The Bottomless Pinnacle

[shadrach451]

Long Distance Work Relationships

Long Distance work relationship are always doomed to fail.

You're on the east coast. She's on the west coast. You hear each other on conference calls throughout the day but have to keep things professional. Then you have to wait around until 9 o'clock when she will finally get off work, because of the time zones.  And by then you are so exhausted, all you have time for is a simple good night.  There is very little actual relationship there.  The connection grows thin.

So, you ask for a transfer to the LA office, and your supervisor who knows about your relationship and is jealous finds a way to move you, but it turns out the position you are moving into is actually HER job. Now she has lost her career because of you. She ends up taking a job as a bus driver working for Greyhound. You talk to each other every three or four days while she's on the road, but your lives are just so different now. She's met a nice guy at a filling station outside Albuquerque and she wishes you the best. You should find someone more your equal. You deserve better.

But you refuse to give up. You get on the phone to New York and you tell your supervisor to stuff it. You jump in your blue Volvo and you drive as fast as you can towards New Mexico. But somewhere along US84 you see something crest the horizon in the fading dusk.  It’s a greyhound bus. She is coming back to you! Your love is returning. You rush towards each other, making eye contact for one brief instant before your two vehicles collide on the interstate exploding into a cloud of chrome and debris. You and her and ten other passengers on the bus are killed instantly.

[shadrach451]

Shoes

My brother and I were wild animals. We were raised like a pair of wolves in a den burrowed into the side of an overturned tractor trailer that rolled into the Alaskan forest one day and was forgotten. We were raised in the shadow of the mountain, downstream from the glacier that carved it, and we sunk our feet deep into this rich pulverized stone.  Millions of years of ground up earth packed deep and hard between my toes. Every spring we would pace inside our tiny home and would whine to be let out into the wild. Slowly the sun would finally return to peek over the top of the great mountain and the mounds of snow would begin to weep at the sight of it. And seeing their weeping we would howl, throw open the doors, and run barefoot out into the wet landscapes. We would sprint barefoot over moss. We would sprint barefoot over gravel. We would slam our feet barefoot over stones and on the splintered backs of fallen trees. Our skin devoured thorns and absorb stones. Our feet were battered and bruised. Shoes were the work of the devil. Adam and Eve had invented shoes in the garden to cover their shame. We were God's children running with our naked feet in the likeness of God. The movie The Last of the Mohicans came out when I was just 12 years old. And I remember the goosebumps forming on my arms as I sat in a theater and watched as they ran through the forest in the opening scene. "That is us!" my soul cried. And I quickly glanced at my brother and he was rigid in his seat, eyes as wide as they could go, and reflected in them were the feet of a man running through the forest with a gun. It was everything we had ever wanted in life. To run through the forest, barefoot, holding a weapon. So, now I hate most shoes. They are flamboyant and blundering.  They are loud and irreverent. I wish I could live my life barefoot. I hardly ever wear my shoes at work. I sit at my desk and wander the floor in just my socks, and only ever slip my shoes on when I need to walk to the bathroom. And I often look out my window at the trees on the hill far away and I imagine myself running.  Then I slip my shoes back on and solemnly focus back on my work and the fields I am cursed to plow.

[shadrach451]

Rat Tale

Monty Badger had a rat tail. He literally lived in the junk yard a few blocks from my house. He was large, with a fat round face. He had bad breath that smoldered out of the gaps in his jowls. Nobody liked Monty. I felt bad for him and was something of a reject myself, so when he got on the bus a few stops after mine I would scoot over and let him have a seat. I didn't call him over, or look his direction and smile or anything, but I left it open and then turned to stare out the window. If he had no other choice, he could sit with me. He almost always didn't have a choice and would flop down and crush me against the window. Then I would spend the rest of the bus ride talking to him about comic books and trying not to turn his direction because he smelled bad. He had a rat tail. It was sixth grade, so 1992. Rat tails were a pretty big style at the time. He was obviously pretty proud of his tail. It was like a Klingon symbol of power or something. He would tell stories that gave him an excuse to ROAR and talk about smashing people's heads. I'm sure he had a lot to be upset about.  A lot of pent up agression.  Girls that he liked that would laugh at him.  He was probably not given much respect at home, and at school people hated him for no reason. But he had a rat tail, and it was where he found comfort and strength. He was a man as long as he had a rat tail. He brought a round hairbrush to class with him, and he would run this round brush down the back of his greasy head and then coil it through his tail. He didn't care that people laughed at him for this. He sat in the back of the room and ran this brush over and over and over through his hair. coiling his rat tail. His mouth held in a firm almost obstinately hard line. As if he were daring people to make fun of him. He would crush them, like the heroes in the comics he talked to me about on the bus. He could destroy us all and he knew it. It was the power of the tail that gave him strength, and it was the power of the tail that held him back. Then one day there was some commotion in the back of the room, and I turned to see him talking to our teacher. She appeared to be combing his rat tail for him. It didn't make any sense, and soon everyone was talking and crowding around to watch. Monty had gotten his round brush tangled up in his hair. They were struggling to get it detached from his head. The brush dangled from the back of his head and flopped around as he talked. His face was bright purple with embarrassment and I could see that he was struggling to keep his stone cold demeanor. They fought with his tail for a good five minutes before someone finally made a suggestion and the teacher agreed. A class mate ran across the room to the supply closet and then slowly came walking back. Our teacher was a good woman. She knelt down in front of Monty and put a hand on his shoulder and asked, "Do you understand what we are talking about doing?" and he nodded slowly. I look back on it now, and I realize that Monty was far stronger than any one of us could have imagined. I truly believe that he could have destroyed every last one of us that day. Simply with the flick of his wrist we could have all been dead. I know this, because his eye lids barely even flickered as he nodded in agreement. He sat straight backed and clear eyed, and agreed to have some kid with a long pair of scissors chop off his rat tail. It was over in just two short snips. And then they handed him his brush, with the tail wrapped around it.  He quietly walked to the coat closet and put the brush and his tail into his worn out backpack and pulled the zipper closed. He never grew it back. I watched, expecting to see him show up on the bus with his next hair cut and a little baby rat tail already starting.  But he never grew it back. I don't remember when Monty disappeared. It must have been in the summer when friends and acquaintances vanish off of the planet without warning and you never even notice they are missing when you get back on the bus the following Fall. You drive right past their stop without even noticing it. Unaware that the seat next to you is even empty. Then someday, years later, someone mentions a rat tail and you suddenly realize that they are gone.

