5 posts tagged “fuck”

    Last night I was over 21 for a few hours.  After work, I jog home.  About a mile and a half.  Then I play courier and pick up some money, run another mile to my dude's house, or sketchy alleyway, and then back to my ex's.  I tell her I am keeping five dollars change to keep myself from feeling used.  When the deal goes down, of course my dude doesn't have change.  I keep this to myself when I get back to her.  Jogging there, I feel like it's burning a hole in my backpack, down through my shirt and flesh and into my bones. 

    I get a text from Mueller: "InterArma at Nara tonight!  be there."  I am rushing there on the Golden POS / Ram Rider because he tells me his band goes on at 11:30 and it is 10:55.  I get there at like 11:40, and hurry to lock my bike up.  I see Mueller drinking a beer with some chicks.  I hop the fence, not paying for entry despite loving the owners, and climb up the deck, throttling Mueller and sloshing his beer everywhere.  "WHEN DOES YOUR SHOW GO ON?!?!?!"  I chugged three beers before leaving my house. 

    "We're after the next band.  We're headlining."  He then introduces me as his dishwasher.  Because I am Mueller's personal dishwasher.

    I go inside to meet up with Olebak and JLee.  JLee tells me I am 21 and buys me a beer.  "We're going to Ipanema next, you need an 'Over 21 bracelet.'"  We never go to Ipanema, but this bracelet is magical and suddenly grants me access to a whole new world of drinking.  The Bar Scene.  If you can call Nara the bar scene, I don't know, but here I am telling Dan Mills that among things like "You need to teach me how to cook," that the bar scene sucks.  

    "Once you turn 21, you'll go through a phase, but yeah, fuck that shit." 

    Again, I agree and iterate that the bar scene sucks.  If only my 20 dollar tab could jump in a time machine and warn me.  I'm having money issues, and because of 2 or 3 dollar beer, I am digging deeper a hole I cannot climb.   I buy Dan a beer.  Finally Mueller's band goes on at like 12:50 and Dan says, "Let's go to the front and be assholes."  This is followed by him just headbanging while I thrash and throw people with my body.  I drop my Yeungling but catch it before it hits the floor, grabbing it at its empty neck, upside-down.  Like I'm about to go into a bar battle. This combined with my drunken sway is so threatening to the girl behind me, she snatches the bottle and gives me a disapproving glare.  I tell her thanks.   I didn't want to hold that shit.

Dan: "I'm too old for this shit."
Me: "You're never too old for throwing people around, you're a BLACKHOLE OF HATRED!"
Dan:"Wait, correction, I am too sober for this shit."

    The awesome InterArma finishes up and pulls out, leaving you wanting more.   They pack up and begin to leave. I say hey to the singer, Mark.  Apparently we have met somewhere, he tells me, "but you were in supreme inebriation mode." 

    I help the owners of the restaurant clean up and I get a free triple shot of vodka, with some lemony tonic.  Then one of the owners gives me 5 dollars for helping out.  This will later go to beer bought off of some dude walking past my apartment at 3 in the morning.  Olebak, Kirkland, and myself haggle.  6 beers, four dollars.  6 beers five dollars?  FINE, FINE, 6 for 6.  We sit there and drink the rest of the beer.  I rip off my over 21 gauntlet, I am not 21.

Now there are scratches, bruises, and blisters covering my legs.  What's next?

   

This is the complete frame for the story I want to tell.  Thematically I am displeased with myself, but at least I got this out of my system.

FLAMBIES: Zombies Aflame.

"I just needed to get some fresh air.  Away from him.  He just never stops."
    "Yeeeah,"  says Samantha, elongating and trailing her words with a sigh.  "Can't we just have a conversation?"
    "Exactly. Enough staring into a computer screen, Jesus Christ."
The cold punctuates their words.  As they push the words through the air, so exits warm moisture.  It is the driest, coldest November for the region.  On the West Coast, this is especially prevalent as wildfires encroach ever so slowly from the southern tip of California, north and east.  It is on the news nearly every day, but neither of these individuals are aware of it.  Miles away, the all-consuming fire is of little consequence to them.  So, so far away. 

    "I should really get going," she says, annoyed at the presence of Jake, their mutual friend, who is on FACEBOOK, a company that poses to "connect you" and make you "closer" to your friends, when really they're selling something out of the back.  That something is your information.  When you list information about yourself, it is leased to the highest bidder.  Once that happens, FACEBOOK allows the advertisers to link ads to your login, specifically targeting you.  Jake is still on FACEBOOK, having his soul siphoned out, hours after they leave.
    "Alright, yeah, I've really got to get up early anyway," she adds. 
    Cabel and Samantha put their cigarettes out together, both having finished within exactly two minutes-- inhaling an entire cigarette, burned. 

