I don’t do whiskey or sleeping aids. But I have written a metric ton of stuff I regret. This stuff hardly ever sees past the confines of my pages app, but it’s embarrassing nonetheless to think that if I died some rando scrolling my stuff might run across it by accident and go “yep, it’s always the quiet ones”. I have ranted endlessly, my lousy and dated opinions on full display. Resting cringe face is an understatement of what this drivel inspires. Since I’m a hoarder of words I never delete anything major so it’s just...there. Time begets more documents, thus putting more space between me and my illustrious hot takes. But it doesn’t negate their presence. I have published some very regrettable things, but I was perfectly sober in doing so, which...debatably makes it worse. These things can all be summed up in a singular word: Wattpad.

Ah Wattpad, repository of everything distasteful, smutty and degenerate. I’m being hyperbolic of course—not everything, just...most. I joined a few years back, and what is it about being surrounded by degenerate things that pulls you down to the same level of degeneracy? Most of the content I fabricated during that time was, honestly, quite horrid. The ‘horrid’ mostly centered around exploitation-tier violence and general vulgarity. Whatever phase I was in compelled me to be eDgY, and most know that’s never a good thing. My edge wanted to go out with a bang, and go out with a bang it did. Were I to read back over the docs, I’d probably suffer a visceral reaction, somewhere between cringe-stung anaphylaxis and outright denial that I was ever that stupid.

A few things (read: a lot of things) I’ve published on here have been regrettable. Thus my purge a few months ago. Maybe I should make the purge an annual thing. I can see fans of the movie doing a double-take at that last line if removed from context but whatevs. I’ve still never seen the movie.

“Maybe I should make the purge an annual thing.” -CatLady1, 2021.

My conclusion is this.

(Writing to Prose itself now) The slave challenge you took down was really interesting. I know I give you flak over challenges (read: Epstein, Hitler), but I do so in jest and I’m all (most) for venturing beyond my comfort zone. Your challenges help me do that quite often. I actually was in the process of editing my entry for submission when you changed the prompt, so just know the challenge itself wasn’t completely ignored. :)

#hyperbolic, #satire, #opinion

and now I’m just writing to fill the word quota I wonder what I can write yep I already know all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I died on a warm August morning.

Took the coronary people six days to find me keeled over in the backyard, all moldered up and decayed, the crows having pecked out my eyes. Unceremoniously, I was hauled from the premises in a black thing that vaguely resembled a garbage bag, the flies dancing around, desperate to infiltrate. My wife was out of town, in case you were wondering. I’d like to think she would’ve noticed my absence had she been home; but I doubt it.

Honestly, with how the past two years have gone, things would’ve probably played out the same. She’d flit around the house, head in a dream, singing softly to herself, playing games on her phone, or maybe texting him, her brotherly coworker. The whole “he’s like a brother to me” part is her shtick. My opinion holds a bit different.

Brothers don’t typically drape their arms over their sisters’ shoulders like that, or lean that close to whisper into their sisters’ ears. Brothers don’t typically undress their sisters with long, lingering glances. And he does. I’ve seen him.

Oh yeah—and a brother doesn’t typically poison his sister’s husband by slipping arsenic into his morning tea. That was a lovely surprise. The day after Tanya left on business, he showed up on my doorstep, looking like a lost puppy. Said he’d had a fight with his girlfriend and thought maybe I could give him some advice. So, having nothing better to do on my day off, I invited him inside to share my breakfast. That was my first and last mistake.

He must’ve spiked it when I got up to get more napkins. How anticlimactic can you get?

And now I get the pleasure of watching their story continue without me. Yes, watching. I may have died but I didn’t go very far. Reverse the old adage and you have it: “Forgotten, but not gone.” Devoted as my dear spouse was, it took her a whole day to move on. And then she was off to find comfort in the arms of who else—Ted McGhee, her brotherly coworker. The pretense kinda’ dropped after I left the picture. She stopped calling him her brother and started calling him all the things she used to call me.

