Hello my lovely lovely readers,
here's a teaser for a piece of short fiction I've produced.
Tell me what you think.. and if you'd like more
love.
Job interviews are made for two types of people in society. In this chasm of the norm. The type of people who spend their whole life aspiring to fit into the mold of white offices and cheap suits, and the type who would rather watch the office burn down.
On the one hand, we have the hero. The average individual with a vision of a better life, where every day is filled with symphonies of fax machines and aimless filing. Day in and day out he works towards a life of regularity.
We like the hero.
Then we have our villain, here to shake things up.
Watch as he pours havoc onto the streets with his artistic demeanor and quirky style. Gawk in horror at his aspirations for change. For something different.
Shield your eyes, lock your doors, and grab your closest issue of Home & Garden magazine. Here he comes.
We hate the villain.
For the majority of my life. In this chasm of the norm. This thing we call society, I’ve seen a lot of these “heroes” and a lot of these “villains”. It’s a lesson we are taught. The schooling for how to live in this bubble of tension, this thing we call earth. I mean, where would we be without our knowledge of mathematics, marketing and religion… along with cursive writing, prejudice and table manners?
Thank you evolution
Thank you social hierarchy
Thank you submission
So here we are, at the pinnacle of my existence on this dirt mound. This thing we call earth, standing in front of a beautiful car. Not just a car, but also one of those cars that appears on a glossy page of a magazine. One of those cars that speeds around a desert to a bass beat on your television. The type of car that people would sell their soul for, It’s that nice. Without hesitation, I determine that this is the possession of a hero. Gliding across the city in his deceit-mobile for his successful life, full of faxing machines and burnt coffee at the office. I walk past wondering how much he loves this car. Most likely a lot. Gleaming in the peaking sun of the smog, it is perfection on a mangled sidewalk. A wet dream for greed.
Staring into the window, I catch a glimpse of myself and reach into the pockets of my jacket.
Lock your doors, shield your eyes, ready or not here I come.
After all his hard work, after all the hours of life spent to get such a pretty imported hunk of steel…it was only polite to congratulate him.
So I left him a note.
“Nice car”
Carved into the driver’s door.
And I walk down the street.
Momma always told me “manners first”.
When it comes to the professional world, nobody lives the dream. We are schooled to believe in the fairytale of success. Told to try. In this heap of disorder, this thing we call culture we’re also told that Santa Clause is real, money isn’t everything and to love thy neighbor as thy self. The dream, this idea of self-worth, exists for a little, until its shattered into a pile of wasted time. The Hiroshima of the American dream. Take for example, these fine young heroes; the doctor can’t afford medical school, the athlete inherits arthritis, the CEO can’t choose stocks for shit, the tooth fairy stops leaving money.
C’est la vie.
Which leads me to the interview process. The bowel movement of the business world. A necessary ritual for this rusted cage. This thing we call humanity.
The questions never change, the wardrobe expectations never differ and the atmosphere of drained personality is always strong. Generation bland.
Today’s interview is as follows. The walls are painted white. Not wedding dress white, but the white of old popcorn at the movie theatre. A clock hangs beside the door crooked to the left with the time 8: 24 am. My watch reads 8:29. The chair I’m sitting in is cheap plastic, held up by a few anorexic metal bars. Starved furniture. On the matching malnourished desk sits Mr. Lynch’s name. It’s engraved into a gold rectangle. It’s cheap, tacky and smothers the office with an air of failure.
Mr. Lynch living the dream.
Here I am sitting in Mr. Lynch’s life waiting for him to arrive so he can ask me a few questions. So he can get to know me.
Does Mr. Lynch care about my views of literature?
Does Mr. Lynch yearn for my scandalous past of mastering the art of the perfect alibi?
Does Mr. Lynch wonder about my apartment of four years filled with bulimic stools and beaten carpet?
No.
What our ignorant dreamer wants to know is how many hours I’ll be available to work per week. And I say full time.
What the entrepreneur of disappointment wants to ask about is what my best business quality is. And I say I’m a real people person.
Mission accomplished.
The easiest way to land any job is to create an alter ego. Be the person your employer is looking for.
The reason people can’t book a job isn’t because they aren’t qualified…. It’s because they’re too focused on selling themselves. Once you learn to stop selling yourself and advertise another, the benefits become exponential.
You have to welcome yourself to the dark side.