Scuttling
    "So, you still haven't told me why we're here, Fisher. Or why I couldn't come the first time," Kristopher hisses through his pearly teeth.
    "Ampulex compressa," Dr. Fisher responds.
    "The wasp?"
    "The wasp."
    "What about it?"
    "It evolved in tandem with roaches-- developed a toxin that it injects into their brains.  Inducing the toxin makes the roaches follow a scent back to the wasp's nest, where it becomes an incubator for the wasp's eggs, who hatch and eventually utilize more roaches for procreation."
    "Well, we're not going to find any wasps in a dark cave."
    Dr. Fisher grins with crooked yellow teeth. He cuts at the skeleton of a Fuji with a rusty knife.
    "That's disgusting."  His friend and more formally apprentice, Kristopher, sits on a damp mound of granite.  Staring in concern for his mentor, not friend, he iterates his point, adding, "You're going to get lockjaw or something."
    Dr. Fisher uses the force of a thumb opposite the rusty, though sharp blade, sliding it toward him.  "You know nothing.  Apples are good for you, clean out your teeth.  And I'll be fine."
    Kristopher continues to stare, annoyed.  He sighs and looks up at the sky of rock.  A drop of water drips.  Drips right into his eye.  Putting up with moments of eternity, Kristopher reminds himself this is worth it.  Misery and his mind wander to gold watches and beautiful women. "You know, we should probably be doing work. You've been carving for thirty minutes."
    "Twenty-six, and what's your hurry?  I could cut this forever, given the right sharpness. You can always get smaller pieces, if you understand how.  We need to understand how to find what we're looking for.   And we'll find it when we find it."
    Kristopher begins a retort, but the air is knocked out of him, as the granite stump gives way to his weight.  Dr. Fisher rises cautiously.  His understanding of caves shaken, just not as much as Kristopher's. 
    "What the fuck?!"  Kristopher belches angrily from within a sunken rock formation.  "That is not supposed to fucking happen.  Is this one of your tests, one of your tricks... I am so sick--"
    "Wait!"  A scuttling noise echoes, and Dr. Fisher continues over discontented whispers from Kristopher, "Do you hear that?"  Kristopher's hands push down on the outer rim of his accidental rock fox-hole, and he pauses.
    "Yeah. I do.  What is it?" he whispers, calmly excited.
    "It's what we're looking for."
    Dr. Fisher turns his helmet-light to full and Kristopher is blinded.  He returns the favor, but Fisher is already creeping down to a nearby pool.  "In there," he says, pointing through a hole in the wall.
    "What about in there?"
    "You're climbing in there."
    Normally one for confrontation, Kristopher trades his grief for anticipated glory and fortune. He begins to move himself forward in the crawlspace to the pool.  He promptly sticks himself the wrong way, and can't move forward.
    "I'm stuck!" he yelps.  Frantically shifting his weight, he continues, "I think I can get out, but I can't go forward anymore"
    "Wait! What can you see?"
    Kristopher stops panicking and remembers the new car he needs.  "Just a wall."  He turns his head.  The light moves with him, panning the wall.  Outside of the hole, Dr. Fisher paces.  Bites his nails. 
    "Anything yet?" Fisher ponders aloud.  Before Kristopher responds, Fisher gets his answer.  Light beams outward from the hole, enveloping Kristopher and startling Fisher.  He shields his eyes and asks Kristopher if he can see it.
    "Yes," he breathes, "it's beautiful."  
   
Consumer
     Cabel's iPod boombox blankets the noisy television in the next room, blasting her favorite song.  The speakers, busted, screech during the higher pitches, while the Media makes hopeless attempts to educate Cabel.  From across the kitchen, she sees shocked eyes on gaping anchor-faces, and thinks little of it.  Shit happens every day.  Every day, shit happens. 
    Bing, microwave ravioli is done.  She reads the nutrition facts.   Fourteen grams of protein, Eight-point-one grams of sugar, and Two-thousand-nineteen milligrams of sodium.  Eighty-four percent, she reads and thinks, Oh well, it's been worse. 
     Years ago, when Cabel is fifteen, she fails a drug test for the last time.  Unable to tolerate it any longer, her mother kicks her out of the house, changes the locks, and nails the windows shut.  For the next week, Cabel lives in a neon-pink and yellow Fisher Price tent in the woods.  The forgotten woods between a new apartment complex and ancient rail-road tracks.  The sewer water leaks through to the creek, and she lives off of fast food.  Her friends tell her she looks pale and malnourished.  Three things go through her fifteen-year-old head:  1) Burning those effigies of my mom in the back yard with my friends, our little arms beating it with lead pipes and sticks,  seems retroactively justified.  2)Maybe I should quit smoking pot.  3) Maybe I should quit getting caught for smoking pot.

     She never quits.  She is high right now, in fact. 

    Her Crest-whitened teeth take their first bite of the faux-violi. If it's better than it was, it's best.  She lowers the volume on her boom box and catches the end of shocked words from a shocked mouth, "Our prayers are with the missing Dr. Bernard Fisher and all of those suffering in California."  Cabel straddles her couch, flipping her left leg over.  She carefully lands on the cushions, facing the television.  She thinks about Dr. Fisher missing and is, inexplicably,  unable to cry as the news fades to commercials.  Pushing her lack of empathy to the back of her mind, she turns the volume up.  Cars overpower cheetahs and horses, victorious, even, over Earth itself.  Medicine cures the minor and embarrassing--  backaches and heartburn, flatulence,  anxiety and confidence issues.  Lose weight, follow our god, monitor your neighbors.  Beware.   A cyclical tale of kindness shows last on the screen-- everyone seeing everyone else lend a hand, and everyone continuing the cycle, until it returns to the first person.  Some music accompanies it and then the logo of a large company fades in and it says, "We care about you."   Cabel begins to weep uncontrollably.
    The news returns, ending the commercials. The ads continue, with a voice conditioned to sell ideas. "Now we return to our story on why breastfeeding may be harmful to your child."

