Unrejected

Initiating is the cruelest of tasks. The would be actor meditates deeply on how to proceed. Anxieties awash his thoughts. Failure, that perpetual inevitability, hangs perilously over every action. He normally freezes and abstains, allowing others to initiate. He was swept along by the decision of another. One day the young man awoke to revelation: his life, if afforded any meaning, must actively pursue rejection, persecution, solitude, and exile.

The young man sat at his unused desk and began to write. He would not leave it until he finished that perpetually deferred work. A week later, after a diet of only bread and water, he completed the task. He did not give the text another look. It was good. It was bad. Most importantly, it was done. He sent it out and awaited the vertiginous recognition he had evaded all his life.

Criticism, especially that of acrid kind, affirms. Dismissal confirms. He craved confirmation. In the past, their eyes unmade him. Their words tore him with voracious malice. Just words, he was told. They're just words. No. Whether kind or offending, all words directed his way were shrapnel. Now, he wanted to lay bare. He expected neither exaltation or infamy. He wanted the recriminations. He wanted their words now.

But, silence, he did not expect silence. No response. The portfolio of rejection letters he had crafted laid barren. Weeks and weeks passed, silence grew unbearable. He sent out another round, this time with a note attached.

"To whom it may concern, this manuscript is utter tripe. I neither want it read, much less published. If you may attach a consolatory letter - "Thank you for your submission, but we're sorry to inform you..." - I would be forever grateful."

Months passed. The note helped very little. Still silence. The young man realized the delivery itself was flawed. The lines of communication were exclusively spectral. He needed to return reality to its material past. He left his home, text in tow, and ventured to an office he had sent two copies of the text to. He entered the iridescent halls of a life forever beyond his reach and saw the betrayal on the wall. It was the cover of a publication. It was his title, his work, with another's name. His head sunk into his chest. He searched for rage but found a only familiarly loathsome feeling. He threw the text into the trash and headed home to begin anew.

Prefrontal cortex is the executive part of your brain.

- Focus
-Forethought
-Judgment
-Impulse control
-Empathy
-Learning from mistakes

What do you want? Fashion your behaviour to get it.
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Self-help isn't all that, um, helpful, is it?

Christina Hendricks in then out of a form fitting dress. That's something I want.

Sipping from the Stanley Cup. That's something I want.

I want to create something meaningful. That's something I want.

I want someone to share a life with.

I want peace. I want serenity. I want to hold off death for a little while longer.

I want to be. I want to become, to evolve. I want to stay. I want to transcend here and now.

I want the girl behind the circulation desk.

So, how would you accomplish that?

I would ask her for a name.

What's in a name?

I can stop calling her, hey...you, or refer to her as "girl behind circulation desk"
and call her Danielle. She looks like a Danielle.

Then what?

I would ask her to coffee or lunch or maybe to just hang out.

Good. Good. And then? What are your intentions precisely?

I don't know, not quite yet. She's lovely. She enchants me. She's a mystery begging me to explore.

Okay. But what do you want?

I want her. I mean I want to know her. I want to see more of her, to reveal something more than a periodic giggle, a smile, a beaming lovely pair of eyes, and just a kind voice.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I can't see tomorrow, much less a decade. Whatever comes to pass, I'll find a way to deal. Life is this endurance, survivial, and persistence.

Relax, in my mind, you are not the most screwed up person I know.

Thanks, I needed that.

Fight Club on Blu Ray

The irony of it was lost on him.  He searched and searched for Fight Club on Blu Ray.  It was the only thing that could complete him.  It was a futile pursuit.  There was no such thing.  He felt sad, downtrodden, and devoid of all hope.  His life remained incomplete.  He could not sleep.  All was not well.

He began a petition.  He searched for others, others like him.  He found them, one by one, at different times, different places, all of them spectral.  People, places, and time, all of them virtual and so very ghostlike.  No matter how immaterial these voices were, he felt something akin to solidarity.  This was his purpose, his vocation, to get a Blu Ray release of that movie, that movie which left his collection incomplete and, hence, utterly meaningless.  Meaning was this movie, a movie that he was rather indifferent to.  It began with F.  He needed this F movie.  It was simple as that.

The calls grew louder, the voices many.  The emails were sent, hundreds upon hundreds.  Still, there was no response.  Not enough.  Not enough for profit and cost considerations.  He was not cowed.  He needed it.  The campaign grew epic and the cohort he developed needed to evolve and elevate the spectacle.  They began to brawl in front of the closest Best Buy and picked fights with random costumers - most trying to get their new LCD television home without many problems.  There was some local coverage, although the message was lost.  "Antisocial miscreants," the whole lot of them were called.  He was not cowed.

He knew the group could no longer exist immaterially.  They had to meet at the studio's doors. 

Only a half dozen showed.  So much for solidarity.  But, he had that covered.  There was enough C4 to go around.  The crowd thinned down to one.  Him.  Alone again.  He snuck in.  He found the boardroom.  He made his ultimatum.  The suits found it too absurd.  They laughed, tears streaming and all.  What a jokester, they thought.  Who put you up to this?  He was cowed.  It was over.   He pressed the button and nothing happened.  The laughter roared even louder.  

"It was Brad, wasn't it?" one of them mustered between guffaws.  The second attempt was more successful.  In the moments, eight seconds or so, his flew through the window and landed on the pavement below, it glanced over at the discarded issue of Variety and caught the ad: "Fight Club - available only on DVD."  Hell would be a welcome reprieve.  

The Trauma to Come

Upon his release, he forgot what brought him there.  He could only recall life draining from another.  It was probably by his hand.  They were there, he was there, suspended in the elapsed time.  How long had it been?  The answer remained a mystery.  He was released and that was all.  That was all he needed to know.  There was no need to know the trauma or traumas scattered in the past.  Only one thing mattered: the traumas to come.