Party Crasher

 

 

 

 

 

 

His cocky attitude sauntered away and hid from the assault of her incredulity.

“So just because little Miss Crazy Pants McGee thinks you’re cute your dick throws your common sense out the window?”

Ah…shit.  If she already knows she’s right do I still have to answer her, he wondered.

She drilled a finger into his chest.  “This stupid ‘club’ was your idea, and the whole safety in secrecy thing doesn’t work if you DON’T.  KEEP IT.  SECRET!”  Her voice rose with every syllable until she was shouting at the top of her considerable lungs.

His ego tried to get its footing back and was squeaking out witty responses in the back of his head; thankfully common sense skulked back in through the window to muffle them.

She let loose something disconcertingly close to a growl and started to turn away.  She stopped, mid-pivot, and arched a brow at something over his shoulder. “You idiot.  I believe that you may be the first Van Helsing to ever actually invite the vampire that crashed the party.”

Ah….shit.  The night erupted into screams.

 

****

a little story for this weeks Trifecta challenge that made me laugh to write 🙂

CLUB 1a : a heavy usually tapering staff especially of wood wielded as a weapon  b : a stick or bat used to hit a ball in any of various games  c : something resembling a club 2a : a playing card marked with a stylized figure of a black clover   b : plural but sing or plural in constr : the suit comprising cards marked with clubs 3a : an association of persons for some common object usually jointly supported and meeting periodically; also : a group identified by some common characteristic <nations in the nuclear club>  

  b : the meeting place of a club <lunch at the club>  

  c : an association of persons participating in a plan by which they agree to make regular payments or purchases in order to secure some advantage  

  d : nightclub  

  e : an athletic association or team

An Interesting Case Study

Alternate titles for this post:

Trust Me, I’m Just as Confused as You Are…..or WTF Brain, You’re a Dick

***

I was gifted with a contradictory personality at birth. Strength and weakness. Violence and peace. Brains and brawn. I am an extroverted introvert.

Most people equate introverts with shyness, but that’s not the case. I’ve got no problem with public speaking, I’ll spaz out on the dance floor and I have a laugh loud enough to turn heads (especially in movie theaters when I’m laughing at bits that apparently no one else finds funny). The only time I really doubt myself is as a parent, and I kind of take it for granted that you can’t grow as one if you don’t.

It’s not that I think that everything that I do is the bees knees (I LOVE THIS RIDICULOUS SAYING), I just have a healthy sense of self.

Along with all of the good things in my stew o’ birth, I also ended up with a heaping helping of crazy pants stirred into the mix. Anxiety, mood swings, panic attacks, depression – every day is like a day at the amusement park in my head, but you never get to pick the ride and sometimes the amusement is less than its name would suggest. Some people add manic, but fuck those people. It’s not my fault they can’t keep up.

Stress obviously makes them ping pong a little faster, a little more erratically, the beer pong players getting progressively drunker and more careless. Apparently, when my anxiety and my mania collide in this yellow + blue = orange popsicles universe the resulting big bang is apathy. Not like hit the snooze a couple of extra times or skip washing the dishes for a night laziness, but full on eyes wide open duh, what…?? My brain just won’t work right, I can’t make decisions, I turn the sound on my phone off and the only people that I have any desire to be around are my kid, my guy, and my animals.

I definitely can’t write. I’ve tried, I still try, but it’s all shite. It’s because I’m empty, I can’t access my normal people feelings so the writing is just crap. Ha, I can’t even write in my journal. The letters won’t come out.

I disappoint people and I hurt their feelings. The people who are close to me get it; they know that if they say Hey Idiot, I Need You Right Now that I’d never not be there for whatever they wanted. But if they just wanted to go grab coffee and giggle, it ain’t gonna happen. It’s hard for me to make commitments because if this shit hits on a day when I’m supposed to go somewhere or have something finished? That’s a big funny on you, everyone else.

There are so many tools I have that help me work through most swings; yoga and meditation, writing reading dancing drawing scratching the cat’s stripey belly annoying the kid snuggling with the dude walking in the woods…but in this apathy mode, taking that first step to get through the fog in my brain and grab on to the tail end of an idea of starting to get up and do something is really hard.

