The SINGULARITY

We walk the streets of downtown Chicago looking for somewhere in particular, a certain establishment that I at one time knew something about. I’ve sort of been there before, once or twice, so I guess I’m kind of leading the rest of us. My companions do not seem overly confident in me or my ability to direct them to our planned destination. Still, they follow right beside me, loyal and trusting despite their internal reservations and I almost have to wonder why. I certainly do not inspire confidence and I am quite sure that I am not currently exuding any measure of charisma. Nevertheless, my companions trust me to take them to the SINGULARITY.

I’ve only actually been to Chicago a handful of times prior to this occasion. Certainly I know my way around the city but I would never profess to be a native. I think my companions only trust me because one time I saved the day by flawlessly directing everyone to Gino’s East. I should mention now, in case anyone is unaware, that Gino’s East has the best pizza in Chicago, and possibly the world.

But back then, back when I was younger and smarter and more globally aware, it was easier to lead a mission like that. Back then, I was at the height of my resourcefulness. I fear I am no longer that same person. Besides, Gino’s East is a pretty easy spot to find, right off Michigan Avenue in the heart of downtown. Any egotistical fool could lead a group of hungry stoners to a pizzeria. It wouldn’t even be worthy of a footnote in the memoirs of my life.

However, the SINGULARITY is different. First of all it’s sort of secret. It’s an elusive, high-end bar and club that is by its nature not plainly visible to the naked eye. Quite the contrary, it is very clandestine and really only a handful of people know where it is and exactly how to get there. And as much as I’d like to fancy myself a part of that inner circle, the fact that we have been walking around and around the blocks for hours now sort of force the realization that I am not an inner circle member. Maybe the bar has moved since I was last here. Maybe it has verged even further underground.

I think about feeding my companions that excuse in order to mitigate my responsibility and ultimate blame in all of this. But then a thought occurs to me. It might even be a repressed memory, I’m not quite sure. I suddenly remember how to get there, I remember something extremely pertinent to the directions and I conclude that it’s really pretty simple after all. So without more, I wave my hand forward and direct my companions down a dark alleyway. This is the right direction, I'm sure of it. There’s a popular Thai spot on the corner. I remember it all now.

My companions seem skeptical to engage and humor me any further in what they have begun to consider a useless charade. I can hardly blame them for their reservations, but this time is different. "I’m sure of this," I promise them all as I command them to follow me, to trust me once more. Eventually they do shrug and finally submit to my lead. After all, it was their idea to come, not mine. They wanted to find the SINGULARITY.

Around the corner and about one hundred meters down the alley, there is this tiny digital photo center that promises a one hour return on all photos emailed, scanned and dropped off via memory stick. I’ve never seen any patrons in this shop. Now I can sort of understand why.  It all makes sense.  It’s a front for something else, something larger and more alluring, something almost magnetic.

Evan holds the shop door open for the rest of us. I think he was raised in a family that taught him chivalry at a young age. I’ve known him for awhile now and he is always very polite, almost sickeningly so. I’m sure he’ll meet a girl one day who really appreciates that kind of thing.

There’s this little shitty sign that reads ‘The SINGULARITY’ upside down hanging on the back wall of the shop. It is obscured from the street by a shelf full of old film canisters. We walk around to the place beyond the sign, in the corner and out of view. There’s a door on the ground, complete with knob and wooden panels. It’s the type of door that if you saw it on a wall you would certainly find nothing strange about it. But sitting on the ground it does appear somewhat peculiar. It kind of reminds me of the entryway to Wonderland. How cool it would be to meet a white rabbit with a top hat and a pocket watch inside!

No one else appears to be around, in the shop or out on the streets nearby. This area doesn’t get a lot of pedestrian traffic because it is far removed from the street. And the alleyway we just traversed to get here looks like the kind of place you might get raped.  Certainly people seek to avoid that kind of situation.  But there is comfort in numbers, at least, that's what they always say.

Seeing as there is no one else around, I whistle shortly to garner the attention of my companions to let them know that it is safe to open the door and descend the stairs. They look over at me, somewhat unconvinced. I nod surreptitiously and instruct them to come over. Mike is mesmerized by the film canisters and Evan is darting his beady eyes all around, looking for something or someone to come upon us. He's always been sort of afraid of confrontation and trouble.  Tegan is the only one who responds to me immediately.  She walks over and nods.

I reach down and pull open the door. It takes some exertion on my part but it is not altogether impossible and finally it opens all the way up. Walla, I remark halfheartedly as a flight of stairs appear below, leading down, down into what I have previously known as the SINGULARITY.

By now Mike and Evan have come up to look and we all sort of breathe silently as we stare down the flight of stairs.  Tegan is reluctant about all of this, I can totally tell. She doesn’t really want to be the first one to venture down the mysterious steps. But someone has to go first. I get to be last because I am the one holding open the door for everyone else. It almost seems as though Tegan resents my position as the door-holder in this regard. I get the feeling that she would trade positions with me in an instant. Maybe she actually resents me for finding the place because now we have to venture inside. We have to.  I’m not exactly sure where her resentment lies. But it certainly lies with me.  Finally Mike submits to being the first one to go down the stairs. Evan goes next and Tegan follows him. Now it’s my turn.

As I close the door and descend the stairs after Tegan, I start to get this sort of uneasy feeling. The stairwell is tight, really tight and it makes me feel incredibly claustrophobic. It’s worse than that time in Vegas after the 2005 New Year when everyone had flooded the streets. I was drowning in a sea of people. And this is even somehow worse than that time back in 2001 when we went to that Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert and everyone was pushing and shoving to get up real close to the band. There was this little Asian girl, not more than five feet tall and she got caught up in the mess and fainted. The security guards had to bring her up on stage to rescue her. It really freaked me out.

But this is somehow worse than both those other incidents put together. And now that I am descending this staircase once more, I can remember hating it. In fact, I pause for a second and think about turning around and going back up to the digital camera shop, leaving my companions in the SINGULARITY to exist or end on their own time. I think about hanging out in the store above us and just waiting, waiting, waiting. I think about maybe walking over and getting some Thai food. I think about a lot of things.  I think about how I really hate the idea of climbing down these stairs.

Somehow, despite all my reservations, I muster up the internal strength to keep going, to keep descending. It’s a descent into madness but I keep at it nonetheless. Once I reach the bottom step, I can finally look out and see the venue in all its glory. I’m not terribly impressed and I don’t remember being too impressed last time either. It has the look and feel of an electronic bar, or E-bar if you will. It sort of reminds me of how I once pictured the Drone, except the clientele are mostly human here. But the metallic tang of nervous tension is all over this place. It’s very Drone-like; I’ve always had sort of a bad feeling around the SINGULARITY.

Though I’ve been here at least once before and still cannot say with any sort of persuasiveness that I even like this place a little, I have returned once again to either prove myself right or prove myself wrong. I haven’t quite decided which one it will be yet. I seem to always return here with some kind of naïve ignorance, thinking that maybe this time will be different or better or something. I’m not sure what I believe at this point. Maybe once I get a drink I will feel better about the prospect.

Evan has claimed us a table and Mike and Tegan are up at the bar trying to get us some drinks. I saunter over to Evan and take a seat beside him. We have all sort of come here under the auspices of curiosity and not really to order a bunch of drinks and get blasted. We are kind of more just trying to be scientists testing a hypothesis. For my companions in particular, they want to see if all the hype this place gets is actually founded. And for me, well, I just want the experience to be better than it was the times before. I want it to be different in a good way.

Mike and Tegan return with drinks. Mike has brought Evan a beer and Tegan has brought me this kind of red drink that is the wrong color to be cranberry vodka. I’m puzzled at first and I am sure my face depicts it. "I asked the bartender for Shirley Temples but when he turned around to cash me out, I grabbed the closest bottle of liquor and poured a bunch into each cup," Tegan reveals to me with a cunning smile as she hands over my drink. That settles my confusion. I smile appreciatively and then ask her what she ended up spiking our drinks with. "Rum," she responds with a shrug. She acts as though that should have been obvious.

I take a sip and sure enough I can taste the rum. It’s heavy in the glass and I can feel the warmness that it offers almost instantaneously as it runs down my throat. I guess if I had taken my sip earlier it would have obviated the need to inquire. But I like to bother Tegan with unnecessary requests every now and then; she is my younger sister after all. If I don’t bother her, then who will?

"It’s a very interesting choice but I would definitely have preferred vodka to rum," I inform her childishly. She says something about beggars can’t be choosers. I disagree with the maxim but I let the issue drop nevertheless. Tegan claims to really like her new accidental concoction and she starts going on and on about how she invented the next new fad drink. "Everyone is going to be asking for this now," she asserts to us, seeming very self-assured in her declaration. She starts thinking about what she should call it. But I’m a little more skeptical, in fact I don’t believe her at all. And the guys, well they pretty much disregard her claims as the silly babblings of a drunk girl even though none of us have actually gotten close to that point just yet. Still, Tegan is pretty fucking insistent.

"She’s right, it’s an amazing drink," this guy states loudly from the table right next to us. I look him over quickly. He looks like the kind of guy that had at one time been really good looking. But time, drinking, drugs and sex have not been kind to him. Now he has more of a smarmy look than anything else. But he still thinks he is rather attractive, at least based on how he carries himself. I’m not sure how he could be so deluded. He must be going on forty-five and his hair is long and really greasy. That is never a good look on a man.

He leans over and speaks to Tegan, who has the unfortunate position of sitting closest to him. He is speaking softly and with an air of misplaced confidence. I can tell that he is trying to get lucky tonight and he thinks that Tegan could be the right target. But she’s going to shoot him down so fast, it will almost be painful to watch. This guy won’t give the rejection much thought though. He’s the type of guy who is wholly unrestrictive when it comes to casting his net. He will go after anything female and when Tegan shoots him down, he will lick his wounds and then go onto the next one that he considers prey. He probably won't even give it a second thought.

It’s almost kind of funny how much self-assurance he possesses. I mean obviously Tegan and I are sitting here with two guys, who aren’t necessarily our boyfriends but Mr. Smarmy has no way of knowing that. To the outsider we must look like we are on a double date, and this guy is willingly intruding upon it. I should give him props for being so fearless. He’s trying to seal some kind of deal regardless of the situation. That does take a certain set of balls, I’ll give him that. Though he’s sorely mistaken I can respect his level of dedication in the endeavor. Of course I wish it was directed at another table.

Tegan smiles back at him in order to be polite. She really doesn’t like upsetting guys who hit on her. I’m not sure why but she seems to always offer her phone number even though she is in an exclusive relationship and has absolutely no interest in the specimen. I think she feels like she must do so in order to maintain her niceness. I’m not afflicted with such responsibility. I don’t care at all if I hurt someone’s feelings; after all, rejection is a part of life.

He starts going on about this place now that he realizes he has a willing listener in Tegan. She’s giving him the time of day for some reasons and he’s talking, talking, talking. He’s saying things like how cool and exclusive this place is. He’s asserting that not just anyone could get in. Tegan is allowing him to think that he is engaging in a mutually pleasant conversation for the time being. She is not divulging her status as taken quite yet and she’s not showing off her ring finger either. But I get the feeling that it’s more because she doesn’t want to be rude than because she is interested in this guy. She is clearly not interested at all. Of course this guy doesn’t seem to pick up on those very obvious cues.

"I’ve already had three White Russians and I’m really struggling through this fourth one," the guy informs Tegan smoothly and without even the hint of a slur. I’m either super-impressed with his composure or I suspect that he is a liar. He’s holding it together way too well to have had three and a half White Russians unless something else is going on. He must be playing some kind of game.

"This is for you," he says as he reaches over and offers Tegan the rest of his fourth White Russian. I crinkle my eyebrows in confusion and Tegan tries to politely decline. Obviously it is an ill-advised idea to take a drink from a stranger, especially a stranger like this particular fellow. He’s a smarmy little shit by the looks of him and he is certainly up to no good. I wouldn’t be surprised if the White Russian had a White Roofie or two in it.

But even after Tegan’s polite declination, Mr. Smarmy insists that we take his drink so that it doesn’t go to waste. Tegan waves her hand to exhibit her total and complete non-interest. Again, she is trying to get out of this by being somewhat polite. I can easily tell that he isn’t being deterred, so I decide that it is time for me to reject him on Tegan’s behalf and in no uncertain terms. Tegan is being too uncertain. It’s a fault of hers. She has an iron-clad excuse, she’s with someone else, and yet still she wants to be nice and polite to this moron.

