Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Beaugly

            “Dude! Dude, this porn-“
            “I don’t care, don’t tell me about what you do in your free time, Jeff.”
            “No, you don’t get it. It was fuckin’ weird, I can’t get it out of my head.”
            “Was it just that amazing? I heard some screaming, didn’t sound like it came from you.  I keep telling you to turn that shit down, I don’t want you to announce whenever you’re jerking off.  Seriously, pull that shit again, and I’m taking a hammer to your computer.  Wear some earphones for fuck’s sake.  You know what those are, right? Tiny little pieces of machinery that actually take what your speakers put out, and put it only in your ears?  They’re great for privacy, Jeff. Check that shit out.”
            “What? Oh, yeah, no shit, man.  I have some… somewhere.  As soon as I find mine, I’ll start using them, I promise, but-“
            “Seriously, until then, remember: hammer, through your computer. God damn privacy. It’s simple.”
            “No need to be a douche about it.  Anyway, yeah, I can’t decide whether what I just saw was beautiful or ugly. It’s weird, man.”
            “Ok, I’ll bite.  How could it possibly have been ugly? Was she missing a boob? Did she have a dick?”
            “No, I’m pretty sure she had both boobs, and didn’t have a dick.  I don’t watch uniboob porn or dicked-chick shit, you know that.”
            “Oh, don’t I?”
            “But still, there were all sorts of weird things.  Like, why were the candles talking? It never said it was Beauty and the Beast porn.  If it was, it was missing the Beast, and the Beauty, ‘cause then I would have known it wasn’t ugly.”
            “I don’t see why you’re bothering me with this.”
            “Because you were in it.  And I was in it.”
            “… I think you’re full of shit.  We never did anything like that.”
            “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.  I would have remembered that, but there we were.  Did we ever have penguins? Or Asians?”
            “I fucking hate Asians, and their food. Fuckin’ food doesn’t do anything but give me bad breathe, I’m hungry 40 minutes after stuffing myself with it.”
            “Yeah… That’s not what I would have guessed, based on that video.  You and that Asian and me and the candles… it looked like we were havin’ a good time.”
            “How about you go back to your room, and fuck yourself to sleep? I’m tired of this conversation.”
            “Ok.  I’m just sayin’.  Good night.”

            “Good afternoon, Jeff.”

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

22 Dates

            She was 22 when she had her first date, and Sheryl had no idea what to expect. Sure, she had seen all sorts of romantic comedies, but those were fiction, right? No reason to expect someone to dash out of nowhere in a dashing suit and be socially awkward and cute and romantic at the same time in an attempt to gain her love. That only really happened in Hollywood.
            Still, a girl could hope, right?
            She worked tirelessly on her makeup, yet always seemed to find some flaw in what she had done, and had to correct it.  Somehow, all of the clothes in her closet had conspired against her.  If the pieces fit, they made her look hideous. Why did they start doing this all of a sudden? Last week, that blue dress had been gorgeous; she remembered it being specifically being gorgeous. Now, it made her look ridiculous. Who wears that shade of blue now, seriously? And how had she found any shoes to match it? The Converse would not work this time. No. Surely there was something…
            How could it be this hard? She got dressed every day, how was this any different? She ran her fingers through her hair, and her heart fell to the floor when she heard a knock at the door. “Shit! I’m not wearing ANYTHING!” Sheryl thought to herself, and frantically threw on a pair of blue jeans and the first shirt she could find so she could answer the door before he thought he was at the wrong door.
            “Coming!” she yelled as she jogged to the door.  Before she touched the handle, she stopped, smoothed her hair, and took a deep breath. “This is just a first date,” she reminded herself. “Calm down. You’re 22, not some mindless 14 year old without a clue how to handle yourself.”
            She opened the door with her best smile, hoping it wasn’t too much of a smile to make it look creepy or insane. “Hey!”
            And so it began.

            

Thursday, February 12, 2015

End of Want

            “Do you see things, Mr. Granger?” The psychologist asked.

