Wildcat Strike!

48,604/50,000

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 04:49:48 GMT

holy shit man. holy shit.

im so excited!

penance: not just for catholics anymore! (43,300/50,000)

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 03:08:04 GMT

so, in order to punish myself for only writing about 1000 words in the past three days, when id hoped to have this thing almost done by now, i will engage in no pleasant activities until such a time as i reach 45,000 words. which is 1700 words from this point, after writing 2300 today. woot.

i can taste it, really. and i do love writing, after all. don't i?

right?!?!?

75%

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:55:37 GMT

im 75% of the way done, now. and im really proud of myself. i actually like my story, and i think with some serious editing after the fact it could really be something. besides, this is a ridiculous goal and i think i'm going to make it, even with thanksgiving and the sudden metric fuckton of work.

i'm patting myself on the back for sure.

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:47:08 GMT

im about 64% of the way done, and aallll i want to do is quit.

who came up with the idea of NaNo being in NOVEMBER. end of the semester, anyone?

Day 18: 32,034/50,000

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:49:33 GMT

okay, so here's what i wrote today!

Chapter etc
Subject: never talk to strangers
So it turns out that your mommy’s advice just so happens to be true, even as a full grown man in the (more or less) suburbs in broad daylight. You should never try to talk to strangers for the simple reason that they will never talk back to you.
In today’s world, you just don’t talk to other people that you don’t know. Anyone’s first advice to a visitor to New York City is to never, ever, under any circumstance, make eye contact with a stranger on the subway. This advice isn’t given entirely out of fear, I don’t think. At least, fear isn’t the only reason. I mean, why bother talking to someone who doesn’t look like they will benefit your life in any way, be it through a sexual relationship, friendship, increased contacts in the real estate industry, what have you. Why have a real and honest, and most importantly human, conversation with a stranger? Why waste your time on that when you could be thinking about the latest celebrity couple with a cutesy couples’ nickname or how you can get one up on the guy who works in the next cubicle or how you really want a tiny little Chihuahua, but that might make you look gay, or how to get your next hit of your drug of choice, illegal or legal substance, meaningless sex or eating the newest hippest food at your favorite pretentious restaurant listening to your favorite pretentious band.
What you are missing in these cases, dear readers, is the human connection. Talk to each other, to your fellow humans! We are all in this shit together, like it or not, atheists and believers, republicans and democrats, Yankees and Southerners, preppy kids and scene kids, anarchists and communists, black and white, rich or poor, male or female or undecided. So let’s be together! Even if for just a second, standing in line at the supermarket, passing each other walking down the street. Let’s stop being a divided nation, a billion or so tiny little kingdoms with no diplomats and iron curtains all around, ad just for one second, make eye contact, smile, and say something real. Say, “God, isn’t this weather something? I love when the sky is this shade of blue, it almost looks too blue, like it isn’t real. When I met the woman I love, she was wearing a shirt just that shade.” Most people, believe it or not, are not pickpockets or rapists. Of course, you should always be wary, but if someone seems safe, be humans together! It’s so incredibly sad to see everyone pouring from buildings at five o’clock and walking around, terrified of each other or so wrapped up in themselves that even a smile seems like far too much.
Dropping out of society like this is extreme, but everyone can help bring down the Zombie State in little ways like this every day, just by proudly wearing your humanity on your sleeve and suggesting that others find theirs too. Make every day Random Acts of Humanity Day.

Stop consuming and start being human
--kuon.

Our hero made his way downtown, in the vicinity of Brothers’ Bookstore but not quite on that street. It would have to be downtown, because that was a shopping district and contained Miller’s Field Park and people actually walked around there, unlike the rest of the town, which seemed, at times, more like a town in a world inhabited by only four-wheeled machines than our beloved Earth. He walked at a leisurely pace on the early afternoon abandoned streets. He was in no hurry at all, and in fact made a concerted effort not to adjust his pace in any way, because that in turn would effect the findings of the day in some sort of adverse and unalterable way. His plan for the rest of the afternoon was simply to go walking around, talking to everyone he ran across, total strangers, and using them, more or less, as springboards on his quest for the meaning of life and perfect truth.
However, our hero had not taken into account the strictures of American society and the disdain that middle-class suburbanites hold for strange men holding a three-foot stuffed giraffe.
Alex turned down Luna Avenue and found himself immediately in luck. There was a man there, sitting on the concrete ledge reining in some dirt and decorative plant life, so it wouldn’t contaminate the pavement, disrupting it with its searching and starving roots. The man looked to be around fifty, maybe a well-cared for and healthy sixty. Most importantly, he also looked bored out of his mind, making strange motions with his jaw as if just to see how they felt, and probably very susceptible to any conversation that happened to come his way. Alex smiled to himself, considering this a very good omen for things to come this afternoon.
“Hello,” Alex began, settling himself in for a nice talk.
“I work for my money.” The man said, shortly, his voice’s nose wrinkled in distaste, as if Alex smelled.
Alex, naturally, was stunned, searching his memory bank for any sort of cultural milieu in which such a sentence was an acceptable greeting, and came up with nothing. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, you bum. You won’t be getting a handout from me, no sirree bob! How about you get a job, hmm? Or at least a bath? Buy your own damn liquor, not have to panhandle change from us hardworking, true Americans.”
At this point, Alex became highly offended. This guy was being intolerant on perhaps three different levels when one would have sufficed perfectly well, thank you very much. “Hey, I’m not homeless or trying to bum some change off of you, okay? I just wanted to have a conversation, just a nice, pleasant human conversation. I’m on this mission to figure out what the meaning of life is, and so I’m trying to ask as many people as I can what they’re living for. I’d also like to, um, point out that your view of the homeless is wildly offensive and also, you know, completely stereotypical and wrong.”
“That’s what they all say,” the man scoffed. “You’re about three sheets to the wind right now, aren’t you, you filthy bum? Get out of here before I call the cops on your ass for public intoxication!”
Our hero, sighed inwardly and decided it would be better not to call this man’s bluff and stalked off, feeling distinctly unfulfilled. He would have liked to smack some education into that man’s head, but getting tossed into jail for assault would probably mean a whole lot of contact with The Man that Alex had been so carefully trying to avoid.
He walked on down Luna Avenue. A woman, thirty-something, pointy toed high heeled shoes that must have something to do with that terrible look on her face clicked her way along the pavement. Alex turned his torso towards her, gave her eye contact and a smile, and was about to muster out a “Hello, how are you today?”. Before he could even turn the corners of his mouth up all the way, the woman visibly wrinkled her tiny ski-slope nose, averted her gaze right to the sidewalk and muttered, “Sorry, no cash.” The click-clack of her probably very expensive shoes sped up considerably in tempo. Alex’s shoulders drooped just a little, and our hero sighed again, this time audibly. Never fear, dear readers, our valiant hero would not abandon his quest that easily. He inhaled deeply, as if re-inflating his shoulders, and pressed on with his quest.
A younger man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in business casual underneath a very unwieldy trench coat that looked distinctly out of place anywhere outside of a black and white detective movie, saw Alex ahead and sped up his walk, clearly thinking about whether it was worth it to cross over to the other side of the street.
“Sorry, buddy, no change today.” The man looked up, but not all the way up to Alex’s eyes, smiling apologetically but not anywhere near sincerely.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Alex yelled. “Why the hell does everyone think I’m homeless!? Just because I’m making eye contact? Trying to have a human conversation?”
The man cocked his head to the right, and backpedaled as if he was incredibly interested. “You aren’t homeless?” He asked incredulously, to which Alex shook his head solemnly. “Huh. Well, I hate to break it to you, but you certainly look homeless, kid.”
Alex considered his own appearance in the nearest store’s windows. “Do I? I don’t think I look homeless.”
“So,” The man asked curiously, but trying to play it as if he were completely nonchalant about the whole thing. “Why is it that you’re so interested in talking to strangers?”
Alex was thrilled that this outing was turning out to not be a total bust after all and began to explain himself, talking much faster than usual. “Well, it’s like this. I’m really disenchanted with my place in the world, you know? It just seems so small. So, anyway, I decided to go on this strike, right? From everything, like, anything that involves money or red tape or factories or anything that isn’t human, that is dehumanizing. Until I find the meaning of life, you know, what my place in the world is, what’s the point of living if I can never make a difference anyway. Then I can end the strike and go back to classes and my job and changing my clothes and buying food again. So, I’m basically just trying to get as many people’s opinions as I can to try and find an answer.”
The guy’s eyes lit up like a Christmas morning boy looking at a strangely wrapped package that looked suspiciously like a puppy in a bicycle shaped box or a bicycle in a puppy shaped box, but trying to play it cool so his parent’s wouldn’t know that he was already in on the surprise. “This might be a long shot, but do you happen to be keeping a blog about your experiences with this by any chance?” His question was punctuated three times by painfully false shrugs, and his eyes were almost embarrassingly nakedly hopeful.
“Um, yeah, I do, actually, but it’s not very-”
“Can I have the URL, please?” The man interrupted, whipping out a little planner type deal and a small plastic stylus that looked outright silly in his full grown man’s hand. Alex gave it to him, confused but willing to play along if it would make his excursion not an utter failure, at the very least. “Would you mind holding on one second? I’ll be back in about a minute, okay?”
Without waiting for an answer, the strange man scuttled off into the café across the street. In response, Alex sighed yet again and leaned against a black streetlamp post.

Day 14:25,159/50,000

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:44:40 GMT

halfway, wooo!

okay so here's the END OF THE NOVEL!!! SERIOUSLY! DONT READ UNDER THE CUT IF YOU DONT WANT THE SURPRISE ENDING RUINED!!!

OKAY, READ IF YOU MUST!

