Folks don’t understand anything and it makes me sad - their blindness is the cause of assed-up attempts, real bothers and failures that can’t be avoided. Every corner I turn down detours for fool’s gold, the adventures of a miscreant delay, deny and devour us all. At times it can be amusing, but not often, and then it isn’t my amusement, not at all the type that I enjoy
The kids all go with fashion, culture - charades! Everything they delight in: charades; excuses for lesser beings, sub-beings, to form communal bonds! I say:
“Bonds without brains are all you’ve created! Bonds that chain you to your standards, bonds with low interest - nay, never those that set you free, never those… You are trapped, stuck in dissent and disease and you could not fight your way out, as every final brain cell is dying or dead.”
My words never strike whom I intend. Actually, they miss everyone except me. Only the people I’d like to reach stay unaffected. Try as you like, hard as you might, some people stay blasé. Pity them. There’s nothing but a terrible addiction inside, later on they may know it as something else. When it stops being happiness some ennui will be left behind, and nothing will cover it. If you could lean out the window a bit further, you’d see that your frame is rusty, and if you had the foresight to check the gas, you’d notice it’s almost on empty. There’s a frailty and a corrosion that no one looks for, and it ruins us. It’s the shady spaces and the salt in the air that cause it, we don’t know how to stop or leave. We only keep going.
A neighbor of mine had a combination of traits that made him very unpopular with women. Timid and unlucky, when Charles approached a woman I’d soon hear her expressing a willingness to never see his face again. Eventually though, a lottery he was bound to win, he landed a date. When the woman sensed that the relationship would come to nothing constructive, she walked out. But Charles was inspired! Inspired by his cheekbones, willing to avow his graces to any hot chick, he would move in on every woman. From the market to the haircut store, he stepped into every dance. It was a product of his vanity.
Never mind that the girls always slipped off the hook and were quickly back out at sea, he kept pressing forward. Charles used to be a runt, and now he was the Adonis. Like you’ve never even seen, he thought. Though he was actually less than fair, his couplings the same.
“But what happened to your lectures,” we all said, “about misogyny and henceforth, about taste and decency!” It went out the window when Ugly Alice sat next to him, that’s what happened! Taste and decency intercepted by Ugly Alice.
“Mark these words, friend! The women you seek are more man than you! Cannot you view your own actions, do not you see that you are now all that was despised. It is a foul state you’ve adopted, with no extra hands to clean this mess - your life! Remember, that we have all abandoned ship. Remember this exit as your means, your ship, exits beneath you!”
And silence again, my speeches garner silence with bowel-like regularity! I am a king alongside roughage! The greats are never understood in their own time, and posthumously is a shitty title, but I’ve still got a few more decades to kick these ideas around, to sway crowds with my influence. Give it time, friends, we can’t afford to lose another. Even though your ideas may be only dim prospects, every thought afforded the potential to blossom is a thought we desperately need. We’re lacking the necessary advances, and when your work turns out shit, don’t worry so much. So long as you’ve given it your go, well that’s a beginning for us, isn’t it? Content yourself with that, and continue as if things were better.
My ideas are all my own and to stay that way, because no one else shares them, no one at all, even the paper has trouble with my ink. The ilks of my ideas aren’t for consumption, my hands accused of peristalsis. Only the people I meet may relate to you, in that aspect I retain some worth... and I meet the worst of people, by the way. Idiots are everywhere.
Some people I manage. The ones decided enough to realize what they actually want. When life isn’t only about what they think they want, but what they really desire. I value that, and I interact with that collective of individuals, who understand their situation. Sometimes though, this applies to the dumbest, lowest common denominator of people. Those folk who wouldn’t know what meaning is, the fat ass who is constantly pining for the next Twinkie, because that’s actually all he actually wants. You know the kind.
One fat ass particularly annoys me, so much so that I find myself wanting to punch her in the face. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have such a fat, pale, disgusting mess observing you, and not even subtly! That gross creature: bleached hair with dirty-fingernail roots, and hot-pink lipstick above a pale, damage controlling makeup. And stretch marks too, I imagine. She entirely stinks. Imagine a chronically runny, gassy youngster (at that greasy age of eight where they don’t bath so much) relentlessly about you, like a tail! Like a plague, a cancerous disease, that just won’t finish you off no matter how much you plead!
Her every act is equally repugnant, similar to those people who constantly belch. And when she is alone I imagine that she consumes an unfair amount of food, given the quantity of people starving places other than here. The impoverished could feast on this one, to be frank! More soft, tender fat suckles from that stomach than from all the great whales taken by the Eskimos.
