"Well, it's not quite a mop and it's not quite a puppet… but man (laughs). So to answer your question, I don't know." – Homer Simpson, "A Fish Called Selma"
My band’s name, per this site, was “Possessed Success”.
Not my best work, but I’m just trying to flex my muscles again as my new job now includes much more creative writing.
Enjoy & Happy Friday!
Possessed Success were a shitty band.
Possessed Success was a shitty band.
I’m no good at verbs of being – especially as it relates to groups of things like bands or assholes – and this group of guys was definitely a little from column A, a little from column B.
Shane (the guitarist) had started Possessed Success when his old band, Orthogonal Unorthodox, had split up over religious differences. It seems you can’t have a speed-metal band with a Catholic lead singer (go figure). At least *they* weren’t able to figure it out.
The rest of the new band came from similar backgrounds: endless squabbling over cash and transportation and booze and venues that eventually ended in burned bridges and failed friendships. The drummer, Knox, even got kicked out of his apartment (though, to be fair, that probably had something more to do with the fact that he’d slept with the guitarist’s sister).
“What? She said she knew him. How was I supposed to know that knowledge was sibling-dependent? For all I knew it was carnal!”
Possessed Success was as much a barbaric yawp or wishful thinking as it was a functioning band. Mostly it was just an excuse to shred really loudly in an abandoned warehouse over on the west side.
“I’m pretty sure they filmed an episode of that zombie TV show here,” Shane had mentioned on their first night of practice.
“Walking Dead,” Jimmy interjected.
“I thought we were Possessed Success,” Knox pointed out to no one in particular.
Once the pleasantries and chit-chat were out of the way, they rattled off some old Megadeth and classic Metallica (pre-Black Album *only*) and shook the girders for more than an hour. It didn’t seem to matter to any of them that no one could meedly or squeedly like Mustaine or howl like Hetfield. It only mattered that they weren’t at home or at work or fighting. Not with family, not with friends (especially girlfriends), not with old bandmates or building managers or anybody else.
The three of them against the world. They were possessed. They’d find success. They were: Possessed Success. [Cue Flaming Logo and Gong crash!]
When they were here in the (relative) quiet that came from deafeningly loud music, nothing else mattered (except, maybe, arguing over whether they should play “Nothing Else Matters”).
And that’s how/when the fighting started.
Shane said “Yes” to the question at hand.
Jimmy, the singer and bassist, said “No”. Those Sting-tooled types could be typecast as tools just like Sting. The shoe certainly fit.
Knox pointed out that “Lars killed Napster. Plus, he’s like a complete tool.”
“Isn’t that like saying the same thing twice,” asked Jimmy.
“Your mom asked for it twice,” Knox responded and was promptly hit with the butt end of the mic stand.
Retaliation with drumsticks and forty five minutes of sweaty expletives and ridiculous wrestling followed. The melee was over when Shane’s brother tossed everyone PBR’s to cool them all off.
“I never thought I could diffuse a situation with a brain grenade, but they’re a lot less violent than the real thing.”
“Anything is less violent than the way these two pussies fight,” Shane interjected.
The next round of brawling kicked off by that comment was bloodier than the first and, also, much wetter and foul-smelling, thanks to the addition of the beer.
Once everyone decided they’d rather be drunk and happy than sober and slapped, morale improved. But only just a little.
*Slurp*
“So,” someone sighed, “is this it?”
*SILENT BEAT*
“I guess so,” two others answered in unison.
*CRACKING CACKLE*
“Y’all are all ridiculous.” This was Shane’s brother. He slipped out the back narrowly avoiding a shower of beer cans being rained down upon his head.
There were all ridiculous. A bunch of dumbies worthy only of ridicule. So they did the only thing that came naturally: they got drunk, played one last song and promptly broke up.
The final tally: No shows No t-shirts No songs No groupies 12 cans of beer 4 hours of lost time
They possessed no success, Possessed Success, only proving how elusive it can be to reach your dreams.
Great band name, though. They were (was?) possessed of such high hopes.
How do you write an entire story in only three sentences? If you think that’s a tall order (or maybe even an impossible question to answer) you should re-calibrate your expectations and try writing a story in only six words. Both can be done but it takes a little planning, effort and creativity.
I’m game enough now that I’ve got a 25 day streak going on my daily writing that this week’s challenge from Chuck Wendig seemed like a great test of my skills both in writing and in editing.
Last time out I had to cull down almost 800 words to meet the 500 word requirement. This time I’m only writing down what is necessary. I’m going to try and say my peace (and write my piece) without any wasted words or extra punctuation.
