Email Relationship
OK, so I wrote this awhile ago, but I thought I'd share it. Why? Because I can.
* * *
Meetings. One after the other. Keeping him away from the screen that was his only link to her. Last thing he'd typed was BRB. Now he was a liar, on top of being a workaholic. She didn't live here; her mortgage payment would scarcely rent a studio apartment in this burg. She wouldn't understand his crazy schedule.
Would work never end? They kept dragging him back from the elevator door like vacuum cleaner salesmen with a sure kill. What would he say to her? His brain swelled like a blowfish. She would expect something profound after letting him try her patience so. A thousand trite email jokes fought for supremacy in his frontal lobes. A million unfinished tasks browbeat him. Loose ends and excess baggage poked tiny fingers in his eyes and laughed louder than the pig-squeal of ancient air brakes on what they call public transportation in this town.
A final porcine death cry and the bus coughed a spasm of greasy air at the bottom of the hill it had no intention of climbing. He jumped out like a piece of gristle resurrected by the Heimlich maneuver, and began his daily impersonation of Sir Edmund Hillary...
"Got any change?" Said the scratchy voice from the doorway of the closed gay bookstore. The man looked like Stevie Wonder. He really liked Stevie Wonder. He tossed the guy a quarter.
Okay, so maybe a quarter isn't all that much. But if the guy were really Stevie, he wouldn't need it. Besides, he could swear those shades were the same ones he used to keep in his car, before some crackhead slashed the convertible top...
He arrived late, like usual, stumbling up the hill to the steps to the door to the staircase to the tiny apartment. Intentionally minimalist. Such a walking cliché. Hills and minimalism in San Francisco. And stairs. Miles of stairs. Even the sidewalks are stairs. Coming home every night was like visiting Machu Picchu.
The house was a Victorian, one more cliché, but he liked it because, like himself, it was a survivor. Built before the quake. The Big One, before television news cameras made every quake into The Big One, and every mugging into a crime wave. Before MTV made every kid into a gangsta. Before they stopped using the letter "r."
The house looked embarrassed. Sometime in the 1920s, a dozen or so self-motivated hacks had tried to "modernize" the old houses around here. Not all of them; in fact just a few here and there. Which makes it worse, of course. Surrounded by quaint gingerbread-encrusted dollhouses restored lovingly by people fortunate enough to have bought them before the eighties made everything in the world cost a million dollars. This particular house, all hint of decorative trim cruelly stripped long ago, stuccoed over and painted Warren Harding beige, stands as a monument to a movement that would culminate years later in such innovations as aluminum siding and simulated woodgrain. Better living through sophistry.
Across town some of the most beautiful untouched Victorians stand rotting behind wrought iron cages, their still-salvageable planks covered with what the aforementioned MTV-inspired thug-wannabes consider "art."
All of this he pondered, gazing at the lights of the city from his pseudo-modernist beige front porch. Perhaps if he stayed out here a little longer, it would be daylight and he'd have yet another worthy excuse for not writing. Another alibi.
No such luck, he thought to himself. Surely she would not be fooled. She saw right through him; he was translucent like one of those delicate tropical fish he used to see in the pet section of Thrifty's back in The Day. He pictured himself swimming around in there, the green curry chicken he had for dinner sitting in his clear stomach for all to see, like leftovers in Saran wrap. He turned the key in the two-dollar lock and entered his apartment.
No one quite understood his relationship with the little furry creature that always greeted him at the door; to most people a cat was just a pet, or, at the opposite end of the continuum, a surrogate child. But this cat was different; a familiar, like a reincarnated close friend. They'd been through a lot together -- well, that is to say, he had been through a lot of shit, and the cat had somehow been there to console him. He loved the cat. He believed it was mutual. At the very least, it was a seriously codependent interspecies thing that very few of his human friends could relate to. But then, neither he nor the cat was concerned with their approval. Ngowrr.
One A.M. Still no inspiration. Sitting bewildered and not a little panicked in front of a glowing gray box, the cat purring contentedly on his lap, he played Tetris until the telltale signs of carpal tunnel crept in. Incapacitation. Disability. The perfect excuse. But he knew better. No, that wouldn't work either. She was far too bright for that.
And then, in an epiphany, like an aspiring tax lawyer finding a new loophole, he was struck with a brilliance so staggering that it seemed unlikely he would be able to be its conduit. His fingers began to rhythmically stroke the grungy keyboard like a vacuum-formed Ouija board; his hands trembling with an energy that scared the cat. The words poured onto the screen; postmodern heiroglyphics flashed ones and zeroes in an insane ritual dance of long-repressed microprocessors finally spilling their angst-ridden bodily fluids in an orgiastic panoply of joyful abandon.