    Later that night, she rolls a spliff and smokes it out of her bedroom window, alone.  Off in the faded black, she hears a train and thinks of her father, who used to take her to chase and photograph trains when she was younger, back before he left her mother.  A wailing metal ghost groans, for it is inclined to keep going in one direction, forced to remain on a set path.  The conductor of the ghost pulls its vocal chord, and it lets out a smaller and smaller call.  And then, when she can no longer hear it any more, off in that dark distance, she tries to cry.  She tries so hard, because she feels that it means so much.  So much now that it's gone.  And it's gone.  
   
 Flambies
     John Goh  lies face down at the foot of the forest.  His skin, stripped from his body, oozes out from under his retardant yellow fatigues.   The hair on his body burns, emanating a bad smell, and no one but the trees, engulfed in cones of fire, claim witness.  John's mind painfully wanders to the edge of sense, and he passes out, dead and still burning. 
   
    Earlier, John tells his compatriots of Buddhist Monks who, protesting the Vietnam war, doused themselves in gasoline.  They lit matches and sat, lips sealed, burning.  Like that guy who loads his shotgun and goes down to the ashes of the twin towers and hops the fence, John says.  Wearing a sign that details why he is about to do what he is about to do, he positions the barrel against his throat and pulls the trigger, splattering himself on the grave that launched a war. 
    John and his group of firefighters get off of their transport vehicle and gear up.  They stand gazing into the perimeter of flame.  Dwarfing them, it gradually advances its will across the California soil, stretching upward to burn a hole in the sky.  Stretching to reunite with the gods of fire in the night sky.  Fighting this fire is a constant struggle, and there is no sleep for those who wish it halted. 

    It is a moonless night, one of the firefighters notes, and John thinks of how maybe it is just a sunless night.  Either way the moon is out there, imperturbably lording some bit of fate over the world, its oceans, its fish and its fishers.  Somewhere higher than John and the firefighters but lower than the moon, fire and gravity play fiend to the group, and a branch, incinerated,  snaps.  It careens, inexorably, as a spear on fire, through the skull of Todd Jennings.  He drops to his knees, his eyes bursting with blood.  He throws up and lands in it. 
   
    The firefighters stand, paralyzed.  John begins to move in to check the body, no longer Todd Jennings, when the body writhes and squirms, launching itself upward.  John falters backward and falls on his ass, as the firefighters, their feet made of concrete or lead, watch in horror as Jennings' body stops flailing and stares, eyeless, through them. 

    John scrambles for his radio. 
    "DISPATCH!  We've run into trouble, CHRIST!" is the understatement he manages before the body begins acting up again.

  The body, with its antenna of flame and face covered in burst over-easy eyes and sizzling blood, stands more erect and hisses.  Then screeches and yelps.
     "This is Dispatch, what's wrong Goh?"
    It clicks and clacks its jaw and rushes forward, rearing his right arm backward.  With an arc of his arm and a claw of a hand, the body effortlessly punctures the eyes of Cameron Dollio and rips down and outward.  John, thinking of the madness on Black Friday, the crowds rushing and violently pushing and breaking eachother to get the better deal first, is unable to respond to the radio.
     Dollio's lip comes with the hand as the body continues to tear.  The body reaches around and sputters blood into Dollio's ear before eviscerating it with its teeth.  Though wearing retardant gear, Dollio's body soon catches fire from the increasingly engulfed body attacking him.  Dollio's corpse crumples to the ground. 

    John gets up, stumbles, and begins to run, as do the four others remaining.   Two bodies chase and catch them with ease.  One down, and fire is spreading more quickly toward the road they took to get here.  The road where more firefighters, from the last shift, rest and recuperate.  Two down, this time three bodies mutilating one, setting it aflame.  Three down.  Four down.  John can see the road ahead where firetrucks and lights and tents with coffee and food wait idly.  He begins hyperventilating, and removes his mask.  Sputtering, he collapses.

The Elephant
    Snuggled tightly in a cocoon of Thomas Lee sheets and blankets, Samantha happily watches a movie at midnight.  The IKEA lights dimmed behind an IKEA shelf, she peers over blankets, her eyes fixed upon her wall-mounted 60" Sony Bravia.  She is watching George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. 
    Outside her window, down the alley and in the next yard, a man swings open a gate and slams it shut.  Hearing this and terrified of the undead on the screen, Sam cuddles closer to a favorite Beanie Baby.  A Beanie Baby that was fifty dollars, and the one she wanted most for Christmas one year. Current Value: six dollars or "priceless memory."
    The man outside takes a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts.  He stares at the ground.  Through the cracks of the fence, and off the walls of the cobble-stone alleyway, orange light filters into his mind.  He runs through the yard and up a flight of wooden stairs, spinning around to look over the fence.  A wall of bodies, aflame, rush through the beginning of the alley way, arms flailing outward.  
    All this commotion has Sam up and out of her bed, staring out her window.  She sees the man ripping up wooden steps and throwing them into her yard.  Her condensed moisture words smash against the window, "Fucking lunatic."  Assuming it is one of the city's ill-minded street denizens, she exits her room, the movie paused with the hero pressing a pea-shooter to his temple. 