Here goes:
There was a look across the room that sparked the romance, though neither of us could ever seem to recall exactly who had looked first and who had returned the gaze, but it was more or less mutual from the word go.
The first winter was cold and yet we both managed to stay warm enough, basking in the glow of each others’ mutual admiration and near-constant physical attention.
By the next summer you’d have thought it was winter by how chilly we treated each other, we were barren and frozen out of even the barest conversation.
Maybe not literature but it’s writing.
Once more:
“I love you,” she said before we’d even gone out three times and it scared me to hear it but I kept on seeing her despite my fears.
“I love you,” I said as we welcomed our first child, a daughter, into our family, into the world.
“I love you,” she said at my bedside that morning and I’m glad it’s the last thing I heard her say.
Better, perhaps, but pretty sappy.
Last try:
The command codes were given; passive voice hides process, avoids prosecution and persecution or so I was told.
The verdict was rendered; swift and decisive justice, even if I never faced my accuser or got to call witnesses in my own defense.
The blade was dropped; the death blow delivered and yet, somehow, no one was ever to blame.
My own little allegory/lament on the use of passive voice. I had an English teacher in the 11th grade who HATED it, but it does have its uses.
Anyhow, Happy Friday! Hope you enjoyed what I wrote.
Thanks to several small nudges from outside sources whom I don’t actually “know” but I “follow” on the internet, I’m doing a bit more creative (read: fiction) writing.
Thanks to Chuck Wendig and Merlin Mann I’m at the beginning stages of forming a writing habit.
I should also thank Buster Benson and his 750 words site. Not that I needed a new badge or other digital form of extrinsic motivation, but a Turkey is a Turkey, after all.
Write 750 words for 3 consecutive days, earn a Turkey badge!
Here, then, are 3 entries in Chuck’s latest Flash Fiction contest informed by these random stock photography images and enabled by Buster’s site and Merlin’s “inspiration”.
35:
I have been holding this goddamned pose for all of ten seconds already and the camera is not even trained in my direction, not even around this “photgrapher”‘s neck. Amateur.
“I am not some William Wegman Weimaraner,” I find myself saying out loud to no one in particular. The photog glances my direction and glint of sun from the lens temporarily blinds me. I drop my frame to shield my eyes and say again, with emphasis this time, “I am not some William Wegman Weimaraner.” He gets the picture and goes about rapidly readying himself to get the picture.
His picture. My picture. A picture of me standing on this beach ball, on this beach, displaying my skin and skill for all to see and share.
A tripod is produced as two production assistants, I assume, finally start assisting that there might be production today. A photograph is to be produced and I am its main subject, though I suppose the beach and the lighting are nice as well. Come to think of it, it’s not really me that is the theme, but age defying time.
I am not beautiful or particularly athletic, but I still have the balance and skill that many years as an acrobat in the circus taught me long ago. I have the sinewy muscle memory of a thousand tucks, rolls, flips, spins and flourishing salutes. I am doing such a statuesque salutation right this very second if this idiot and his drones would ever bother to snap a shutter.
“I can place my hands on my hips, you know,” I say.
No one is paying me much attention, not even the dolt with the light meter flitting about my now-ample frame. I suck in my gut just a touch before releasing a follow-up statement.
“I did not study for six years under the Teutonic tutelage of Theodoric Tausher to simply let my shoulders slump and place my hands on my hips.”
“f/8 at 1/250 maybe?” the light meterer asks.
“I would be doing it purely by choice, mind you,” I continue. “Certainly not because I’m tired of all these amateurish antics and am ready to be done taking this absurd picture.” Perhaps I mean absurdist here, but I am becoming frustrated. I still like to think of myself as an artisan, an entertainer, but my collaborators clearly see me as nothing more than a trained seal.
I consider barking, clapping my hands, balancing the ball on my nose or jumping in to the sea to grasp a fish in my mouth but the water is cold and craggy. I need neither the shivers nor the sharp protrusions poking me.
“No!” someone shouts and I struggle to maintain my composure as the ball slips back and forth underneath my feet and I extend my left arm to join my right to help me balance. The photographer has cried out and is now gesticulating in the general vicinity of me, though I suspect he is addressing the light meter man.
“We are in full sun, yes?”
Light meter man and I both respond: “Yes”
“Yes!” the photographer echoes, throwing up both his hands in a mirror image of my own. I briefly imaging I am being mocked and return to my previous stance.
“He is standing stock still in the full sunshine and you would have me shoot him at f/8 at 1/250?”