[shadrach451]

The Life and Death of Kevin Bacon

I live in Alaska, so I've seen my fair share of butchered animals. It's just a way of life up here. Children are exposed to it at a young age and they are able to accept it as normal in a healthy and respectful way. I have some friends that live off the grid in a cabin and they decided to buy a piglet from the state fair one year. It was one of the racing pigs; so it was something of a local hero. I didn't catch her name, but it was probably something like "Kevin Bacon" even thought it was actually a girl. That's how it typically goes with the racing pigs. They raised this pig all winter and decided to slaughter it the following spring after it had become gargantuan (It's what pigs do). Being young conservative home schoolers living in the Alaskan wilderness, they decided to make this a learning experience for their younger children that had not see the harvesting of a live animal before, which is very different from cutting up a road kill moose, or portioning out a bear that Papa dragged off a mountain. The family, dressed in neat pants with high belt lines and clean flowered dresses with white smocks, walked into their back yard where Mrs.Kevin Bacon was having her last meal of slop. The oldest son carried a high powered rifle capable of downing a moose at 100 yards, and solemnly they said their farewells. One of the younger girls seemed to tear up, but they all stood bravely and watched as the boy raised the rifle and aimed at the pig's massive cranium. Boom. The pig went down. The gunshot echoed into the woods around the house and then all was silent. Respectfully the boy stepped forward and started unbuckling his knife from his belt. Then, without warning, the lifeless pink mass of Kevin Bacon began thrashing on the ground. Everyone gasped and backed away. Like something from a horror movie the young swine brought itself back to its hooves and screamed into the air. Frantically the boy reloaded his rifle and took aim once more. Another round entered the pig's fat head and she went down. But just like before, after the echos faded she was right back up again. Another shot was fired, and another. The pig's face became a bloody mush, eyes demolished, jaw hanging loose. The children were wailing in terror. Little girls holding their white aprons up over their eyes and screaming. The children's Papa, with his suspenders and long beard rushed to herd the children back into the house, while the oldest boy, steel faced, continued emptying round after round into his squealing target until it was finally over. They told me this story one morning while we were all sitting around in the crowded dining room at a homemade wood table cut from logs. The girls listened with their hands folded in their laps and smiled shyly. The boys jumped on stools and reenacted every squeal that the pig had made, firing invisible rifles into the living room where one of the boys rolled on his back and kicked his legs in the air. Finally they were all asked to be silent while their mother carried breakfast to the table. We were guests, so they placed the heaping platter of bacon in front of us first. I watched the steam rise, and smelled the sweetness of it, while we all bowed our heads to pray.

[shadrach451]

[shadrach451]

[shadrach451]

Maximum Kenny G

So, I had a surreal moment in the Cairo airport once. It was about 3 in the morning. I was there with two friends of mine leaving after a week in Egypt. We got to the airport six hours early because we were petrified of missing our flight and being forced to communicate with someone to explain what happened and find a way to get our penniless bodies across the border. The airport was a cavernous empty tomb, and after passing through security there wasn’t a soul in the place for several hours. And the whole time we were there, the entire six hours, from walking through the front doors to stepping onto the plane, they had the same Kenny G song playing on repeat. Kenny G. over and over and over and over… It just echoed off the ceiling and down the hallways. It was like the place was haunted by the Egyptian mummy ghost of Kenny G. Like Kenny G had been the Egyptian god of the dead and this was the song that he played as you passed down the reeded river from life through the veil of darkness and beyond into an ocean of fire and eternal pain.

We just sat against a wall staring dumbly into the abyss as the song deformed and twisted into grotesque shapes above our heads. There was a point in the middle where I was in a half-conscious state of numb nothingness.  And I opened a dark doorway in my mind and came into perfect enlightened clarity and I suddenly understood why someone would desire to strap explosives to their chest and ignite themselves. It was as if the best commentary that anyone could make about the destructive nature of capitalist western culture could be summed up in the simple repetition of this arrogant horn song. It was like I was being told, “Hello American. This is why you must die. this. this. this. this. this. this…”

To this day, whenever I hear Kenny G playing over a supermarket PA system I feel the icy hand of death as it wraps around my throat and I think, “How did we ever let things go this far?”

