Morning After

            “Oh, fuck, my head hurts. What happened?” I mumble to myself, unwilling to open my eyes.

            “You mean you don’t remember, Broseph?” I hear, much to my surprise, somewhere else in the room. Only guys call me ‘Broseph’, I think to myself, that narrows it down to 50% of the population, at least. Keeping my eyes closed, I sit up and lean against the wall. At that point, I realize I’m on the floor.  I wonder if the mystery guy is on the bed, or on the floor, too. I don’t care enough to open my eyes just yet, though.

            “Remember when I asked ‘What happened’? That would be a good indicator that I don’t have a fucking clue what happened, or that I don’t remember. So, I’m on the floor. Did I fall, or did I do this on purpose?” I try to open my eyes, to see where this guy is, and maybe figure out who he is without asking him. Immediately, pain shoots through my eyes and my head like a lance. I mumble “… Shit…”, grab my head, and roll back onto the floor, belly-down.

            The guy laughs a bit, and says (too loudly, in my opinion), “Dude, you were so awesome! No one knew you could pole dance like that! I thought it was gonna be gay as hell at first, but you fuckin ROCKED, dude! I don’t even know where that pole went, but we need to get it back. You could be, like a professional, man! Seriously! And, by the way, next time you play beer pong, just stick with beer, please, man. For our sake. You tried to stab that one guy… Karl, I think, you tried to stab him with the table, dude, you got so pissed. I didn’t think anyone could move a table like that, but you did. It was balls, dude! But, seriously, no Bacardi Pong for you, bro. That scared the shit out of the chicks. You see how you’re on the floor by yourself? That’s why, man. No stabbing people with tables, bro.”

            “Who’s Carl?” I wonder aloud. I’ve never known a Carl in my life.

            “No, bro. His name is Karl. You’re gonna know him if he runs into you again. You don’t forget that stuff, man.”

            “That’s what I said, Carl. His name is Carl, isn’t it?”

            “No, bro. His name is Karl. Get it right.”

            “You seriously said that exact same thing last time. I get his name is Carl, right? Leave me alone about it.” I try to get up, realize it’s a bad idea, and fall back down. I’ve got to quit doing this. Hangovers just aren’t worth it, I think as I continue to cradle my head.

            “But you’re saying it wrong. His name is Karl, man. You’re saying Carl, don’t you get it? Karl, not Carl. He’s picky about that. I think he’s got a tattoo of his name on his back, or something.”

            “Just leave me alone, whoever the fuck you are. I’ll talk to Carl Not Carl, mother fucker that he is, when I have to.”  I find a random pill in my pocket, dry swallow it, and pass out again in a matter of minutes.

             

Just Like the Past Few Weeks

My coffee reminds me of something,

Everything I’m doing is what I’ve done.

These days just blur together

With the newspaper,

Just repeating stories we already knew.

So, why is it called news?

How many times

Have I sat in this chair,

Drank the same coffee,

Read the same stories,

Saw the same walls?

It happens every day,

But the days don’t care

If I get bored, do they?

So, just like every other day,

I sit here, drinking my coffee,

And try in vain to talk with my wife.

Her skull is taking on

An interesting

New hue.

So nice to see that

The dog hasn’t moved the bones yet.

He always avoids them,

Every day.

Answers

            “Hello, this is the Vermillion residence. We aren’t at home right now, please leave a message.”

            “Cocksuckinmotherfuckinpieces OF SHIT! I should have hung up before I said that, sorry. If you’d just answer your fucking phone! Where the fuck are you?!” James punched the end call button on his phone as he ran down the sidewalk, desperately trying to get away from the suits behind him. He had seen these assholes get Chimmy and Gin, and he’d be damned if they got him.  If only there weren’t so many people out walking today!  Why the hell are there so many people downtown on a Wednesday afternoon?! He thought to himself as he ran and pushed past people, knocking a few off-kilter and getting yelled at.  Frantically, James looked at his phone and dialed a different number, hoping for an answer.

            “Come on come on come on come on PICK UP!” He told the dial tone, panting as he continued his sprint through town.

