himself as he washed his face, then his arms, then his stomach, then his legs, then washed the soap off so he could wash his face again; I’m completely fine. And so is everybody else around me. It might be because events have been going strangely. Like my alarm clock…and my job…and…a whole bunch of things, I guess.

            Distracted by the hot water and his inner monologue, Daniel finished washing himself, oblivious to the fact that right outside his bathroom-wall-white shower curtain, his watch reset itself for no reason other than that it was bored. In his bedroom, his black shoes undid their double-knot because they enjoyed watching Daniel trip himself up. And down in the parking garage, Daniel’s car’s battery slowly started draining itself in a sadomasochistic act of dramatic foreshadowing. But Daniel neither noticed nor cared about any of that, as he was focused solely on his thirteen-minute-long shower, his forty-three to fifty-eight minute commute, and his eight-thirty A.M. job. Oh, and maybe getting a few beers with his friends to celebrate the weekend. And, darn it all, he kept forgetting that he needed to replace his alarm clock! Alarm clock first, then beer. Alarm clock first, then beer. Alarm clock first, then beer.  Okay, now keep that in mind before you go out drinking. Right… good.

            Kill the shower, snatch the towel, throw on clothes, and swipe the watch. Should he bother bothering the razor? No, he didn’t have that much stubble anyways. Besides, it’s not like anybody would notice a five o’clock shadow after eight in the morning. Bedroom: cell phone, wallet, shoes. Kitchen: tea, keys, briefcase. Ta ta, pathetic and plain apartment room, bonjour, mildly comfortable used grey sedan! Daniel closed the door to his room and subsequently checked to make sure it was locked, as always. Then, as he hurried to the lift (yes, he’d been living in America, but he still called an elevator a lift. Daniel was proud of his British heritage), he went through his mental checklist one more time. Was he forgetting anything? Well, he certainly wasn’t forgetting anything for work, so if there was anything he happened to neglect; he easily could get it before he got drunk. The floors slowly started changing as the lift made its rickety way down to the parking garage. Five. Four. Ding! the lift cheerfully sang, as if it were trying to soothe Daniel’s pain with irritating tones. Oh come on, he thought, who else was awake this early? The doors slowly slid open to reveal a face that Daniel really didn’t want to see this early in the morning. The face was attached to the body of an easily detestable elderly woman, the type who will give their grandchildren those little hard caramels, but only until they forget to say “thank you” that one time. Her name was Mrs. Warner, and she was the mortal enemy of what little social life Daniel had. If Daniel did anything in his inconveniently located fifth floor apartment after ten at night, it was practically a shell game to bet on how long it would take for Mrs. Warner to come knocking to “turn that racket off!”  Daniel had even gotten yelled at once or twice for the “hum of that television” at one or two in the morning. It was all utterly ridiculous; weren’t old people supposed to go deaf with age?

            “Good morning, Danny.” Mrs. Warner greeted him with a smile faker than her teeth as she stepped into the lift. “Going down?”

            “Yes, Mrs. Warner.” Daniel sighed. Why did everybody insist on calling him Danny anyway? That wasn’t even his proper name! “I’ve already pressed the button, so…oh, okay…yeah, you can push it again, that’s…whatever.”

            The two of them sat in their normal uncomfortable silence as the lift continued climbing down. Ten seconds per level meant only forty more seconds to endure her presence this morning. Four. Three.

            “So, how is Jesus treating you as of late, Danny?” Mrs. Warner sweetly inquired as Daniel started to wish he could just free-fall the remaining thirty feet. He might live, and even if he didn’t or if he were horribly injured, he wouldn’t have to go in to work…

            Daniel sighed audibly. He had been through his agnostic views with this near-dead terror multiple times before, but that just made her look harder for an excuse to bring God up in everyday conversations. “My life has been…” Daniel trailed off when he couldn’t think of the word. Normal? Bland? Boring to tears?  Horrible? “…pretty good.”

            “Well, that’s good to hear.” Mrs. Warner said decisively, with another plastic smile. “Are you still seeing that Susan girl?”

            Oh come on! Not this again. “No, Mrs. Warner,” Daniel said, punctuating every word in a feeble attempt to get her to remember once and for all, “we stopped seeing each other two years ago.”

            “Oh, that’s right!” She replied, and then chuckled feebly. “I know you’ve told me that before. What about that Kim girl?”

            “No, Mrs. Warner, I’m not going out with her. She’s just a friend.”

            “Oh yes, just friends! I remember my ‘just friends’ when I was your age.” Mrs. Warner laughed once again, this time to herself.

            Daniel shifted uncomfortably in the lift. If the situation hadn’t been awkward enough, he would have stared at this batty old lady agape. This was a conversation that he really didn’t want to be having this early in the morning. In fact, this was a conversation that he really never wanted to have. Why would anyone her age ever say something like that? He paused, took a deep breath that whistled in his nose, and then cleared his throat softly, as if to say “No, that’s not what I meant at all.” In fact, he had just opened his mouth to say exactly that, when—

            One. Ding! The elevator doors slowly slid open, revealing a small empty lobby.  It was about time, too, thought Daniel as he politely let Mrs. Warner get off the lift first. As Daniel walked into the lobby and headed towards the door to the parking garage, he paused. Mrs. Warner was walking out of the front door with her massive handbag, as she did every morning. She didn’t have a job, so where was she going? She didn’t have a car, and she never hailed a cab, either. Why would a woman as old as her risk walking around the city all day with that huge bag? Maybe she was just going to some church meeting, or something of equal importance. Some things just don’t make sense, like the way Daniel stopped with one hand in mid-push on the door to watch Mrs. Warner leave the same way she did every morning. She would push the door open with both hands and then cautiously step out onto the sidewalk before looking both ways, and crossing the street.  Where did she depart to every morning? It was incredibly odd, Daniel remarked to himself as he THUNKed open the door to the parking garage. One of these days, he decided, I think I’m going to follow her. See what she does with her day. Maybe tomorrow, if I’m not too hung over…or if she doesn’t die first. But Daniel shook both trains of thought out of his head, and started walking down the Shining-esque hallway, disregarding the THUNK of the door. Unfortunately, Daniel picked the wrong thing to disregard that morning, as the THUNK he heard was in fact not the door hitting the wall, but an eerily familiar taxi colliding with the body of an elderly woman who just wanted to cross the street. Of course, it didn’t help that Daniel also tripped over his own two feet and almost fell on his face in that instant. Everything was going wrong today! Looking down, Daniel saw that his shoes were untied. How the heck had that happened? Daniel briefly paused to ponder this new situation, remembering vividly the quadruple-knot he always had his laces trapped in. Oh well, he concluded, I’ll re-tie them when I’m not late for work. And with that, he tucked the laces into the sides of his shoes and walked briskly down the bleak hallway.

