Day 58 | YOLO, for the Elderly

You’re dwindling down the finest years of your life, heading into that tunnel of uncertain fate.  Will you die at eighty?  Or will you forget both your children and how to brush your teeth?  The young’ns these days have a very elegantly abbreviated phrase: you only live once.  They use it as an excuse to perhaps joyride, or drink until they’re only vomiting liquor, or get shitty butterfly tattoos on their behinds.  But you and I, anonymous Ethels and Mildreds and Georges of the world, you and I know better.

Day 57 | Arctic Hysteria

You grow up in the suburbs.  The quiet, settled nature of its life suits you somehow.  The cars go by at prescribed times, the people leave and enter their houses roughly the same hours.  Children grow up, go to college, more children are born.  The cycle seems endless.  You have a nice meal cooked for you by your bored housewife mother each day.  She wonders if life is better outside the house and grows tired of your father’s obvious and poor habits.  

You depart the suburbs.  The city seems like an impossible residence for you, and you spend your first year there sleeping with earplugs because of the ambulance sirens that bleat multiple times an hour.  You avoid contact with other people on campus.  You wonder how to make friends.  A year passes and the only people you really know are the people on your intramural team, and the handful of guys you share a hallway with.  

Your long-distance relationship collapses just before the end of winter term.  You turn inside yourself and wonder how you’ll get a real girl.  The girls at parties only seem to want unattached relations.  You learn how to give impressive oral sex.  You get a few phone numbers.  The year ends.  You’ve learned that there’s music better than Weezer.

You return home for a three-month hiatus.  Your friends have all moved on to other things, and many of them make the journey through college into some kind of strangeness.  Some are aloof, others on drugs, others still into weird video games and fantasy novels.  You languish for the brief period.  The next three years pass almost as one.  You return to the city, spread yourself out on its pavement.  It lives and breathes with you, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Its restaurants become your places of worship.  Its late-night cafes become your retreat.  Its people become your friends, companions, subjects to serve.  The city captivates you.  You settle into a small apartment and maintain it happily, as if your time here is permanent.  You avoid moving to different places.

You explore yourself now, make connections, find God, lose God, find God again.  Your friendships grow and people start to remember your name.  You still don’t find a girlfriend, even when you start learning how to dress yourself and go to bars, and can speak with authority about basic science topics that make it sound like you’re going somewhere.  You collect yourself an impressive collection of liquors.  You try different hair styles.  You spent a solid two grand on clothing and food.  You start spending more time on campus and outside of the library, comfortable in your study habits and needy for contact.  As the date of your graduation draws closer, you feel your soul shift in its cage.  These are the people you know.  Your heart is here.  Your body must return to its old home.  To live out the post-grad slump.  Life would have it no other way.

You graduate and smile in your photos.  You realize that all of three people you know live within two hours of you.  You cling to your apartment until you can’t take your roommates anymore.  Hesitantly, you pack your life into a few Tupperware boxes and watch your parents’ truck drive them off towards a distant town.  You languish again on your futon, watching the last hour of television you’ll probably ever watch with these people.  Your plans for the future are a fog.  

You return to your familial home again and find it is the same, and yet you are not.  Your body no longer fits here.  This world, with all its attachments, now attaches you to your room and nowhere else.  You struggle to find a job offer that requires less than five years of experience.  There are maybe two in the entire world.  You avoid leaving the house except to work out.  There is no reason to dress well anymore; your parents laugh at you for it and the town barely even understands what a button-up is.  The food is all Italian.  The people are all white and lacking souls or intelligence.  You wonder how anyone ever decided this bubble world was anything but a place to die in a very non-physical way: intellectually, spiritually, emotionally.  

You try to fight it and escape to the city, but there is nothing there for you.  No job to pay the rent, no friend to let you crash until a job comes your way.  You have four grand in your account and no way out.

One day, you feel a piece of you die in the quiet of your room.  You watch the sun rise and set each day, watch the people move out of the homes they can no longer afford.  Subtly, the town consumes more lives.  The sun rises and sets.  You wonder why God could let this happen to anyone.  You come to hate suburbia, and rail against it when alone on car rides.  You hope people think you’re talking on a headset.  

One day, when the second snow of winter casts a foot and a half of white ice onto the world, you rise from your bed and walk into the cold.  It doesn’t hurt.

Day 56 | The Blue Blucher

The Blue Blücher smacked Osama straight across the right cheek.  Jack never felt better, seeing the ink finally bleed into the humiliating blow.  Four years of work, fighting terrorism overseas, had culminated in this glorious moment.  Jack bathed under the warm glow of the American flag he hung from his office window.  He could feel, somehow, the red-and-white stripes heating his face.  It wasn’t the sun – no, it was America.  

Day 53 | More prompts

She’d sat for what felt like days.   The white walls of this goddamned little prison of a room made her nervous, the fluorescent lights quietly humming holes into her skull.  No one had even trained her for the job.  Were bathroom breaks allowed?  Her first day needed perfection; she had to make a good impression.

The sweat on her palms made her wonder if anyone could notice how freaked out she was by all this.

Then in came the first student.  Why had they given him to her?  There was someone else on the schedule.  

Day 52 | Amazon Reviews for Normal Products

Timex Weekender T2N647KW Weekender Black Slip Through Strap Watch

List Price: $39.95

Price: $25.59 Prime & eligible for Free Returns

270 out of 340 people found this helpful

***** Good God.  July 4, 2011

By Watchaficionado

Alright.  Let me lay it out for you here.  This is the only watch you’ll ever need.  Rolex?  Screw that.  Why pay 11,000 dollars for a watch when you can pay 0.002% of the price?  Get this Timex.

I put this freakin’ watch on and bam.  It’s like every day is the weekend.  I’m going out to bars all the time, getting girls.  Show them this watch and they really want it.  I mean, really.  It’s turned up the testosterone factor about 379 times.  In the dull light of my local dive bar, the Indiglo(TM) night light really got things going.  It’s like a lava lamp.  The little green numbers get her interested, and then all of a sudden you’re this suave motherfucker with a really expensive watch that’s not actually expensive.  Ladies don’t even know Timex.  They buy their watches from Limited Too, I think.  

And let’s talk for a minute about the strap.  20 millimeters thick. Pure braided badassery.   And if you’re not feeling the ultra-masculine black?  Switch that shit out for one of those colorful guys.  But I guess that’s only if you’re into dudes and interior decorating.  Me, I like steak and chopping wood.  

Well, actually, I do spreadsheets.