I've Gone to 83% opaqueness, Pt. 1

I wake up today hungover and a little invisible.

I wake up slowly. I move my eyelids. I find them glued together with sleep. I begin to remember the night before.

Last night was not a good idea. Tequila is never a good idea for me. The first shot always has a way of secretly inviting several friends along, motioning to them behind my back, sneaking them past the doorman that was my self-control. These make a soiree of debauchery in my head that I never plan to attend but always get dragged along to.

I check my biological inventory. Heart, hands, feet, elbows. All nominal. The rest of my body is chugging along like a 1974 Dodge Dart, threatening to stall or overheat, but still running. I’ll live

It is at this point I make my first mistake of the morning. I lift my head off the pillow. Stop. Back up. Delete. I try to lift my head off the pillow. Elephants stamped on my face and leave dung in my mouth.

I vomit in my slippers. My throat aches.
I put my hand to my head. My hair aches.
Last night was a horrible fucking idea. My vocabulary aches.

I decide to remedy this first mistake. I go back to sleep.

My brain wakes up three hours later, my body four minutes after that, and I stumble to the bathroom. I drop my slippers in the tub.

I brush the elephant dung out of my mouth and finally look up at the mirror. After wiping the sleep from my eyes I look again and see the framed picture of Abe Vigoda on the wall behind me staring through my chest. I’ve gone to 83% opaqueness.

An open letter to all you people who’ve been touching my stuff:

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I do not appreciate all you people touching my stuff. That honey bran muffin that I left on my table this morning at the coffee shop, I wasn’t finished with that. I was going to eat all of it. I was just pacing myself. Those things are dense and require a certain amount of time devoted for proper digestion.
Furthermore, who touches another person’s table at a coffee shop? It was quite clear that I had just stepped out for a cigarette. My computer was still there and open. And to the lady whose name I never got and who I asked if she could keep an eye on my laptop, you’re guilty by association. I would think that any normal person could make the logical leaps that if I was coming back to my table I might still want that muffin. All you had to do was say one little sentence to the bus boy/girl/person of undefined gender. “Oh, I’m sorry, but the gentleman sitting there is just out smoking and I’m not sure if he’s done with that delectable, but dense, baked-good.” Simple and sweet (the sentence and the muffin.)
This kind of fervent neglect to act is like failing to pull the lever that diverts a streetcar away from unaware pedestrians. You are ultimately responsible for the deaths of those innocent people and for the touching of my muffin.


There are more offenders that I wish to address in this letter:

Whichever neighbor of mine that has been taking the menus and ads left on my screen door. I have a drawer in my kitchen where I keep those.

The guy who leaves flyers for European auto repair on my Kia Rio. I do not keep those. Stop touching my car.

Jeanine at the office. That’s my goddamn tape dispenser. I brought here from my last job. Go get your own.

Whoever stole the pack of Fruit Stripe fruit flavored gum off my desk while I was in the Mendelson meeting last Tuesday from 10 to 11:30 A.M. This might be Jeanine as well.

Dr. Hansaraj Chakrabati , PhD. I know my health insurance requires the physicals and I gave consent. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.


In closing, would you people kindly keep your grabby little hands to yourselves and off of my stuff?

This would be greatly appreciated,

Martin Henderson
Accounts Payable
Hawkings Paper Supply, Ltd.

An old man laughing.

Dennis steps outside, pulls a bent Camel Light from his breast pocket. He lights the cigarette, awkwardly juggling his coffee, and inhales shallowly.

An old man sits at a table on the patio to his right. The man’s face immediately reminds Dennis of 19th century photos from the California Gold Rush. A prospector. The man is wearing a dark grey suit that’s seen better days. The man has seen better days. But he laughs with a genuine, full spirited laugh, touched by a hint of smoker’s rasp.

Dennis follows the man’s eye-line, trying to see what the old man is laughing at. The elementary school across the street. Dennis doesn’t see anything obviously comedic. The man could just be senile. He could be remembering a joke from twenty years ago, vacantly staring at nothing at all. Dennis enjoys imagining that the man has just seen a kid in the playground fall down. One of those running full-speed falls where your head just outpaces your feet. The kid is bounding along one second and the next he’s airborne, his feet flying out behind him, spilling into the air. He skids across the grass a few inches and lies still for a moment before propping himself up. His hands stained green and covered in wet dirt, he looks around for someone to acknowledge the traumatic injury he’s just incurred. When nobody takes the time to offer him pity or empathy, the kid simply jumps up and runs off again, chasing the red kick ball that is still rolling away towards the other side of the playground.

Dennis imagines the old man, with his several rows of misaligned teeth stained yellow from tobacco, a human-shark hybrid, remembering what it was to be a child of that age. An age when pity wasn’t something that you gave yourself but received from others. An age when, if someone didn’t acknowledge your pain, you didn’t hurt.

