#weston gardner

[teen-heart-throb-mr-hyde]

scream queens fandom take my garbage (and add to it if u want)

[teen-heart-throb-mr-hyde]

i’d die for weston gardner, by the way

[unconsoled]

[wolvesofinnistrad]

Weston Gardner, worst advice giver ever

[archiesbae]

[westongardner]

When she slips right through your fingers.

This familiar place. Standing in the shower with the back of my head against the wall and hot water running down my face in a sheet. The water has to be hot because cold water doesn’t make you clean.

I know if I open my mouth the water would flood in and sucking some of it down might help, but I don’t do that. Instead I breathe in and there is a slight feeling of suffocation as water enters my nose. It’s beautiful because it deadens the hangover. I moan and take my head from under the stream and the headache comes back.

 This familiar place. Sitting on the porch in the dark with thoughts for company. But I don’t want company. I don’t know what it sounds like and I can’t say what it smells like. It’s fall and spring. Summer and winter. It doesn’t really matter because it’s been each of those. And it doesn’t matter because I don’t notice the weather. I notice the dead in my thoughts, which I'm producing. The deadness is all I want, but under the deadness I can feel a sunken, wrangled, hole behind my belly button. 

Exhausted but not tired, I’ll wait for the rest of my feelings to die down.

Days or months or years from now and I’ll be back to normal. Only there is no normal. There is chasing what you can’t have and realizing it and then hot water and hours on porches. You can never get new again. But sitting thoughtless in the dark after a hot shower gets you damn close. 

Neither the shower nor the porch are good. But they’re home in their own way. And there’s the experience of feeling, or living, which is rare. In between this girl and the next there won’t be any such feeling. – if there is any in between and maybe that’s why there won’t be.

 This familiar place of one girl to the next goes nowhere.

This familiar place. Getting beat by hot water on the floor of the shower. 

[westongardner]

Suburbs

I’m driving home from movie night at a friend’s. It’s raining hard as I pull through town. Most of the storefronts on Main Street are vacated now and it’s impossible to see for the dark and the rain. For a fraction of a second between the whisk of the windshield wipers I see the van driving in front of me. Otherwise it’s only a blur of red lights. A friend is driving that blur and I follow it. We’re probably driving too fast because we’re young and we need to show each other how dumb we are.

  We turn from driving east to heading south and the windshield becomes even more opaque as the rain hits it directly. We’re heading home too fast but I press the accelerator harder. Soon we’ll be under the trees and it will be better. We come to the next turn and we swing back eastward. The trees help momentarily and then we come to a stop sign.

  We turn back south and as I take the turn I notice a white trash bag standing out from the black everything-else. I put my eyes back on the path in front of me until I notice the bag is moving franticly. Now the bag is a rabbit. Half of it is glued to the pavement and the other half twitches frantically as the legs paw at the air stunned at the lack of traction. A broken little body running on its side in the pouring rain on a near abandoned street. That’s an image I’ll remember for a very long time. And we did that. 

  Disappointment and disillusion, the same way we end every night.

[westongardner]

Quick Sketches Intro Piece

[this is the first piece of a short story collection called Quick Sketches in a Crowded Cafe, which you can (and should) find for free on Amazon/B&N in e-formats]

I was drinking tea in a crowded café and worrying about the deodorant I hadn’t put on. It was drizzling outside, but hot in the café, and I was sure to start sweating. It figured I would forget deodorant. I’m always forgetting things. It could be a notebook or a bus ticket or deodorant and I could write all over my hand “Don’t forget your notebook” or “bus ticket” or “deodorant” and it wouldn’t matter because if it’s important I’ll forget it. There might be some hand sanitizer in the bathroom, though. I’ve heard that works pretty good in a pinch.

