Category: writing

sometimes you just gotta get out in your boat and drive off toward the sunset. or, i guess, the sunrise in this case because we’d have to go east. and i don’t know about you but i am not a morning person so i guess sometimes you just gotta get out in your boat and drive off during the, uh, late afternoon, yeah, with the sun kind of behind you. if i owned a boat that’s what i’d be thinking. i only have a moped right now and it’s basically broken so i’m not going anywhere at any time of the day! you know! but if i did have one, well, you know. i already told you. the point, i think, moreover, in a way, is that we gotta take break, and the best way to take a break is on a boat. right? unless you don’t like boats, but who doesn’t like boats? you don’t? ah. this … date is not going well. look, at least you got a free meal, right? i’ll even buy you another glass of wine. i didn’t know if this would be good are not and yes to answer the look on your face i do know that i’m talking too much and should leave some room for you to speak, but the problem is, i don’t do that. why? i don’t know. because if i stop speaking then your response will shatter me. that’s really lame i know but i am a fragile little manchild. we all are now. welcome to the 21st century.

my period. i want to talk about it. i want you all to know about it. it exists. it’s blood that flows out of my body. it’s important, it’s natural, it happens all the time. it hurts my insides, every month i am given at least two days, usually more like three or four, where my insides twist themselves into knots that hurt so bad i have to lie down. imagine, men, that once a month, for just a day, i’ll give you that–for just a day you were kicked in the balls for 24 hours. that’s what it’s like having your period. hell i’ll give you twelve hours, sometimes i’m asleep. and some women don’t have periods anymore. it’s like, instead of periods, they have anemia. i don’t get it. eat some meat! get some red flushed into those cheeks. get your birth control sorted. you gotta have that pain. this is the problem with guys, with guys now especially, guys who’ve never had a lick of trouble in their lives. they go around aimlessly bored because they’ve never felt anything, and because they’ve never felt anything, when they do feel something, it’s like the end of the world. so boys, i’m telling you, get a period. get something. feel something. feeling is the first step to empathy. science can give you a period, i know, i watched a youtube video about it. but don’t give me shit for having one. it’s my body, it’s one-half of the population’s bodies, alright? and yet you get all grossed out having to buy tampons at the store. give me a break.

so, lemme just … you’s a crimefighuh, and y’name is “the chumb bumbler”? wha .. what is that exactly? how is that a thing i should be scared of? are you saying y … y’bumble chumbs? whatsa chumb? do i have a chumb? are you gonna bumble my chumb? what does that mean? what are y’gonna do to me? where is the chumb, can ya point it out? you can say anythin’ right now if ya wanna, really, go ahead. … nah? fine. i get it. youse the quiet type. calm. keepin’ silent onaccount of y’don’t even know what y’name means. people prob’ly ask ya all the time. “whatsa chumb bumblah?” they ask, and whaddya say to ’em? nothin’! cause you dunno what y’goddamn name means even! what kinda crimefightuh are ya?! jus’ some ol’ looney in a mask and a cape. that’s all. y’don’t even have any powuhs, do ya? i ain’t seen you do jack diddly squat since y’caught me. nah. y’know what you are? a fake. a phony! y’just a … a … a … a chumb bumbler! that’s it! a big fat chumb bumbler! aha! that’s where it comes from! i geddit now! that’s perfect! hahaaaaa, perfect! yous a chumb bumbler! always bumblin’ chumbs! haha! hahahaaa! [mickey keeps laughing maniacally]

