Category Archives: Fiction

Sartre Had it Wrong

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I’m sitting naked on the toilet.  I’ve been sitting here for an hour and a half.  The shower is running the entire time and the hot water has been used up.  All my roommates are gone, and won’t be back in until tomorrow.  I can’t call them because my phone it charging on my desk.  They can’t help me.  No one can help me now.

The trash can is empty.  There are no clothes on the bathroom floor because I undressed before I even came into the bathroom.

There are paper towels in the kitchen, but that’s 25 feet away, and all the neighbors would be able to see me walking, crouched down in shameful discomposure, through the windows.  All of which are open.

My towel hangs on the wall, silently laughing its 2-ply, ring-spun, combed African cotton taunts at me.  It knows I can’t use it to get out of this mess.  Using it would only make the mess worse.

I’ve flushed I-don’t-know-how-many times.  I stopped counting once I realized you can’t time the flushes to create a decent splashback.

Hell is not other people.  That’s ridiculous.  Hell is the long, dark solitude that leads to fantasies of owning a bidet.  Hell is longing for even the tiniest scrap of those subscription inserts that fall out of magazines.  Hell is being here, in this situation, with absolutely no toilet paper. nopaper

ETA . . . Yesterday or Tomorrow?

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Marty had been driving for close to three hours before he noticed anything had changed.  His attention had been so focused on the large rotunda at Los Angeles International Airport that led to all the terminals’ pick-up and drop-off zones, he hadn’t noticed what else had been going on around him.  His girlfriend’s plane had been delayed departing from South Carolina because of a large woman in a wheelchair had gotten stuck at the airplane door, delayed at a stop-over in Houston while they waited for a replacement pilot since the original one had gotten sick, then had to take a detour mid-flight because of some ‘weather anomaly’ heading towards Los Angeles, and then delayed again at the gate for reasons unbeknown to him.

After forty minutes of circling through the airport, Marty had been ready to tell his girlfriend to call him when she was finally outside, and then go to a bar at the Holiday Inn down the street.  But she wouldn’t like that.  For one, she would insist on driving home since Marty had been known to knock back one or two or five or six drinks without a breath in between; and two, she had explicitly said she didn’t like waiting in the pick-up zone (something about the desperate cigarette smoke of the tar-breaths).  So Marty had stayed, not wanting to deal with a pissed off girlfriend after so much driving.

After an hour and twenty minutes, however, Marty had enough.  Unfortunately, it was one of those days in Los Angeles.  Marty was convinced that Southern California really had only five weather patterns: Perfect Sunshine, Rain, Too Much Sunshine, The Final Earthquake to End California, and Traffic.  On this day, the airport has been struck with a mighty trafficstorm and Marty had not been able to maneuver his way to the LAX exit before being put on the return road back to the terminals.  Bumpers bumped, horns honked, busses strong-armed onto the road, and pain-in-the-ass pedestrians were crossing wherever they felt like it.

After an hour and forty five minutes, what seemed to be lightning flashed around they airport.  This surprised Marty because there was not a single cloud in the sky.  He looked out his window to see if some power line had busted, but then had to swerve slightly to miss an elderly couple who were the road 20 feet away from the crosswalk.  He stuck his head out the window to apologize and saw the couple looking back at him in disappointment and regret, as if they had wanted to be hit.

After just over two hours, Marty did not care about picking up his girlfriend, nor about trying to exit the airport altogether; now it was about principle.  This traffic was a war, a rampage, and it was each man for himself.  Many cars would enter this arena, but only one would leave.  He intended on being that lone hero, and damned any automobile that dared cross his ire.

So Marty had not noticed when the cars had begun to change.  It was nothing any normal person could pick out, because many cars from the early 2000’s all the way back to the 1980’s were still widely used in this day and age, and it was not so unusual to see them on the road.  The advertisements on the busses had begun to change as well, from The Dark Knight Rises, to the rerelease of Titanic, to Harry Potter, to Shrek, to the original release of Titanic, and so on.  But these advertisements could only be seen on the side of busses, and Marty had not been paying attention.

It wasn’t until Marty had stopped just short of running over a tall, black man in a red disco outfit, who had said, “Watch where you’re going, you fucking honky!” that he clued into his surroundings.

Something was definitely different about the place.  It looked older, somehow.  No, not older, because everything was clean and looked like it had just been made.  No, things looked . . . retro.  He started to pull over, but the traffic was still a nightmare, and so he just kept circling.

