(no subject)
After having another wonderfully inane chat with siriaeve on technopop, BF!Harry's theme song, the way of Zen, and vodka, I felt good and ready to tackle my ripoff original fic. (was that an oxymoron or what?)
This is posted to prove my existence, and that Chuck Palahniuk does it better than me:
Antoine is Looking for Himself. This means he bums around the apartment he's about to be evicted from and smokes pot. He says he doesn't exist and tries to prove it by standing in the middle of traffic.
"You do not exist," Antoine says. "You are just what you think you are."
How can you be looking for yourself if you don't exist?
"I'm looking for what I think of myself."
I nod and smile. Antoine shaves with his back to the mirror. "I do not exist. I am the reflection of the shit other people say about me. I am the festering sore of the universe."
Antoine is the badly shaved festering sore of the universe.
"You have to be assertive and get in their face," he tells me. "All the pop stars have to table dance for the record labels. Why do you think they all have such big tits?"
I'm assertive like you wouldn't believe. I tell Cindy I want a red toothbrush this time, not a blue one. You should probably turn the radio off, unless you really want to listen to this song. And do I want that raise? Of course, unless it isn't really possible right now, in which case, that doesn't mean I don't want it, just that I'll be more than happy to take it later.
"I'm not a nihilist. I'm just a realist."
He cuts himself to prove he is nothing but matter, inconsequential. Do you see this? Blood gushing all over the place, face grinning with not-quite white teeth. I am nothing. I am blood cells and bone cells and skin cells.
Pain is just an extension of our minds to try to prove our existence. Antoine knows this, but it doesn't stop him from screaming all 12.7 miles to the hospital.
I call 911, and he screams at the dying people in the emergency room, "Dying is the best thing that could happen you." He goes on to tell the teenage boy with third degree burns covering his arms and legs and swim trunks melted into his skin that death is just proof of our non-existence. "After death, you can see that there isn't any life."
All these people, with their severed fingers in ice-filled plastic baggies, brains squeezing out of the fractures in their skulls, they just ignore Antoine. When you're dying, I guess, you don't care too much about whether your life exists or not. You just know it's about to go to the crapper.
I am Antoine's last friend.
All his others died or got married.
I'm not really married to Cindy. We just live together and share a bank account and have papers to prove our marriage.
We also share last names. This may or may not be a coincidence.
Antoine understands. Antoine understands everything.
Molecular theory.
e=mc2.
Hamlet's soliloquy.
What Women Want.
How to make a really good onion dip.
You know, important stuff.
Antoine smokes pot because it feels good and might aid in killing off more brain cells. "We lose millions of cells everyday just by living," he says, "why not speed up the process?"
According to him, we don't live anyway, but I don't remind him of this.
Antoine can get violent when you contradict him.
I hate Cindy sometimes.
The feeling is mutual.
I tell all the young guys going to college or to start off on their one-year hitchhike of Eastern Europe, don't marry your high school sweetheart. Look at me.
Look at me.
They take one look at Joe Tellerman, Joe with his gut, Joe with his flannel slippers, Joe with his nine to five, Joe with his shitty Pontiac Grand Am. Joe who doesn't Get Any. This is Joe. Look at me. Do you really want to end up like this, in unholy matrimony? Do you want somebody else in your house who will make you take out the trash and vacuum every Sunday?
Some of them listen to me.
They give promise rings to their sweethearts, their Cindy's and Amanda's with their highlighted hair and Gap sweaters. If we like, don't screw around or something, we can still be together, right?
Some of them marry and completely the disregard the hindsight of authority. They start off on their white picket fence, 2.7 children, six-figure American dream. If they're smart, they get a divorce within the first year.
My parents think divorce is the greatest sin ever to besmirch the purity of the beautiful union between two heterosexual souls. It's all til death do us part, or an accidental fall. When Cindy and I go over to visit, we have to hold hands and smile and try to explain why we haven't produced screaming offspring for them to spoil yet.
I don't think we're ready yet, Mom.
Joe and I have decided that children aren't right at this point in our lives.