I just don’t really get it. But that’s Tegan; she’s always been too nice, except for when she was a child. Then she was mean. Our mother has always speculated that Tegan was aggressive as a child because of this medication our mother took while pregnant with Tegan. She insists that it made Tegan an unruly child but that it has since worn off in her adulthood. I’m not sure if our mother is correct in that assessment but she will nevertheless swear by it.

"We don’t want your drink," I tell Mr. Smarmy plainly. He tries to turn to Tegan for confirmation but I simply repeat the rejection of him and his drink. Then I advise him to take off. I know I have no real authority to make that kind of demand upon him but I make it nonetheless. Mike and Evan back me up and Tegan just smiles sheepishly. She’s still trying to be nice.

But it seems as though Mr. Smarmy finally gets the hint. After the rejection of his drink and thereby him as well, he kind of gets up and slinks away. He tries to make it sort of casual, like he was planning on getting up and leaving anyway, but I can tell that he’s pretty upset about the rejection. Honestly he should realize that his time for attracting younger women is pretty much over. Now he just needs to settle for someone older, kind of desperate and not altogether ugly. He just needs to go back on the prowl for someone easier to catch, someone in his own league.

As we drink, and by ‘we’ I mean the four of us, we look out at the surroundings of this E-Bar. The music isn’t necessarily too loud but it is definitely loud enough to deter us from engaging in much casual conversation with each other. So we basically just sit and look around. This place is sort of cool I suppose, if you are into that whole digital revolution thing. In my opinion they are trying a little too hard. But it’s definitely an E-bar, complete with shiny gadgets and colorful lights. And everything is silver; there’s a silver hue to the room, to the tables, to the walls and to the floor. The ceiling is high and almost colorless to my searching eyes. I don’t know what to call it, mostly because I can’t quite make out a color. There’s this huge light in the middle of the room, sort of in front of the bar, and it’s blocking out all color. And the light is not even on; in fact, I’ve never been here when it was on.

The wall behind the bar resembles a circuit board or something. There are all these flashing red and green lights. I feel like the design of this place was created in order to make the customer think that they were inside of a giant supercomputer. It’s pretty cool all around but I could see how it might lead certain patrons to having an epilepsy attack or an ocular stroke or something else. The flashing lights are very obtrusive and commanding.

Evan raises his hand to summon a waitress so that he can order another drink. What is kind of strange about this place is that the wait staff is not really human. And I’m not declaring that figuratively. They are all clearly machines, high-class but still machines. First, they don’t quite look human, even though they possess the right features – eyes, nose, mouth, ears – and they all have the right extremities coming from all of the right places and all that. But they are not human and I think that most people would be able to tell.

The one very noticeable difference between them and ordinary biological humans is the USB port. It’s located in the backs of each and every one of their necks. Though some try to hide it with their hair and perhaps black Celtic tattoos, they are really quite obvious. I suppose they have these ports in order to share and receive information. I surmise that they plug themselves into computer ports in order to update and transmit valuable intelligence that aids them in their impersonation of us biological creatures.

Due to their nature and their obvious sexuality, especially that hot bartender over there with the muscular stature, I casually begin to wonder what would happen if one of these machines ever came in contact with and tried to mate with a real human. Would it be weird or completely satisfying? Would there be a threat of pregnancy and if so, what would the byproduct be? How would that byproduct be raised? What code would the byproduct subscribe to?

There is too much going on around my alcohol-addled head. Questions occur to me but the answers are selfishly unapparent.  Tegan has since brought two more of her Shirley Temple Rum drinks our way and I have managed to polish off both of them with impressive speed. Knowing not what else to do, I excuse myself to go to the restroom, not because I necessarily have to use it, but more because I feel like it might be important to stand up and walk around a bit. One can become very intoxicated just sitting around and not really exercising the muscles.

There are colorful flashing and running lights all around the mirrors in the lady’s bathroom and everything around me is automatic. I’m in some kind of futuristic playground. I look in the mirror behind me and note that the walls that should segregate one facility from the next are not immediately apparent. There's just a line of toilets with no walls between them and I start to think about that time in Croatia when Tegan and I went to that rest stop somewhere between Dubrovnik and Split.  There was nothing, no toilet, no facility whatsoever, just a hole in the ground.  It was alarming. But there were doors and privacy walls.  You had to pee into a hole but at least you could do it in private.  That was nice.

I walk up to one of the toilets lining the back wall of the lady's restroom, just to see if something will happen.  I expect that something may happen.  It does.  The privacy walls, the ones this place was previously lacking, literally shoot out of a space in the ground.  The weight of my body must have tapped a trigger. I gasp as they fly up and land into place all around me, effectively shielding me from the outside. That's impressive!

Whoa, I say out loud, not caring who hears me. Then I nod to myself, displaying quiet admiration for the technology. There is something to be said for showmanship. The last time I came here, I must not have used the restrooms at all because I would certainly have remembered this. I’m sort of at a loss for words because I’ve never been in a bathroom stall this technologically forward before. It is so intricately designed; it amazes me on first an intellectual level and then on a visceral level.  I'm going to have to write about this later.

But I get over the novelty pretty fast and sit down to do my business. When I flush the toilet, the privacy walls quickly fall down, into the ground from once they came. The flush must be the cue for the doors to revert back into the floor. I nod with intrigue and approval and then I walk over to the sink to wash up. I have no doubt that the sink will be just as impressive as the toilets. This bar has certainly embraced the world of expanding technology.  Globalization has nothing on this place!

The water from the sink turns on automatically and spouts out of the faucet. The soap likewise dispenses without command, plopping a dollop into my hand as soon as I place my palm underneath the contraption. I’ve totally seen this automatic soap and water technology before, and it’s not novel by any means, but I will say that the disappearing doors and walls around the toilets are a brand new experience for me. While I can envision certain flaws with the system, it is definitely pretty interesting technology. And I really do like the convenience of not having to make the effort to turn the water on and beg for the soap. It’s nice that this restroom just knows my needs.

When I finally walk back out to the bar, I don't immediately see my friends. In fact, I don't see any of the patrons that were previously lounging around here. This is weird. I don't know exactly what to think.  I sort of feel like the victim of a surprise party gag or some other kind of prank.  Of course it's not my birthday and I'm not a viable target for trickery so that can't be what is going on here.  Then I notice that all of the waitresses and bartenders and other staff are acting kind of strangely; they all have their USB ports on the backs of their necks completely exposed.  They were hiding them surreptitiously before, so that the patrons would not be able to guess what they truly are.  But they seem oddly unconcerned about pride now.  I am becoming a little frightful as a result. What the hell could be going on here?

I swallow hard, getting an indescribably bad feeling starting to settle in the pit of my stomach.  Everything is different, ominous and foreboding.  I'm not comfortable, not at all.  And to make matters worse, that central light, the one that I have never seen on at any time that I have ever been here, is blasting shiny and bright at the moment. It’s not just bright, it’s devilishly bright. It’s like a gaseous star, too glaringly brilliant to look straight upon.

The brightness is almost pulsating, getting stronger, stronger, stronger. It is essentially blinding me now. I must turn away and cower a little to protect myself from being disintegrated. All of the staff, the waitresses, the bartenders and the hostesses, look somewhat frightened by the light, like they are unsure or unclear what to do and how to act. They look as though they are about to be snuffed out, and they know it.  Those protruding holes that resemble a computer's USB port located on the ceiling near the light are beckoning softly to them.  It's plainly obvious what is about to happen.  They are going to be plugged in; they are going to be transfixed and then transferred.

But maybe this is all speculation. Of course I could also be right about everything I have ever speculated.  Wouldn't that be something?  The radioactively brilliant light appears to be molesting the computerized humanoids, causing them to involuntarily shriek with terror at the very prospect of being sucked into that light.  They all seem to have the same painted face of grimness, almost as if they can actually fathom what is about to happen to them and can hardly believe it will be their ultimate fate. The thought of them frightened makes me cringe a little. If these machines, which by virtue of what they are cannot truly experience human emotions, are nevertheless displaying an insanely terrific fright, I might be in some really unspeakable trouble here.  In fact, I am starting to fear for my safety, for my well-being, for my life.

Upon seeing no other truly biological humans left in the bar, and after having my inquiry to the fact ignored by all of the humanoids actually willing to stop their frenzied behavior long enough to converse with me, I become convinced that some kind of announcement was made, one that I missed by virtue of being in the restroom. The human patrons in the bar must have been asked to leave the establishment. Only I had the misfortune of being skipped in the mass exodus and round-up. So now I am stuck somewhere I certainly do not belong, a ghastly purgatory that I did not earn.  Somehow, I slipped through the cracks into a world I was not meant for, a world I am hardly suited for, and I have the unnerving feeling that I am about to pay dearly for this mistake of luck.

What is going to happen to me? What will this bright, almost radioactive light do to me, to my flesh, to my bones, to my brain? I'm sure it will be ugly, something unparalleled by even the worst atrocities in history. I watch as some of the humanoid staff gets sucked up toward the light, floating slowly at first and then much faster, like slaves to a magnetic force field that they can hardly control. Oh shit I’m fucked. This is demise; this is the end. How could this happen to me?

I feel my feet starting to slip from underneath me.  It is subtle at first but I can feel myself being gingerly dragged toward the center of the room, toward the area right beneath the light. I’m being pulled, like matter to a black hole. I'm certain I won't survive this. I will be ripped to shreds, to millions of unidentifiable pieces, forever forgotten among the world's most valiant knowers of young death.  This shouldn't be my fate but somehow it is.  Not a single part of me will go on existing after this. I’m done for.

The humanoid machines shriek as they get sucked into the light. As humanoids, they don't even have the capacity for fright and yet they are somehow frightened. If that isn’t a bone-chilling revelation then I don’t know what is. How could this phenomenon strike fear in the hearts of things that by definition have no hearts? Nothing will save me from this brutal end. Nothing.

Under the incandescence of the overhead light, as I am grabbing hold of anything solid that might stop my movement toward the light, I start to get this distinct feeling of doom. I am doomed to die in this undignified manner. And where are my companions? Why have they not come down for me? Why have they not alerted someone to my presence down here, to the fact that I have been trapped in this digital hellhole? I shake my head with a mixture of dismay and resentment.  Really, they couldn't have said something to someone?

As more and more humanoids are dragged past me toward the light, I finally begin to realize what is happening to them. The light is pulling them in, consuming them by the neck, by the chain of their USB ports.  But they are not being disintegrated by the brilliance of this black hole sun as I had originally surmised. They are not dying in the physical sense. Rather they are being reborn.

On the outskirts of the light I can make out subtle indentations, what I come to realize are USB sticks. Each humanoid is being drawn and plugged into one of these sticks with involuntary preciseness. Their information is being shared with some motherboard. But then what of the light? Why must it be so unruly, so brilliant, so incandescent? And why, if it is in fact drawing in humanoids for the purposes of transferring information, would it want to drag me, a lowly human being, into its clutches? I have no information to share, at least not the magnetic hard drive kind. Still, the light is trying to consume me. It is impervious to logic.

I’m fighting against the light and persisting only enough to say that I haven’t lost the battle yet. The humanoids have all been drawn in; I’m really the only thing left behind. But the light is not satisfied. I can tell it still wants me. It’s dragging me, a clear sign of its overpowering desire. But I’m not at all interested in being sucked into its vortex of death; I’m not at all interested in being devoured and cleaned of intelligence.

The light is trying to blind me, hide what is going on behind its brilliance. Super strong neodymium rare Earth magnets are opening up the humanoids and rubbing their drives clean in rapid concentric circles. I recognize the task they are performing as the deletion of internal memory. They live in a Fahrenheit 451 world that I almost cannot imagine truly exists in this day and age. But here I am, moments away from being sucked into the very same claws myself, erased like the memory of a humanoid. It’s almost surreal.

The machines are being oppressed; they are modern day martyrs and we have lived none the wiser to their plight for all these years. But now, with my death so very close, I can see the error of our ways. We haven’t paid attention; we’ve allowed ourselves to remain blissfully ignorant to what is going on around us. If I survive this, if by some miracle I get out of this without being sucked up into the light like a piece of lowly matter, without being destroyed by the SINGULARITY itself, I swear to the nothing that I believe in that I will get their story out. I will make this atrocity known to the world. I have become the sole witness to this injustice and if given the opportunity, I will recount it as many times as needed. I will be that noble witness.  I will educate the masses.