But after three and a half hours, Marty found that the more he kept going in circles the more dated everything became.  The planes flying over head began to get smaller.  The styles of clothing he saw at the terminals began to look like stuff out of some Norman Rockwell painting.  A newspaper, carried on a gust of wind, flew into his window and onto his face.  He pulled it off and glanced at a headline saying ‘EISENHOWER REFERS TO ASIA AS A COMMUNIST DOMINO” before chucking it back out the window.

Traffic had finally started to die down, but Marty was afraid to stop now.  While a Prius in his day and age was a normal sight to see, in the 1940’s it would look like some sort of spacecraft.  It did look like some sort of space craft, and many people were gawking and eyeing him as he drove through the airport.  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and realized that he was almost as shocking as his car; a hipster-wannabe, with a styled beard, pierced nose, tattoos crawling up his neck, in a tank-top with “My Little Pony” stamped on the front.  No, getting out was no longer an option.

Could he turn around?  Maybe driving the other direction would send him back to his own time.  It was an option, but then he would be driving against traffic, and while he could dodge the few amount of cars on the road now, he was not so sure he could forgo a head on collision once he got closer to his time, and then he’s really be stuck.

He could just stop and start living in the current time.  Sure, he would look strange, but he had gotten paid this past Tuesday (or will get paid, once he’s born), and Marty had cashed it all and filled his wallet.  That money could go a long way in the current time, and he could just hop on a plane to Asia or some Caribbean Island, where his look might not be so foreign.  And with his knowledge of future events, he could probably make a fortune with very little effort.  Hell, he might even be able to set up a trust fund for himself, his future self, so that the would-be-he would never have to worry about money after college.

The idea was entertaining, but Marty doubted he could pull it off.  Sure he could make some money, but he was finding it hard to come to grips with never having the internet again.  WWII, Vietnam?  No problem.  A life without cute cat pictures and YouTube?

“Not on your life,” Marty said, and sped up.

After four hours, Marty was in the mid-1940’s, and both the car traffic and air traffic had died down.  Twenty minutes after that, the airport celebrated its opening.  Twenty minutes after that, and there was no airport.

Even though it was over bare dirt, Marty kept driving in circles.  He was grateful that he had filled his tank before coming to the airport and that his car was a hybrid.  He didn’t know how much longer he could go, and he didn’t want to get stuck, but he felt he had no other choice but to keep going.  He just hoped that time was actually cyclular instead of a straight line, and that he would eventually end up where he left off.  Sure, it was some shoddy sci-fi plot line from an episode of SG-1, but it’s all Marty had to go on.

He flipped through the case of CDs he kept in his car.  He found the soundtrack to Jurassic Park, stuck it in the player, hit the accelerator, and began waiting for the dinosaurs. 

Multi-Tasking on a Sunday Morning

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This . . .  this isn’t very easy . . .

I thought I had this post all set but something went wrong . . . now I am writing this while I’m driving.

This . . . this isn’t very easy.  People in other cars are looking at me.  Sure . . . whoa, almost hit a truck . . . sure, people type on their smartphones while driving.  They’re not supposed to but they do.  But no one expects to look over to the car next to them and see the driver typing furiously on a laptop taped to the steering wheel –

-whoops.  That house didn’t need that mailbox, right?

I’m . . . I’m actually starting to get the hang out of it a little.  If I need to turn left I just start using the left side of the keyboard a little more OH GOD – was was was was WAS WAS WAS WAS WAS WAS WAS WAS  . . . . phew.  That was close.

Uh oh.  A cop is coming up.  Hello Mr. Officer.  Nice day we’re having isn’t it?

Shit, did I just type that, or did I say it out loud?  I’m getting confused.

Sure, I could pull over and finish this, but there’s this bakery that offers these delicious almond croissants for half off for the first hour that they are open and I need to get there and if you say that it’s not a good reason to endanger everyone on the road by POLLY POLLY POLLY POLLY concentrating more on the computer than the wheel then all I have to say is ADE ADE ADE ADE ADE is that you’ve never had one of these croissants.  I wouldn’t kill you in cold blood for one, but manslaughter?  Small price to pay.

Hey, when did everyone on the road start driving the other wayOH SHIT!

Asdkfjha woeifj ldk.  Adlfkj oeinfops.  Ssssssssssssssssssssss.  JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ!

This isn’t so hard.  In fact, the world suddenly seems like a brighter place.  My heart is in my throat.  I need to change my underwear.

This is going to be the best croissant ever.

Shit, I need to get me one of these.