Take our very own Mr. Lynch. The moment he walks into his own office I’ve already holstered all control. One look and I can assume a few things about our newest hero. First of all, he’s unorganized, he’s wearing a blue tie and a brown suit, and he looks as though the idea of hygiene could make him vomit. He looks like a run of the mill murder scene. Each attribute is chaos. Looking into his eyes, you can almost see visions of people screaming and running in fear.
He’s perfect.
This makes my job very easy. All I have to do is emanate everything Mr. Lynch has aspired to be. Crush his internal deceit-mobile. Carve myself into his esteem. So I smile, and slide a perfect manicured resume over emaciated cedar. As Mr. Lynch glances over my resume I watch as he fills with boiled blood and envy. I ask will you need a recommendation contact sir?
And he says start on Monday.
Please, hold all applause till the end of the show.
You see on this radiated sphere, this thing we call civilization, the easiest way to succeed is to conquer. Pick up a historical encyclopedia, flip through it.
Sure, a few thousand people were killed here and there. But the men in charge, they sure knew what they were doing.
Looking back to our past, you can easily subdivide every recognizable figure into one of those heroes or one of those villains.
The heroes did some pretty exemplary things. Hunger strikes and all that jazz. But those villains… they were able to take the world and shatter it’s skull.
Was it just?
No.
Was it fair?
No.
Was it impressive?
Undeniably.
Working an office job, one of these white walled cheap suit things is much like being smashed in the back of the head with a baseball bat. You feel paralytic, helpless and tricked.
Mr. Lynch is the manager for an insurance agency specializing in accidental occurrences.
Lynch Insurance Inc.
One thing about these heroes, they are the autism ward of human creativity.
Sitting in a ravenous cubicle I flip through file after file.
Maria Saremba
Single mom
Sticky accelerator leaving her numb from the eyes down
Thomas Aberdale
Father of three
House fire leaving him homeless.
Mistakes, mistakes and more mistakes. Leaving the heroes of old popcorn walls to pick up the pieces. We can build technology to outsmart the human brain, we can alter the weather but this whole fate situation… that still needs work.
Working for Lynch Insurance Inc. was by far a nightmare. It was full of burnt coffee, glossy magazines, mistakes and a sour taste of pathetic in the air. For the three months as a valued employer I learned a few things.
Just when you think you know a hero, you meet a villain
Mistakes happen.
Old popcorn paint and matches work wonders.
Shield you eyes, lock your doors, and grab your closest issue of Architectural Digest
Ready or not. Here I come.
Faith, Mighty Faith
The mind is the most powerful tool that god created.
A centre of full control, a dictatorship of the body.
More consuming than a passionate love affair, more painful than a knife to the back.
It is a tumor of power.
To use it, you have two choices… embrace or revolt.
At this point, perhaps you’re a little confused. Pardon the abstract poetics and artistic strings of consonants; it’s just that this topic of cerebral turmoil really gets me going. It’s one of those topics that makes me want to scream, run around the neighborhood and machine gun the old bag who lives three doors down with the red shutters and silver convertible… non-hypothetically speaking. The aggravation that comes from the negligence of our thoughts is quite upsetting. Abduction from our own independence. If you still find yourself confused by my banter of slanderous vowels direct your attention to the experiment below.
For 10 seconds, do not think, imagine or envision a blue elephant.
Seems simple enough doesn’t it?
Go ahead and try…
I know what’s inside that grotesque clump of brain matter
A Blue Elephant.
No escape you see.
Hopefully your comprehension of my abusive letter compositions has a little more clarity. Hopefully, you see the point I’m trying to make. We are imprisoned to our minds. We are nothing else than what is conjured into that clump of subconscious, yet we choose to edit. Half of what is thought is discarded of, evaporated, pushed to the back. In order to be put into action, the mind must fit a template of conformity. We must blend. Take a gander at scenario number two.
When a co-worker drinks your coffee by mistake, a hook shot to the chin may cross your mind.
From here you have two options,
You revolt… walk past said coffee thief, smile and suppress
Or
You embrace…. And beat that son of a bitch to the ground.
If I was to take a wild guess, you probably think I’m crazy. You probably would call the police and gossip to all the neighbors about me if you ever met me in real life. You would probably go on for hours about my distasteful mannerisms and bizarre behavior. You would probably be a little frightened.
Please, allow me to explain myself a little further.
