Bizarros pt 7

Bizarros, Pts. 5 & 6

Call me conceited, but the world of bizarros appears to revolve around me. Maybe it's just that I get around more than the rest of you, but it seems to me that whoever issues these creatures has trained an eye on yours truly. For this endowment, I can't say whether I should yawn or yelp - are these creatures amusing or sickening? It's a question I've asked before, and I repeat it now because each new duplicate is truly more horrible than the last.

(not Ben)

This could because I have had to interact with these people on a day to day basis; in place of wonder, they inspire simple distaste. I have no chance to marvel at them from afar - when I see them in the library or outside my room, they traipse mercilessly on the grave of my fantasies. Goldberg's is perhaps the most despicable of the bunch, smugly offering the worst quips which crumble, dead on arrival. I've danced around the word, but I'll say it now: He's a douche.



At least he's a snappy dresser.

Me, Me, Me

Lately I've begun to wonder if I have become a robot. A slack-jawed, faintly happy boy who moves from task to task with no real inspiration but preciseness and lines of correct thinking. In one sense, I'm the same as I ever was. People see in me whatever they've always seen in me. I could entertain what I believe those qualities to be, but here is not the forum for that discussion. I have similar interests, the same motivational forces and in all likelihood a superior grasp of what I want my life to be and where I think it's going. Maybe that's the problem. The joy of late-night blogging in high school was that a) late-night was 9 pm and b) I possessed a more speculative nature. Now that I know more things, have I lost my way? The answer is no. Despite the glazed-over feeling I get, I'm confident I do mostly know what I'm doing. I have my faults, but I'm coming to accept them rather than rail about them and do nothing. You could tell me I should work to improve myself, and I believe it's a good idea but if I'm not motivated to improve myself even during my worst bouts of self-loathing, why bother loathing myself at all?

If we have to talk about a personal problem, here's one. Like anyone, I want to be an alpha male.



I can't stand to feel inferior to other people in any sense. I don't know if this is because I'm insecure or because I think strangers are awful. The latter is if anything, less reassuring. Yet my conception of myself as an alpha male inherently involves only self-pleasure. Let's call it the Kirill axiom. I can act the way I really want to and it'll be fun for awhile but I'm inevitably going to be seduced by social pressures. The fact of the matter is that the standard alpha male on a college campus is a womanizer, a drunk, and an all-around asshole. So the question that begs itself is obvious. Alpha Jeremiah would be considered an alpha male by about the same amount of people that consider me an alpha male at the current moment. My eccentricities would be too much for people who didn't know me to handle. My friends would still consider me a friend but whether they like me more or less is meaningless. It's the others I want to impress.

What I'm getting at is my problem with myself in college: I don't stand out. I don't think I've ever really stood out but at least in high school, I logically represented a much higher percentage of what the average person in school was thinking about. I was one of sixty instead of one of 1500. You know the guy who sits behind me in class who wears a Ninja Turtles bandanna and a nose ring? I want him to look at me, someone he's never met, and say "Damn, what a guy." The extent of my desire for gratification is beyond all limits. I'm not going to say I shouldn't care at all what people think about me because you can always take things too far. I do care what people close to me think of me and I think I should care. Why do I want to be beloved by strangers? That's the real question.

Signed the end, in calligraphy

Because it couldn't get enough attention!

The Tiffany Laugh Scale

collaboration

As we round the street-lit corner, Rupert checks the bag again. We've been driving almost ten minutes now, and at least once every minute he's pulled the edges apart and craned his neck down over it. And every time, in the now dark, now street-lit bag, there remain, undeparted, a crowbar, a coil of rope, and a revolver. Their sister-sack, in the trunk, unchecked but with equal certainty contains a helping of cinder-blocks, a length of chain, and a two-and-a-half dollar padlock. I think things are obvious enough.
We pass under the next streetlight and I reach out and smack Rupe's left hand. "Stop it." He looks up at me and under the next-after-that streetlight I see his face is blank. "Stop looking in the damn bag," I clarify. "The same damn shit's going to be in there each time." His bottom lip starts to emerge so I soften things with a justification. "It looks suspicious."
"I'm sorry," he says, not sarcastic. "I've never murdered anyone before."
I strengthen my 10-and-2 grip on the steering wheel and look straight ahead. The street-lights are orange so everything is orange and spooky in the early-morning mist. Every so often we see a pedestrian and we both hold our breath, like passing a graveyard. "It has to be done, though."
"I know."
"We've tried everything else."
"I know."
"It'll be fine."
"Alright."
I drew the car to a shuddering halt on the high school track. "Shouldn't you park in the field?" said Rupert. "I don't know, what if your hands shake and you drop all of our shit in the grass, huh?" I replied. Out came Rupert's bottom lip, sure as Sunday. I thought back to the ancient days. Back then, they would judge a man's character by his looks. Nothing more to it than that. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. How many assholes have a sneer when they walk around on the street? How many child-rapists are pale, skinny motherfuckers? Rupert was small and covered in hair. It was like he'd made the jump from slaying dragons with a pair of dice to the real business in a day. Maybe he had, I don't know. And the name. Rupert? Seriously?
Who knows, maybe my theories are full of shit. All I know is, a solitary jogger hops the fence. 1:14 am. Clockwork. He starts running around the loop. Pretty soon, he almost runs straight into our car. "What the fuck?" he says. You can tell he wants to yell, but it comes out all hushed. Something's already gotten to him. It sure as hell wouldn't be Rupert, if they could see each other. But it's too dark for that. I'm sitting there, rubbing the revolver absentmindedly with my thumb, trying to build up the suspense a little bit before I get out of the car. I'm a sick fuck that way. Then I hear the thud and the squishing sound of metal meeting flesh. Faintly I see the jogger trying to dance onto the hood of our car. Of course, it isn't any kind of dance they teach you in middle school. Little Rupert has just smashed in our jogger's skull with a crowbar. "Aw, come on, Rupert," I say, getting out of the car. "I didn't even get to use my rope." The last word falls out of my mouth almost as I survey the situation. I had been shocked about Rupert rising to the occasion. But the shock falls out quickly too. The dead jogger is someone I know all too well. Someone I've known in a way that Rupert would never comprehend.
I interrogate Rupert gently. I never like to know anything about a target. It's not my style. I find it easier to project a certain image on them and make believe. I always figured it worked, since I'm never as jittery as Rupert was in the car. I feel bad about the jogger being dead. What I feel worst about is not being able to look a man like him in the eye and do it myself. That's why the morning joggers find Rupert with a cinder block halfway up his ass and a dead man's grin on his face the next day. I hate people who take their job too seriously.