Creative Writing II

still amateur, of course, but meh.

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100 days.

I hate the smell of smoke. Cigarette smoke that is. Its fumes are noxious, vengeful and nauseating. When I smell it, I think of a hangover from some forgettable New Year’s of my youth, and I picture a toilet—cold, white and comforting.

Yet, it is time for my cigarette.

Before you stomp off, enraged at my seeming hypocrisy, know that my addiction is a carefully calculated expiration date. You see, I despise life. I despise breath, air, water, the key elements to survival. I despise the consumerism of our society, the meaningless from which we wander through and through, clutching onto small pillars of self worth until they are nothing but deteriorated faces of who we wish we were, like a washed up actress clinging onto some obscure award won in the heyday of her youth.

But unlike the greats, I am too much of a coward to die. A bullet is too easy, too artless, too meaningless. To die in war is even more meaningless. To die by the hands of earth, wind, water or fire, all too scary for me. So, all I have left are my poised and beautiful cylinders of death. A constant stream of minusing minutes, 11 to be precise. And so it goes—with no desire to live or to die violently, I passively accept mortality under the nauseating stream of smoke asphyxiating my lung cells.

As I mentioned, my hopes for death is carefully constructed. If each cigarette will deduct 11 minutes of my life, and I inhale about 1 pack and 16 cigarettes per day,  with a reluctant estimate of, at the very least, 20 more years of life, than that should eliminate approximately 100 days of my sorry, sad existence.

Perhaps some envision me as a prime candidate for Zoloft or other means of life-coping therapies. But fear not, I am content, now that I am dead, 100 days earlier than expected.

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These are the verbalized, written memories of a life un-lived. The lost minutes of a man who died 100 days too early.

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I am awake. My watch alerts me that it is time for my morning cigarette(s). The self-timer on my Mr. Coffee machine dutifully initiates the preparation of my morning coffee(s). War and Sudoku puzzles, pieces of the paper which greet me each morning, alongside my coffee (s) and cigarette(s).

¨´I am capable, I am young, I have potential.¨¨ I manage to say this aloud today without scoffing, jeering, or sucking my teeth in disgust of this bizarre ritualistic mantra. After sighing my usual sigh, I move on to my immaculate closet. One filled with tailored suits from varying designers, alphabetized and ordered by color (shades of gray and black require differentiation, appreciation even) of said designers. I feel less unimportant in a suit.

Today is Monday, I shall wear my Monday suit, with my Monday tie—a Michael Kors piece, one I primarily bought because it would fit well with my other M pieces for the M day, that is Monday.

My office is minimalistic, symmetric. I spend approximately a quarter of the eight hours smoking in the back alley, another playing computer solitaire, another eating lunch, and another doing work. I had three conversations suspiciously reminiscent of ones i´ve had just one hour prior.

¨Hi B. How was your weekend?¨

¨Fine, how was yours S.?¨

¨Did the same ole, same ole. Golf with my buds, had a few drinks, and went back to the wife for some dinner. Did the same on Sunday.¨

¨Hi B. How was your weekend?¨

¨Fine, how was yours P.?¨

Öh, you know, the same thing. Golfed 18 holes, had a beer or two, and went home, hung out with the wife and kids.¨

My mouth seems to move, and yet the sounds that come out cannot be willed into different words. Strange. While I said ¨fine¨to both S. and P., what I really wanted to say was ¨Same ole, same ole, tried to pick up a girl, got drunk alone, and fantasized about killing myself.¨ Of course, I said none of these things (which were in fact true), I wouldn´t want them to reveal shared desires, and then be bonded. The sheer thought of that makes me lose all desire to kill myself—because then I would surely not be unique or special and have to compete in extravagance or thoughtfulness of our deaths.

The most exciting part of my day commences—the time period between 4:58 and 5:00 pm. The collective anticipation of herded, cubicled, bored, generation x-ers seems to cumulate and for the brief 2 minutes, coagulate into almost-hope. And then it passes and we are out the door, on our blackberries into the world which escapes us.

Four gin and tonics, 3 beers, and 2 failed pick ups later, I am at home once again. Falling asleep in my chair (after properly hanging up my suit and tie),  to the sounds of Sport Center.

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I am awake. I have my cigarette(s) and coffee (s). It is sunny and forecasted to remain so today. It is Tuesday and so I must wear my Tuesday suit with my Tuesday tie, both designed by Tommy Hilfiger (it was a bit of a challenge to find other T designers, leaving me to have a similar but lighter suit to wear on Thursday).

In my cubicle, I realize I hate fashion. I hate that some fat man or skeleton of a woman in Milan are making arbitrary decisions and fooling our society at large to consume and purchase whatever they have decided to be ïn¨. It annoys me when people claim some unique sense of style, when truly, over 100 million other people have bought the same things, wear them in the same way, and often will also, too loudly express, even brag about their superiority of putting cloth over their naked bodies. They judge others for wearing things that are last season, when the fat heads and thin bodies in Milan are judging the rest of us for wearing what they had said 3 months prior should be in vogue. Our whole sense of outward expressed self, is nothing but the old, watered down versions of what someone else viewed as chic or new. We are the recycled ideas of the true visionaries, we are the consumers of mirages in the form of the silk, wool, and linen. We are mediocre and lame, crippled by credit cards into cookie cutter paper doll fashion.

Alas, I, by no means am above this. The only way I can in someway feel shape or form of self via fashion is by my organization. M is for Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, so on; T is for Tommy Hilfiger, so on an so fourth. Of course, if it is cloudy I will wear a wild card, consisting either of Armani, Burberry, Calvin Klein, any other designer that does not fit in with the days of the week. Another loose sigh escapes me, and concludes this thought. My watch tells me its time for my 8^th cigarette break.

A new success. I have reached a new high score in Solitaire. My aim, which was achieved, was to get through all the cards until they are lined up from King to Ace, without one card submitted into the cavernous, tempting place holders, all in less than a minute. Was this mythological, ambitious goal attainable? Today, at 4:42 pm, it was done.

After a cool lean back in my chair, I relished in my victory with an air of confidence that was momentarily clouding and spilling over my cubicle into my neighbors´ spaces. It almost made them pop in and ask… but the best part of the day was to begin. And so what was an almost explanation of my longed for victory, was instead the communcal silence, the almost-hope high of our days.

2 bottles of wine, 1 beer later, I am asleep on the posh rug of my apartment.

–

I am awake.

Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc

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97 days sporadically peppered into the lapse of time to which I lived, of useless existence later, I died.

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