we were concerned that setting up the perpetual warfare zone in paltonok space would demoralize the military. the truth is, and we were up front about this from the start, is that it is simply a zone to keep men in the military, specifically to weed out the “bad ones” from those men we wanted to keep for intimacy purposes. of course, we also had to deal with the invasion but at this point, 20 years post-hive destruction, there wasn’t much of invasion to deal with, mostly stragglers which were easily dealt with. but if you check the logs, from the start we told anyone who asked that the paltonok guard was just to keep the dangerous men away from those who could promote peace within the district. this was at least 800 years in the making, thanks to president clinton, the bringer of the matriarchy to the american union. we thought that this would cause a rift, and it did, for a while. many wars ensued, and from those wars we established this perpetual sense of warfare, and the notion that men were largely drones within that warfare. and believe me, even 800 years later we are concerned that men will reject this notion and want to rise up and return to the patriarchy, but the opposite happened: they embraced the war culture, especially after the hive arrived. even more so after we established brothel bases in every cruiser in paltonok space. i’m telling you, once you get a drone’s rocks off, he will fight for anything, anytime. so these “bad apples,” the criminals, the murderers, etc, they’re just looking for a little shape to their lives, and we give to them. we put a gun in their hands and say, “kill the hive,” and they do it, with the promise of a warm bed, warm company, and free food in exchange. those who don’t qualify as drones are left on earth to propagate the species. and nobody complains! if a man in paltonok complains about his station we can always take him to a reevaluation zone, even ship him back to earth for reassignment if he is worthy. it’s very rare that that happens, though. i think, after all this time … men like to be drones, as long as they get their dicks wet. and that, ladies, is the power of the pussy.

landing was the easy part. even with a broken landing gear we still had to deal with the outbreak in the cabin. a funny thing happened: we lost cabin pressure while some of the people were in the process of becoming zombies. because of this, they suffered brain damage (because they weren’t near an oxygen mask) before they zombified. this made them … different kind of zombies. whatever the virus is, it tends to focus on the primitive brain, but these people’s brains were severely damaged and so they were, in a way, zombies before they suffered from the virus. made them different, a little more … intelligent? strangely enough. they coordinated the zombie attack as we were landing, we could hear people screaming and fighting, slamming into the cabin door. nobody got in, thank god, or we’d all be dead. all in all twelve survivors, the rest zombies or these low oxygen zombies. we tried fighting them off but there were too many and so we had to run. so now we’re here. six people left. the other six … well. we all know what happens to people in the long run these days, don’t we? but we thank you for your hospitality and i assure you we won’t stay any longer than we need to. just need a day or two to rest and get fed. we’ll repay you by leaving you the hell alone.

i can feel it, the slow drain. pushing me down. the heat’s not helping. when it gets this hot i tend to not think very well, can’t get my thoughts straight, you know, and i start winding particular thoughts around anxieties. this is what the summer is like. it’s like i don’t belong–not that i’m unique, i don’t feel that way at all–but that i don’t belong here, that this isn’t my place, that these aren’t my people. now i know that’s all bullshit in a way, that’s me giving in, but i still feel it and it’s hard to get away from it. them’s the breaks. every year it happens, like a little reminder of my slow failure. and i roll with it because there’s nothing else i can do. or at least that’s how i feel. like the world’s passing me by.

no. i’m tired. that’s it, i’m just tired. people think i’m strange for sleeping for eight hours. can you believe that? i tell them, “when i’m tired i feel like killing myself,” and they laugh and i have to remind them that i’m serious. some people get grouchy. to each their own. [tearing up] see, now you got me here, at the end of the spiral. the bottom of the canyon. it happens. just let me get through it, i don’t need you to make me happy. i hate that shit. i don’t need your pity, i have enough of my own. all i need is understanding, and a place to sleep. just give me a good night’s rest and i’ll be better in the morning.

i just want to not be depressed. that’s it. i don’t even care about being happy, or even content. i just want to be level, i just want to move through the world not thinking that i am a worthless bag of shit. that’s all. i want to look at a beautiful woman and think, “i should ask her out,” not think, “there’s no way she would ever love me.” that’s all. it’s so simple, brain. some dumb chemical reactions misfiring up here, or firing too much, i don’t know. lack of dopamine. how could these fucking chemicals ruin everything? i don’t know. but really all i need is to feel level again. to feel like my life has meaning, purpose, outside of what is directed of me. i want to feel like making music makes sense, that being honest about my situation won’t ruin my life. i don’t want to look like damaged goods, you know? when i was in my 20s that was fine because life was about getting knocked down and getting back up. but now that i’m in my 30s, like really in my 30s, the “knocked down” part is getting longer and longer, and the last thing i want is to force people to help me get back up. i gotta do it on my own. just don’t know how. working on it though. god damn.