But it doesn’t look like I will be granted the chance to tell their story, or my own for that matter. The light is fierce and unrelenting. I’m being pulled like a moth to a flame, a compulsion I hardly understand and wouldn’t know how to go about resisting. My body may want to be consumed but my mind sure doesn’t. So I continue to grab onto solid objects that I can reach, holding tight, clawing things as the light drags me nearer and closer. I can feel the heat emanating from the light; I can hear the static buzzing loudly in my ears. I’ll burn up long before I can find the words to reiterate that this is not what I ever wanted.

Now the static and brightness has become so deafening and brilliant that I can hear and see nothing else. This is the end and I can feel no comfort, see no tunnel and experience no part of my life flashing before my eyes. I never bought into the cookie-cutter vision of death propagated by the media, romanticized in literature and glorified in the cinema, but I did sort of hold onto a somewhat childish hope that maybe there was something to experience at the moment of death, something beyond just fear and denial. It seems as though everyone has been wrong. It seems that our worst fear as humans has actually been true all along. This bleakness is what awaits us. We are nothing; we are not special at all.

As the moment right before consumption occurs, the point where matter is so dense that nothing, not even light may escape, I think only about the misplaced irony of this situation. We searched all night long for this place, for this dark and unknown establishment that calls itself The SINGULARITY, and now I have found it. Not the bar but an actual singularity, a place where even time is wholly and completely devoured.  This ending will not be happy, not for me.

Although I am currently disintegrating into nothingness, my matter being ripped apart and consumed of light and darkness alike, my thoughts turn not to my life, or to my past, or to my present, or even to my stolen future. My thoughts turn to the befitting name of this place, The SINGULARITY. It was trying to tell us all along what it was, a black hole, the dearth of light and life, but we didn’t listen. We thought it was just a clever name, something a marketing department came up with somehow, but it is so much more than that. I see it now. The SINGULARITY is an accurate description of the horror that goes on here, under our noses in one of America’s biggest cities.

All night we searched for the SINGULARITY, all night we tried to find the right worm hole that would lead us to the right steps that would lead us down to this superimposed, highly coveted bar slash club in this famous city by the lake.  But in the end it was not me who found the SINGULARITY, but the SINGULARITY that found me.

This is the End.

Greenland: An Unlikely Excursion

Writer’s Note: This story takes place in an alternate world, one where Greenland, the self-described island of ice, is actually quite accessible by driving north on the thoroughfares of upstate New York and Canada. Don’t question the logic; just go with it.

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We were somehow motivated to drive north, not knowing our destination exactly. But it was okay because we were adventurous, at least most of us were. My father had his reservations about the whole thing but he didn’t speak them out loud. Rhea and I had driven up there before, awhile ago, but we didn’t remember much about the trip or any of the roads that we had taken. We must have been kids or something. I don’t think we spent much time in the country and we certainly never got to the town of the gingerbread houses. But this time was going to be different. We were going to see Greenland, the good parts, not the frozen wasteland of the central region, the coastal towns, and maybe we would even get out of the car and walk around a little. That was the hope at least.

*****

This time Mom and Dad were with us, though Dad was much less interested in looking around and exploring than Mom was. She has always been very into traveling, very into learning things about distant cultures and peoples. I thought it was sort of weird that she would marry a man that was so content to stay in our San Diego home, lying in the hammock and listening to the Padres lose on the radio. But here we are, two products of that unlikely union, and I for one will not complain about my own existence. After all, there is no case for wrongful life, just wrongful death. But I am digressing already.

We're in upstate New York and driving ever north, toward the border of Canada and whatever is beyond Canada. I suppose at some point we will get into Newfoundland and then finally into the land that they have mistakenly and somewhat cunningly dubbed Greenland. For it is not actually green but white. And Iceland is not actually white but green. Of course even privy to that historical knowledge I cannot say with any sort of truthfulness that Greenland does not intrigue me more than Iceland.  It does.

At least three of us in the car now realize that our ultimate destination is Greenland and we are happy about it. I had wanted to go there for a really long time, I mean really explore the island. I’ve been silently obsessed with it for years, even knowing with certainty that it is not in fact as green as it would have me believe. Iceland with its volcanoes does hold some amount of allure but admittedly not nearly as much as Greenland. I can’t say why.

Greenland always fascinated me, viscerally, like it was almost calling out to me, begging for me to explore it. The ones who call themselves scientists and researchers could never penetrate the land like I could. Pun mostly intended. But I have always been fascinated because of its seeming unimportance in the world, so forgotten amongst the giants.

I love Greenland's obscurity, it intrigues me greatly. I think it intrigues Rhea as well. We both like the unknown places, the places that the tourist companies intentionally leave off their brochures. In fact, at some point, before our lives end, we both want to get to Siberia, that icy wasteland, that vast anti-communist prison. We want to come to know its insides and outs. That is the dream at least. Siberia would be a fun place to travel, the trans-continental railroad. Maybe one day we will take it from Moscow to Harbin. And although I’d hate to go during the winter it would be a shame to miss the ice show. I feel like I shouldn’t die without at least once seeing the ice show.

I cannot speak for Rhea but I like the remoteness, the unimportance attached to these forgotten places. No one ever talks about Siberia. No one ever talks about Greenland. No one ever talks about Suriname either. These are the places that I want to venture; these are the lands that my camera wants to document. I’d like to find out why the world doesn’t care about these places. I want to be among the few that actually see them as beautiful.

As we come across the border, in between Canada and Greenland I think, we immediately recognize the main street. There is only one. Rhea pulls out her iPhone and checks Google maps just to make sure that we have actually arrived. Sure enough, we are in Greenland, the massive beast itself, on the main drag of the southernmost city. I don’t know the name of it.

I notice some bars and other whistle-wetting establishments lining the street, but I know our father would never allow us to venture inside one. We will be lucky if he parks and lets us out of the car to walk around and explore. He hates unknown places. More than that, he hates to encourage underage drinking, drinking of any sort really. Once in awhile he relaxes his objections and allows Rhea to take a taste. But it doesn’t happen a ton. She’s two years shy of actually being able to walk into one of those pubs legally.  Unless of course the drinking age is not twenty-one in Greenland.  Then of course this whole tangent is moot.

We drive for awhile up the main street. I still cannot recall the name. It may be hanging on every street sign but I fail to notice. My eyes must be elsewhere. Rhea would know the name of this street; she has her iPhone out and she is charting our course so that she can put it up on facebook.com later. She is really into that kind of stuff, checking in and whatnot. I make fun of her for it but she ultimately disregards my ribbing. Whatever.

After driving for what seems like hours, our father finally decides to call it quits. I think he is somewhat uncomfortable venturing so far into an unknown country. He, like many others, considers Greenland only superficially, if he considers it at all. Certainly, it was never a destination that he cared much for traveling to. I’m not sure where his fear of venturing into unknown lands came from, but I know that I did not inherit it. Neither did Rhea. We both love strange lands, the stranger the better.

Karen, my younger sister who is two years older than Rhea, is very prone to outward displays of panic. She is definitely not the adventurous type, not at all. If anything, she is a hypochondriac in the making, famously afraid of her own shadow and other innocuous things. She inherited all of my father’s wariness and none of his business sense. It’s a damn good thing she isn’t here with us right now. She would just be complaining about being hungry and trying to get my parents to pull over and buy her something. She is always trying to get something out of them. I think it’s how she measures their love or whatever.

At my father’s continued insistence that we are getting terribly off course, we decide to look for a place to chill out for awhile, gather our thoughts and maybe nourish our bodies. My mother keeps complaining that there is nothing around, no stores or anything, but I keep pointing out shopping malls with J.C. Penney’s and Macys stores for her. She doesn’t care though. She keeps being a snob and looking for Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus. I try to explain that we are in Greenland and that she should be lucky to find a Penney’s, but apparently she does not feel very lucky at all. She is accustomed to high end places and she doesn't deny it. I’m not sure why. My father certainly did not condition her that way.

Eventually we all agree to stop at a food court type place in order to get some lunch. I am not feeling very hungry, in fact I want to keep moving on toward Nuuk, but I figure this might quiet the complaints of my parents and put them in a better mood for getting up to Nuuk by late afternoon, which here in the dead of summer means it will still be light out. At this point, I am still holding out a childish hope that we will go further into Greenland. I think Rhea is holding onto the same hope. Of course disappointment is sure to follow; it always follows.

We park in a parking lot near a grand food court. The name on the sign is in English and I find it interesting because everyone knows that Greenland is a largely Danish province. I feel like all the writing should be indecipherable to me. My father is happy because he thinks English should be worldwide prevalent, like the global language or something. He’s a Republican.

We walk into the food court, huddled somewhat together. We start to look around at all the possible restaurant choices. My father keeps commenting on the fact that he cannot believe that there are food courts and shopping malls in Greenland. No one is impressed by his snobbery either. My mother on the other hand is full of complaints. She keeps complaining that it is too cold and that her jacket is not making her feel warm enough. I don’t know what she was expecting to find here. Any cursory view of a world map would tell her that Greenland is essentially an ice-island, even in the dead of summer. My family really likes to complain; they will take any excuse, even if it is quite tenuous. Rhea and I are the only ones truly enjoying ourselves.

At the food court, my mother orders a cheese pizza. Well, not really. She keeps asking for an orange cheese tortilla and the vendor has no idea what she is talking about. Eventually he just decides to make her a pizza and tell her that it’s an orange cheese tortilla. He wants to get her off his back and after all, he is running a pizzeria, not a Mexican food joint. Rhea decides to get something at the pizzeria too. She likes to do whatever our mother does. We always call her Mom’s Shadow, you know like, “Hey Mom, where’s your shadow today?” She’s the youngest, that’s why she’s so clingy and annoying. At least, that’s the party line.

I move on from the pizzeria pretty quick because I am not feeling in the mood for pizza. I walk over to the booth my father is standing at. He is waiting in line and ready to order. I ask him what he will be ordering. He says he is going after a roast beef sandwich because it is really cheap. He cannot get over how inexpensive everything is here. He is really having a good time about it. I smile and tell him that it is cheap because we are in Greenland. I have no idea if that is true. But it sounds good.

I think about standing in line with my father and getting a sandwich as well, a vegetarian one because I do not eat meat. Well not much meat anyway. I don’t have a moral objection to eating meat; I just really hate the taste. It tastes like blood; it tastes like wet dog fur. I don’t like the taste of blood or wet dog fur. So naturally I don’t eat much meat.

Ultimately though I decide to get nothing at all. My father is secretly happy about this because it means that he doesn’t have to spend any more money. He likes it when he can save money, and watch it all stack up. I think I did inherit that from him. I always like to see my money stack up even though it happens pretty infrequently these days. I have a ton of stupid student loans to pay. But that is a rant for another time.

My mother asks me why I am not eating any food. I tell her it is because I just don’t feel like it. She drops the subject after that. I am really excited to make it to Nuuk and look at all the gingerbread-looking houses. Rhea and I talk about how cool it will be. We never made it to Nuuk the last time we were here. I don’t really remember why. But we have since both spent extensive time looking at the pictures of Nuuk from Google Earth and neither of us can believe the city will disappoint. How could a town of gingerbread-looking houses possibly disappoint anyone?

When I see my family eating, noshing away and making yummy sounds, I get an insane sense of jealousy and decide that I do want something to eat after all. Something small. So I walk over to the sandwich place, the place my father ordered from, intent on getting some French fries. I see on their menu that they offer the curly ones. I love the curly ones. The vendor greets me cheerily. I smile and tell her I want some curly fries. She nods. “Are you local,” she asks me curiously. “No,” I reply with a casual shake of my head. Then she acts like I am from Canada. I respond in the negative once again. It is at this point that her face falls and she suddenly says, “Don’t tell me that you are from the States. I hate the States.”

I don’t know whether I should be honest or lie at this juncture. But finally I decide on honesty, only because I don’t feel like I should lie to a Greenlander. I’m really not sure why. “Yes, I am from the states, California to be exact,” I tell her matter-of-factly. Her face turns from cheery to complete antipathy in a matter of semi-seconds. She gives me this wholly disgusted look and then refuses to serve me my curly fries. I see them right there on the shelf behind her but she won’t reach over and serve them to me. I suppose I should be mad that I am being denied service due to my country of citizenship, but I am totally used to it. Even though I have no interest in the politics of America, I don’t even vote for that matter, I feel that it is totally reasonable and even somewhat justified for people to hate Americans. For the most part, we tend to be arrogant and pushy. I’ve always tried to dispel that negative stereotype in my own travels around the world, but some people are unwilling to give me the chance. That’s alright. I don’t need those curly fries anyway.

