GRAAARRG. That is all. This section is under construction. But that doesn't matter, as it will always be under construction. This was designed to be an archive of most of my writings, aside from the front page pieces that you saw upon arrival. And it serves its purpose well. I'm constantly going through and editing things such as line breaks and paragraph divisions, so please excuse the formatting. Anyways, I take credit for all of my writing, good, bad, or indifferent. I hope you enjoy it as others have. These writings of mine have come from various sources, mainly AKpCEP and No Chick Trix. Some of them haven't even been posted before. Anyways, enjoy. Impending… He saw it. It soared around like an eagle, peaked, and began its menacing descent. His pulse began to race. His nerves pounded and screamed with adrenaline. "Goddamn it," he said. Ignoring the angry shouts of his coworkers, he started to run. Down the stairs, out of the building, into the avenue. He was the only one there. The streets were deserted. Thoughts darted throughout his mind. "Why? Where? How?" Confusion and panic set in. "How long....do I have?" He started to run again. Only this time, he ran toward it. He sprinted for miles. His muscles burned and his heart pumped gasoline. After a while, he collapsed to the asphalt in a gasping, heaving mess. His lungs seared and his senses kicked into overdrive. All the sights became clearer, the air thicker with the smell of coal. The concrete was more tangible, the atmosphere crackled with a maniacal static. He tasted the humidity as he lay there panting. It had stopped. It hovered over the city like a raincloud. Pandemonium He screamed in fury as he kicked the television set. The large-screen Sony tipped over and exploded in a supernova of light. Breaking the silence. "You idiots!" he fumed. "Can you not see what this thing is DOING to us?" Blank stares, dumb, vacant gazes. "You broke it." one man grunted in monotone. The angry man screamed "What in the fuck? Did you not hear what I just said? This shit is rotting our brains! We gotta get outta here while we still can!" In a panic, his eyes darted around the room. White walls, white floors, white ceilings. Even ths lamps buzzed with a fluorescent white light. The other faces, pale and emaciated, looked at him with sunken, hollow eyes. The only contrast was the colors of their uniforms. Each person was dressed in a different shade of neon. Green, yellow, blue, pink, orange...all stood out from the bleached background, like stains on a canvas. "You broke it," a woman chimed in, with the same dull voice as the other. "SHUT UP!" screamed the angry man. "You stupid cunt!! You're all stupid!!" One fellow glanced upward with bright eyes. "I'm not...." while glancing at the angry man's name tag "...Moore." Moore took the guy by the hand and lifted him to his feet. "That's more like it!" Moore whooped. "Now let's rouse the rest of these listless losers and get the hell outta here!" "YOU BROKE IT!" growled another man. They all began to rise. "Holy shit! Moore, what're we gonna do?" "I don't know. Go for the door." They all began to chant "You broke it. You BROKE it! YOU broke IT! YOU BROKE IT!" Their tones became angry and menacing. Moore and the boy scrambled at the door. Locked from the outside. They looked at the windows, which were bars welded to the building's metal facade. "There's no way out!" screamed the young man. "Shut UP!" Moore retorted. He began to beat on the door. When that proved useless, he began flailing his limbs against the triple-paned Plexiglas. "FUCK!" he yelled. He began to smash his massive body against the door. It didn't budge, and the group was advancing toward them. One fellow brandished a knife and roared, "YOU BROKE IT!" Sharp pains, hands grabbing, tearing hair and skin, beating of fists. The white-hot feeling of a blade tore into their bodies. At the sight of blood, the crowd grew angrier. They began tearing and beating on each other. Within an hour, everyone was in a bloody, screaming heap on the floor. The doctors looked on through the glass, unimpressed. "Happens every time," one doctor said to the group. They all laughed heartily as one of them went over and picked up the telephone on the desk. "Yes, nurses' station? Send in the janitors to room 12 A." Evolution of Reality Remember when you were young? Let's just say between the ages of 4-10. Those action figures, stuffed animals, whatever you owned weren't just mere objects. They were your escape. You'd spend hours playing war with your G.I. Joes, the girl next door was drinking tea with her dolls, everything was cool. Five years old...and one day, you're out in the yard, slaying dragons as usual, brandishing your sword in the faces of your adversaries like a modern-day knight when about that time, your parents tell you it's getting dark, you need to come inside, etc. So you walk back towards your kingdom with your trusty sword. Upon entering the door, your mother quips, "Honey, don't bring that nasty stick inside the house. It's probably got bugs and fungus and god-knows-what on it." You look down at your hand, and clasped in your chivalrous grip is a moldy old stick. Not the shiny chrome sword you once wielded. The magic is gone. Part of your imagination is jolted. Let's go a bit further. You're about 6-7 years old sitting in class. You look outside and the ground is coated in a fine, powdery foot