Metal Monday Mornings

Good friends, I have failed. Shameful missteps have haunted my footsteps of late, and I acknowledge that my stumblings are entirely my fault. I have failed, and I will do so again. Inevitably. It angers me. To be so doomed, to be so pathetic. What can I do, but wait for more sin to envelop me? What can I do? I wonder and beat my brow, willing myself to change, or at least to escape. Is this it? Is this it?
Hold. But hold indeed, what is that?

It is the bass drum!

It is nothing. A low, pumping, pulsating, beat, nothing more than a stretched out wave of frequency. But hold, dear body, how dare you shift likewise! You enjoy the beat? I can't but help it, tho it contrasts harshly with my strong desire to roll around in self-pity. How dare I jig at such a time, I was enjoying my most melancholic moroseness!

But what of it? There's a God, right? What must he think? His child, so flawed, slopping around in sin and temptation, and what must he think? If anything or anyone can pull me out of this most melancholic mire, it most definitively is the great being who thought the whole darn universe into existence! Pull me out, slap me upside the face with common sense, and shout into my ignorant ears, "HEY! Wake up! What are doing there, slouching meekly, when you are still alive? You are alive, aren't you? Your body still functions, and here you are, in the middle of creation, selfishly thinking only of yourself?"

Forget my losses and my shortcomings, they are in the past! Yes they happened, and yes I am sorry for them, but what is to stop me from living still? Learn from your mistakes they say, get back on the horse they say, and so I shall! Enough sadness, I will confront the future both with defiance and with pep, and will  boogie into the future with the bass drum of the present cheering me on.

By Jove and by Gaffrey, if anything can change, it is me!

The Coffee Shop Man 2

The coffee was hot. Good. If it’s not painful to drink, I drink it too fast. The jazz was interrupted by some garbled French babble before flowing back into some slow swing music.

My target didn’t look up when I sat down. Whatever. His pouting was almost laughable. “You shouldn’t have moved your hat. You know how hard it is to miss your beady little eyes,”

He grunted. I continued. “Seriously though, I thought you left this town. What happened? Vengeance not a strong enough motivator anymore?”

He grunted again. It was a distinctly cordial grunt. I sipped my coffee and burned my tongue. Somehow he sighed without moving his chest. “Mik,” he grated, “I don’t wanna talk. Go ‘way.”

I didn’t move. He looked at his mug like he just realized he was holding it. “I dunno why I came here. They don’t even serve booze.”

“Hey, focus,” I couldn’t figure out how he could be so apathetic. “What happened to Logan? You had the train ticket and everything. Why are you still here?”

“Hey, I’m not still here. I’m long gone.” He slumped forward and flopped his forearms on the table. “Point is, I came back. Been back for three days.”

Usually it’s easy for me to keep my voice steady, but for some reason it started getting all shrill on me. “So you were there for what, a few hours? Didn’t you find them?”

Naturally

There’s sweet, icy piano music a-slidin’

It’s natural

Sweet background music

But the piano ain’t where I’m lookin’

Cuz she’s a-standin’ there

Existin’

S’all

Just standin’ round, natural-like

But elusive, y’know? So… elusive

Got that dark brown hair, an that way she moves… even when she’s not…

A special, so original smile

An I steal a glance at that smile, an that hair, an those moves

An brother, I just don’t know

Can’t make no sense out of myself

I’m just confused

But she…

She’s still there

A-standin’ around, all natural-like

An she’s just out of reach

Too… damn… elusive

An brother, I’m pretty sure it’s my fault

The Coffee Shop Man 1

I saw him from across the coffee shop. It was kind of a dumpy coffee shop. One of those out of the way hovels where prissy hipsters come to brood and commune. It smelled like coffee; an attractive, but distinctly bitter smell. Similar to the man who just walked in. He was balding, but his rock of a chin more than made up for this trivial shortcoming. It was one of those chins that allowed male movie stars to star in romantic roles well into their fifties, simply because of the chin-painted illusion that they haven’t lost any of the masculinity from their decades old prime.

I tried to make out what he ordered. The stupid staff in this joint takes really takes their sweet time in making drinks, and by the time they were done I had forgotten that I ever cared about what his drink was at all. Thanking his server, he swept his stiff leather coat in a slight, dangerous swirl and strolled out the way he came in. Smooth jazz began to play over the tinny speakers in the ceiling.

