Cities

            An old Cadillac sputtered past Eric as he sat on a bench, waiting for a bus to take him somewhere, anywhere, hopefully out of this goddamn town.  The car had a different style of wheel for each tire, and looked like it had once been black, but had faded to some indescribable mesh of grey and a dirty reddish-brown after the driver had failed to care for it over the decades.  The dents and scrapes only served to accentuate the apparent distaste the owner had for his/her own car.  The only things that had managed to stay in some sort of decent condition were the windows, which didn’t have a scratch on them, somehow.  They were tinted beyond belief, and Eric wondered how anyone could see out of them, as he certainly couldn’t see inside. 

            It kept on going, sputtering, lurching down the road, and suddenly stopped about a block away from Eric.  He thought it had died on the road, and got up to see if he could help the stranded strangers in the car.  Before he even got off of the bench, though, two oddly average-looking men in suits leapt of the car.  The driver slammed his door shut and stomped over to his associate on the passenger’s side.  The conversation they shouted at each other lead Eric to believe that the car was not something to be worried about today.  The driver kicked things off.

            “Where do we turn, Todd? Where the FUCK do we turn now? Do you even know where we are, because I don’t!  ‘Take this split off the interstate.’ I remember you saying that very fucking clearly, Todd, and look where the fuck we are now! The middle of the fucking inner city, and I don’t think we need to be here! No, we’re supposed to be across motherfucking STATE LINES by now, Todd!” 

            Todd wiped some spit from his shades as he replied. “Oh, really? I’m wrong? That’s how we’re going to play this one, eh? Blame Todd, again! Just like the last three times we’ve gotten lost.  If you’re the master of directions, why did we start this trip with me driving and you on the map, huh? Why exactly is that? Did we switch because you didn’t know how to read this shitpile of a map? I think that’s the case, yeah.  You gave up, said you would drive and I would handle the directions, remember?!  How old is this map, anyhow? These street signs don’t eve-“

            “Dodging responsibilities, yeah, that’s how we’re gonna get shit done! Well done, Todd, I don’t think anyone avoids things quite like you do.  That’s why you can’t drive anymore, dipshit! Remember Tortuga? Your driving got you in the shit can for three months, that’s why I didn’t want you to drive!  If they actually saw you in the driver’s seat, they’d chew my ass, too!  Do I want that to happen? No, so I took the wheel. Guess that’s what I get for trusting you.”

            “Wait a minute, though.  Look at these signs, none of this matches… You got the wrong fucking map, asshole! Look at the top, it says “Shit Kickin’ Dallas, Texas”. We aren’t even in that fuck-nugget state!  Why did you buy a map from a state we weren’t going to be in?! Texas doesn’t even BORDER Kentucky, dumbass!”

            “Wait, what? Let me see this, are you shitting me?” Not-Todd said, as he snatched the map away from Todd.  He scrutinized it for a minute, and loudly proclaimed “FUCK! They gave us the wrong map!  Ok, ok… We’ll deal with that later.  Wing it for now, we just need to get out of here.”  They smoothed their hair back into place, got back in the car, and coughed down the road as fast as their rickshaw car would take them.

            This wound up not affecting Eric in the least, but at least he had something to contemplate as he continued waiting for the bus.

Social Little Pill

            “Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?”  Jerry sang along to one of his favorite Alanis Morissette songs as he waited in traffic on his way to work.

            “Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines, or when you think you’re gonna die? Or did you long for the next distraction?”  That was his favorite part of the song.  It caused him to reflect about society and its need for constant stimulation.  Why did everyone seem to be unable to cope with being alone with their thoughts?  Was there something intrinsically wrong with the American psyche? Jerry’s train of thought tended to deviate from there at this point, as it certainly did today as the music faded into the background of his mind.

            Was he, Jerry, preoccupied with being entertained?  Was it right for him to put much thought into his perception of society as being different from him, if he was truly not different at all, but one of the many he looked at?  How can a drop of water perceive whether it is part of the rain or the lake? Does that matter, in the end, anyway?  Jerry heard a honk and some irritated yelling from behind his car, and he realized that he hadn’t scooted forward after the car in front of him had.  His thoughts returned to Earth long enough for him to lurch into an acceptable place in line, make sure to stop, and let the music take him back into that fun little cerebral playground he had been thrown out of.  Was Alanis using bagpipes in this part of the song, or was that just some other instrument that had gone through massive electronic distortion?  Jerry couldn’t tell, but he still loved that song. 

            This got him thinking, though: Could he take silence?  What would happen if he were to just shut the music off and soak up everything this world had to offer him at this point?  Thinking about it, he realized that the only thing that would happen would be that he would get bored very quickly, and nothing beneficial would really come of his boring himself in a car on the way to work, which was bound to be boring today, as it had been every other day.  There really was no point to prove in that. No ground to gain.

            But then, an epiphany struck Jerry like an angry ninja with no hands.  There was nothing making him go through the boredom of work.  Boredom was simply a product of routine experiences over a significant period of time.  People were only subjected to the routines they chose to experience.  Therefor, the only reason people ever became bored was because they chose to be.  They could break their routine at any time.  What a thought!

