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| 8:53 p.m.-2005-11-01 Oh rapture, oh joy, oh dear. It's that time of year again! NaNoWriMo...which I was unceremoniously unable to complete last year because my computer SuperChunk decided to bite the big one. A moment of silence for SuperChunk. Okay. Now. On with the show. This year, for your perusing pleasure, I'll be posting my rambling writing off and on. Names are subject to change without notice. And oh yeah, this stuff is all copywrite. You steal it, and I'll send a rather large Rottie to eat your shoes and crap on your bathroom rug. Capice? So, without further ado: �Mick! You�re going to get us in some sort of trouble!� Greg glanced around nervously, eyeing the other patrons of the all night caf�. Not that it was exactly night anymore�.it was closer to dawn, but the sun wasn�t up YET.
�Well�I think so�I know what I�m NOT. I�m not � I�m not�� Greg sputtered like a leaky radiator. Something Mick found hysterically funny, actually. �Blasphemous?� Mick drawled around a mouthful of cigarette smoke. Sometimes�.he thought this was probably the last caf� in town that allowed smoking. Only �after hours�, but still. It was a blessing as far as he was concerned! �Blasphemous?� Greg spluttered. �Uh. Uh. Well�not blasphemous. Disrespectful, maybe, impious definitely, absolutely irreligious, possibly sacrilegious�� Greg sulked back into his jacket and the tattered old vinyl booth seat, with its once bright colors faded to muted shades, and repaired over and over with duct tape and other less successful patches. A newer wound, inflicted in the last few days was spilling cottony guts out onto the seat beside him. That�s how the place�s omelets had always affected him, too. And then he squirmed, not so much on the outside as the inside, already going over the few words Mick had come up with so far tonight. Mick was probably his oldest friend, and always the daring one� but lately, he�d become a little more cerebral and in Greg�s opinion, more foolhardy. This wasn�t a discussion for a public place, as far as he was concerned. He�d rather talk about something else. Like finding one�s sister attractive (not that he did!) than argue religion in public. �Greg? Greg! Hey�I was saying, if /I/ were the devil, and I really wanted to screw with the world, I�d make sure I got into every religion, just as it was getting started up. I mean, really. Take a good long look at the Bible for goodness sake. And I don�t mean literally,� Mick expounded. Greg glanced around the caf� himself, under the harsh light, reverently hoping no one was eavesdropping, but the other early morning patrons all seemed lost to their own worlds, or troubles, or business. A taxi cab driver who didn�t look like he spoke much English anyway; a troubled older man, muttering to himself and going over the Daily Racing Form, a tired looking working girl who looked like she�d seen better decades much less better days, a cop going off duty. Outside, the city slumped in the sleepy pre-dawn hours, a few cars driving at their own paces through the street, completely ignoring the tattered old street car style diner and its flickering, fading neon glory. �Greg! Dang it�you want some more coffee or something? You�re not listening.� �No, I suppose I�m not. Not listening. Sorry Mick, it�s just not my thing.� �This from the guy that� Oh, never mind. Look�I got to go. No rest for the weary and all that. Here�let me get your ticket.� �No, that�s fine. Thanks, but you do�� Greg just stopped. It was no use, trying to talk Mick out of something, once he got it in his head. Even if it was as simple as paying for his small, egg free breakfast. �Great, now I owe you.� �Naw, it�s nothing. Look, you take care, and think about what I said. I�m serious. Even if you don�t agree with me, it�s good for you. To think about stuff, instead of just hiding all the time. Words are just words�ideas are just ideas.� �Yeah, yeah,� Greg agreed, just to get out of the conversation. The whole thing left a funny feeling, deep in the pit of his belly. He might�ve lapsed in his devotion to the church, but. It bothered him, to hear even his best friend speak so flippantly about that sort of thing. �I�ll see you tonight�same time?� �Same place,� Mick chuckled amiably. �Unless you have a date or something.� �Date,� Greg chuckled, unhopefully. Yeah. A date. He wasn�t just chubby, he was fat. And growing fatter. A date seemed about as likely as him suddenly, spontaneously growing wings and flying circles around the dilapidated little park down the street. Mick slipped out, tipping the waitress, who greeted his generosity with a wan, thankless smile. The lanky man seemed unphased, and all but skipped out, hopping down the four shallow steps with a sprightly step before he was swallowed up by the not-quite-night. �Date. Devils. Damn it, Mick. You�re a lunatic�going to get us beat the crap out of or something. Or worse,� Greg grumbled softly. And then heaved himself out of the abused booth. He shuffled to the door, gave a glance back to the gum-popping waitress, and then headed out into the cool morning himself. It could have been pretty, that morning. It was spring. The vernal equinox, he reminded himself. He was always conscious of such things. Winter, turning into spring. The moon growing full, or wasting away to newness. Meteor showers, eclipses, Mars drawing close to the earth, bright ruby red and angry looking. Never mind, he�d rarely seen the planets, the meteors, even the stars. The sickly green glow of the city washed out all but the bravest stars, and