I watched the man stroll back to his ride from my window seat. A black Escalade, of all things. Any doubt that his shades cast about his identity was quickly brushed away after one caught a glimpse of his car. Subtle indeed.

Finishing my drink, I waved away a nearby degenerate who felt that it was his duty to tell me all about how he spent his irrelevant weekend, and was about to drop my glass cup on the counter and leave, when the guy in the corner raised the hat off his face.

I hesitated. Not good. My mind quickly churned out the potential results to my walking away, not reacting, and not giving in to my curiosity prodding at my brain. Thankfully, my mind has a habit of churning fast. I turned my awkward delay into an order for a refill. The cashier passed my used glass back to his coworker, his eyebrow arching at my insistence not to use a clean cup. You say it’s weird, I say it saves me $0.05 on my drink.

Him and the Night

               “It’s dark,” said the night.

               “Oh, is it?” he responded, “I can’t tell.” At least, he was pretty sure he was a he. He couldn’t actually imagine being anything else, so he decided that for the sake of convenience he would stick with what he thought he knew.

               “Are you sure it’s dark? How do you tell?”

               “I don’t really know,” the night thought out loud, “That’s just how things are, I guess. People have always said that it’s dark when I’m around.”

               “What do they say when you’re not around?”

               “I have no idea, because then I’m not close enough to hear what it is they’re saying.”

               “Hmm. Well, this is all very interesting,” said he, “Really, it is. But I feel like I really must be going.”

               “Yes? How do you know that?”

               “Same way that you know it’s dark. Because that’s just how it is. We know about ourselves because of what people say about us. So I know that I must continue walking because I say so.”

               “I see. People logic never really made any sense to me, but I suppose it would make sense to people. Else, why would they keep using it?”

               He felt like he was moving, and that was more than he had felt before, so he decided that it would be progress if he continued feeling that way. “Goodbye, night. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

               “Bye. See if you can find me once you’ve gotten where you’re going. Good luck.”

               He imagined himself gesturing in a way that would indicate that he was leaving, but none of it really made any sense. Anyway, the night was getting fuzzy, and this strange bright sensation began to cover him.

               “Hm, this isn’t night,” he was getting concerned that he would never arrive because everything was so confusing, “Now it’s not dark, it’s messy. This new night is messy.”

               And he was right. The area he was moving into was cluttered with all sorts of things that were coloured, and had mass. Now this was most confusing. The objects seemed to be separated, as if this new kind of night had hardened and then been smashed into a bunch of incongruous bits. And the bits obviously repelled each other, else why were they not sinking into and fading through each other?

---------------------------------------------------

               I enjoyed writing this.

               I am slowly becoming more and more peeved that the blogger posting system does not contain an adequate indentation system.

               Also, I only really write from a male standpoint because I have never experienced life from any other perspective.

7 Things I have Learned About Blue-Collar Work

1. It sucks
2. Be polite to everyone and your job will be much easier
3. It's a lot more fun to work with people who don't care too much about their jobs
4. Canadian winters are not terribly compatible with construction
5. Coffee is essential
6. Nobody seems to understand that radio stations exist which don't just play the top 40 songs
7. Blue-collar work (at least in construction) is dirty. I hate being dirty
8. The vocabulary of most workers is about Grade 7 level, just with more swearing

---------------------------------------------------------------

I've decided that I don't like the name of my blog. It was made in haste and was a desperate attempt to sound original. Alas.

A Man on his Porch

            It was a pleasant winter evening. The elderly gentleman stood on his porch, watching the cars as they went by and occasionally glancing at the construction going on across the road from his quaint, attractive townhouse.

            The hedge around his garden was well kept, and gave the man a nice sense of privacy, even though it was only about a hand’s breadth above waist height. His gnome bustled around the hedge, trimming a leaf here, a wayward branch there, helping the shrubby wall keep up the illusion that it had in fact grown to be as orderly and mathematical as it appeared.

            The man was very pleased with his life at the moment. Heat emanating from a mug of mild black tea teased his hand and prompted a satisfied smile. He had a good life, after all. He kept a clean, prim house that was but a short distance walk from the town’s small commercial district; he didn’t struggle to make ends meet; and he had reached that stage in life where he had both the means and the time to take things slowly, and fully enjoyed doing so.

---------------------------------------------------------------

            Hello again. I have finally decided that I will continue to post updates, but the focus will no longer be on travel, rather it will be a place where I dump pieces of creative writing I've made. I don't know how often I'll update, but it will probably be more than once a month.