Stream of Consciousness: Chapter One

Something I wrote today. Need feedback and thoughts, comments and corrections. Thanks.

The best commercial I have ever seen started out with a guy sitting on a bench. He was watching some squirrels play. He started to stand up when two paramedics rushed over to him and threw his body to the ground with shock after shock from a debribrilator. He was a decent actor, not bad for a commercial at least. His face twisted and contorted as the camera panned in to watch his dying dance with electricity.

"We lost him," says the first paramedic as he checks the man's pulse.

"Nothing we could have done," says the next.

Meanwhile, the man starts to sit up, completely bewildered, too stunned to even talk. The paramedics walk away and the man tries to pull himself up on the bench. Right then, we hear a chainsaw rev up off-screen. A monkey carries it in and ambles towards the man. The commercial freezes and in big white type, the words, "Timing is Everything," jump onto the screen.

The subway car rocked to the left. The rails needed replacing. You can feel it over time, the little cracks and depressions that make every subway car ride feel like a cheap fair ride. These rails could have been replaced years ago, but I can't complain. At least there is a subway to take me home.

But I still feel trapped inside this moving metal canister. I feel like I'm part of a huge mechanical mouse that is running through a maze. It gets the cheese every time I put that little token in the turnstile and hop inside. Then it runs through the multicolored maze to freedom. Or at least that what it thinks. There's no freedom at the end of the tunnel for this mouse, there never will be. It always travels the same one way path down the tunnels, and then turns around and speeds home. But there is no home, just another trip though the maze.

The doors open. People get on; I got off. I looked at all those people and laughed. They won't ever know how much that mouse hates that trip, but he does it for the cheese. We all do.

My life is like a multi-colored maze. Every time I sit back and think about my life I think about it as colors. One for my family, one for my friends, one for school. Each color diverging and crashing into all the other colors. Each path run by a separate mouse always looking for his stupid little reward.

Rewards are pretty rare, so I usually have to make them up. I have to keep my mouse running. I saw this movie one-time. It was one of those artsy flicks, at some festival. Admission was free and I figured that if nothing else, I could sleep a little while I watched the movie.

It was about this serial killer who had to keep killing people or he would kill himself. His only reason to live was to end other people's lives. Pretty damn cheesy I thought. He ended up committing suicide instead of killing this girl he loved.

You know the whole spiel about love being so powerful, that was the message I guess. He died for love. I think he just wanted his life to mean something. The police were pounding on the door when he shot himself, so it was either suicide or getting a daily pounding up the ass in prison. The movie ends with the girl lying on his body crying. Personally, I think both of them should have died.

I don't really have any tolerance for stupidity. It just really pisses me off. And that girl was the ******* epitome of stupid. She was like this other girl I knew named Linsey McMackin. The kind that love to watch chick flicks and that are still is in the dark about the whole earth going around the sun thing. No ****, one time I was sitting in class with this girl when she tuned into the lecture. I'm sure most of it was over her head, but when the teacher sort of diverged for a second and talked about time zones she must have figured it was story time. This was all flying right past her, but her face turned to shock when the teacher said, "Earth spins at about 1,308 miles per hour." Without raising her hand, she blurted out, "The Earth spins? I thought that if it moved any we would all fly off."

She was sixteen then, and I think that she just got stupider by the time we graduated. You have to wonder what drives people like that.

I was on the sidewalk now, head down, thinking, walking to my apartment. A man reached out and touched my arm.

"Wanna buy a paper? You know, we's got some breaking news in here. People dieing, politicians lying, you know, good stuff."

"How much?"

"I tell you what, I'll make you a special deal." I gave him my perplexed look. "For you, just twenty five cents." What the hell, help someone in need. I gave him my money and walked off reading the cover story.

I looked at the top and realized that he had just sold me a paper that was a day old. I didn't really care. News is news, like he said, people dieing, politicians lying. The cover story was about a man who had tried to commit suicide downtown. He jumped off the building, fell twenty-seven stories and landed on top of another man who was just walking down the street, a Mr. Klimso. Mr. Klimso was a father of five, and had worked as a stock analyst at a firm downtown for twenty-two years. In the picture, he was bald headed, sort of pudgy. He was smiling. The force of a two-hundred and twenty pound man falling twenty-seven stories was enough to completely snap Mr. Klimso's neck in half. He died on the sidewalk from severe head trauma. The suicidal jumper, John Doe, also broke his neck, but it was later determined that he had put a bullet through his head as he teetered on the edge of the building.

It's all about timing. No-one realizes that. That everything we do depends on us being in a certain spot at a certain time. Our entire life is based on this moment from this point forward. What I mean is that every moment shapes every future moment. It's scary to think that maybe some co-worker held Mr. Klimso up for just a few seconds and because of those few seconds, he ended up being in the right place at the right time to die. In fact, for most people who die accidentally, if just a few seconds of their day had been changed, they would still be alive.

As I neared my apartment building I could see that I had missed the trash man. Missing the trash man always makes me have a bad day.