Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Fear and Loathing in Overland Park pt 8 and 9


PART 8

Continuing the trend of or...

"A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth."

-Aesop


The revolution begins at midnight. Or mid-day. Flyers are going out to the major cities and metropolitans. Keep an eye on the sky and the papers below. Something will hit your hands soon. Hopefully.


Traveling to work this morning, an ominous vibe filled me. Pushed me to the boiling point. I was sweating. Jerking the wheel too hard at every turn. Some sense of foreboding dread had swept over me to the point where I couldn't see straight. Couldn't think straight. The thoughts of worthless meetings and anger and frustration from before was still there. The idea of revolution still blooming behind my eyes and within my heart.


I should have dropped acid this morning. I should have opened the floodgates to the wealth of information gathered while in an acidic stupor. I wouldn't have felt so violated this morning. So intensely disgusted by those around me when I stepped into the office. I may have understood exactly why I was so frustrated if it was still stemming from last week.

But it wasn't any longer. It was something else. It was a lie. Perpretrated by someone least expected and now number one on the list.

I now see the error of my ways. I trusted the Company with my future once before. I trusted it to have my best interests at heart. I assumed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Company wasn't evil and soulless.

Now the building has sprung fangs. Large horns directly over the west and east wings. A pitchfork is grasped in long skeletal fingers that scratch at the concrete as you travel by. A little piece of your soul is swallowed daily by this gut-wrenching horror of a Company, and now, the lies are abounding on all sides.


It has begun, fresh and new, to seem like maybe working under the conditions of a stupor would be for the best. I usually am more influential in my words and actions when I am. I usually have a little bit less ability to control my actions and the reactions about me at the same time. Weird.

I take a long breath at the lie. At the reality that has been beset after the lie was told and the truth has come out. I clench my fists and grind my teeth. Little specks of teeth grind into my water as I take a long drink, wishing the cool refreshing breeze from a whiskey sour was overtaking my throat instead of what composes 70% of my body re-entering through my face-hole.

Instead of whiskey, mescaline. Instead of mescaline, absinthe. Instead of distilled absinthe, straight absinthe.

I want to taste my taste buds explode. I want to feel the air around me. I want something so much more than this Company who has managed to bastardize my existence and turn it into a joke. I want everything to erupt around me and change instead of the world to fall on my shoulders like Atlas walking the Earth damned for all eternity.

I want something more. We all want something more. We all want to be something different. It's time. It's time for something new. Something of the or variety. Something strange and exciting and fresh.

It's time for the or to take over and start something revolutionary. It's time.

"Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson



PART 9

Continuing the trend of More Or...

"When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges."

-Jack Handy

Things change everyday. Things get weirder. More strange and more constricted around me. I keep seeing things, things that aren't there. Visions? Maybe. Hallucinations? Probably. My banana yellow auto began speaking to me this morning on the quest to work. Telling me secrets of the universe. Increased wordplay made the trip quicker and easier to handle than most, and the Groundhog Day vibe almost melted away.

Almost.

Even weirder things happened. ASHES dIVIDE was playing in the boat and beside me at a stoplight pulled Billy Howerdel or at least a well-crafted automaton appearing to have taken the form of Howerdel. I rolled the window down, carefully, slowly, particularly, to make sure that I don't scare off this automaton or possible Howerdel impostor.

When I rolled the window all the way down, taking a particular amount of time as the window is hand-crank styled and not the fancy new models with the buttons that go up and down with the flick of a switch, so did he. Billy-esque male. Billy-bot. Whatever he was.

I motioned to him to look over. He did. Like a frightened deer he stopped. It wasn't Howerdel. It was more a Billy Corgan-bot. I waved my hand to him and mouthed my mistake and continued onward. Howerdel's music wrapping around my head as I hand cranked the window back to the top. I was ashamed at my mistake.

Back to the reason: interviews. The weird happened more than ever in a waking dream with R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket screaming obscenities about my pansiness and my fear of change at me while attempting to cross-reference other roles he has been in. Saving Silverman. The Frighteners. My mind kept changing his garb from football coach/gym teacher/police officer/drill sergeant and all I kept hearing was: failure. Discipline. Live and learn. Get off the pot. Do something with your life and stop whining.

Then the radio woke me up with the new song by NIN. Discipline. A trend? Had I really been asleep? Was I remaking the world in my image? Was I God and this is all some elaborate plot to make me feel more human?


Questions questions and more questions. On my way to work, my destination of no choice, my heart skipped a beat as these thoughts flooded back in. Discipline. Honor. Respect. None of that follows me to where I go every morning, the empty shell of a building that encases mortal souls til their doom. I decided to act.

I decided to act.

In a similar way to my action against Billy-bot, I took a pen. Wrote some notes. Reworked some samples. Got an interview. All in the span of a day. A DAY.

ONE DAY!

One more day and none of this would have worked out. A different day and a different person and instead of changing things because of a dream with R. Lee Ermey and a waking nightmare with Billy Corgan-bot, it would have been a dream with Patrick Duffy and a waking nightmare with Delta Burke and my actions would have lead me in front of the television to watch Designing Women and Dallas reruns.

But alas, things have changed.

For the better?

One can certainly hope so.

It is very hard to do what comes naturally to us sometimes, to fend for ourselves instead of others when responsibility seems to be the most important thing. But today...

TODAY IS DIFFERENT. Today is about the Or. Today is about the different. Today is about taking chances and making changes and doing something completely different.

"Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world - to do what we want. And it takes the greatest courage. I mean, what we really want."

-Ayn Rand

0 comments:

| Top ↑ |