            Walking down to the parking lot, Daniel fumbled for his keys, which were, as usual, in the bottom of his front-left pants pocket. Bwoop! Bwoop! His car signaled to him as he hurriedly walked across the echoing grey concrete that made him think there were twenty other people in the garage. Getting into the driver’s seat, Daniel placed his briefcase on the passenger seat, where it would keep him company during his lengthy commute. What was the logic, again, of living and working in New York City? Or even the reason he was anywhere near the Big Apple? Daniel hated cities, and Daniel knew that he hated cities, yet New York was the city where Daniel had voluntarily decided, after much debate, to reside. Why did I choose this place, he interrogated himself as he put his keys in, waited two seconds, and turned on the car; what was I thinking? Ignoring the uncharacteristic sputtering from his brand-new used car, Daniel put the sedan into reverse and started his long and boring traverse of Manhattan. He pulled the car out of its spot and started driving towards the exit of the parking garage, unaware of the fact that his car clock stated a time significantly later than his watch.  To make things worse, while he was nonchalantly pulling out of the garage, he was almost blindsided by a speeding yellow cab. Daniel decided to respond in a way he thought appropriate for the City: slam on the brakes, slam on the horn, and dish out the insults.

            “What the hell’re you doing?!” Daniel screamed at the taxi as it came to an abrupt halt next to him, momentarily forgetting that his own window was rolled up. “You filthy little bugger, don’t you know the speed limit?!” But as far as the taxi driver was concerned, Daniel was just flailing his arms, and as far as Daniel was concerned, the taxi driver wasn’t even aware of him. Daniel couldn’t even see the man who was behind the wheel of—wait a minute. Were those tinted windows on a taxi? Daniel realized his mistake at the last second and started to roll down his window and start fresh, but the taxi agilely swerved around Daniel’s sedan and continued speeding down the one-way street. Grumbling to himself and wondering how he became so irritable, Daniel rolled his window back up and finished pulling out; making sure that there were no more unexpected surprises from his right and being completely unaware of the red smear on the side of the receding taxi, along with its advertisement for a play that went off-Broadway many years ago. Of course, there weren’t any more cars coming; a mob of people were in the road, crowded around something, which (of course) prevented any further traffic from braving the road and possibly incurring Daniel’s British wrath. Thank goodness, he thought as he finally pulled out of the parking garage and started driving to work. Anyone who drives that recklessly is bound to get into an accident sooner or later…I’m just glad it wasn’t me.

·          

Shit. Fuck. Shit! Fuck! SHIT!! FUCK!!! This was the general thought pattern of a certain New York City taxi driver, who—for reasons that will be revealed shortly—will be referred to as Taxi Driver, or Taxi for short. God damn it! What the fuck is going on? He continued to himself, realizing that he had just made a huge mistake. Continuing to speed down the avenue, Taxi Driver thought about the repercussions of what he had just done. There’d certainly be many; he had just killed an innocent woman. An old innocent woman. An old innocent woman who was probably the sweetest thing ever. A woman who donated to charities and loved her grandchildren and still went to church and Bingo night and whatnot. But the act of killing wasn’t enough to get him into real trouble—hell, that was his night job. It was the fact that he had hit her in plain daylight (when he was off-duty) combined with the fact that she was an innocent, and he wasn’t supposed to kill those whose numbers weren’t up yet. In fact, such an act was strongly discouraged in his line of work. He was going to be in a shitload of trouble.

“Damn it all to hell!” Taxi ironically roared, pounding his fists on the steering wheel. “Why’d I even take this job in the first place? Jesus Christ, I’m a fucking idiot!” He continued to mumble to himself, a nervous habit that was fairly unusual in his line of work. But of course, Taxi Driver was no mere taxi driver. A few years back—about forty years now, come to think of it—Taxi had sold his soul to a certain lower power in order to become a part-time ‘angel of death’ (at this point, Taxi subconsciously made quotation marks with his fingers). The years had been quite kind to Taxi though, as he still looked like he did the day he made the dreadful deal. That, combined with the fact that he was immortal, made him seem an almost boyish youth; still in his early twenties. His shaggy light brown hair fell only slightly in front of his light blue eyes, which were nervously lingering in the rear-view mirror, making sure that nobody was following him. Oh Jesus, he thought to himself, rubbing his clean-shaven face (he’d had no need for a razor in years) and mulling things over in his head. Fuck Jesus, he reconsidered, what did he ever do for me? What did anybody ever do for me? Nothing, that’s what, everything that I am I’ve made myself, for better or worse. Or more precisely, for mediocre or worse.

So why did I get into this business anyway? Taxi inquired, quietly flashing back to the earlier moments of his life. What went wrong? I remember that day, but I have no idea what happened before. I don’t even remember my name. Nothing; that seems to be a prevalent theme with me. It’s all gone. But, like it or not, what happened that day he would never forget.

·          

In the late 1960s, when people were talking the talk and walking the walk, Taxi timidly crept up to the door of the abandoned warehouse. Why he was doing this he really couldn’t explain. It wasn’t every day that he got a seemingly fake business card for a taxi service, let alone from a man who looked too obscenely wealthy to be a taxi driver. So it was partially his excitement, partially his loneliness, and partially something he couldn’t quite put his finger on that made him put his finger on the doorbell and apply pressure. Why was there a doorbell on an abandoned warehouse anyway? he wondered as what seemed to be church bells echoed within. If it were twenty years later, 1960s Taxi would have been more likely to recognize the AC/DC tune the chimes played. But it wasn’t twenty years later, so his primitive counterpart was completely unaware of the ominous tune that rang out as the door was casually opened by that same man that he saw earlier in the day, wearing the same tuxedo. The man grinned widely at Taxi, as if he were a wolf and Taxi an unsuspecting rabbit or infant. But not even this could outwardly faze Taxi, who shot the strange man a return grin and cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Welcome,” Suited Man began, drawing out the ‘L’ as a psychopath would draw out a particularly bloody torture session; “I suppose you’re here because of the card I handed you earlier today?”

Taxi frowned at the man, his disposition changing with his temper. He didn’t like people fucking with him, and he was pretty sure this guy was trying to do so. “No, Sir,” Mr. Driver returned in kind, “I’m here because playing ding-dong-ditch with abandoned warehouses in Brooklyn is one of my many hobbies.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” Suited said, clearly mimicking Taxi’s frown in a grotesque pout, “I didn’t realize that you weren’t good at chit-chat. Will you be gracious enough to allow me to continue?”

“Yeah sure,” Taxi said, the grimace glued to his face, “just promise me right now that you’re not—“

“Fucking with you?” Suited Man interrupted, making quotation marks with his fingers in an extraordinarily annoying manner. “I might be, I might not be. Stick around and see.” And with this, Suited’s pout turned into a snakelike grin. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, extending a smooth and strong-looking hand, “I am William ZeBub. Bill for short.”