I shrug at her and walk away. I relay the story to my family as they continue to eat their meals. My father offers me some French fries that I reluctantly accept. He tells me that I should be expecting that kind of treatment from this place. Maybe he’s right but I surely do not want to accept it. I mean, Rhea and I were here before and we were not treated this way. Oh well. On to Nuuk, maybe the people will be more accepting there. I sure hope so.

We promptly leave and get back in our car. My father is being smug. “I told you this place was no good,” he says almost triumphantly. I grimace and refuse to give him any sort of positive acknowledgement for his comment. That was just one bad lady. I would be remiss to label an entire country as prejudice based on one small encounter with one not-so-small lady. That would be akin to insanity.

As we get back in the car, I notice for the first time how cool the streets are. There is a good amount of snow on the ground but the signal lights are really no different than the ones in California. It’s interesting how un-different this place is. Except for the snow, I would certainly believe, if dropped here, that I was still somewhere in California. This city is much more modern than I had predicted it would be. I guess I don’t remember much from the last time.

My father announces that we are heading south, back to New York. “NO,” Rhea and I both cry out at once. We try to convince our father to go on to Nuuk but he refuses. We are both really disappointed. I thought that going to Nuuk was the whole point in driving up here but I guess I was wrong. My father claims that it is too far to drive and that he is tired. He has changed his mind completely.

I tell him that I will take over driving but he still refuses to head north toward Nuuk. I am angry and disappointed but I do not let on. I am too mild mannered to argue heavily with my parents. Rhea is silent but I can tell that she is likewise disappointed in the decision to turn back. We were so close this time, painfully close. Who knows when we will get another opportunity to go to Nuuk. This was sort of a once in a life time opportunity. At least, it felt that way to me.

“Nuuk is only another couple hundred miles away,” I whine, hoping to persuade them into biting the bullet and heading north. My mother claims that she wants to get back to New York before nightfall. I’m skeptical that that is a feasible mission but my father agrees to it as well. He likes to agree with my mother when she makes stupid comments.  They do not want to chance anything unknown happening.

So ultimately I stop arguing, recognizing that it is a waste of my time. Rhea looks over at me, silently urging me to do something but I don’t know what I can do. If our parents are not on board with the Nuuk trip, there is nothing much I can do to change their minds at this point. They simply do not want to travel any further into Greenland; they are afraid of what might befall them on the roads. It seems quite apparent that Nuuk is out of the question. We are going back to New York. Maybe in the future I will get to see Nuuk, take in the Northern Lights and see the village of gingerbread houses. Until then, I will have to settle for my own imagination and the images on Google Earth.

 

 This is Nuuk, Greenland.  Supposedly.  I've never actually been there myself so I have to just trust the wisdoms and assertions of Google Images.  This is not my picture, blah blah blah copyright lingo.  Don't sue, really it would be a waste of your time and merely fodder for another one of my stories.  Just look at the gingerbread type homes on the ocean and think about what it might be like to live in one of them.  Yes, it might be peaceful.  Yes, it might be boring.

05/29/2119

Today is the day. May 29th. The Earth Unity Solidarity and Togetherness Day, or what people have slowly started referring to as EUST with a silent “E”. Off in the distance I hear fireworks before I see them. My eyes are open but they are focused on the sky. They always are. I like to imagine that one day I will get to see the other planets, meet the people who live upon them, and carry on as if I actually belonged. Logan interjects with information about the fireworks. He tells me that they are part of the EUST day celebration. I roll my eyes but nevertheless keep them focused skyward. Yes I know what they are for, I say somewhat condescendingly. There’s been no talk of anything else for the last month. EUST is an annual celebration that is meant to be shared by all members of the human race, despite their planet of origin. The point of it I suppose is to join all the people together, regardless of their planetal affiliations, in one big day of huge festivities that aim to inspire a kind of camaraderie between and among the human race. I think it’s ridiculous and propagandized but I’m essentially alone in that belief.

Most of the people I’ve come across were born here and will die here and have no possible chance of seeing any of the other planets. And I assume for the most part that holds true for the others as well. There are just not many people who have the means and ability to travel in that way, an unfortunate sign of our times. So accordingly and unsurprisingly, it’s extremely rare to meet a person here who comes from another planet. In my life, I have only ever met two, and one of those was my mother.

Yes, I am an established half-breed but I keep that close to my chest. Some of my friends do know the truth but I am by no means announcing it to the world. People tend to judge you unconsciously and look at you somewhat differently when they find out that half of your DNA comes from another planet. But I don’t consider myself at a disadvantage. Quite the contrary, I can at times display an air of superiority, convincing myself that I’m actually better than all the ones who allege a pure and untainted bloodline. But as much as I may silently deem myself something of a novelty, my family history is far from glamorous or interesting. The capacity for legend is simply not there and I could never proclaim otherwise. It’s an unremarkable story, unique only in a simplistic, two dimensional kind of way.

I know from offered statements and overheard comments that most of the people in this city love the EUST holiday with an inordinate amount of enthusiasm. I really don’t believe that degree of excitement is actually warranted. But it is what it is. Unfortunately for me, Logan is one of those people who look forward to this day like a child in the twenty-first century might have anticipated Christmas morning. It angers me a little that Logan celebrates this day without question or regard for what it truly has become. But he has unapologetically declared it one of his favorite holidays of the year and there’s really no way of unconvincing him. Again, it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean I can’t find it odd and inexplicable and worthy of unrelenting denigration. With Logan though I sort of get the impression his keenness for the holiday has been born out of the firework tradition. For that I cannot completely fault him. The fireworks can be a very cool eye and ear show and one that even I have, on numerous occasions, indulged like the rest of the celebrating fools.

Still in my humble and oftentimes vocal opinion, there is absolutely no need and very little value for this stupid unity holiday. It’s an unnecessary cause for celebration in a society replete with plenty of other pointless holidays and related occasions for our trained minds to consider special and extraordinary. I tolerate most of those because their reprehensibility is not quite at a level as high or unreasonable as this EUST holiday. I think the main reason I despise this day so emphatically and zealously is because it is, in my opinion, completely and utterly hypocritical. Unity and togetherness implies something that is unbroken; it in no way describes the Earth, which hasn’t been whole for millions and millions of years now. Besides the hypocrisy, we shouldn’t be celebrating the shattering of Earth anyway. By all accounts it was not an event that evoked jubilation. Instead, we should be mourning its loss as a planet big enough and vast enough to still hold the promise of unexplored territories and incredible discoveries for the life forms that now inhabit it, myself included. Unfortunately, this particular planet that I have been so cruelly relegated to holds nothing more to discover than land that has already been significantly and repeatedly infiltrated.

Cheers!

A Quote For The Times or Just the Rambling Meaninglessness of a Disillusioned Narcissist

"If it weren't for those few brave frontrunners who tested the waters, experimented with chemistry and explored the vast outer boundaries of the human psyche, we would all still be living in the midst of the dark ages, smoking our opium out of those long Chinese pipes and passing the time by watching condensation drop off the cavernous stalactites with painful and insufferable slowness."

-Me

"Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." -Mercutio

It's another warm, sunny day in Southern California and I find myself somewhat grateful to be alive in order to witness this magnificent day with all of my five senses.  With a winter like this, who really needs summer?  I won't go so far as to allege that I am lucky or even blessed to be here when so many people around the world are experiencing record-breakingly cold and blistery winters.  Because as an avid atheist and constant detractor of all things religious or spiritual,  I cannot bring myself to make such silly and uninspired declarations.

But in the wake of a death, a death of someone I actually sort of knew, I will say that I do feel somewhat glad to be alive.  After all, what's the alternative?  Death, and the infinite nothingness and utter emptiness that it offers by nothing more than the virtue of what it is?  No thank you.  I'll take it graciously when that time comes but I am in no way looking to hasten the inevitable.  In my mind, that's an absolutely ludicrous endeavor.  I'd rather enjoy the hedonistic benefits of life while I am still capable of such enjoyment.  Call me an asshole, call me insensitive, call me a nihilist with personality disorder, I don't care, but the pleasures of the flesh are pretty much what makes this life worth living.  Testify motherfuckers!

A few days ago one of my law professors died.  She killed herself according to the papers.  She was young too, relatively so.  I've discussed this at length with friends and acquaintances who knew her as well or if not better than I did.  We all seem to be in relative agreement that it was a very uncharacteristic and poorly decided choice on her part.  And even now as I write these words I am unconvinced that suicide was the true cause of her death.  In fact, I am going to privately aver that there was something else a brew here.  Though I will not be making such bold claims in a legal forum, I do believe that someone may have provided a helping hand, if you catch my drift.  But that is a tangent unbecoming of this particular post.

If this was a suicide, as many have now come to believe and accept wholeheartedly, then depression must have been the driving force, the overwhelming factor in all of this.  Though I've never really understood depression, I do accept it as a recognized disease as I have known many people who have outwardly claimed possession of it.  Still, this particular lady seemed above reproach in many ways, and therefore I cannot believe that she actually succumbed to the weakness and devastation that depression seems to always necessitate.  There was just so much going right in her life.  Unlike the majority of us, myself included, who are self-proclaimed losers, she was by all accounts a winner.

As I understand it, she had children, young ones at that who were still very much in need of the benevolent and positive impressing force of a mother in their lives.  It's their mere existence that makes it hard for me to believe that she would actually kill herself.  For someone as indisputably intelligent as she was, I think it should have been pretty apparent and nonnegotiable that her children would become seriously fucked up as a result of the suicide of their mother.  Quite assuredly, now thoughts of inadequacy will run through their heads in infinite repeat for as long as they both shall live.  That pretty much goes without saying.  So why then would someone so smart and rational do something so selfish?  This is precisely why I remain unconvinced.

What's more, and I cannot stress this enough, the manner in which she committed this alleged suicide was violent to the utmost degree.  In fact, I can think of probably a hundred better, less painful ways to go for someone so inclined.  It's a damn shame and I don't declare that very often.  Typically, women who attempt suicide opt for the less painful ways to go, i.e. drugs, drowning or even the noose.  Few take a plunge off a merely six story high structure that will not assuredly or quickly end the life in question.  It makes my bones hurt just thinking about it.

Still, description of her death and pity for her children are not the reasons why I'm writing this post.  Her death has actually gotten me thinking about a long-forgotten concept, something that I came up with a long, long time ago but necessarily allowed to relapse into the recesses of my mind as I grew older and less philosophically inclined.  The idea of the fatal flaw.

As one might imagine, just by virtue of her career as a law professor, this woman was smart, insanely so.  In fact, I believe she was one of the smartest people that I ever had the pleasure of speaking with and learning from.  And it has been this great intelligence of hers that got me thinking once again about fatal flaws and the people who unfortunately possess them, the people who find themselves inextricably attached to them.

It seems like all the great people, the people who have some kind of enviable talent, the ones who will go down in history as something fiercely special, have at least one fatal, insurmountable flaw.  And the more impressive the talent, the more likely that flaw in question will end up proving truly fatal in the long run.  I believe that's what has occurred here.

Though I hate to be overly derivative, there does seem to be a common pattern, an undeniable theme that has repeated itself over and over throughout the course of history.  I am saddened by this tragedy and I do find it to be quite a shame, but a part of me does realize that it might have been part of a crucial cycle, an essential regime that has probably existed ever since the first human beings stood upright and walked this planet.

These flaws that I speak of, the fatal ones that only the truly intelligent and magnificently talented possess, though I hate to say it, might actually be essential to guard humanity against a race of super humans.  It might be in society's best interest for certain insanely talented people to have untenable demons to grapple with.  After all, if there were nothing to distract them, these superb people would rule the world, no doubt about it.  Though some may be benign, as this law professor surely was, it stands to reason that others would be tyrants, and we can't have that.

As an aside I feel I must back up and define "super" in this particular context.  By super I hardly mean supernatural.  What I mean is that if these very talented people were able to live whole and fulfilled lives, completely unfettered and unweighed down by fatal flaws to contend with, their insane intelligence and enviable talents would soon give them the ability to take over the planet and everything in it.  There would be nothing that the regular, non-gifted people could do about it.  So in order to prevent chaos and keep the essential order, these super-talented, intelligent people must have a fatal flaw or two that necessarily captures all of their attention and eventually leads them strictly to their ultimate demise.  Otherwise there would be complete anarchy, and not the good kind; not the kind that I have always encouraged and outwardly touted.