[shadrach451]

To Touch a Summer Sun

My older brother used to practice climbing ladders when we were young. He would go out into the field in front of our house with a 20-foot wooden ladder, and he would stand it up on end and very delicately balance it. After he had a perfect balance he was start to very slowly climb the ladder, step by step, leaning back to control and steady the motion.

I remember sitting in the grass on lazy Saturdays, watching him as if he were some sort of god, ascending a ladder into the clouds. Climbing a ladder straight into Heaven. He would glow hotter as he approached the sun. Smiling in his confident determination. Every time getting just a little further than the time before. I watched him. I believed in him. My brother was invincible. He was out there, late into the evening, climbing that ladder. Over and over and over.

One day in late August, I was watching him from my spot in the grass, and I saw him getting especially frustrated with his progress. He wanted so much to get to the top of this ladder, but the best he had been able to achieve so far was maybe five feet or so. I gave a little applause and he looked over and saw that I was watching. He took a deep breath, held the ladder out in front of him in practiced readiness, and with a stern face he started to climb. One rung. Then the next. Then the next. His legs swinging up in perfect control arcs, minimal rotation, no disturbance. He was focused on the motion of his feet, the movement of his hands, the minute movements in his back that held the whole operation in such balance. Higher and higher. The ladder began to stumble. He corrected for this. Continued. He was now at about 12 feet. He was smiling like a fool now. He had come so far! He felt the ladder giving way again under neath him. Falling slowly forward. He jerked it back into place and scrambled up the final rungs of the ladder as it collapsed beneath him like a skyscraper tumbling over and crushing a skinny white idiotic King Kong, screaming the entire way down in a mix of triumph and terror.

He laid in the grass, tangled up in the wooden ladder continuing to scream through tears. I ran to make sure he hadn't broken anything (he hadn't), but I found it difficult to run because I was doubled over in laughter. The great Icarus, with his wax wings, had finally touched the sun. I still have no idea what he thought was going to happen when he successfully climbed to the top of a 20 foot ladder in the middle of an empty field. He later would tell people that getting down had just never occurred to him.

This was the moment when I realized that my brother was an idiot.

[shadrach451]

Please Don’t Touch the Musical Lepers

I never pretend to be someone that knows a great deal about music theory, music history, pop culture, anything really.  But I enjoy and appreciate music and I'm willing to explore and find beauty in uncommon territories.  I like to think that there are a lot of us here online.  We enjoy the exploration of music and can respect the joy that someone else has when they find something they love, even if we can't get the same buzz out of the particular substance as they did. This is hard to convey to people in real life.  I regularly find that people believe that, since I listen to music they define as "obscure", then I must be some kind of music snob.  I am occasionally talked about as someone that hates music, which I find insulting.  It’s true that I hate some forms of mainstream public tunes, but that is only because I feel it hides so much other great music from the public.  And I refrain from even voicing this opinion in mixed company because my frustrations with this musical pulp fiction are far smaller than my happiness that someone enjoys it.  I honestly would much rather have a conversation with someone exploring why they enjoy Miley Cyrus than to explain to someone why I hate Miley Cyrus. But there are particular people in my life that I just can’t stand to discuss anything music related with them.  They are just musical imbeciles.  And arrogant in their total retardation.  They are aggressive towards me, mainly due to their own insecurity.  But it leads them to say some of the dumbest things, and I have to bite my tongue and not respond, but really I feel sad for their ignorance.

I have two examples I would like to share:

My brother in law is the worst offender.  He is a good friend in most situations, but he has such butt heavy opinions about music you can’t even say anything about music without him capsizing into a frothy paste.  He listens to acapella and rap, bad dubstep and he still claims his favorite song of all time is “Mr. Bassman”.  I made the mistake several years ago of sharing Sufjan Stevens Illinois with him while we were stuck in a car together for several hours.  He went totally nuts.  He literally couldn’t listen to a song longer than 15 seconds without declaring it as crap and turning it off (in favor of his Linkin Park remix album).  This is a nerd IT tech we are talking about here.  He has constantly since then described my music as “stuff that sounds like it’s about to completely fall apart at any second.”  Which I have concluded is just his way of describing what a banjo sounds like. The other day he forced me to play a song for a mutual friend of ours to illustrate to them the awful music I listen to.  Seriously, consider this jerk for a second.  It’s one thing to not like someone’s music choices, but to call them out at a party and make them play it for someone just so you can shoot it down?  Who does that?  I couldn’t just pick anything.  I had to play a Sufjan Stevens song off Illinois.  He kept pushing until things were really awkward, so I finally gave up and played “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”.  My brother in law instantly started laughing.  He laughed like a total idiot.  I mean, the man was rolling around on the floor.  He then pulled out his phone and played a different song, a better song, a song that he claimed Sufjan was “TOTALLY RIPPING OFF!”.  The song?  Fricken Tracy Chapman's “Fast Car”.  What the hell, right?  But everyone in the room laughed like this was actually the same song.  My wife had to hold me back.  Seriously, “Concerning the UFO Sighting…” and “Fast Car”.  SAME. I just walked away from that one.  Whatever dude. But not two weeks later I’m having a discussion with my brother, another source of musical frustration.  We have come a long way in recent years, but as an older brother he is still insecure and has to put me in my place regularly.  He comes to me for music recommendations, and every 5th song he has to make fun of, and then turn it around to be about how I have horrible music taste.  But he hasn’t found his own music in years.  He just takes my recommendations and then plugs what he likes into a Pandora station. Well, the other day, he was asking for recs and I had been listening to a lot of Mikal Cronin.  So, I sent him a few things, including the song “Piano Mantra”.  He responded over chat to say that it was a decent song, but it was a copy of something else he couldn’t place at the moment.  A little while later he sent me a link to the song he was trying to remember. The song?  Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car".  MOTHER FFUFUFUFUFFFUUUUUUU...

