Category: Fiction

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A story about everything

How do we start this? How do I tell a story about everything by telling a story about me? Why would you care about me? I certainly don’t. Why should you? I’ll give you a reason. This isn’t a story about me. It isn’t about what happened to me, though that is all I’m going to tell you. Every word that follows is about you. I only know what I’ve seen and read, so I can only write that. But none of it is that specific. I’m not that good.

This is my story, so it’s everyone’s story. It’s my voice, but it’s your voice too. My friend told me I was self-absorbed. I’ve been wrapped up in the vision in my mind since I knew I had a mind. Her calling me out is just saying the obvious.

We were talking about lovers. She’s happy with hers. I’ve been juggling. I was telling her that as I get older, it has become very easy to talk people into doing what you want them to do, especially sexually. We have this whole pretense, mostly women, about how sex is this fortress that needs to be climbed or conquested. It is not. It wants to surrender. It wants to be given up. It just needs a reason. If not for the world, then for itself. Legs want to know why they are spreading. I didn’t know that when I was a boy. I was always looking for a superfluous cause. Everything is so simple if you don’t make it difficult.

It’s why drunks succeed before they get too drunk. Alcohol removes pretense. It removes that chameleon dance where you jump and jump and try to fit this skin or that color. And instead just be the fucking lizard that you are.

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Unreliable narrator

I am an unreliable narrator.

I make no pretense to disinterest. Everything I use to fill the vacuum of this life is done by choice. Consciously or subconsciously, I am neck deep in my interests and biases. So are we all. The difference is my memory. It is eidetic. I can often remember things exactly as they happened. The trick to being unreliable is the interpretation of these events to suit the argument I am making, which may or may not remain consistent. It really depends on the moment. It depends on the audience.

Now for the hard part. Sometimes I am the sole member of this audience. And the cognitive dissonance that occurs during the process of packaging a situation is far more dissonant when the package is for self-consumption. It’s not impossible, clearly. And by what I’ve witnessed, I’m not the only person doing it. You see it in a color-by-numbers, kindergarten-simplicity when the law becomes involved. Statements are taken, snap judgments are made, then all evidence that fits a hypothesis is hoarded, while anything that subverts the accepted idea of “what happened” is summarily dismissed as coincidence or superfluous. In our personal lives, we do this shit on a whole other level. Why? Because we are fighting for our perceived actualization and the definition of our capital-s Self. That is a constant battle waged from cradle to grave, and everything is sacrificed in its effort.

The few individuals who can subvert this compulsion, or rise above it, are pointed to as heroes and anomalies of selfless wonder. Again, I don’t include myself, even remotely, among these beautiful freaks of human nature.

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Soft-boiled egg

She was slightly taller than me, 76 times better looking, and super age-inappropriate.

“Why do you like me?” I asked.
“I like smart.”

And so this weird thing began. She was smart, too. More street smart than me. Unfortunately, she had earned that. She was a soft-boiled egg—hard outside and soft in the middle.

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Count

This is the new beginning. The new originals. The new today. This is not countable. It is impossible to count. Impossible to accurately measure.  If the universe has a bookkeeper, then this is accounted for  somewhere. But for all real purposes, there will be no count. It’s a thought exercise. Like wondering how many potentially fatal doses I’ve ingested, or how many times I’ve actually been close to death. No one is counting. But it is a set of integers greater than one and less than infinity.