Alex snorted, glad that James could so easily slip back into his old self. He could only hope that he could make the same easy one joke transition back into his own real life after all this was over.
“Is Rosie around?” Alex asked, being careful not to even thank James for talking with him so sincerely for fear of shooting him off back into that higher gravity space, trying to change the subject and get them both away from it as fast as he could.
“She went on lunch break just before you came in. You wanna hang around and wait for her? “Shoot the breeze” or whatever?” Alex tried to decide if James wanted him here or not. Should he be left with his own potentially heavy thoughts or would Alex’s presence be a worse reminder. He couldn’t decide; James had already closed up shop, pulled the cartoon blinds down over the sad brownness underneath.
“Nah, I’ll wait outside over on that bench. The people watching is choice there, and, you know, I’ve got a lot to think about.”
“Sure, don’t worry about it. Try not to keep my cashier away for too long. Hey, are you two finally, you know…” James trailed off and made a series of ridiculously vulgar hand motions and pelvic thrusts.
“Not yet. We’re having a…we’re in a…thing. But none of that. Yet.”
“Well, get yourself back to living, so we both can get some, you hear me?”
Alex nodded and they did that macho hand clasp back patting thing that’s almost a hug, but different in such a way that men concerned about such things can engage in it without feeling like sissies. They parted ways, both our hero and his knightly-saintly friend satisfied with their conversation. The bell clanked after Alex, and James nodded at the closed door, thinking how glad he was that at least someone young and living in the good old U. S. of A. still cared about such things, and also, the fact that it looked like he was due to get his Fridays back any day now.
Alex plunked himself down on the backless cement bench that faced right on Commerce Street. The people watching was usually excellent, but this was two o’clock on a weekday, so the bustle Alex had expected was not there. Those who did stroll by were, however, particularly interesting.
Within a minute of arriving at the bench, a clown in full regalia sat down next to Alex. A bead of sweat dripped down his white face, he’d probably just finished a performance at some sort kid’s party. The clown coughed uproariously, crossed a yellow polka-dotted leg so that his big red shoe sat across a red polka-dotted knee, and pulled a box of cigarettes out of his left sleeve. Our hero, understandably, was staring at this display of unusualness, recalling a time in his long-forgotten youth when he had peered out the window of a playmate’s sixth birthday in time to see a chain-smoking headless Barney out in the driveway being paid off by the birthday girl’s dad. He decided that it was that crucial moment in his young life that made him the cynical man he was today.
“If you think this is something, the only reason I smoke cigarettes is because you can’t smoke pot in public.” The clown said with a smirk, his voice sounding exactly like one would expect from a man who’d clearly been smoking for decades. “Want one?” he offered, holding a cancer stick out to our hero.
Alex waved his hand. “No thanks. Asthma.”
The clown shrugged, inserted a cigarette in the middle of his big red grin, and cupped a hand around it to get it lit. “Damn kids. You have to smoke something after a gig or you’ll lose it.”
Alex contemplated asking the clown for his opinion on the meaning of life, but he had the inkling that he probably wouldn’t want to hear his answer. The two sat in utter silence until a woman who thought that the very white-trash look was in this year pulled up in an old dingy convertible. The clown put out the stub with the heel of his ridiculous shoe, hopped over the passenger side door and the pair drove off.
Alex shook his head and cracked his knuckles in thought. What James had said reminded him somehow of what his mother and Professor MacMillan had said, but he couldn’t figure out why. All he knew is that they sat with him right. Perhaps if he could figure out the overriding element in all three, then he could figure out what to make his cause for living. Or was it just the fact that he respected them? No, he respected almost everyone he’d talked to, and their opinions were all great. It was just that those three felt the closest, but not quite perfectly, they weren’t quite him.
A harried mom in a business blazer totally undermined by a miniskirt and three inch heels picked up her daughter and sat her on the bench. “Mommy needs to run one last errand right away, but you can’t take that in there. So don’t move an inch from this spot right here. And try to finish that ice cream before I get back, okay? Do not move.”
The mom scuttled off, and the little girl followed orders, sitting completely still except for her arm and face, which were actively devouring her ice cream cone. Alex suddenly felt a surge of protectiveness for the girl, who was old enough to know not to talk to strangers but young enough to trust a convincing actor with a lost dog. What the hell kind of mother leaves a kid on a bench in a world absolutely crawling with perverts? Alex decided to be her protector, resolving to make absolutely sure she stayed put and didn’t even suffer a sting from the bee hovering around her now sticky head. Alex waved it carefully away.
The girl chomped up the last of her ice cream cone. Aside from a stickier than it seemed possible chocolate face, she was a fairly generic looking tiny blonde girl in a pink jumper dress and canvas shoes. The shoes were what got him, probably. They were the most vulnerable looking shoes he had ever seen. The girl sat quietly for about fifteen seconds, with a look of pain across her face at the prospect of having no freedom of movement for an unspecified amount of time. That’s the worst for kids, it probably seemed like longer than eternity for the poor kid.
She stood up, and Alex’s heart caught in his chest, imagining a scenario where she would run away, he would go to catch her and return her to safety, but she would scream ‘Not my daddy!’ and he would land in jail for five to ten. And he knew what they did to child molesters in jail, even those who were actually just trying to protect the kid. Thankfully, she was just adjusting her position to place her chubby white little girl legs under her, sitting on the backs of her calves.
She turned to him excitedly, as if just realizing now that there was someone to talk to, and in her boredom losing the memory of ever being told how talking to strangers is dangerous. “Hi!” she greeted him cheerfully.
“Hi back!” he returned. “What flavor ice cream did you have there?”
She considered in that cute little kid over exaggerated way. “Birthday cake.”
“Interesting. My favorite’s plain chocolate.”
The little girl wrinkled her nose. “My mom’s making me run errands with her today. It’s so boring. And now I have to sit completely still ‘til she gets back. She’s gonna take forever.”
Alex was very glad he was sitting there and not some other guy. She was practically giving a pedophile every opportunity he needed. He was growing increasingly upset with her mother every minute.
“My name’s Julia. Julia Graham Greene. What’s yours?” Honestly, this girl! Next she would be handing out business cards with her home and school addresses!
“Alex. Alexander Julius Kuon.”
“That’s a funny name. Kids at school think my middle name is funny, like Graham crackers, but my mom says it has character. What do you think?”
“Well I certainly think your mom is right about that. It is most certainly a name with character.” Alex nodded overzealously.
The little girl shifted on her end of the bench again. “I’m so bored. Do you know any good stories?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve got a few. Why?
“Could you tell me one?”
“Um, sure. Do you like ones about princesses, dragons, brave quests and stuff like that?” She nodded, smiling excitedly. “Okay, so. There was this…knight, a brave and handsome knight. And one day, this knight met a beautiful princess, who was also very funny and very clever. The knight had met many pretty princesses before, so it was being so smart that made her special, and the knight just absolutely had to marry her. But the princess, she wasn’t quite sure if the knight was good enough for her, so she sent him on a mission to find a very special flower, called The Rose of Truth and Beauty. It was a dangerous quest, which many knights and princes had died on, but the knight was so in love that he was willing to face any danger. So he sets off on his quest.
“First of all, he has to find out where The Rose of Truth and Beauty was being hidden, and he talked to some people in the local town, and they told him that he should ask the fierce and fiery dragon in the cave just outside of town. The knight goes out there, and he’s quivering, I mean he’s really shaking like a leaf. But his love for the princess leads him on, and he bravely enters the cave.
“The dragon is fierce and terrible, breathing such fire that he feels his eyebrows singe right off. But eventually the brave knight is able to pierce the dragon in the heart. Instead of dying, though, the dragon magically transforms into an old woman! She tells the knight where The Rose of Truth and Beauty is located, and he, in exchange, promises to bring back to her one petal from the rose so she can eat it so it will make her young again. Then the dragon woman gives the knight a special kind of magic bread. When he eats a bite of it, it will make him supernaturally strong, smart, and fast. The knight thanks her and leaves the cave.
“The knight moves on, riding as fast as he can to the north, where the dragon woman told him to look. He sees ahead of him a dark and scary forest, filled with all kinds of demons and ghosts that are calling out to him, terrifying his trusty steed Domino.”
Just then, Julia Graham Greene’s mother swooped in, still carrying her leather-bound checkbook in hand. She picked Julia up under the armpits, glaring at our hero suspiciously, apparently not realizing that he was her daughter’s great protector. “Come on, honey, time to go. Mommy’s late already.”
Julia’s face was the picture of pitiful, crumpled in near tears and still sticky with ice cream. “But Mom! I wanted to hear Alexander Julius Kuon’s story! What happens to the knight and the princess, Alexander Julius Kuon?” She screamed over her mom’s shoulder, as her mom made an apologetic face for anyone who just so happened to look in her direction as she carried Julia bodily to the car.
“Don’t worry! The knight finds the rose and brings it back to the princess! And they live happily ever after!”
Julia’s mom closed the car door tightly but Julia smiled through the car door. This satisfied Alex, made him smile quietly to himself and really want some ice cream.
“Nice story,” he heard Rosie’s voice say from somewhere behind him, and he spun to face her. “Do I get to hear the full story sometime?”
Alex grinned that stupid happy grin that he just couldn’t keep off his face when Rosie was around. “Of course you can. And that’s a promise.”
“Good. I love stories about brave knights and quests and whatnot. Speaking of quests, how’s yours going today?”
“You know what? I think it might be over soon. I was talking just now to James, and he had a lot to say about it. He’s a good guy, James. And then I came out here, and a fucking clown sat down next to me, I mean literally a clown, big shoes, white paint, the works. He was a douche bag. And then I was talking to Julia Graham Greene. It appears to be a very good questing day.” Alex nodded.
“Good! That’s great. Ooh, damn, late back to work. I’ll see you tonight, right? Kiss?”
Alex stood up and leaned in to his princess Rosie for a sweet, in public, see you later kiss. Halfway into it, his brain fired a few neurons together and Alex’s eyes opened wide and his hands grabbed for her shoulders!
“Rosie! Oh my god, Rosie! I’ve figured it out! I just figured it out!”
“Figured it out? You mean, it, the big it? The meaning of life?”
“Yes! I have figured out the meaning of life! Well, I mean, my meaning of life, but I really think it could work for a lot of people! Aw man, this is great! Come on, let’s go tell James I can take my job back! My mom, I should definitely tell her, she’ll be glad to…and The Disciples, I can finally get them off my back, be friends with them instead of their leader! Come on!”
Our hero grabbed the princess’s hand and pulled her hard toward Brothers’ Bookstore. “Wait, Alex!”
“Wait, what? I have the meaning of life! After all that searching, and not showering and eating out of the dumpster! The goddamn meaning of life! Let’s go tell people! This can’t wait, are you kidding?”
Rosie shook her head and bore her weight down so Alex couldn’t drag her along anymore. “No, Alex, wait and tell me. What’s the meaning of life?”
Rosie looked so concerned that by thinking about it more, it would ruin his excitement to return to being a real human, but so hopeful that he had come up with some kind of truth, even if it was only just for himself, even if it was just a lowercase ‘t’ truth and not a capital one.
Alex’s excitement was unflagging, his whole body jittery with victory, his voice just a notch higher, his words coming faster than usual. “Okay, so it’s like this. So, my mom’s thing was about family, having kids and raising them right is the most important. And Professor MacMillan’s thing about education, teaching and letting yourself be taught, that’s the most important. And James, just now, talking about passing on the stories and making this like, continuum of stories. I knew that the three of those things together were right, but that they were missing something, right?”
All Rosie could do was nod in response. She was holding on to his train of thought, but just barely, just by her fingers and not even her whole hand.
“And then, I was out here, telling Julia that story, and then you came over and I went to kiss you and bam! It was like everything all the sudden, like, congealed into this, you know, glob. The Jell-o of truth! Everyone was right! Well not everyone, but everyone who was trying to just be human. But that’s not it, you have to…god, you have to… stupid fucking English language! I can’t find the words. It’s like, you have to live for this future that you’ll never see, but you have to trust that it’ll be good, and you have to trust that what you’re doing here will have an effect there and be happy with that. What the hell, it’s not really that at all. I sound crazy, I know, but I can’t, god, I can’t explain it at all. I have all these words and phrases that kind of say it, but none of them are really the right ones. And it’s driving me crazy because I know it so incredibly much, you know? I know it all over, in my toes even. And I want you to know too but there’s know way to tell you. What am I gonna tell the followers? Jesus, they’ll think this is like some second stage of the initiation and they’ll never leave me alone. God, I wish like hell I could explain this. I’ve been searching for a month just to find what I set out for and then not be able to show anybody!” Alex sat on the bench and rested his forehead in his hands, looking as thought he was trying to find the words he needed written on his shoes.
Rosie sat down softly next to our now deflated hero, rubbing his back in soft circles with a warm and comforting hand. “It’s okay, if you can’t explain it. I mean, I think it’s unexplainable. Some things you just have to know for yourself, and if you don’t, it either comes to you or it doesn’t. And no amount of words will ever be able to convey a person’s whole reason to live. No matter what anyone said, there was no way they could have said it all. Even if you just wrote about it for fifty thousand words, you’d never really get anywhere. Everyone who is alive, really living, who hasn’t given up, they all know. It’s just that so few people are actually really living, and even the ones who are, talking about it is impossible.”
Alex looked up at her for a few seconds, and then grabbed her into his arms. “Alright. Okay. That’s true.” Our hero grinned and stood the both of them up, spinning his princess in a little waltz-like, spinny dance. “I’m done with this whole stupid strike, then. It’s time to go back to living.”

Day 13: 21,907/50,000

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:49:55 GMT

so, the other day i finally figured out an ending! i was quite concerned that i was just eventually going to stop writing and type, well...yeah....there you have it. hurrah. i intend to write more on the end tonight, but alas, i can't post anymore cuz THEN YOU WOULD KNOW THE END! AND ITS A SURPRISE! A FUNNY ONE!!!