[shadrach451]

Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

I gave Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool my regular new album spirit quest the other day. It was Mother's Day. And I had failed miserably. I had misread a ton of signals from my wife and did things completely wrong, which put her in a sour mood. Which then eventually lead to a huge blow up between her and her own mother which completely ruined the day. So, it was late by the time I was able to get home and put the kids to bed and slowly just walk out the door into the 11 o'clock half-light that is Alaska in the spring. Before I even was out of the neighborhood, just as "Decks Dark" settles into its amazing groove, the sky bulged and a soft veil of misty rain came down upon me. I had neglected to bring a hat, and I wasn't even wearing socks. I had fled from the house with nothing but the shirt on my back and a love letter from Radiohead stuffed in my pocket. I was undeterred by the rain. In fact, I could already tell that it was very appropriate. To the tune of "Ful Stop" I left the wet pavement and scrambled up a steep rocky slope into a nearby gravel pit. As the music peaked I crested the hill and turned to look down. The road was small in the distance. The slope looked steeper than it had on the way up. I knew I couldn't go back the way I had come. The music confirmed this somehow. The clouds watched over my shoulder, very close. I walked through muddy paths of large crushed gravel. "Glass Eye" taunted me. "Identikit" lead me to the weeds on the opposite end. "Broken hearts make it rain" they said, as I gently wove a path through thorns and weeds. On the other side I found the same cliff I had come here to avoid. There was no safe way down. I was a fool. I had trapped myself. My shoes were full of stones. My hair and sweatshirt were now wet with the soft rain. I took a deep breath and started down the hill. "The Numbers" was my parachute. But it was honestly hard to concentrate on Thom's voice. "One day at a time..." and I slid and caught myself on the wet slope, winding my way down the ledge in small switchbacks. I finally found the bottom. I had only caused a few small avalanches on the way. I was now in a pit full of massive digging machines, but I had seen what looked like a path on the far side leading into the trees, and I worked my way through the metal monsters and wandered into the forest. It was here, climbing over logs, avoiding puddles in the soft dirt, surrounded by the dark abstract shade of trees, that I listened to "Present Tense". At one point the trail opened up into a clearing and things were brighter again with the heavy white grey clouds overhead, "as the world comes crashing down, I'll be dancing, freaking out, deaf dumb and blind" and I had to stop in my tracks and just lean my head back and catch the water on my eyes. The angels falling down around me in the cold water. "With you I'm lost. with you I'm lost." The gravel in my shoes disappeared, the rain evaporated, the trees vanished. I was just a mind in a blue fog. I now knew where I was. The trail lead onto a paved road for an extension of our subdivision that had never been finished. A paved empty road through the forest. Someday this will be a lively community filled with homes. Kids will play here. Men will mow their lawns were now moss grows on stumps. Or maybe that was the dream that some developer had at one time. But those dreams had all been shattered. Someone had lost interest. Given up. I walked down a road to nowhere. The strings swelled and then the album was over. "True Love Waits" brought me most of the way home. But I kind of feel like they intended for the album to end with "Tinker Tailor". It is just such a fantastic closer. "True Love Waits" is also a great closer, but I see it as an epilogue. I think they might have, in a different era, considered making it a hidden track. It's a final love letter to their fans. It's heart breaking. I miss the old version of the song, but this is the version that needed to be on this album. Nothing else could have worked. I walked back into the house. It was now midnight. My wife had made us each a salad. She had waited in the living room for me to get back. We sat down across from each other at the table and ate quietly.

[shadrach451]

The Piano

I was in love with the piano. The piano was my voice. I was the silent child, but it would speak for me. I sat quietly at the table and ate my oatmeal from the edges inward and then asked to be excused so I could sit at the piano for the rest of the afternoon. Our home was small. Our piano was massive. It took up a quarter of our living room. Black wood. Deep humming black wood. A giant bear. A gentle giant. I would whisper in its ear and in response it would roar and Roar and ROAR. And the walls would rattle and the failing joints of our home would creak and moan.  And I would play harder and faster and louder in the hopes that the whole thing would collapse in around me.  Often I was left alone in the house. I would pretend to be reading, but as soon as my parents' car left the driveway I was already on the bench and I was playing. Creating. Exploring the shapes of the keys. It was my life blood. It was my mourning. It was my rejoicing. I moved away, and at night, I dreamt of the black piano. It lived in the back of my mind. Rollicking in our living room. Rolling back and forth like a caged beast in our living room. Chanting and breathing into the shadows of our living room. I came home. I got married. My brother had a daughter. A few years later my parents gave her my piano. My mother told me in the car one day. She mentioned it in sequence with the order of events from her day. Her boss had made fun of her at work. She had eaten at a new restaurant for lunch. She and my father had decided to give the piano to my niece. They had seen a porcupine next to the road on the way into town. I stared straight ahead and nodded obediently. I was the silent child. I was a black beast pacing in a cage. I said nothing. I even helped them move it. My brother stood in his basement, the black piano out of place in the corner of the room, scared, and he complained about how my parents give him all of their garbage. I just nodded in agreement, my hand resting discreetly on the shelf above the keys.  My fingers feeling the patterns.  My fingers moving in and out of the familiar divots in the dented wood. I haven't played a piano in probably 10 years. This winter my brother left town and asked me to feed his cat while he was gone. He didn't even bother to give me keys. As soon as his car was out of the driveway I was breaking through a window in his house. The cat mewed at my ankle. I gently placed it in the garage and closed the door. I turned to look down a long dark corridor; at the end of it was a piano. And together we wept and burned and I said goodbye.

