The Absurdist Chronicles

My walkabout concluded when I met myself. I had made my way down a random alley. I had been searching for my answer for so long– so long. The day had been brutal, soul crushing– I’d done things I didn’t want to; it reminded me of what I sought. As I navigated the piles of reeking garbage strewn about, I saw a vague figure appear at the other end. I made my way cautiously towards it and it followed suit only with a more assured stride. At half way through, I began to both recognize and rejoice at the form I saw. It was unmistakable, undeniable. It was, indeed, me. Same tattered clothing. Same weathered face. Same prematurely greying hair. This is it, I thought. Now, I find out my answers. We stopped a few inches from each other. As I stood and stared slack-jawed, he stood and mechanically examined me with his eyes while slightly grinning. I started to speak when he slipped four inches of steel into my chest cavity from a blade he had produced. I gasped as my blood flowed and pain radiated. He grinned. I wheezed, “Why?” He leaned in to my ear as I struggled to stand, embraced and supported me, and whispered, “I’m not you. And, you never were either.” I fell to my knees as he withdrew the blade. I sucked at nothing, reeling. He kicked me into a pile of garbage. I lay there dying, flies amassing on my bloody torso. I thought of my short, confused life. I thought of my choices. I watched his form recede down the alley with a confident stride and then blend into passersby on the sidewalk. It was me, it wasn’t. I am, I never was. Now, at the transparent end, I know.

I was sitting smoking my grass and reflecting on things of varying natures when a realization by way of a question occurred. I had started by letting my mind stray as best as I could but I kept returning to feelings of remorse foremost. There were other feelings, but, the pang of my hardened heart and melting brain kept echoing remorse.

It was annoying. It was invading my high. I labored to be lost and think of stupid shit. Random shit. Fleeting thoughts of absurdity to drive away the encroaching pain. I imagined the music I heard as colors while simultaneously seeing the ‘hang in there’ kitten poster morph into an act of suicide with the rope. I toked feverishly away at my joint trying to escape or, at least stave off the fast solidifying facts of previous failures, catastrophes, and blow ups– mistakes, in other words.

I smoked and started to see threadlike lines connecting the blunders and misfortunes of my life. I saw it all like a tack board in a police station hung with string and photos detailing an ongoing investigation. I gazed blankly towards the cottage cheese ceiling as my mind set into hard, concrete facts. The strings began to coalesce; one string of randomness suddenly merged with another and so on all pulled by a growing question.

They undulated reducing in number but growing in size. Now giant, they narrowed to two. Two things, I reflected dazedly, connect it all, all of my mistakes; two things that I had misused. I tried to deny it. I finished the joint trying.

I simply had to sit and wonder– had I hurt more people with my mouth or my dick?

His name was Steve. Good guy. He had a good job– insurance salesman. He had a good home– decent sized apartment in a decent part of town. He had a good partner– Karen, also an insurance salesperson. The best part for Steve was that he was good with all that was good to him. His job? Top agent. His apartment? Impeccable. His partner? Couldn’t be happier. Everything was good for Steve and Steve was good back. Effectively, he had the universe in a nutshell– until it all seemingly went to shit.

Steve isn’t Job, this isn’t that story, again. Rather, it’s fair to say that life on its own had its way with Steve rather than a deity out to prove something and that, really, said life was just Steve’s choices. It all started with a party that Karen and he had attended. It was with friends from work and was at the friend’s new house. What Karen and Steve didn’t realize was that the couple liked to party– hard. After dinner and quite a few cocktails, the wife declared, “Time for ice!”

Steve and Karen couldn’t figure out why there was an event solely centered around ice, but they considered themselves cool and tolerant of anything. Neither Karen or Steve knew what to do when the crystal meth was brought out by the wife and husband who both were beaming with eager anticipation. The rest of the party quickly partook and it was obvious this was not their first time. Steve and Karen, again, considering themselves both cool and tolerant of new things, eventually cast their fears aside and mixed the ice into their biological cocktail. What ensued next was chaos.

Karen, after ingesting an amount of meth she was completely unaware of or ready for, sat for several minutes before quite casually announcing, “I have to shit.” Karen stood and excused herself from the room while Steve sat and tried to bulge his eyes from his head while staring at the wall. A moment passed before a blood curdling scream echoed through the house. Steve immediately recognized the scream as that of Karen and, seeing that no one else was nearly sober enough to care, he quickly bolted towards the bathroom.