“Alex! What are you doing here?” Rosie had just rounded the corner and crashed right into our hero. She was dressed a little more preppy and ironed than usual, and her clothes were utterly desexualized, not a hint of more curves than seemed safe. She was carrying a small tower of pillows, and her hair looked a little misplaced, harried. She was overall looking much like the “before” princess in a fairy tale. Alex was carrying a few large-print versions of novels, likely of poor writing quality.
“Oh, hey Rosie!” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “I didn’t know you would be here today. I’m, you know, volunteering.”
Rosie looked excited, the slightly open mouthed and happy eyes variety. “So does this mean…you’re done with your strike? Back in the system.”
Our hero, of course, was not in the least delighted to let the beautiful and beloved princess down. In fact, he was flat out terrified. It still seemed, and would probably always still seem that Rosie could discover the truth of Alex’s personal failings that he had somehow managed to keep hidden thus far and just run away from him, disappear, never to be seen in his life again.
“Nope, still going. I’m just cleverly disguised as a mild-mannered volunteer, but that’s just a cover to get in here and talk to some of these folks. I realized that I hadn’t really covered the nursing home demographic in all my interviews. Maybe they have the secret.” Alex tried to seem funny or witty so she wouldn’t be as disappointed as she might, and then lapsed into hopefully quiet.
“Oh.” There it was, the tiny little disappointment oh, but it really could have been much worse. Alex exhaled and felt a little less pure terror deep within his soul. “Well, you get on back to ‘volunteering’ and I’ll get back to really volunteering.” Rosie sensed that that might have come across sounding too far on the bitter side, so she leaned in for a cheek kiss, and like a master of espionage whispered covertly, “The eagle flies to the dock at midnight. Bring a cantaloupe and a map of stars’ homes. Come alone.” With that, she disappeared down the next hallway.
Alex grinned to himself, shaking his head, thankful for Rosie’s good sportedness and sense of humor about this whole thing. She certainly could have been taking it much worse.
Our hero entered room 219, where he had been headed before running into his lady love. According to the volunteer sign in books for that day, Alex was here to read to Mr. Carl Milton and Mrs. Angela Desoto, but his real mission here today was to figure out what these people, who were so close to death but so tenaciously hanging on to the last of their thread of life, what made such a small life so important.
Alex had known the two of them before, from his previous work in actual volunteering at the Shady Acres Nursing Home, and knew that he would need to steel himself against the specific strand of depression caught only from the inhabitants of nursing homes or otherwise spend the evening watching a spot in the corner of the room and knowing that one day, if you are lucky enough to not die early, will be wearing that diaper and unable to function in the world of humans. These folks were, by almost anyone’s definition, no longer a functioning and productive human in society, some of our hero’s fellow non-people.
The widow Desoto resided in room 219, and had for several years. Alex vaguely and guiltily recalled her house at the far end of the street, its gloomy and rotting exterior, the smell of cat that rose from it, the constant darting of black shadowy feline forms darting in and out in the night. Hers had been the dare house, the wicked witch’s house and I double, no, triple dare you to run up and ring the doorbell and run back here before she reaches out and grabs you with her wrinkly gross old hand and uses your eyeballs in her spells.
Alex liked to spend time with her as an attempt to ease a bit of the karma he was sure to be due from all that little kid wicked witch stuff, never working up the guts to Trick-or-Treat there on Halloween. Besides, he knew her back story, which was a comfort. Carl Milton, her next door neighbor, was found on the street, half frozen and never claimed by a loved one, a charity case whose nursing home board was paid for by some foundation he had probably never heard of. All that was known about him were spotty medical records and what could be found on his driver’s license.
Widow Desoto, though, was well known and fairly well liked by the mothers and other older women on Alex’s childhood street. She was eccentric, for sure, but kind and lonely, and the women, especially the also widowed Mama Kuon, appreciated that. They all came to visit from time to time.
She had been married young to her true love, Abraham Desoto, who died either at the hands of the Japanese or bootlegging mafiosos, depending on who is telling the story and how old you suspect the widow to be. They had a small son, who died of polio before very long. The widow was too heartbroken to ever remarry or even leave her house again very often. She lived, it was suspected, on some form of hush money from the Bianchi crime family or perhaps the American government, and still drove the same car that she did in the fifties. She was kind to all animals, and strays came and went from her house daily. After awhile, the smell and noise became too much and some animal protection agency or other came and rescued the kindly treated animals by putting them in pounds to be given away or more likely destroyed. When the widow Desoto raised a fuss, they told her she was senile and unfit to take care of herself. It was even a story on the evening news for two nights in a row. She was temporarily made a ward of the state and put in a state-run elderly care facility to wait to die cold and alone in an overcrowded room until a wealthy but distant relative intervened, landing her a warm single room in the privately owned and operated Shady Acres.
The facts were that she was truly growing senile, at least by now, if not at the time of her last stand with the pet-shelter folks. She didn’t call him by her dead husband’s name or mix up her words, in fact, she was almost as sharp as a woman his mother’s age when it came to things like that. It just appeared that, sometimes, she would forget that she was. Alex had freaked out his first time on reading duty with her, convinced by her unblinking eyes and slackened jaw that she was a goner, that somehow he had been the last straw to the old woman, seeing one of the cruel boys from her street. But the tired or bored looking nurse just shook her head, checked her vitals and breathing, and showed Alex how to put his hand under her mouth and nose to feel that her breathing was just shallow, rather than nonexistent.
Alex crossed the threshold, clutching his books. The widow Desoto looked up and gave him a little smile, almost confused, but as if you could tell that she didn’t care enough to actually be confused. Alex sat in the visitor’s chair, a fairly comfy armchair with that ambivalent multi-colored pattern so common in cheap highway motels and medical institutions. He had been to people’s rooms before where the chairs were well worn, even one that had been broken just the day before by a pair of six year old twin great grand children. Alex liked that, he thought that it would be a good idea to somehow hire kids to climb all over the room like crazed monkeys, or if that broke some kind of child labor law, midgets from a metal band in kids’ clothes. The widow Desoto’s chair, though, had an almost eerie level of newness to it, like it had just been removed from its packaging not more than a minute before Alex had entered by wildly stealthy furniture store ninjas. He supposed that it would squeak when he sat down, but it made no other noise than the usual soft sitting noise.
“How are you today, Mrs. Desoto?” Alex asked softly, but being careful to treat her like a human being and not a patient. That was really why they sent readers in here, but they usually didn’t manage it. But that, when you got down to it, was Alex’s mission. To find humanity, seek it out in others and finding the best way to achieve it in himself.
“I’m doing just fine, Alex. And yourself? How is your mother faring?”
“I’m alright, ma’am. And my mother’s doing well. Actually, would you mind if we just talked today? You know, had a chat, instead of reading?” Alex held up the books offhandedly.
“Sure. I think I’ve heard all of those books at least twice, and they were drivel the first time. What would you like to talk about?” Mrs. Desoto adjusted the blanket over her lap, pulling it a bit higher, tucking it in tightly under her, patting out a few wrinkles.
Alex stood and pulled the chair quickly all the way up to the side of the bed. “It’s like this, Mrs. Desoto. And this’ll probably sound, I dunno, stupid or childish. But I’m on this…mission, and I’m meeting a lot of people or talking to people I already know, and asking them what they really think the point of living is. And I really respect your opinion, I think it’ll be valuable to me. So what do you think? Why are we all here, what should we be living for?”
She gave Alex a long, sad look that can only be given by widowed residents of gray nursing homes. It lasted about a year and looked about a mile past the point her eyes were focusing on. It was such a long and pregnant pause that Alex was sure she had gone again into whatever brainspace she went to when the only thing alive in her was her shallow breathing. But then, she spoke up, “Well, isn’t that a depressing notion. I don’t know. I’m just about set to die, and don’t you dare try to tell me that I’m not, and I don’t have any idea what life is for, what my life was for. Isn’t that something?”
This hit Alex hard. What if this was him, fifty, sixty years down the line? Alone in a mechanical bed, not having the slightest idea what life means to anybody? Still, he decided, whether she was right or not, he should at least pretend to comfort the widow Desoto.
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much, ma’am. I don’t think anyone knows. You may have been the first person to admit it, but I think everyone else is just pretending. Because there is no way to know, and what you’re living for may seem completely wrong to everyone else.” Alex nodded.
“Maybe that’s it then,” Mrs. Desoto murmured quietly. Maybe that’s life’s mission, to figure out what to live for in time to live for it completely. In which case, I’ve still failed.”
Alex’s eyebrows crumpled in on each other. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, of course you aren’t a spring chicken anymore, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have plenty of time to figure out what the meaning of life is. I mean, how much time could someone possibly need? A week? A month, tops.”
But the widow Desoto had, of course, gone off to that nearly dead place within her mind. Alex hurriedly checked for that gapped and almost too soft breathing, looked on her forlornly with a soft hand placed along her hairline. He sighed, retrieving the books the lady in charge of volunteers had given him, moving on to the next room.

“Hey! If it isn’t the great and powerful Kuon! What brings you down to these parts?” James nodded to Alex as he walked in the doors, the bell ringing behind him.
“Hey, James. I just came to talk to you guys, about my whole mission thing, get your opinions.”
“That’s great, ‘cause I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of thinking about it, about what I would say. John isn’t here right now, but I don’t think he’d really want to talk to you anyway, you know, he thinks this whole thing is you being a lazy, silly jack off. But I think it’s great. And I’ve figured it out! What I live for, what I think being a human being means, and why that made me fine with your quest and what made John so damn furious. And it’s all wrapped up in this bookstore right here. Do you know Anton Chekhov?” James was talking at such a furiously fast clip that Alex could barely keep up, and the question at the end didn’t register for a few seconds.
“Sorry, that weird Russian guy who used to work here? What does he have to do with your purpose in life. You guys never seemed all that close.” Alex finally understood enough to respond, but not really at all, much like Alex’s experience in every foreign language class he had ever taken.
“Russians never seem all that close with non-Russians. It’s like, I don’t know, some kind of culturally exclusive brotherhood. But anyway, no, his name was Anton Federov. I bet he’d have an interesting perspective on your quest for you, a really interesting guy. Did you know he spent something like ten years in a Siberian gulag back in the day? But he went back to Moscow about a year ago, wanted to die in the soft war arms of the motherland and all that. So he won’t be able to give you an answer.”
Our hero found himself growing impatient with the apparently very excited bookseller. This was clearly a revelation worth waiting for, at least to James Brothers, but Alex just hoped he’d get on with it already. “Oh, okay. But so who’s Anton Chekhov? Oh, wait, wait. Chekhov, the author? Playwright?”
“Yeah, that Anton. Most importantly he’s like the definitive master of short stories. I’m convinced it must be something in all that goddamn vodka, Russians are all literary geniuses. I experimented with russifying my writing during college. I ended up with the mother of all hangovers, lasted a good goddamn week, and my writing was still for shit.”
Alex shook his head. This conversation alone was probably due to give him a hangover. “Why the hell do you call him by his full name? You just wind up confusing people.”
“It’s just a habit, really. Because when you just call him Chekhov, you make him ‘the author’, ‘the playwright’, ‘the master of the short story’. And hell, those are great things to be, I’d love to be them, but the take away his humanity, get it? When you call him ‘Anton Chekhov’, then he’s a person, flesh and blood, you can mix him up with the one time manager of Brothers’ Bookstore. That’s a lot nicer of a way to think about him, right? He seems less daunting, more of your buddy. But anyway, what I’m alive for, what I think everybody should be alive for, it all comes down to my buddy Anton and this fine establishment surrounding us.”
Alex had finally managed to turn his frustrated impatience into amusement, which so often happened with James. Any conversation with the man lasted long enough to drive you crazy, but you always came out of it feeling warm and fuzzy with enjoyment, all your impatience forgotten and his talkativeness forgiven. “Okay, so come on. Everybody around here is so melodramatic, Christ! Out with it already!” Alex commanded laughingly.
“Alright, alright! Anton wrote this story, takes up about both sides of a piece of paper, but it’s absolutely perfect. No kidding, perfect. It’s called ‘The Student’. I’m gonna lend you a copy of a bunch of his stuff, but I want you to read this one first. You don’t have to read anything else, but I’d put hard money on you wanting to. Anyway, what it comes down to is, by telling these two peasant women the story of the betrayal of Christ, the whole ‘before the cock crows thrice’ deal, this upper-class young kid becomes connected to the women. And the women become connected to the disciples and the whole history of Christianity. And then Anton is telling you the story, so you are connected to the great Chekhov and to the women and Jesus. It’s actually pretty overwhelming. And I actually didn’t read this story until I already owned this place, but I’d always had this inkling, that that’s what I was meant for, what my life should be about. Storytelling. Passing along history, literature, culture, all that. Humanity. I used to want to be a writer, just for that. I was Realist as hell. I wanted to capture everything. Make this perfect time capsule to ship off to the bookshelves and high school English classes of the future. I wrote like a madman, sent my stuff to every magazine, newspaper, publishing house that I even thought I had half a chance with. I was just desperate to be a part of this huge literary continuum. But the thing is, I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, and I eventually got that. But I still wanted to be a part of storytelling, passing all this around. So I eventually figured out this bookstore. It used to just be me, only one of the Brothers brothers. Remember when John wouldn’t lay off for months about raising all the prices by four dollars? I mean, he was right, actually, because before that we weren’t making a profit. And it wasn’t that I don’t know business, I was just pricing things at exactly enough to keep the place afloat. I wanted to be a part of the storytelling biz, you know? But that’s not what John is in it for. He’s living life for all the wrong reasons, I think.”
James took a much deserved and long needed breath. Alex almost wanted to run and grab him a cup of Gatorade, that monologue had seemed like such a work out. He had been using rapid hand gestures impossible to describe in print, bearing close resemblance to those gestures of a bleach-blonde Italian woman from North Philadelphia. He was shaking his legs back and forth at a set tempo faster than sound, the beat of The Light-Speed Metronome, what could only be corresponding to the tempo of his thoughts. Alex was very glad that he had waited out his impatience. James’ philosophy was a very appealing one for our valiant hero. It valued humanity, personal connections, the written word, all things that were very pleasing to him. Besides, James was a pretty good speaker, probably from all those years of vodka-binge-writing, so he was fun to listen to. And, Alex realized, probably the best part of this conversation was the fact that he was actually really getting to know James Brothers, the guy who had signed his paychecks for two years but until this very moment had a veil of good humor between them. There was something about Alex’s quest, something he couldn’t quite place or name, that made people want to be honest and open, excessively so, sometimes. People were rooting for him, even Rosie, his mother, the widow Desoto, even the strangers who had become his vehement followers so quickly, because they all wanted answers, despite not really allowing themselves to believe that such answers existed. That’s such an important part of the human condition, Alex decided, needing answers so badly that you couldn’t think about it too much, or you’d go crazy.
“What is John living for, then, do you think?”
James shrugged with forlorn shoulders. “I don’t think he even knows. I think that’s why he got so mad at you. He doesn’t believe in answers anymore, because answers implies an absolute, right? And he used to be an absolutes, black and white kind of guy. His favorite one was Justice. The only lawyer I ever met who really did love justice, believe in it. That’s what got him disbarred, breaking every rule in the book doing what was just. So after that, he was career-less, and totally lost since what he’d been living his life for was just proven to not exist. So he came here, I made him a partner. I still hadn’t read ‘The Student’ yet, so it was mostly subconscious, but I wanted to give him my cause, make him part of the continuum. But that was a mistake, really, because philosophies aren’t one size fits all. I guess in law school, John picked up a lot of hierarchy, upper-class American Dream thinking, so he kind of went back to that. I think he thinks that making it big in business is what he’s living for, and when that doesn’t work or when he figures out what a terrible thing that is to live for, he’s gonna be crushed again. But that’s why the price hike was so important to him, he wants us to be the next Barnes and Noble or whatever. So, you know, I met him halfway, raised the prices two. We’ve got at least some kind of profit now, he likes that. But nothing’s gonna make him happy until he finds out what to live for. Nothing will make you really happy until you find out what you’re living for either, you know, Alex? So I’m really pulling for you to figure this all out soon, and not just because I have to work Friday nights ‘til you come back. Friday nights are my bar-hopping nights. Do you understand that I haven’t gotten laid since you started this whole thing?”
Alex wouldn’t have put it past James to tell that whole tale just to make raucous sex comments at the end just for ironic value, or the scandalized look on the old lady browsing classics at the word ‘laid’. But no, it had been sincere, and sincerity had always weighed much too heavily on a man like James. You could read the handful of true sincere moments on his face that was sprouting its early wrinkles. “Wow, for someone so deeply philosophical, you’d think you’d be a bit more of romantic.” Alex said snidely, hoping to ease the gravity around James’ brown and heavy eyes.
“Hey, now, don’t judge. I always tell them a bedtime story. I’m making them part of the continuum!”

the problem is that im starting to not care about my characters, story, etc. blargh. so unmotivated. ill do my damndest to hit the halfway point tomorrow. urgh.

fuck the fucking fuckers!

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:09:27 GMT

so, i was 900 words or so from 20,000 at 2 oclock, so i should be done now and not really guilty about having fun starting in like an hour or so.

but then the power went away all over campus. grrrrrr. but you know, i think thats okay, i didnt hit my goal but i got pretty close, and im ahead o' the game anyway, so it's all good.

now im gonna be girly and try and find pictures of my dream bangs.

(okay, so i just reread that last sentence just now, and adam brought it to my attention just how dirty 'dream bangs' is. i dont know how i missed that. DREAM HAIRCUT!)

Days 8&9: 17,515/50,000

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 06:11:58 GMT

i will not give up on writing tomorrow until i hit 20,000. and that is a fact. you can even quote me on it. for reals.

here's some more.