“Pleased to meet ya,” Taxi Driver said, relaxing a bit and forgetting whether or not he gave his name. Shaking the hand of this still strange, still suited man, Taxi noted that there seemed to be nothing behind Bill except an empty room. Was this warehouse actually abandoned? What the hell was going on?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bill quickly remarked, closing the door behind him and stepping out into the sunlight, “well, I mean, I always know what everybody’s thinking, but this is different. This shows on your face. You’re thinking ‘Hey, it’s just an abandoned warehouse in there! What’s up with that?’  And I’ll tell you what’s up with that, but only if you promise to suspend your disbelief for a second. Can you do that? I’ll give you a hint,” Bill added, whispering in Taxi’s ear, “your answer is going to be yes.”

At this point, Taxi started to feel more than mildly uncomfortable. This man, with all of his supposed foresight and horrendous flair, was just plain creepy and seemed a bit dangerous, too. If Taxi had been less self-conscious, he would have tried to back out right there and then. But since he did not want to reveal his inner awe, he dumbly nodded, and Bill’s awful grin slithered even farther across his face.

“Excellent. Now, by using your incredible powers of observation, you’ve probably already deduced two things. Thing one: I run a taxi company. Thing two: I don’t appear to run it out of this abandoned warehouse. And guess what? You’re right on both counts; I do and I don’t, respectively. My headquarters–so to speak—are located in the basement of 245 West 44^th Street, lower Manhattan,”

What? But that’s—

“And yes,” continued Bill, “you’re about to sputter out something along the lines of ‘Bu-but, that’s the Majestic Theatre!’ And don’t stop me there; I’m just getting started! But I think you’d like to sit down before you hear any more, it would probably be the—how should I put it?—the healthier option.”

“Uh…yes please,” Taxi meekly agreed. This was a bit too much, as his personality change was beginning to signify. Becoming significantly less comfortable, his head was beginning to spin and his usually sharp wit was quickly dulling. He did need to sit down, but preferably somewhere far away from this devilish man and his apparent psychic prowess. At least he was being met halfway.

“Somehow, I knew you’d say that,” Bill remarked, snapping his fingers. And lo and behold, quicker than the snap of a finger, they were suddenly standing in the meeting room of what appeared to be a rather large office building. At least, from the look of things, it was an office, but Taxi Driver had no clue what office building they could be in. The building had no outside windows that he could see (not even in the meeting room; what poor aesthetics!), and as he walked to the clear glass between him and the rest of the office, there seemed to be no plausible exits. Nothing was marked, and there were quite a few shady-looking characters sitting in cubicles, each of them wearing some sort of bizarre headset while talking on a phone. In the center of the room was the most bizarre thing of all; a blackboard with the outline of Manhattan on it was divided into multiple sectors, with flashing lights going off everywhere, some staying on, some flashing, some green or red or yellow. It was like Wall Street merged with a police department and a telemarketing firm. Looking closer, Taxi was prompted with another question: Were there names by the flashing dots?

Bill’s clawed hand (or did he just have long fingernails?) grasped Taxi’s shoulder and squeezed gently, bringing Taxi out of his gaping stupor. “Now then,” Bill said, “on to business. Have a seat; it’s what you came here for. Would you like some coffee, too? It’s damned good!”

“Yes please,” said Taxi, taking a not particularly comfortable seat facing away from the window, “I like mine—“

“—black, I know.”

“Could you—“

“—stop that? Yes, I could,” Bill continued to grin, pouring what looked to be tar into a pristine white mug, “but that wouldn’t be fun. I don’t know about you, but I’m having a helluva lot of fun right now. One black coffee for you.”

“Er…thanks…” Taxi said, taking the mug and sipping. It was hot and bitter and not particularly good, but then again, it was coffee.

“Now,” said Bill, sitting at the head of the table in an odd-looking horned chair (aesthetics indeed!), “let’s get down to business. I’m not going to lie right now, what I’m about to say will probably shock you—“

“Wait a second,” Taxi interrupted, setting down his mug and staring at Bill as if he were possessed, “you met me in an abandoned building and somehow teleported me to an office building which you say is under the Majestic, and you expect me not to be shocked? Who the hell do you think you are?!”

“Well I already told you who I am, but I'm what you would call an 'angel of death'." Bill said grimly, sans finger-quotations, although Taxi was pretty sure they were implied. The phrase hung in the air like a convict, and all Taxi could manage was a slight cough caused by coffee going down his windpipe. Bill took advantage of this interruption to fish out a folded piece of paper from the inside of his jacket. “Don’t worry,” he casually said to the nearly-choking Taxi, “it’s not your time yet, and it’s not going to be a cup of coffee that does it.”

“Thanks,” Taxi replied, stealing a glance at the paper clearly labeled CONTRACT that was pushed under his nose, “that’s real reassuring.”

“Go ahead;” Bill prodded, “read it over. I think you’ll find it most enticing. You see, what I’m offering you here is a sort of, well, a sort of internship. Usually we—and I only say ‘we’” (those goddamn finger quotations were back again!) “because as a leader, I find that a sense of unity boosts morale—only employ those that are immortal, but I think we’re ready to make an exception. Don’t worry, there’s nothing special about you that would make us choose you,”

“Oh gee, well that sure makes me feel better,” Taxi scoffed.

“But we want you just the same. You might happen to be a random person, but we urge you to consider it like you’re winning the lottery!”

“What lottery in hell would win me this?” Taxi exclaimed, completely abandoning his coffee.

“Well, I feel the answer to that question is fairly obvious,” Bill replied, procuring a feathery quill from his pocket, “but look at the benefits! Health, dental, 401(k), it’s all there, and the salary is to die for.”

“Oh?” Taxi inquired, regaining interest in the whole proposition and quickly scanning it. “I don’t see anything here about—oh.”

And there it was, staring at him with squiggly black eyes, right after the terms of employment. ‘Upon accepting this job, the undersigned will be immediately provided with a checkbook that is linked to the company’s account. There is no budget cap, and there are no spending restrictions, although the company strongly encourages the undersigned to keep a fairly low profile. Also, upon accepting this job, the undersigned will be rendered immortal until his/her/its resignation. In addition to this, the undersigned will also fail to age in any way (this includes growth of height, hair (facial or otherwise), fur, nails, claws, tails, breast/penis/horn size, or character).’ This whole thing is unreal, Taxi thought as he reread the contract just to make sure. Unlimited money? Unlimited lifespan? Horns?

“No, you’re not going to have horns,” said Bill, who had strolled behind Taxi to read over his shoulder, “certainly not if you want to go out in public ever again. I mean, if you really want them, we could arrange some sort of hermit-esque scenario, but I don’t think you want that.”