To this question neither of us offer a response. I am not being addressed and the light meter man is either too stupid to know the answer or too smart to offer one to an angry photographer.
The photographer proceeds, happy to educate those he has either stunned or stumped.
“If I wanted to wash him out and overexpose the whole damn scene I’d use f/8 at 1/250 but that’s not the assignment. The assignment was a fully focused, no bokeh view of a beach with a man standing on a ball in center frame.”
He turned to face the tripod and pull it a few feet closer to himself and the scene we were finally about to shoot, it seemed.
“We’ll be shooting f/32 at 1/125,” he announced and the light meter man dutifully readjusted his sensor to take some more readings.
After a few furtive fidgets with the meter the light meter man went to the photographer’s side to relay his current message. I suppose I would have done the same after surviving such a shameful scolding as he had just received.
Still, it was nothing like the tongue lashings I used to receive from that German bastard Tausher. I sucked in my gut again and stood a quarter of an inch taller just thinking of his stinking breath and his ranting rebukes.
It was time to take this picture and I was proud that we had all arrived ready to do it justice, whatever misguided stock photo editor was thinking.
34:
The vacuum tube shushes us all to a hush, sliding to a stop in its housing, a slippery sluice of pressurized air and the only mode of transportation into and out of the factory. We disembark our shiny, ferrous ferry onto brushed metal pathways that click and clack each footstep ringing like the tick and tock of the clock. It is time for work and we have arrived with all pompous precision that is intended to inspire and reassure with its glinting glare and hyper-realism.
I sometimes imagine the tube car is a giant, gentle worm carrying us on its back to our subterranean factory. Since I have never seen the steam pumps or generators or whatever it is that power the pulsating thrust of our underground city, it is easy to transform the technical into the animal. Hums can be anthropomorphized more-so than the drumbeat drone of drudgery that is electronics, so I choose to imagine my gigantic animal friends as opposed to crazy Kirby creations that are far more likely to draw us in each and every morning and churn us out each and every evening.
Striking strides on the hyaline hallway lead to my assembly line. Number 34. Thirty four of seventy six if you’re keeping count and they most certainly.
They arrive in the form of Masterson, my supervisor. I adjust the thin metal visor to ray shield my eyes. The glasses were forged by Geordi La Forge or so says the supervisor clucking a chicken chuckle cackle oblivious to the fact that I obviously don’t get the joke. Or maybe I wasn’t supposed to and that’s why he’s laughing.
We’re here for the chickens, after all. And the cows. And the pigs. And, most important of all, the people.
Masterson makes another crack about Soylent Yellow before cracking up and cracking the whip and starting the countdown clock. We run for eight straight hours every day from 8 AM to 4 PM. No breaks to pee or smoke or choke down coffee, just churn the corn, inject the dye and hormone and whatever the fuck else we’re pumping into the food nowadays. I should know, I’m the one doing it, but I don’t ask questions. I just sit and stare behind my silver slitted shielded eyes, hollow out a point on the cob, dip the hollow point of the needle in then out and just keep moving. On, on, on.
I can do my stretch pretty well most days. Today is not most days. I’m itching to fidget or move or get up and walk out at the 90 minute mark. Masterson notices and comes on over, intent on refocusing attention.
“What’re you doing, eighty six?”
“My job, Masterson. Same as you.”
“I mean,” he smiles, “what are you doing later on?”
I almost stop and drop and roll. The heat of such an impromptu proposal, so apropos of nothing, and so inappropriate by current standards could get us both fired.
“Whatsa matter,” he says, noticing that my work has all but stopped and I haven’t yet responded. “Not your type?”
The short, simple answer is no, but I can’t say this to Masterson. He’s easily twenty years my senior and he has a visible scar on his face despite trying to hide it with a short, dark beard. The alopecia runs along the right side of his jaw and terminates in a sliver of silver hairs that point up towards his pointy ears.
He is not my type and my continued silence is giving me away again. I try to lie but it comes out as workplace avoidance and temporal vagueness.
“I’m busy,” is what I say. Now, right now, and forever is what I think. What I mean.
“I’m not your type.” He pauses this time. “You missed a spot. Get to work.” And then he leaves.
I have missed a spot. All this talk – and this is a lot of talk for an otherwise sterile and stainless steel structure – distracted me. I rush to catch the cob I missed before and the one I should be doing now and the one after that which is ripe and plump and almost (not quite) perfect until I’ve injected a drop of this whatever inside of it. My contribution. My deposit, no refund.