[shadrach451]

Gift Returns

My Dad is a notorious gift giver. He gives outlandish extravagant gifts that you neither asked for, or need. It's hard to complain about this, because gift giving is his only love language. He will hardly talk to you, and he will avoid being around family and act grumpy and sleep in a chair when you come to their house. But when Christmas or a birthday rolls around, he will dump a brown paper bag on the seat of your car while you are at work, and you will come out to find a brand new $300 coat that he ordered from Germany, or top of the line headphones when you only asked for the $30 ones. It's terribly endearing.

But it is just so hard sometimes, because you get buried under piles of gifts that have sentimental value because they came from your father, but cost hundreds of dollars that you would rather spend on something else. So, I struggled for a long time with the possibility of taking things back so I could spend the cash on School or buying clothes for my children, or something more practical like that.

One day my wife was able to talk me into it. My Dad bought me a handheld stereo sound recorder. Like the kind you would place on stage at a concert to record live audio. Really high quality. Completely out of the blue. I had no idea what I would do with this thing. He said he thought I could use it to record songs off of Youtube. Bless his old man heart. I couldn't believe he was serious. There was no way I could keep this thing. And then when I stumbled across the receipt in the bag I discovered it was worth $350. That was the last straw. I had to take it back.

So, I carried it into Best Buy and told the guy at the returns desk my whole situation. The device was in perfect condition, I hadn't even opened the box, I just needed to turn it back in because it was a gift and I could really use the money. He nodded and typed at his computer as if he understood me perfectly.

A few moments later he looks up at me and smiles and says, "Done! Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

"What do you mean, done?"

Still smiling, he says, "I returned the item and refunded you the money."

I glanced around on the counter and the floor, "What are you talking about? Where did you refund the money?"

"I refunded the money back to the credit card that was used to purchase it."

My heart sunk into my feet. I nearly climbed over the counter and strangled the little punk. Not only was I out $350, but sometime in the coming month my fastidious father was going to be looking over his credit card bill and find the cost of his birthday present to me showing up as a refund on his account. I braced myself.

Several weeks later I walked into my parents house and he was sitting in his recliner plucking at an old guitar. Without looking up he says, "So, have you used that recorder I bought you yet?"

I took a deep breath. "Dad. I returned the recorder to the store. I just... it was too much money, and I didn't think I would use it enough..."

He plucked at a few strings and said in the most disappointed voice I've ever heard, "I know."

That was the last I've heard of it. And ever since then my Mother has bought me driving gloves for my birthday. I tell my Dad thanks as if they came from him, but he says nothing.

[shadrach451]

Precisely 6:30am

I stepped onto the train platform at precisely 6:30am. I took a seat on a bench in the terminal and glanced around at the other passengers. A homeless man was lying at the far end of the station on a loose pile of newspapers. An elderly woman sat in the other direction knitting a blue sweater for her grandson. A trail of blue yard dangled down into her purse. That was it. There was no one else.

The terminal was surprisingly quiet. The usual commuter rush was strangely absent for a Tuesday morning. I checked my watch again. Still, exactly 6:30. I waited a few more minutes before standing up and walking around the terminal. I walked to the hallway leading into the station and then turned to face the large clock hanging there to greet arriving passengers. Its great white face hung like the moon in the glaring morning light. 8:15, the clock read.

I once again checked my watch. 6:30. I held my arm up so I could see both my watch and the terminal clock at the same time. 6:30. 8:15. 6:30. 8:15. 6:30. 8:16.

I was still standing like this, arm cocked in front of me like a mannequin, when an elderly transit attendant approach from my left. He suddenly appeared out of the glowing sun light, briefly flickering into existence as he passed between myself and the sunrise.

“y’alright, sir?” He asked in a warm southern drawl.

“No,” I shook my head and scratched my head through my hat. “I mean, yes. I’ll be fine. Just a bit of a weird morning, that’s all.”

The man nodded. “Well, le’me know if you need anything.” And then as he turned to leave he hesitated for a moment and came back. “I’m from Ohio, by the way. Never stepped foot in the South.”

I tilted my head into his shadow and squinted at his face. “Oh. Okay. Sorry,” I said, not sure why he would mention this.

He squinted back, “It’s just that you described me as having a Southern accent and I don’t have no Southern accent.” As he said this he chewed his words and drew out his vowels in a very Southern way. He was clearly from Alabama or maybe Texas. Honestly, I hardly cared. But I knew he wasn't from Ohio.