A fat, disgusting baby is all she makes me think of… precisely what coerces my impulse to strike, presumably; I somewhat Freudonized myself and came to that conclusion (I’d be surprised is she hasn’t been struck for like reasons dozens of times by now).
One morning she entered our workplace and took a seat by me.
“Hey,” she said.
I shuddered, internally, and said hello. That was it for a short time, I had hoped that she was just passing through and would soon leave, only she wasn’t ‘just passing through’ and soon enough we’d begin again. While we sat, I in silence and she in neglect, I studied my shoes. As I saw it there was a chance she would simply leave, continue on towards whatever pursuits she’d planned (likely, the snack machine) if only I ignored her for long enough, so I paid strict attention to my shoes.
She was on the verge of manhandling a passing vendor, when instead she flung an arm out to tickle me. It’s no secret; I’m terribly squeamish about tickles, so she pursues this amusing little game of hers purposely. Seeing her hand encroaching I smacked it, out of fright - completely reactionary - like a grade school teacher and she recoiled in pain and contempt while I celebrated my manly heroism. Before long she was complaining to our mutual friend Al, who chanced to be nearby.
“Ohmygawd, he hit me!” she whined, but Al didn’t want any part of the situation. He only gave us a tired stare.
“For a reason…” I mentioned, after all I didn’t want the argument to sound one sided. Al shrugged, he couldn’t have cared less, and his negligence strengthened my gusto so much that I let fly another onslaught, this time verbal:
“Try it again, forthright, frivolous strumpet! Wanton child, I call your appearance sluggish and ham-fisted! Your figure ham-indulgent, I say! Perhaps you’d try reach again and test what contempt my code hath mustered!”
“…You’re weird, and you hit me,” sauntered back in a wavy, watery voice.
I have nothing for that and so it stood. Uncontested. At the time any return on my part would have been only empty shells, and today it would unfurl the same. She and I are always that way, we’re caustic, the worst types of chemicals. Her touch alone burns my skin. If she emigrated I’d be glad…though actually, I might like to travel abroad someday, so I had better watch my words. Instead let her immigrate to a far foreign body, a remote planet where her poor hygiene will cause the brave little rock to throw itself into the sun, a martyrdom of the most endearing caste.
I believe that she had left the room to cry when I sought refuge in the broom closet. Only there could I safely avoid her. I sat in there for six hours, occasionally hearing her pass up and down the hall, the floor creaking and bitching under her girth. Those were truly harrowing times. I kept concealed until afternoon when the worst of things began.
We had filed out of the building shortly after five o’clock, each going his own way home. I was on guard for the fat-ass, walking quickly but not suspiciously, not giving away my escape. Perhaps thirty feet into my mile walk, she stopped me, to talk. How she had found me so quickly I’ll never know, but I couldn’t worry about it then, I didn’t have the time. I tried to run! I had to! But she held my sweater and with her strength advantage she pulled me in. I was back peddling, arms flailing, trying to escape the impending discourse, but still she wouldn’t let off. She kept after, kept reeling me in, and when I tried to slip out of my sweater, ready to call the garment a necessary casualty, she saw that I intended to leave without further words and by any means… and so, in a last ditch effort, she tried to embrace me. I panicked. I had lost my wits, and gone screaming:
“Keep your scent off me, foul woman!”
There was an audience for the event. A sizable crowd was on its way to the movies at the time. Some stared, and others rolled their eyes. A few snickered. She was too stunned to speak. She just stood there with a gaping mouth, like a gorilla, like usual.
And where she was slow, I was quick. Like a rabbit, carpe diem! I seized the moment and bounded away. Running wildly into the background, farther and farther until finally, they all lost sight of me.
She was very into charades. That’s what really drove me away. And my neighbor, the faux-Adonis, he didn’t know what he wanted. He was after a Hollywood dream, that’s all. And I’ve lost the company of everyone around me. I don’t know exactly what I want either. I don’t want to sway people from their nature. At the same time I don’t like their nature. I can’t say who’s right, though I’m fairly certain that I’m not. So long as you’re happy I guess… forget about everyone you don’t need, don’t waste your time worrying. Because I’m always worrying, if I didn’t think about it so much my mouth never would have opened, never at all. Not once, and then all of them would be better off. But I have to, we have to. We’ll have to push somebody down on our way, and it’s easier when we don’t think about who it is. I haven’t seen any of them since, and I’m still running. I can’t say what I’m after, but it’s going to take me to the other side, of the country, life, philosophy… I’ve lost so much here, that I think I’ll keep going until I find a clean slate.
Born in La Jolla, California in 1986 Benjamin L. Bower was raised on the West Coast. In autumn of 2005 he will travel east to study English Literature.