So I have to bow out for a few days. I have to ditch interactive social media, get enough sleep, and consistently turn my thoughts away from anything internal. For a few days it’s all about observation of the world and breathing, until I start stepping back into my skin.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, or the hardest. It is, however, amazing how exhausting doing nothing for a few days can be. I’m hoping that by writing this out I can shake the last tattered remains of this episode off and wake up. It’s kind of fascinating to watch the things that go on inside my head from an outsider’s viewpoint, honestly. Incredibly frustrating and unproductive, but interesting nonetheless.

I didn’t particularly want to write this. I definitely don’t intend for my head poo to become the focus of what I write. But I wrote something (fairly) cohesive and I didn’t lose interest within the first few minutes of sitting down, so I’m gonna chalk it in the plus column.

Yay words 🙂

The cat gets it….

Momentum

 

 

 

 

 

For Trifextra, Week 71: tell an entire story in 3 sentences.

*****

She chose to fly away on her broken wing, even though they mocked her lopsided flight.

Their laughter rolled off her back like warm drops of soothing rain.

She figured that even if she was only flying in circles, at least she wasn’t standing still.

That Kind of a Day

I woke up with a headache.  My brain engaged before my eyelids parted and it was the first thing that I consciously knew.  I felt the atmosphere like a leaded blanket, so close to the ground I could brush it with the top of my head like a low ceilinged room.  I didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon and I didn’t really give a shit; it was the kind of day where it didn’t matter anyway, seeing as when I opened my eyes it was grey and heavy like a picture bleached to a monochromatic blandness.  An invisible giant’s hands cradled my skull, exerting an inexorable pressure with gentle glee, squeezing slowly tighter.  An army of enthusiastic imps danced about, jabbing at the backs of my eyes with tiny pitchforks.

I bit back a groan, exhaled slowly through my nose, and vowed to not move an eyelash again for at least an hour.  What I would do, what I would do is I would lay here; I would lay here and try to stop my brain from spinning like an overwrought carousel so that it would tell me important things.  Things like, what the fuck happened last night; things like, why didn’t I feel the indent next to me in the bed that would tell me Melody was still here; things like what the hell gave me this forsaken headache on my day off.

As the merry go round began to slow and my mind stopped poking at me – Hey! You there!  Are you sure you know how bad your head hurts?  I can keep reminding you, lest you forget!  That’s what I’m here for! – pictures of last night began to emerge.  It was like watching someone shuffling through a slideshow without context, no professor announcing the topic of today’s lecture before jumping right into the lesson.

A bar.  A back room.  Melody walking through a door, looking hot enough to melt ice cream in Antarctica; me giving the evil eye to a guy at the end of the bar who stood to intercept her.  Smoking a cigarette in a back alley, strobe-like broken light flickering at the world’s worst rave and splayed feet on the ground sticking out from behind a dumpster. Flexing bloody knuckles. Melody murmuring thank you and planting sloppy kisses on my neck so I could feel the smile on her lips; the bar-back yelling in my face, telling me to go-go-go, NOW!  Slipping through a manhole cover, snicking down a slimy ladder into the sewer tunnels.  Throwing shoes that smelled of shit into the garbage can behind my house. Giggling like a drunken girl, leaning on Melody as she helped me to bed.  Did she stay?  I couldn’t remember that part.  Maybe the sex was just a dream.  Probably it was.  Son of a bitch.

Someone hammered on my back kitchen door.  “Saul!”, yelled a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize.  “Saul, sweetie, it’s time for you to get the fuck up!” The hammering continued unabated, until I heard my neighbor’s door open, his whiny voice complaining about the noise, the profanity.  I heard a laugh, footsteps, my back gate swinging open with a squeak.  There were heavy footsteps, one-two-three, up the neighbor’s porch steps, a hurried conversation carried on too low for me to hear much more than grumbles.  A door slamming after Bob the neighbor made a sound that sounded suspiciously like ‘eeek’.  The hammering resumed a moment later.

Shitfuckpissdamn.  I gritted teeth like fuzzy cinderblocks and propped myself up on my elbows.  A quick inventory told me that only my head and my hands hurt, so that wasn’t too bad.  As I swung my legs over the side of the bed my vision swam and the imps smoked some crystal meth before joyfully resuming their whirligig dance of pitchfork fun.

By the time I could open my eyes again, the hammering had stopped and there was a presence looming behind me in the doorway.  Lock picking criminal who isn’t afraid to walk into my house after calling me sweetie?  That this was someone that I should be worried about was an easy assumption to make.  People didn’t barge into my house.  I am the one that people are afraid of, the one known as Gladiator to the right kind of people, who most often were the wrong kind of people.

