Yep, it’s Christmas 2010. I’m holed up in my Chicago apartment drinking brandy and eating Cornish Hen and decided to share a little fictional satire I wrote today. I’ve been wanting to post some of my fiction here but haven’t till now. I hope you all enjoy it:
The snow was falling outside and the kids were playing in the slick streets. I wasn’t sure how we were going to be spending this Christmas afternoon but it seemed to be turning out quite nicely. A bland Christmas sinking the drinking age down into a mire of boredom on the inside of the house while elf-like children jumped and played out in the white powder. Why had I chosen children over the other white powder, money, power, and a life that was fated to end quickly? Who wants to end up in a rest home anyway? The smell of death all around with your last friend hooked up to a machine that pumps him full of air only to have him deflate every two seconds? That sounds like some sort of modern Spanish Inquisition torture. A life that ends slowly, is that even humane? Death lurking, menacing, staring at you behind wooden bars that slowly burn and char away. The smoke burns your eyes and lungs and deafens your mind. The only sure thing you know is that the black beast will break through and consume you soon. Some days you want to break the bars yourself because it’s not death that’s trapped, it’s you. Death is your gatekeeper and the only way out of your cell is to break those bars. But you’ve lost the strength of middle age and can’t even fathom what youth was once like. The smoke of age has weakened your muscles and bones and the dullness of retirement or laziness has atrophied your mind. So you wait for time to burn those bars and leave you as a pile of ashes with them. What is going to happen to the loved ones who rarely if never come to visit? They fear your reality and dislike the stench of age that permeates ‘the home’. Yet they will not be able to escape their own gilded cage. They are young. Their wooden bars are still coated in the gold and sheen of youth so they either ignore or deny that your fate will be their own; you’re not sure which and you probably don’t care. The times have changed and you don’t understand your own children anymore. The girls are sluts and the guys are fags. Politeness has left society and with it a respect for the old and infirm. The youth want to make their own mistakes and don’t care to learn from yours. Perhaps this is why they say history is fated to repeat itself. In reality the fear of change has hardened you in your ways and modern society had no patience for waiting. You have been left behind, stagnated by your own fear and cannot understand this current generation. You say that the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket but the world doesn’t even remember what a hand-basket is. I’m not quite sure myself. It must be something that involved a hand and a basket. Maybe it was a game… but if it were a game why would it be going to hell? Perhaps people are cheating. That’s what it is! People are cheating at basketball and you aren’t quite sure if that’s fair. Cheating is never fair, even that time you cheated on your ex-wife with those two polish students. You didn’t know one had herpes till it was too late and now regret is in the form of divorce papers and Valtrex. I smile at myself from the window and the scene of the children and a snowy Christmas comes to view again. It looks like the same scene I saw before but my son Tomi has a bloody nose and is crying his eyes out. Sixteen seems to be a bit old to be crying like that but he’ll be alright. Let him work it out himself, it’ll take the pussy out of him. The younger kids are still pelting him with snowballs and Tomi is in the foetal position now. That’s gotta be embarrassing to be taken by a herd of 9 year-olds.
Just another WordPress.com weblog
