Rent Free From Loose Handlers

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. 

The Killer's Dead Part

“’I don’t know, Bob,’ I said, ‘there’s a couple kinds of laziness.  The don’t-want-to-do-nothin’ and the stick-in-the-rut brand.  You take a job figuring you’ll just keep it a little while, and that while keeps stretchin’ on and on and on.  You need a little more money before you can make a jump. You can’t quite make up your mind about what you want to jump to. And then maybe you make a stab at it, you send off a few letters, and the people want to know what experience you’ve had—what you’ve been doin’. And probably they don’t even want to bother with you, and if they do you’ve got to start right at the bottom, because you don’t know anything. So you stay where you are, you just about got it, and you work pretty hard because you know it. You ain’t young anymore and it’s all you’ve got.’”

Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, pg 129.

The autopsy report showed the lines of worry scrawled all about his youth, a shadow index of all kinds of perplexity…and as he aged, in a generalized sort of way, they seemed to coalesce and send rigors straight from his forehead through to his sternum, shorting out what bit of heart he had pickled because he needed to save face at the regular assembly of his peers he secretly hated.  Those men who stupidly listened to, and accepted all of his spiteful, lying diatribes on just about anything current events had to offer, to the extent that his belittling intelligence trusted no one but the unknown experts he believed weren’t just toying with their own ideas about nothing.  Those thoroughly practiced individuals from some region just East of L.A. who popularized such great notions from bunkers in TV land, complete with historical histrionics reenacting parts from grander stages when battles were fought and things that a man did were real in the eyes of hedge fund managers.  With a bit of spunk and derring-do, just about any man with good sense could glean private property from the hands of Native extraterrestrials with plenty of good, clean land for the flagging.

A Festival for the Herded

Another day, hot as spit, full of long, drawn-out complexities not to be aroused.  Talking all night about feelings gives me an example of how numb it feels to reach out towards somebody who pulls away, takes the wind out of my sails, and makes me feel disgusting.  So now, of course, I don’t want to talk to anyone about anything.  When so much attention and focus has been directed towards the topic of lying about feelings, making believe they’re all good, or at least attempting to convey a good feeling, because it takes a little bit of effort to feel good around you.  Patience, persistence, and determination slowly pulls me to pieces as I attempt to get in on a piece of the action.  We’re all attached, just not at the hip, as shadows and light interplay, alterations’ skullduggery and the scene’s emotional mosquitoes make it more and more difficult to coalesce, and makes you more and more loatheable. 

Like a skinny girl who is getting way too drunk for her cool-headed boyfriend who knows from experience that the responsibility will eventually fall undesirably on his shoulders and that her parents will inevitably blame him for eventualities that he wittingly tried to prevent, to no avail, wise words wasted on honorless she, pain to her parents, a grinning fucktard.

The pain is palpable, in the air, fifty shades of coercion.  What a reduced rush!  A noxious exchange of gases <smolt> spoken words like a shed of feathers plucked out for quills, anticipating the end of Bic®.

Bickering.

 Overhearing what you have to say about our lack of chemistry, like chiral racemates debating handedness of relative polarity cold extracted to combat systems of belief from bombshelters, crucibles, or bucketseats.

Because I want to get to know you forever by asking how you feel right now…

Tired, hungry, and pitiless.

+(/_\)+ Four Others, Connected

?

Socratic
Semi-
Circles
Break
off to a
Radical
Point,
Tangential
to origins
with space
to fill with
substitutes,
replacements,
or breaks in
the action for
a drink or a
cup of coffee
to be specific,
a beer
to be honest,
or simultaneous
with consideration to
the system as a
whole, variable for
a moment, second,
minute, hour, month
year, decade, century,
or two sideways eights
depending on how you slice it,
a flower,
a pinwheel,
or a blastula?

seven-two seven-one

Second-hand afterthoughts leave me used, in the borrowing
business, at the library, smoken for by a shmo’.

Control yourself, big man, the Devil’s at your wheel, driving
me to shame.  First you create for yourself a reputation,
and then, like a man, blow it.  Vitriol sets me off
on a tangent’s tangent, wrestling with vocabulary.

Nothing seems to quench the demon.  A bright idea?
Insanity’s gist.  Until I run the syrup through my system
a smoker’s coffers go up in flames. (An activity nobody can afford.)

The thing that gives me confidence is the thing that gets me by…
make my feet stink.  I must go for that reason alone.

--

To make matters matter, mountains must first be made of flowers.
Beauty behave, Powers overpowers the man in my likeness with
aspect and attributes all the same.  There’s no easy way to say this,
so I’ll let my representative speak on my behalf:  Discursive politics talks
me to boredom as receive a sit-me-down lecture for parental scorn.

The simplex is herpes, Vaccix is the commercial.  Vestigial
anthropomorphized appendages that do the business no good
must be cut off and cauterized to avoid a bleed-out.

Craven god ost darapture, take me to that place
overliver where mistakes are not made and health
is not important.  Vice me beanie non necesse est.

It’s a crazy kinda life, don’t lead me, leave me,
talk to me, make me do.  A warden always
captures the part of me that needs
to be locked up in the cell that holds the soul captive
in the mind, that perpetual awareness that is aware of constant
imperfection, that needs to be force feeding everywhere
in a deranged funk, transmogrified to ideal endings
of shit and piss, regular anal fixations, analyzed
for blood and sweat, a condition of dark force and
shady concentration, idealizing horrors that make me feel
weak in the knees and young again, full of spunk.