“No.” Taxi replied quietly, his hands softly trembling, then just for clarity’s sake: “No, I don’t.”

“I know,” Bill said soothingly, pretending to understand Taxi’s dilemma, “and I know that you’re not sure that you want any of this. But just think about it. Immortality. Money. Yes, you do have a bit of blood and guts here and there—“

“Blood and guts?” Taxi asked incredulously, “A bit of blood and guts?! Oh yes, because it’s only, like, the fucking job de-script-shun! You’re asking me—me of all people! I still cry when I think about my dog Buddy dying in fifth grade—“

“I know you do.”

“—No! No you don’t! You don’t know jack shit about me!”

“Yes, but I do know that there are eighty-five thousand and forty-two people in this world with names that phonetically resemble Jack Shit. Would taking care of one of them make you feel better?”

“What? No! I just…” Taxi stopped, sighed, and tried to get his bearings. This was all a bit too much for him to take in. “I just don’t know why I would want to do this, but I—“

“You want to. Who wouldn’t?”

“Could you please stop that? Anyway, can I get some time to think about it?”

“I’m afraid not on both counts,” Bill shook his head and clucked his tongue, “we all want more time, but I’m afraid that as soon as you leave this building, you’ll either have no recollection of this happening or you’ll be a part-time ‘angel of death’, finger quotations included. It’s your choice which.”

Taxi reached for his coffee, which by now had to be cold, but it was reassuring just the same. He grabbed the mug and brought it to his lips, remarking with surprise that, contrary to popular belief, it was still hotter than hell. Downing the portion that was left, he got up and started pacing, Bill’s eyes constantly following him around the room. Like a hawk. I’ll have to decide soon, Taxi thought, and I have to pee too, although I doubt there’ll be any bathrooms in this place. As if that’s the biggest problem I have right now. What would stop this guy from just killing me if I said no? He even knows I’m thinking this, how am I going to just walk away from this without being in this guy’s pocket? I’m not, that’s how. Christ, this is a messed up situation. How can any of this be happening, and why me? Oh well, at the very least, it’ll be interesting.

“I’ll take it.” Taxi said firmly, grabbing the quill from Bill’s already outstretched hand, “And I know you knew I would, so do me a favor and stuff it.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about it!” Bill remarked wryly, his grin reincarnated at the good news. “I’m sure you’ve probably already guessed this—well, I actually know it, but that’s beside the point—but you’re going to need to use something a bit more substantial than ink.”

“How cliché.” Taxi grimaced, as he stabbed his finger without any hesitation. “I might as well get it over with, right?”

“Right.”

Without any further hesitation, Taxi brought the quill to the paper, and with an unnecessary flourish, bled on the dotted line. He wanted out of this Godforsaken place already, and if he had to get in to get out, so be it.

“Right again, so welcome to the company. There are a few things that you’ll need to know, and your training will be quite intense, but I’m sure you’ll come to love working for us. Now the most important thing you’ll need to know is…”

·          

And so it went. He couldn’t remember the exact details, but what did it matter anyway? Taxi became a part-time ‘angel of death’ (mental quotation marks included), specifically for the lower-East side of Manhattan, where he was to reside for the rest of eternity. The training was hellish, too. He’d had to assume a variety of fake identities, lose his own identity, maintain a separate job so as to not arouse suspicion for his ludicrous income; the list went on and on. Taxi had no idea that the years had flown by so quickly, but they had. Forty years, four new identities, it was really quite trying. He was allowed ten final days in his old body (days that he didn’t even remember anyway), and then everything about him was erased in an identity change. When Bill had said “identity change,” he had meant it. Taxi was forced to remain nameless, living as a John Smith, and adopt a new persona at the start of every decade. It was not a pretty process; his entire body was forced to undergo restructuring depending on who he was going to impersonate. For his first decade of employment, Taxi had persuaded Bill to let him keep his old body, if not his old identity. Bill reluctantly agreed, and Taxi was off the hook, but not out of the noose. When the second decade came around, he decided to make the best of things and adopt a hippie persona, one that he enjoyed very much. But then the era came to an end and he needed to become somebody else. Taxi then chose a grungy, sullen looking man who people generally avoided; a personality that closely fit his mood at the time. The fourth decade was a total mistake: Taxi, tired of his job and his life, decided to put another spin on things and become a Jane Smith. This did not end well, as Taxi regretted this Eureka! moment half a week into the less-than-pleasant experience. For the newest ten-year stint, Taxi had made sure not to make the same mistake twice, and he carefully chose a persona that he could adapt to, one that made him feel more at home in his body. He chose a man who had awkwardly bumped into him in the grocery store one day. Something about that man, who apologized profusely for a full thirty seconds in a non-New York accent, reminded Taxi of the man he used to be, so he kept a mental picture when reporting to Bill. Looking back on it, he wasn’t sure if it was ethical or not, but what aspect of the job was? Besides, it wasn’t like he’d ever see that person again.

Shit, was that even half a year ago? Taxi wondered to himself, reminiscing himself away from his current situation. Time flies when you’re—no, he wasn’t even going to pretend that he was having fun. It was a terrible job, even though there wasn’t as much guilt as he’d originally believed. There were no robes and scythes as an ‘angel of death’, no smoke and mirrors, no theatrics. Taxi would simply get orders during his shift (as a new employee, Taxi was stuck with the graveyard shift, which didn’t really matter, since he didn’t have to sleep anymore); his radio would go static-y for a few seconds and the same polite female operator would say “Driver One-Eight-Nil. Come in, Driver One-Eight-Nil.” She (or he, or it, as gender wasn’t really prominent with Bill’s crew) would tell Taxi who was about to die and how long he had to get there. Taxi rarely had to speed; there was never any traffic where he was going, even in New York City. He’d get to the apartment, the office, the park, the hospital room, the party (the parties were always incredibly depressing, almost as bad as carnivals or picnics), whatever. Then he’d park the car down the street (somehow there was always an open spot), and start the meter. This, Bill had told him, would allow him to be essentially invisible. Nobody would see him except for the poor soul whose time it was. He’d walk right up the stairs, open the door, locked or not, and march right up to the deceased-to-be. Somehow, he knew who it was without a description or a picture. He had the picture in his head as clear as day: they would see his face, and something would flicker in their eyes. It was unnerving the first few times it happened, but now he hardly noticed it. There would be a dim inner realization of what was happening, and as Taxi would beckon to them (nothing ostentatious, just a wag of the finger), they would get up in a daze, leaving their body behind and walking with him to his vehicle. Upon getting into the car, they would vanish without saying a word. There was no fighting, no screaming or crying, they didn’t say anything. They were left to their fate, as Bill had said. Everything Bill had said about the job was true, even the blood and guts part. Sure, he wasn’t directly killing anybody, but over the years, he had seen it all. Ax murders, bludgeonings, coughing up organs…the list went on and on. He never had to get his hands dirty, but by this point, his mind was soiled beyond cleansing.