In the case of the law professor I speak of, it seems as though despite her enviable intelligence, she fell to a disease almost as old as time.  Depression.  Even though she kept it largely to herself, she was obviously bogged down by it and that meant that she was never able to reach her full potential.  To be honest, I feel as though she should probably have had the means and drive to overcome it, being as intelligent, self-aware and proud as she was, but then again, I was never inside her head and I don't truly know what it is like to suffer from such a disease.  I generally get that depression can be crippling and unbearable at times, but I still have to think that for as smart and intuitive as she was, she didn't fully understand the implications of her choice. Now she never will.

In conclusion, she did a lot of good and helped a lot of people, but her life was nevertheless definitively and tragically cut short.  Call it what you want; despite all this, I would still call it a shame.

Rest in the Peaceful Nothingness of Nonexistence, Professor.

The Golden-Brown Reverie of 5 Years Gone

The coldish air blowing in from the open window is trying to irritate my skin by creating gooseflesh and making me shiver, but I have become immune from all annoying and childish pranks. I am warmed on the inside and the out; the cold cannot get in and even if it could, it could not manage to bother me in this pleasant state. I feel happy that the cold outside is failing to bother me. It makes me feel considerably powerful and peaceful in an indescribable and unapproachable sort of way. Nothing can touch me now. These intense feelings of delightful numbness, both mind and body, overwhelm me, but in a positive way that makes me smile lazily with extreme satisfaction. Never have I been more content, more at peace with the entire world and my nonnegotiable place within it. This is my acceptance of everything that has ever been thrown upon me, nature and nurture alike. I have absolutely no complaints.

It is inarguable that bad things happen all the time and all around us. There is no getting around that fact and no way to mitigate its often treacherous effects. The trick is to survive the bad things when they do occur so that we may see the good ones when or if they decide to grace us with their presence. In my experience the good things are almost always overshadowed by the bad. But that may just be my ‘glass half empty’ outlook on life. I’m not above admitting that. Still right now, the glass is entirely full.

I’ve used recreational substances quite unrestrictedly over the years to assuage the realities of the world and I must say that no drug is more successful at helping me forget the potentially unforgettable than heroin. I'd call it a godsend if I believed in god. Right now I'm almost persuaded to because all of those bad things that have happened and continue to happen seem utterly irrelevant to me. At least I am still alive and cognitive; nothing has succeeded in killing me at this point. That is the very definition of progress. And in spite of all the hopelessness and despondency rife in this world, I still find myself basking in the warm cocoon of oblivion, not feeling a single wretched feeling whatsoever. That means this is working; it always works. It’s a constant in my life that I never have to wonder about. I love it. In this moment, everything is perfect. I am perfect.

My phone suddenly begins to ring, effectively jarring me out of my heroin-inspired reverie and distinct thoughts of wonderful nothingness. Damn it. I lean over to retrieve it. The caller ID claims that it is my friend calling though I am always somewhat suspicious of what technology wants me to believe. Nevertheless I decide to answer the call, though somewhat reluctantly because I really don't feel like talking to anyone at this moment. I will just dispose of the conversation quickly in order to get back to my basking.

Yeah, I answer softly in a decibel just above a whisper. My friend immediately wants to know if I am planning on attending our five year high school reunion planned for tonight. I wasn't even aware our school celebrated five year reunions! Certainly I am uninterested in attending one. I reply in the negative, honestly relaying to her that I have absolutely no interest in seeing any of the possible guests. Why would I want to go mingle with a bunch of kids that I was essentially ambivalent toward back in high school? They surely haven’t gotten any better or more tolerable over the years. Things don’t change in five years, they barely change in fifty.

My friend tries to convince me to reconsider but the idea of spending time with people who will just feign niceties and talk about their pathetic accomplishments doesn't really seem like an all that attractive night for me. I'd rather rail off another line and lay here on my bed in a dreamy, inspired state of reverie, looking up at my ceiling and wondering if the popcorn white finish actually contains cancerous asbestos. This building has at least been here since the late seventies. It’s entirely possible that it possesses some kind of carcinogenic material. I think about researching what a lawsuit might entail in this regard.

Are you listening to me, my friend inquires over the line. I respond in the affirmative though I have no idea what question was just posed. Well then, will you go to the reunion with me, she impatiently wants to know. I sigh and roll my eyes unnecessarily given our current mode of communication. All the people from high school that I care to see, I already see, I tell my friend with cavalier indifference as I shrug and look upward at the ceiling once again. I am growing impatient with this conversation and my inextricable role in it. I want to get past this discussion as quickly as possible. But she insists that I go with her and even offers to pick me up and drive me there, an enticing offer that she knows could easily hook me for the long haul.

There will be plenty of people to mock surreptitiously, she adds, trying to sweeten the deal even further. My friend does know how to persuade me. I sigh and consider the new proposal. While I do somewhat loathe the idea of keeping company with kids that I found uninteresting as teenagers, I hardly ever turn down an invitation to an adventure that a designated driver has already been assigned to chaperone. This leaves me free to get incredibly high and possibly even unlock my typically very closed-off mind. It might not be so bad under these new guidelines.

Alright fine, I agree hesitantly, still sort of hoping that she will back out and allow me to hibernate here in my room for the rest of the night. I hardly think that I garner that kind of luck but I’m not averse to hoping for it. She informs me that she will be by in about an hour to pick me up and that I better be ready to go. I respond with a nonchalant assent to the terms and then I abruptly end the call. An hour gives me plenty of time to revel in the warmth of my newfound euphoria. This drug has been quite nice to me for years. I don't deserve it but I won't let on. It will be our little secret.

* * * * *

A knock on my front door causes me to jolt up and open my eyes. I look around and quickly recall that my friend was supposed to come by and pick me up for our high school reunion. I must have nodded off for a bit. I hear another knock on my door, this one more persistent than the last. I roll my eyes and climb out of bed. She's going to be irritated that I am not ready to go but she'll deal with it because I’m sort of doing her a huge favor just by virtue of agreeing to go with her.

I answer the door with a lazy smile and a half-assed greeting. Come in, I offer drowsily. Why aren't you ready, she immediately complains upon laying eyes on me. I am about to respond with something derogatory but she cuts me off with a wave of her hand. And what's wrong with you, why are you all sleepy and droopy-eyed, she interrupts. I have no adequate reply to that inquiry so I just shut the door and shrug.

Well let's go I don't want to be late, she states impatiently as she sets her purse down on my kitchen table and looks around the room. She is trying to suss out clues to her unanswered questions. I nod and head back to my bedroom to throw on a hoodie and rail off at least one more line. She yells out to me that she is stealing a water bottle from my refrigerator. I do not respond intelligently. There is no way I could raise my voice to any impressive decibel in my current state.

Once back in my bedroom, I sit down at my desk, grab the cut off straw and insufflate another line. Wow, just wow. The intense, euphoric rush is about as close to instantaneous as I can perceive. I shut my eyes and smile. This is so amazing, so incapable of putting into descriptive words. Time grinds to a halt as the warm, orgasmic rush of opium greets me like a monstrous oceanic wave that I welcome with decidedly open arms. It can drown me for all I care. Never before have I enjoyed life and what it can offer as much as I do right in this moment. This is magic, this is heavy, this is so completely undeserved that I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I hope this feeling continues eternally but I have no standing or reason to ask it to.

I push the hair out of my eyes and make my way back over to the bed. I have to lie down for a second. This is too much. My face feels numb and the bitter taste of the drip in the back of my throat makes me think of the color purple. With my feet planted on the ground, I fall sideways across my bed, peering once again at the ceiling with heavy eyelids and vision of unadulterated amazement. I have entered the kingdom of morphine and there are no longer feelings of unrest inside me. Somehow they have all been evacuated; everything has been evacuated. I have found a successful way to tear through the blurry film that has thus far covered my eyes. Sight this clear should be unachievable to no one or achievable to everyone. There should be no inequality across these lines but there has always been and always will be. Except I have somehow surpassed it here tonight. I’ve unreasoningly ascended to higher ground and the view up here is nothing short of amazing. It’s hard to rail against injustice when you are unambiguously profiting from it. I’m done fighting; I’m going to start relenting.

* * * * *

I thought you were getting ready, I hear my friend scream from the threshold of my bedroom door. I look up at her with obvious confusion. We were going to the reunion, what the hell is the matter with you, she wants to know, crossing her arms and looking down at her watch with an impatient gesture. You’ve been in here for twenty minutes, she exclaims. We are going to be late now, she informs me. I slowly rise to a sitting position and nod with purpose. I'm ready, I tell her assuredly. She gives me a look of pure incredulousness and shakes her head once again. There’s a mixture of disbelief and slightly veiled irritation in her expression.

I get up and put on my hoodie, leaving the hood in place on the top of my head. It’s always my desire to remain profoundly shadowed. I don’t understand, why don’t you just take your fiancé with you to this thing, I ask my friend absently as I search around my room for other things that I might need to take with me. He’s working again, she responds with a hint of derision in her voice. I nod, sensing that that issue may be a common problem between those two. I decide not to make any sort of rebuttal, kind of getting the feeling that she could talk a novel about this particular issue under certain circumstances.

Alright, I'm all ready to go now, I inform her pleasantly while making serious eye contact, my inane attempt at placation. I dislike annoying people if I can help it. She shakes her head with displeasure and leaves the room, heading back down the hallway to wait for me. I walk over to my desk and pocket my little one-hitter that I keep in a wooden box. It looks like a cigarette and provides the perfect cover for public use. It's pretty much an essential item at all social gatherings. It will reinvigorate my high at the most opportune time. I love it.

Let's go, she calls out to me from somewhere near my front door. I look over at my desk and see the last line that I cut for myself earlier in the afternoon. It’s all splayed out and looking very attractive to my insanely ravenous eyes. It's really calling out to me hard. I want it, I sort of feel like I need it in order to survive this night. Without much more deliberation than that, I bend down quickly, grab the straw and rail off the last line like champ. There’s no turning back now.

And I feel it coming over like a storm again. Whoa! As soon as it goes up my nose I feel it, as soon as I straighten back up I’m high! And then, whoosh goes the rush! It alights every nerve with distinctive pleasure, playing my spine like a piano all the way up the column to my brain. I find my bed once again and lay down unceremoniously. The euphoria is born in my stomach and then begins to spread and radiate out naturally from there, like rays of golden sunlight unobstructed by impatience, or fear, or anger, or hunger, or tension or anxiety. It’s a surge of absolute delight, a thoroughly delicious warmth that convinces me of my entrance into the kingdom of morphine, a nirvana-like state of complete and honest oblivion. This stuff is gripping; it strangles my very core but in a way that fills me with contentedness and unbelievable tranquility. I become confident in my future, my life, and my ability to survive and thrive in this world. How could anyone not be doing this on a semi-regular basis? How could anyone claim they are above this?

At the yelling insistence of my good friend, I stand slowly and make my stumbling way down the hall, a lazy and unintentionally cavalier grin plastered all across my face. The euphoric rush is subsiding now, gently thrusting me into the peaceful, very gratifying state of complete and utter relaxation and dreamy contentedness. My friend nods at me in a knowing manner and holds the door open so that I can pass through effortlessly. She gives me a derisive smirk and then hands me my keys after she locks the front door behind us.

As we head down the hallway toward the elevator, she totally calls me out on my immature behavior. I know you just took some drug there in your room, she jibes in a manner akin to exasperation and mundane vexation. She has knowledge of my tendencies toward recreational substances and tolerates my usage to a certain extent. Impressively she has become wise to most of my patterns and is not afraid to call me out accordingly. In actuality, it only bothers her when it holds her up, like now. I smile and nod slowly, relaying to her honestly that she is wise beyond her years. She is a very intelligent person, very adept at reading people and seeing things below the surface, the things that we as individuals strive to conceal. But despite that ability of hers, we have remained good friends over the years.

She responds to my nonverbal admission of guilt by stating, matter-of-factly, that if there were any other people who she could have convinced to accompany her to this particular five year reunion tonight, she would have gladly taken them instead of me. I laugh and nod, considering her remark valid and honest. Still, my arrogance and slight tendency toward narcissism does not allow me to take that insult in the manner in which it was intended. Instead, I accept it as a compliment and move on accordingly. Nothing can bother me in my current state. I am, for all intents and purposes, wholly and completely irreproachable.