Sassy butthole, shit on me speaking in a cold voice,
that, “all that you do you are good at.”
It’s a compliment, get over it, you son-of-a-bitch
in fire-linked chains giving me a flurby.
How can I resist?  You’re making my hot dog tinkle with
excitement on the parquet floor paneling.

Breathe with me, that’s it…
synchronize with my circular-circular technique.
Sex everywhere!!  Guttural metaphors exist and
the fruits of my labor are rotting without upkeep,
waxing tomatoes for a review of hungry criticism…
the empty can’t afford to hurt, so they don’t.  
 

American legs are out awhoring;
nothing strange, just the same old, angles and curves with struts
vagging about bitches for attitude, can you believe it?
How she got into this mess, just be being near me?
Proximity possesses those who seize easily, blacking out
for confusion, distrusting for safe-keeping, because
you can never be too careful when it comes to dispelling
elements you worked hardly for and I’m describing the way
you do it, blockhead.  At ease, soldier, permission to speak fluently?
I do it because I can tangle.

Untangle, poor slinky, do me away from these steppes
high-beaming, blinding me with your brights, take care,
there, in the dark with the light of the world by your side.
It’s not so suspicious after all.  An empire of deserved getting
compensation for severe dearth or lack thereof, for
when the super-rich get together with the ultra-poor for prayer
and thanksgiving shall be the day I choose to die for
happiness, just can’t take it anymore, it’s too good...
for emphasis on rhetorical free-speech, not free bull-
shit because you have to pay for manure to grow on.

I’d rather not be here when the hit shits the fan,
“o my god, o my god, o my Christ, would you listen to this?!”
A whistle or a xylophone, blissed out, simply.

Stubbish

Ecstacy reduced lexicon: that part of the brain for
cheesing like a Swiss high on Alps yodeling.  Death to the
white light!  …And towards the chalk on the boards of a
school (iGand).  Glasses aye me, starved for approval, my elders
enable me to nerd.  Off. And on to the break of dawn
wetting the house soaking in light: swimming substance
of seeing that can’t be seen.  Gilt by association, nobles
have faith in each other, the guild that peaks and crests
symbols on to shields that protect me from the onslaught
against me that seeks to rip my soul from my body, high on
pretend ego that associates scenes I see for myself in a
dream, vision, and selfish aspersion.  As I self-efface
contradictorily to seem a certain way, I age myself
for a smiling austerity, giving tax for favor.

Robber barons soldier for fortune in the same soul-sucking
city for years full of idiots about, that is, until they get
wise or I slip up.  Society daughters give themselves up
for a fatherly dicking or talking-to.

“Lecture me daddy, oh! Tell me all about your failed rehearsals
of applied hindsight and how it wrinkled your brow and
made you lose faith and gain weight!  Do me righteous!
Oh! Lip me prudent like the whore that I am not!  Thwart
my dirty little urges, yearnings, and compulsions to feel good and
get knocked up, and be bopped around!  Make me a smiling
professional in a suit who writes letters and makes demands
that may or may not be rational nor has be, but needs
to be taken as seriously as I didn’t take my education.”

“Give credit where credit’s due? Give credit where credit has always been.
To our founding white fathers, to God! Because God is a bearded
figure of a man, as depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
that I have a vague notion of what it’s actually like, and it’s
of vague interest, but not interesting enough to give up what
it is I’m doing now in my careering life, rushing headlong
for the rush I’ve achieved over-and-over again and yet…
I’m still in search of…something…missing…the arrangement…
(the wedding).”

Stub

Mental vomit, crazy amounts of black bile acid spewed forth from
pen-tip, metaphor for it, the Fly, Belial, and all his specks.

A hertz donut of raw ground beef festering in the Sun
with maggots of military dictum.

A lock with no key hairs me.

Compulsion to engage in obsessive behavior stresses my time,
makes me write on a wobbly table.

Mental hygiene, crazy amounts of cleanliness? Reduction to nothing?
Purity, tomb of the ascended, better off dead…an idea, a conviction
with a close friend, quick to anger and even faster to forgiveness.

Irresistible urges are impossible to resist, by definition…
Hold your breath! Even after you pass-out, the medulla modulates.

A friendly stabbing: panged in the back by allies who really
have their own best interests in mind, to be your friend, the advantaged.

Objectives upon floating isles, a mile up on inverted clouds,
Native aboriginal smoke-signals puff Morse striated.

Day-to-Night at Noon undercover…not a spy.  For lack
of concentration or ability to direct focus on a single subject
or topic, to force the issue that should perhaps remain unresolved
for the time-being.  The 4^th Dimensional Hero is here! Have you seen the Times?

Attached to the mantle in the forecastle, the weatherman predicts a
random sequence of unpredictable events and patterns yet to be
mathematically equated with respect to any barometric you can feel
in your bones like migraines.  Migrating daily to work?

Not today! Or you will be killed by rabid riot police armed
with immunity to their own highly contagious aerosol transmissions.
Smoke, gas, and pepper everywhere outside of masks…
Skull suckers suck faces melting everywhere through straws,
the last of a subspecies of suspicious suspects who
should have been locked up and executed long before tolerant
proposals that do nothing to remedy the actual health consequences
that ravage the epidemiological subsection, high on well, being
unselfless.

The path along the race to enlightenment is strewn with darkness, death, and every kind of failure.

Full

of

Self,

like

an

-itis

that

needs

to

be

drained

of

rotten,

stinking,

pus-filled

fluid.