“Who the fuck is this guy,” I mumbled to myself, loud enough for the man to hear.  The looming loomed closer and as I turned my head to check out the man with the admirable set of brass balls, all I got was a glimpse of a Cheshire smile and a ham sized fist before the imps were silenced by a giant devil who took over their pain detail and knocked me the hell out.

*****

My head was lolling forward on a neck that felt like it was held on by limp spaghetti noodles.  This new pain was white hot and blinding, but they call me Gladiator because I’m a bad motherfucker, not because I cry every time shit doesn’t feel good.  My brain engaged before my eyes again; I smelled sewer rot.  What was with the sewer thing?  I had no idea why I had been in them last night and no clue why I was in them again, but the sickly smell was a sense memory that told me I most definitely was.

I tensed and flexed with as little movement as possible.  Minute tensions at wrists and ankles told me I was bound, but I couldn’t tell if it was to a thing or only to myself; a coppery taste and a quick dart of the tongue told me that the bastard had knocked out both my front teeth along with consciousness.

With an effort worthy of Atlas, I raised my head up and held it firmly in place with grit and orneriness.  I pretended that all was peachy keen with the world as I waited for the bright lights to stop spotting my vision and the waves in my stomach to slosh back to stillness.  I grimaced a smile that I hoped looked as awful as it felt.

“Thup?” I asked, and then grimaced for real.  My nonchalant ‘Sup was trumped by lack of front teeth.  Instead of sounding like a tough guy smart ass, I sounded like a second grader posturing on a playground.  I shrugged, hid the wince, and looked around.

A cavernous room of dirty brick, seeping walls and a pitted cement floor.  A couple of bare bulbs hung from chains here and there, casting fitful circles of light.  There was a man awkwardly slumped against one wall and I recognized the shoes on the splayed feet as the ones I saw sticking out from behind a dumpster in that memory flash alley.

I laughed and pointed with one finger, tugging just a bit, discovering that my hands were tied together behind me but not to the chair I sat on.  “Did I do that?  Right now I’m kind of hoping so.”  I turned and looked up, and up, and up into the face that I had seen right before I got sent to la-la-land.

I’m no shrimp but this guy was a giant, 6’6” at least.  He had to run around 300 pounds and it was solid muscle.  Not body-builder show off muscles, but muscles that someone is born to, leaving them the choice in childhood to lean towards gentle giant or enforcer.  I don’t think this one had to make a conscious decision.

He nodded his large, round head.  “Yup, Leo over there is your work, kid.  You broke his neck.”  He flexed his fingers open, closed, open.  “Did you mean to kill him?”

The surprise on my face must have registered as genuine.  “I don’t remember what happened.  I remember smoking a cigarette in an alley, and there was someone on the ground behind a dumpster.  All I could see was their feet.  How did I kill him?”

The man considered me for a long and silent moment.  “You hit him.  Once.”

I nodded.  That sounded right; if it was necessary I knew how to do that.  “Do you have any idea why I found it necessary to kill your friend?”

Another long and silent moment.  His shoulders strained the sleeves of his jacket as he shrugged.  “No.  I came around trying to find Leo.  There was a girl running to the other end of the alley, some blond in a black dress with killer legs, and you two squared off.  Leo said something I couldn’t hear and pow,” he mimed a straight armed jab, “his head snapped back like someone yoked it with a leash and he hit the ground.”  Again with the stare.  “I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”

Melody.  Melody running.  But I remembered her helping me, I remembered her leading me through the sewers and lifting the lid so I could throw my shoes into the garbage can.  So, obviously she came back after she ran.  Shit.  Did I kill a man for a girl?  My head started to throb like a rotten melon the harder I strained to remember, and the ache in my face from my missing teeth became grating.

Sausage fingers snapped in front of my face.  “Hey, pal, stay on task here.  Who was the girl?”

“Yeah well, why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are first?  Not that I don’t appreciate your hospitality and impromptu dental work, I’d just like to know who it is that’s being so magnanimous.”

He chuckled like graveyard bones dancing through gravel.  “You’re Gladiator, right?  Well.  They call me Scrapper.”