    On her back deck Sam, oblivious to the fires several yards down to her left, yells across to the man, "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"  Un-phased, the man readies a hose over the railing facing the yard, leaving it on full blast.  He begins banging on the door, but these people are out of town.  He smashes his hand through the door and unlocks it.  Baffled, Sam turns to go inside to get her cell phone to call the police.  As she does this, she immediately understands the nature of the man's behavior.  Standing there, in the cold night air, with the encroaching fire there in front of her, she is unable to move.  Something about the sight of fire, whether vast or small but especially of this magnitude,  renders a human transfixed.  In awe.

    An inhuman screech comes from across the yard.  Crashing through a window is the man, hands gripping the shoulders of a flaming person.  He falls on his back and yells out.  With built adrenaline, he heaves the person up and through the railings of the deck opposite of Samantha.  He picks the hose up and douses himself, putting out patches of flame.  Finally he notices her.  He begins to say something when the wall of flame reaches the back of their apartments. The man's gate busts open, several bodies falling through to the ground, which, covered in dry brush, catches immediately.  In seconds, ten bodies pour through the opening and more climb over the fence.  Scrambling to keep up with the larger bodies, children run with the pack, their flame flickering like a strobe light.  The man directs the hose to them.  Hearing the water sizzle, he realizes the amount of water he can utilize is fruitless and begins to run back into the apartment as bodies attempt to jump the gap in the stairs or climb the pillars of wood.  This sets the deck on fire. 

    Sam, seeing several flaming bodies jump her own fence, runs back inside.  She runs through the apartment, which seems enveloped in daylight.  Reaching her front door, she swings it open and heads downstairs.  Outside, Samantha witnesses a condensed demonstration of human nature. 
    On the street several friends are running for a car.  The foremost friend stretches out his arm and unlocks his car ten feet away.  This allows he and all but one of his friends to jump in the car.  The leave him, halted by a horde of flaming zoo animals.  A fiery elephant slaps the hood with a crimson trunk and the driver crashes through the windshield, his body sailing through the air and into the fire.  The driver catches flame, and runs for his car toward his friends who are fighting each other to exit the vehicle.   
    "Over here," someone yells on Samantha's side of the street.  The yeller, "Tom" perhaps, struggles with a handful of keys, searching for the right one.  The left-behind friend, maybe "Fred," runs across the street.  Eventually Tom gets it and they enter, not noticing her, and drive away. 
   
   The car takes a right turn past a CVS and 7-11 where the lights are off.  They prematurely disappear from sight when the man from the back deck steps in front of her, saying, "FOLLOW ME, WE NEED TO GET IN THE BASEMENT!" as loud as he can.  Samantha pees a little and passes out in the man's arms. 

    "Shit," he says.

Answers
    Samantha awakens, her face smushed against cold slate.  She pushes herself up and rubs her eyes.  Her stranger-savior rocks back and forth, hands on his knees.  She looks behind him, where the ancient iron doors are sealed.
      "You can't begin to imagine the drugs they pumped into these things.  Hunger amplification, high concentrations of melatonin, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish," Kristopher shakes words from his bruised head.  "No, I didn't think this would happen." 
    Samantha contorts her face, puzzled.  "Isn't that the stuff in your skin?"
    "No," he responds.  "Melatonin is in your brain.  Regulates your rhythm, uh," he pauses-- straining his eyes in the darkness of the basement.  He continues, "Sleep patterns, dreaming, belief in the supernatural even.  Might be linked to the God gene, I don't know.  Melatonin is triggered at night, in our brains.  I remember when I was a kid, I got frightened by the dancing stuffed animals on the shelf next to my bed-- kids have a hard time discerning between reality at night because of melatonin and the developmental level of their brain."

    Samantha pouts, remembering the flickering children.   She thinks of something--How can insects have melatonin?-- to ask him to keep him talking.  She is comforted by his knowledge.

    Kristopher begins again, knowing that telling her something about how it started will release him of the burden.  The longer winded he is about how it happened, the longer he can keep from thinking how it is happening.  "Nearly all life has it, regulates the circadian rhythm, you know, the physiological cycle of day and night, night and day.  They first discovered melatonin in insects back in the seventies--in the compound eyes of crickets. And when inducing more than was 'natural,'" he says, using facetious air-quotes with his fingers, "their night activity increased substantially."  He chuckles, "Eventually eliminating day-time activity.  Not the case, here, though.  Not completely."

    Samantha brews.  At this point, Kristopher has run out of things to say to her.  He doesn't feel he can communicate on her level, which, for him, is much lower than he is willing to venture.  Able only to see dim reflections off his eyes and protruding cliff-face of a nose, she wonders aloud, "Why in their eyes?  Is that the only way we can tell whether it is day or night?  Can't we feel the sunlight or lack thereof on our skin?"

    At this, Kristopher perks up, remembering the gruesomely bloody candle-wax face of a body, dripping gaps in the face, six inches from his own face.  "They don't have eyes, he says."
    They launch into a verbal foray.    
    "You said you found these in a cave, right?"
    "Right."
    "Was there any light down there?"
    "No, we had these heavy fucking helmets mounted with lights.  You know, like Hollywood."
    "You were in California,"  she smiles.
    "Yeah, not twenty miles from the edge of the wild-fires."
    The conversation dies with Samantha's last, sleepy thought, "Will they ever burn out?"