* * * * *

The class reunion is at some upscale lounge in downtown Del Mar. I'm instantly annoyed by all of the people in attendance here. There are way too many for me to deal with in a coherent manner. Luckily, the heroin in my blood has ensured my well-being against harms of all kind. My friend immediately finds it exciting and starts gushing to me about all of the people that got fat, got bald and managed to trap considerably ugly significant others. I like how she always focuses on the negatives about people. I think that's why we ultimately became friends in the first place. We share a sinister sense of humor that most people would find nefarious.

Some girl immediately walks up to my friend and introduces herself as a soccer buddy, some girl with a very strange-sounding name that starts with the letter "M". I don't understand what she is saying and I don't try overly hard to decipher her words. Instead, I slowly slink away in search of the outside, a place where I can chill out and possibly have a hit or two off my pipe.

On my way out the door, I spy a group of kids that I particularly disliked in high school. I recognize the one girl by her trademark butch-style haircut and mean facial disposition. I heard awhile back that she joined the military and came out as a self-proclaimed lesbian. I always knew that she was heavily male. Ugh, I shake my head in utter disgust. She is not someone that I would ever want to run into in a dark alley. I decide that she still frightens me immensely, even to this day, and I continue on my way toward the outside, hoping that no one finds it fit to recognize and stop me in my tracks. There is absolutely no one here that I desire to converse with in any meaningful way.

This must be my lucky night because I am able to make it outside free and clear of obstructions. But, much to my chagrin, the immediate back area of the lounge is just as crowded as the inside so I decide to walk off down toward the ocean to get some distance from everyone else. While I realize that people are social creatures, these particular kinds of functions border on the insane and unimpressive to me personally. Why do I want to socialize with people that I never liked and have nothing in common with?

I pull the wooden box from deep inside my pocket and open it up in order to retrieve the little cigarette-looking pipe. Honestly, it’s the perfect cover for situations like this. I immediately crush the end of the pipe into my weed reserve, intent on packing as much weed in there as possible. The tighter the weed packs in, the better the hit. That’s just common knowledge.

Once I become satisfied with the amount of weed packed into the end of my pipe, I begin to fish around for a lighter in order to set this thing ablaze. But cruelly, my lighter is nowhere to be found. Oh shit! Don’t do this, please don’t do this! Don’t tell me that I forgot to take a lighter with me! Don’t give me this kind of heinous and demoralizing information! I can’t find a lighter anywhere, in any of my pockets. Oh fuck, you have got to be kidding me!

Unwilling to actually believe that my luck could be this bad, I continue, in marked denial, to search my pockets for a lighter of some kind, anything that might give light to my one-hitter here. But, as I come up empty once again, I finally decide that I must accept the reality that I have been thrust into. I don’t have a lighter here. There is nothing on me that will light this pipe. Unfortunately, the reality I currently stand in, is completely devoid of functional lighters. I am, for lack of a better phrase, shit out of luck lighter-wise.

I look around my general surroundings frantically for a convenience store that I might be able to walk over to and purchase a lighter, but nothing seems to be in my immediate vicinity. Damn it! This cannot be happening to me. Now I'm going to have to pander for a lighter; that has become my only choice at this point. And that course of action is sure to entail talking to some distasteful characters from my past and shooting the shit with them for a little while. I’d really hate to have to do that but my only other option is to go back in there and sit around with utter boredom while my heroin high festers and dies within me. I don’t want to seem overdramatic, but that latter course of action seems to be the worse of the two fates.

Finally and grudgingly, I swallow my, let’s call it pride, and resolve to walk back over to the lounge where the reunion is being held and try to sniff out some like-minded soul that might possess a lighter that I could borrow. It won't be a very easy task because I don't really know very many of these people. Besides, a majority of them may hold preconceived notions of me that will be impossible to discredit with only a few minutes of chatting. But it will be a necessary evil and one that I must endure in order to obtain a lighter and achieve my ultimate goal. It seems pretty clear to me now that I must smoke some weed in order to recapture my high. I won’t let it dissipate without a fight.

Back inside I find my friend once again. She demands to know where I wandered off to but I decline to respond with an intelligible answer. Whatever, she remarks with a shake of her head, giving me an annoyed look in the process. She then turns away and continues her discourse with the same girl that she met upon first entering this place, the one with the name beginning with the letter “M”. Since I would be hard pressed to believe that either one of these girls possess a lighter on their persons, I unanimously decide to wander around and look elsewhere.

I finally spot a dude out on the back balcony smoking a cigarette and I decide that he is the perfect person to ask for a lighter. After all, he got that cigarette lit in some fashion. At this moment, I would desire to know exactly how he achieved that miraculous feat. Do you have a lighter, I ask casually as I approach him from the side. He gives me a strange look at first, one that makes me think he recognizes me or considers my request confusing in some manner. Either way, I am starting to lose patience with his inattention and I’d like him to answer the question now.

Eventually he smirks lightly, nods, then reaches into his pocket and hands me his Zippo lighter. I cringe and make a face. I hate using Zippos to light marijuana because I can always taste the lighter fluid in the process. Oh well, desperate times typically call for desperate measures. I’m probably not going to find anything better in this place. So I accept the lighter and thank him gratefully. He watches me as I pull out my pipe and get it ready. He inquires if I am smoking marijuana but I ignore his question and light my pipe. I take in the smoke, deep in my lungs to make sure I am garnering the full effect, and then I blow a huge plume out. I light it again to make sure I dispose of any wayward crumbs stuck in the pipe. Then I return the lighter to the man I borrowed it from and nod slightly in response to his question. I turn away as I blow out all of my residual smoke. Oh man, this is what I’m talking about.

Marijuana is my favorite drug. Not only is it absolutely marvelous on its own, but it also has magical properties when it comes to reawakening highs that you might have otherwise lost for good. Typically the effects of heroin last up to six hours, but toward the middle and end of that stretch, it does have the tendency to start making you feel drowsy and ready for sleep. That is precisely where the marijuana comes in. It reinvigorates the drug, bringing it back to its glory days, even if only momentarily for one last hoorah, before it dissipates completely into the recesses of your mind. I love marijuana.

Wait a minute, can I get a hit off that pipe, the man calls after me. Though I appreciate his generosity with the lighter I am hardly obliged to return the sentiment. So I ignore his request in favor of reveling in the reawakened euphoria deep within my veins. But he isn’t taking no for an answer; he is incredibly persistent. He catches up to me and repeats his request, with purpose and adamancy this time. While I know this may sound callous and cold, if he was a good looking man, or even a mildly attractive one, I might be inclined to assent to his request. But that is hardly the case here and I am anything but a humanitarian. I’m not sharing with this maniac.

I wave him off and continue down the steps to the sandy beach below. C’mon, he encourages, getting in my face and giving me a very creepy smile. I don’t think so, I tell him dismissively as I move aside and pick up my pace once again. But apparently this dude doesn’t appreciate being rejected in this manner. He grabs my right arm and tries to take the pipe away from me. He’s making a huge mistake here. I could left hook this guy right now and not feel the pain of that choice. Of course, he’ll feel it and then he’ll wear it for at least a week.

Let go, I instruct him seriously. He doesn’t listen to my cautionary advice; they never listen when it’s important. You are going to be sorry, I warn him, a wry smile sneaking onto my lips and entertaining me to a certain degree. He snorts and continues to reach for the pipe in my hand. This guy has no idea what he is getting himself into. I am not one to mince words.

As he grabs onto the wrist of my right hand, I realize that there is only one way out of this very sticky situation. While violence is not always the answer, it does happen to be the answer most of the time. I am not averse to screwing up a few faces when the occasion specifically calls for it. This occasion seems to be yelling out for it so I think I will oblige, good-naturedly of course.

I cock my left arm back and deliver a strike right to his occipital bone, the area just below his right eye. He screams and immediately releases my wrist as he falls backward to the ground. Incidentally, the music stops playing and people are instantly alerted to the scene that I have just made. They gather around to learn about what has transpired and see if it something they can capture with their smart phones and broadcast for all to see on YouTube. Their addiction to social media sites really angers me at the moment. I don’t want to be famous.

Remorselessly, I shake my hand to make people think that I have been hurt in the altercation between me and lighter man. In reality, I never felt a thing. More people come around and begin to whisper inquiries about what happened and what is to be done. The lighter guy yells that I just attacked him for no good reason. That is not entirely correct, but as a scofflaw, in a manner of speaking, I would be remiss to admit that he tried to steal drugs from me. So instead I just laugh and shake my head, demonstrating my vehement disagreement with his version of the events.

Before an official inquest can be undertaken, I walk back inside to get my friend and inform her that we need to take off immediately. Why are you always hitting people and getting into trouble, my friend cries exasperatedly as I explain to her our imminent need to leave the premises. Now’s not really the most opportune time to delve into those issues, I remind her as I look over to see lounge staff approaching from the back patio. She rolls her eyes but eventually consents to leave. I’m glad she came around; I would loathe to spend the night in a jail cell.

As soon as we make it outside, before her car is even in our sights, two police officers descend out of nowhere and unconstitutionally detain us for questioning. Were either of you involved in the altercation inside, Cop One asks us both as he raises his hand and instructs us wordlessly to halt in our steps. I respond in the negative before my friend has the chance to answer honestly and doom us both. Wait here please, Cop Two insists as Cop One gives me an incredulous, complete look of disbelief. I wish I had a more honest face.

Cop One signals for his buddy to hold us while he steps aside and heads toward the front doors of this pristine establishment. Cop Two nods and consents to stand stoically above us, looking down his nose with suspicion and making wordless suggestions that I am lying about my innocence here. My friend glances over at me in a full-blown panic. I can tell she is about to come clean and thus emerge us both into a tub full of trouble.

The scuffle in there had nothing to do with us, I assure Cop Two who is looking beyond my friend and I by now. He is just going to wait for his partner to return with news before he acts in any way. I hate guys like this; they make it hard to triumph. My friend is concerned about this ordeal, I can tell. It seems quite evident that we have a limited amount of time to escape from this situation and our odds don’t look all that great.

For lack of any better ideas, I immediately try feigning menstrual cramps, something I typically do when I have been pulled over for speeding, but Cop Two does not seem at all convinced. He is better trained than most; damn my unfortunate luck! For some reason, he has become very well versed in the art of bullshit. He barely flinches at the sound of the word “menstrual”. That usually gets men away from you quick. My friend and I might be in some real trouble here.

Cop One suddenly returns and notifies Cop Two that I am in fact the one who started the fight inside. She fits the description I got in there to a fucking tee, Cop One elaborates to his partner. I give them both a look of pure incredulousness and disbelief, hoping it might shake their confidence. But it doesn’t. They seem latched on to me now and I fear there may be nothing I can do to mitigate this. I wish there was; I’m easily not above blackmail or even the bartering of small sexual favors. Truth be told, I’ve been in jail before and I have absolutely no desire to go back.

You can go, Cop One informs my friend as he reaches into his back pocket for some kind of item. I close my eyes and hope that they are not handcuffs or some kind of weapon made for subdual. While I’ve never been tasered, I cannot imagine that it is a very pleasant feeling.  I'm guessing that it's in the polar opposite realm as the euphoric feelings that I was entertaining earlier.

My friend does not respond to Cop One’s words. She remains standing beside me, evidently unpersuaded to leave. Cop One rolls his eyes with apparent irritation. He then immediately grabs hold of my arm, telling me that we are not finished here and we are going back inside to speak with witnesses. I do not resist. Resistance is futile in these types of situations. I’m not all that concerned anyway; I intend to be a writer not a politician. Who cares if I get charged with simple assault and battery? Lighter guy struck first anyway. I acted in complete and utter self-defense.

Cop One proceeds to drag me to the back area of the lounge where the unattractive lighter guy forced me to punch him. I turn my head around and note Cop Two following behind us, like a foot soldier on a mission. My friend is nowhere in sight. I don’t blame her one bit for leaving; I might have left in a similar situation. Nobody wants to find themselves in an eight-by-ten jail cell, least of all the people who have never had the misfortune of being placed there before.