The deodorant wasn’t the only thing on my mind. Once you start worrying about one thing you start worrying about a lot of things and then suddenly you’re worrying about everything, practically.  So the crowd in the café was worrying me too. It was full of girls with nose rings and old women and a nerd spilling crumbs over the book he was reading. It wasn’t the right setting but at least tonight couldn’t be as bad as the last date I had. That’s always the comfort of hitting rock bottom, though. Anyhow that was a different girl and I knew early on I wouldn’t be seeing her again.

“What’s that? Yes, of course. Love kids, I used to coach a YMCA soccer team actually.”

       If you want to know, I have a formula for dating success. I start off by complimenting her on something specific and atypical. After that the main thing is to turn the conversation back to her and what she likes as often as possible. Girls like to talk about themselves and when they do they get this smile like they’re finally doing what they were put on this Earth to do. The funny thing is I fall madly in love with that look. They always make me fall madly in love with that look, right before they go after some bore. That’s how it works. Either I love them and they go after some bore or they like me and I just don’t feel it at all.

Anyway, you always have to smile and be observant too. Being observant is particularly important because reading and responding to body language is the most essential aspect of a successful date. Each girl is like a safe. You hit the right places and listen for the clicks.

The truth is you get with right girl and hit the right places and there’s this feeling of flow. It’s the same as that brief window when you’re driving just after it starts to rain and your car moves so smoothly over the slick pavement – that brief window of glory right before the roads turn to hell. I’m always looking for that flow. The funny thing is you can never really find it when you’re trying to.

  I could tell the date was going well and I was starting to wonder what teachers were like. Really like. Surely they can’t live up to the America’s collective schoolboy fantasy. That is too heavy a burden and I’m not even sure she’s seen all the proper materials to know how to act anyway. She’d try though, I thought. She really would.

       “What kind of animal would I be?” Girls always ask the stupidest questions. She was a blonde, I think. Or maybe she wasn’t. “A human. I think we have it pretty good, but if you insist I can’t be human well I’d really like to know what flying is like.”

My chances seemed pretty good. Throughout my adventures, and with some generous help from the movie Groundhog Day, I have learned that there are two types of American women: those who will sleep with you on the third date and those you have not wooed correctly. No American woman’s walls are strong enough to survive the appropriate three-date siege. Click, click, click.

  We were sitting in the hand chairs, which are not chairs with special hand rests but rather chairs shaped like giant hands. I chose them because they make you feel like you are sitting in the palm of God’s hand. I swear to God they do. It’s a nice feeling because it feels like God actually exists and he loves you.

The table was placed strategically too. It was parallel to the wall so that we could discuss the art on display. The art was always changing, but it was always weird in a good way. I have my own term for it. I call it “Good modern art.” God knows there’s little enough of that.

       Much to my pleasure I was finding that she wasn’t going to be a long-term prospect. It would not do at all to play this game with a girl who could be a long-term prospect because you can’t bring yourself to do certain things to long-termers. As good as that was, my thoughts were far more concerned with the Initial Cost-to-Entry and the Future Cost-to-Entry ratio. But right now those seemed pretty good too.

     There is no surer way to get what you want than to show the girl that you are in fact a good dude. To do this, naturally you must strongly agree with her subjective tastes: music, movies, books, etc. People always like when you agree with them. It helps if you are familiar with whatever you are lying about but sometimes you can’t be.

Do you know how I knew she wasn’t a long-term prospect? She didn’t like The Beatles. That’s on my list. If you don’t like The Beatles or Pulp Fiction or Kurt Vonnegut – there’s the door. I hope you trip on your way out and die.

Not really, but pretty close.

       “They’re very overrated,” I agreed and a bead of sweat slipped mercilessly down my side. As I felt it trickle down I realized how rotten I felt all over again. It wasn’t working and I knew it wasn’t but I told myself instead that the preamble had gone on too long and I decided I really wanted to get things moving.

  We were going back to my place. I put down a large tip because I felt that throwing some money around could really seal the deal. When we walked outside I couldn’t feel the heat anymore. I just felt cold. And I noticed the rain had begun to collect in large pools…