No Encore
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
A man begins to die.
He’s only got about half an hour left.
Thirty minutes before it’s all over
And he gets dragged back to hell.
Poor guy.
Every other night, I have to watch him be peeled away from reality, skinned alive and thrown back into his swollen debt, expired milk world. At first, I used to experience something we like to call pity but then I realized just how amazing it was, to see him suffer the way he does, and come back again and again for more. Superman with an addiction for kryptonite.
Oh dear…He’s drowning.
His neck is tilted back as if his hair was sewn to the back of his jean jacket and as usual, his arms are wailing about in that typical melodramatic fashion… trying to spark attention.
Nobody looks.
Nobody cares about superman overflowing with despair and self-loathe.
It’s all very routine, and frankly, pathetic.
The shock value left a long time ago, before his impromptu show became a regular thing. We all want to help him, don’t get me wrong, but saving someone over and over and over again… you can’t imagine the fatigue.
Twenty minutes left.
The man’s breathing begins to slow. His chest is rising through strands of loose argyle and miscellaneous designs below his denim straight jacket. On the outside, it’s as if he may just be leaning towards tranquility…but the peace is only a mask for his lips being threaded shut.
This way. He becomes silent.
No one around him can hear his pleas.
No one around him can recognize his pain.
No one around him can understand.
Helpless little Superman with a cape of murdered thread.
The regular audience of his vaudeville torture, including myself, has arrived at full realization of his predicament.
The guy is just too much of a fucking narcissist.
Don’t let him trick you either. If you’ve found yourself feeling sorry for The Late Show with Look at me, Look at me, Look at me. Well, you already lost.
That is exactly what he wants.
To shift.
Shift every procrastination, impulse and craving made from him, to the background.
Over paid bills for a slashed throat.
Cut phone lines for a hook shot to the cheek.
Hot water for a shattered ankle.
Razzle Dazzle for his remedy of deceit.
Look at me.
Look at me.
Look at me.
Ten minutes left.
This is the worst part of the night. The grand finale.
Around this time, Superman usually realizes that nobody around him is impressed… or shocked by his powers.
So he tries a little harder.
Gripping the oh too familiar laminated oak in front of him, he attempts to rip the threads from his lips and rave about some incoherent topic.
The audience cringes. In his most desperate attempt to reach a pinnacle of performance,
Everyone just wants him to shut up.
Including me.
But I figure, being killed little by little provides him with some distorted sense of life as opposed to keeping to himself… and decomposing alone.
I try not to get emotionally involved with any of these types. It’s their decision to come and perform for the unpredictable spectators. Some may say I’m an enabler. But it’s not my problem. I’m just trying to make sure I never end up in their situation. If they want to give a show. I can’t stop them. Not until time runs out.
5 minutes left.
Thank god...It’s almost over. I’m put in a pretty awkward position. Telling a man with bloody lips, filled lungs and broken fingers that it’s all over for him. But I have to… I have a life as well.
As usual, the news is less than amusing to him.
His fingernails lift in synchronicity, followed by a piercing yell.
It’s a very awkward situation for everyone.
I tell him one more time, “Five minutes left.”
And then fireworks.
Standing for the first time, the man tries to charge at me, but he knees are quickly batted in and he crumbles to the floor.
Round two.
He picks himself up. Brushing off the embarrassment and replacing it with rage he looks around the room for back up… for any sense of help.
Quiet.
No one is going to help.
No one is going to interject.
No one is going to ignite an encore.
The man looks at me. His eyes are sunken into his skull. He looks empty like the insides of the very last Matryoshka doll. Alone and empty.
Round three.
The man begins to weep.
Weeping for everything he has tried to forget.
For everything he has to go back to.
His expired milk.
His cut phone line.
His old sweaters.
All of it projecting more and more tears down his wretched face.
While his best friends, his murderers, laugh at him behind me.
Howling at their victory and giggling at his sadness.
They win.
“One more…please.” The man whispers to me.
“Fine. Just one more.” I reply, only agreeing because I know the shows over.
A final conniption of the neck for one more dosage of friendship.
Then an exit.
There is no applause.
There is no ovation.
Just quiet.
After the one man show leaves, the audience slowly trickles out the door, going back to their stocked fridges and warm showers.
And I flick the lights.
It may seem heartless.
Cold.
Artificial.
But the bar has to close eventually.
