34
The daily routine of Autumn Christian, unknown cult writer and general terrible human being:
Wake up
If Robert is awake, hug him
Grab redbull from the fridge, drink redbull. Put system into shock.
Watch League of Legends videos or go to computer and check emails
I’m starting to feel human, which means around this time I’m getting irritable.
Check Google+ for any notifications from work.
Remember that I’m a project manager now, which I’m terrible at. While cursing, go to my work’s online project management board and rearrange things so my importance to work is justified and like Scheherazade, get to live for another day.
If feeling particularly lively/disgruntled, climb through the empty space in the fence that someone kicked down and go get coffee. Return home with coffee.
Work for the next 8 hours, with intermittent breaks to mentally abuse myself and think about my novel/my relationship/the book I’m currently reading/the music I’m listening to/whether or not I’m an acceptable human being/how to make myself a better person/if I’m eating too much/my bad childhood/the earth decaying/how advanced robotics would vastly improve my life
When Robert comes home, hug him.
Buy some beer. Drink the beer.
Listen to music
Play video games/write/pontificate about human condition
Cry about life. Try to explain the vast multitudes of possibilities in my head that have brought me to this moment of overwhelming break.
Drink more beer
Have sex/Sleep
Have nightmares with obvious, insulting symbolism. I am very disappointed in my dreams. At least I’ve stopped dreaming about my mother.
Start over again
Some alternatives to the daily routine:
Leave the house and try to be social. Regret it.
Take photographs or model. Regret it.
Go visit my Dad in Denton.
I wonder why I’m human why I’m human why I’m human.
Have a rare moment of sheer enjoyment and appreciation at life. Sit in awe and stare at a tree for an hour, observing the intricacy of the trunk as it spirals upward, soaking life and sunlight through its hardened skin. It survives. Fuck, how it survives. Observe how the limbs shake when a bird lands, how the bird’s claws, so amazingly designed (though design is somewhat of a misnomer, as it would imply a designer.) curl around the limb. Appreciate the tendrils of the leaves curling, get chills that pass from your throat to your fingertips as the wind blows through the trees. It’s a new kind of music and an eternal music, simultaneously, it’s been there the whole time, pouring down through the roots, waiting for you to notice. Why were you so concerned about the microcosmic annoyances of your life, again? Didn’t you notice that the grass takes root on starstuff, that the trees gives, immediate and forever, the product of its silent life, without demand of attention or even compensation of respect for its existence? See the tree drink the earth and the earth, pushing upwards, a mound of sediment older than all of human life culminated together, the clock reversed until its cryogenic in its pace, the tree pulsing without a conscious thought to lead it astray, the sun the only non abusive mother in the solar system, giving, feeding, breathing, healing, healing, healing so that we can one day return
to the beautiful existence beyond existence, the swirling molecular riptide of the pleroma, filling up the empty spaces, the dark matter, the supreme haven beyond the cyclical lifespan.
But before that moment, and trust me, it’s going to be an eternal moment, 99.999999% longer than your existence as human, maybe I should try letting things go once in a while. Like those taxes I didn’t file.
35
My neighbor is a righteous bitch who hates video games. She sits at her kitchen table, in between yelling at her children for thinking impure thoughts, or making blueberry pies to give to neighbors as a kind of guilty entitled foreign exchange of baked goods, she’ll occasionally do a crossword puzzle because she read once it can prevent Alzheimer’s.
“Kids these days just stay indoors and play on the computer,” she said when nobody was asking her. “There’s no real human connection. Back in my day kids actually played outside with each other, rode bikes and played in the swimming people. We’re raising a generation of degeneration antisocial losers.”
Look, lady. First of all, the universe will be lucky if you get Alzheimer’s if it means you’ll shut up for one fucking second. Secondly, if staying outside and riding bicycles until you got heat stroke produced the person of average intelligence such as yourself, I will start driving around suburbia in my PT Cruiser and knocking over every kid with a bike that I see. This will become my mission in life.
Third, antisocial doesn’t mean “not social” or “introverted,” it’s the clinical term for sociopath.
Fourth, in your supposed Utopia of children riding around on bikes like a swarm of computer-generated zombies with pathing issues, you’re forgetting the anxious child, the disabled child, the autistic child, the child who doesn’t like bikes, the genius child who is inside building coolant systems for his robotic orchid, the child who is one degree off and doesn’t quite “fit in.” In your system of children riding on bikes acting like a bloody gang of wolves, howling and tearing up the streets and nipping the bellies of the omega.
Video games are equalizers, a great dissemination of information and cultures and interests so that at anyone can find their tribe, regardless of physical location or physical disability or barriers of social anxiety. The pack outside on their bicycles doesn’t want us and we don’t want the pack. We just want to exist without having to shove ourselves into preconceived molds as preconceived by crossword puzzle, technophobe lady, destroying our sense of self in the process. Thanks to video games I didn’t commit suicide when I was 16, because I had people I could message at 4 in the morning to shoot golems with lightning bolts and talk about how nobody else understood us.
But continue doing your crossword puzzle, lady, and complaining about how things were different in the good old days, because cliches are sometimes perfect in their understanding of human behavior, and people are afraid of things they don’t understand, and I’m afraid if you talk any more I might put a bullet through your head.
Fuck what you heard.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed.
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