Taxi had grown numb to the job by this point. It wasn’t like he was killing people, they were already dead. Most of the time, the person was on the ground with their eyes vacant when he showed up. In fact, even though he was an ‘angel of death,’ Taxi could still say with total certainty that he had never killed anybody before. At least before a minute ago…

Taxi snapped back into the present as if he went through a particularly chilly shower. SHIT! He was so screwed! The radio had been off the fucking hook for the last minute, it wasn’t even the normal operator anymore. No, it was much worse: his supervisor had been talking to him, saying God-knows-what. Taxi rarely listened to his supervisor, a surly demon named Johann…Feist? Fast? It didn’t matter, none of the people there elaborated too much on their last name. But there was no question as to Johann’s demonic nature: the man was a stereotypical red-skinned, horned demon. The only things he was missing were a pitchfork and a tail, Taxi remembered remarking to himself upon their first meeting. Johann was a huge prick, standing about six-foot-five and built so that he could get away with acting like an asshole to Taxi. Another thing Taxi recalled about their first encounter was the pleasant dialogue:

“Hello,” Taxi extended a greeting to the giant demon standing uncomfortably close to him in the cramped meeting room.  “I’m the new guy…”

“Yes, I’m aware.” Johann replied icily, encroaching on Taxi’s personal space even more. “Now please, I’d like to make you understand something. I don’t like the fact that William has employed you. You’re not like us. And I’m letting you know right now: if you mess up even once, I am going to kill you so bad that your newfound immortality won’t even help you.”

“Oh…” Taxi said, retracting his hand slowly, “so no handshake, right?”

It certainly seemed as if Johann was looking to make good on his threat, as the last words Taxi heard before ripping the radio out of its holder and throwing it on the passenger seat beside him were “…and just so you know, I’ve come up with multiple ways to insert the needles into your flesh. Some of them don’t even involve excessive heat!” Taxi gulped, he couldn’t help himself: he had never heard Johann sound even remotely gleeful until now. Drumming his fingers on his steering wheel and mumbling to himself weren’t easing the nervousness as much as he would have liked, either. This was all a crock of shit, he wasn’t ready to die, he’d just gotten started living! Taxi had dropped a few hours from his other part-time job (a taxi driver, coincidentally) in order to make time for a few new hobbies. He’d bought a large television, a camcorder, a painting set, and a mountain bike. After forty years of work, Taxi had felt some unknown urge to make more time for recreation and at least attempt to enjoy his now-undesired immortality. He was more dissatisfied than he’d ever been, and he couldn’t imagine the situation getting any worse. He had had the mind to quit a few times now, but he had no idea what Johann, or even worse, Bill, would do to him. As if he knew what Taxi was thinking, the radio once again crackled to life in the passenger seat. Hmm, I guess they make these things cordless now, Taxi silently griped.

            “Hello there, One-Eight-Naught,” Bill’s voice came in loud and clear, although Johann was still muttering murder in the background, “I am sure you know that we know you killed someone while off-duty. Please come back to the Majestic immediately. As much as I would love to, I admit that I cannot bring you here against your will, but be aware that I can find you if you choose to run.”

            I hate to be redundant, Taxi thought, but shit! What the hell can I do? I probably can’t run, I definitely can’t go back there… I need a miracle. At that moment, a miracle happened to not look both ways and ended up blocking Taxi’s path. Slamming on the brakes and screaming at the top of his lungs, Taxi cursed his brains out at the bastard in the sedan who had dared get in the way of his tinted and tainted taxi. Then he saw something that the other driver could not see, partially because of his rage, and partially because of Taxi’s taxi’s tinted windows. The other driver, that bumbling British bastard, was the same one from the grocery store. It had to be some sort of sign, there was no other explanation. He didn’t know what it was that made him do it, but Taxi jammed the gas. Swerving around (and narrowly missing) the grey sedan, Taxi floored his cab down the avenue, and grabbed the microphone of his radio:

            “This is driver F-U; I hear you, and I quit. Jackass.” And with that, Taxi dropped the mike and finished speeding down the road. He had a plan, maybe.

10/29: Made some changes, powered out the rest of the intro on the train. I think the rest of the book should be ready to rock. When I get it all together, it may be as long as, that's right, 80 pages. I'm talking real novel here, and damn does it feel good. This opening, however, welcomes any revision that you gracious people could give, and I'm always loving to hear your feedback!

Okay, this is how the book works: it's a mock scientific discourse, written by me in a pseudonym. The experiment, obviously, is trying to prove that people actually sabotage themselves when it comes to matters of love, and that humans aren't meant to love. I know, I'm a genius for thinking such abstract and amazing thoughts. Please, less praise, and more criticism!

But seriously, I'm going to spend 5-10 more pages having the psychologist discuss the experiment, and then write 5-7 short stories from the perspective of various people interviewed. These stories are all going to support the scientists theory, and all of the people and events are based off my conversation with other people (and some of my own experiences as well). So all of it will be true, which is incredibly unsettling in parts, even to me. But I don't have that right now, all I have is this.

Oh, and there are also numbers above certain points. Those are 'endnotes', which will cite fictitious works and give extraneous information about things you really don't care about. I'm probably going to add in more end-notes as I go along, but as of right now, me not putting the actual notes up won't detract from your reading of the 'study' at all.

Without any further ado, I present this writing to you.

-blake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Art of Self-Sabotage

OR

How certain psychological impulses (if not counteracted) can lead to a healthy misery.

 

A discourse by Dr. Jonathon T. Murray, Ph. D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Brief Introduction from the Author

To all who may encounter this book while searching for some sort of truth:

             I would first like to offer you salutations and congratulations for finding this study. Doubtless, by now it has been brought to your attention by some strange and coincidental means. Maybe it got pushed off into some obscure psychology journal you had to read for an assignment in class or pleasure; maybe by now, it is nothing more than a dusty pamphlet pushed into a corner of an academy library. But I digress. I did not write this section merely to pose additional hypotheses; this portion of the study is meant to douse any debate roused by skeptics and their sycophants. So without further ado, here is the written support that I can give to you, all of the hard support can be found in the actual study, whether through data, descriptions, or debate.

