Roger That

A couple friends and I sat down to study and write and decided to get our brains started by writing this. We rotated writing paragraphs: 

            Roger wasn’t a fan of Walkie-Talkies.  For reasons that would soon be known (though Roger would not be pleased to let his little traumatic incident involving Walkie-Talkies and the local haberdasher known to the public, he’s dead now—Roger, not the haberdasher), Roger tries to avoid Walkie-Talkies at all costs. But being a prison guard in a state penitentiary that wasn’t actually in the state of Hawaii, but was on a small island in the middle of the pacific--well, the Walkie-Talkie was his best friend.  It was his only friend. It’s little red light stared back at him as he lay on his cot, sweating and thinking  about how his dismal life had become a little less dismal with the introduction of that Walkie-Talkie.

            So when his son, Roger Junior, asked for the new “Ultra-Long-Distance-Rough-and-Tough-Walkie-Talkie” set (batteries and the urge to actually go outside for once not included) for his birthday, Roger said flat out, “no.” For weeks Roger was ostracized within his own house, his wife and son treated him like kids in the hallway treat a hall monitor, like he took all the fun out of life with one little word, “no.”

“Roger, he’s a kid. He asked for ONE thing for his birthday. He needs this!”

“No.”

“I can’t even believe you right now. You’re acting like… like a dictator.”

A warden. He was acting like a warden of a penitentiary, or at least that was how she was making him feel. He thought about this for a second. The warden, the Walkie-Talkie, it was all the same, and yet different. Now he was the Warden, his wife was the guard, and his son… the haberdasher himself: A wolf in sheep’s clothing (very well-made sheep’s clothing).

  With a sigh Roger said aloud “Enough of that kind of thinking, for now.”  Roger frequently spoke audibly to himself when no one was around, a product of his lonely, wardenly existence. This unfortunate habit was the root of the entire confounded haberdasher debacle. That and his inability to ever turn the Walkie-Talkie off (“Too many infernal buttons”)  Roger leaned deeply into his pillow and decided to contemplate the next day which would hopefully include chocolate cake.

The problem with thinking was that once you start doing it, it just isn’t going to stop doing it.  The human mind is one of those wonderful things; it will do whatever it wants to do, even when the person who happens to possess the mind has told it to stop. This was happening to Roger as he tried to not think about things. His mind told him to shut up and pay attention: Roger fell into the darkness of his mind, spiraling and coiling into the oblivion that is the human memory—where memories not only were stored, but fabricated. Roger landed with a thud onto a giant chocolate cake. 

“Cake? We’re having… cake?”

“Yes Roger! We’re celebrating!”

Celebrating, Roger thought. Since when does the Warden celebrate anything? Since when has there been anything to celebrate in a prison?

“I’m sorry sir, but what exactly are we celebrating?”

“Life, of course. I figured since we can’t have a birthday party for every prisoner on their birthdays we might as well just have one big birthday celebration a year for everyone!”

“Chocolate cake. Is that chocolate mousse frosting? With almonds on the trim?”

The Warden just laughed and turned back to talk to some of the prisoners.

Roger still couldn’t wrap his mind around what was going on. He scanned the room. All of the prisoners were laughing, smiling, enjoying their cake. No one seemed suspicious of the situation. Finally he spotted the haberdasher sitting in the corner at one of the tables, alone. He walked over to sit with him, both of them cake-less and word-less, until Roger noticed that the haberdasher had a black eye and he felt obligated to say, or at least think, something.

            “I’m sorry I blackened you eye, good sir…You understand how it couldn’t be helped after the, you know, thing.” The haberdasher did not raise his head or acknowledge Roger in the slightest. “Now, don’t hold a grudge, Haberdasher. You know I had to do it. I just had to…” He trailed off. The Haberdasher still did not alter his continuous gaze at the dark green table-top. Roger’s irritation swelled inside him like rising bread, “I’m just trying to help after all” he sort of yelled accidentally.  The haberdasher raised his grizzled head, staring directly into Roger’s face with his ghostly eyes and whispered “I’m not alive and neither are you. You know that, don’t you?”

Dead people were all the same. They were dead. Most people who die have the chance to come to terms with death before the scythe nips off their heads, but some, such as Roger his Walkie-Talkie, just couldn’t put up with the whole idea of it.

            “Dead?” he asked, his eyes were open wide, trying to absorb the information, but all they could do was wander off to a very slim piece of cake, which had just been set in front of him. He took up the cake and fork and was going to eat it when—

            “Don’t!” the haberdasher said.

            “Well, why not? It’s a perfectly good piece of cake.”

            But when Roger looked back down at his “perfectly good piece of cake” it had turned into a small man holding an umbrella. The man was in a very sporty suit. He smiled up from the plate, but when he spotted the fork that nearly maimed him, his expression became very serious.

            “Hey dad,” said the man in the suit. “Do you have my Walkie-Talkie?”

Roger woke with a start.  It took him a second to focus enough to realize where he was. His son was standing over him; he must have fallen asleep on the couch.

“Roger that.”