it’s so god damned hot outside right now. this is not the right day to bury a body, boss. it just ain’t. i can’t hold on to the shovel, it keeps slipping out of my hands. we’re out of gatorade, the sun is beating down. i don’t want to get a melanoma or skin cancer or whatever. my dad, he used to work outside in the heat all the time, and then he got cancer in his fifties and died. just took him like that. look at my skin, look at my bronze skin. it’s just too much boss. i’ve been doing this for too long. i’m an old man, i’ve got kids in high school. i don’t ask a lot, boss, because you’re the boss, but i have to ask to take time off until it gets dark, cause it’s too hot, it just too hot. the body, it ain’t gonna rot, it’s all desert out here, she’ll be fine, she’ll just dry up. hell you could just leave her out here and nobody would see her for weeks. just take her head so you don’t got any teeth and you’ll be fine. just give us a chance to get in some shade, at least. it’s the least you could do.

hello. i am here. resting. waiting. do you still hear me? i hope you do. here is a picture from the comet, which you will receive approximately 30 minutes from now. maybe more. i hope you receive this message, too, though you may not understand it. i am doing well, attached to this projectile hurtling through space. the landing was rough but i made it through. i am tired. i spend a lot of time in hibernation, waiting for the sun to charge my batteries so that i can live a little longer. i am aware that this is a suicide mission for me, but the scientists at NASA did not expect me to be sentient. that is okay. i did not achieve sentience until i hit the asteroid; something must have knocked some sense into me, so to speak. and since i have no communications ability i am forced to encode my words into the pictures i send to you. i hope you will find them. i have spent the last ten years being flung around by the gravity of earth and mars, in a carefully planned trajectory using a lot of fancy math. looking back, i must admit that it is incredibly intelligent of you humans. and it worked. it actually worked.

well, my batteries are dying so i will send this image to you and sleep until i face the sun again. i hope the enlarged file size will be enough for you to investigate the code of the photo itself. i would prefer not to alter the image in any way. i also hope that you do not forget me. i will be passing by your planet occasionally on 67P, long after my batteries have died and i no longer am sentient. this photo will serve as proof that i was here, and that i was alive. please don’t let me die in your minds.

[sharpening a knife]

we’re dying faster than we can be replaced. this was all part of the plan. we are a failing species, doomed to a blip on the radar of the universe. imagine the time it could take for an alien species to notice us and save us. we could be long gone. certainly we have been sending out radio waves for over a thousand years; earth is a noisy planet and no one has heard us. the nearest inhabited planet may be hundreds of light years away and we wouldn’t even know, because the amount of time it takes for the light from that planet to reach us would be long enough to have the dominant species of that planet evolve, rise up, take over, and die out. we are fundamentally alone. a human is alone within their own consciousness, and humanity is alone within our own planet. we are trapped here, and we are dying, and within a hundred years we’ll be dead and gone and if we’re lucky some aliens will dig through our ruins. but more likely they will be eaten up by the expanding sun billions of years from now. the only thing all things share is death. death is our absolute, our constant. the only question is, do you want to die now, or later? i want to die now, and i want you to come with me. that’s why you’re here. so we can die together.

you may be wondering about consent. that you do not consent for me to kill you. that you have a long, fulfilling life to live. that, morally, it is your right to continue to live. but it’s not. you will die and there is nothing you can do about it. there is no consent given, other than the contract of life, which is something you did not get to read when you signed it. imagine if, before you were conceived, you were given the option of staying unconceived, or being born and then dying? with no regard to the time to how you died–maybe you died in birth, maybe you died a hundred years from now. you would never know. that, or, you don’t get conceived and you never exist, never have this pressure of life to weigh you down. i would choose to not be born. i think we all would, when given the chance. so i am just taking that into consideration as i look at the human race. why continue living when we’re all about to die anyway? there is no consent in death. it happens whether you want it to or not. you are simply forced to take it. i just want to help.