The corn wars are raging. The porn wars used to rage. After all the exploitation and explosions (double entendre!) of the race to own the space of pleasure we all now race to meet the needs of that other insatiable desire: hunger.
I don’t know what to say or do. About this job. About Masterson. About the sleek and shiny and silver and stainless steel that protects and corrects.
I just know that desire never goes away – as Masterson has proved despite that previous porn war being over – it is just redirected, shifted, to a new enemy.
Me.
33:
I look back only to discover, my brother, that there is one footprint left behind and it is not my own. Nor is it yours. Nor is it mine.
You are not here. I am not here. There is only the single depression pointing in the opposite direction of my gaze.
Seven wonders were there once. This is but a singular occurrence. One of none, or at least not so many. The lasting effigy of a colossus now disappeared.
I have emerged, I decide, on the other side. Born out of this indentation. Marker from nowhere, marking my appearance I know not where.
I seem to recall a conversation. With my brother? With the colossus? With the desert I now find myself in? I only seem to recall, it could be the heat getting to me.
I’m awfully overdressed for desolation, wearing wingtips in the sand and a windsor knot in the windswept Sahara or some other such sweltering sunshine. Shiny seems too positive a connotation for the intensity and brightness of a light that shone no relevance, revealed no secrets, only made shadows; doubts.
I look skyward to meet its gaze but, instead of striking blindness, I’m stuck motionless. Moving my eyes, changing my perspective, yields no difference in angle or lens flare. I’m frozen in the desert if such a thing is possible and all the details of my derangement are arranged in linear synchronicity. Each piece and part moving in geo-static orbit that only some impartial, unseen observer must be seeing.
It must be him, right? He (the colossus) must have been carrying me. It’s not my footprint, I can see that, but where were we two? Where are there two? Why is it only me now and not my brother, not the colossus, not another mark or dent of hill or mountain or molehill or goddamned anything at all. At all; at all. At. All.
I twist around and crane my neck and discover I’ve leapt ahead (or fallen back) and am repeating all the lies, the lines, to myself inside my head. I try to speak, to scream, to cry and find I’m emerging newborn again into the light again but I’m no more enlightened than bats who strike out at daylight, though just as blind.
I find a new thought creeping in and seeping out through sweating pores: what if the footprint itself is Sisyphus’ rock? And here I am a dapper demigod doomed to dampen the ground with my sweat and toil thinking over the thoughts of abandonment and aloneness and isolation but those never lead to civilization. Or rescue. Or anyone else; they only lead in.
No pool is forming for the liquid I exude. I shake my brow to spread some spray but it evaporates into fine mist before it even hits the ground or the footprint or the surrounding area. My eyes tear up and I begin to cry but they only leave stain trails on my cheeks; they can’t penetrate the crusty earth either.
I raise my crying eyes skyward once more searching for the sun, the light, through closed lids. It follows me as a I look away and races towards a draining source as I seek it’s warmth and guidance and explosive exposing rays. I only get exposition written in the trailing tears vanishing points of an absentee celestial entity.
The sun is no good to me.
It refuses to reveal its face to me.
Colossus had had to flee.
I’m back to staring over my shoulder. Still wondering, not wandering, the desert. Is this my just desserts? What I wouldn’t give to be a deserter. To through caution to the hot winds, throw up a sail in the sky, and just disappear.
Is that how it happened, a disappearance? Was there something here before? Am I what came after? Or was all of this nothing a more barren brand of nothingness disguised as empty void?
Is the footprint empty or am I filling it up? I try to fill it up again with tears and sweat and yelling and now the coughing spatter of blood from sand-caked lungs.
A single drop of blood splashed down and now there are mountains within the distance of my tilt-shifted view. Are they blue?
I. I am. I am still. I am still staring. I am still staring down. I am still staring. I am still. I am. i.
Constructing the sine wave has proven incomplete. I am still on this side and cannot complete the thought, complete the wave, complete myself without proper understanding of myself, my brother and the colossus.
I finally collapse and fall straight through the other side.
I am. STILL?!
Now I have but one large foot but it is not my own foot and has unfamiliar hairy toes and breathes and pulsates life, radiating white hot heat and it is not my own, this foot, but I am. Still.
I sense a thousand eyes and ears and nose (I know) but none can see or hear or smell only suck the life out of me. Some give but fewer than all of those who only take, take, take, take take take, take-take-take.
I am the sun. I am the desert. I am the mountains.
I am the wind. I am the footprint.
I am the doubt. I am the stillness. I am the searching.
