I've always been the person doing the kicking, to be kicked out is definitely a surprise. I mean, I guess when I did it, I handled it a bit more professionally, but I guess we can't win them all, can we? So, here we go, back into the endless void of bandlessness.
I'm sure you, reader (let's call the reader Brooks from here on, as I assume he's the only person reading this. So, from here on out, when I say Brooks, I mean the only person reading this, and when I say Mike, I mean the only person writing this. Capiche?), know how it feels to be lost in a sea of instrumentalists, but with no one to do anything with.
I'm done with it. Let's start working together after spring break. Oh, and if there's a reader here who ISN'T Brooks, speak up!
Okay, onto other issues. Here's a short story I wrote:
My head wheels about with each town that flutters past the windows of the battering ram that I try my best to call a car. Between every town, I count the thousands of highway lines that divide up our cities and towns and homes, always losing count when I realize I'm supposed to be driving and not calculating just how lonely and isolated every city in America is. In my efforts to keep busy, I always end up guessing the lives of other drivers and deciding on their motives which have propelled all of them to the exact same highway, experiencing the same forsaken places.
The jittery, almost frightened girl on my right is driving up to visit her parents, she is driving in her green sedan, which is her favorite color, but she's so uncomfortable in her own skin that it doesn't matter what color she drapes over herself. The bottle of pills she's trying to pour into her mouth remind her that there are still sun-soaked fields to lay in, even if today's sky is grey, with searing cracks that rip the clouds aside just enough to let some people enjoy heat in what is supposed to be spring. I will never see her again. Such is how the highway works.
Off to my right are beggars pleading for my time and money. A McDonalds' sign demands that I surrender my values and devour a Big Mac immediately. A Holiday Inn advertisement believes that if I let down my arms and spend a night on one of their rock-solid cots, I will experience something more than just an expensive night's sleep. I'm so exhausted from driving that it's almost welcome.
The field full of farms off to my right begins to give form to a town. Concrete is poured down onto the grass, laying waste to the vacant lots. Housing developments wrench themselves from the ground, standing awkwardly, like crooked, misaligned teeth against the huge plains behind them. Soon, businesses hoping to capitalize on these behemoths slap themselves together wherever they feel it's the most profitable to do so. It isn't long before skyscrapers in hopes of reaching the fingers of God have transformed the approaching woodland into a metropolis, and now I am being begged to take part in their travesty.
One, two, three, four, five highway lines pass before a red-faced, sneering man nearly crashes into me as he and his girlfriend race to the movies. Their tires are melting across the highway as they change across three lanes at once, nearly missing their exit, but not before I could get a glimpse of the happy couple. They fought before they left over nothing; she egged him on, just for her own entertainment. Who needs a movie when you have that? She's a tall, dark woman who seemed as displeased with her date as he was with everything in the world around him. He's bigger than she was in all regards; an athletic, pale man whose neck was almost nonexistent behind his huge head. As they speed across their exit ramp, I smirk at the road sign: "Oakland, Exit 2B, ¾ Mile." I love when they name towns after the trees that they uprooted to make the way for the stores.
As Oakland approaches, the skyscrapers recede; they're replaced by something I could never smirk at. Churches with black eyes and bruises line the highway, as though God might finally shed light on their small, broken community if they build more shrines to him. Children play in the streets, cautiously and carefully avoiding broken glass. What's happening at home? I haven't talked to my mother since I left; she knew where I would be going, but I only had a vague idea of where I was headed. In fact, I wasn't entirely convinced I would end up anywhere. I could see where I was and I could sort of remember where I had been, but the world around me was being constructed as I entered into it, transferring highways at random, looking headfirst into what's supposed to be the greatest country. So far, nothing was particularly impressive, nothing was especially exciting. It was exactly what life had always been like, just moved further away from where people knew me by name and said hi to me. Who needs them anyway, though? I'd meet new people, or something.
As existentialism wraps itself around my brain, biting and injecting lethal venom into my axons and neurons, the schism between the clouds separated further, prying light onto the treeless forest of Oakland. Children squint in the awesome power of its rays. A small, elderly couple miraculously caught up with my foot, and I have never been more amazed by any people before. They were on their fifth honeymoon together, and have never been more in love than they are right now in this exact moment. And who could blame them? They were proud. Proud just to be alive. Proud just to be thinking and feeling and keeping all of their senses and their beliefs as their own. They relish every moment they have together, they have never experienced anything more sweet than the smell of oxygen in their lungs, no sound more beautiful than a heart pounding away under a ribcage, and no sight more amazing than the sun gripping the dawn and letting them stay awake for another day. They don't fear death, they fear wasting what they have left.
That is their secret.
One, two, three, four, five million highway lines separate Oakland and my home. I never should have left what I had.
Hm. Not as good as I remembered it being. <3later, Brooks
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