    Kristopher begins to fall asleep as fire sweeps through the city, conforming the minds of all willing beings.  His last thought is of the helicopter, bursting into flame--fading into the clouds. With Samantha asleep, he removes a translucent box from the inside of his coat.  Within the box, a white mantis-like creature is stretched by hexagonal distortions on the outside.  Kristopher shakes his head as the inside of the box ignites and extinguishes several times.    

Abednego
    Cabel peers across an empty ocean.  Antarctica is supposed to be here somewhere.  It would be hard to miss, but it is missing.  One day, the flaming bodies collectively decide to rush for the oceans.  Every survivor of the immortal flame that were the mysterious bodies, now stands alone, against a tide of change-- across the face of their planet, they must soon learn to survive.  No longer will they subsist. 
    Visible gusts of air exit her lungs, and her lips begin to crack and bleed.  She looks to her right, to her father who stands looking out into the blue oblivion with her.  Words have yet to jump his perfect ivory gap.  Puffs of air cannot be seen coming from his mouth.  Cabel does not notice.  She just leans against the wall of the deck and rubs her gloved hands together and against her body.  She cannot remember arriving on the boat.  Her last clear memory is of the man who head butts her in an attempt to force her aboard a helicopter.  It happened so fast, she thinks.

    "Abednego, goddamnit!  Abednego!"  Cabel shakes a chain-linked fence with meat-hook fingers.  A security camera watches the sidewalk where she shakes the fence.  It pans to the surrounded parking lot. "HEY, HEY, I'M RIGHT HERE!  YOU LET ME IN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" 
     "Yelling at the camera won't get you inside."  Two rows of perfectly straight pearly teeth meet her teary-eyed gaze as she spins around.  A man faces her, unreadable behind huge bug-eyed reflective lenses.  Red eyes and a pouting mouth mirror her own.
   
    "My father is missing, and they need to let me in here.  Now."
    "I understand," say the pearly teeth. A hand extends for hers.  "My name is Kristopher Elijah and I work here."  They shake hands.  Before she can introduce herself, he continues.  "What has your father told you about Abednego?"  He smiles for an answer.
     "It's our code-word.  When I was little, he gave us a code-word, for safety. He said if I ever needed him, I could come to his lab, and if I said Abednego, the guards would have to let me in."
    "Drag you in, maybe.  Who did you say your father was?" he asks her.
    "I didn't.  I'm Cabel Fisher."
    At this, Kristopher's smile evaporates.
    "Follow me," he says.
    Kristopher approaches a box on the gate.  He retrieves a key from his pocket and uses it to open the box.  He removes his sunglasses and hunches forward to place his eyes in front of the box. 
    "These things destroy your vision." 
    The gate creaks sideways, dragging itself on rolling wheels.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you should know," Kristopher begins.  "I saw it.  I experienced it.  Everything I saw profoundly changed me."  He laughs, "And your father, him too.  But he actually has one.  Or maybe one has him."
     "What did you see?"  Confusion strikes Cabel blind to Kristopher's actions.  They enter completely black room.  Kristopher paces to the back wall and plucks something from a rack.  It clinks the keys in his pocket, sounds like glass.  They exit and keep walking.
    "Where are we going?" 
    "To the roof?"
    The building seems empty except for a few rooms they pass to the elevator.  In one, Cabel glimpses a man strapped to a bed, his muscle exposed to the air.  In another room a man is pulling organs out of a body and placing them on a table.  The body squirms but makes no sound she can hear through the door.  She throws up a little in her mouth and grabs Kristopher's arm. 
    "What is this place," she says muffled, her hand over her mouth. 
    "We just wanted to make money off of suffering.  That's the human way."  Before she can respond, he says they have reached the elevator.  He enters, but she does not.  "Do you want to see your father?"
    "Yes."  She enters.  The doors slide shut as a clicking and screeching noise bellows somewhere in the hallway.  The crashing sound of metal against stone is the last thing they hear before the doors shut.  They look at each other.
    Kristopher presses 5 and says, "I saw everything beautiful in this world.  Everything right.  I got this feeling, in the pit of my stomach, that we, as humans once had it right.  The oceans were crystal pools on the face of a green rock. Before Prometheus, before the first revolution, we were not separate from this world.  I was stuck in this tiny hole down in a deep cave with your father.  We were looking to make money off of this new species we had discovered.  Incredible evolutionary abilities.  We're not even sure how what it does is possible, but we've witnessed it.  And, there I am, seeing into myself, my father, his father, our kind.  All our sins replayed in an instant.  In that eerie mirror, where only the light in my mind exists, I am overwhelmed with the horror I witness.  Our world burns as our moon tosses itself, crashes into our surface, shattering.  Splintering.  I see the lives of each person, each ancestor, played out and destroyed.  I scream and tell your father to pull me out, but he has gone.  I don't know where.  A few days later, he shows up here--"
    "But?"
    The doors open to the fifth floor, which is essentially a hallway leading to a ladder.   
    "Your father is waiting for you on the roof" is the second to last thing he says to her, pointing to the ladder.  The last thing he says to her, after she comes scrambling down the ladder minutes later is, "You have to go," right before head butting her.

    On the boat, her father begins to speak, slowly.
    "The bonding trestle of heart and mind.  If only you could see as your Leviathan sees, perhaps you would would understand as I do.  As gods do.  Your fractious construction of lineage, your muddled perception.  Darkened shadow compressed to brilliant diamond threads, all for you, undeserved." 
    "Dad."
    No response.
    "Father."
    Nothing.
    "Abednego"
     Nothing.
    She rears back.  "I don't understand."
    "You're not meant to understand.  You never were.  You are a flashlight in the dark.  We are the dark."