            “I don’t understand the point of that question,” Mr. Granger responded, raising himself up from the old leather couch to change his focus from the beige, cracked ceiling tiles to the psychologist’s phosphorescent irises. “We live our entire lives in our heads, whether or not we know it.  Our life experiences are all interpretations of what is going on as it is presented to our brain by our senses, or nerves. The gathering, interpretation, translation, and retention all occur inside the brain of the individual, and this IS a very subjective thing, this reality. 
            Everything we see, do, think, feel, is simply a manifestation of electric and chemical signals sent between neurons in a cranium. That’s it, as far as we know. People may argue for a collective intelligence or experience, but no, that isn’t what really happens, if anything could be said to really happen. Suppose I kick this couch here, before I sit on it. I kick it hard enough to fracture three of my toes. Do you feel the pain of my toes being fractured, or is it just me? I am the only one experiencing the pain at that moment, the only one feeling the frustration of bringing injury upon myself yet again because of my own carelessness. I imagine you can sympathize with me, but I do not sympathize with myself. The experiences are not the same, but similar.
            So, given that what we take to be reality is purely a mental construction from the get-go, what does it matter if one brain embellishes a bit? Who is to say that the brain is not embellishing the stimuli, but rather catching and reacting to stimuli that other brains have merely missed? Can you be sure that you are experiencing the totality of what could possibly be experienced in this very office? You spend so much time here, but would it be too outrageous to think that you have perhaps skipped some aspects, and that I or some other person that comes through this office could pick up on those aspects your brain has glossed over, be it as some method of protection of the psyche or simply an act of absentmindedness?

            Perhaps the question you should be asking is not whether or not I am seeing things, but whether or not you are missing things.  You cannot hope to understand or control me completely. The only thing you can truly come to understand, control, and help is yourself. However, as I am part of your reality, it could be that I can be helped by you by proxy, I guess.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

No Step For a Stepper

             So, I saw Philbert walking around in circles in my basement, again.  I’m not sure what had him all hot and bothered, and it didn’t seem like he was all that certain, either.
            “Oh God, what have I done?” he mumbled fervently. I tried to reply in case he was talking to me, but he interrupted me with, “It wasn’t your fault, Phil, and you know it. They made you do it.  Pi is relentless and omnipresent, you can’t help that.”
            Maybe he had prevented me from interrupting him; I’m not sure how the semantics of situations like this go.  Someone almost interrupted someone else, in any case, but it was foiled effortlessly.  Phil was sweating a bit. I only noticed because of the evidence on his shirt. I wasn’t close enough or concerned enough to see if there was sweat on his face or anything. He must have been power walking like that in circles for a while.
            How’d it take me so long to notice it?  He was hiding in the basement, sure, but I usually catch him close to the start of these, what would you call ‘em, sessions? 
            “Is this close enough? It has to be.  Pi wouldn’t have it any other way.  It is exact. It is endless.  It is perfect and irrational at the same time, how can we not see that we must be as it is?”
            I hadn’t heard Phil talk like this before.  What the fuck was he talking about? Pie isn’t endless unless you make it endless. You’d have to have an infinite amount of resources, which he doesn’t have, so he shouldn’t concern himself with it.  He was definitely concerned, though.
            “Fibonacci was the real genius, he figured out the secret of Pi’s golden ratio.  You don’t see people handing out literature on that, though, do you,” he weirdly rambled on.  By weirdly, I mean he used a fucked-up sounding voice that he doesn’t usually use.  It could just be something he does to differentiate between perspectives when he talks to himself, how should I know? It sounded really strange, though.  I figured I’d try to snap him out of that shit to see if he could explain himself.
            “Hey, Philbert?  Anyone home, man?”
            “Of course, that’s more like Phi than Pi,” he continued, ignoring me like an asshole.  He isn’t usually an asshole, though.  “Not much difference in our spelling of those, if you think about it.  Phi is just Pi with an ‘h’ in the middle, as if humans got in the middle of perfection, screwing it up.”
            “Ok, that’s nice,” I told him, in case some part of him was subversively listening to me.  I told him I’d be back, then went upstairs.  Found a few oatmeal cream pie things in the kitchen, they had to be his.  I can’t stand the thought of eating those now that I’m properly acquainted with internet porno.  I grabbed two or three, went back downstairs, and decided to play a game.  I could feed Philbert and entertain myself at the same time. Why not?
            As he retraced the circle end over end, I tried to toss the cream pies in the middle of the circle without hitting him.  His frantic pace made this an interesting challenge, and he stepped on one of them. His loss more than mine, but I still lost points.  I had good luck other than that, so I left him in the basement to whatever ends he was planning.

            If you’re wanting to go down there, good luck.