            Hypothetical situations and extrapolations only went so far, though.  To really see if he was on to something, Jerry had to put his idea to the test.  Now was the time to live!  Jerry hit the “skip” button on his radio until he reached the song on this album called “You Learn”, thinking it was an appropriate theme for such an occasion, and cranked the stereo’s volume up to its maximum.  Jerry then opened the driver’s door to his car, followed by the other three doors, ran to and through the median of the freeway, and managed to jump into the bed of a pickup truck as it cruised by.  He had always wanted to do that, and he had finally found the time.  It was any time.

I sat and waited

I sat and waited, anticipating the night.  What exactly I was anticipating, I didn’t quite know at that point, but I felt as though this night would be something to be remembered.  As I sat on the park bench, I contemplated the rather unextraordinary day that had preceded this very moment.  I had lunch at Larry’s bar, again. It was Tuesday, after all, and that’s what I do on Tuesdays.  My suit had started out clean and pressed, but had become stained with rust and smelled of smog. I still felt the urge to shiver when I looked at Tyler, never did narrow down why. It’s just one of those things, I guess.

As I sat there, almost completely caught in my own head, a shadow passed through my field of view.  Something laughed behind me. That’s new, I thought to myself. Bushes don’t normally laugh at me. I turned around, and was surprised by the chupacabra sitting Indian-style behind the bench. He (I guess it was a ‘he’, how do you determine a chupacabra’s gender, anyway?) continued to laugh as he took a drag from the biggest joint I had ever seen.

“Wha… What are you doing here? And why do you smoke?” I couldn’t help but ask. I tried to think of something a bit more relevant to say, like “HOLY SHIT, it’s a chupacabra! Save yourselfs, hobos!” but it just wasn’t coming to me. I stared at the thing, confounded as to why it even existed. The smell of the weed hadn’t quite registered in my brain at that point.

“I’ve been watching you.” The chupacabra croaked, with a bemused tone. “You have a cell phone, right? If you order me a pepperoni and anchovy pizza, and get it delivered here, I’ll let you take a picture of me and sell it.”

            “… What’s to stop me from taking a picture of you without getting you a pizza?” I half mumbled to him, reaching for my phone.
            “I’ll fucking kill you, that’s what’s stopping you. And you know it.” The chupacabra’s face changed from bemused to deadly serious, which struck me as odd, considering how much weed he was smoking. It was kind of scary, actually. I’ve never been threatened for pizza before, and I couldn’t help but feel that this was a milestone in my life.
            “Ok, but just this once. No more free pizza after this one.” I said after a short internal deliberation. I later learned that the creature’s real name was Jiroyminuporfduiploploploplo Jr, but no one ever really called him that. Chupacabra was much easier for me to remember, and Jake was even easier than that. He was ok with me calling him Jake, but we never really hung out after that.

Old Men in New York

            They said everything happens in New York. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Why else would Gary have left his beautiful little hometown in Kentucky and came here, to New York City, itself? Most people back home had told him, “You’re from Kentucky, Gar. New York has nothing for you. They’re all sophisticated and stuff up there.” He always hated being called ‘Gar’, that was one of the reasons he had left in the first place. In New York, everyone would call him ‘Gary’, because that’s what normal people do. They call you the name you introduce yourself as. He didn’t know if anyone had actually tried going around, telling people “Hi, I’m Batman.” But he was really curious to see if that would work. He liked being called ‘Gary’ too much, though, to tell people that he was Batman.

            Besides, Batman never conspired to rule the world, and Gary did. Sure, he was pushing 70 years old, but he could still think on his feet, and he felt better here than he had in 30 years. Sure, he had never been to college, but lots of people hadn’t been to college. The anarchists made a cookbook without any college learning, right?  Gary thought so, and he had memorized the whole thing. To him, all of life’s lessons came from this book. Some people would call that crazy, he’d heard that a lot back home, but that didn’t stop him. He’d rule them all, one day. Such a simple plan, too. No one would see it coming, or be able to stop it.

            It was simple, really. Simplicity was what he knew, and Gary did what worked, so simplicity was the name of the game (Bingo lost in a landslide).  He had watched hours upon hours of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and memorized the Anarchist Cookbook, and now he had formulated his own mind control serum. It was so easy, Gary couldn’t believe that no one had ever done it before! All he needed was a lot of tequila, mixed with a few shots of bleach, Tang, and gun powder mixed with the filament from a regular light bulb (that was the hard part. The filaments kept breaking!) He marinated hot dogs in this concoction over night, then put the new Gary’s Famous Kentucky Doggy Dogs on his hot dog cart to sell the next day. He had thought up an irresistible slogan, too: No Cats in these dogs! 100% dog, guaranteed! Gary new the importance of a good slogan in business, and in world domination. If he stopped to think about it, Gary would realize that slogans were important in every aspect of life. Everyone in New York loves hot dogs, so Gary wandered around the city, sowing the seeds of the world’s demise with every hot dog he sold. Sometimes it was hard for him to keep from cackling at his costumers as they walked away, but he knew that the serum needed time to sink in, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

            One day, when he had sold enough hot dogs to enslave all of the minds in New York City, he would go to stage 2 of his plan: Get on American Idol. Gary knew that American Idol was televised across the nation, so it would definitely get everyone in New York City. With his 3 minutes of screen time, he would sing a song that would cause everyone in New York City to revolt, over thrown their local government, and declare him King of New York. From there, he would use the massive economic power of the city to expand his empire, and spread his wiener weapons around the world.

            No one could hope to stop Gary the Almitey!