He looked around, trying to pick the very best place to sit for sorting his thoughts out and basically avoiding his new two person band of followers like the plague. Besides, this was a beautiful church and was only really scary in its big woodenness; the rest of it was soft afternoon light filtering in through brightly colored glass and paintings of kind-eyed women and flowers. It would be a pleasant place to sit and hide from the world a bit.
At the very left most part of the church, in the very front pew, sat a woman with a rosary. The rosary was beige, and the woman was not memorable in any way. She looked to be about 30, and was certainly decent looking but not beautiful, looked at ease kneeling in the pew but not overwhelmingly in her element, and was generally unassuming. In fact, Alex had missed her on his first look around the church, but she had certainly been there for quite a chunk of time, since she was nearly through her rosary and she definitely looked settled in into praying position. Since she was so utterly forgettable, our hero knew she simply had to be talked to, connected with, interviewed, whatever the hell it was that Alex was doing with all these people he was meeting.
He walked into the pew and sat next to her, but not immediately to her right, so as not to appear creepy. He sat awkwardly and quietly at his respectable distance, waiting for her to finish her penance or thanksgiving. She completed the ritual, finally, after what seemed like an eternity, replaced it in her little beige rosary pouch and sat back on the pew’s bench. She rested her entire back against the shiny wood and seemed to be thinking, but not as if she would be wildly upset if her reverie were broken.
Our hero slid closer to her down the pew. “Um, hi!” he said, even his smallest of whispers sounding like it had found itself a megaphone and street corner and was now warning anyone in shouting range about the coming apocalypse.
The woman regarded him extremely carefully and decided he was harmless, and nervous, and besides, just a kid really and wouldn’t be terrible to have a bit of a chat with. “Hey there.”
“My name’s Alex. Hi.” He stuck his hand out to shake.
“Lacey” she returned, shaking evenly.
“So, um, what do you do?,” Alex began. You might think, dear readers, that the frequency with which our hero was asking strangers oddly placed questions, he would grow more used to it, but that, as you can see, is not the case. In fact, he seemed to be getting worse.
Lacey blinked, trying to figure out the game here. “I work as a, um, an call answerer for a 1-800 number. What is it that you do with yourself, Alex?” Lacey, the quietly beige woman in the front pew, just happened to have the single sexiest voice that Alex had ever heard. She was probably Father James dream girl! He pieced that together with the reluctant “um” she placed before her job.
“Wait, are you a phone sex operator?” Alex asked incredulously. It was her job to talk to people, just like Father James, plus, she was bound to have a fascinating perspective on the world.
“Yes, I am.” She admitted, looking worried about it, not for her own embarrassment but for the way people tended to look at her after they learned this fact.
“So, is that why you’re here, at confession?” Alex asked, trying to remain neutral, but barely able to keep his fascination in.
Lacey finally figured this strange kid and placed him as a talker, the kind who would call up the hotline just to talk, just to find out what it phone-sex girls were like. So she obliged, and decided to have a real life conversation with him. “Oh, god no!” she laughed. “Honey, that’s just a job. That’s how I make my living. That’s like, I don’t know, thinking that a weatherman should be blamed for the weather. I mean I don’t have any skills really, but people tell me I have a great voice. So I mean it’s either this or waitressing at some restaurant, but, well, this pays better. And it’s not like I’m you know, enjoying it or anything. So, no, I’m here for my own sins that have nothing to do with my job. What is it that you do?”
Alex paused for a second, nearly intoxicated by this woman’s siren voice, smooth and warm. He could certainly understand why a celibate man of the cloth would have trouble keeping from impure thoughts with such a voice after him every weekend. “Well, I used to be a student, and I worked part-time at this really nice little bookstore downtown. But now I’m on this weird strike, journey, quest, something.”
“Oh? What are you journeying to? Or striking against?”
“Well, I’m striking against the system. I know that sounds silly or cliché, but I really just couldn’t. And I’m journeying to…answers. Why are we here? What possible difference can we make? And I’ve been finding out that no one really deep down thinks that we matter, but everyone pretends. So I’ve been mostly trying to find what I need to pretend for. What do you think?”
Lacey assumed the posture that everyone seemed to do with Alex nowadays, tilted head, trying to decide if he was just jerking them around or not, but also really considering their own actions in a way that they never did, a way that made them uncomfortable. “You think too much, that’s your problem. People like you. Always over thinking things to the point that you have a nervous breakdown. I think this world would be a hell of a lot better off if everyone stopped thinking so much and would just be, you know? Be human with each other. The guys that call at work, they can’t just be with a woman, just lay in bed wrapped in one another. They’ve made it too much thinking, too much dirty talk and weird fetishes. All that thinking, all of your thinking, it’s keeping you from connecting really to other people. This right here, talking, that’s not connecting. Sitting here quiet, just being, and if we knew we were making a connection, that would be it.”
Alex wondered about this. Was he going about this the entirely wrong way? Talking and thinking and then talking some more. Should he just let it be, let peace come to him, wash over him?
“I guess that’s why I come here, to be connected. To the priest, to the other people, to God, to the whole history of the Church and everyone in it. Usually, I don’t even pray, or even listen. I sit and let it cover me. I think that’s what you need to do. Not go to church necessarily, but to figure out the things you’re good at or like doing, and do those things the very best you can, and other than that, stop over thinking things and just plain start existing.”
Lacey grew quiet, and the woodenness of the church encroached back onto the territory of the maternal floral. “I can see that,” Alex nodded. “I can definitely see that working.” The two sat in silence, possibly truly connecting, and yet possibly just ignoring each other. You really can never tell, dear reader.
“Well,” Lacey turned to Alex. “I’ve got to get going. Back to work with me! And, hey, good luck with your quest. I really hope you get all the answers you’re hoping for.” She smiled sincerely, cheeks flower pink, and stood. Alex stood with her and gave her a parting handshake. Alex watched her walk down the center aisle, cross herself supremely demurely in the little golden bowl of holy water, and walked out the huge wooden front doors. This would likely be the last time he ever saw her, Alex thought, and realized that this was a good thing with a lot of the people he talked to. They wouldn’t necessarily be his friends, even people he could talk to on a regular basis. They just didn’t have all that much in common.
Alex stuck his hands in his pockets and made his exit as well. He headed off towards home, holding in his mind an indulgent hope that would likely never come true, that one day the long suffering Father James would call up a phone sex hotline, quietly and secretly, in the dead of night, and Lacey would pick up and after time they would blushingly recognize one another’s voice from their weekly confession session. They would open the screen the following Saturday and kiss and then sit quietly just existing in one another’s presence, perfectly at peace.
He hid behind the building next to his, peering around the corner in order to ascertain the status of his two indefatigable followers, hoping with all of his being that they had recognized their folly and had gone home to their houses and lives, leaving his for good.
Alas, our hero discovered that the exact opposite was the case. In fact, the pair of slapstick disciples had grown, apparently having gathered three more misfits in the course of the two hours that Alex was gone. The five had all even flipped their shirts inside out and written “stop consuming and be human again!” on them in black marker.
He sighed and collected himself, unable to think of how to get rid of them and deciding to just go with the flow for now, waiting for them to figure out how ridiculous they were all being with the educating passage of time. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried to stroll over toward the persistent band of disciples in a particularly unleaderly way. However, each pair of eyes turned to him and showed the glow of someone in the presence of their life long hero, ready to either fall to their knees in unworthiness or to sobbingly beg for an autograph.
“Hey there, Kyle, Fiona,” Alex greeted to the original two. “How’ve you guys been? Who are your friends?”
“Hi Alex!” said the ever-enthusiastic errant knight. “Look, we all made shirts. And this is my girlfriend, Bridget. I was so excited about all this that I just had to make her join up. And that’s Chad, Fiona’s old manager from SuperWorld, and her best friend Cherish. Guys, this is our leader, Alex Kuon.”
“Dammit, Kyle! I’m not a leader!” Alex shouted in exasperation, and then felt supremely guilty when the boy’s face fell, his eyes whimpering and putting their tails between their legs. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that, I just get frustrated. I am not the leader of any movement, okay? I don’t want or need any disciples. All of you, you should understand that. Okay? I’m just a dumb crazy kid! I’m just trying to figure out who I am. I mean, you should all be doing this too, but in your own way, going on your own journeys. Try to figure your own crazy selves out. But if you follow me like you want to, even if I find my way, you’ll still be totally lost, ‘cause it’ll be my way, not yours. Okay?”
Kyle’s eyes took on an amused glint, and he all but nudged Alex with an elbow that said, oh ho, way to put one over on the newbies, master. Alex focused every molecule of strength on not letting his mouth and lungs sigh or his eyes roll.
Chad cleared his throat and spoke up, even half-raising a pasty and nervous arm. “Kyle told us not to believe you when you say that, because it’s an initiation? And if we keep it up, we get to be a part of the real following?”
Alex only just barely suppressed a rabid wolf-like growl deep in his throat. He would just have to accept this leader’s fate, he realized. It was his own fault and he deserved what he got, when it came down to it. This was cosmic punishment of the highest order for jerking that reporter’s chain. Instead of being miserably impotent in this moment, he decided to instead examining his new followers.
Chad, who had spoken up, was middle-aged, pale and balding. He was still wearing black pants, an ill-sized button up white shirt, and a gold-colored nametag reading “Chad Burlington, Assistant Manager, SuperWorld Food Market”. He looked aware and awkward about the fact that he was a good fifteen, twenty years older than anyone else here, and either this fact or the mid afternoon sunlight made him squint his already tiny eyes into what seemed like two little black beads.

“Alex! What are you doing here?” Rosie had just rounded the corner and crashed right into our hero. She was dressed a little more preppy and ironed than usual, and her clothes were utterly desexualized, not a hint of more curves than seemed safe. She was carrying a small tower of pillows, and her hair looked a little misplaced, harried. She was overall looking much like the “before” princess in a fairy tale. Alex was carrying a few large-print versions of novels, likely of poor writing quality.
“Oh, hey Rosie!” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “I didn’t know you would be here today. I’m, you know, volunteering.”
Rosie looked excited, the slightly open mouthed and happy eyes variety. “So does this mean…you’re done with your strike? Back in the system.”
Our hero, of course, was not in the least delighted to let the beautiful and beloved princess down. In fact, he was flat out terrified. It still seemed, and would probably always still seem that Rosie could discover the truth of Alex’s personal failings that he had somehow managed to keep hidden thus far and just run away from him, disappear, never to be seen in his life again.
“Nope, still going. I’m just cleverly disguised as a mild-mannered volunteer, but that’s just a cover to get in here and talk to some of these folks. I realized that I hadn’t really covered the nursing home demographic in all my interviews. Maybe they have the secret.” Alex tried to seem funny or witty so she wouldn’t be as disappointed as she might, and then lapsed into hopefully quiet.
“Oh.” There it was, the tiny little disappointment oh, but it really could have been much worse. Alex exhaled and felt a little less pure terror deep within his soul. “Well, you get on back to ‘volunteering’ and I’ll get back to really volunteering.” Rosie sensed that that might have come across sounding too far on the bitter side, so she leaned in for a cheek kiss, and like a master of espionage whispered covertly, “The eagle flies to the dock at midnight. Bring a cantaloupe and a map of stars’ homes. Come alone.” With that, she disappeared down the next hallway.
Alex grinned to himself, shaking his head, thankful for Rosie’s good sportedness and sense of humor about this whole thing. She certainly could have been taking it much worse.
Our hero entered room 219, where he had been headed before running into his lady love. According to the volunteer sign in books for that day, Alex was here to read to Mr. Karl Milton and Mrs. Angela Desoto, but his real mission here today was to figure out what these people, who were so close to death but so tenaciously hanging on to the last of their thread of life, what made such a small life so important.

Day 7: 13,101/50,000

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 05:38:48 GMT

so, im steadily plugging along, and i feel pretty confident that unless something unforseen goes on, i'll actually be able to do this! score!

finally, the priest scene! i really will get around to the phone sex operator bit any day now. as in, tomorrow, dammit. maybe even NOW!