of snow. Your teacher tells you to each get out a piece of paper, because you're all going to write letters to Santa Claus. You beam in excitement. You think, "Great!! I'll ask Santa for that new bike, or maybe a Nintendo or something." So you clap and holler along with a majority of the class while a young boy behind you mutters, "Santa's a load of crap." Horrified, you turn and face this disillusioned individual. He gives you a menacing grin. He's missing his front two teeth. He restates, "Santa's just something your parents told you to keep you amused. He's not real." You whisper back, "Really?" The kid replies, "Yeah. Come talk to me at recess." So you and him engage in a philosophical discussion about Santa Claus. You go home a little bit dejected and a little bit wiser, but your heart skips whenever your parents mention Santa to your little sister. Once again, the magic is gone. These little experiences, these fleeting visions of enlightenment, become more common with age. You mature, begin to take interest in the opposite sex, hang out with your friends, and spend your parents' money. One day, they refuse to pay for you and tell you to get a job. You are angry at first, but then you begin to sympathize with them, as well as learn to budget and sometimes help out with the bills. Some of the innocence is gone, but you're all the wiser. Once you hit the job market, you're set. You're making good money, you have a nice apartment, sporty car. You buy quirky, self-descriptive things to decorate your home. You have nice, brand-name clothes, and you come in every night to dinner, a few beers, and zone out on the TV or computer. You're on your own. One day at work, you walk in on a co-worker in the bathroom. He leaps as if terrified, and is snorting and sniffling furiously. He has a bit of white powder spilled on his dark-gray Polo tie, and his eyes are red and glazed. He offers you some..."Sure helps on these late hours." You accept, willingly. After about 15 minutes you become nervous and frantic. You scramble at everything you do and talk at an alarming speed. This drug is nothing like the joint you smoked before the senior prom, this stuff is like gasoline. You begin to hook up with your co-worker and coke buddy, "Brian". You now have something ELSE to spend your salary on. You have another vice. The innocence is gone, but you have new magic. You have nose-candy. A year later, you find yourself in an uncontrollable downward spiral. You have a $5,000/mo. cocaine habit and are on the verge of losing your job. You can't keep a girlfriend. You quit your job, pack your things, trade in your sporty car for $15,000 cash and a $3,000 junker, and spend 10 of your $15,000 on coke. You rent a hotel room for a month. All you need is just more...more....magic. A month later, you're working for a shoddy remodeling company. You start drinking in the mornings with your alcoholic co-workers and get the jobs done slowly. You do shitty work and you retire to your hotel for a syringe full of heroin and a prostitute to shoot it up with you. And then you have unprotected sex with her, nightly. She's worried about the pus-filled sores that are beginning to form on her vagina. Your balls itch. You go into a rage when you can't find a connection, and you're 2 weeks behind on paying the hotel bill. They're on the verge of kicking you out. But, you have the bottle. The magic is fading. A week after, you can't seem to make ends meet anymore. You lost your job, got kicked out of the hotel and wander around the streets babbling like a madman. It's been a week since you've shot up, but you can still follow a man down the alley and roll him for his wallet. However, not many rich people hang out in this area, and the most you've gotten is $20.00. No respectable drug dealer would sell 2 cc of his worst heroin for $20.00. So, you go buy a gallon of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes with your collective savings, and drown your sorrows. You vomit into a gutter, pass out and piss yourself on the sidewalk. The cops kick you out of the way under an awning. It'd be a waste of time for them to arrest you. You awake blurry-eyed, hocking up nasty, bloody wads of phlegm. You stink of the fermenting trash that you sleep in, and have developed a chronic, raspy cough. You start to talk to yourself more often and become unintelligible. One day, you're following a black man down the alley. You run to tackle him and beat him senseless, but he is aware of you. He leaps forward as you sprawl to the ground in a half-drunken haze. He whips out a .357 Magnum from his jacket pocket and blows your brains onto the pavement. The magic is gone. The Selling of America Advertising. It's everywhere. From the pop-up windows that annoy the hell out of you to the brand names on people's clothing....it's practically a plague. Nearly everything is copyrighted or trademarked. A majority of television channels and radio stations play more commercials than actual programming. Advertising has become the business game of the century. In the fledgling years of advertising, people bought products with the most appealing ads. Nowadays it's almost the same, but ads have taken a turn. Ever since ad agencies started putting emotional "jolts" into their campaigns, "jolt advertising" has become the staple of sales. Think about it. People enjoy commercials that make them laugh. Usually what causes