They were married three weeks later. By then I’d learned a neat trick. If you concentrate hard enough you can move stuff as a ghost. It’s a dimensional thing, popularized by TV and apparently applicable here. So I started following them, knocking stuff off the tables. I’m a pest like that.

Ted always prided himself for his machismo, or whatever you call it. I learned very quickly that it was all a facade. A few moving pieces of furniture captured by our glitchy old security cam and he was out of his mind. Tanya was the one having to comfort him, and I could tell the luster was already fading. The thing about people like Ted: they’re good at pretending, but give them something real, any taste of conflict or fear, and they fall apart. I downed a lamp and he dove for cover behind the couch; first making sure nobody was around to see.

I didn’t consider it revenge so much as entertainment. I was bored and lonely—predisposed to both in life, but they were even less tolerable in death. My mind began playing with the question why. Why was I still here? What had kept me from crossing over? I wasn’t the one in the wrong. And my heart wasn’t really revenge-bent, as one might’ve assumed. If Tanya wanted this guy, who was I to stop her. I knew more about him than she did. And I knew them both enough to know that they deserved each other.

The answer arrived on a warm August morning, almost a year after my passing. Ted wasn’t feeling so hot, so he’d taken off. Tanya was away and he was alone in the house. I overheard him on the phone with someone, and I could hardly process what followed.

“Yeah, she’ll be out of the picture real soon. I just gotta’ work a few things out. The spark’s gone. There’s nothin’ in it for me anymore. Plus Tanya’s old hubby was worth a small fortune. Get her dead and we’ll have enough to spring for a royal-tier wedding. We can retire nice and comfy in the Bahamas, just like you wanted.”

A million thoughts pounded in my skull. Not only was this two-bit hustler looking to kill my wife—well, I guess ex-wife—but he was talking to this ‘other woman’ like they’d been seeing each other for months. I couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been planning this. Probably since the day he and Tanya tied the knot.

By the time Tanya got home, Ted had a nice candle-lit dinner ready and waiting.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked, red smile stretching, bouncing on her heel with that adorable enthusiasm I used to love.

I knew then that I couldn’t let this monster kill her. She wasn’t mine anymore. But she didn’t deserve to be his.

So when he offered up her tea, I promptly knocked it over. She let a frightened squeak, and he nearly jumped out of his socks as per usual. Upon recovery, he went to get her a refill. I prepared myself for round two. It was going to be a long night.

Seven refills came and went before Ted got fed up. Angrily, he flipped the table so hard and high that it struck the window. Noticing the gaping hole it left in the glass, an idea crossed his eyes. He grabbed a steak-knife off the floor and lunged at Tanya. I knew then that he was going to stage it and make it look like a breakin.

Tanya was small-framed and fragile. She didn’t stand a chance. And that was what dogged me most about cowards like Ted: they only preyed on the weaker. He would’ve never tried a thing like that with me.

Gathering all my concentration, I sent a vase crashing into the wall. It missed Ted by a hair. I figured if I could incapacitate him, maybe that would give Tanya a chance to run. I hadn’t even bothered to look what vase I’d grabbed. Imagine my surprise when my own cremated ashes puffed everywhere, like a smoke bomb in a riot. They blinded Ted, and he staggered around, refusing to relinquish his grip on the knife. By the time the ashes cleared, Tanya was already out the door and running up the street. Ted made a break after her, but he failed to account for our elevated threshold, and tripped out the front door, landing facedown on the porch. When he rolled over, I saw the knife had stuck in him, and blood climbed thickly from both sides of his mouth. As he died, it was almost as if our perceptions brushed for a moment, him staring directly into my eyes and me staring back ever-so-calmly.

“It was kill or be killed...” he muttered in delirium, in what was the most unconvincing excuse I’d ever heard.

That’s what I call a twofer’ one then, I wanted to retort. But I maintained my class and upheld my silence. No need to lower myself. He already knew that he’d lost.

The life left him, and there I stayed, stranded on the porch against a world that I was no longer any part of. I’d helped save Tanya, but I was still here. Nothing had changed.

