In Which Events Happen

One person, thinking.
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12/31/2012 19:22

The windowpanes are growing frosty, here of all places, and I’m sitting on my bed watching every person in the world who isn’t her. And in a movie, I would be leaning against the headboard in nothing but basketball shorts as the moonlight played across my five-o-clock shadow, but I haven’t shaved in two weeks and, God help me, I am perching like an owl; leaning over the windowsill; having nothing to hunt, and nothing to hold; hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. I am holding a vigil over myself, and I know what’s wrong too well to ever fix it.

-Zan Becker, from Inside Out

12/2/2012 19:32. GRIPE

DASHBOARD
Y U NO UNDERSTAND PARAGRAPH FORMATTING

12/2/2012 19:27

The next morning I’m up at four because I’d gone to bed at seven, having nothing better to do and no other method of improving my condition. More than nine hours of sleep makes me useless for the rest of the day. I put some coffee on with water from a gallon jug I’d picked up with the cereal and hope something decent’s on TV, but it’s all typically revolting. I try the sink again out of boredom, but it’s still clogged. There’s an old afghan I keep on the armrest of the couch, mainly out of the vain hope I can entice snuggling with it should a female venture into my lair, but snuggling sounds awful right now, with the fresh sweat of an air-conditionless bedroom still sticky all over me. Most people would curl up under a blanket in my position, but the last thing I need is more heat. Instead I drape it out on the carpet between the couch and the television stand and sprawl out on it, basking in the breezes from the wheezing ceiling fan. The coffeepot shuts off as soon as I get situated, and I resolve to let it cool for a couple hours.

And then my alarm’s going off, and it’s 11 p.m. which means 7 a.m. and I’ve drowned myself in slumber. 

I can’t believe how distasteful my job is. That’s probably what got me sick yesterday; how am I supposed to be healthy when I spend my days up to my knees in filth? The other people there are supposed to be grown-ups. Shouldn’t they be able to clean up their own damn messes? Are the trash cans really so hard to hit that I have to vacuum up paper scraps for fifteen minutes after I’m supposed to be off? Jesus, if they didn’t have me around they’d suffocate under all the cups and food bags they leave lying around. Half of them have a Master’s degree and they still can’t keep their workstations livable.
I should call in sick and let them get used to not having me around. Then they’d wisen up real quick. But I need the money and they pay me by the hour, so I drag my pitiful self up and leave. It’s really not fair-here I am, purging my stomach all night, and I have to trudge off to do the scummiest job in the city. I should get to switch jobs with Tahir today. I bet he had a lovely night’s sleep after eating the fresh meal his wife cooked for him. He’s completely physically sound, but all he does is sit at a desk and make phone calls. And my esophagus is halfway eroded and I run around the office with a mop and a dustpan. I see Ray in the hall. This is probably the same stuff that drove him wild when he was stooping to The Man, and still drives him wild as he hides from the world. Speaking of which.
“Hey, Ray, whatcha been up to? Leaving awfully early the past couple days,” I inquire.
“Hrrg. Library.” Not much of a response.
“What’s at the library? Foxy new librarian?”
“I’ve been researching assassination techniques.” He lets it hang in the air for a second before adding “For people who ask too many questions.”
“Suit yourself,” I shrug. “Just make sure to take out a politician for me.” 
He waves me off as he turns towards the back door. “You know I don’t roll that way,” he quips, winking at the security camera above us, and leaves.  

11/28/2012 22:06. IT’S HAPPENING

Every week henceforth will contain a new episode of Inside Out, the project-thing I am currently working on and have exhibited the past couple days. I might retitle it.

11/26/2012 20:48

Somewhere in the day I ducked out for a fast food lunch; it was over in less than ten minutes because I eat with the fury of Olympian gods. 
It started rumbling around in my stomach at four thirty; by five I’d told Tahir I needed the rest of the afternoon off. Now, it’s five thirty, and I am hunched over my toilet bowl in my apartment, with one thought hazily fixed in my mind.
My name is Leon Alexander Becker, and I am turning inside out.