The old man’s laugh fades from the high spirits to an cheerful chuckle to a fit of chest rattling coughs, his lungs driving out phlegm and spent amusement. Dennis vows to never reach that age.

The Great Unexplained Orange Incident of 2009

The plate of orange peels has been on the lower shelf of the coffee table for a week now. I didn’t buy the orange. I didn’t eat the orange. I don’t even recognize the plate. Everyone else in the house denies their involvement. I’m dubbing it the Great Unexplained Orange Incident of 2009. What a way to end a decade. A mystery with no closure. Although, I suppose that most mysteries don’t lend themselves to closure based on the whims of our calendar system. If they did, that would be a mystery in of itself.

The orange is starting to whither. A strange quality of orange peels. I’ve rarely seen a rotten one. They tend to just shrivel until they’re golf ball, snake egg-sized. Old man testicles. The aroma from the coffee table is a sickly sweet smell. Just a hint of decay, but mostly that chemical citrus smell you get in citrus “based” cleaning products.

Here’s one theory I’ve been throwing around: there’s a ghost in our house. But that doesn’t make much sense. How, as a ghost, is your M.O. of haunting eating the fruit of the living. Some sort of poor soul that died choking on an orange seed? Is that even possible? In what conceivable way could a person die in which they would just eat fruit. You need something scary. Appropriately scary. A trail of water where no one has taken a shower. Windows rattling. Knives floating through the air. You’ve got to moan some. Stand in the middle of a field and stare at the distance forlorgnly.

I can’t believe I forgot how to spell forlornly. Awesome, got it right that time. At least if I died at this moment you wouldn’t find me haunting your bookcase, tearing out the F-section of the dictionaries. I could be the most boring ghost ever. That might be the most annoying afterlife I can think of. I would prefer everlasting torment over that.

So this orange. Disregarding the supernatural, I have to assume I’ve been lied to by my roommates, that or I’m experiencing extremely early onset Alzheimer’s. I hope it’s the lying. I can deal with others lying to me, but me lying to me, that would be upsetting. It’s the reason I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I prefer others to let me down, as opposed to letting myself down.

The Liar

 
I look down at the drink in my hand, a bourbon on the rocks. A drink designed to keep me drunk and blissfully unaware of my surroundings. I rattle the ice in the glass and half miss the question.

“Sorry what? Oh, no, definitely not. I mean, yes, of course there is some possibility of personal harm involved in unbeaching a sperm whale, especially if they’ve been there a while and are getting a handle on the solid ground food chain and their position in it, but the sheer awe and exhilaration involved in such an endeavor is definitely worth a few broken bones.

When you’re dealing with a creature of such power, such nobility, you almost feel like you’re communing with the universe. If, and when, you have a chance to look into the eye of an animal like that, I swear, it’s almost like looking into the eye of God.”

My focus drifts from the face of Sally, the attractive and gullible young lady in front of me. I do this when I’m bored at parties. I lie. The more bored I am, the more extravagant the lie. It’s a matter of pride if I can keep a listener believing when I’m spouting off the most outrageous bullshit you can imagine. Sally is just too easy. Too trusting. Too naïve.

“How did you get involved in something like that?”

A spark. An opportunity. Good girl. Don’t just trust anything I say. Question at least some small detail of my farce.

My mind races to find the most outrageous thing this girl will believe. How did I get involved in saving whales?:

1.    I grew up with a dolphin training family but they were attacked and killed by poachers. Now I patrol the night fighting injustice and saving cetaceans. The coast guard have a bat ray signal they shine into the sky when I am needed.
2.    I was swimming one day and I saw, underwater, a burning bed of kelp. The kelp said to me, “My name is ‘I am’ and by my decree, the whale shall be cherished. Go forth and do good.”
3.    I used to smoke PVC pipe stuffed with twinkies. It was a dark time in my life. I did things I wasn’t proud of. When I finally got clean, my sponsor told me that I should put my life in perspective and turned me onto SPERM (Saving and Protecting Errant Roaming Mammals).

“Sally, can you keep a secret? I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. I know I’ve only just met you, but I need someone to tell and, I know it sounds crazy, but I think, no, I feel, I can trust you.

When I was thirteen, I changed. I gained the ability to talk to sea creatures. It’s harder the more removed they are from humans. Sea slugs are damn near impossible to understand, but I feel a strong connection with whales.

Not only that, but there are others like me. We all have different abilities, which seem to manifest around puberty.  Some of us are more dangerous than others, but on the whole, we’re not that different from everyone else.”

Silence. I don’t try to read into the expressions on Sally’s face. I focus on looking relieve, unburdened.

Sally opens her mouth and whispers, “Oh my god, that’s amazing!”

Jesus Christ. My eyes wander.