Heyo

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:49:26 GMT

It's (about) that time again. Profile updated (kind of).

Night One - 2506 words!

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:39:06 GMT

-1-

Your Daily Horoscope for Pisces
You can have fun almost anywhere, even in the most
inappropriate of situations. Maybe you should tone it down a little bit,
lest your significant other come home late at night to find a
stripper named Esmerelda passed out on the sofa.
Your future happiness depends on this.
And sober up, cocksucker.

   The first thing I notice when I get to work is that the office was on fire.
   The second thing I notice is that my office was on fire. Rather specifically. The rest of the old building, which takes up the entire block, imposing and dominant, stands rather resiliently, given that an entire corner of it appears to be playing host to an ancient ritual involving smoke signals, or perhaps re-enacting the Industrial Revolution. Just my office, my tiny office, stuffed with my life’s work, as well as the major reserves of my alcohol cabinet, which, now that I think about it, probably was not contributing to the “dying down” phase that I am praying the fire will eventually lapse into.
   The firetrucks blare past, and I stand rooted to the ground. A hand finds its way up to my hat, and with a slow shake of my head and cluck of the tongue, I pull the fedora off, and brush the ashes off the top of it. There is yelling, and bustle, and I hear some colorful language erupt out of the chief firefighter as the hose bursts off from the hydrant, unexpectedly, and sends a fabulous spray of water cascading up and out and away from my rapidly dissipating career.
   “…. Figures.” With no more than a mumble, I press my way past the scrambling public officials, and towards the gawking crowd. I find myself staring into a pimple, that resolves itself into a chin, when the teen boy finally glances down and sees me staring at him, eyebrow half cocked.
   “Dammmmmn,” he wheezes, “It just keeps getting worse.”
   “How’d it start?” I ask, slipping a pack of cigarettes out of my trench coat.
   He glances over at me, the disgusted look on his face reminding me why I can’t stand this new generation. Sodding bunch of health freaks, campaigning to shut down the tobacco companies and then going home to smoke their ‘medicinal’ herbals. I light up and blow in a direction that will no doubt find its way up his ever-sensitive nose holes and disturb the limbic part of his brain that is socially programmed to act elitist, and listen to indie music.
   “No, I won’t be home for awhile, I wanna watch them deal with this. The fire hydrant just went postal. …. Yeah, you heard me.”
   It is only then that I notice the tiny little Blue tooth set behind his right ear. Bugger if he isn’t on the phone, and if that dirty look didn’t have more to do with the fact that I had just attempted to overlap conversations with him, and less to do with my personal campaign for the right to burn out any internal organs that I choose too, as long as they aren’t replacements, as, if I were to get someone’s else’s lung in my body, I wouldn’t feel as cavalier about destroying it.
   Still, I hate those little headsets and so I blow another puff directly in his face before turning to regard my collapsing future once more. I shake my head and push through the crowd, traipsing ashes behind me as they are blown off from my fedora again, and as I tap my cigarette against my leg. My lungs are burning already - I’d had to walk to work eight blocks, as the damn tube was down, and the harsh winter winds are buffeting my tattered coat about., as it repeatedly becomes untied, despite all my best efforts to make it look jauntily assembled.
   Ah, well. The walk home isn’t so bad. Despite the rumbling and grumbling hobos, the repetitive advertisements, plastered six by twelve across an entire wall, the businessmen, carrying their Starbucks, poking at their tiny PDAs with their miniaturized styluses, in the reverse compensation style that was the modern business world. Despite all the hoodlum kids, who hadn’t changed since the last century, always looking for the next big thrill, and readily distracted by cheap beer or porno rags. Despite all of this, it is, in its own unassuming way, kind of charming - that is, if you spend large amounts of your “working days” surrounded by boozing nobodies in a backwards pub, or chasing scabby yellow cats off from the window sill where you are drying casts of cement shoe prints that will inevitably tell you no more than that you are looking for someone who shopped, like everyone else, on Oxford Street, or at Marks and Spencer, and that you shouldn’t be expecting a check next month.
   I can almost imagine the street as the music video set for some peppy, ambling number, that features a mime or a clown with a spinning umbrella bouncing their way down the street spreading cheer or flowers or some other drug culture symbol all their merry way.
   Truthfully, in the depths of my heart, the image depresses me, and I pull my hat down further. Even the nicotine loses its bite.