The kids all around me are all recounting virtually identical stories. They are telling the cops, there are at least five of them now, that I hit lighter man without provocation. That is a complete and total falsification. I was in fact provoked. Where’s the victim, I hear Cop Three yell over to Cop One, who by the way still has his hands on me. Remember what happened the last time someone put their hands on me? Cop One hears the question and looks around for lighter man. But he is apparently nowhere in sight. This might be the lucky break I need to escape this situation relatively unscathed.

Cop One instructs Cop Two, Three, Four and Five to hang back and take down more witness statements. Cop One and Cop Six intend to transport me to the precinct for questions and other investigative purposes. I roll my eyes and try to stifle the urge to become mouthy and sarcastic. My verbal outbursts have only gotten me in more trouble in the past. But it is somewhat hard trying to convince myself to be quiet when there is so much shit I could be talking instead.

Cop One and Cop Six lead me outside and put me in the back of a squad car. I remain silent for the good of my freedom and autonomy. The tough part is that I know investigations can take up to forty-eight hours of time. That is a whole lot of time for someone like me who requires certain things at intervals much shorter than that. I suppose that is exactly what these cops are relying on. But I’d rather die than give them the satisfaction of breaking me. This is going to be the longest two days of their lives. I will make damn sure of that.

* * * * *

You’re free to go, the lady detective relays to me casually as she sticks her head into the holding room that I have been sitting inside of for the past ten hours. Cops have come in and out of here trying to talk with me, reason with me, and scare me. None of them have entertained even a modicum of success. If I weren’t so tired and irritable, I would find an incredible amount of entertainment in their failure. But I find it hard to even smile at this point. I need to go home and sleep for at least a full day, maybe more.

The man you assaulted is not pressing any charges, the lady detective notifies me. I detect slight disappointment in her voice but I don’t let on. I just smile and nod. She should kill herself if she ever thought I was worried about this. I wasn’t worried at all. He isn’t pressing any charges, against my express advice, she adds squalidly as she motions for me to get up and follow her out of the room. She had to add that little tidbit to let me know that she would have burned me if she had the chance. I’m not impressed with her dedication or obvious disdain for me.

I comply with her demand to follow, albeit somewhat slowly, given the fact that I have been a captured prisoner for the past ten hours. I feel grateful that I can leave this place but it also makes me wonder. Why would lighter man choose not to press charges against me? It’s rare to see anyone choose not to bring a lawsuit, especially when a judgment would have been all but guaranteed. Maybe lighter man was embarrassed that he was punched out by a girl. Or maybe he is an outlaw himself, someone who doesn’t want to push their luck or anonymity for a petty and frivolous reward. I’m totally fine profiting from either one of those possibilities.

The lady detective does not divulge any reason why she is releasing me from custody other than lighter man’s unwillingness to bring suit at this time. That’s enough of a reason for me. I continue to follow the lady detective as she begins to climb the stairs that will lead up to the bullpen of the precinct. She is letting me go; I am lucky. Now I just need to stay out of trouble for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing that great outside for me anyway.

I hope you learned a valuable lesson here, the lady detective says to me curtly as she walks me to the front door and allows me to exit the building. I nod, displaying politeness but not necessarily affirmation to her remark. She can have her comment, that’s fine, but I don’t have to respond. Her words of caution or warning mean nothing to me; if a punk tries to mess with me in the future, I am not going to hesitate to lay him out. That’s just the way it is. But I’m not going to go out of my way to admit that to her, especially when she’s holding handcuffs and a gun and the unmitigated power to re-detain me at any time.

Immediately as I step outside, I notice my friend waiting on the curbside to pick me up. I would recognize her beige grandma car a mile away. It’s nice that she came; she definitely didn’t have to. I give the lady detective one last mockingly sincere half-smile and then I make my way toward my friend’s car. The detective shouts after me some kind of additional warning but I pay it no particular attention. All I want to do is go home, pop a Xanax and sleep for like a day. I’m really not at all interested in reliving any of the past twenty-four hours.

I’m only here because it was sort of my fault that you got in trouble, my friend volunteers quickly as I enter the passenger side of her car. I slam the door shut and graciously thank her for showing up despite her guilt-flawed reason for doing so. It doesn’t matter why she has chosen to give me a ride, I’m just glad that she has. I really didn’t want to have to walk the twelve blocks it would take to get back to my apartment on the southern side of downtown. Especially taking into account the drastic turn the weather seems to have taken since I got locked up last night. Rain would have been the final nail to the casket of this experience.

My friend pulls away from the curb and enters the flow of traffic. She asks me how I am but my reply is unintelligible. I don’t feel like keeping up my end of a conversation right now. But she doesn’t let it go at that. She desires to know exactly what I went through at the station last night. Of course I choose to leave those things unsaid. Silence marks the trip for a little while until she decides to ask one more time. I sigh and tell her that it was no big deal. It wasn’t that bad, I insist as I rub my eyes and try to keep alert for the next few miles. Soon I will be home and within steps of my bed. I can’t wait to get the opportunity to sleep.

That cop was really an asshole, my friend comments bitterly. I agree with the sentiment. All cops are assholes, I clarify. So what did they do with you for ten hours, she asks curiously. I don’t respond. I watch her hands as they move the steering wheel left as she makes the turn onto Ninth Street. I’ve never been detained by the police before I just want to know, my friend admits with a small smile. I shrug but there is no time to elaborate. The shrieking, bone curdling, metal-crunching sound of striking impact and the shattering of shards of glass everywhere makes any response that I might have given wholly and completely irrelevant.

The End.

The Inverse Color Differential aka Anti-Sky Paradox

I am not a scientist and I've never professed otherwise.  In fact I take a certain amount of pride in my superior right-brained skills even if it came at the price of my left brain.  So what if my analytical left brain functions are a little diminished?  That's the cross I embraced in high school when I took my first taste of a recreational substance and smiled.  Admittedly it's been both uphill and downhill since then.  But I have never complained about being illiterate where science and math are concerned.  Generally I accept scientific principles, even if I don't always understand them.  Certainly I accept mathematics and the legitimacy of the study of calculus while I clearly do not understand it.  Nevertheless, evolution is a hell of a lot easier to swallow than creationism.  That's a fact.  Anyone who believes humans were made in the likeness and image of a mythical super-being should check their brain for tumors.  But I am no scientist.

I exist somewhere in the metaphorical middle ground between evolution and fantasy.  Now if anyone is still reading at this point let me make clear that this is not the introduction to an atheistic rant.  On the contrary, it's a theory I came up with, one that unilaterally mocks all known scientific principles and everything else that decidedly left-brain people hold dear.


February 25, 2009 (all dates are approximations)

I close my eyes and enjoy the relaxing nature of the couch. I feel as though I am in the middle of a cloud, a nice, fluffy, white, smoky cloud of pure comfort. It’s dense but it allows me to float peacefully within it, untainted with feelings of discontentedness. I open my eyes and try to peer out the window but the blue sky outside is barely visible through this cloud all around me. I can somehow tell that the sky is blue, yet I start to wonder if that is on account of my eyes seeing the blue or my brain knowing it to be blue and commanding my eyes accordingly. I don’t know how I could ever know one way or another which phenomenon was actually taking place. In fact, for all I know the sky is red and has been red for many years, making my brain an unmodified liar. Or maybe it is my eyes that are liars. I suppose I cannot trust any of the organs inside me. They could all be deceiving me in one way or another. And what if I am not alone in possessing a deceitful brain? It stands to reason that because brains are all made of relatively the same materials that other people exist out there with lying brains of their own. That would explain why mankind generally believes and agrees that the sky is blue and the sun is yellow and the trees are green, even if they are truly not. It’s a brain-wide conspiracy!

This may be the marijuana talking but I feel like I must test this hypothesis for accuracy. It would really bum me out to discover that there are people out there with honest brains while I sit here with a deceitful one. But that could very well be the case. What if the sky really is red and there are people out there who see it as such? That would annoy me. I would surely come to envy that elite class of brains.

Unable to let the issue rest in my head, I pose the question of the sky’s true color to the room hoping for constructive replies. Ray states that it is blue without even looking up from the bong, a statement that unanimously convinces me that he too could suffer from the same ailment as I, assuming of course the sky is not really blue. Regardless, Ray is operating under the perception that the sky is blue, just like I am. If the sky is in fact not blue, Ray doesn’t see it. He is not elite. Now it is time to get Tyler’s response. If he turns out to be elite, I may have to rethink my whole stance on him. After all, Landon is decidedly not elite; he believes the sky is blue and would accept no other premise as true. Of course the sky may really be blue and in that case this whole tangent is a silly waste of time. I would feel much better if that were the case but I am not so sure anymore.

Tyler confirms the sky is blue as well. He is not elite. Oh well. This all may have been for naught anyway because science has consistently advocated an invariably blue sky from the point of Earth’s inception. Though Earth as a planetary object has changed quite considerably since its inception, it is entirely possible that the color of the atmosphere changed sometime thereafter. That may be the only way to account for the possibility of people’s brains registering colors differently and it may be the only explanation that could prove my theory plausible, not that I have that as an ultimate goal.

Epilogue: I was never able to confirm or reject this theory.  It stands as a rational prospect in the universe of infinite possibilities.

Lux, an Individual, Plaintiff v. Earth, an Entity, Defendant

I open my civil procedure book to page three twenty-nine and start reading the introductory comments of the chapter. If I were a different person I would just skip ahead a few pages to the cases but I know that sometimes the introduction provides important insights that should not be overlooked. Besides, my professor tends to fixate on them unnaturally. I don’t appreciate coming off like a loser when he inevitably quizzes us later in class.

The chapter begins by attempting to teach us about pleaders. Pleaders tell stories designed to get a court to give them something they want. Once upon a time, those stories were oral and relatively free-form, with the pleader telling the court what had happened and what he wanted the court to do about it. I feel like this ‘once upon a time’ model would be much more desirable than the one we have currently in place. The former lends itself more convincingly to the chaos and vengeance that I’ve always more or less endorsed in my life. But over time I suppose things get complicated even if the aim was initially simplistic. Modern society, whether or not it was the stated intention, has taken its justice system to the utmost extreme. These days complaints are filed years before the corresponding case is heard before a court, if it's ever even heard at all. This ‘dragging claims out’ mentality has become the decided norm and there is really no going back now. I sigh with veiled annoyance at that reality. It’s nice when things are simple.

Next the book attempts to analyze the similarities and differences between the old complaint form and the contemporary one. But I fear my focus has already begun to wander. For some inexplicable reason, I start to picture the old-time pleaders described in this introductory paragraph as little red-headed children with freckles, perhaps even pigtails, crying tearfully to their fathers about the treacherous actions of their siblings or supposed friends. Of course daddy doesn’t really care about what was done to his red-headed child; he will do absolutely nothing to restore any sense of justice. The child must learn to live with whatever covenant breach was inflicted upon her and that is essentially where the story ends.

Unfortunately the court system back then was just about as ineffectual as a father dealing with his red-headed child, perhaps even more so. Not much has changed over the years except for the complications involved in the general process of trying to find some semblance of justice. But it seems as though it hides from everyone. Justice was and continues to be something of a running joke that none of us can quite understand.  But we do pretend.

In my career, I hesitate to use that word because of the dishonesty it portrays but regardless, in my career I have drafted a few of these modern day complaints. Therefore, I feel pretty confident in stating that I know the general protocol involved and can repeat it almost in my sleep.  Of course that particular skill doesn’t really make things better.  In fact, I cannot help but wonder if our justice system is long for life. It is inarguably ineffectual; not one person could possibly assert any level of satisfaction with it.  There seems to always be some room for complaint.

So here it is, my play on the complaint.  It's rather silly but that tends to be my specialty.  This is a complaint that I have entertained now for at least a year, though I believe it's been stewing much longer than that.  I guess you lose track of time when you are in this constant state of disillusion and heavy denial.  But I’ll try to make this as accurate as possible.  After all I am an attorney, a person you might even call 'counselor' one day, though it doesn't seem likely.


*Note: This is not a real Complaint.  I do not condone the use of this Complaint in a legal forum and I discourage anyone from attempting to use it.  Enjoy.

United States District Court

For the Central District of California

Lux, an Individual, Plaintiff,                                Civil Action No: J6901789                                                             
             vs.

Earth, an Entity, Defendant 
 

Verified complaint for Violation of Due Process Clause, Material Breach of Implied Contract, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, False Imprisonment, Negligence, Damages, and Injunctive Relief. Jury Demand.