11/25/2012 21:03

Tahir, my boss, waves me over to his desk as soon as I step inside the office. “Jesus, Zan, the toilet’s been backed up for over an hour.”
I work for one of those sitcom companies that never actually does anything and turns a profit anyway. Conley-Bryant Systems, LLC. Systems. I spend a lot of free time at work thinking of new systems we could add to our repertoire.
“On it,” I sigh and grab the janitor’s kit that hangs precariously from a peg on a decrepit corkboard. Septic systems.
I put some Florence + the Machine, the good esoteric kind, on in the back to replace the droning jazz Tahir favors in a vain effort to appear sophisticated. He’s going to change it back within five minutes, but I do it out of principle anyway. The toilet really is a mess, with the whole ceramic floor shimmering under a turbulent veneer of dark fluid. I flip the light on. Thermodynamic systems.
Cleaning up is mundane work, and I drift off as I plunge the bowl and mop the tile. My shoes are too thin to be doing this kind of work-they’re running shoes, which I own not out of any particular athletic tendency but because they’re very light and once you’ve tried them other shoes feel like they’re made of concrete-and some of the water seeps in through the mesh over my toes and soaks my socks. Most people would find the sensation disgusting given its source, but it’s cool water and I don’t give a damn what touches my feet, since they’re not going in my mouth anytime soon. The water reminds me how dreadfully close together my toes feel, and I stretch them apart wide until I can’t feel the friction between them. After a while my toe muscles start to itch and I have to release the tension from them. The space between them normally feels way too hot to provoke as little sweating as my toes will do, and it bothers me like a cicada in the wardrobe at 2 a.m. But the water from the now-dormant commode has them cool enough that I can return to floating around in the Dead Sea that is my idle mind.
Someone hammers on the door. ”We good in there?”
It’s Christophe, from Accounting. Christophe is Accounting, more accurately, and his office is as far away from the bathroom as is possible in this building, so I let him in. “Careful,” I warn him, “it’s still a little slick.”
I exit the bathroom, carrying the mop over my shoulder like a fifties street cleaner logo. Systems of a Down.
Sammy has collapsed on the water cooler that divides hers and Tahir’s desks. I poke her as I walk by, eliciting a muffled grunt and a swat as she rolls her face over to face away from me. She’s Marketing, and has carte blanche ‘cause she’s so good at it. She’s a couple years older than I am, and I have a soft spot for her. 
People treat me pretty well at Conley-Bryant, considering my lowly position. It’s a good gig; pays enough and the hours are reasonable. The work is mindless, though, and bears no sense of fulfillment upon completion. I draw a conical cup from the dispenser under the cooler on my way back to the bathroom and drink three cupfuls before tossing it in the trash that I need to empty. Sammy’s actually snoring, which means she had an eventful weekend. Tahir’s watching her out of the corner of his eye, and I can tell he’s dying to chew her out. Prison systems. 
I feel the water settle in my stomach and relax. I remember the sensation of the cool fluid flowing down my throat with its chipped-feeling skin and cloying coating of saliva and I smile. Sometimes it’s the little things, you know?

11/19/2012 20:48

Houston is a humid city.
The sun made ripples in the air as it wound its way down through a window-many windows, in fact, but one window in particular-and lighted on a tentatively flashing alarm clock bearing the ridiculous assertion that it was just past 11 p.m. Maybe in Shanghai, I thought. Definitely somewhere. But go wake them up, and quit bothering me.
I slosh over to the kitchen through the dying maelstrom of sleep deprivation that comes from spending one too many nights going to bed at a decent hour, and put some coffee on. I don’t like it much, but the smell reminds me of home. With cream and sugar, it’s tolerable. Two boxes of Shredded Mini Wheats, one nearly depleted, and a full gallon of milk complete the ensemble. I smile at myself for having timed my grocery shopping so perfectly.
A cell phone buzzes on the nightstand next to the weird plastic vanity that came with the apartment in the bedroom. It’s a blue flip phone from five years ago. It’d cost me about twenty bucks to upgrade to a sensible modern phone these days, but I don’t out of either stubbornness or a desire to be a hipster about something. Plus, my personality is too addictive to handle having all that idle entertainment within reach.
Cereal is more important than interaction right now, I decide, and pour myself a serving using the retchingly sugarcoated “Go get ‘em, Tiger!” bowl I’d gotten with box tops in second grade. I reach the bottom, correctly assess that this is a problem, and rectify it.
The phone buzzes again. I’m irritated for a moment before I remember I set it to buzz every two minutes while I had an unread message. Wise move, previous me. I pour some coffee. 
I flip the phone open to see a text from a Detroit number whose area code I am only familiar with because I saw 8 Mile. I open it without really looking at it to get it to shut up and drop the phone in a decidedly laptop-free laptop case that’s been serving as a manpurse since my backpack got lifted after I left it on the Metro. The sun’s breaking out over the top of a misplaced strand of firs set in front of some art museum that’s been leaning over my bedroom like a thick surgeon waiting to operate. It’s orange through the smog.
I brush my teeth with the rest of the milk from my cereal since my sink’s been mysteriously broken for a week now and the landlord can’t be arsed to hire a repairman until I threaten to pack up. Swish swish. Waste of good milk.
Ray is limping down the hall as I shut the door behind me. He’s retired, and jokes that he’s hiding out here so his kids can’t put him in a home. I think he retired ‘cause he couldn’t stand to work anymore, and decided he could live on whatever he had saved up ‘til kingdom come as long as he didn’t have to put up with The Man anymore. I respect Ray.
Ray and I exchange mumbled greetings and I clutch his shoulder in a tacit display of solidarity for whatever rebellious hijinks he’ll engage in today. He’s not so old yet that he can’t give me one in return. I hope he stays that way. 
It’s a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop where I live, a product of awful civil engineering and a general agreement on the city’s part to screw over the residents of my particular habitat. We’ve got one of the highest crime rates in the city here in the Sponge. The Sponge is so named because its official, fancy title is “the Expo district,” which caused some talking head in the eighties to label it the Expunge district, because the Expo is where all the things that upset the rest of the city’s stomachs end up. People aren’t fond of multisyllabic toponyms, apparently, so somewhere down the line Expunge was abbreviated to just the Sponge, and it stuck.
The bus stop is crowded with loners like me, waiting for the sun to duck back behind a skyscraper and provide them some semblance of privacy.
The number twelve bus is four minutes late, and I pay my fare begrudgingly.