the impulse to laugh at advertisements is a sudden, unexpected event that leaves one of the ad characters as the brunt of hilarity. Other ads rely on beautiful, thin women or powerful, masculine fellows to appeal to the consumer. The average consumerist female(or, in some cases, male) will buy Cover Girl mascara if Cindy Crawford looks good wearing it, and the average consumerist male will only buy Budweiser beer because of the slapstick commercials featuring edgy comedians. Quite often, we have a corporate answer for every quandary we face in our modern lives. If we get hungry, we go down the street to the desired fast-food restaurant. If we get thirsty, we have Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Gatorade right by us to quench our thirst. And the sad part is, the advertisers are selling us their ideas of "cool". Many people are so engrained into their consumerist lifestyle, they don't know any better. Example: The woman next door owns a Ford Expedition, and she's a trendy soccer mom. She has "it". So, the brooding neighbor goes out and buys a monstrously huge gas-guzzling SUV and becomes the talk of the junior high, carting her kids and their various friends to aforementioned fast-food joints and even the mall to buy overpriced brand-name clothing. A majority of kids aren't satisfied until they are wearing Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie and Fitch, or Nike. God forbid they were caught wearing anything less. If some kid's wearing Wal-Mart clothing, they're poor trash. Even the "alternative" kiddos are decked out in their Adidas, Puma, and (insert trendy band-name here)t-shirts, accompanied with accessories from the "alternative" stores. Kids' fashion templates are homogenized with what they see on MTV or VH1. When everyone comes home at night, they log countless hours in front of the television or computer. We (as a culture) have become so detached from our standards that we would be lost without television, radio or computers. Reading books? That's for nerds. Just go buy a magazine. Actually going somewhere and having fun as a family? No way. Mom and Dad are too tired to go do anything and besides, the kids would get all nasty if they went outside. We are breeding cultures that are raised in a completely electronic environment. The amount of information zipping around is so overwhelming that a majority of it is useless. If it can't be reduced to simple little factoids and memorized, why learn it? Amazingly, our culture has survived despite mass consumption and destruction of natural resources. What the real kicker is, is that nobody is willing to stop. Very few people are actually willing to ditch their electronic vices and go do something. My challenge to the masses is: Do something different. Instead of turning on the television, read a book. Exercise. Instead of drinking soft drinks, try water. The next time you're dying for a salad, go find a mom-and-pop produce stand that grows all of their own products. All it takes is a bunch of small changes to make yourself stand back and look at your life. And then you can prioritize and wonder what you are actually getting out of all of this. Leaving Here The wall shook as he smacked her up against it. He was drunk again, and she had accidentally burned his steak. Such a stupid little thing to get angry over. Her face was throbbing. "YOU STUPID CUNT!" he screamed. "CAN'T YOU DO ANYTHING RIGHT?" She felt so sorry, so bad for what she had done. She watched out of the corner of her swelling eye as he made a fist and reared back. She felt his fist smash into her face like a car wreck. Cue forward. Hospital bed. Fades in and out of consciousness. She looks over at the intravenous tube stuck in her arm and gazes up towards the contents of the IV bottle. Through a slight haze, she can distinguish the letters "MO-P--NE" Morphine. She reaches up to touch her face, through the drug haze it takes millenia for her fingers to graze her own cheek. She feels the bandages and gingerly touches the swollen cheek, feels the blunt pain of her broken nose. Bastard. Five hours later, she wakes up. A little groggy, somewhat shaken, but still breathing. The doctor walks in softly, as if noise would hurt her. She looks over at him and he smiles and shakes his head in disappointment. "Lucky you're still alive. That guy…is he your husband?" She replies, "No, boyfriend." Her swollen lip makes the words unintelligible. The doctor quips, "Maybe you ought to get some more rest, ma'am. By the way, your boyfriend is down at the police station being questioned. A restraining order will be placed on him if you wish. Do you want one?" She nods her head, and lays back down on the soft hospital bed. As she tries to go back to sleep, her mind begins to wander. She remembers all of the times he had beaten her. The beatings hadn't started until she had moved in with him…and there was something different about him. He became more annoyed with her no matter what she did, and one day he went over the edge and smashed her over the head with a bottle of vodka. She suffered a concussion, and the doctors said that he had intercourse with her while she was knocked out. She didn't file rape or assault charges though, she had only packed her things and left while he was at work…he came back a few days later, kneeling on her doorstep, looking like a saint. She moved back in with him, and they started with