All Betts Are Off

Deserted.

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:09:04 -0400

Sigfried was very lonely. It was a feeling he wasn’t used to, as he was a robot. In fact, feelings, in general, were a pretty new phenomenon. Nonetheless, loneliness was the most prevalent now, fourteen years into his stay on the tiny deserted island he now begrudgingly called home.

The only respite from this intense loneliness was the occasional crab, wandering up onto the shore for a breather from the rolling ocean for the afternoon. Or the occasional pod of dolphin or school of tuna, cruising by, unseeing, never looking back. It was always brief, and as soon as they had come, they were back away into the endless sea.

You see, despite being a very advanced android, capable of amazing feats of agility, massive computations, surviving with only the light of the sun, and, as of recently, human emotion, Sigfried had a flaw. This downfall was his extremely delicate wiring. The water, the very thing that he found most irresistible, the substance that literally surrounded his life, was not to be touched. ”Computationally Impossible,” his readouts declared.

On this day, however, loneliness was the farthest thing from his mind. He had been doing something thinking. He’d re-routed some wires, re-worked some equations, and had come to an altogether new outcome. Loneliness had been replaced by some new emotions. Joy. Freedom. Self awareness. Smiling to himself, he stood up, and with his recent enlightenment coursing through his circuits, dusted the sand out of his servos, turned off his inhibition, and walked into the sea.

Farmhouse.

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:20:00 -0400

I’d never really met a horse. Well, there had been summer camps as a kid, and I’d ridden a few times before, but, as I say, I had never met a horse. My girlfriend, on the other hand, had a long standing relationship with horses, had fully invested her time in them, other than a brief stint as a dental receptionist, since she was knee high to a grasshopper. All throughout college, riding, grooming, picking stalls, showing, etc. She was mad about them. But me, I didn’t really have any good reason to feel one way or the other about them. That was just that. But they are big, they tend to have a certain aroma, and, as far as I had been able to tell, were stupid and finicky and emotional. So you can imagine my surprise when we moved to a horse farm.

At first, there I didn’t really have much to do with them. That was her thing. She could have at it, as far as I was concerned. Sure, I got out there with a feed bucket from time to time, and I might go stand with her while she cleaned and oiled her tack or rinsed off one of the great sweaty beasts, but that was about all. Attention to them was limited, and friendship was downright out of the question.

Sitting one particular afternoon, nursing what must have been my third or fourth spiked Arnold Palmer of the afternoon and listening to Mandy in the shower, washing the grime and sweat of an Atlanta summer day at the farm, I stood up, dropped a few more cubes into my condensation covered glass, and grabbed a few carrots from the fridge.

As I walked out to Rainy (that’s the current horse of supreme interest in Mandy’s life) I felt a certain amount of reservation. It wasn’t that I was afraid, or even particularly sober, for that matter. I just wasn’t sure what I was going to find. Rainy, on the other hand, knew exactly what was coming his way. As a swayed gently across the courtyard, bright carrots dangling listlessly from my fingers, Rainy let out a great neigh, realizing at once that this was going to be a treat.

I tentitively held out one of the carrots to him, not really knowing how he liked them or what. Was I supposed to give it to him all at once? Should I break it up? Or let him bite it himself? Anyway, there were no questions from Rainy, he just bit off the end of the carrot, and started chewing, starting at me with big brown friendly eyes. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of this either. Were we friends, or was he really just that oafish as to not think twice about an offered carrot.

Eventually, as we went through carrot after carrot, I abandoned the drink in my hand, moved closer to him, and began to rub between his eyes and around his ears. I grabbed his great top lip, and he twitched it, removing it from my grip with surprising force, like he had done it a thousand times. We communicated with rubs and pats, nips and tugs and head nods.

Needless to say, we were friends. And are still friends.

Horsewatching.

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:57:04 -0400

Ah wis trembling. Ah noticed, trying no tae notcie, trying no tae listen tae the fuckin voice en mah heid. Focus en the telly. Watch tha cunt shown aft his new fuckin blender. It’s interesting, no? Jis keep watchin. Ah couldnae stop it now, ah could keep mah ahys en the screen. Ah had tae go, walk if ah had tae.