Alex stepped into the quiet of the church, and finally, it seemed, truly appreciated the wooden and still tranquility a place like this could offer the troubled soul. It provided a definite bigness and irrefutability that our hero, after a day of being tailed ferociously by his two new disciples and a week of strictly pondering the world’s biggest questions, found immeasurably comforting.
A benevolent, motherly Mary beamed down at him from the stained glass above and to the side of the altar. Alex decided that this was a good omen for success here, the kind of church with such a pleasant and happy Mary that looked so ridiculously like his own mother, boded well for their employment of the kind of understanding priests that Alex was needing for this mission.
He found the confessional area and was glad to see one of the doors open and waiting for him. He took a breath deep enough to suck back in and trap down all of his fears and stereotypes of the priestly class, and entered the little booth.
The noises of sitting and shifting and closing the awkward little balsa-wood-like door alerted the mysteriously shadowed figure on the other side of the screen to Alex’s appearance, and appeared to have woken him up from a nice nap.
“Hello, my child.” The priest’s voice was groggy and neutral, but it shocked Alex that he just sounded like a regular older guy, like one of the men from Shady Acres. This actually served to make our hero entirely more disconcerted and unsure of himself, as he was expecting someone more…special? Stately maybe, infused with the awesome power of the Holy Trinity. Irish accented, at the very least.
Alex gulped the stale air and began. “Hey, Father. I was wondering. I’m not a Catholic, I was just wondering if we could just…talk?”
The priest cleared his throat, and Alex nearly bolted from the room preemptively, figuring the father was about to kick him out in a fury of righteous indignation. But, the priest soon spoke up calmly, “Well, provided there isn’t a line, and I’m willing to bet with Satan himself that there isn’t, sure. We certainly can have a chat, son. So, what’s your name?”
“Alexander. And yours?”
“Father James Johnston. What exactly is it that brings you in here today, Alex?”
“Okay, this is probably going to sound silly to you. It sounds silly to most people, and you’ve probably always had your answers. So, I got really upset thinking that there was no way I could ever make an impact on the world, so why bother trying? But then, I started thinking, well, what is there to live for if you can’t make a difference at all? I’m not suicidal or anything, I’m just kind of curious, you know? Because, I’ve been going around talking to dozens and dozens of people, reporters, high school kids, my mom, and apparently everybody realizes that life is pointless and futile and silly, but everyone keeps living and pretending to make a difference.”
Father James Johnston snapped open the screen between the two of them, and considered Alex with a tilted head. His balding pattern was kind of silly and made him look like a medieval monk or friar or something. “I actually didn’t always know the answer to that. Why keep trying to leave a mark when even the biggest marks are nothing. Even sometimes still, when I’m standing up there and look down at a practically empty church, and the people who are there are probably there for all the wrong reasons.” Father James trailed off, wrapped up in philosophizing. Alex let the silence sit for a bit, still nervous over the all of that authority, power and history that Father James had behind him.
“So what are your answers, Father? I’ve been just talking to people, for a whole week, asking for their answers to what makes life worth living for them, running around and trying on all these ideas, trying to find the one that’s a perfect fit. I’d love to know yours. I mean, it’s pretty much your job to know, right? That’s what people come to you for, pretty much.”
“The official answer is, to serve God, to accept His will on your life, to do good on earth in order to achieve your eternal reward.” Father James answered, and his voice got the tenor that Alex had been expecting, boomingly and assuredly correct. Now, though, instead of being comforting, it just sounded fake.
“Sure, but what do you think? Honestly, personally?”
Father James sighed, and considered his words carefully. “Faith. I really mean that. Knowing that you cannot possibly matter and trusting that you must anyway. Doing what you can to be a true believer and a true practitioner of the faith, whatever your belief system is. I guess…I guess I mean, what I live for is the preservation of my personal integrity of my beliefs. Does that sound sensible at all?”
Alex nodded vehemently. “That’s exactly the problem. Everyone’s ideas and reasons make perfect sense. Yours sounds great, it sounds like my thoughts exactly, some of them anyway. It’s just that none of them fit me right.”
“I suppose that you do have to believe in something, some reason to stay alive, and believe in a reason to be active. Or else, you either commit suicide or become some kind of non-person.” Father James added quietly. Usually, Saturday confessional duty didn’t require all this much thinking. Frankly, he usually worked on the next day’s homily, unless the sinner had a particularly juicy need for forgiveness.
Alex considered this last statement, the idea of being a non-person. “And I guess that’s where I am right now. I’m not taking anything, or contributing anything, so my status as a person…it just doesn’t truly exist. Because I don’t have anything to believe in, anything I want to believe in.”
“Now that’s a problem, son. Coming from someone who deals in belief. What are you planning do about that?”
“Not a clue. I guess just keep talking to everyone, keep thinking about it ‘til I come up with it. It’s not a great plan or anything, but it’s all I’ve got for right now.”
The two were silent and thoughtful. The silence then grew awkward, somehow, both knowing they were through, and not knowing how or not wanting to end it.
“So, do you have anything you want to confess? I mean, that would help me out with the whole way this encounter is scripted.”
“Not a thing. I’m not a saint or anything, I just don’t have a confession, y’know? How about you?”
Alex and the priest laughed a little. “Sure, why not. Just a little while ago, there was a woman in here with the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard.” Alex jumped at that, the priest just said “sexiest”! “She shows up just about every Saturday. And sometimes, I have dreams about her.” Father James didn’t make a sound after his confession.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Father. I’m sure the big man understands. He didn’t exactly build us to be celibate, right?”
Father James laughed and shook his head. “That’s exactly the point, rising above human frailty to become more Christ-like. But it’s okay, I’ll just do my own special penance for it.”
Alex was filled with terror at the prospect of what such a penance might be, so he quickly averted his thoughts. “What about me, do I get a penance?”
“It sounds like you’re already performing your penance. You’re on penitent’s pilgrimmage!” Father James grinned, liking this designation.
“I guess I should go then, continue on the path to enlightenment.” Alex laughed, and stood up slouchingly in the too-short room.
“Before you go, if it wouldn’t bother you too much, I’d like you to know that I’ll pray for you to achieve your inner peace. Unless you object.” That kind of made Alex nervous, being a non-believer and all, but Father James looked so concerned and intent. It looked like he had to do this one thing or the day’s conversation would have been too much for him.
“Sure, go right ahead!” Alex nodded, trying to show that he really meant it. “And thanks, for the prayers and for talking to me.”
“No trouble at all, Alexander. Thank you for hearing my confession. If you ever want to talk again, you know where to find me.”
Alex grinned and exited the small and safe booth into the scarily gigantic woodenness of the main part of the church.

Day 6: 11,224/50,000

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 04:41:52 GMT

i wrote another metric fuckton today! 20K by this friday, dammit!

and now, our hero has it out with his momma and gains another follower!

His mind could not clear completely during the walk to his mother’s house. He found himself, instead of contemplating naught but serenity, as he’d hoped, he could only contemplate strategies for getting rid of the persistent knight Kyle without making the poor guy go postal. His face remained contorted in concentration and was thus as he arrived at the dark and frightening entrance of his mother’s abode.
His hand had barely left the door between the first knock and the second before the door burst open, revealing Mama Kuon, who was very visibly very unhappy with the whole situation.
“So, you’ve come to explain yourself, huh?” Mama Kuon’s voice was cross-armed and raised eyebrowed but with a mischievous grin.
“I don’t actually think I need to explain myself, but I do want to tell you about my life, sure.”
Mama Kuon laughed. “Okay, okay, no need to get defensive, let’s go have a talk. I made sandwiches, cut into triangles, crusts off and everything.” Mama Kuon had the tendency to be very intimidating to her three sons, but in that particularly loving mom way. They were terrified, absolutely, of disappointing her and losing their rights to the triangle sandwiches that they still loved and pretended embarrassed them, just like it did ten years ago. And it was warranted, she had demonstrated time and again that her affection could be snapped away from the unworthy, as evidenced by the long train of relationships after Alex Senior died shortly before Alex, our hero, was born. She was of medium height and exactly average build, features, and hair, but the way she carried herself made her appear scarily strong and beautiful.
Our hero followed the mother goddess into her kitchen, and they sat down at the table, quietly eating the sandwiches that tasted suspiciously like his own childhood. “So,” asked Mama Kuon. “You do realize that I’ve been trying to explain to everyone I know all day why on God’s green earth they saw you on the news last night picking through a dumpster? Mr. Greenwood has been eying the house all day, like it’s the Red Army headquarters or something. Care to tell me what I should say to them?”
Alex sighed and started to explain about the politics of over-consumption and, conversely, freeganism but Mama Kuon quickly cut him off.
“No, no, I don’t care about the politics. Besides, I’ve read your blogs. I may be old, but I do know how to check up on my own kids. It’s an ancient motherly art. I mean, why are you doing all this?”
This, our hero realized, was a considerable harder question when it was put to you by the woman with perhaps the world’s best bullshit detection software built in to her brain. No rhetoric flies here, not a chance. “I was feeling small, you know? Like no matter what I did or tried to do or even thought about doing, no matter what, nothing would change and I was just a miniscule little…child, you know?”
Mama Kuon smiled benevolently and put a warm hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Oh, honey, I would have thought you learned that a long time ago.”
Alex cocked his head to the side and considered his mother, realizing that in all these years he had never taken her for such a cynic. Really, he should have known.
“Of course the world is big and unchanging, Alex honey. There isn’t really any way to effect things in any major way. But that doesn’t mean it’s alright for you to go around playing homeless person because that upsets you. People have been looking at me all day like it’s my fault, either that you’re a hippie, or that I’m not providing for you and you have to resort to dumpster diving, or that you’re being incredibly tasteless and insensitive. And I kind of have to agree with those last people, that you’re upset that there’s homelessness within this unchangeable system so you go about this noblesse oblige invented destitution instead of trying to help individuals. I mean, don’t you see how that would upset me, as your mother?”
“But how do you live with that knowing? You personally, I mean, not general you. That you’re so small and all your help is even smaller?” Alex asked, curious. He had come over here, intending only to appease the angry mother goddess, but forgot that she, too, would have a personal philosophy on what made life worth living, just like every other mortal. Even among heroes and princesses and knights, it is so easy to forget that mothers are just people, neither dragons nor goddesses.
Mama Kuon rested her elbow on the table, and then her head in her hand, considering. “Making a family, I think. I know that’s the answer you’d expect to get from mother, but I really think it’s true. To find someone you love and trust completely, and then create life with them, and pass on all of your values and hopes and dreams. And you can try to help other people, but what’s important is your happiness and your family’s happiness, and just passing this message of being human down and down and down, you know? Making sure they‘re going about things the right and proper way, you know?”
Alex nodded, taking it in. He definitely resolved to keep his strike on the quiet side, at least on forums like the news It was a pretty good way of looking at it, but he wasn’t sure if it was the good way of looking at it. That was the biggest essential problem with our hero’s search for truth, he was beginning to realize. Everyone had a fairly convincing argument that was flawed or defeatist or too optimistic in some way. None were perfect, and all were pretty damn good. Too many jackets, none exactly the right fit. Alex sighed and ate some more of his childhood sandwich.
“Let’s talk about lighter things, huh?” Mama Kuon grinned. “How’s that little girl Rosie Leibniz you like so much?”
A bit later, our hero sauntered along the noontime streets of his small city, imagining it to be a sweetly pastoral historical countryside and himself to be riding a bold steed bravely and chivalrously into the unknown. He contemplated his goals for the rest of the day, deciding finally to tackle the worlds of religion and sold sexuality today. First, however, Alex decided to stop back at Rosie’s apartment to tell her of his enlightening encounter with the mother goddess.
As he approached his apartment building, he was shocked to see that not only was the errant knight Kyle was perched faithfully on the railing of the entrance, it appeared that he had rounded up yet another follower. Kyle’s lady knight was a skinny, fairy-thin blonde girl sitting on the top step and popping gum with too much makeup on her eyes and a grocery story polo shirt and apron. She was also wearing a terrible look of sheer attitude and skepticism on her face, but her eyes said that she was dying to find someone to trust. “Oh, shit. Another one.” Our fearless hero muttered and seriously contemplated leaping into the alleyway and around the back in order to avoid their notice. Alas, the sharp-eyed Kyle had spotted his master and immediately leapt to attention, waving as if possessed; the girl however, remained sitting, apparently unimpressed.
“Um. Hi,” Alex greeted.
“Hi, Alex!” Kyle had become almost blindingly cheerful during Alex’s visit with his mother. “Look, I’ve taught someone all about the your doctrine and being one of your followers and all.”
Alex blinked furiously, hoping to maybe cause a seizure and make all this go away. “Hey there. I’m Alex. What’s yours?”
The tiny blonde angry sprite stood up and tried to maintain either neutral or annoyed features, but her darkly circled eyes looked damned hopeful. Alex couldn’t handle having all of that intense emotion centered around him and his thoughts and actions. It was pretty much the scariest thing he had ever experienced. “Fiona.” Alex wondered if perhaps she really was one of the fey folk, with a name like that.
“Hi, Fiona. Nice to meet you. Look though, I don’t know what Kyle’s been telling you, but I’m not a master of anything. And I don’t actually have followers. That story on the news was just this crazy misunderstanding that’s getting all out of hand. Seriously, though, you really don’t want to follow me. I so don’t have my shit together. Which was the point of the whole blog and strike in the first place, to get my shit together. So, honestly, I’m like the very last person in the world that you should be following.”
Fiona nodded her head, small and carefully, as if making any extra effort or exhibiting any other emotion than general scorn would turn her to stone. “That’s cool. I mean mostly I just followed this tool around because I was sick of working. I’ve been meaning to quit anyway. Today as a good a day as any.”
Kyle was trying to be subtle but was utterly incapable. “Hey, hey!” he stage-whispered. “Remember? About the initiation test?”
“Oh right! The test!” Fiona said out loud, causing Alex to wonder what sort of painfully ridiculous movie set he’d stumbled into. “I didn’t mean that, that’s just my defense mechanism, pretending I don’t give a shit. But I do care, I really do, probably too much, about so many big things in the world, you know? So I just had to pretend to stop caring or else I figured I’d have this full-on nervous breakdown. But then I was out back for a smoke break and I see this kid digging through the dumpster. And no way is he homeless, I mean, look at his hair. So I ask him what the hell, and he starts going on and on about you and your ideas. And they just keep sounding better and better, and now, before I know it, here I am, asking you to let me to please be one of your followers.”
Alex was quiet, having no idea what to do. He apparently was quiet for quite a long time, for Kyle and Fiona grew nervous and fidgety. “Alright, guys. Come on up to my apartment, we’ll have dinner, and I’ll do my best to try and convince you that I’m nobody’s leader, okay?” He couldn’t believe himself, bringing strangers into his apartment, especially such eerily persistent and flat-out stalkery ones. But he felt for these kids, who were just incredibly disenchanted with the world as almost all people are, if a bit more lost and confused about the whole thing. He wanted to help them out, he really did, but our hero was realizing more and more lately that he was just as lost as when he set out on this journey.
“Congratulations! That totally means you’re in!” Kyle told Fiona, his whisper nudging her in the ribs, and Fiona actually didn’t look like she wanted him dead, a marked improvement. Alex sighed inwardly, hoping Rosie would get back from work soon to help him sort all this out.

frivolous milestoney victory post!!

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:44:50 GMT

10K! wooooooooo!!!! 10K!!! hurrah for me!

bomb the blogosphere!