a clean slate. He had kept his composure and was looking well. They even talked about getting engaged. One day they got into an argument and screamed at each other for an hour. He ended up throwing her down to the ground, and she yelled until he left. She cried herself to sleep that night, and awoke in the morning to a rose and a bottle of wine with a card next to it. He apologized again and asked her to stay. That was exactly four days ago. As she lay in the bed, she thought, "Once more….that's all it will take." She returned home 2 days later, acting as if nothing had ever happened. He apologized profusely, and she accepted, half-heartedly. She had plans, though. She wasn't going to be stupid, not anymore. He would pay. Cue forward. One night, he began to get irate. This time, she expected the blows. As he drew back his fist in anger, she raised her hand. "Stop. Justin, listen." "Shut UP, WHORE!" he bellowed. "No. You shut up, you dickless pig. I'm sick of your shit. You get drunk and use me as a punching bag." He opened his mo mouth to say something, and she stopped him. "I told you to shut up. Now, listen to me, honey. This has gone on for waaaay too long. Personally, I can't take it anymore. So, do you know what I'm going to do?" He grinned and cocked his head. "You mean, what do you THINK you're going to do?" She grinned back. "No, it's what I'm GOING to do." She promptly yanked a butcher knife from the chopping block and jabbed it into his throat. The blood flowed forth like a fountain. "Now, honey. SHUT UP," she said. He gurgled and staggered backwards, a look of extreme sorrow in his eyes. She stepped forward, tore the knife from the hole, and stabbed him in the head. He slumped to the floor as more blood pumped from the open gashes. She looked at the crimson liquid leaking from his head….reached out, touched it. It was warm and thick. She put her bloody fingertips to her lips and licked them. It tasted metallic. She liked it. The taste of freedom. Turmoil Advisor Musavi looked around the room nervously. He was there, President Nkemi was sitting right there at the table. He checked his watch. 9:05. Musavi told the man to be there at 9:00 with the rifle. No sign of him whatsoever. "Yes, I understand", Musavi replied in Swahili, their native language. The politician was blathering on and on about his "human rights policy". Musavi thought to himself: 'Fuck your policies, fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on.' Every time President Nkemi said something, he would nudge Musavi. Musavi would respond with a Swahili "Yes" , and kept on looking for the man. He saw a movement in the rafters over Nkemi's shoulder. 'There he is....slow bastard.' Musavi glared at the President as the sniper steadied his aim. All he had to do was give the signal and BOOM. All of the country's financial problems, all of the racial oppression, all going down the drain with the pull of a trigger. They had been planning this one simple moment for months. Musavi took another sip of his liquor and grimaced as the President told his council members of the military progress in Sandovia. 'In the next five seconds', Musavi thought,'you won't be worried about your military.' With that thought in mind, Musavi leaned back in his chair and raised his hand above his head. Three shots. President Nkemi was chuckling when his head exploded and liquefied like a rotten tomato. Musavi looked up, mouthed the word "Run" to the sniper, and fired six wild shots into the rafters. "Goddamn it!" he yelled, "I missed! Someone go hunt that fucker down!" People were running, children were crying, women were screaming. In the midst of all the chaos, Musavi grinned. Liberty… A pretty olive-skinned woman with flowing black hair walked down the beach. She looked to the shore, sizing up the 15-foot-tall grating-and-barbed-wire fence that snaked down the coastline and made an immediate right angle towards the land. It ran all the way from the beach to the border. It was high tide, and the fence sat about 10 feet out from the water's edge. She had been thinking for a while, and had decided that today was the day. She was going to get over that fence, even if it meant her life. She looked around nervously, and began to run. Her pace quickened as she neared the fence. As soon as she hit it she began to climb. She clamored over the barbed wire and lost her grip. She found herself hurtling face-first towards the ground, when she was jolted. She screamed in agony and looked upward. Her foot was tangled in a loop of barbed wire. The skin tore like wet paper, followed by muscles and tendons, ripping like fabric. Blood spewed forth and ran down her leg like a river of crimson. She frantically pawed the fence, bellowing in pain as the spikes tore ribbons of skin and flesh from her leg. Hearing voices, she scrambled and gasped to relieve herself of the wire. As she dangled there in a panic, her weight finally caused the barbed wire to give. It snapped. She landed on the other side of the fence with a resounding thud. She looked up in a daze, noticing the strange, new people gathering around her, with rocks in their hands. A large, shirtless man bellowed out a command in a language she had never heard before, and the sharp rocks began to rain on her. She shrieked in pain, curled up in a fetal position, and cried herself into a warm, black, endless sleep as the rocks pelted her frail body.