   “Fuck optimism,” I mumble between my teeth, the cig still clenched there, and I pull it out, spitting to the right, onto the prim and proper pink stiletto of some aspiring socialite, who is wrapping her hand absently around a leash, which leads to a spunky looking young boy, who is struggling against the harness with all of his youthful might. She takes a step away and I notice her dirty look.
   “Hey, barmpot,” she says, with charming bite. “Bugger off, and watch where you’re salivating.”
   Instead of gracing her with an equally eloquent response, along the lines of call her out as a bloody bint, for parading around in those eight inch nightmares, I simply flick my cig in her direction, and watch out of my peripherals as it bounces off the sidewalk and onto her son’s shoe. It prompts a smirk out of me, although I’m not sure why.
   The boy overreacts, obviously having picked up his social clues largely from his polished and cultured mother, and takes a few wheeling steps backwards, arms flailing. His launches an accusatory fist in the air towards me, and seems to lunge in my direction, nearly pulling his now-teetering mother down with him. The leash goes taut.
   “You’re a bad man, you are! He swore, momma, I ‘eard him!” His little lower lip juts out in a practiced sort of way and I almost feel sorry for the mother. He’s gonna grow up to be a right arsehole, and probably put her through the embarrassing pain of defending him in court cases where he assaulted someone for the part in their hair. But right now, he’s calling me names and that she’s not jumping to my defense, so my sympathy fades fast.
   “You’re right, I’m the bloody Antichrist,” I mumble and the boy starts crying, and I realize that maybe I was wrong, maybe he’s gonna grow up to lead the Broadway cast of Rent in America. Somehow that bucks me up a bit, and I hear the woman give a sound that is half huffy and half screech based, and I reach up and dig a finger in my ear to blot out a percentage of the sound.
   Never a dull moment, truly.
   My apartment is still eight blocks away, I regrettably discover, despite a fervent and compulsive wish to find that my shite had been relocated without my knowing it to a much nearer, much swankier locale. Not that anywhere I pass is swanky. But it’s my fantasy and it can have whatever the hell I want.
   I add belly dancers for effect.
   I head up the six flights of stairs that are suspiciously missing railing, as they have been for the last seven suspicious years, and yank the keys out of my pocket, juggling the cigarette pack and scowling as the face of the Pimple and the Pink Platforms and the Plump Pipsqueak reemerge in front of me.
   I hate this sodding city. Unfortunately, I haven’t found anywhere else that I hate marginally less. So here I stay, and root through the mail shoved haphazardly under my door again. Six years ago, the mailboxes were removed after a station wagon crashed through the front hall. The landlord, one Mr. Ennis, the man who defines the word gaunt as it applies to modern physiognomy, promised they would be reinstalled in a ‘timely and orderly’ fashion. Time seemed to quickly become sacrificed to order, and the mailboxes have remained on order since then, according to any inquiries put to the office, or to Mr. Ennis himself.
   Not that the landlord usually is open for many inquiries. He appears more or less on a ‘biannual’ basis as I’ve come to define it, and it’s usually in the most disturbing of contexts, and regrettably, on more than one occasion, when I’ve had a bad run, followed by too much bad rum. I’ve been known to stagger out of my bedroom in the middle of the night, scratching and lumbering in the most private of fashions, only to find the man standing shock still in the midst of my living room (slash kitchen slash dinette slash occasional rumpus room), looking up, his intense white blue eyes narrowed as if he were searching out hidden Jews in the attic, and even the wisps of hair on his head seeming alert and up to no good. On these merry occasions, he will turn to me, and say in the most aloof of voices, as if he were not trespassing into both my midnight hour and sanctuary: “Rusty.”
   I always ask “Yes?” or “What?” to be polite, Rusty being, after all, my name, but it usually merits no more than a harumph, which, in and of itself, dates Mr. Ennis back to the prehistoric time when Victorian men and women walked the streets of London, harrumphing back and forth to one another. And then he’ll turn and march out, and I’ll note, despite whatever altered state I might be in, that he is wearing his coat in the middle of the night, inside the apartment where he supposedly also lives and works.
   Eccentric, I have found, is an overused term in today’s society.
   The mail reminds me that I haven’t paid up insurance on the office. Fire insurance.
   Fuck me sideways and scrub me dishpot, I think, and sit down hard in my recliner, which butts up against my desk in the corner. I run a hand across the digital screen there, and pull down the keyboard. My home screen pops up, and a flurry of email messages, junk filters, and various pop ups assault my senses. Better than coffee, that. The modern day wakeup call. On the top, a window flashes. Daily bloody horoscope. I don’t think twice about reading it, I just do. Natural and all.