     Nothing is as difficult as the decision to answer or ignore incoming calls.  For me at least, it had been this way my whole life.  Until recently, a new path flattened the hazy overgrowth around me, and I was set in forward motion to an unknown destination.

     It started about three months ago.  I was at a party with some friends, a college somewhere northwest of where I am now.  It is pretty hazy.  All I remember is drinking my fourteenth beer and then blood-- blood everywhere.  Something had broken, some sort of glass structure.  I didn't fully understand what, but I knew it had been my fault.  In earnest, I gathered the splinters with my hands, some piercing my skin.  Blood poured out on tile flooring and two silhouettes told me it was okay, and to stop. 

    I didn't stop.

    Blood kept pouring until my hands were red, and someone grabbed me by the shoulder, picking me up and hustling me to the bathroom.  In my beer-full dream, I wept as someone picked little shards from my palm. 
    "I'm worthless," I told the person, and believed it. 
    The person helping me was my friend, Parson.  He reassured me I wasn't worthless, that I was worth something, but I persisted. 
    "I'm a horrible waste," I kept saying, "A horrible piece of shit, worthless, worthless, worthless."
    No, he would tell me, you are my best friend.  Whether that was true or not was the least of my concerns.  What happened next is most important.  After cleaning out my wounds, Parson left to tend to what I later heard was a broken hookah.  By "tend to," I mean he paid the guy for it.  He was going to sell it to us anyway.  But now it was broken.  A false, empty purchase, like the day I was birthed to my parents, I had in my head. 

    Parson was full of money.  He drove a nice car that he had replaced after totaling his first.  He paid for the damages, but it was ultimately with the backing of his mother, a banker, that pulled him through.  On the other hand, there is me, alone in the bathroom with only a sad, depressed version of myself, filling myself with horrible thoughts. 

    I look down at the ripples in the toilette.  My tears are falling in with the rest of the waste.  I'm Poor, my drunk version told me.  I'm Poor and I'll Never Amount to Anything.  My Girlfriend Won't Love Me.  My Parents Have Abandoned Me.  None of it true, except for right now.  I reach in my pocket to grab my phone.  To talk with God or who knows, but I grab my phone.  It fumbles from my pocket and hand, spins through the air and splashes right into the middle of the toilette.  Water spills up onto my leg, and this is the grain of rice that tips the scale.  I actually begin crying. 

    I bend to fish my phone out and reach for some towels.  Parson comes back and walks me out.  The rest is a blur.  All I remember is crying for what seemed like an hour while some girl desperately tried to study in the far corner.  I must have been in some study hall.  The study desks, four linked desks, looked like swastikas from above, up on the stairs.

    Somehow Parson managed to drive us back-- a two hour drive-- somewhat drunk.  He asked me questions all the way back, wondering how to contact my girlfriend and tell her I was in bad shape.  He called people to message her online since he couldn't get in contact with them. 

    God, she was fucking worried the next day.  She felt waste. 

    Waste is something unneeded.  Like worrying about nothing, she would tell me.  Like wasting your worry, your feelings expecting something much, much worse than just a sad, sad drunk.  But expectations narrow your reality-- which is why dropping my phone in a toilette was a blessing.  My view-screen is permanently fucked up.  I could break my two year contract with those miser-y bastards and get a new one, but this is a sign.  A sign to answer every call.  My view screen is white.  Just white.  A harsh, clinical whiteness.  And I have no fucking clue as to who is calling me.  As to what is coming my way.  So I let it come.  I accept everything. 

Sometimes I let it stay. 

And sometimes I let it go.  

The last sane story I will tell begins with four guys walking twelve blocks in the cold to get to a party.  A party that isn't going on that night.  So, four more blocks over, to a party where some girl we'll call "Jill" invited Theft.  "I'm bringing someone" he told her.  Someone(s), it turns out.  When we get inside, Chocolate, Theft, Roman, and myself all mingle at the door before spotting the keg.  I am immediately ahead of everyone, leaving my friends behind.  There is a couch against the wall, next to the keg, and in front of the beer pong table.  People are sitting on the couch like it is a fucking riser for the beer pong game.  Their legs hang over the edge of the couch and form a gauntlet to the keg.  This gets increasingly irritating as I drink more.   

The next thing I know I have five solo-cup sized beers in me and I am out on the porch negotiating with Tony, a kid from my dorm, to give me some of the liquor he brought with him.  He has major OCD and won't let me drink out of his bottle.  I tell him this is probably for the best, since, you know, I have aids from all the buttsex I have.  Apparently I say this very loudly, because a group of people turn to stare at me.  The girl in the group is hot and I decide saying "Yeeah, you heard correctly" is the appropriate response.  I don't say anything else, as I am back to bargaining for liquor, the devine nectar of the gods.  The girl turns around and giggles.  Tony agrees to pour some of his draft into my red cup.  He tells me it is Bacardi 151.  I tell him I love him.  We throw back together.  He wretches and I lick my lips, telling him I am indebted, and that 151 is delicious. 