this city in particular seemed inclined to clouds. In fact, Greg preferred that. He�d been out at night, in the countryside, driving from one city to another and found the yawning gulf of the night time sky to be a fathomless void that filled him with a nameless, inexplicable dread. Even photos from satellites and telescopes and the like filled him with the same funny fear. He blamed it on books he read as a child, describing monsters from other planets and insane gods that cared nothing for their flocks. All nonsense now, he realized, but he feared it had left its mark. And more, he felt no desire what so ever to fix the �problem�, since a fear of the night sky didn�t exactly interfere with his life in any way. He was already a little huffy, having trouble breathing by the time he got to the end of the street, where the derelict little park sprawled over an awkward spot between several one way streets. Still, for all its yellowed grass and weedy planters, the trees still seemed healthy, wearing the seductive silken green of spring. And the benches were relatively free of both homeless wanderers and pigeon shit (two things Greg considered necessary to consider a park �nice�), so he plopped down on one and dug around in his jacket for the hard plastic shell of his inhaler kit. He didn�t look at the sky, though it was growing decidedly brighter and bluer, finally smothering the sickly green glow of the city at night. The medicine in the inhaler left a bitter, nasty taste in the back of his throat, and an acrid smell in his nose, but he was already breathing better. Damned cigarette smoke. If Mick had another really horrible habit (other than talking a lot of crap and trying to get him beat up by the nameless Them), it was smoking those god damned, foul, disgusting cigarettes. Excuse him, cigarillos. They were classier than cigarettes or something. And they stank. A lot. The only downside to the inhaler was that it left him feeling oddly jumpy, shaky, woozy, unwell�and he�d need to sit on the bench a while, both to catch his breath and to get rid of the nasty aftertaste, the nasty afterglow, the nasty aftereffects of his asthma medication. He stared into early dawn of the park, and sighed�watching papers whirl around when a taxi cab driven by the man he was certain didn�t speak much English came whisking by. Like autumn leaves, long out of season, they made him somewhat uncomfortable. Autumn, like the night sky, made him unreasonably uncomfortable. Like his fat (and getting fatter) body. He stared down at his tattered shoes, contemplated the holes in them. He needed a new pair, but new shoes would require new money, and new money would require a new job, and a new job didn�t seem very likely. Unemployment was high, and his marketable skills were decidedly low. He contemplated too, the tattered hems of his jeans, worn through were they came into contact with the smooth soles of his shoes. Any pants big enough to fit around his waist drug the ground; he wasn�t a tall man at all. He could, of course, do something practical about it, like roll them up. Paying the little ancient Asian lady to hem them up for him (she was Chinese, he thought, but maybe she was Japanese, or Taiwanese, or Vietnamese, or maybe even Javanese or some other exotic-ese he wasn�t even aware really existed) at the dry cleaner downstairs from his shabby, hot, smelly, cramped apartment was out of the question. Hems in pants that were too long for his short, squat legs were too extravagant, and yet, he refused to roll them up too. Instead, he rolled his chubby self to the side (far more than he really needed too�but then, he wasn�t nearly as fat as he thought, in some ways), to dig at his back pocket until he came up with the tattered black wallet. The sun was starting to creep shades of pinky gold and peach blush into the eastern horizon, when he opened up his wallet and watched a few fluttering moths fly out before they made magnificent swan dives towards the earth again. He bent over, with a soft grunt, and picked one up, retrieving the scrap of paper from the ground. Not because he was concerned about littering�but he was hoping the well worn strip of paper would fake out the bus driver just long enough to get him home again; he didn�t want to give up the scant handful of change that lived next to his ring of keys. One actually opened his apartment; the rest were reminders of parts of his life best forgotten now, each memory left behind like the one before, in the shabby remains of apartments he couldn�t afford any longer and cars he couldn�t make the payments on any longer. �One paycheck away from the streets,� Greg grumbled to himself in unhappy sarcasm� �I�m three paychecks overdue�and all Mick can talk about is the devil sneaking into Christianity before it was even a religion. If that was the worst I had to worry about.� A glance at his cheap watch told him it was time to go�to stop enjoying the quiet of the destitute little park�and go and find the bus, to make his way back home again. He left the little park without a backwards glance, not caring the few bits of stray paper blew where his feet had just been, and then were lost to the coming dawn and the gutter.
My Current Weight: 234lbs (yeah, I'm dieting again)  The Internet's Mood: The Captain Recommends Dogcessorize 2006-08-13 - Movie Review: Monster House 2006-08-07 - Movie Review: The Descent 2006-06-09 - Movie Review: The Omen 2006-06-03 - She's here, She's here! 2006-05-22 - Blame the Cabin-Boy for playing 50 questions.
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