            I will be the first to admit to you the reader, as well as the general scientific community, that at first glance, this does not seem like an extremely scientific discourse. I am sure that there are some who, without further exploration of the topic at hand, will deem this study largely hypothetical, easily falsifiable, and dare I say, unscientific. However, I assure you that this is simply not the case. This study is the result of four years and two months’ research of a large and varied pool of volunteers. I will discuss the various statistics later, but rest assured, many of the researchers who disagree with my findings are, at the very least, forced to admit the extensiveness of my studies. Also, every participant in this experiment was shielded from the true nature of this study, as to ensure the results desired were unfettered by a desire to…well; let’s just say to sabotage the experiment. I don’t want to give away too much information regarding the content of the experiment; that will be for you to observe as you read further. So I will leave this introduction brief in regard to complaints. If there are any questions regarding the validity of this experiment, they will most likely be answered in the course of this discourse. I merely wished to address the issues I felt were the most prominent here.

            Secondly, I wish to establish here the cause and purpose which this study is based upon. This study was initially provoked by coincidence: one of my colleagues from New York City (a fellow by the name of Lee Russell), was discussing with me the psychology of love. The neo-behaviorists such as Czarrp, Dickson, and Grangé all agree that love is a predictable behavior in humans, and they go on to say it is also a mannerism quite different from lust¹*. I’ll not go into their studies, as that is not the purpose of this introduction, but that is how Dr. Russell and I started our conversation. This conversation eventually led to a subtopic which, quite frankly, I have become engrossed in; the necessity of love in human lives. Granted, infants and youth need care and nurturing from their parents, and adolescents and adults both crave comradery and reproduction. But is love essential to a human’s being, or does lust suffice? This question perturbed me almost as much as its subsequent musings: how could one conclusively prove that love is a necessary or unnecessary emotion? While trying to find an answer either way, I stumbled on the concept of self-sabotage, which is what this report is based on. I will leave further explanation to the experiment, but I felt that it would greatly help your understanding of this concept to see what led to the study in the first place. So now, I will leave you to read about my findings. Scoff at them, canonize them; I care not. Above all things, I pray you will consider the implications my findings have on the workings of society, whether you believe them to be true or not.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jonathon Thomas Murray

 

*- The superimposed numbers designate end-notes, which I have organized for your viewing pleasure at the tail end of this discourse. They do not need to be scrupulously studied, or even looked at. They merely serve as errata so that I might assuage my fears of not explaining myself fully in select places.

Description of Concepts and Experiments

            First and foremost, the concept of self-sabotage should be discussed here, so as to clear up any ambiguities there may be surrounding this idea. Self-sabotage is a person’s subconscious instinct to physically, mentally or socially purge himself of certain unnecessary toxins. Self-sabotage obviously originates in the mental realm, but it does not have to be confined to there. Compare this concept to when one imbibes too much alcohol. The mind knows that the body has had too much to drink, so what does it do? It treats the alcohol like any other poison in the body, and attempts to expel it by any means possible. Now, this is a concept that will definitely work for the physical self, but what about the intangible and unconscious? Well, this is what these experiments are trying to outline. Surely you have noticed something such as this before. It could be a social response, such as one’s innate habit of ostracizing themselves from a group which participates in activities or holds beliefs the person disagrees with. Or it could be a purely mental action. For instance, the mind could orchestrate non-tactile actions that would prevent them from participating in said hazardous activities or consorting with such people. Therefore, the term ‘self-sabotage’ should not be considered a negative one, for it appears to work in the same way as other, healthy ways of preventing hazardous behavior. At the time, the person will think ill of their decision or action, but as events unfold, they will soon realize that they did the right thing. But, once again comparing this action to the imbibing of alcohol, this will not necessarily stop the person from repeating the action. Just as an alcoholic might think that their vomiting and hangover won’t happen again, a self-saboteur might realize that they somehow did wrong, yet repeat their actions over and over, only to have them ‘purged’ again in the same way.

The process of self-sabotage, as I have previously stated, is not a negative one. In fact, it helps the body pass through times which would otherwise be harmful or block progression. However, I can fully understand why one might see it as a hazardous behavior. Yet if self-sabotage really was hazardous, why has it not been wiped away by years of Darwin’s Natural Selection? Well, to the contrary of this statement, self-sabotage may have been developed by humans as a result of evolution; maybe even in the last fifty or one hundred years². But most importantly, when does self-sabotage occur? Well, now that self-sabotage has been defined, I can present the hypothesis which surrounded these experiments. You see, in the beginning of these experiments, my colleagues and I were trying to devise a reason as to why love may not be vital to a human’s existence. After conducting a series of preliminary experiments that were in accordance to the other experiments in this discourse, I came to a completely different, and much more shocking, hypothesis, as follows:

Human beings were never meant to behave in such a way towards each other that exemplifies the common definition of ‘love’. Therefore, when in a romantic relationship with another, a person who is a ‘self-saboteur’ will attempt to ruin their relationship, whether by physical, verbal/emotional, or social actions.

This hypothesis has been tested extensively, to the best of my knowledge, on approximately 4,500 males and 500 females over the course of this experiment³. However, I feel that I need to delay the description of these experiments once again to better explain the composition of the test group.

            Our test group was 90% males for a specific reason. We started off testing both males and females; the subjects’ ages ranged from puberty to middle maturity (the age range of our subjects was from 14 to 40). However, we stopped testing females after about half a year, because we found that females simply were not susceptible. In all of the tests given, females continually failed to show any signs of self-sabotage, the reasons for which I can only guess⁴. Out of all 500 women surveyed, none of them gave even the hint of having self-sabotaging characteristics, even the earliest symptoms in men. Therefore, it was unanimously decided by everybody conducting the experiments to drop the study of women, and solely focus on the prominence of self-sabotage in men. Even though our field was now fairly limited, we still garnered simply amazing results. Out of all the men tested, only 8.13% showed absolutely no signs of self-sabotaging tendencies. The majority of these men were in a happy relationship, usually a marital one, and they were all over thirty years of age. This once again points to the evolutionary theory; that self-sabotage is a trait that is currently in formation in the human race. The entire breakdown of the male subjects is as follows:

Age:

·         14-21 years old: 1,500 subjects

·         22-30 years old: 1,500 subjects

·         31-40 years old: 1,500 subjects

Evidence of self-sabotage:

·         No signs of self-sabotage: ~8.13%

·         Slight signs of self-sabotage (1-3 minor relationships): ~13.37%

·         Average signs of self-sabotage (3-10 minor relationships, 1-2 major relationships): ~41.55%

·         Severe signs of self-sabotage (10+ minor relationships, 2+ major relationships: ~36.95%⁵

