I started this story for CC's & KFC's http://freerentcontest.com/ in the hopes that I might secure some money! I wrote it out, then realized that it had to be reduced to 600 characters. Here are 600 characters: I titled it "One Abstract Wish"
I quit my job of 3 year with extreme prejudice and a
wish. I got my wish on a stick. I returned home for a holiday, ran out of
savings, and before I knew, I was trapped, financially castrated. Acerbity
precedes acrimony. My parents get some sick thrill in watching me suffer. My
primary primal relationship, Man vs. God, the Father, the One I want to change
with an ultimatum without leverage. I have violent tendencies. I've tasted
freedom without limits. Nothing nauseates me more than my own fear and inertia.
This is unsettling. This is serious! 6:00 am?
I went to sleep at 1! Work? Not today.
Here's how the rest went:
I had never wanted or intended to
go home. I wanted to live in the fantasy
land of Oz forever. After attending
University, the place that made the freedom sense tingle, the thought of returning
to that old, familiar homestead was never a passing thought or
consideration. Even when I dropped out
of school due to excessive drug-use inducing social anxiety disorders and
relationship disorders, I was determined to ‘make it’ as a writer of high
regard on account of my buoyant ego, because I wanted a freer freedom. I found myself chasing the Dragon. I cut ties.
Part of me is masochistic, both physically and mentally, but I have
faith in the fact that love is all-enduring.
When we
stop learning, we start forgetting, so I applied to the school of hard-knocks,
where all the late greats earn their chops.
I moved around, I lived here and there, in halls and vestibules. I
worked for pittance, long hours for little reward. I’ve slept in warehouses and streetcars, on
hardwood slats and itchy wall-to-wall carpeting. I thought I had it pretty swell when I found
a surfable couch and a one-oh hourly wage to sleep on with low rent and no
utilities…Yeah, I had it real swell until I got fired, or I should say, quit
with extreme prejudice.
But this
is still all a lead in to the point of living at home with the ‘rents. Yeah, these old bogies still have the same
face, live in the same place, and have the same numbers attached to their
names, their social security, yet, something was not quite right because everything
was still the same. My Father rules his home with the heavy-handed laws of
subjective aesthetics, where cleanliness is next to godliness, and yet not
being a believer in God or gods, helping keep things straight is a thankless
job. Despite all his rage, or perhaps,
in spite of it, I still intended to move back to Buffalo, NY, my home, find
another job, and hunker down for the winter, but when my car’s radiator blew
the last of my savings, I felt the sickness of financial castration bubbling
uneasily into the Nausea that I’m sure that Sartre describes in his book ad
nauseum, although I haven’t read it.
My
parents didn’t feel sorry for me, or if they did, they never showed it. My dad is bitter that I spent all his
projected analysis on a fruitless venture (college), justifiably so, in a way,
but then again, he never even got to hear the full story because it’s difficult
to listen with hard ears, look with hard eyes, and judge with a hard
heart. My Pa doesn’t take the truth too
well unless it’s glaring him in the face from the TV set of The History
Channel, and even then, I’m not sure if he’s really paying attention.
This
just serves to show the acerbity and acrimony that frames the aspect of my
primary primal human relationship with Man vs. God, the Father. I’ve spent many sleepless nights in a bed I
can’t afford just thinking how I’m going to kill the old bastard if he crosses
me the wrong way and just thinking how I never had these thoughts floating
aimlessly on my travelling woven blanket from the Mexican Pee-Pee Station that
I obtained on a trip I once took to Cozumel to visit the Mayan ruins built long
ago for newlyweds on a beach following a Jeep caravan through a forbidden city
on New Year’s Day when I was only sixteen…
Now, a
decade later, it just goes to serve the purpose of contrasting between the
potential diversity of an experience that a single day can offer with the
finite rigidity of first-worlders who spend their time arming clocks. These keepers of time, money, and other
intangible ideas that they swear to possess, tighten what has been sprung in
the name of the calendar’s Sun, waxing and waning the Moon that is there to
fantasize, but not to touch. I’ve got
balls, man, sir, dude, however you call it, but how am I supposed to use them
if you cut off my dick? I am required to censor myself and work full time for
the minimum standard of living, minimum for a littler person perhaps, but not
for a giant like me. Man must eat,
sleep, and play, or pray for those things to come that might not yet
exist. But I’m a realist in a certain
sense. I understand who the suppliers
are and what they’re demanding: Fresh
Goods! I see who lives and who toils for
a living: Modern slaves who are slaves
to their own modernity and calculate freedom with an App tablet that tells them
where to go, what to do, and where it’s at!
Goods forbid that I should be globally positioned ineffectually! Yet here I am, again, a part of me apartment
hunting for that load bearing egg of a carton to contain me and transport me
from one miserable situation to a more vibrant green on the other side by the
path less traveled.