Your Daily Horoscope for Pisces
You can have fun almost anywhere, even in the most
inappropriate of situations. Maybe you should tone it down a little bit,
lest your significant other come home late at night to find a
stripper named Esmerelda passed out on the sofa.
Your future happiness depends on this.
And sober up, cocksucker.

   My hand floats the mouse over the X for a moment and I feel the contempt tugging a frown across my face. A picture of Madame Zelda taunts me from the box’s layout, her large blue eyes magnified through the crystal ball she held up to cover part of her face, her wide lips stretched into a “mysterious” smile, though two years taught me that the mystery had a lot more to do with how one woman could have lived twenty seven years of her life without picking up a scrap of common sense along the way, then with the manner in which she channeled the mystic energies of the universe through those fake lashes and lacquered nails.
   Yeah there had been something magical about the idea at first - an astrologist girlfriend who could entertain you with hokey ideas that you could laughingly dismiss with a wave of science. Someone who thought you were destined by the stars, planets, and sunbeams to be together, and who would attribute your annoying and less desirable idiosyncrasies to forces outside of your control. In other words, a free pass from guilt trips for eternity, and a chance to escape the heavy burden of responsibility for one’s own actions.
   But then reality crashed in, as “Zelda” gave way to the reality that was Josephine, with its two am tantrums, its mad insistence on feng shuing the liquor cabinet, which included throwing out a few bottles of ‘liquid bad karma”, its invented phrases such as “liquid bad karma”, and the repetitive and varied ways of claiming that she “knew that today was going to be one of those days” whenever business or pleasure ended on a sour note at night. Which was, admittedly, most nights.
   It’d been a slow and painful decline from reading those horoscopes daily with a superior smirk on my face to reading them just to decipher what hidden messages might be directed at me, masked as a message to all born under the sign of the compassionate fishes.   After I decided it was over, and she learned as much the hard way, the messages became a lot less between the lines, and a lot more likely to get her fired from her job. Somehow, this amps this drama, and makes me more curious to check them every day, and see if she’s still getting away with ruthlessly slamming my every habit, while insulting billions of other innocent people around the city.
   I wonder if anyone has shot themselves in the head after reading “You’ve been feeling directionless lately, and it’s probably not without grounds. Purpose has abandoned you, and you have no one to blame but yourself.”   I would at least expect one or two overdoses. For all the horoscopes on all the websites and all the newspaper pages throughout the globe, there has to be enough kooks who place stock in them to keep them prevalent. I wonder if “Zelda” ever thinks about that.
   Plus, as she so liked to point out, incessantly and repeatedly, we Pisceans exhibit a high susceptibility to alcohol and drugs in the first place. And as we are the emotionally volatile sort, torn between shifting emotional currents, conflicting desires, and extremes of temperament, I don’t know what she expects other than a little bit of blood on her hands. It must be some sort of psychosis, some desire to drive men mad, though it’s usually the kind of complex I see in serial killers.
   I would know. I’m a detective.

NaNo 2007

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:44:12 GMT

It begins. Soon.

And I've figured out my plot.

Beware.

Bio info on this lj updated with the sordid details.

METAPHOR powah

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:17:45 GMT

Simon = ego
Robin = social conscience
As yet unnamed Priest character who hasn't appeared yet = faith

Three parts, one self, how they collide when the social conscience's deeds lead to a collision with ego, and later conflict with faith.

I'm writing about Anakin Skywalker, and I did not mean to.

Le sigh.
P.S. If you can think of a name for an awesome priest, lay it on me.

Hello darkness, my old friend

Heyo

Night One - 2506 words!

NaNo 2007

METAPHOR powah