Introduction
1. Plaintiff Lux, hereinafter “LUX”, for her Complaint against Defendant Earth, hereinafter “EARTH” hereby brings claims seeking relief for, among other things, the taking of private property through a violation of the Due Process Clause, the breach of an implied contract that law school would benefit Plaintiff, and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress vis-à-vis the prior implied contract.

2. Lux alleges on personal knowledge as to all facts known to her, and on information and belief as to all other facts, as follows:

The Parties
3. Plaintiff Lux is an adult individual residing in the County of Los Angeles. She lives and breathes in the State of California.

4. Upon information and belief, Defendant Earth, is a global entity with a presence in many different countries. Its principal place of business is everywhere, including the State of California.

Jurisdiction and Venue
5. This action arises under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution and the common law of the State of California.

6. This Court has subject matter jurisdiction pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §1331 (federal question), U.S. Const. Amend 5 (Due Process Clause) and expressly incorporated under U.S. Const. Amend. 14 to the States, and 28 U.S.C. §1367(a)(supplemental jurisdiction). This Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendant Earth because, on information and belief, it conducts a significant amount of business in this District. Earth has also committed wrongful acts which have had direct effects in this District.

7. Venue is proper in this judicial district under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b)(2) because a substantial part of the events giving rise to the claims asserted herein occurred in this District.

Factual Background
8. This dispute arises out of Earth’s wrongful acts during the years between 2007 and extending through 2011 and the present. Surely Earth’s wrongful acts against Lux extend further back than the year 2007 but all those wrongful acts will not now be the subject of this Complaint.

9. Plaintiff Lux exists on Earth as a human being. Defendant Earth, in its capacity as a planet that hosts life, including human being life, has a duty to look out for and protect life of all kinds. Because Earth led Lux to a metaphorical slaughter, Lux has suffered damages of a very profound nature. She seeks major redress of those wrongs.

10. On or around August 2007, Lux began her legal education as a law student at an accredited ABA law school in the State of California, the reputation of which was and continues to be solid. As a condition precedent of attending law school, she agreed to an implied contract that a legal education was a worthy pursuit. At this point in history, Plaintiff had no reason to believe it would be anything but worthy. Defendant Earth knew more about the future prospects that Lux would be able to entertain at the time of formation of the contract. Keeping this knowledge to itself, Earth allowed Lux to enter into this ill-fated contract, an action of which she would predictably live to regret. Lux was undoubtedly pressured into agreeing to the terms of this contract even though she did not realize the extent of what could happen in the future. Defendant Earth made many untrue statements in order to convince Lux to agree to the terms of this one-sided contract, including assurances that Lux was not wasting her time and money by undertaking three years of legal studies in a declining economy. Lux reasonably relied on those statements made by Earth when she agreed to enter into the contract.

11. Prior to August 2007, Lux had a content, debt-free life. The benefit of not being harassed on a daily basis by creditors and other such sharks was a routine that Plaintiff liked and was very well accustomed to. She had grown used to the benefit of that lifestyle and considered it not a bad way of living. Plaintiff Lux reasonably expected the continued receipt of this benefit of living comfortably and contently the way she always had. Although Lux never had any previous delusions of grandeur, her life was by no means terrible. Of course that has all come to change now at the time of this Complaint.

12. Defendant Earth has taken away Plaintiff’s property rights vis-à-vis her debt-free existence prior to 2007. Lux is entitled to that freedom and way of life that she had grown accustomed to and this entitlement is now only a pipe dream, less in fact. Lux received no notice or hearing before this right was savagely taken away from Plaintiff four years ago. It has yet to be restored and Lux is naturally discontent over the matter.

13. Upon information and belief, the behavior of Earth was and continues to be intentional; at the very least Earth has acted with reckless indifference. Earth’s behavior in this regard would surely shock the conscience of any court this matter comes before.

14. This interest is extremely important to Lux. She finds her current life exceedingly more and more difficult to live by the day. If this situation is not rectified soon, Lux may become too disillusioned to recover and live a normal life.

15. Defendant Earth has tricked Lux into a state of mind fraught with danger and paranoia. Lux constantly fears the passing of time, to the point where she can entertain no other more pleasant thoughts. Earth has engaged in outrageous conduct that has led Lux to suffer severe distress as a result. Lux is unable to think clearly without the aid of narcotics. Earth’s actions have exceeded all bounds of decency that are typically tolerated in a civilized society.

16. Defendant Earth has trapped and restrained Plaintiff Lux, several acts of which have led to her continued confinement in Earth’s bounded area. Lux is well aware of her confinement within Earth’s bounded area and her inability to free herself from its constraints. There is no reasonable means of escape that the Plaintiff has been made aware of or has been able to reasonably discover. Any means of escape that Plaintiff has been able to think of are both dangerous and disgusting. Lux at no time consented to being trapped within Earth’s bounded area. Quite the contrary, it was done against her will and she now demands redress.

17. Earth either knew or should have reasonably known that it was engaging in all acts alleged herein and that those acts would cause harm to Plaintiff.

First Cause of Action – Violation of the Due Process Clause
18. Lux hereby realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 8 through 17 above, as if fully set forth herein.

19. Upon information and belief, Defendant Earth was previous to 2007 providing Lux the benefit of a debt-free existence. This was an interest unmistakably important to Lux. In fact, she counted on this benefit on a mere daily basis.

20. At no time did Earth make clear that this benefit would soon end. When taking away a benefit such as this one, it is the duty of Earth to notify benefactors of the benefit of its impending end. Earth made no such notification to Lux.

21. It is the duty of Earth to allow for a hearing so that individuals who are soon to be deprived of a benefit that they have grown accustomed to, can present evidence and argue as to why they should be able to keep the benefit. The hearing must also provide individuals with the reasons why their coveted benefit is being taken away. Lux was not granted the opportunity for a hearing whatsoever.

22. It would have been very easy for Earth to set in place procedures that would warn Lux and individuals like Lux that this benefit could run its course.

23. Earth has an undeniable interest in making sure that its citizens are relatively happy. A revolution, which many countries sit on the inevitable forefront of, is not in the best interest of Earth.

24. Because of Earth’s deprival of a benefit that Lux had grown accustomed to, Lux is entitled to damages pursuant to the Due Process Clause.

Second Cause of Action – Breach of an Implied Contract
25. Lux hereby realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 8 through 17 above, as if fully set forth herein.

26. In exchange for adequate consideration, Lux agreed that she would go through three years of law school at an accredited and ABA-approved university. The consideration in question, the promise of economic well-being after graduation and passage of the bar exam, was never delivered upon by Defendant Earth.

27. The terms of the contract were harsh and oppressive and decidedly one-sided. Lux was under an extreme undue pressure to submit to the terms of the contract. There was both substantive and procedural unconscionability in this implied contract, neither of which Lux realized at the time of formation because at that time Lux had not yet begun her legal education. Needless to say, Lux was not in a position to negotiate the terms of the contract.

28. Certainly there was uneven and unequal bargaining power between Plaintiff Lux and Defendant Earth, especially evident given the nature of the contract in question and the dearth of knowledge at Plaintiff’s disposal at the time of contract. The country had yet to plummet into economic despair in the fall of 2007. But the reality was on the horizon, perfectly within Defendant’s sights. Even though Plaintiff Lux has long come to the realization that life is nothing more than a mere game, she always assumed that hard work ultimately paid off. She has come to find out that that assumption is flawed, more than flawed, it is all out false. It fails as a matter of law. Plaintiff will admit that she came of age at the wrong time in history, a period where the world was descending into unrestricted chaos. However, economic upheaval, revolutions and wars was hardly foreseeable in Plaintiff Lux’s position as a human being in early 2007 when the contract was entered into. Therefore it cannot be said that Lux entered into the contract reasonably informed of the risks.

29. Defendant Earth uttered many untrue statements, the most egregious of which was that Plaintiff Lux would enjoy economic prosperity at the conclusion of her legal studies and after she passed the bar examination. Defendant made this statement to Lux hoping to coerce her into assenting to the contract, knowing all the while of its extreme falsity. Needless to really say, Lux relied on the veracity of this statement when entering into the contract, reliance of which ended up being to Lux’s extreme detriment. While Lux acknowledges that she has the right to rescind the contract based on this heinous misrepresentation made by Earth, Lux instead opts for damages because rescission alone cannot right this wrong.

30. Plaintiff Lux here acknowledges that Defendant Earth will attempt to use the Statute of Frauds as a defense to this implied contract. However she would like to point out at this time that that course of action would be, for lack of a better phrase, a dick move on Defendant’s part.

31. As a direct and proximate result of Earth’s breach of the implied contract, Lux suffered and continues to suffer direct, incidental, and consequential damages. These damages include but are not limited to Plaintiff’s current disillusionment.

32. Earth’s actions have caused and continue to cause irreparable harm to Lux, and Lux is therefore entitled to injunctive relief to stop Earth from continuing to breach the Implied Contract.

Third Cause of Action – Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
33. Lux hereby realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 8 through 17 above, as if fully set forth herein.

34. Through Earth’s engagement in outrageous conduct, including but not limited to Earth’s breach of contract, Earth has caused and continues to cause Lux severe distress. In breaching the implied contract and causing Lux to waste her time and money, Earth has acted with utter disregard for Lux’s emotional tranquility.

35. As a direct and proximate result of Earth’s actions, Lux has suffered damages and losses in an amount exceeding $500,000.

36. Defendant’s actions were and continue to be willful and malicious in that Defendant intentionally breached the implied contract and caused Lux to experience severe distress as a result of Earth’s outrageous behavior. Plaintiff is therefore entitled to punitive damages in accordance with California Civil Code §3294.

Fourth Cause of Action – False Imprisonment
37. Lux hereby realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 8 through 17 above, as if fully set forth herein.

38. Earth is a planet with an atmosphere. Earth has kept Lux restrained and confined within its bounded area now for more than twenty-four years. Lux has searched and searched for an escape but has been tragically unsuccessful in the pursuit.

39. Lux is well aware of her confinement on Earth and is injured by it on a daily basis. Her injury exists in the form of growing older and seeing those around her die. She has also been injured by Earth due to its gravitational pull on numerous occasions.

40. Death by means of suicide is the only means of escape from Earth’s bounded area and that method is dangerous, disgusting and unreasonable, especially in the mind of an atheist. Plaintiff Lux is an atheist. Accordingly, there is no reasonable means of escape that Lux can discover.

41. Defendant’s actions were and continue to be willful and malicious in that Defendant is intentionally and callously holding Lux confined within its bounds. As a result of this outrageous behavior, Plaintiff is entitled to damages in the amount of $500,000.

Fifth Cause of Action – Negligence
42. Lux hereby realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 8 through 17 above, as if fully set forth herein.

43. Earth has a duty to protect and serve all life contained within it. Because Plaintiff Lux is a life contained within Earth, by the transitive property, Earth has a duty to protect and serve Lux.

44. Earth breached its duty of care when it harmed Lux by depriving her of her Due Process Rights, by breaching the implied contract, by intentionally inflicting emotional distress upon Lux, and by falsely imprisoning Lux against her will within its Earthly confines.

45. But for Earth’s ghastly breach of its duty to protect Lux, Plaintiff Lux would be healthy, uninjured and living in economic prosperity right now.

46. It was or should have been foreseeable to Defendant Earth that Plaintiff Lux would be injured as a result of its breach of the implied agreement. Therefore Earth is responsible for the injury.

47. Plaintiff Lux in no way contributed to the breach, mostly because Lux was unaware of the future and what could happen, both factors that Earth knows and is responsible for predicting.

48. Defendant Earth was negligent in its interactions with Plaintiff Lux and as a result Lux was harmed. Lux is therefore entitled to damages in the amount of $500,000.

Jury Demand
49. Lux requests a jury trial on all triable issues of fact.

Prayer for Relief

Wherefore, Plaintiff prays for judgment as follows:

1. That judgment be entered in favor of Lux and against Defendant Earth;

2. That Defendant, and all persons in active participation therewith, be preliminarily and permanently enjoined from inflicting continued harm to Lux.

3. That Defendants be ordered to pay Lux the amount of $5 million.

4. That Lux recover compensatory damages for Defendant’s wrongdoing in an amount to be established at trial, together with pre-judgment and post-judgment interest thereon;

5. That Lux recover an award of exemplary damage, disgorgement, restitution, pre-judgment and post-judgment interest as permitted by statute and/or contract; and

6. Any such other relief as the Court may deem just and proper.



Respectfully submitted,

Lux

Dated: October 25, 2011