That’s Quite a Get-Up

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“Yeah, this outfit only attracts a certain kind of asshole in a place like this,” the young lady who I shared an economics class with screamed to me over the loud, throbbing pulse that some one some where must call music if it’s being played in a club.  “But if I had any dignity at all, you think I’d be here in the first place, drinking this . . . ‘whatever’tini?  Once you hit bottom, it’s easier to keep going down instead of reclaiming your pride.  After awhile, it becomes sort of a game to see how much further you can push the line.  My friends and I started a contest.”

“Are you winning?”

She paused to down the rest of her drink, wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, and eye a prospect dancing across the room.  “No one wins.  You don’t win with things like that.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that logic, I told myself, and went outside to get a bacon-wrapped hotdog from the vendor on the corner.

Unknown Spirits of the Modern World: The Chapeater

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There are numerous gods of lost artifacts, many having evolved from older gods of long ago times that have modernized the objects they stand for (e.g. “Where did I tie up my horse?” to “Where did I park?”).  Others have not needed to update or change much as their embodied objects have more or less stayed the same over the centuries.  Some, however, have only relatively appeared and are often overlooked by even the newest gods.

Of the lost artifact gods (or “Losties” as they like to call themselves) the most prevalent are, of course, the Lord of Lost Keys, KeyKlar, and the great sock stealer Lintam, who reign over all the losties as they are some of the oldest.  But of the modern losties, there is one of the gods that is rarely paid notice to and yet he has touched many lives across the globe.  He is Chapeater, the God of Lost Chapstick.

Chapeater, or Wax Lippy Lips as he is known among the godsect, presides over all of the chapstick in the world.  Barely over 100 years old, Chapeater has never been a prevalent lord despite having impacted almost every modern life in first world countries.  Unlike KeyKlar, who fashions extravagant armor out of his boons, or Lintam who simply throws all of his boons into a large, mountainous pile, Chapeater has built himself a small cabin out of lost tubes of chapstick.  Located in the forests of Canada, Chapeater’s abode is small, uniform and symmetrical, no more than a large plastic box hidden in some trees.  “The cold climate is good for the chapstick,” Chapeater says, “because a lot of heat melts the balm.  It’s horrible when you wake up and you’re covered in slime.  I’d smell like a holistic medicine beach bum for weeks on end.”

Chapeater also remarked that his cabin is comprised entirely of old chapstick tubes with some of them dating back at least sixty years or so.  When I inquired as to why he doesn’t replace the tubes, or expand his cabin into a larger house, Chapeater says, “I’m a simple lostie.  I don’t need to have large piles of things or lavish costumes.  The size of this place gives me all the room I need.  A place to sleep, eat and work; anything else is extravagance.”

As to where all the chapstick that he has collected since finishing his cabin has gone, his name is all the explanation one needs.  “I eat them.  Turn the tube so the rest of the stick shows and then gobble gobble.  And now that chapstick is coming with all sorts of vitamins to help the skin and such, I have a much healthier diet.”

Despite being an ignored god, controversy has surrounded Chapeater since the 1980’s, when the God of Lost Pets proclaimed at the annual Lostie Convention that, “Chapeater’s inclusion into the Lostie sect is outrageous.  Humans don’t lose chapstick, they merely forget about it and then throw them away when they do find them.  He is a trash-digger, not a god.”

“I can understand the argument,” Chapeater tells us, “but the fact remains that this station still exists and that I hold the title.  How humans treat these artifacts is of little consequence in the end, for even if they throw them away they will always require more.  Then they will think, ‘Where did I put that last tube of chapstick?’, and then their discarded sticks become my boon.”

When asked whether he is worried that his station might one day become obsolete, Chapeater said, “No, I’m not worried in the slightest.  I mean, think about: Have you ever finished an entire tube of chapstick?”

“Aren’t You Going To Write Your Blog Post For Today,” . . .

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. . . my girlfriend asked me as I dished out a small serving of Singapore Noodles onto my plate.  I broke the chopsticks and rubbed away the remaining splinters away with my thumbs and dug into the thin, curry flavored noodles.  I choked slightly as I attempted to chuckle while chewing with my mouth closed.  “Do you not have a topic?”

“You don’t know how blogging works, do you,” I asked as I finally swallowed the noodles in my mouth and then washed it down with some expensive looking cheap beer.

“What do you mean?  I have a blog, too.”

“Topics are for beginners.  A person doesn’t need to worry about theme or topics or plot.  As long as you strike the right tone, readers will think that you’re writing about something even if they don’t know what.”

“What?”

“Why, I could even write this conversation, word for word, and as long as I did it in the right manner, people would enjoy it.  In fact, I’ll do that tonight.”