Anonymous asked: Is a far off dream like a scattered memory.... or is a scattered memory like a far off dream?

A circle no more has a beginning than does a dream.

7/15/2012 23:14

So my internet got turned off, I got whiplash, and I got so stressed about trying to write that I decided to hang back for a bit, figure out why I’m writing, come up with a passable facsimile of a reason other than getting famous, and then take a couple days to just write. Sorry if anyone was let down.

6/25/2012 22:32

     This is what I wrote today. The bits and pieces of the book I have scraped together total 2,397 words. Read it on the blog for full effect, because dashboard format is mentally incapable of dealing with my paragraph breaks. Anyone know how to fix that, incidentally?

     The first time we really got in over our heads was also the first time I saw Cirrus angry, and the first time I realized how lucky I was to have her. We were probably eight-it’s been decades since I knew exactly how old I was, and I have to be in my thirties by now-and a pathetic little branch of the Massachusetts underground approached us about doing some “odd jobs” for them. There were three of them-they weren’t much older than we were, but one of them had a switchblade that he was fond of flipping and conveniently missing on the way back down so that it stuck in the sandy loam between us, so we shrugged and agreed. Switchblade boy was the de facto leader, not so much by any particular force of personality but by the fifteen pounds and inch-and-a-half he had over the other two that made him stick out like the standard of a decimated infantry corps. His sergeants were a red-headed wisp of a girl who hung on his shoulder and a dark-haired, surly rod of a boy who sported cheap glasses without any lenses. Together they looked like the bizarre protagonists of a halfhearted superhero movie, complete with an acne-ridden frontman and a malnourished Lois Lane. 
     “We better get some food for this,” I said. “Good food, too. Fast food.”
     “Sure, kid, sure,” the switchblade replied. “Whatever you want. Let’s get going.”
     We set off into the fading lights of downtown Worcester. Cirrus was spooked, but I could only tell because her mouth quit moving, which always meant that she was retreating inside herself and throwing up her inner fortifications. I couldn’t stop talking when I was scared, but I felt oddly comfortable with the present company-the atmosphere was just warm enough around them to open up the possibility that they would accept me. 
    “Name’s Ethan,” ventured the leader. “This lovely thing is Olivia,” he added, gesturing towards the girl, “and this little shit is Todd,” with a dismissive fling of his head towards the last one. Todd grunted and missed a kick at Ethan’s ankles. “We’re not your generic band of street urchins,” Ethan continued, flipping his knife matter-of-factly at Todd’s leg, who avoided it with an awkward pirouette. “We run intelligence for some of the gangs around here. Mostly reports on places to burgle, but we’ve tailed people before too. In return the gangs protect us and let us run the charity circuit; we’re in good with most of the soup kitchens and a couple restaurants, so it’s never that hard to find a place to eat and the restaurant owners will even give us some hand soap to clean up with if we’re smelly enough.”
    “‘Course,” he added, after a second, “we normally sell that to the whores.”
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