            “Hey! What’s up?”

            “Jesus Christ, tell Jerry they’re after m-“

            “Ha! Gotcha! Sorry I missed your call, this is a recording. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I find my phone again. It’s probably in the couch or something.” –Beep-

            “Fuck you, you son of a bitch! The plan went sideways, where are you? Answer your fucking phone!” James screamed, again, and ended the call with a vengeance.

            Out of a building Jerry thought had been closed for years, three of those bastards with the shades and suits seemed to appear in front of him.  They tackled him, and drug him kicking and screaming to an alleyway close by.  As is the custom, no passers-by noticed, or seemed to care.  James was tossed violently against a wall, and one of the suits pulled a small pistol from some interior pocket of his horrendously normal sport jacket.  As the guy pointed it at James, the murderously inconspicuous ass hat asked him, “So, where are your friends, now?” What an odd accent.

            James spat on the ground, and said “What friends?” right before his head grew a brand new tunnel from forehead to the bald-spot that had been on his head since 10^th grade.

These People That I See

            These people that I see, I’m beginning to think that I don’t really see them, you see?  They just don’t act like they are able to be seen by anyone else, and everyone else acts as though they can’t see the people, so all I have is the assumption that the things I think are there really are nowhere.

            Some things come from nowhere, though, don’t they?  I hear about them every once in a while. Like ‘That car came out of nowhere and just hit me!’, or ‘Then Jake came out of nowhere and spooked the shit out of those little kids!’.  In either case, something came from nowhere, which seems impossible if you don’t think about it too much, but then it has to be somewhere, right?

            It’s like the number zero.  Most people would say that 0 is a number, but it has no value. It’s the physical manifestation of nothing, making nothing into something.  If you have 0 apples, then you have no apples, but you also don’t owe anyone apples, like if you had -2 apples, and being bereft of apples is definitely considered by everyone that isn’t a pecan tree to be its own sovereign state of being.

            With this in mind, perhaps the people that I see are truly there, only in the respect that they are not there in most ways other than that they are symbols for nothingness.  What substance do they have? I can’t tell, they won’t really talk to me.  No one else interacts with them, so I can’t get anyone else to verify what I’m seeing, or that they are seeing me.  They look at me, sure, and sometimes they communicate with me nonverbally.  A nod as one man sits down in an ER waiting room, a shaking head of a woman leaning against a window sill at the pharmacy, and they see only me.  What if I am nothing, and yet simultaneously serve as a meeting point between two realities that don’t acknowledge the existence of each other?  In both at the same time, but not wholly in either one?  Who’s to say?  There is nothing here, but what is the nothing? Am I observing it, or am I the nothing being observed?  I’ve asked my hands, they don’t know.  No one else knows, either.  The people on the bus have looked at me enough times for me to know that they think I’m crazy, but which side are they on? Do I even have a side?

Crumbs of Bonuses Under the Table

“So, things like karma don’t really exist?”

            “No… They do, but not in the tangible sense of the word in which you seem so stuck in thinking. To use your example, karma exists in that it is an idea in your head or mind.”

            “Are they not the same thing?”

            “I’ll explain that later. Anyway, this type of existence doesn’t necessarily have to manifest itself in your material world, though it does. You have a word for it, and the concept of it does affect the behavior of some people, so its existence is hard to truly deny. How can something have an effect without existing? It exists in the collective conscious, which acts as a plane of reality all on its own. The act of being happens in layers, and this collective conscious happens to be one of the layers”

            “But is it my layer? The one humans live in?”

            “Ok, maybe that wasn’t the correct phrase to use. Yes, it is its own plane, but each plane of reality has, for lack of a better term, fingers or tendrils reaching out into other planes.”

            “So, do I exist on different planes, or does everything get included into these tendrils?”

            “You’re here, aren’t you? Your connection to one plane just snipped, causing your consciousness to snap back toward other tendrils it had.  It’s difficult to explain exactly how this happens because I can only use words you know, and therefor I’m limited to using concepts familiar to you in order to explain a completely foreign concept.”