If the signs of self-sabotage are so high, where people botch a large amount of their relationships in life, how is this trait passed on through generations, if it truly is a result of natural selection? Well, this question is surprisingly easy to answer. There have been a number of studies and surveys done to estimate the number of teenage pregnancies, and in a large amount of cases, a divorced or separated couple have reproduced and subsequently had children. Since the separation rate is so high in the United States today (a recent survey stated that about 37% of children did not live with both biological parents at the time when these experiments were done⁶), one can infer that the children of these relationships are victims of self-sabotage, and the males will probably have a noticeably larger chance of becoming a self-saboteur later on in life. Even if self-sabotage is not a genetic factor, the single-parent environment these children are raised in will undoubtedly affect the way they perceive romantic relationships. Neo-behaviorists and classical behaviorists across the map will agree that whether self-sabotage is brought on by nature or nurture, these single-parent children will have intense impressions of living a solitary life. Of course, the cause does not always lead to this effect, but the statistics once again show that subjects at a younger age tended to show larger tendencies towards self-sabotage than their elders. Sorted by age, below is displayed the number of male subjects who showed either average or severe signs of self-sabotage⁷:

·         31-40 years old:  708 subjects

·         22-30 years old: 1,354 subjects

·         14-21 years old: 1,470 subjects

            As you can see, the youth in this study are more than twice as susceptible as the middle-aged men to self-sabotage in their life! The quickly rising figures here make it clear that this is not simply a trend or fad, but a lasting change that will be sure to affect future generations. Either by the cultural messages the youth are exposed to, the family they are raised in, or the DNA inside their body; the tendency towards self-sabotage is increasing at an incredible rate. I am no sociologist, so I cannot predict what will happen to the American culture as a whole if this trend continues at a similar rate. However, I would like to point out that even in the most rudimentary of societies, animals take mates who they look after and care for as they raise offspring. Companionship in animals is quite common, as the survival rate in wild animals tends to increase with numbers⁸. So then how is this trait beneficial to evolution or society? I have absolutely no idea how to answer this question, and I fully recognize that it is one of the enigmas that happened to arise from this experiment. Please keep in mind that the purpose of this experiment was to diagnose whether or not love is a necessary trait in humans, and to touch on this concept of self-sabotage that was discovered in the course of these experiments. Of course, the existence of self-sabotage alone should be enough to prove that romantic love is not a vital part of life, but I will make no such presumptions. In fact, that is why I will absolutely refuse to put a finite conclusion to the original question of this experiment. This discourse is on the topic of self-sabotage; the concept of love has been reviewed, but with the amount of self-saboteurs that are present in our society, it should be fairly obvious that the answer to the question of vital love is ‘no’.

            Once again, I must reiterate that I feel this is a conclusion you must come to on your own, and that this paper is not a discourse on the prevalence of love in human society today. It is a discussion of this new concept that we have uncovered by piecing together the behaviors of various individuals who exhibited a similar style of behavior. At this point, I believe that the only portion of this experiment left to discuss is the method of experimentation performed on the subjects. All of the subjects studied in this experiment were volunteers, but they were not aware of the nature of the experiment. It was only natural to shield the nature of our experiment, as we wanted our results to be as unfettered as possible. Therefore, these tests were not even advertised as a scientific experiment, but a series of creative writing exercises and interviews. As far-fetched as this may seem, it will all make sense once I have further described our procedures.

            First, we gathered the subjects as thoroughly as we could by looking for volunteers of all ages and equal gender (although as I have said, we desisted looking for women early on in the experiment). The youngest volunteers that we took were boys of around fourteen, but we made sure that these boys were mature for their age, and that they had already hit the age of puberty. They were largely asked hypothetical questions, because at such an early age, these boys would not have had as much relationship experience. This is another criticism drawn from other scientists who thoroughly analyzed this experiment: how do you distinguish ‘major’ from ‘minor’ relationships in boys under the age of, say, twenty-one? In fact, how do you identify and distinguish between the two types of relationships in general? Of course, this is a question that I need to address, because the experiment is incredibly dependant on these classifications.

            For the purposes of this experiment, we judged any ‘major’ relationship as a relationship that served as a landmark in the subject’s life. Such landmarks could be their first relationship, their first non-virginal relationship, relationships that last for over one year, and similar events. One of the most distinguishing factors of a ‘major’ relationship in a person’s life is their answer to the question, “In your opinion, who was your best relationship with?” The people that the subjects named were either one of these landmarks, or (usually in cases of major self-sabotage) a relationship that was broken off prematurely for some reason. This relationship usually served as a focal point for our interrogations and writing topics, as the relationships held dearest to a person are generally the ones they can recall easiest. That matter will be discussed more in-depth when I discuss how my team and I interviewed the subjects. Now that you have a general definition of ‘major’ relationships as opposed to their ‘minor’ counterparts, you can begin to get an image of how we questioned those who have not had many relationships in general, let alone many major relationships. Let me continue to explain, however, so that there are no questions about the validity of our methods.

            When dealing with the youth or those inexperienced with relationships⁹, the following general questions were posed:

·         At what age did you engage in your first relationship?

·         How long did that relationship last? Was it your longest relationship?

·         Have you had any other relationships? (If so, which did you enjoy the most, and why? How long did they last?)

Questions such as these started out incredibly general; as I’m sure you can see. However, depending on the person’s answers, general, more specific questions were asked. It is impossible to detail all of the questions that we asked, as they were about 75% tailored to the individual. However, as this discourse progresses further and you encounter the ‘Demonstrations’ section, you will see how the questions asked to each subject varied. Like fingerprints and snowflakes, no two series of questions were exactly alike. But going back to the inexperienced or young subjects, hypothetical questions such as these were also posed:

·         What are the ideal qualities that you are looking for in a significant other?

·         Why have you not engaged in more relationships?¹⁰

·         Are you more of an aggressive or passive person when it comes to pursuing relationships? Can you explain why?

·         What was the reason for the termination of your ‘favorite’ relationship?

As you can see, these questions were directed to specific aspects of the person’s character to try and pinpoint the reason (if it was not simply youth) they had not engaged in more relationships. More often than not, as you can see in Discussions 4 and 5, these reasons were indeed signs that self-sabotage dictates many of the actions that person makes. Surprisingly, although the number of relationships to self-sabotage was lower in these people, ratios told more than numbers. In looking at the number of relationships sabotaged, the ratios remained almost constant with those of minor and major self-saboteurs. Of course, this led us to the conclusion that if these people do continue to engage in romantic activity, they will ruin the same amount of relationships as their older and more experienced counterparts. This seems an obvious fact, but I feel it is necessary to emphasize how we established the existence of these characteristics in people who have not had the same time or opportunity as the majority of our subjects. We shunned no male volunteers, and frankly, had females shown any signs of self-sabotage, we would have accepted all volunteers of the XX variety as well. I feel that the examination of these less-experienced subjects was more than satisfactory, and so now I will continue to discuss the process of examination that all subjects undertook.