I head back inside for more beer since I have no more liquor.  I pass Theft on the way inside and shake my empty cup in the air at him.  He takes a second to register this, turns, and asks, "Dude, you're going back already? How many have you had?" 
"Like five," I tell him. 
"Let me catch up!"
I smile and walk away, tripping over the gauntlet of feet stretched casually across the floor.  This pisses me off so as soon as I get my beer I chug it and fill up for a seventh.   With my seventh beer in hand, I head back to the porch outside.  The porch rests on the second floor of an apartment building.  I want to test its integrity, so I give Theft my beer and begin jumping up and down.  Because, testing something with YOURSELF that could lead to your DEATH is an awesome idea.  Theft is saying something to me, but I am too busy testing the strength of the pillars below.  
Theft: "Dude, it's concrete"
Hunter: "That just means we'll fall faster, right?"
Theft: "Uh, what beer are you on?"
Hunter: "Mmmm, like.. like seven... and some 151 that Tony gave me."
Theft: "Jesus man, I'm on like four, give me a chance to catch up with you."
Hunter: "I knew a guy that ate just ketchup.  It was gross."
Seeing that I was 100% capable of sustaining a real conversation, Theft takes this time to introduce me to "Jill," the girl that invited him.  She is cute, with short brown hair, bobbed, and piercing eyes. I shake her hand and she smiles. I am not revolting to her because she is probably more drunk than me.  Distracted, she shambles off into the party.  I ask Theft if he is hooking up with her.  I must have almost yelled it, because he's giving me the buldging eyes, slice-across-the-throat hand movement.  "Oh," I say.  "Nice." 

I head back inside and pass the couch.  This time, I step on everyone's feet.  Someone calls me an asshole, but I tell them they are impeding my intoxication.  I get an eighth beer and Chocolate and Roman say they're headed out.  I am giving them high fives and hugs like they're departing for some long journey that they'll never come back from.  I turn around and some random guy is behind me, so I high five him too.  I am a happy drunk tonight. 

Terror strikes.  The keg is dry.  I almost begin weeping, because I am no where near as drunk as I want to be.  Jill sees that I am distraught and comes up to me.
Jill: "There's another keg in the place behind this one.  Just go around back, outside, and take a left."
Hunter: "You are my hero."
I end up following her to the next apartment where she waits outside to smoke.  You know, on one of those ancient fire escape things, the pitch black metal and what not. Inside, I am packed between two fat dudes that smell like shit.  Luckily a girl entertains me while I wait to get to the alcohol.  She asks me if I'm Hunter.  Hunter Caldwell.  I say yes, and ask her why the hell she knows me.  I am enamored.  I feel famous. "You went to James River, you were in my graduating class. I guess you didn't see me much."  It just got scary.  I have never ever seen this girl in my life.  She tells me her name as she exits and I tell her I'll look her up on Facebook sometime.  I immediately forget her name. 

I finally get to the keg, fill up, and leave.  I go outside and my current entertainment, Jill, is gone.  I decide to drink this beer as fast as possible and go for another.  I do, and a guy from my dorm comes up behind me saying, "Nice."  I turn around to see who it is.  It's some kid that absolutely zero people like.  I've never had a problem with him, but think that fate has given me a means to my own entertainment.  I talk to him for awhile, making sarcastic remarks about his leather outfit.  Before I go for another beer, he asks me what my name is.  Not being very creative in my drunken stupor, I tell him my name is James.  That's my first name, so technically I wasn't lying.  Throughout the rest of the night I would tell him my name was Fred, Jason, Jackson, Jefferson, Earnest, Bunsburry, and Captain Kirk.  I think he finally got it by the last one. 

After several more beers, I am out on the terrifyingly high fire escape.  Jill is sitting on the stairs leading up.  I guess to the roof, there aren't any third floor apartments.  She's smoking a cigarrette, and I ask her for one.  I am not a smoker, but when I drink, I do smoke.  The nicotine-alcohol concoction is nice for a head rush.  We sit out there and smoke, talking.  I am not going to lie to you, I remember nothing of the conversation, and I'm not going to pretend I do.  She asks me to hold on to her cigarrette and heads inside to use the bathroom.  The kid from my dorm comes by and asks my name.  I think this is somewhere around the use of "Jefferson."  "Cool," he says, and I head inside, leaving Jill's and my cigarrette behind on the rail. 

After awhile, I am drinking another beer out on the porch, talking to Theft, when Jill comes up.  She asks me if I have a girlfriend.  I am honest, so I say yes.  I kind of wish I didn't right now, because the question is not subtle at all.  I tell her yes, and am surprised to hear her explain the friend zone. 
She says, "Oh, because you can climb the 'Friend' ladder or the 'Fuck' ladder."  Ooo, girlfriend means "Friendzone"!  I'm not a cheating bastard, but am disappointed to have been put in a less-than-awesome category.

The rest of the night between that and getting back to the dorm is unimportant.  We did go to another party, but it was totally lame.  The last thing I remember before getting back to the dorm is riding on Theft's back down the street. 

So, I get to the dorm, sloppily swipe my card a few times, and rush upstairs.  Yes, stairs.  Even drunk, I have a four-floors-or-less stairs policy.  I live on the third floor and I refuse to be that lazy.   I have to take a hurculean piss, so I go to the bathroom.  I see two shoes sticking out from under a stall door.  Somebody has been partying way harder than me.  It kind of reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, and I wonder if the shoes will curl up and disappear. 

