Archive for March, 2011
Life Goals
Monday, March 21st, 2011
I’ve almost got it. There’s a headache at the back of my head, right above my neck, and I know that’s how it starts. The primitive part of my brain flaring into life, burning up all the useless parts of the inside of my head, turning everything into ash except for the strongest parts of my mind, the parts made of steel and stone.
It’s too bright in the parking lot, and I’m almost out of cigarettes, but that hardly matters.
If I keep concentrating, I can feel it inside. If I concentrate hard enough, I can see it outside. I see the world vibrating like the string of a violin. I have plucked it. I can see things shimmer; I can see the moment before everything begins, shivering there. No one else can see that potential, but I do.
The secretary, who should go find her own place to smoke, looks at me sideways and I wonder how much she knows.
Once it happens, everyone will see it, though. Everyone will see what I can do. I will change the world, move the mountains and burn down the sea without ever lifting a finger. I will concentrate, I will harness the power of my mind.
On my next break, I’ll make a list of heads that I need to explode.
10 Answers to the Question “Where’d You Get Your Black Eye?”
Friday, March 18th, 2011
1. “Yeah, I didn’t think you could get hurt head-butting a shark. Cartilaginous fish, my ass!”
2. “It’s a tattoo. Like it?”
3. “From your mom. Man, she is one wild chick!”
4. “Extreme chess.”
5. “Well, I was asking this guy how he got his black eye, and apparently he’d had it with answering that over and over …”
6. “I was sitting next to this pregnant lady on the bus and I said, ‘So, when are you due?’ Long story short, he wasn’t actually pregnant.”
7. “Oh, this isn’t mine.”
8. “I heard these weird noises late at night from my neighbor’s house, terrible, inhuman ululations. I crept into my back yard and climbed the fence to land on their weedy, overgrown lawn. A pale green light pulsed in the neighbors’ attic window, silhouetting a dark figure that it seemed to be clawing to get out. I moved closer, slipping silently through the grass, my eyes riveted to the window–and that’s when I stepped on the rake.”
9. “The black eye is nothing! It’s the microchip they implanted in my brain that worries me.”
10. “Well, it’s actually kind of a funny story involving you, me, this conversation, and a time machine stuck in a loop, but I’m so sick of telling it, you might as well just go ahead and punch me now.”