He hung his head. The very thought of digging through his papers for a single lost immaculate idea repulsed him. What a hassle! Couldn't he just fail the project and move on to a easy comfortable unexceptional existence eating chezzies and watching Seinfeld reruns. The 90s man, the 90s were the life.
He tore through a pile in a closet with a sort of frantic indifference; he always managed to feign a slight bit of concern in case somebody was catching a voyeuristic glimpse somewhere, somehow. He found empty condom boxes - a few of which had seven digits scrawled on them, a loose cornucopia of candy, chocolate bar, and gum wrappings, various mid-terms with marks scrawled in bright red across the front: B, D, F, C+, A- and etc. But there the immaculate idea, neigh the perfect idea, the now forgotten thought that was his salvation, was nowhere to be found. Digging deeper into the recesses of his badly neglected closet, he started singing a few lines,
"I'm a bad boy for breakin' her heart,
and I'm FREEEE....FREE-FALLING,
yeah, I'm Free-falling...."
Losing that perfect idea was like losing that titular chick. You start to spiral into unknown, repressed, hideous shit. You start singing Tom Petty at the top of your lungs, while taking in copious amounts of the noxious olfactory cocktail of old gym shorts, dirty socks, half eaten sandwiches, cigarette butts, and the faintest hint of lavender.
"Perfection is a bitch, reserved for the vainglorious and inhuman degenerates that frequent Pottery Barn and Sharper Image," he thought to himself. He decided to wing it. Boy would that be a mistake.
The last thing he remembered when waking up in the drunk tank was being beaten down by a big black dude named Eli - the proceedings flanked by a pair of strippers. He couldn't remember their names. He assumed they were named Destiny and Mystique. Their names mattered little; they were ornamental to the proceedings.
The dude was named Eli, but he had a couple pasty midgets with him. One went by the name of Bipolar Bill and the other was Tommy Tit. They were kicking and punching away, at least he thinks they were kicking and punching away. But they were ineffectual, hence irrelevant. It was the big black dude supposedly called Eli who did the damage.
The bad motherfucker was death with knuckles, he recalled.
"You think you're pretty college boy," he recalled Eli saying. "You and your perfect teeth, perfect hair, and perfect glasses piss off ol' Eli. You think you're better than ol' Eli."
He tried to beg off and placate the behemoth, but Eli kept up his verbal and physical barrage. He prayed for the end and everything grew dimmer until it faded to black.
He sat on the edge of the cot. "I never said I was perfect," he mumbled to himself.