I am willing to ignore the person, take my piss, and be on my way, but then the groaning starts. 
Hunter: "You alright in there, man?"
"OoOOOARH!"
Hunter: "Dude, you don't sound so good, you need some help?"
He starts puking, "BLAAAARRRH!"
I finish up and look under the stall.  There is dark, viscous liquid coating everything.  The toilet, the floor, the wall, his arms and shirt.  It is fucking gross.  I reckognize him.  It is "Somedude2" from my story "Drunk People."  We'll just call him "Toilet" in honor of his submission to the porcelain god. 
Hunter: "I am so getting you some water man... it's like. . . a cure-all"
Toilet: "BLllaaargh"
I go to DasBox, knowing he is the only other person awake at four in the morning.  I ask him to help me.  I don't know for what, maybe moral support.  Or maybe because Toilet is a fucking tank of a person, and immobile to someone like me. 
We keep supplying Toilet with water and he keeps throwing most of it up, or just pouring it on himself.  Toilet has been arrested before on campus and is on the verge of getting kicked out of the dorm, so I can't leave him in good concience.  We decide to move him.  But first we get a trashcan so he can throw away his shirt.  It is literally caked in brown and black throw up.  I don't know about you, but the second I start throwing up black shit, get help for me, please.   We get him to his room.  I walk inside, and try to get Greez off of Toilet's bed.  I tell him he has to move.  And he doesn't listen to me.  This pisses Toilet off and he says something to the effect of "I'll fucking kill you."  I don't really remember, but I recall it being commanding.  And besides, this guy is an ox and could destroy Greez.  Greez hears him and springs into awareness, moving to the floor.  Some random girl is on his bed. 

I mention the last part, about Toilet, because that may very well be me soon.  Heading back out into the drinking world, beyond my limits and what not.  My friend Luke is coming back this summer, and let's just say I can drink a lot, but not like it's my job.  Like, if you're in the military, you kill people for a living.  If you're Luke Koftan, you drink bitches under tables for a living.  This man keeps drinking after he has won drinking contests.  People actually tell him, "You don't have to drink anymore, you know." 

"FUCK YOU," is his response.  So, I have some catching up to do.  With a family history of alcoholism and my Irish heritage, here's to the last sane story I ever tell. 

    The past few days, everyone's been having the same conversation.  A fire alarm went off.  If you know anyone from the Cabaniss dorms down here at VCU, you know the story.  I hear the same fucking complaints about burnt soup everywhere I go.  On the bus.  In the dining hall.  In class. 
In the bathroom, two guys sit and converse through the blue panels surrounding their respective toilets.  They're talking about the goddamn fire alarm.  The fire alarm caused by soup.
 
    Some girl on an upper floor burns soup and causes this whole ordeal.  On the bus to class, some guy questioned the possibility of burning a liquid, as if all liquids share the same exact qualities found in water.  He doesn't understand the dire situation our nation is facing with such non-water-esque liquids.  He doesn't understand fire.  He doesn't understand fire like I do. 

    Waiting for the bus, I read my book, foolishly leaving my knuckles exposed for anyone to see.  Thomas walks by and asks me what happened to my hand. 
"Bloody knuckles," I tell him, dissmission coating my voice.  I find that straightforward answers held with little regard yield the best avoidance possibility when dealing with outsiders-- those not in the know, in my life, in my head.  The lesser tiers of my involvement.

    Earlier, I met Devon, the tall guy on my floor with the long hair, outside of my math lecture building.  I sit down next to him and ask him whether the imminent test is scantron. No, he says, not scantron.  No, I say, I guess it's just "papertron."  A failed jab at something clever.  The girl mirroring me on Devon's other side asks what happened to my hand.  Before I can bullshit her, she hands me a crutch to lean on--"'Bloody Knuckles' or somethin'?"
    "Yeah," I say, agreeing with her.  People like to think they're good at knowing what's going on in other people's lives.  If people speculate, I let them guess correctly every time.  You got in a fight? Yeah. You punched a wall? Yep, it looked at me funny.  You played "Bloody Knuckles"? Of course, it's my favorite game.  

    The truth is, though, that none of those are true.  I'm not bleeding, I'm pussing.  Pussing the ever living shit out of my unhealing hand and arm.  It looks like a battlefield, my arm.  My mind too, if it were visibly available to me.  No, I just feel it.  A dull roar of cognition.  A dull infrastructure of senses and reactions.  My system. Me. 

    My point is, if you keep your mouth shut and don't suggest things, hand over your ideas, people may be more willing, or more pressured to surrender the truth.  The truth is a self-generated understanding of the universe, and as soon as you have interfering factors, like a ditzy blonde who says "'Bloody Knuckles' or somethin'?"  you have a chance to skew that universe, to blur it.  To take an image and sodomize it with falsehood.  False enough to the point where I'm lying twice.  Bloody Knuckles?  I've never even played that game.  Great, blondy, now you have me lying about having played this sophomoric game TODAY and ever.  Thanks a lot, you genesis of lies. You sssserpent of deceit. 

    So, before it is questioned, I do stupid things when I'm drunk.  To myself.  Several times.  Again and again.  I'm fascinated by the utter lack of pain during intoxication.  A quick swipe of fire normally will not hurt you.  A longer duration of exposure to it, however, will.  And, if it doesn't feel like it's hurting, the scars and bulging skin balloons of puss will tell you otherwise the next day.  So, I'm sorry to You and Me both, for causing these second degree burns.

Also, fuck cigarettes.