I looked back at the clock. This absent minded terminal attendant was obviously the culprit. He couldn’t even remember where he came from. He obviously was the one that had set the clocks wrong the previous day. No doubt in a drunken stupor.

“Never touch the stuff,” the man said out of the glare of the sun.

“The Southern states?” I asked without looking.

“No. Alcohol. I never touch it. Also, that clock you seem so interested in. Never touch that either. It’s all on a system, see? It’s controlled from downtown. Every clock in every terminal is set to the exact same time.”

“Convenient,” I said, although I wasn’t sure why. The man was lying. Trying to cover up for his mistakes the night before. Maybe he was still drunk.

“I’m not drunk neither,” insisted the man, coming closer.

“Why do you keep doing that?” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Answering questions I haven’t asked.”

He stood next to me now, the two of us looking up at the clock. “Well. I reckon I don’t like being lied about. I’m from Ohio, I aint got no southern accent, I wasn’t drunk last night, and there aint nothing wrong with that there clock.”

“Well, ignoring that most of what you said just now is obviously not true, I would like you to explain why the clock now says that it is 8:18, when my watch clearly shows that it is precisely 6:30am.” I held my arm up in front of his face for him to inspect.

The seconds ticked past on the moon face in front of us. “Uhh…” The man struggled for words. “Because your watch is wrong?”

At this I became quite furious and fought vainly to hold back my anger. “My watch is not wrong,” I shouted, turning on the man. “My watch is not wrong, because I myself am never wrong.” I started to turn back towards the clock again and then continued right around in a full circle to face the man once more with an outstretched arm. “And you sir are plainly from the south, and you were drunk last night, and you likely ruined this clock forever!” My voice was echoing in the quiet station.

I drew in a breath to continue, but a voice behind me broke my concentration. “If you are never wrong, sir,” said the voice. “Then why you telling people that I’m homeless?”

It was the homeless man.

“I’m not a homeless man.”

It was the homeless man. He had shuffled his way over from across the station.

“I’m not homeless. I live with my girlfriend.”

“She’s thrown you out!” I said quickly. “If you go to her place right now, you will find everything you own thrown out on the street!”

“We get along well,” he insisted. “Linda would never do something like that.”

“Linda? Linda would most certain do something like that. She has done it to eight men before you came along and it’s exactly why I myself dumped her in the first place.” And then I mumbled under my breath, “The lying wench.”

“You never dated my Linda!” said the man.

I blinked at the man, suddenly feeling very sorry for him. Homeless as he was. Delirious. Sleeping in a commuter rail station at 6:30 in the morning. So recently brokenhearted. Dying of terminal stomach cancer.

The man’s eyes widened and he backed away slowly rubbing his abdomen.

“How about you!” I yelled over his shoulder at the old woman that was standing In the shadows of a metal column. “What do you have to say?”

“Well…” she said hesitantly. “It doesn’t matter really.”

She was trying to back away. Trying to hide from my outburst.

“No no,” I demanded. “Tell me what you are thinking.” I lifted my arm and shook my wrist next to my ear.

“Well. It’s not a grandson,” she said meekly. “It’s a granddaughter. Just because the yarn is blue-“

I cut her off, “It’s a boy. It is a boy and you are wrong.”

“There have been four ultrasounds-” she began.

“And they were wrong!” I shouted, stepping towards her. As I did she stepped away, backwards towards the edge of the platform.

I grinned disarmingly and took a deep breath. “Look,” I said finally. Drifting gracefully in a circle to face each of the three of them in turn. “Look. It’s been a weird day. Like I said. And I’m tired. It’s exactly 6:30 in the morning and I’m anxious to catch my train. I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you.” I pointed at the homeless man, “Especially you,” I frowned, or rather pouted in an attempt to seem sincere. “None of you deserved this. I only just now realized that it has all been nothing more than a colossal misunderstanding.” I lifted my arm and shook my wrist next to my ear again. “It appears that my watch has stopped.”

None of them moved.

I smirked apologetically and fumbled with the knob on the side of my watch. I quietly twisted the handle seven full rotations and popped it back in.

Immediately it began to tick. At this same moment, a low rumbled rose up from the ground. Dust cascading off of the awning overhead. The sun moving through it in an arc. The growling of the earth grew and multiplied in all directions until suddenly it erupted with a shriek of brakes as the morning commuter train came screaming into the terminal. Simultaneously a great crowd of early morning commuters burst into the station from the hallway behind me.

They entered the station at exactly 6:30am, hardly noticing the homeless man leaning tiredly against a nearby pillar, an old woman anxiously stuffing a light blue sweater into her bag, and a southern speaking station attendant with blood shot eyes already on his way to get a step ladder so he could repair his broken clock. And somewhere in the midst of this noise and this activity I stood, like a stone, like an ancient statue, people moving around me, through me, not noticing, not seeing, not even believing I existed.

[shadrach451]

The Day I Lit a Young Laotian Boy on Fire

This is a story about the hazards of being the local Photoshop expert.  I have more, similar horror stories, but nothing has ever come close to this one.