Ah got up, grabbed mah keys an heided oot. Ah didnae need to lock the door, wouldnae be anyone by. Jis tried to keep focused, keep mah heid goin till i gotto the store. The cigs, mah junk, was all ah could think about now.

Better out than in.

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:43:14 -0400

We all know about those foods that people shouldn’t eat because of the risk of gas. My life is a little bit different. A bowl of soup could easily be a bowl of beans. My chicken sandwich, a heaping plate of lentils. It wouldn’t matter, the result would be the same. Day in and day out, my body processes what it gets, and with an overwhelming mantra of “better out than in,” it removes, sometimes whispering and sometimes bellowing, what it considers (and I can’t blame it) to be the unwanted remains.

For me, it’s part of the experience of the food. It is part of the enjoyment. Something that indicates true relaxation and total contentedness. I admit, sometimes it gets out of control. But these little frills, their tiny invisible waves rolling over the senses of everyone around are some way for me to keep peace in my brain, to justify elaborate and unhealthy meals, to remember.

Mandy’s either got the smallest nose or the biggest heart, but she’s stuck with me in spite of my affliction. It definitely gets on her nerves, but she hasn’t let it become something divisive. It is something I try to control. Most people are considerably less comfortable with it that Mandy has grown to become, so it’s something I try to hide. Sometimes even to the point of it becoming a secretive obsession. But sometimes, deeply satisfied and perfectly relaxed, no matter the company, it escapes, reveals itself. I’ve gotten past apologizing. It has gone on for far too long for me to try to keep up appearances once the truth is out.

Better out than in. Blessing and curse.

Happy Birthday, Richmond

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:20:18 -0400

That last hour into Richmond was always the slowest. The anticipation builds as quickly as the traffic. Although, now coming home from my new home in Atlanta, people would probably give me an awful look just for calling this minor slow up traffic. The conversation had turned to meaningless bickering, just keeping our mouths moving really.

“I’m starting to get a little worried about this white line over here, you’ve been driving on it all the way from Atlanta, and I think it’s getting tired.”

“You want to know a great way to get away from that line on our right? Get in the driver’s seat for once and then you’d be able to drive and hold the wheel at the same time.”

It was meaningless, but poignant. It was tension embodied.

As we pulled off the interstate and hit the Boulevard, though, we were home. We were right back in the center of our old haunts, our best parties, and our worst decisions. Better or worse, we were home.

When we got out that night, things were different. People seemed strange, and those initial conversations that we had been running over in our heads to have with friends we hand’t seen in months seemed out of place or irrelevant. We had come back to little old Richmond, denied ourselves a weekend in the big city, and had driven all the way up here just to visit our poor friends who hadn’t gotten away from the golden handcuffs of their hometown. At least, that’s what people must have thought.

“How have you been?” Handshake, nod, and a quick look over my shoulder towards the bar, looking for an empty spot to get a drink. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

It was as if they didn’t realize that we had moved to the suburbs, we had left the city, and that we had not betrayed our roots for the guiles of citydom.

Eventually, as the tabs became longer and longer and the empty glasses teetered perilously in haphazard piles, sometime, I think, after the champaign toast, the walls broke, those conversations reignited, and the fun started back. The next day it was as if we’d never left. The same old banter, the same old friends, and a weekend that could not have better celebrated the 26th anniversary of my existence.

Ticketing.

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:56:22 -0400

It seems like it would be difficult to know anything these days, really. Here I sit on the brink of yet another traffic ticket, less than 5 minutes from the impending doom of the arresting officer walking back up to the window. But this is one thing I do know; I know it is going to happen, but it isn’t the suspence that will kill me. It is likely my father.