*****

I intend for this to have a conclusion, cleverly titled That Kind of a Night, but I haven’t quite figured out whether or not the mysterious blond is gonna be a good guy or a bad guy yet.  Probably bad, because, you know, blond 😉  I’ve heard they’re always trouble…

Anyhoo, this is my submission for Master Class this week – the line was chosen by Prof SAM from Chosen, by Ted Dekker.  Check out the prompt, the other writers, and SAM’s other stuff at www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com because all of it is completely worthwhile.

I would definitely be interested to know how the ‘tone’ of this piece read.  I’m not sure if it vacillates between tough guy and verbosity too much, so I’d be glad to hear opinions.  Thank you as always for reading 🙂

What the f@*k is Blog Tag?!

So what the fuck is Blog Tag anyway? Is it like TV Tag, where you have to yell out the name of who got you into blogging in the first place? The Bloggess! (www.thebloggess.com) Sinistral Scribblings! (www.sinistralscribblings.com) No? Oh. Is it like the one that all the new school pansy parents whine about, where the taggee must feel humiliated by being told neener-neener you’re ‘it’? No? Hmmmm….well, according to TwinDaddy, who was cool enough to tag me mostly because he hearts my Stankmeaner moniker, it’s a thing where you answer questions and talk about yourself. Narcissistic and nefarious, indeed. Seeing as I write mostly fiction on my blog this will be a departure for me. Seeing as how I am, in fact, narcissistic and nefarious, and the fact that I love Stuph Blog, the First Unshitty Blog on the Internet- http://stuphblog.wordpress.com/ (BEST TAG LINE EVER!) this should be a snap. Tag, I’m it! Links for some reason pretend they don’t exist on my laptop, so I’m just typing out all the internet addresses. Pfft technology….

So, firstly you have to repost these rules (my instinctual rebellious nature is already chafing at the idea of ‘rules’):

1. Post these rules.
2. Post a photo of yourself and eleven random facts about you.
3. Answer the questions given to you in the tagger’s post.
4. Create eleven new questions and tag new people to answer them.
5. Go to their blog/Twitter and let them know they’ve been tagged.

The picture of me will come at the end because if you make through it all the shit that is about to come, well, you get what you deserve.

Dah-Dah-Dah….And now, 11 random facts about me:

1.) When I was 5 I split my forehead open pretty much to the bone running full speed into the corner of a wall. Instead of calling my mom or taking me to the hospital, my Gramma called the 700 Club and had Pat Robertson pray for me on tv.

2.) When I was 12 I used to steal my mom’s Benson & Hedges Menthol Light 100’s and squirrel them away in my New Kids on the Block waterbottle

3.) My first pet was a guinea pig. I named her Daisy Duke.

4.) I currently have 6 tattoos and one non-naughty piercing

5.) I once bested a player in D&D so thoroughly that he hyperventilated and then threw up in the help-me-breathe bag his mom had given him. I was not invited back to that basement to play again. Rolling on the floor with laughter probably contributed to this.

6.) My son was about 10 seconds away from being named Waddy after the lead singer of The Exploited. Almost 16 years later he still thanks me for bowing to the pressure and changing my mind.

7.) I have a cat named Joker Frank and a Bearded Dragon named Princess Loki Mononoke.

8.) I was first introduced to the non-normal side of life when I saw The Red Hot Chili Peppers perform on Colin Quinn’s 2Hip4TV when I was in 4th grade – my relief was boundless

9.) If I had fuck you money to blow, I would pay someone to teach me how to drift, Tokyo style 😉

10.) In 6th grade I was called to the guidance office because I put ‘sniper’ as my future career choice. It took a lot of convincing to explain that I meant for the Navy Seals.

11.) I can trip the light fantastic like nobody’s business

Dah-Dah-Dah….And now the answers to TwinDaddy’s questions:

1.) If you were a super hero, what would your super power be? My superpower would be called ‘Derp’- anytime someone was being stupid, I would super-smack them on their block head and they would instantly ‘get it’

2.) You don’t like your name (if you do, pretend that you don’t). What do you change it to? I always thought it would be cool to have a boy’s name so people would be all ooh-la-la surprised when they met me, so probably Trevor. Or Charlie.