She nods, thin-lipped, and I can practically hear the Viagra being shipped anonymously to our house already.
It's not that there's anything wrong... Really, we couldn't be doing better. I mean, Cindy and I are perfectly fine.
Joe and I have decided that children... she starts mumbling again, staring very intently at her raspberry cheesecake.
Why can't she understand that the last thing we need is something to keep us together? Having children would prove we were a couple. That something happened besides living in the same apartment.
Don't get me wrong. Kids are great and all, but they would be the biggest mistake since some dumbass said, "And let there be light." It would be like Jeffrey Dahmer polluting our already smogged up, burned up, chlorofluorocarbon-filled gene pool.
I think we've got enough sociopaths in this world, the result of unhappy marriages and unfit parents, and I don't intend to be responsible for producing another one.
Cindy shuts up all the way home in the car, the chopped off ends of her hand ending at her clenched jaws. We go and defy my parents once more by not producing offspring. In fact, it would be pretty damn impossible to produce offspring unless sex is a projectile thing. You know, doing it without actually being there. Though that sounds like most of our times in bed. It's like fucking a battery-operated blowup doll.
The next day, Cindy doesn't burn the toast on purpose and actually butters it.
Joe, we have to talk.
We do?
She goes on to say something about healthy relationships and why our relationship needs work from both of us, how marriage is a joint effort from both parties, and how we're not at the end of the road, we're at a cross section.
This is not the end. This is a cross section. We can drive the right way, or we can misplace the road map and end up in courts on grounds of irreconcilable differences.
I just stare at her.
Where do I buy this road map?
Joe.
What?
I call Antoine later, and first he assures me he isn't trying to prove his non-existence in self-destructive ways ("There is nothing to destroy but our preconceptions and our fears.") then listens silently as I tell him about Cindy's road maps and cross sections.
When I finish, he chants, "Love is just a sound you make when your tongue touches your top teeth."
-------------
*scratches head* I'm mostly writing this as the, "Just write it. No matter how crappy it is," camp of writing. I figure I waste my time writing too much substandard fanfiction and should do something slightly more productive by writing substandard original fiction.
This is posted to prove my existence, and that Chuck Palahniuk does it better than me:
Antoine is Looking for Himself. This means he bums around the apartment he's about to be evicted from and smokes pot. He says he doesn't exist and tries to prove it by standing in the middle of traffic.
"You do not exist," Antoine says. "You are just what you think you are."
How can you be looking for yourself if you don't exist?
"I'm looking for what I think of myself."
I nod and smile. Antoine shaves with his back to the mirror. "I do not exist. I am the reflection of the shit other people say about me. I am the festering sore of the universe."
Antoine is the badly shaved festering sore of the universe.
"You have to be assertive and get in their face," he tells me. "All the pop stars have to table dance for the record labels. Why do you think they all have such big tits?"
I'm assertive like you wouldn't believe. I tell Cindy I want a red toothbrush this time, not a blue one. You should probably turn the radio off, unless you really want to listen to this song. And do I want that raise? Of course, unless it isn't really possible right now, in which case, that doesn't mean I don't want it, just that I'll be more than happy to take it later.
"I'm not a nihilist. I'm just a realist."
He cuts himself to prove he is nothing but matter, inconsequential. Do you see this? Blood gushing all over the place, face grinning with not-quite white teeth. I am nothing. I am blood cells and bone cells and skin cells.
Pain is just an extension of our minds to try to prove our existence. Antoine knows this, but it doesn't stop him from screaming all 12.7 miles to the hospital.
I call 911, and he screams at the dying people in the emergency room, "Dying is the best thing that could happen you." He goes on to tell the teenage boy with third degree burns covering his arms and legs and swim trunks melted into his skin that death is just proof of our non-existence. "After death, you can see that there isn't any life."
All these people, with their severed fingers in ice-filled plastic baggies, brains squeezing out of the fractures in their skulls, they just ignore Antoine. When you're dying, I guess, you don't care too much about whether your life exists or not. You just know it's about to go to the crapper.
