benchilada (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
benchilada) wrote2004-08-27 04:29 pm
benchilada) wrote2004-08-27 04:29 pm
I'll tell you I love you if you stop hitting me...
HAND-WRITTEN AT: “Home of Gourmet Chinese and Thai Restaurant”
TYPED AT: The University of Illinois Bookstacks, on my break
I’m eating curry tofu and vegetables with steamed rice, drinking Thai coffee, and trying to beat back a monsterfuck headache that’s been tugging at the ass of my brain all day. Must be in O.K. head-shape for ride to Michigan, to help Sara’s parents move furniture, et al, from a small family summer-home in Three Rivers to a small family summer-home in Galesburg, Illinois.
It seems that I don’t have, as recently reported, just a dozen white hairs. You see, I’ve grown out my beard in the last week and a half and have discovered an actual white patch of hair.
To prove, yet again, that I have no sense of embarrassment, they would seem to have a direct correlation to the recently-arrived and fast-spreading white, pigment-free splotches on my naughty bits.
That’s right, gentle reader, it seems that I may, in fact, be developing vitiligo.
God has taken yet another, previously undiscovered, steaming shit in my D.N.A.
Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Manic Depression, and now Vitiligo. If somebody can give me rickets, I think I have a full-house.
Oddly, I’m not terribly concerned. Even if it spreads to visible areas, which is far from a certainty, according to everything I’ve read so far, I don’t much care if people stare. I’m a touch too laid back. Or I don’t give a shit. Perhaps I’ve just repeated myself there…
In any event, here’s a poem about it:
---
I continue to wear my
paint-spattered,
natty,
torn,
old,
khakis,
because I can’t afford
what I need
to wear:
designer genes.
---
And here’s a supershortstory that sucks, but I have to get it out of my head, it’s cluttering up useful space:
---
Try as I might, I can’t seem to die. Just like I can’t eat, or drink. Or touch her.
For years now…four years now…it’s been this walking hell for me, since the day my migraine got worse and worse and worse and I felt something go “pop.” Not me, but everything that wasn’t me.
After a year, I discovered it was because I had accidentally…paused myself, for about six pico-seconds. And everybody else had kept going, full-throttle. I can see them, or rather, I can see the light left behind by them as they move, beautiful, perfect holograms, complete with sound.
And smell. Good God, I follow her, smelling her perfume, smelling her when she’s just sweated off enough soap to reveal that unique scent that only she has. Listening to her laugh, and cry, and scream.
It’s only living things that I can’t touch.
Somehow, everything else remains substantial enough for me to handle, but everything I eat tastes like ashes, and all the drinks are like bile. I’m never thirsty or hungry, anyway.
And so I watch her and wonder where her life will go, every day, I stalk her from just a hair’s-breadth away. She’s my own private soap opera, only so much nicer.
I wish. Oh, Christ, how I wish…that I’d told her how much I loved her, when I still had the chance. Instead of just asking if she could spare a quarter every time she walked past my box at night.
---
And here’s your homework:
Less than three hundred words, starting with the following sentence:
“I woke up this morning to find that I had shot myself in the foot.”
Post the story to Dead-horse@yahoogroups.com, or benchilada on LiveJournal, and/or e-mail the story to moxy@tmbg.org
Thanks.
Away from the internet until Sunday night, I imagine. Ring the cel phone if you must reach me. Definitely ring it if you’ve gotten me one of those rhesus monkeys that can control a robot arm from across the country…
benjamin sTone
CURRENT MUSIC: Louis typing and scanning, Chuck talking on the phone
LAST MOVIE: Still SAMURAI RESURRECTION
CURRENT BOOKS: Narrowed to FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL IN ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, THE SUICIDE CLUB by Robert Louis Stevenson, and THE CONQUEST OF TIME, by H.G. Wells
TYPED AT: The University of Illinois Bookstacks, on my break
I’m eating curry tofu and vegetables with steamed rice, drinking Thai coffee, and trying to beat back a monsterfuck headache that’s been tugging at the ass of my brain all day. Must be in O.K. head-shape for ride to Michigan, to help Sara’s parents move furniture, et al, from a small family summer-home in Three Rivers to a small family summer-home in Galesburg, Illinois.
It seems that I don’t have, as recently reported, just a dozen white hairs. You see, I’ve grown out my beard in the last week and a half and have discovered an actual white patch of hair.
To prove, yet again, that I have no sense of embarrassment, they would seem to have a direct correlation to the recently-arrived and fast-spreading white, pigment-free splotches on my naughty bits.
That’s right, gentle reader, it seems that I may, in fact, be developing vitiligo.
God has taken yet another, previously undiscovered, steaming shit in my D.N.A.
Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Manic Depression, and now Vitiligo. If somebody can give me rickets, I think I have a full-house.
Oddly, I’m not terribly concerned. Even if it spreads to visible areas, which is far from a certainty, according to everything I’ve read so far, I don’t much care if people stare. I’m a touch too laid back. Or I don’t give a shit. Perhaps I’ve just repeated myself there…
In any event, here’s a poem about it:
---
I continue to wear my
paint-spattered,
natty,
torn,
old,
khakis,
because I can’t afford
what I need
to wear:
designer genes.
---
And here’s a supershortstory that sucks, but I have to get it out of my head, it’s cluttering up useful space:
---
Try as I might, I can’t seem to die. Just like I can’t eat, or drink. Or touch her.
For years now…four years now…it’s been this walking hell for me, since the day my migraine got worse and worse and worse and I felt something go “pop.” Not me, but everything that wasn’t me.
After a year, I discovered it was because I had accidentally…paused myself, for about six pico-seconds. And everybody else had kept going, full-throttle. I can see them, or rather, I can see the light left behind by them as they move, beautiful, perfect holograms, complete with sound.
And smell. Good God, I follow her, smelling her perfume, smelling her when she’s just sweated off enough soap to reveal that unique scent that only she has. Listening to her laugh, and cry, and scream.
It’s only living things that I can’t touch.
Somehow, everything else remains substantial enough for me to handle, but everything I eat tastes like ashes, and all the drinks are like bile. I’m never thirsty or hungry, anyway.
And so I watch her and wonder where her life will go, every day, I stalk her from just a hair’s-breadth away. She’s my own private soap opera, only so much nicer.
I wish. Oh, Christ, how I wish…that I’d told her how much I loved her, when I still had the chance. Instead of just asking if she could spare a quarter every time she walked past my box at night.
---
And here’s your homework:
Less than three hundred words, starting with the following sentence:
“I woke up this morning to find that I had shot myself in the foot.”
Post the story to Dead-horse@yahoogroups.com, or benchilada on LiveJournal, and/or e-mail the story to moxy@tmbg.org
Thanks.
Away from the internet until Sunday night, I imagine. Ring the cel phone if you must reach me. Definitely ring it if you’ve gotten me one of those rhesus monkeys that can control a robot arm from across the country…
benjamin sTone
CURRENT MUSIC: Louis typing and scanning, Chuck talking on the phone
LAST MOVIE: Still SAMURAI RESURRECTION
CURRENT BOOKS: Narrowed to FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL IN ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, THE SUICIDE CLUB by Robert Louis Stevenson, and THE CONQUEST OF TIME, by H.G. Wells