And then I saw it, a light in the distance, so radiant it couldn't be natural. I ran toward it the fastest I could manage, and as I collided with it all became new. I saw a great many instances, the proverbial life flashing before my eyes; and it all ended with Tanya hunched over, panting and tearful at the end of our street, and a half-muffled “thank you” stirred off with the wind.

Note: This is strictly fiction as I do not believe in ghosts, nor do I condone fighting with cremated ashes, not even your own. Peace. :3

#fiction, #strictlyfiction, #donttrythisathome

I drug my backpack behind me as I entered the lab. Dr. Landon was ready and waiting, looking like a man ten hangovers in at once. He was not, in fact, ten hangovers in at once. His scraggly appearance was just the collateral of his newest project.

“We’re at the precipice of the future, young protege!” he declared when he saw me. “Two years of work has finally paid off. With this new invention we’ll be able to extract fictional characters from any literary setting. Name a novel, name a context, name a name, and bam, we’ll pull ’em right out and plop ’em down on these great linoleum floors.”

The fiction-to-reality converter was, in essence, a glorified box. It was simplistic and metal, vastly anticlimactic. But for one who knew its uses, the possibilities were endless. All you’d have to do was crack the book of choice open, place it inside the box, zero the scanner in on a name or image, and the converter would do the rest. Analytics was nothing. Dr. Landon was a genius and he’d already resolved the intricacies.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“Science!” he yelled.

“No, I mean, what’s the process behind quantifying something fictional? What brand of quantum physics allows for a—”

“Science!” he yelled.

And that was good enough for me.

I drew my book of choice from the gaping mouth of my backpack. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Where my classmates had endured such a book, I actually quite enjoyed it. Among my favorite characters was the main boi Raskolnikov. Murderer as he was, I was fairly intrigued by his ideas and mullings. That’s right! For the first fiction-to-reality conversion, I chose a fictional murderer. What could go wrong?

Upon inserting the book, I shut the door of the contraption and Dr. Landon switched it on, monitoring the process carefully. Like a printer, it scanned the pages, honed in on Raskol’s name and something started churning. A strand of light wormed its way down from the projector attached to the box’s righthand side. Soon, the projector threw forth a full-blown cast of light, and in that curious womb germinated the hintings of some spectral being. Slowly, he materialized. He was standing upright, eyes empty of thought. That came later. As he stepped from the bluish pocket, the lab’s white flushmounts caught him and then I could see. It had worked! I...think? I had to ask myself—did I know for certain what Raskol even looked like?

“Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov!” I cried, for the sake of insurance.

“Where am I!” he cried back.

I took that as a yes.

“Really?” Dr. Landon sighed with a great sense of defeat. “Him?”

“Hey, at least I didn’t materialize Alex DeLarge,” I retorted.

“You’ve never read A Clockwork Orange in your life.”

“No, but I’ve seen parts of the movie.”

“Where am I!” Raskol was now flipping out. Perhaps it was the modernity of our stark-white lab hitting him like a sledgehammer to the gut.

“Hide your sharp objects,” Dr. Landon muttered. “Especially the axe.”

“We have no axe,” I replied.

“Well, materialize an axe and then hide it.”

Logic! Dr. Landon did not like to be wrong.

“This is getting kinda’ mean. I’m gonna’ explain things to him,” I volunteered.

“Good luck with that,” Dr. Landon dismissed. “He’s your problem. I’m gonna’ go fetch my Superman comics. And maybe materialize a character who hasn’t killed anyone.”

“Zod.” I reminded.

“That’s not canon!” the doctor cried, indignantly.

“If you say so...”

*****

After unloading my spiel to the frantic Raskol, he calmed down. Said the last thing he remembered was passing a tavern where some most “unceremonious” language was wafting out. In other words they were cussin’ a blue streak.

“Well, you should feel right at home here then,” I replied. “Unfortunately, modern day’s pretty much the same.”

Upon the conclusion of our bizarre heart-to-heart, he asked if we had any card games around to pass the time. So I took him up on his enthusiasm and brandished my Uno deck. I never left home without it.