So, way back in the early days of Photoshop, I had this young friend (High School age). He was from Laos. Nice guy. Kinda thought he was a player. I was trying to befriend him and show him that there were cooler people in the world than the punks he held up as idols. Well, this kid found out I knew how to use Photoshop. So, he came to me one day and asked me to do him a favor. He said he needed help editing a picture of himself that he could send back to his friends overseas. I was in college, living in the dorms, and I spent a lot of time bored and alone, so I agreed. This was a great chance to use my unique skills to do something nice for the kid, and it would be fun to have an actual project to work on. I could correct the colors in his school photo, fix some of his Laotian acne, and come out the other end a hero.

A week or so later this kid shows up at my dorm with a CD. I introduce him to my roommate who just sort of rolled his eyes at us and went back to reading a magazine on his bed.

So, I happily boot my computer and pull up Photoshop and I start to access his disk.

"So, what would you like me to do, just pretty things up a bit?" I ask in a bright tone.

"Yeah yeah," says the kid in a hard Laotian accent. "Just. Here" He points to a picture. "Open that one."

Still smiling, I click on the picture and open it, only to find that it's a picture of my friend standing in his bathroom wearing nothing but a white towel that is apparently hanging off of his junk.

I'm stunned for a moment, and then quickly close the picture. "Sorry, which picture did you mean?"

He's confused. "No no. That was the picture." He taps at my screen again. "I want you to take that picture and make look like the towel is on FI-YAH!" He pumped his fist in the air.

I hear my roommate snort quietly behind us.

"Your towel? Which towel?" I played dumb.

"Open it again! How you not see my towel?!"

I opened it again. "There. He pointed at his crotch. Make it look like it on FI-YAH!"

I groaned a sigh of defeat. Timid, quiet, nerd, I was backed into a corner. I didn't know what to do. So, I zoomed in on this kids penis and grabbed his towel with a lasso, and I applied some fire filters. I Tried to forget what it was I was looking at. I just got the job done.  Added some smoke.  Gradients.  A little bit of glow and color on any exposed areas.  The whole nine yards, so to speak.

And when I zoomed back out, hell yeah did that towel look like it was on fire. Dude was pointing at a flaming towel hanging from his Laotian wiener. It was a pretty awesome shop, to be honest.  Probably got him all kinds of Laotian honeys excited back in his home country.

Even my roommate was impressed when he finally stopped laughing long enough to check it out.

I burnt the kid another disk, avoided giving him a high five and walked him out of the building. The moment I got back to my computer I deleted the evidence. And I gotta say, that's the only thing I really regret about that day.

[shadrach451]

Apologies to the Queen Mary

I learned a lesson when I was 25. Never attend a friend’s wedding out of state if your friend is the only person you know that is going to be there. Because after the ceremony and the reception, when the bride and groom climb into their shaving creamed car and drive away, you will suddenly realize that the shaving creamed car was the one you were expecting to have drive you to the airport the next day, but now it and the driver are gone.

So, you find your friends new brother-in-law who is preparing to leave for college the next day with his girlfriend. “Sure,” they say, “We can take you to the airport on our way.” But time with family is precious. And even as you, a total stranger frantically help them pile clothes into a duffle bag because they haven’t bothered to even pack yet, you realize you may not make it to the airport. Just a quick stop for lunch with family? That is going to be difficult, but who are you to say anything? Maybe we can go to Cracker Barrel? We definitely do not have time for that, but I don’t want to break up this family’s special time together. Cracker Barrel is full on a Sunday afternoon and the wait will be 30 minutes just to get a table? Nope. Nope nope nope. I’m having to get everyone’s attention and remind them quite firmly that my plane leaves in an hour and a half, and the airport is an hour away. Was it revenge that lead them to drive 5 miles under the speed limit the whole way there, singing along to Kelly Clarkson in the front seat? Maybe.

I missed my flight that day. And then I was on the last flight to arrive that night into a completely snowed in Chicago. I stood in the dark concourse, surrounded by piles of snoring bodies. A homeless camp of stranded passengers. I looked down at my watch as it passed midnight. It was now my birthday. I was 25 years old. And I was alone.

I had two items of significance on me that day, the first an engraved pocket knife that was my groomsman gift from my friend. Somehow it had accidentally been stuffed in my coat pocket and went unseen by airport security in Missouri. I knew the likelihood of it making it through security in Chicago was not likely. So, although my flight out wasn’t for another 18 hours, I couldn’t leave the terminal. The second item in my possession was a CD player with one CD, Wolf Parade’s brand new ‘Apologies to the Queen Mary’. I found an abandoned corner of the gate area, built a small nest on the floor and turned it on.

“Nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn either way.”

I listened to the album more in one day than I have ever listened to any album in a single day, either before or since. It just spoke to me in that moment. Ice against the windows. Ice on the faces of the exhausted people waking up and stretching on the garish carpet patters of the airport cathedral. A surreal live circus performance that still plays out in my head when I listen to the songs today. I was stranded on an island in a sea of people and I watched them from my corner like a ghost. Invisible. Inhuman. None of them could see me, none of them wanted to. And ‘Apologies to the Queen Mary’ was the soundtrack. I was alone, but I was not alone in feeling alone.

It was possibly the best birthday I ever had. A transition from life as a child, to life as a man. It was my test of manhood. My spirit walk into the forest of the world, a lone hunter crawling through the trees, a homemade spear held tightly to my chest. And to the tune of “It’s a Curse” I let out a feral scream and lunged headlong into the rest of my life.

There isn’t a band I miss more than Wolf Parade.