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 05:31:11 GMT

i cant stop giggling. people are silly.

i was looking for like, scholarly dealies on the 'blogosphere' to most effectively mock it here, and, omg, get ready for this:

some people

actually refer to it as

BLOGISTAN!!!

hahahaha i think the funny may kill me!

Day 5: 8,778/50,000

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:40:49 GMT

i wrote about a metric fuck-ton today, and i may write more before bed. but i wanted to post while it was still day 5, and im working til 1 am.

today features romantic tension (whee!), a silly newscaster, and a creepy kid bent on following our hero around. the next installment should feature a dragon-mom, a priest, and a phone sex hotline!

“Whoa, Alex! Get over here.” Rosie beckoned with one hand furiously, eyes glued to the glowing box from which emanates that terrible and beastly, yet oh so sweetly addicting bluish glow.
“Do you just not understand my cause, or have you been sent by a secret organization to seduce me from my path for I have strayed to close to the ways of truth and light and must be turned to the Dark Side? I mean seriously. No way can I watch TV! It’s like a 24/7 commercial for the man, chock full of-”
“Alex! For the love of, just quit the rhetoric for one second and get the hell over here! You’re on the news, dude!”
“The fuck? Who in their right minds would put my crazy ass on the news?” Alex leapt over the couch like a blood crazed jungle cat and landed on the edge of his seat. “Oh, no. Shit.” Alex realized within a few seconds of watching a miniature of himself on the screen. “That douche bag reporter I was talking to earlier! I didn’t know he had a camera on him!”
The tiny televised Alex laughed and smiled and was all around charismatic, while the real life Alex was quietly sheepish. TV Alex said, “I wouldn’t call them followers, per se, or disciples. They’re just other people, just like me, who are unsatisfied with life in America as it is, and they just happen to like my ideas about it, and we figure that, all together, we’ll find a way of life that we can, well, live with.”
Rosie crossed her arms menacingly. “Oh, please, please tell me that this is all some sort of fraudulent conspiracy on their part.”
“I just meant to jerk his chain a little! He was taking me so seriously. It was supposed to be funny, for Christ’s sake!”
“You lied to him? That has GOT to be against your whole Jedi karma freegan code of ethics!”
“I was joking! You so cannot blame me for his being so thick-skulled.”
The apparently humorless and dull-witted crack investigative reporter pronounced from the screen, “Upwards of 100 young visitors a day frequent www.kuon.blogspot.com in order to get their leader’s daily thoughts and discoveries as he travels outside the world of accepted capitalist consumerist thinking. Through the newly minted blogosphere, the internet has become a veritable marketplace of philosophical exchange among the newly adult Millenial Generation.”
Rosie and Alex were dumbstruck.
“You have 100 daily followers? Followers at all? Blog readers at all, for that matter?”
“It’s news to me. Where did he get that shit? I swear I never said anything even pointing to that.”
Rosie shrugged. “It’s the new trend in the news media these days, all these special features things. A big old push to appeal to our “Millenial Generation” which is an asinine name anyway. It’s always about the dangers of MySpace, not getting hired because of your blog, whatever, bullshit like that. I mean, remember the Stephen Colbert roast of Bush? The story was always about how nifty it was that it was this huge underground hit in the ‘blogosphere’ and all, not like, the fact that he brought up all these issues…whatever. The point is, that’s what’s in now, what the people want to hear, apparently. They’re spicing up the news for the young whipper snappers. The guy probably had some quota to fill about trendy stuff like this, and blamo! You’re on the news and you’ve got followers.”
Alex sighed and leaned back on the couch. “God dammit. I’ll have to explain all this to my mother now. There’s no way out of it. Ah, shit, I took him diving with me, too. She’s gonna be so far beyond pissed.”
Rosie squinted at him and tilted her head at exactly the ‘are you really as stupid as you’re acting?’ angle, about 75 degrees, more or less. “So, you just aren’t going to worry about the whole people thinking you have followers now thing?”
“Calm down, Rosie. It’s not like anyone takes this stuff seriously.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Just you wait. This’ll bite you in the ass before the week is out. I’d bet you, but I doubt betting is allowable.”
“You are correctamundo there, sweet, doubting Rosie. Now, c’mon, let’s make that dinner. I’m starved, leading a philosophical movement sure takes it out of a guy.”
Rosie grinned good-naturedly and smacked Alex lightly on the side of the head on her way to grabbing Alex’s reclaimed rice and filling a pot with tap water, setting it to boil on her electric stove. Alex grabbed a knife from a drawer and began chopping up his found tomatoes and carrots. He chopped nervously, knowing that the talk he had come down here bent on having would need to be initiated any second now.
“So,” Alex began, and it seemed as though his jaw became made of lead and his mouth stuffed with cotton, and our hero found that he could go no further.
“So,” agreed Rosie, dashing salt into the bubbling water.
Our hero summoned up every last iota of his courage, letting it well and simmer inside of him until, at last, he could make the words leave his brain and travel out of his mouth. “Look, Rosie. You know how we were, you know…getting closer, right before I started this whole strike thing?”
“Yeah?” Rosie answered, turning away from her water and towards Alex.
“Right. Now I really don’t want to lose that, you know, that momentum in that direction, and we’re best friends besides, and I definitely wouldn’t want to lose that either. But I’ve noticed that, since, you know, the ride how from the bookstore, it seems like you’ve been cold, or something, upset with me.”
“Well,” Rosie sat down gingerly at the table next to him. “That’s ‘cause I am upset with you. I think is silly, and I think you’ll realize that eventually, too. I mean, the ideas behind it aren’t silly, trying to find truth, and being dissatisfied with the way things are going in the world. But all this pomp and circumstance, that’s silly. You should just pick something that you know you have to live for, and then live for it, all out, balls to the wall, no questions asked. But anyway, I always avoid bringing silliness into my life at all costs. If you were just somebody I worked with, I’d have ignored you, dropped you like a potato. But we’re best friends, I love you, so it’s my job to make sure that when you realize all this, you’ll have things to come back to.”
Rosie finished and was quiet. Alex didn’t know what to say. Suddenly he did feel pretty silly, chopping vegetables found in a dumpster and wearing dirty clothes. Rosie had always been the voice of optimistic reason in his life, and if this didn’t seem reasonable to her, well, maybe it wasn’t. But no, he couldn’t give in, his pride and his mental and philosophical fortitude depended on not giving in just because the woman he loved thought he was being a tool. Alas, all of our hero’s courage had been used up, and he could only sit and worry that things would never be the same between them again, that it would always be silence and boiling water and chopping vegetables.
Rosie stood and poured the rice into the pot. “And besides, it isn’t exactly as if you’ve made any moves toward me yourself. I guess I kind of assumed you were going all monastic hermit and striking against lovin’ the ladies, too.”
Alex laughed without really meaning to, as if the weight was being taken from off of his chest in jumpy spurts, inflating his lungs in a pattern that sounded like a laugh. “God, no! I mean loving, isn’t that one of the most human things in the world? One of the things that is the hardest to buy and sell?”
Rosie grinned. It seemed like he was finally getting it. “Now, don’t think this is an ultimatum, I mean it, I wouldn’t want you sacrificing your pride or feeling unsatisfied intellectually or philosophically or whatever. But we can’t be… sexually involved or whatever until this is done. I mean, you see how that would be compromising my ideals or whatever, right?”
“No, yeah, I totally get that. We can’t sleep together.” Alex and Rosie nodded smilingly at each other, and Alex put the chopped veggies in an oil doused pan. “But hey, do you think we can sleep sleep together? Like actually sleep, just in the same bed? I read this article today about how people, families, used to be so much closer because they all slept in the same bed, and now we all sleep in our own closed off little rooms, all alone and disconnected. So, what do you say, huh?”
Although Alex hadn’t asked her, he knew that Rosie’s reason for living, the reason she saw in putting effort into life, was happiness, both for herself and others. She considered, stirring the softening rice, and finally gave Alex the nod he knew she really wanted and had to give. He grinned ear to ear, his so recently leaded mouth now made of sugary, pullable taffy, and our hero kissed his slightly thawed out ice princess a warm, almost painfully human, and perfectly chaste kiss on the forehead before returning his attention to successfully cooking his half of their meal.

The sun playing like a cheerful woodland sprite on their faces woke our hero and the sweetly sleeping princess in his arms the next morning. They stretched awkwardly, yawned through smiles, and were supremely happy that they had found themselves snuggled together upon waking as they had been in dreams.
“Good morning, Rosie Rose.” Alex kissed her sleep-crusted eyelids.
“Morning!” Rosie grinned and kissed his cheeks. “So, fearless leader, how are you going to revolutionize thinking in the blogosphere today?”
Alex sighed comfortably and attempted to bury himself in the bed. “I guess first of all I should go see my mom and get the lecture that’s coming to me. Then I’ll try to solve this problem of running out of people willing to talk to me. I’ve got an idea about that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll go talking to people whose job it is to talk to people. Priests, phone sex operators, people like that.”
Rosie laughed sparklingly, tinkling. “That’s genius. They’ll probably have amazing ideas about what to live for, too.”
Alex nodded excitedly. This had to be a good idea if even Rosie was behind it. “The funny thing is, I totally got the idea from our buddy the jackass reporter. Something he said about how the best people to talk to are the ones who are the completely most obvious and the exactly least likely.”
“Alright, dear wandering philosopher king, get out there and discover the secret of life!” Rosie chided, poking him gently in the side.
Alex rolled out of bed, took one last stretch, and walked toward the door, sliding into his shoes in the hallway. Cassie, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a brightly pink paperback chick lit novel, watched this exodus with considerable interest and amusement. At the door, Alex noticed Cassie to his right and his face turned about as red as a sunburned and drunken Irishman’s.
“Oh. Hey there, Cassie,” he choked out.
Cassie grinned. “Hey there, cowboy.” Precisely as she had thought and hoped, her talk with Alex about the humanity of sexuality had indeed sparked a lovely night of, shall we say, “connection” between the two, who, as Cassie saw it, “totally needed to get some like whoa”.
Alex realized that he should have come up with something to refute Cassie’s assumptions, but he, frankly, was far too embarrassed to speak. He needed to not see any people for just a few minutes, to just walk, to clear his mind, to figure out how the hell he was going to explain his strike in a way that would make his mother not bring it up in every conversation they had for decades to come. Hopefully, he could at least achieve a calm state of mind before he had to face down-
“Hi! Are you Kuon?” said a strange teenaged boy that Alex had never seen before, at the exact moment that Alex stepped over the threshold of his apartment building. Our hero was so startled that he nearly tripped over the last step.
“Gah! Hi. My name is Alexander Kuon, yeah. Do I…know you?”
“No, Master Kuon, you don’t know me. But I’ve been reading your blogs, and I want to be one of your followers, too.” Everything about the boy was entirely and completely embarrassingly earnest. His features were on the small side and pointed, and his hair carefully covered most of his forehead and a bit of his eyes. His voice was deep but sharp, and it seemed as though rejection here would topple him for good.
“Ah, Jesus,” Alex muttered as he realized that Rosie was right, the whole news report had indeed managed to bite him in the ass in a space of 24 measly hours.
“What was that, Master Kuon?” pounced the terribly thin boy, whipping a pad and pen out of his back pocket. Alex blinked, trying to process this whole thing, quickly, before this poor fellow exploded.
“Okay, first of all, you definitely cannot call me Master. No way. My name’s Alex, nice to meet you. What’s your name?” Alex sucked in a good gulp of air, and stuck out a ready to be shook hand, for some unknown reason honestly worried that this kid would rip off his arm in a fit of earnestly rabid rage.
The boy’s eyes got big and fearful, as if he hadn’t been expecting to shake the hand of The Great One, much less asked for his name. “K-k-kyle.” He managed out after what felt like hours and tentatively shook Alex’s hand. Alex finally breathed again, feeling at least a little safer about the boy’s mental state.
“Alright, Kyle. Did you see that news thing about me last night?”
“Yeah. During dinner. And I haven’t slept. I’ve read all of your blogs, and researched a shit-ton of philosophy and about freeganism and all. And I really, really want to be one of your followers.”
“Look, Kyle. I don’t actually have followers. I was just fooling around with that reporter, and I didn’t think he’d even take me seriously, much less do a report on the nightly news about me, okay? I’m just doing this weird strike thing on my own, to try and figure my shit out. I mean it’s really nice and flattering and all that you appreciate my thoughts so much, but I don’t want followers.” Alex tried to make his eyes as earnest as the boy’s, trying his best to get rid of this weirdo without hurting his feelings too much. You have to be careful with the feelings of earnest knights such as our new friend here, dear readers, for one never knows when they might explode.
Kyle was quiet for a long time, a tense, calm before the storm sort of quiet, and Alex watched him carefully, waiting for the first sign that he should duck and cover. “I get it!” Kyle announced happily. “This is, like, a test, right? An initiation test? Like, I have to be willing to defy even your ideas of truth and all that? Well, I defy you! You do too have followers. It was on the news, you know. They can’t just flat-out lie on the news. So, you’re lying, and I want to be one of your followers.”
Alex could honestly not believe this. This kid was nuts, and it seemed like he couldn’t shake him. “Look, Kyle! I’m not a master, I’m just a confused kid like you, really upset by the world today, cynical as hell, but knowing life must be worth living and trying to figure out why. You’ll be even more lost than you are now if you try to follow my crazy ass.”
Kyle assumed the raised eyebrows, crossed arms in disbelief position. Alex sighed and resigned himself to asking Rosie later what the hell he should do about his apparent new sidekick. For now, every minute he wasn’t at his mothers was another minute she had to stew.
“Alright, fine. I have to go to my mother’s house now. I’m gonna start walking. And you most definitely should not follow me. Got it?”
Kyle was unmoved. Alex started walking towards his mom’s, and, of course, the sincere knight followed. After a few steps, Kyle chirped out, “So, what is, ‘Mother’s House’? Is that like, a church, or, I mean, meeting place or something?”
“No, dude. I mean like, my mom’s place. My actual biological mom? The lady who birthed me, fed me, taught me right from wrong? The fire dragon waiting in her lair to torch me for that stupid news report last night?”
Kyle looked confused, so Alex conceded, “Yeah, I suppose you could call it a meeting place.” Kyle looked sated, at least a little, and wrote down ‘dragon’s lair’ and ‘meeting place’ under the heading ‘Mother’s House’ in his little notebook. Alex could almost feel the cartoon light bulb over his head as he figured out a way to get rid of this kid, at least for now.
“But yeah, it’s a little too, you know, advanced for you right now. Maybe in a little bit. But right now, you actually can’t even know where it is. So, you know, you’ll have to go do something else for awhile. Go home or something.” Kyle looked positively crushed, and Alex didn’t know what to do. To break the, frankly, creepy as hell silence, our hero posed a question to his knightly sidekick that had been bothering him since his entrance upon the stage of his life.
“Hey, how’d you know where I lived?”
Kyle perked up right away, obviously proud of himself. “Well, I just traced your ISP address to the university library, and the news thing said you were a student, so I cross-referenced you with a list of students to get your full name, and then I looked you up on Facebook!”
Alex made a mental note to take his address off of Facebook and then to smack himself for putting it there in the first place. Still, this kid’s intensity and perseverance was way beyond impressive, and if he could manage to shake him loose from this hero-worship thing, they could be friends. But for now, Alex nodded at him and Kyle walked off excitedly.
“Jesus Christ” our hero said out loud, rubbing his eyes and hoping against hope that the fire dragon would be easily soothed upon his entrance to her lair. He doubted he could withstand another such battle today.