Halfway in, I was miles ahead, and he apparently found this irritating enough to accuse me of cheating. All the while Dr. Landon was scurrying to and fro in the background, hauling in armful after armful of novels, comics, and magazines. All I knew was he had better keep his naughty mags out of the converter. It’s a shame when a 17-year-old has to uphold the decorum in a scientific partnership as this.

“Stop!” Raskol demanded, checking behind him for reflective surfaces. “You’re spying on me. I know it. You predict my hand much too well.”

“Hard to cheat at Uno,” I retorted. “But you’re forgiven since yer still learning the ropes. It’s all in the deck, man. All in the deck.”

“You shuffle it purposely then,” he theorized. “You know what cards are where.”

By then, Dr. Landon had everything from Tarzan to James Bond to the Joker running around. And he’d been cross with me for picking Raskol.

Honestly, though, I was starting to see it. What an ill-temper on this one. He was kind of a sore loser. Not my fault he was so unversed in the art of Uno.

“Curse these modern games!” he finally declared, flinging his deck down in a flare of annoyance and storming out.

Whenever he returned I decided to ignore his outburst and opt for optimism. My decision was only squelched when he reappeared in the doorframe, a rusty axe in his hands.

Uhhh...maybe I’d picked a little too early in the novel to extract him.

He was, perhaps, stuck in some kind of “nothing left to lose” phase. As he chased me around the lab floor, I hoped this phase passed quickly. What an idea this was! Tarzan was now strangling the Joker, negating the longsuffering mercies of Batman. Superman glided through the air above, crashing through walls, searching for his bearings. A bunch of Vegas showgirls giggled demurely in the corner, surrounding a euphoric Dr. Landon.

Why was I not surprised.

Still, with every dodge of Raskol’s axe, I figured I had bigger things to worry about.

#fiction, #strictlyfiction, #don’ttrythisathome

"Who did you vote for?"

"It's none of your f'n business. Why don't you and your snowflake libtard friends take a long hike off a short pier before this country goes to total shit. I'll vote for whomever the hell I choose to, damn it."

"I was talking about Dancing With The Stars, but I think you just told me who you voted for for president."

“Am I pretty?”

“You’re tolerable. Personally I’d lose the dead-mothers-of-anime haircut and maybe cover those soulless corpse eyes with contacts. Acne appears to be an uphill battle for you if that hill was 100% vertical. Speaking of vertical, you’re a bit vertically, ehem, challenged. Horizontally too. Here I thought only cats were supposed to have whiskers. You need to wax that, girl. Maybe you’d draw more compliments if you didn’t dress younger than my six-year-old cousin. Your complexion is so pasty it would blind the sun. And as for the muffin-top, I’d say you had more rolls than the Michelin Man, or more rolls than a bakery, but those would be too unoriginal. So I’ll just say, you got more roles than Hollywood. Bruh.”

“...so is that a no?”

#fiction

1) ”Cuantos sus anos?” instead of “Cuantos sus años?”

Without pronouncing the tilda, you are asking how many butts someone has instead of how old they are.

2) “Cuando esta el inodoro?” instead of “Cuando esta el baño?”

You are asking where the “toilet” is instead of the restroom.

3) “Estoy muy embarazado!” instead of “Estoy muy emoccionado!”

You are saying you are pregnant (embarazar is a false cognate).

4) “Ella es muy guapa!” instead of “Ella es muy bonita!”

You are saying that she is “handsome”

5) ”Él es una maestra buena!” instead of ”Él es un maestro bueno!”

You are addressing a man as a woman.

On the stove. (Rotary phone) Over a traditional flame. It takes more (time/content) for you to make my blood boil

Whereas a small matter such as (any will do) in a modern microwave (Long text form)

Will be nuked into a heated red faced rant and rage almost instantaneously I reason.

In less than a second glance at the five hundred or more characters a complaint is to often comprised of.

I will have deleted it. And written off it’s composer as delusional for expecting anyone to be onboard with reading long winded versions/answers to simple yes or no questions.

So in this case rather than be quick to judge you. I’ll let my expected hatred simmer. And hold the door for whomever. Bowing my head appearing concerned while rejecting any gratitude as follows.....

"Your thanks and your money. Like my concerns? Are no good here?"