I could always try a daring escape, like the ones you see in the movies, try to pull something out of my ass to get away with this. I could just hit the gas, floor it through the parking lot of the JCC that I have used as my pull-off. You have to remember to use your hand break when speeding through parking lots. It can add a lot of speed for you. Or so I have heard. Seems to work in Grand Theft Auto. But he’s on a bike. And not a peddle bike, a big BMW motorbike. He would get me before I was half-way through the lot. Or I could try explosives. Explosives have never, ever worked for me. It usually just comes down to an excuse, which never works.

You can try to evade cops, or blow them up, or excuse your actions, but in the end it always works out the same way. You are always caught, you are always behind, you are always under someone else’s thumb.

You drive, you have to, it gets you where you’re going.

You speed, for one reason or another.

You get pulled.

You die.

Mexico

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:42:39 -0400

The road was long and dusty. Just ahead of the horizon was a little town that Dave was starting to wonder if they would ever reach. They had been driving now for a little over eight hours, and the sun and the road and the wind and sagebrush were starting to get to him, and he was starting to wonder if he even knew where this old two-lane stretch would take them. The only thing he was thankful for was that the sun was now coming in on Erica’s side of the car, and not right onto his left arm as it had been for the first half of the day.

Everything they had passed – which had not included any other cars, and barely any other signs of life – had seemed to be in one of two conditions: so overgrown as to be muddled and barely recognizable, or so desperately under-grown as to be colorless, barren, and bland. Even the ghost-towns they had passed through occasionally seemed to follow this pattern, cluttered and heaped up with rusted out shells of old Datsuns and Fords, discarded refrigerator boxes, old, door-less door frames, tractor tires. This would suddenly break into the dun colored wide-open grassless wastelands that lay between them, as if everything had been hastily tidied into little piles by a messy child. The storm clouds had been chasing them down all day, and Dave rolled down his window to have one last cigarette before they were overtaken by the thunderheads.

“Damn, this whole thing sure hasn’t been easy,” he said on the exhale of his first drag.

After a moment: “There had better be a gas station in that next town, cause I gotta pee.” It was the only response he had gotten all day.

“Yeah, we’re gonna need some gas, anyhow.”

Right as they pulled out of the station, they heard the thunder start.

“Not long now,” Dave mused.

“Why did we do that, Dave? How did it come to that?”

“I don’t know, I guess it just seemed like our only option at the time… I couldn’t see any other way to change her, could you?”

“I guess not… it just doesn’t seem right, all the same.”

“Of course it wasn’t right! It’s too late now, thought, isn’t it?” His face was turing red, he paused, looking out his window. “Oh, God… oh, God…” he whispered, biting his lower lip and blinking off tears.

“I just don’t know why she wouldn’t ever listen, and she just wouldn’t stop. She was never like that with us, why did Joey have to deal with it. It wasn’t fair, not of it was fair.”

“Why didn’t he just protect himself? Why couldn’t he just fight back, or leave, or something? He just sat there and took it from her. The whole thing would just have been so much easier if he wasn’t such a good kid.”

“No, it wouldn’t. It never could have been easy, no matter what the circumstance. She was our mother, Dave, our mother. She raised us.”

“What does that mean now? She tortured him! He is dead, Erica!” he screamed. “What the hell kind of mother is that?”

“Does that make her deserve it? I don’t know, Dave. I just wish that was enough to convince me that we did right.” There was a pause. “Dave, please tell me that we did right,” she pleaded, choking on tears, somehow knowing that neither of them would ever find that peace of mind. Dave, only half hearing her almost rhetorical plea, was far beyond the point of being able to reassure her, anyway, fist to his mouth, teeth clenched, and the wet snail-trails of tear drops highlighting his face in the evening sun. The overbearing silence of the first leg had returned, broken only at odd intervals by a sniff or stifled snob.

The storm started just as the sun was a red crescent out to their right, and the sky glowed a radiant deep purple-to-crimson. Big, heavy drops steadily increased as the sun disappeared. Now all that could be seen was the flicking neon “MOTEL” sign up ahead in the rain. As the pulled in, Dave thought, maybe tomorrow will be better, but his mind had given up looking for new hope, and now only looked for the border.