“But we’re just eating cheap Chinese food.  Nothing’s happening.  There’s nothing interesting about this.”

“I agree,” I said, louder than I had intended, “but the fact remains that an experienced writer, or one who is more lucky than talented, can make the mundane seem important.  And by the time you’re making something seem like something it might as well be something, at least on paper.”

My girlfriend stopped chewing and stared at me.  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“That is because your mind is too literal to comprehend the basic tenets of deception.  It takes guile to fool someone.”

I was startled, but I can’t say I was surprised, when she threw the noodles that were on her plate on to my head.  A piece of chicken toppled off my nose and I was able to catch it in my mouth before it dropped to the floor.  She poured more noodles on her place and began to eat again.  She wasn’t angry.  I figured she got it all out when she upended her dinner over my hair.  I was happy that was the end of it and there would be no ensuing fight that I would have to work against the rest of the evening, but she had ruined the experiment I had set for myself – to write about nothing and make it seem like it was about something.  My offensive comments and her rash actions had forced a plot into the evening, and now the entire story had a purpose.

But there was still some room for breathing; would it be about my girlfriend’s inability to grasp the bare bones of art as a whole, making something from nothing and fooling the audience?  Or would it be my insensitivity to her view and abilities?  Or would it be how, through all the dumb, careless and petty things we say, the bonds between people will always survive?  I don’t know . . . that will be up for the readers to decide. 

This Has to Be a Kind of False Advertising

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I first started to be concerned when my feet stopped touching the ground.  I hovered a few inches off of the sidewalk as the gusts of wind blew around me.  Then I became quite alarmed as I shot up through the sky and began to float over my neighborhood.

You’d be surprised what you’d find while you’re dangling fifty feet in the air.  Fred Hunter, the vocational guidance counselor that lives a few houses down from me, doesn’t take good care of his pool, which is a shame because it’s the biggest in the area, by far.  Mr. Chapel, whose wife died early last spring, is apparently building a boat from large sheets of galvanized steel and what looks like empty tuna cans in his backyard.  But he still tends to the late Mrs. Chapel’s garden, which looks a bright and cheery as ever.  The new skylight that the Johnsons had installed in their bathroom looks great, although I can see Mrs. Johnson (who is looking fabulous now that she’s on that diet) stripping to take a bath.  I’ll have to warn them about people being able to see through that skylight while they’re naked.  Normally you wouldn’t worry about people floating fifty feet in the air, and yet here I am, and since the advertisement for this jacket appeared in the local neighborhood newsletter, I’m sure this sort of thing will start happening more and more.

I reach into one of the many pockets of this new jacket to find that advertisement, which I had been reading when I went for a walk this morning.  It appeared in the “ANOTHER MAN’S TRASH IS YOUR FORTUNE” ad section in the Walton Boulevard Gazette, a small bi-weekly newspaper that Miss Greiger prints out of her garage.  Right underneath the Loaf n’ Jug’s usual offer of “A Free Gallon of Milk When You Buy Four lbs. of Figs!” was this ad:

Get the all new, incredibly cheap Samfordtinnidonarrosonabergie Wind Jacket!  Made with groundbreaking technology straight from Newfoundland, this Samfordtinnidonarrosonabergie’s New Wind Jacket makes fighting against the wind a thing of the past.  Only $9.99!  Great for the explorer in you!

I was a little wary of the purchase, but I had recently left my jacket on the bus when I was returning from our neighborhood theater’s lackluster rendition of A Zoo Story and was in the market for a new jacket.  As long as the stitched stayed together, I figured I wouldn’t mind wearing a cheap jacket.  And the stitches had definitely stayed together.

I yelp a little as I pick up speed and start to flip backwards in the air.  I put out my arms and begin circling them forward, which helps to steady me back in a mostly upright position.  I look back to the ad and notice that there is a line of fine writing at the bottom of the page.

* Warning – This is not a “Wind Breaker” but a “Wind Catcher”.  All sales final; no refunds.

Oh, well that explains it, I think as I lift my arm to scratch my head and then bring it back quickly to my body as I am lifted another twenty feet into the air.  This is definitely a wonder, but I really think they should have led the as with the whole “Wind Catcher” business.  But then maybe a jacket that presupposes to make you fly might be categorized as a novelty item and wouldn’t sell as well.  I put the ad back in my pocket, and stare up into the sky.

I have no idea how I was going to get down, but at least it is a nice day.  The wind is incredibly strong and quite loud when you’re up this high.  I figure I’ll try to catch a bird when I want to get down in the hopes that I can at least get some attention.  But for now, it’s just nice to be outside.