3.) Debbie leaves Cincinnati at 5PM and travels an average speed of 62mph. Triton (where did that name come from?) leaves Dayton at 4:47PM and travels at an average speed of 87mph. They head towards each other. At what point do you give a fuck about any of this? BONUS Question: How long until Triton gets arrested for reckless driving? The only thing these people would give a fuck about would be getting to the civilized northern half of Ohio. Triton is arrested because he had a sexy times blow-up doll in his passenger seat and also because his license plate says SHROOMS. Fuck Dayton 🙂

4.) Coffee gets me high and keeps me awake at work on most days. Do you have such an addiction? If so, what is it? MountainDew Live Wire – that shit gets me hopping. Fun fact – soda has the same effect on tooth enamel as methamphetamine or crack cocaine.

5.) I truly believe we are all broken in some way or another. What is your biggest defect? APATHY. Prolonged stress puts me into a waking zombie-like coma that makes it hard for me to get out of bed, let alone leave the house and/or be productive

6.) Conversely, we all have one thing we are extremely talented at. What is your best attribute? Honesty, with others and myself at all times. No lies, no subterfuge, no excuses. Caveat- some would say this is my worst quality. This is most likely because these are the people who are lying liars who lie.

7.) If you were like Pinocchio, but could choose which body part would get bigger with every lie you told, which body part would it be? HAHAHAHA! This is a ridiculous question. Uh, my torso, I guess…? I already have long legs and arms, my nose certainly doesn’t need any help. I guess some girls would say ‘boobs’ but those are 2 body parts and plus when I think of longer boobs I get a weird visual of something resembling fleshy colored bananas….

8.) You find an empty box on the floor of your office. What was in it? The heads of all the people whose work I had to finish because they fucked it up in the first place (don’t ask why it’s empty now, if no one can find them they can’t prove shit)

9.) You just walked into Starbucks. What do you order? Venti White Chocolate Mocha with an extra shot of espresso, one blast of whipped cream on the bottom and one on the top

10.) Do you read (besides blogs)? If so, what type of reading do you enjoy? I read incessantly. I subscribe to Yoga Journal, Shambala Sun, and GQ. Obsessed with Terry Pratchett (Going Postal) Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere) (or Good Omens, the fantastically hilarious collaboration between those 2) Clive Barker (Sacrament) and Douglas Adams (any damn thing the man ever wrote)

11.) If you could guest post on any blog, what blog would it be? Stuphblog (duh), because of curse words and honesty and community and I think I have some Unshitty things to say about life. Or The Bloggess, which would mostly be fan girl gushing, which is okay because really she changed my life and that ain’t even an exaggeration. Or As Long As I’m Singing, which I guess would be more of a collaboration than a guest post because it would be fun to write a poem with someone who plays with words the way that he does.

(Holy shit, longest post ever….I keep getting distracted by chirping birds, kids who want cinnamon rolls already damn it and freefloating thoughts about weird dreams I had a week ago)

OKAY!! Home stretch – I chose one person as my Taggee because I felt like he could get into the spirit of the game and be both hilarious and honest (which should a prerequisite in the Rules of this here game o’ tag). So, As Long As I’m Singing (insert your real name at your discretion 😉 here are your 11 questions…

http://aslongasimsinging.wordpress.com/

UPDATE: my awesome friend Eric has now accepted the Blog Tag challenge: so http://www.sinistralscribblings.com- Tag, brother 🙂

UPDATE #2: my friend SAM would like to play the game as well, so: http://www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com – Tag, sister 🙂
1. What smell instantly takes you back to a moment from your childhood?

2. What song will make you headbang/car dance/waltz around your living room no matter what kind of a shitty mood you’re in?

3. If you had to pick having to smell roses everywhere you went all the time or never being able to see the color blue, which would you choose?

4. Would you be more afraid of a rhinoceros charging at you or a hippopotamus?

5. Which, to you, would be the most flattering way to finish this sentence: Your writing really reminds me of _______.

6. Is it hard for you to stay on task from beginning to end, or do you jump around and do a little of this and a little of that and eventually cross the finish line?

7. What is your biggest pet peeve about yourself?

8. Do you plan to write your own epitaph or let someone else do it? Or, I guess conversely, cremation or burial would need to be answered first. TWO-PARTER! So that’s 8 & 9, because I multi-task like a motherfucker

10. All time favorite curse word, either one you’ve heard or one you’ve made up in the heat of the moment?

11. What vanity license plate would put “YOU” out there for all other driver’s to know?

BAM! DONE.

Here’s one of my tattoos – it’s a take on the chapter break cartoons in the first copy of Good Omens I owned : )~