fiction (an excercise mostly...)

"i'm leaving!"

he rolled over, the scattered sheets crumpling under and around him, and fixed her with a bleary-eyed stare.

"did you hear me? i'm leaving."

"ok." he rolled back over and smashed his face back into the pillow.

he could feel heatwaves of anger and indecision wafting across his back.

"and i'm taking this!" accompanied by the sound of something or other being lifted off the dresser. her dresser.

he didn't even bother rolling back over to see what she was "taking" with her.

an exasperated breath, followed by: "don't you even wanna know what it is?"

he sighed, rolled back over. took a moment to focus on the object she held in her hand. some meaningless knick knack.

"issin tha' yers?"

thunderheads accumulated in her eyes, "i bought this for you on our one year anniversary!"

"oh." he waited. she stood transfixed.

"well," he said, lamely, "you bought it, makes it yours i guess."

she cast her eyes feverishly around the room.

he rolled back over.

she hissed an exasperated noise.

he tried to go back to sleep against the ticking of the clock and the burning holes her eyes tattooed into his back.

after a few more moments of feigning sleep, he rolled back over.

"thought you were leaving?"

for a moment he thought she was going to cry; then the thunderheads broke in her features. "i am!"

"'k."

he rolled back over.

the clocked ticked. the back of his skull lit afire with her stare.

"aren't you going to say anything?"

"ha'n't plann' on i'."

"what?"

he sighed. rolled back over. "hadn't planned on it."

still she stood.

he rolled back over.

tick tock tick tock.

"oh!" he said abruptly, rolling back over, the sheets falling away in his haste.

"what?" she turned from the door where she had been lingering reluctantly.

"take the cat and the plant with you, will ya?"

lemme know what you think. what you think each character wants. if i hit my mark or not.

darth sardonic

epilogue, epitaph, epithet

ultimately, i am a big fucking asshole.

the car formerly known as the interceptor now resides at a junkyard. n my neighbor was right. (though he was completely sorry, refused to say "i told you so" (despite me saying he could, as i was man enough to take it) and said he says that stuff and then hopes for the best because he knows i love the car.)

but let's be honest, o thou droogs and only friends, the beloved non-existent readers who have truly (apparently) become non-existent, when the shop called, the repair was much more expensive than expected, and would take four times as long as expected, and hey you know what? i like to think i am man enough to admit when i have had it; when my number is up.

going car shopping tomorrow, and no, i will not be looking at lincolns.

and furthermore, a simple little tagline: i'm a dick. well, sometimes. i try not to be, but like every other fucking homo sapien on the planet, i have my moments. i try to own em when i cotton to it. so this is your opportunity to say "fuck you, darth, ya cunt!"

thanks for playing along.

darth sardonic

thoughts from the inner reaches of the dark corners of my so-called mind...

stephen king once said "everyone is the hero of their own story." (i'm paraphrasing of course.) what he meant that everyone thinks what they do is right and justified.

perhaps it's because i am a bucket of contradictions. maybe it's because i think too deeply about miniscule things. maybe it is because i have finally become aware of myself and all my foibles and yes, even all my strengths, and maybe it's because i never take myself too seriously, but i am a strange position of being keenly aware of all the stupid shit i do on a daily basis. but, being happy with myself for the most part, i find myself not feeling like i need to make any kind of excuses either.

it also puts me in the unique position to be aware of the duplicity of nearly everyone around me. don't worry, i very seldom will call anyone on it. unless i don't like them and they are attacking me or a friend of mine. in which case it will be the first thing i point out.

i posted a quote from mike ness (of social distortion) about punk rock music being dangerous back in the day recently as one of my status posts on facebook. one friend commented in a friendly-ribbing kinda way. another friend climbed onto her soapbox, and proceeded, in her own mind no doubt, to put us all in our place. i told the first friend, who was using my status as an opportunity to tease me (which i love) not to mind her, that she was a pretentious twat. my friend, yes. but still a pretentious twat.

i'm not gonna make excuses for her failings.

i didn't do it to her, i just explained to him to not worry about her. he's able to laugh at himself enough to not have taken her seriously in the first case.

the interceptor is back in the shop. it's been several months, and this is an easy and inexpensive fix, and if i had wanted to leave my car running 24/7 i wouldn't have had to fix it right away. but i worry about emissions and running out of gas, heh heh.

anyhow, my neighbor used this as an opportunity to ask me (rather roughly, i might add) when i was gonna come to my senses and ditch the dream of the interceptor for a reliable car.

this always puts me in a fighting mood, but i reigned it in for the sake of our very strong friendship, and simply said "never." with my trademark laconic smirk.

cause here's the thing that i know, but let him realize for himself: one of his vehicles, a newer suv, is in the shop about once every three to four months for what he ended up terming "routine maintenance." his car payment on this car alone is more every month than the most expensive thing i have had done on the interceptor. and his other car has a payment as well. his other car was in the shop for a week. it coincided with his wife being deployed, so he had two vehicles sitting in his driveway. if my wife was in the area, instead of in alabama with her car, this would have been a minor hiccup in my day.

he went on to say he just hates old cars. i replied that the 03 saturn we owned was in the shop easily as many times as the lincoln, and for longer stretches, and for double and triple what it has cost each time i have taken the lincoln in.

"yeah," he replied, "but you brought that car from the frozen north, and that was hard on it."

"nope, we got that car in seattle."

"oh."

another thing i didn't mention is the only newer cars we could afford to buy would be no more reliable, and spend more time in the shop, and cost considerably more to fix, than the interceptor. and i wouldn't like the car at all, and a little thing i know about myself since i am so keenly self-aware: if i don't like something i am forced to use, i have a tendency to be extra hard on it; to treat it with contempt and displeasure. which means it would be more likely to break down than normal.

like i said, my friend and neighbor came around to realizing on his own that for all his fillibustering and gasbagging, he couldn't really point fingers at me and my situation. and despite knowing all my friends flaws (or perhaps because i work so hard never to bring them to harsh light), i have so many people who will dive in to help me out on the rare occasion when i find my life turned topsy-turvy by a situation such as this.

darth sardonic