Days 3 & 4: 5471/50,000

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 04:30:15 GMT

i intended to get to 6000 by tonight, but alas, im a supa-slacker and i never ever get anything done on the weekends. alas. however, at work, i thought through the "mom" sections and the "how our hero gets disciples through one of the great mysteries of the blogosphere" section. hopefully those will be written by wednesday, the day i also plan to hit 10K.

i also added some stuff to previous sections, but that would just get confusing, so, heres the bit that is still in chrono order, yo, foos

Alex closed the door behind him and blinked in the darkness, his hand steady above the light switch. Everything was a philosophical debate now. Okay, he could picture electric companies screwing over little old ladies in the winter and giving them bodies that were cold and dead. Lights stay off. What about the internet? Alex could make a case for that, the internet was more or less free, and he needed some medium to exchange ideas over a broader range than all the talking he intended to do. He decided that after tonight, he would take a strike from his computer as well and use only the computers in the university’s library.
He sat down and began blogging in the ultra-quiet and total darkness of his apartment. Alex had a roommate that he sometimes didn’t see for weeks at a time, except for being woken up sometimes by an alarm clock and shuffling at an obscenely early hour of the morning, and then he was off to the library until after Alex was safely abed. Alex called him The Great Scholar Godwin, and, although our hero realized, and rightfully so, that The Great Scholar Godwin was a pretentious douche bag, the kind of university-jackoff that uses words like “dichotomy”, “agency”, and “therefore” in everyday conversation and doesn’t know that everyone else knows he’s trying to hard. It turns out, though, that he also made the perfect roommate because his ridiculous studying hours made it so their paths so rarely ever crossed. Alex had no idea what he did for all that time, maybe memorizing all of the smarmy sounding words in the dictionary and practicing them on unsuspecting victims.
Alex submitted his blog to the undeterminable powers of the blogosphere for the edification of the masses. He was proud, satisfied with his new cause- no, no, his new absence of a cause. Alright, so his best friend thought he was stupid, and he also hadn’t figured out the whole how the hell am I going to eat issue. But these were all problems with answers, and in time these answers and, hopefully, the answers to life’s bigger questions, would wash over him like a tidal wave of philosophical satisfaction.
Alex slept the sweet sleep of a man who had until very recently been depressed with the state of the entire world and his place in it, but had now made at least the smallest dent in these problems, and felt, well, to be frank, righteous about it.
Alex stretched when the sun woke him up in the morning and wondered both what time it was and whether it was kosher for him to even look at a clock while on strike. He decided against it, considering how rushed and impersonal and time-obsessed the society had become these days. He sat up, considering his open window. It seemed like it was about time for class, but, to go or not to go? Well, he had paid for tuition already, and it seemed that teaching and being taught, the passage of knowledge from one generation to the next, that seemed really important, right? But he wouldn’t go to the institutionally demanded classes. He was a poli-sci major, what the hell was he doing in Elementary Chemistry? He would just pop in to whatever classroom was occupied and listen to the proceedings. If an interesting conversation was flowing, he would hang out, learn what the classroom had to teach him. It would be a good experiment, at any rate.
Alex picked his shirt up off the floor. Nudity? No, too over the top. He would just commit himself to these clothes. His epiphany clothes. He flipped his t-shirt inside out and then suddenly and sharply grabbed a Sharpie from his desk and scribbled in all capital letters, “STOP COMSUMING AND BE HUMAN AGAIN”. He nodded approvingly as he capped the marker. It was a good, solid motto and he decided to keep it as his official message. He slipped the shirt on, slogan to the world, and left his headquarters for his very first quest, a foray into the adventuresome and ever treacherous world of higher education.

Chapter 2
Subject: the perilous world of higher education

Today, dear readers, I learned a very important thing: There is something very and deeply wrong with our educational system. The population of students in the higher educational structure are divided into two groups, with neither group getting nothing from their ridiculously high tuition and four wasted years from their lives, except a chance at a better job and the higher salary that comes with it. I stress the word chance because in today’s economy, coupled with the inflated rate of students receiving degrees, those chances are getting slimmer and slimmer.
Group One are those unfortunate students who make any thinking person seriously wonder how they graduated high school, much less got accepted into a real, accredited four-year institution. And I’m not saying that to be cutely sarcastic, there is no way that someone confused about the person and profession of such historical personages as Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin (I met such a failed child today!) should be considered successfully educated by our society. These people have not only fallen through the cracks to land in dead-end menial labor (which is an entirely different atrocity for an entirely different blog), but have instead fallen through the cracks to land in a university!
Group Two are those students whose individual talents have been squished out in favor of conforming to educational norms. There are a few institutions in which creativity and individual choice are encouraged, but those are few and far between. In most cases, even talented students are funneled into 200 member classes in lecture halls in order to fulfill specific institutional requirements, a literature major in Intro to Statistics, a math major in American Literature and Film. These classes are usually taught by TA’s, and the majority of students don’t even meet a professor until their junior year! Plus, the usual system of grading, in which a good job is simply one that falls above the average score, creates an insane amount of competition and fosters an isolation between students. What is supposed to be an environment of creativity, conversation, and dare I say it, education, has become nothing but a diploma mill. The kids who frankly deserve to be involved in higher education are just as equally failed as those in Group One.
The educational system, however, is so deeply wrapped up in all of our other, equally fucked up, systems that a repair of this situation is not possible without a complete overhaul of our entire way of life. Could you imagine a world in which your actual learning was what mattered instead of your scores on a test in test taking? Neither can our politicians, because, why, however else can we judge who most deserves the tax dollars?
And hey, for the majority of Americans, and certainly for those Americans with the power (cough cough money and connections) to create policies, we have a comfortable, pleasant way of life. But pleasantness, is pleasantness a good enough trade for everything being so seriously and grievously not right?

The sun was set, the day’s blog was written, and Alex had naught to occupy his mind in the pink and purple sunlight besides his hunger. He hadn’t eaten for at least 24 hours, since dinnertime before his strike. He had no idea what he was going to do about food. Our society’s over-consumption of food, as compared to the rampant hunger and poverty in other parts of the world, had gotten disgusting, and Alex wanted no part of it. Besides, food cost money, probably too much money for the actual nutritional value of the stuff, and that, our hero realized, would be playing into the system and, therefore, against the rules.

Day 2: 3,932/50,000

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:22:58 GMT

so, i didnt hit the 3000 word marker i set for myself. but i think i spent my time well.

the word flood looks stupid. also, the second section is out of chrono order.

James grinned. He was the good-natured twin and relished each and every opportunity to bust on each and every single person. He was good at it, too, waiting for exactly the right moment, carefully sizing up the situation for the angle with the most humor value. “Alright…and you called us up here for that…because…?”
John rolled his eyes. He appreciated a good joke as much as the next guy, but he got sick of James’s tendency to make everything a one-liner, from John’s failed law career to his failed marriage. “Because, James, if you cared about your own damn business, you would care that one of your employees is trying to go on strike.”
“He can’t go on strike.” James shrugged. “There haven’t been negotiations.”
“Goddammit! I can too go on strike! It’s a wildcat strike! Besides, I’m not going on strike against you guys, I’m going on strike against the system, and having a job just happens to be in the system. I mean, I just feel like no one can make a difference on anything, so why try? I’ve protested, fundraised, studied, all that. And not even the tiniest dent in the world’s problems. So why try, right? The system is too big, too fucked up, too intense.”
James grinned and put his hands over his heart. “Gasp! I think our boy has become disenchanted with the system! Whatever shall our hero do? I know! Become a hermit in the Holy Order of Cynical Brothers!”
Alex glowered. He knew this would happen, he knew no one would take him seriously. “Quit it, James. I’m serious about this stuff. I need to drop out for awhile and think about things. I’m disenchanted with my place in the world, everyone’s place, and I need to get some semblance of optimism back before I become some kind of consumer zombie!”
Brothers’ Bookstore was quiet. John wondered where the hell they were gonna get another employee willing to work with this goddamned crew. Alex wondered what he was getting himself into. James smirked skeptically and planned a punch line, and Rosie…well, Rosie was pissed and earnestly attempting to keep it contained.
James redoubled his weepy act, gulping air and fanning his face. “You know, it really hurts that you can’t just put your ideology aside to really be with me!”
Rosie shot James a Glance, a definitely capital-G-glance, and a tight “James, do not.” James had the next snarky comment all worked out, but he was also knew that the truth was so rarely ever funny and that this was how Rosie actually felt in this moment. James decided to keep his insight on the proverbial “down-low” for now.
“Fine, whatever, whatever!” John threw up his hands. “Be on strike from the world. We’ll even hire you back when you’re back in the world of the living.”
“Yeah?” Alex was pleasantly surprised “Thanks, man.”
“No problem. I feel vindicated enough knowing that you have to answer to her.” He pointed his long nose at Rosie, who, by now, was surrounded by an aura of “not mad, just really disappointed in you”, which, as everyone knows, is so very much angrier than “mad”. Alex was depressed, but he certainly still wanted to live, and every fiber of his being screamed to him that his life depended on holding in that groan.

It was a long, cold car ride home to the apartment building that they both lived in, across from the university. Rosie didn’t say a word as she sat steaming in the passenger seat.
“Look, Rosie. Look.” She remained unmoved. “Look. I really need for you to tell me you know not to take this personally. It’s just this thing that I feel like I have to do. I just feel this overwhelming sense of uselessness and unimportance and dissatisfaction that I have to find a way to fix before I go crazy. C‘mon, say something.”
Rosie said nothing.
“Rosie, please?”
“Fine.” She turned toward him, denimy legs squeaking against the car seat. “I’m not upset for my own benefit. I’m upset that you think this should be about you. I get it, you’re cranky that we can protest and raise money and the world stays the same, you’re still in disbelief that things are not completely right in the world and never will be and that your elementary school teachers were lying to you all that time. But that is not the point. You’re right, you won’t make a difference and even when things change, they really stay the same. But don’t you get it? That’s not the point. This isn’t about you. It isn’t even really about making a difference.”
“The hell it isn’t. That doesn’t make any sense. Fine, whatever, what IS it about then?”
“It’s about making an effort. It’s the meaning behind it all that matters, not the…the whatever, the final product. It’s about just trying to fix the things that feel wrong and making it feel right. It’s…gah fuck it, I don’t care. Do what you want.” Rosie sighed and turned back toward the rainy twilight window.
“Rosie,” Alex said, his voice on its knees with its hands clasped and eyes big and wet. “C’mon, please don’t be this way about this.” He needed her approval in this, it would be better, easier, if she could see where he was coming from. His quest would be a guaranteed success if she would, every so often put her hand on his shoulder and nod her head. He touched her shoulder, lightly, frightened, and she jerked away angrily, pressing her side against the side of the car, playing with the automatic window, sending it up and down. Alex’s hand burned and he was suddenly filled with a renewed hatred of the automotive industry and all it stood for.

