The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Do This Systematically
2-27-1999

It's starting to rain, and my dad and I are running toward shelter in a shanty western-like town. As we run, I glance to my left and see my mom standing near a stone mound in the ground with an umbrella. We slow our pace and realize she has the right idea -- my dad had previously cut a hole in the mound, revealing that it's hollow and leads deep into the earth. The perfect shelter. My dad comments on how much of a pain it was to cut a hole that size into the rock.

He drops me off at a convenience store. I'm looking for a before-school job. The place is small, packed with empty cans and bottles, owned by two middle-eastern men. The one gets out a can of aerosol and shows me how to use it to clean out the roaches. Some days there's many, others few, but they always have to air out the place every morning before doing business. I explain how much of an expert I am at this sort of thing, having developed my own techniques and everything. They hire me.

I decide to take out all these bags of empty returns. By the time I manage to tie up one bag, however, I notice that most of the others are gone already. Actually, the entire back wall of the store has been 'lifted' up like a garage door and a forklift had taken away all the bags, which had been sitting (unbenownst to me) on sets of palletes! I follow the forklift outside of the store, which is now totally empty and resembles more of a garage.

It's a nice park, with a few trees around and lots of grass. There are men walking about, doing various construction jobs, such as laying down a pipe. I nod and smile to a few people and get greeted by someone that seems to be in charge. I go back and tell the store owner about this, and he says he knows a few of those guys.

I go back to my home in the shanty town. I'm greeting by my mom's cat, Gelsey, whose fur has taken on a white tone (instead of grey), and who greets me in the typical fashion of pouncing on any available part of my body (this time my face) and attacking it. I play with her for a little while before leaving her to her own devices.

I think of what it would be like to lower the cat into that hole in the stone mound, and then wonder whether we might have done that before already. I imagine her meowing and staying put in the bucket, timidly looking down into the deep depths below. Then I wonder why I have the cat at all, because my mom doesn't live with me.

My friend Mike H (fellow student) comes by, wondering if I'd like to go on a motorcycle ride. We hop on our bikes and cruise toward town. It's night. We park by some warehouse where we have an exchange with some other kids (heh, I still think of people our age as kids) that I don't remember. One of them takes off on a motorcycle of their own. I'm not on mine, but Mike is about to whoosh by, in chase, in his, so I flag him down and hop on the back.

By the time I gain some balance, I notice that it doesn't sound like a motorcycle at all, but a jet aircraft (our bikes DO have a LOT of power, after all). The bike takes to the air and I find my legs dangling and me reaching for the footpegs. He takes some crazy hairpin turns only possible when one's not on the ground, whishing over cars and around streetlights through the streets of the skyward city.

At last we catch up with the guy, who has landed his 'bike' on a landing pad above the entrance to another building. I imagine someone else down there warning him that we're about to launch some dumb-fire missles down on him. I imagine him thinking what dumb-fire missiles are, logically eliminating the possibilities of heat-seaking and image-recognition missiles. As he comes to the conclusion that these missiles are merely going to fire straight into the ground wherever we aim them, Mike fires a volley of about 6 missiles into the launching pad, collasping it. We land on top of the rubble.

Apparently the guy has survived and run into the arcade (not video arcade, but arcade as in the open space between several shops) inside the building. I dash in, practically busting down the glass door to the video rental place on the left, thinking to myself, "Check everywhere, don't let him slip by, we'll do this systematically." I jump about, getting quick looks over counters and behind shelves and everywhere, not finding him.

Suddenly his two friends (how they got there, I don't know) come out of a closet wearing different clothes than before. As I turn my attention to them, I almost don't notice the guy running out from another closet, also in different clothing. I dart over and catch him, except he's not a him, he's a her! I've got her from behind, so I decide to feel her up. Small, perky tits. Not my type, but I continue to fondle her anyway.

I then wonder what would have happened if we'd never chased these people. I fancied that we would have stopped at a big video arcade, where this would have happened:

I had a big bag of coins and tokens from my mom. I went into the arcade with Mike and some other people who happened to come along. I stepped up to the latest Tekken game. Some kid was already playing, but I put some coins in, thinking it would convert my quarters into tokens, forgetting that there existed a thing called change machines and that video games didn't work like pop machines. It took four quarters to play the game, and I put three in before realizing this. As I stood up, some black guy comes up with intentions of playing the game. I stoop back down and put the last quarter in. He's like, "Wtf man, I was gonna play!" but then I inform him I was just putting that last credit in for him. He seems satisfied. I put my hand out and he gives me the credits he would have otherwise payed to play the game with.

My group weaves among the various games. This place is huge. One of the gang comments on how they hate how they'll put a crappy old game right next to a cool new one. I explain that if they put all the cool games in one spot and all the crappy ones in another, that everyone would congregate in one area and it would be a waste of space.

We get to a strange machine that takes your change and converts it directly into a bunch of prizes. You can then put your prizes into the machine and get fewer, bigger prizes, and so on. I do this and get a bunch of cheap plastic toys, a whole bag full. I put all these into the machine (much to the annoyance of the same black guy who's now waiting in line for this machine) and get a bunch of REALLY huge prizes, wrapped and everything so that I don't even know what they are. There are people at the end of the machine's conveyor belt, like baggers at a grocery store, bagging my prizes for me. I ask how long I can have them hold the prizes for me here, because I came on my motorcycle and there's no way I could carry them all home.

posted by Phlegm at 11/24/2003