I am Antoine's last friend.
All his others died or got married.
I'm not really married to Cindy. We just live together and share a bank account and have papers to prove our marriage.
We also share last names. This may or may not be a coincidence.
Antoine understands. Antoine understands everything.
Molecular theory.
e=mc2.
Hamlet's soliloquy.
What Women Want.
How to make a really good onion dip.
You know, important stuff.
Antoine smokes pot because it feels good and might aid in killing off more brain cells. "We lose millions of cells everyday just by living," he says, "why not speed up the process?"
According to him, we don't live anyway, but I don't remind him of this.
Antoine can get violent when you contradict him.
I hate Cindy sometimes.
The feeling is mutual.
I tell all the young guys going to college or to start off on their one-year hitchhike of Eastern Europe, don't marry your high school sweetheart. Look at me.
Look at me.
They take one look at Joe Tellerman, Joe with his gut, Joe with his flannel slippers, Joe with his nine to five, Joe with his shitty Pontiac Grand Am. Joe who doesn't Get Any. This is Joe. Look at me. Do you really want to end up like this, in unholy matrimony? Do you want somebody else in your house who will make you take out the trash and vacuum every Sunday?
Some of them listen to me.
They give promise rings to their sweethearts, their Cindy's and Amanda's with their highlighted hair and Gap sweaters. If we like, don't screw around or something, we can still be together, right?
Some of them marry and completely the disregard the hindsight of authority. They start off on their white picket fence, 2.7 children, six-figure American dream. If they're smart, they get a divorce within the first year.
My parents think divorce is the greatest sin ever to besmirch the purity of the beautiful union between two heterosexual souls. It's all til death do us part, or an accidental fall. When Cindy and I go over to visit, we have to hold hands and smile and try to explain why we haven't produced screaming offspring for them to spoil yet.
I don't think we're ready yet, Mom.
Joe and I have decided that children aren't right at this point in our lives.
She nods, thin-lipped, and I can practically hear the Viagra being shipped anonymously to our house already.
It's not that there's anything wrong... Really, we couldn't be doing better. I mean, Cindy and I are perfectly fine.
Joe and I have decided that children... she starts mumbling again, staring very intently at her raspberry cheesecake.
Why can't she understand that the last thing we need is something to keep us together? Having children would prove we were a couple. That something happened besides living in the same apartment.
Don't get me wrong. Kids are great and all, but they would be the biggest mistake since some dumbass said, "And let there be light." It would be like Jeffrey Dahmer polluting our already smogged up, burned up, chlorofluorocarbon-filled gene pool.
I think we've got enough sociopaths in this world, the result of unhappy marriages and unfit parents, and I don't intend to be responsible for producing another one.
Cindy shuts up all the way home in the car, the chopped off ends of her hand ending at her clenched jaws. We go and defy my parents once more by not producing offspring. In fact, it would be pretty damn impossible to produce offspring unless sex is a projectile thing. You know, doing it without actually being there. Though that sounds like most of our times in bed. It's like fucking a battery-operated blowup doll.
The next day, Cindy doesn't burn the toast on purpose and actually butters it.
Joe, we have to talk.
We do?
She goes on to say something about healthy relationships and why our relationship needs work from both of us, how marriage is a joint effort from both parties, and how we're not at the end of the road, we're at a cross section.
This is not the end. This is a cross section. We can drive the right way, or we can misplace the road map and end up in courts on grounds of irreconcilable differences.
I just stare at her.
Where do I buy this road map?
Joe.
What?
I call Antoine later, and first he assures me he isn't trying to prove his non-existence in self-destructive ways ("There is nothing to destroy but our preconceptions and our fears.") then listens silently as I tell him about Cindy's road maps and cross sections.
When I finish, he chants, "Love is just a sound you make when your tongue touches your top teeth."
-------------
*scratches head* I'm mostly writing this as the, "Just write it. No matter how crappy it is," camp of writing. I figure I waste my time writing too much substandard fanfiction and should do something slightly more productive by writing substandard original fiction.