Cassie looked over her Cosmo from her place on the couch when the door slammed shut. “Hey, Cassie Nova!” Rosie greeted cheerfully as she bounced past the sitting area toward her room.
“Hey,” greeted Cassie Jones, not Nova, a nicknamed invented by Rosie the same time as her love ‘em and leave ‘em reputation was discovered by our hero’s currently reluctant lady love when she discovered a Kappa Delta Epsilon brother in Rosie’s bed, a wide receiver at the front door with flowers, and a lab partner on the phone. “Rose Red, you do realize that your boyfriend is following you around like a runt puppy that wants his nose rubbed in it?”
Rosie shrugged. “He’s not my boyfriend, for the last time. And yes, I know. He’s been a naughty puppy, oh yes he has!” Rosie pinched Alex’s cheeks with a tight, bitter, lonely dog-owner voice and he just glared and let her, thinking, oh god, if this is how she reacts, my mother is going to have my soul!
“Did he mark his territory in your shoes again?” Cassie teased, laying her magazine open on the coffee table.
“He can tell you all about it, I’m sure. He’s decided to go on strike. And I’m going to bed. See ya in the morning, Cass.”
“Night,” Cassie called as Rosie righteously closed her bedroom door. Alex slumped in an armchair and sighed despondently. Cassie, apparently was beside herself with hilarity. “Aw man, are you in trouble now, mister.” She was practically giggling.
“Yeah. Thanks for all your support.”
“Alright, okay, I’ve contained myself. What’s the story? What are you striking and why is it so stupid?”
“It isn’t stupid! Why does no one see that? Jesus Christ!”
“Okay, okay! Sorry! Why does Rosie think it’s so stupid, then?”
“She can tell you that better than I can. Look, I can’t talk about this right now. I have to get all my thoughts in order first. But I do want to talk with you about it sometime. Soon. I wanna know what you, what everyone, thinks. But not yet, okay?”
Cassie tilted her head just a mite to the side and considered Alex. He looked manic and nervous, but like he’d come out okay in the end. That was good news, otherwise she’d probably be hearing about it for as long as Rosie was her roommate.
“I’m gonna go home now, think all this out,” Alex declared, standing up from the armchair awkwardly. “Tell Rosie I’m sorry she’s upset, okay?”
His sincerity made Cassie smile, but something about it made her twitchy and nervous, too; she couldn’t quite place why. “Alright, honey, good luck with your vision quest.” Alex shot her a quick thanks and was out the door an instant later.

“Come in!” He heard Rosie call from the other side of the door. It killed him that, although she was treating him like a human again, she only sounded like her old cheerful self again because she didn’t know it was him. He pushed the door open and creeked out a “Hey.”
“Jesus Christ, Alex, what is that smell?” Rosie greeted him. Our hero’s spirit withered and grew defensive. He dramatically sniffed himself, first toward his right, then his left. “What?”
“Tell me you smell that. You smell like you’ve been rolling in a pile of sweaty gym socks and dead fish. No wonder you’re having trouble getting people to talk to you.”
“There is nothing wrong with smelling a little…natural. People smelled like this for thousands of years. And at least I’ve been rinsing, they thought water could kill them.” Alex’s voice was at a nice, sturdy podium, presenting a B-list celebrity the key to the city. “Besides, soap is a commodity. Made in impersonal factories by underpaid people and sold to wash away your daily contact with other people. No way was I putting soap on me during my strike.”
“Oh, for the love of…Mary, mother of…Alex. Look. I have accepted your strike, whatever. But you cannot stop bathing! I would lean over and smack you if I wasn’t worried you’d get your stink all over me.”
“Rosie. You know I can’t. Soap would violate my strike.”
Rosie bit her pretty lips that Alex had been missing the most, out of all the things his strike precluded from him and considered. “Ooh, ooh, how’s handmade soap? My mom got me this rose petal souvenir soap from her honeymoon with Bill. You can’t argue with it, it’s super human. This order of French nuns makes them by hand, and give them as gifts to tourists in hopes for a donation for their orphanage. If I give you this soap, will you finally take goddamn showers?”
Alex nodded solemnly. This was a big step, she was helping him again now. Rosie nearly sprinted to her bathroom and returned bearing a frilly pink bar of soap. “Now go, go. And think about changing your clothes, too.”
Alex grinned. “Nu-uh. The clothes stay. The unchanging costume is symbolic.”
“Symbolic of what, pray tell?”
“My status as a mad, itinerant preacher. Besides, I want my fans to be able to recognize me in the streets.”
Rosie rolled her eyes so hard they looked as though they could have easily rolled right across the kitchen’s floor tiles at him. “Whatever, Father Looney Tunes. But if you don’t wash up soon, you’ll kill any disciples you’ll get with your stench before they get close enough to worship you.”
In the shower, Alex thought about Rosie. Nothing naughty, but a serious contemplation of what Rosie meant in his life. He couldn’t help it; as he rubbed his body with her soap scented with her namesake flower, his mind flooded with thoughts of his lady love that he had long repressed. Officially, they were best friends. Unofficially, Alex had loved her since the ninth grade when they were the only two atheists in their ultra-conservative small town. Nine grade, Kat Harding’s basement was, coincidentally, the site of their first kiss, although it was Spin-the-Bottle induced and therefore not a legal first kiss. This somewhat world-shattering event was met with insanely red cheeks and about a month of intense awkwardness before Rosie and Alex could return to being the best of friends with no romantic intent.
Of course, a declaration of ‘no romantic intent’ did not abolish the sexual tension that naturally comes hand in hand with a heterosexual male-female friendship. Every so often there would be bouts of kissing that never led to anything. Except this last one…this last one had gone on for an entire week previous to Alex’s strike, and it certainly seemed to him that it was heading in a very positive direction. That is, until, his strike began. Their relationship had become strained in a way it hadn’t been since after Kat Harding’s fifteenth birthday, and at least that had been a warm, red-faced strain. This was an ice-cold, “well then” kind of strain. He had to talk to her now, before things floundered out here in this Antarctic no man’s land forever. Even if he never got to kiss her again, to lean in as she bit her lips and then started leaning in too and brush her neck and ear and cheek with his fingers on the way to running his fingers through her dark, soft hair. Yes, Rosie was one of the only real, honest, solid human connections in his life. He was determined to get his Rosie back, even if they never kissed again.

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 17:51:15 GMT

i had a dream about zombies and nanowrimo and i woke up honestly thinking for about a half hour that my novel actually WAS about zombies.

im going for a 3000 word goal today. scurry!

rap is the perfect novelling music.

Day 1: 1700/50,000

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 03:24:51 GMT

dont ask me how i ended up with a round number like that.

the biggest problem i've run into so far is finding a narrative voice i like. there are about 3 or 4 in there right now. once i can pick one that can be funny and emotive at the same time, ill go back and edit for continuity. but until then...well...

Chapter 1

Subject: the system

The system, dear, dear readers, is fucked. Inescapably, un-fixably fucked.

I have tried, don’t get me wrong. I’ve studied politics, sociology, economics anything I can think of and nothing will help. It seems that we are all just trapped in this big, what should I call it, structure? And we’re all just floating around, getting nothing done and so rarely ever even noticing each other, like we’re in some zombie-movie-mall. And the ones that are aware are breathing heavy and brandishing whatever blunt object they can find and hoping to god no one eats their brain.
We are at the bottom of a shit heap, folks, and I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been naïve in thinking that maybe political activism could help, and so I’ve protested the Iraq war, petitioned my congress-people to have them work on the Sudan crisis, education, welfare reform, global warming, gay rights. But there are too many causes, and anyway, politicians can’t make any money from fixing these things, so what do they care? It’s the system that’s wrong, and systems are too much to be fixed.
So, I’ve decided to go on a blanket strike. I will only participate in direct, natural human contact until such a time as I can regain a belief that humankind can prevail through the zombie apocalypse. Until I can believe that one human, me, can really mean something, I won’t touch money, I won’t touch a single cause, I won’t touch the system in anyway, not with a ten foot pole with a machete strapped to the end.
I still believe. In what, I don’t know. But I can’t help it. I suppose it’s just habit, believing, but I can’t shake it. I will find something, I will. It’s just a matter of time. I can’t go on being a speck on a speck on a speck, unless I know that I can be a speck that touches other specks.
Never fear out there in the blogosphere, I’ll keep you all posted. I know, there are banner ads that come across the bottom of this page. But if you ignore it, and please do, then the internet can become the best forum for the passing of thought between people, freely exchange the written word. You can’t do it with books anymore, the way you could once. You have to SELL your book and turn a profit, so your ideas are invalidated by the system. It sucks, but it’s true.
Look here for updates about my search for a cure for the brain-mania!

-kuon.

Admittedly, Alexander Julius Kuon was kind of a douche bag. But come on, he was a sweet douche bag. And you have to give him bonus points for the whole Dawn of the Dead metaphor. He really, truly, honest-to-godly meant his little “wildcat strike”. It isn’t his fault that cynics are just as naïve as idealists, in their own way, or that cynicism happened to be “in” at the time, blowing the whole thing out of proportion. But really, he was a smart boy, he should have known better. In all of human history, there has been exactly one search for Truth that ended well, and all that got humanity was the spork.
Alex’s wildcat strike began at exactly 7:27 on Thursday, April 10th. By eight o’ clock that evening, it had been added to his blog and was, therefore, officially official. Like all epiphanies that seem so great at the time, but turn out to be as ill-fated as the so-called “foon”, it occurred to the prophet at the tail end of an eight-hour shift at a slightly-above-minimum-wage customer service job.
Alex was valiantly manning the register at Brothers’ Bookstore that fated twilight evening. He was struck by how much the three people in line looked as thought they didn’t have a single thought in their brain. The first woman was middle-aged, bottle-blonde, blank-eyed, and bought whatever book Oprah was hawking that month. The ladies from the local book club were regulars at Brothers’, and it depressed Alex intensely that none of them ever looked the least bit excited.
Money was snapped out of wallet, swished between hands in a way that sounded like skin touching but wasn’t, shoved in the cash drawer that banged open with a ring, and closed up. Alex was filled with a desire to touch this woman, her hand, her shoulder, hair, anything, even to make eye contact. It wasn’t that he wanted her, she had been pretty once but corpses aren’t sexy; it was just that this woman was about to leave his life and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, but it made him nervous that they had absolutely zero effect on each other. Just .0001% effect was all he wanted, but he put the book in its plastic bag and pushed it toward her across the counter.
Next up was a younger girl with a snotty toddler on her hip, smiling like she felt guilty for taking up oxygen or space in the store. Alex’s nervousness switched its cause from not nearly enough humanity too way too much. Instead of blank eyes, hers were sad. And not in a self-righteously sad way, like on girls playing teen mothers in movies or girls crusading for teen mothers’ rights, but an almost embarrassed, tiny sorrow. He rang up her storybook, and told her the price. “Oh, dammit…forgot tax,” she said sheepishly, putting her crumpled dollar bills on the counter and digging for change in her pockets. She came up empty-handed and gave Alex the saddest, most mortified smile he had ever seen and looked at her boy, getting a slight crinkle above her eyes trying to think of the right thing to say. Alex felt his heart speed up. What could he do? He wanted this girl to be able to read her boy these stories, desperately. “Oh!” Alex said, quietly. “Stupid, dammit.” He contemplated a hand-to-the-forehead gesture, but decided not to be dramatic. “I forgot, the uh, special,” Alex mumbled as he rang it as an employee purchase, getting the price below the amount of crinkled bucks. He handed her the change and book, unbagged, and accidentally brushed her hand with his fingers, making them feel itchy and tingly.
“Thanks. Have a nice night.” He said after her as she left. He always felt like such a tool saying that. She answered back, “Yes. Thank you,” as she nearly burst out of the front door, which rang after her.
Alex turned back to the last customer in line, a man in a good suit. He was here instead of Barnes and Noble because he was the type of big business guy who truly believed in the good old mom and pop shops. Alex did not have high hopes for him here after hearing him rail on Rosie about the ways in which their selection was lacking. He put down a book with a title that was a euphemism for “How to Screw Your Friends, and Also Strange Women You Pick Up in Bars.” The man shook his head disapprovingly after the girl. “Those people,” he commiserated. “Always looking for a handout. And seriously, wipe your kid’s nose, for crying out loud! Am I right, or am I right, huh, Alex?”
Alex twitched. This guy had to be kidding, right? He was just being a jackass ironically, right? He carefully regarded the guys shoes. They didn’t look brand new, but they certainly looked shiny and Italian and laced perfectly. Unfortunately, this guy really meant it. He really thought all those things were okay to say, that it was okay to call a stranger by their name just because they were wearing a name tag.
That was the last straw. “I’m going on strike!” Alex turned and announced to the area of the store to the left of him, New In Paperback! John Brothers, co-owner, kept cutting the packaging from the shipment, but called up to the register, “Oh no you aren’t.”
“Of course I can. Why can’t I?”
“Well, you can’t go on a legal strike until you and your employer have entered into negotiations that have failed. Hello, did you forget that I went to law school?”
“Then, then,” Alex cracked his knuckles, thinking. He couldn’t be here anymore. He couldn’t be so close to all that impersonal money. He couldn’t sit in lecture halls anymore. He couldn’t handle hearing one more commercial or seeing one more breaking news story about corrupt politicians. “I’ll go on an illegal strike, then. A, whatsitcalled, a wildcat strike.”
“You do realize I’ll just fire your ass, right?”
“That’s fine. I don’t mind. I can’t have a job anymore. It’s making me a nervous wreck to get paid to take people’s money for shit they don’t need.”
John stood up now, his knees cracking. He walked up to the counter, giving Alex a curious look. “What the hell are you talking about, man?”
“Hello? I’m kind of in a hurry?” said the suit, who was summarily ignored.
Alex’s whole forehead was wrinkled into a frown. “Don’t take it personally. I’m going on strike from everything. I can’t take it anymore. All this buying and selling and zombified people who don’t even know it…I don’t know. I need to find a way to fix this. I’ve just got to think for a while. Maybe a long while. I just need to feel like we all matter somehow in the-”
“Look, am I going to get to pay, or should I take my business elsewhere?” interjected the suit.
John didn’t even look at him and answered, “Well if you weren’t such a whiny bitch, maybe you’d get some service. We don’t want your business. Get! Scat!” The suit looked unbelievably flustered and left without a further word. “Hey, James, Rosie, c’mere!” John yelled toward Graphic Novels.
James Brothers and Rosie Leibniz were there in seconds. “Yeah, John?” Rosie asked cheerfully. That was her ‘thing’, cheerfulness. Usually that was what Alex loved most about her, but right now it was making him want to throw up.
John folded his arms across his chest. “Well, Rosie, James: Mr. Alexander Kuon here is being a fuckhead.”

post!

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:35:18 GMT

so. this is supposed to be a novel, eh?

i'll be taking bets.