And, sated...weary...he clicked Send.
* * *
Meetings. One after the other. Keeping him away from the screen that was his only link to her. Last thing he'd typed was BRB. Now he was a liar, on top of being a workaholic. She didn't live here; her mortgage payment would scarcely rent a studio apartment in this burg. She wouldn't understand his crazy schedule.
Would work never end? They kept dragging him back from the elevator door like vacuum cleaner salesmen with a sure kill. What would he say to her? His brain swelled like a blowfish. She would expect something profound after letting him try her patience so. A thousand trite email jokes fought for supremacy in his frontal lobes. A million unfinished tasks browbeat him. Loose ends and excess baggage poked tiny fingers in his eyes and laughed louder than the pig-squeal of ancient air brakes on what they call public transportation in this town.
A final porcine death cry and the bus coughed a spasm of greasy air at the bottom of the hill it had no intention of climbing. He jumped out like a piece of gristle resurrected by the Heimlich maneuver, and began his daily impersonation of Sir Edmund Hillary...
"Got any change?" Said the scratchy voice from the doorway of the closed gay bookstore. The man looked like Stevie Wonder. He really liked Stevie Wonder. He tossed the guy a quarter.
Okay, so maybe a quarter isn't all that much. But if the guy were really Stevie, he wouldn't need it. Besides, he could swear those shades were the same ones he used to keep in his car, before some crackhead slashed the convertible top...
He arrived late, like usual, stumbling up the hill to the steps to the door to the staircase to the tiny apartment. Intentionally minimalist. Such a walking cliché. Hills and minimalism in San Francisco. And stairs. Miles of stairs. Even the sidewalks are stairs. Coming home every night was like visiting Machu Picchu.
The house was a Victorian, one more cliché, but he liked it because, like himself, it was a survivor. Built before the quake. The Big One, before television news cameras made every quake into The Big One, and every mugging into a crime wave. Before MTV made every kid into a gangsta. Before they stopped using the letter "r."
The house looked embarrassed. Sometime in the 1920s, a dozen or so self-motivated hacks had tried to "modernize" the old houses around here. Not all of them; in fact just a few here and there. Which makes it worse, of course. Surrounded by quaint gingerbread-encrusted dollhouses restored lovingly by people fortunate enough to have bought them before the eighties made everything in the world cost a million dollars. This particular house, all hint of decorative trim cruelly stripped long ago, stuccoed over and painted Warren Harding beige, stands as a monument to a movement that would culminate years later in such innovations as aluminum siding and simulated woodgrain. Better living through sophistry.
Across town some of the most beautiful untouched Victorians stand rotting behind wrought iron cages, their still-salvageable planks covered with what the aforementioned MTV-inspired thug-wannabes consider "art."
All of this he pondered, gazing at the lights of the city from his pseudo-modernist beige front porch. Perhaps if he stayed out here a little longer, it would be daylight and he'd have yet another worthy excuse for not writing. Another alibi.
No such luck, he thought to himself. Surely she would not be fooled. She saw right through him; he was translucent like one of those delicate tropical fish he used to see in the pet section of Thrifty's back in The Day. He pictured himself swimming around in there, the green curry chicken he had for dinner sitting in his clear stomach for all to see, like leftovers in Saran wrap. He turned the key in the two-dollar lock and entered his apartment.
No one quite understood his relationship with the little furry creature that always greeted him at the door; to most people a cat was just a pet, or, at the opposite end of the continuum, a surrogate child. But this cat was different; a familiar, like a reincarnated close friend. They'd been through a lot together -- well, that is to say, he had been through a lot of shit, and the cat had somehow been there to console him. He loved the cat. He believed it was mutual. At the very least, it was a seriously codependent interspecies thing that very few of his human friends could relate to. But then, neither he nor the cat was concerned with their approval. Ngowrr.
One A.M. Still no inspiration. Sitting bewildered and not a little panicked in front of a glowing gray box, the cat purring contentedly on his lap, he played Tetris until the telltale signs of carpal tunnel crept in. Incapacitation. Disability. The perfect excuse. But he knew better. No, that wouldn't work either. She was far too bright for that.
And then, in an epiphany, like an aspiring tax lawyer finding a new loophole, he was struck with a brilliance so staggering that it seemed unlikely he would be able to be its conduit. His fingers began to rhythmically stroke the grungy keyboard like a vacuum-formed Ouija board; his hands trembling with an energy that scared the cat. The words poured onto the screen; postmodern heiroglyphics flashed ones and zeroes in an insane ritual dance of long-repressed microprocessors finally spilling their angst-ridden bodily fluids in an orgiastic panoply of joyful abandon.
And, sated...weary...he clicked Send.
posted by brioSphere at 12:28 AM
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