            As was previously mentioned, the subjects were led to believe they were participating in a thought and writing exercise undertook by my alma mater, Bloomfield College. Of course, this was not the case, but my colleagues and I are positive that nobody save one subject¹¹ was certain of the true aim of this experiment. During this exercise, each subject was paired with a professor the college had hired (This was partially true; as Bloomfield was nice enough to give what meager funds were needed to these experiments. However, the professor in this case was a psychologist such as me). The subjects were tested for two sessions and given one homework assignment. Each session was roughly 4 hours, and it consisted of thought exercises and concentrated writing combined with the questions we designated to ask. For the first half hour of each session, the subject was asked to partake in a warm-up writing exercise, where they would write in a stream-of-consciousness style and then review what they had written¹². Then, the subject would discuss the strong and weak points of their writing with the confederate-professor, and they were given a topic to think about and write about throughout the course. We never advertised how unique each topic would be, but as you may have guessed by now, every topic was the same. The exact topic they were asked to focus their thought and writing on was “Relationships and Love”. A fairly general topic; the subjects were then asked to write whatever they felt comfortable with for whatever length they felt comfortable with. This project was assigned at the end of the first session, and was to be handed in one week after the second session took place (the two sessions were held on consecutive days). These papers allowed my team to divulge how prevalent self-sabotage was in these relationships. The subjects were also asked to—whether in fiction or fact—write truthfully how they felt about relationships and love.

To better prompt the subject about this topic, they were prompted to think about their own experiences for about an hour and a half each session (usually the last 90 minutes of each session). During this time, they were to outline each of their relationships in-depth, evoking their own feeling about their experience and generally giving the session (and the experiment) a more personalized feel. The subjects’ emotions varied greatly during these question/answer periods; some of them were totally candid and nonchalant in describing their relationships, but this was not the general case. Usually, the subject would be apprehensive and questioning, but after fifteen or so minutes of discussion, they would open up more and give more heartfelt responses¹³. As I previously stated, it is impossible to generalize the emotions that subjects expressed, as every single case was unique. There were subjects who laughed about their experiences, subjects who wept upon remembrance, and every imaginable emotion in between. I cannot begin to explain how the subjects differed in discussion, so I hope that this will be enough to satiate your queries about the responses garnered. Once again, in the ‘Discussions’ section, individual subjects will be related, but the seven included by no means speak for every aspect observed.

 The written assignments collected from subjects were an even greater indicator of how prevalent self-sabotage is in a typical human’s life. The stories, written from the author’s opinion, were generally advertised as ‘fiction’. From the results gathered, about 85% of the subjects wished their tales to be viewed as works of fiction. The other 15% ranged from journalesque dictation to factual accounts and opinions that were as clearly laid out as this discourse (for the sake of brevity, we grouped all the stories into ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’). Even though most of the stories were fiction, they largely reinforced what their author discussed in the ‘workshops’ with the researcher. For instance, many of the stories were written from the point of a character (or the author) while they were in the relationship that they deemed to be their ‘favorite’. In these stories, they repeated what they said in their interviews, but they also revealed new factors of their relationship or beliefs that were not expressed during their conversations in the experiment. For this reason, the stories served as a vital part in our understanding of how self-sabotage affects a person’s judgment, as the subjects turned out to be more likely to reveal intricate details in their writing than in their interviews. All of the pieces in the ‘Discussions’ section, with the exception of my personal additions, are word-for-word what the subject revealed to us in their final project. The seven pieces chosen for ‘Discussions’ are by no means the best-written or most entertaining novels of the bunch, or at least if they are, that was not our intention. These stories are intended to be the ones that best represented different forms of the same malady; the best representations of the ways self-sabotage can manifest itself in a person.

            I feel that I have, by this point, appropriately outlined the concepts and fine details of this experiment. I hope that I have painted a clear enough picture of the concept of self-sabotage; especially how and why the tendencies to sabotage oneself are manifested. I also hope that my outlining of the experiment—specifically the subjects studied and tests done—has been to your satisfaction, and that you can see how these subjects were tested and why we chose the subject pool that you saw on pages 5-6. Finally, I hope that everybody who reads this comprehends the importance of this experiment as well as its credibility. I, nor any of my colleagues, wish for this study to be dismissed, forgotten, or labeled a product of some ‘neo-behaviorist pseudo-science’. While the ideals may be neo-behaviorist in nature, I feel that this is not sufficient reason enough to dismiss the study, and I hope that take these views into serious consideration; especially with the implications they make about the future of human culture.

So to catch all of you up who haven't been reading me at all, I'm in the middle of an incredibly large creative block right now. It's been lasting for about the last two weeks of my life, and it's absolutely horrible. And I wish that I could say it was just a bad case of writer's block, but it's so much more than that. I can't write, yes, but I also can't even formulate good ideas. Define good ideas? Well, I do comedy, I regularly come up with about 2 story ideas a week that I don't start at all, and I'm witty and quick on my feet (which is only good for 1) Picking up people and 2) Improv, neither of which, coincidentally, I've felt like doing recently). I'm trying so so so so so so hard not to turn this into a fucking livejournal post right now, but it's really hard not to, simply because it's exactly how I feel right now. I don't really know how to explain it in any other simplistic terms save this one:

I feel listless, plain and simple. There's a few big ideas that've gone through my head, but nothing that I've really expanded on save this:

This summer, I am going to hitchhike as far across America as possible from May 30th to July 1st, then turn back and come home. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're going to say; it's just like On The Road... or is it? To make things a little bit more challenging, and a lot more interesting for us, we've decided to only take the following things:
1) A blank journal
2) A few disposable cameras
3) Medical stuff and one or two changes of clothes
4) Identification
5) An emergency credit card and cellphone.
6) A towel

That's right, gentlemen and lady, we're going to hitchhike across the USA without any form of money. It's going to be one hell of an amazing trip, both in the literal sense, and in the mental sense. I think that above all things, it'll give us a sense of just how vital (or otherwise) money is to our existence here in America. I doubt that it'll work without a hitch (we'll probably have to use the credit card somehow or somewhere), but if it does, that'll simply be mind-blowing.

So yeah, that's my summer. I'll probably post more on the stops we plan on making and give people chances to get in touch with me/Zack if you'd be so kind to shack us for the night or drive us places. None of it's finite, but I'm sure that you lovely folks will be loving and accommodating, especially a few of my college pals.

Besides that, there's not a lot to go into today. I'm working with whatever free time I have on a short story/novel that I plan on having at least rough by the end of November. I'll post more of it as more of it comes into play (maybe I'll even get a section up here tonight). Also, I've been talking about doing a rant or two, but the mood hasn't struck me since Saturday night. As I said before, maybe my mood will change and I'll get something up here tonight. Probably not, but keep your fingers crossed!

Ooh, also an errata: For all my Bardians who read this, stand-up comedy has been changed this week. From now on, it's every other Wednesday at 9:30, NOT 10:00! Small change, but I know I'll be going up in the first half hour. Hope to see everyone there!

-blake.