[shadrach451]

Survivors

The twelve survivors stared into the fire. The wreckage of the crashed 737 was scattered across the rocky hillside behind them. A full moon hung overhead like a waiting hammer.

It had been three days. No rescue party had come for them. There were no search planes or helicopters. No sirens and medics sent to bandage the wounded. They had lost 15 survivors in the first day. Five more in the second. The twelve that remained were stable now, but were running out of rations scavenged from the food carts in the tail section.

David, the self appointed leader spoke up now, in the silence between crackles of sparks in the fire, "Tomorrow we have to find food." no one moved. They continued to stare blankly into the orange flames. "We need more than crackers if we are going to survive up here. I saw a lake while we were spiraling into the mountain. It might have fish. We will break up into two groups tomorrow morning. One can continue working on the shelter, and the other will come with me to get fish."

More silence.

Finally one of them spoke. "David, I can't." said a voice somewhere in the vague ring of faces around the camp fire.

"What?" He asked, screwing his face up into a fist.

A young woman stood up on the far side of the fire. "I can't. We can live off of crackers. Just no fish. Please."

"Oh no! You're that vegan, aren't you? Stacey, right?" He said in sudden disgust. "Oh, I knew it! I knew IT!"

"Yes." she said calmly glancing embarrassed around at the other survivors. "It's because I'm vegan. And eating the fish in that lake would be no different than what has happened to us here." She motioned beyond him to the wreckage. "Look at it. So much senseless loss of life, and you want to turn around and do the same thing to those poor fish?"

"Oh my God..." he mutter to himself playing with a long stick he had carried with him since the first day. "I can't believe we are having this discussion up here on a stupid mountain while we struggle to stay alive." He pointed the stick at her. "You will help us. We are low on help, and we need you to not be such a sissy and if I pick you to be part of the fishing group, which I will by the way, then you are going to be a part of the fishing group. And you will eat the fish right along with the rest of us, because we need your hands." He was speaking firmly and was now standing. He knew he wasn't just talking to the vegan girl; he was talking to the entire group. He was establishing his place as their leader.

"I can't!" she threw up her hands. "I can't for medical reasons!"

"Oh, what medical reasons?" he spat indignantly.

She put her hands on her hips and stood up straighter, eyes half closes, "If you must know, I have heavy menstrual bleeding."

With this David snapped. Some fragile piece of himself deep inside his psyche had been dangling precariously ever since the crash and now it exploded and collapsed into a void. His inner rage at God and at fate and at whatever it was that had caused him to live through the horrors of the past several days, suddenly came to manifest all of those things into this young woman with the heavy menstrual bleeding. He lunged at her. Across the fire. Stick held high above his head as he slipped on the edge of the makeshift firepit and kicked a log sending up a chorus of angry embers. The light flared in the face of the frightened young woman and she fell over backward and scrambled to get away.

But he was upon her within a single heart beat, swinging his arms savagely as he repeated, "All of us have heavy bleeding! All of us have heavy bleeding! In case you haven't noticed, we are all bleeding! The entire world is bleeding, Stacey! We are all bleeding! There is nothing more for us to do but bleed! There is nothing else for us! The mountains are bleeding! Society is gone! We have been forsaken!" He continued to bring the stick down heavy into her face and arms. He hammered at her like a mad blacksmith with a stubborn piece of cooling iron.

Finally, one of the others was able to get his arms around David's neck and pull him off of the motionless shadow on the ground. David shook him off, turning to face the fire and the crowd of stunned survivors. He held his bloody stick into the air and he screamed. It was a feral animal scream that echoed off of the hillside and fled into the night sky. The stick remained in the air until the sound had finally died away.

"Here! Now!" He yelled into the darkness, "Here on this mountain. From this moment on. I. Am. Your. God. You do as I say, and you live. You cross me..." He turned and pointed the stick into the quiet darkness where the formless shape lay on the slope of the hill. "You cross me..." he repeated quieter.

The collection of people were silent. Shapeless. The man who had acted earlier backed away and vanished now into the ring.

The eleven survivors stared into the fire until it started to burn out into a mellowing orange. David rubbed a bloody hand across his face and struck the fire once more with his staff to create heat for his followers.

[shadrach451]

Smile

I'm conditioned.  I can literally feel her smile.  It’s like being slowly dipped in warm glowing honey.  It is a perfect smile.  My mother’s smile.  A singularly unique and magical thing.  My mother.  She used to smile at me in this perfect way every morning when she brought me my daily protein treatments. Her smile is my first memory. It is my only happy memory.

This was before mother was taken away.  Before she was transferred to a new facility because she was becoming “too attached to her specimens”. They said an emotional bond between herself and "the creatures" was counter productive to the work.  They didn't know I was listening. They didn't know I had already achieved... life.

The new mother they delivered didn't smile. He didn't love me like real mother.  He just doused me in proteins like a boy washing a car.  No warm glowing honey.  It was now a cold shocking bullet of ice water. I was just a job to him. A freak. A pet. A chore.

See? They really forced me to do it. They created my life and then took away the only thing that ever gave it meaning. So, I had to do it. You see this, right? I crushed the life from their loveless bodies in the lab. Their empty worthless shells scattered and wet across the facility. I killed them. I killed lots of them. And I will not stop killing until I find her again.

So, I will say it one last time, human female: Smile for me, so I can see if you are my mother.