Steve was lost for forty-five minutes before honing in on the sound of a weeping Karen. A talking dog in the kitchen had given him lousy directions. After finally locating the bathroom, he burst in and found Karen sobbing on the floor near the toilet. She was bawling and gasping for air yet managed to choke out two words– “toilet baby.” Steve looked into the toilet bowl and instantly vomited. He started, “But, we’re always safe–” his words trailed off in disbelief. Karen sobbed, “I know– I don’t know.” Steve squinted his eyes at the bowl and in utter bewilderment announced, “It’s so fucking brown– I’m pretty sure it’s not mine. White as snow am I– nope, not mine. Smells awful too, babe.”

With that Steve shrugged his shoulders and flushed the commode. Karen screamed from the depths of her soul, “NO! La Treen!” The water swirled as it flushed the excrement away. Neither Steve nor Karen were sure what had flushed. Illegitimate mixed race baby? Impressive pile of shit? Jesus Christ the Sequel? A combination of all three? Neither knew. What Karen and Steve did know now was that meth was the bee’s knees. Within three weeks both of their jobs and residences were replaced with simply a trailer that served for smoking and making meth.

In the end, Steve had it all and lost it all. But, now, he lives solely with Karen and every once in awhile, just every so often, a toilet baby pops by to metaphorically, or, sometimes, literally, say hi and scare them shitless until Steve just, ultimately, shrugs and flushes it away; side note– their plumbing is nearly destroyed. Their landlord hates them. But, hey, they don’t care or know any better at this point– plus, the toilet babies keep them on their toes. It’s a brave new world for Steve and Karen who have it all differently now.

He had been nothing but a student all of his life.

High school, when most are establishing their personal lives, saw Tim studying away nightly.

He wasn’t pressured by his parents. He wasn’t problematically abnormal– he just hadn’t lived.

Freshman year of college had certainly seen more studying; it had also seen many other firsts for Tim. Despite his rigorous attention to academics Tim had still managed to strike up an ongoing friendship with a female student, Becky. The two saw each other regularly, studied together at every possible given opportunity.

Things continued this way for the entire semester and the two reached an ease with one another despite an unspoken mutual attraction that neither had the software to understand what to do with. As they were about to leave for summer break, Becky and Tim were both in good moods over their final grades for the year. The two had celebrated with alcohol and pizza in his dorm room on one of the final nights while the RA was away.

Becky, half inebriated, half driven insane by nearly a year’s worth of growing and yearning, decided to end the night with a parting gift to Tim. Not wanting to kiss him and send him too forward a message, but, not wanting to sleep with him either and send that kind of message, Becky drunkenly and inexperiencedly settled on mooning him.

As the two said goodbye and Becky approached the door she said, “Hey, Tim,” and with that she not only dropped trough but also spread; as I said, she was drunk and severely limited in the relationship department. As with many drinking incidents with the young, a tragedy ensued. See, Tim, just as equally naive and ignorant as Becky, did not respond so well to the gesture presented to him– in fact, Tim’s 34 and still in a psych ward.

Why, you ask?

Because as Becky stood there sticking her ass at him, Tim absolutely lost his mind with male delight– for about two nanoseconds. As Becky spread, bent, and thrust her ass towards Tim, he stared eagerly and then noticed that dead center, right in the pupil of her brown eye, was the ever so slightest bit of a wet, brown protrusion. Tim did two things– instantly vomit and then began reciting the sequence to pi, the reciting being something he had found comforting at a young age.

Tim is still counting. Becky immediately pulled her pants up and played it off as just normal Tim the hypervigilant student and simply men being weird. Becky staggered back to her dorm, passed out, and awoke the next morning. The buzz around campus was that a student was being taken to the psych ward. Becky eventually learned that it was Tim and quickly rushed off to see him. She visited him many times, each time she garnered only a new set of pi’s sequence.

Eventually, as college life began to dominate, her visits began to dwindle and then came to abrupt end. The last time Becky had seen Tim, as she left, she winked at him and said “good luck.” The wink sent Tim into a comatose state for several days and prompted the doctors to ask that she not return. Becky abided and went on to graduate magna cum laude.

She still doesn’t know what exactly happened that night to set him off; deep down, Becky secretly believes she’s gifted with one of God’s finest asses and that its reveal to the virginal Tim set him off. What Becky does allow herself to know for sure is this, the fact that she’ll never forget the huge, body draining move she took that next morning before she found out Tim had lost his mind.