          What if people were like books, leaning against each other and other miscellaneous objects on a shelf somewhere? There would be those people with soft covers, easy enough to get inside, but with a barrier of politeness and social-normalcy. Then of course there’s those books so thick that they not only have a hard cover, but a layer of padding covering the hard cover to make it seem softer. There would be the stoic hard cover, black, minimal wording, simple, tough, unapologetic. There would be ones with no cover, maybe never had one, only bound with rings, or maybe a soft cover that over time ripped away, or worst of all: the thick hard-cover who had it’s protection viciously torn off, all of whom show their guts to the world unable to cover them up.

            There are millions of types of book covers, all with different textures, art, font, and all covering up a different set of pages, a different pile of meaning. I believe some people are poems: multiple poems, making up a person, not necessarily the same theme, but a collection nevertheless. Some people are full of stories, facts, definitions, order, or fantasies. I guess I know people are like books, and at the same time I wish people were books. I could open the cover and read all about them and hopefully the words would help me understand their story and their essence.

Complex

I don’t know what to call it, but I feel like everyone is in love with me all the time. Mostly, when I meet a guy, especially one who I become friends with, I have a constant paranoia that he is madly in love with me and that I’m going to break his heart and ruin everything forever. What would you call that?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got. It’s not that I think I’m extremely attractive or anything, I think I’m mediocre looking. I don’t really think I have that great of a personality either; as a matter of fact, it’s rather prickly at best. None of that really matters though of course. People don’t love people because they’re perfect, they love them because they’re what they wish they were or because they don’t give them what they want. That’s why everyone in the world just wants the person who treats them like they’re dirt because they want to figure them out, change them, fix them, they want the challenge, they want to prove they’re tough enough to deal with them. Weak people say, “I love him/her” what they really mean is “They’re tough, if I can handle them then I’m tough too.” It’s just not true; we can’t all be strong. I was born this way. I was born without whatever it is in your brain that makes you upset when the cute boy in class doesn’t like you or when the popular girl doesn’t like your clothes. I have some sort of handicap I guess, but honestly it’s more like a gift. I just don’t really care that much. I mean I care about starving babies in foreign countries and when my mom cries and when people die young and stuff like that but really besides that things just blow past me like the breeze.

Back to everyone being in love with me: I don’t really care about anything, I don’t lie because if people can’t handle the truth they need to learn how to, I just do what I want basically. People love that. I don’t have those moments when someone is making me feel uncomfortable or shy, I just am the way I am. So when someone meets me they are taken aback. I’m different.  It’s like everyone is a rock collector and I’m the cool one with the crystals inside. Nobody wants Samantha the girl in your Physics class who studies and gets B+’s on every test, drinks on the weekends, and likes to listen to folk music because no matter how exciting she thinks she is or unique she thinks her music taste is the truth is most people are Samanthas. So when her boyfriend of a year meets a girl and breaks up with her leaving her crying with her best friend every night, she won’t see it coming because they were “special.” Then when he goes for the new girl, because he’s the male version of a Samantha, he’ll be surprised when she loses interest in a month because they were “special.” Then he will go running back to Samantha because the truth is they are both boring and are perfect for each other.

Don’t worry I would never actually tell Samantha this, or Kyle, or Julie, or Ally, or Tyler, or John. It’s not like they can change what they are. What they are isn’t bad anyway, sometimes I wish I was boring too. You might be thinking, “Man, aren’t you miserable?” or “Do people even like you?” No, I’m not miserable, I’m pretty happy. I get bored of being so not upset all the time but I get over it. And yes, people do like me obviously. Thinking everyone is in love with me isn’t entirely in my head. I actually do have to turn people down a lot. I’m also just rational enough to know that I do get a little paranoid about it sometimes.

I met this guy today. He kept looking at me and smiling. I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop writing a story. I don’t know why people do that: look at you and smile. If you aren’t interested in them they just look creepy. You have to have a lot of confidence in your charm to sit in a public place staring at someone like that. It’s stupid, even me, sitting here telling you about my giant ego would never make myself look stupid like that, no matter how little shame I have. So, we kept making eye contact and he would smile and I smirked back once or twice to keep it from being awkward. Obviously he took that as an invitation and he walked over to my table.  This is a perfect example of why I have a complex.

“Hello, my name is James.”

He stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then shook it.

“Hello.”

“I figured since I was just sitting over there getting bored of my book and you were sitting here alone I would come over and we could both sit here and not be alone anymore.”

“Well, sit down then.”  I was already bored of writing whatever I had been writing and he seemed entertaining at least.

“Is that an invitation?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t expect you to do it.”

“So is it?”

“Yes. It was an invitation.”

“But it’s not anymore?”

“No it still is. Unless you don’t want it to be then I’ll go back to writing.”

He sat down. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed by him or keep talking to him so I just waited for him to start a conversation.

“So do you go to school?”

“Yeah, I go to UCF. You?”

“I don’t go to school. Hey, I’m sure this place will close before we can have a really good conversation how about we meet up another time? You seem interesting.”

“I don’t know about that,” I laughed.

“Don’t be so vain. I just met you, I’m not asking you on a date, I just like a good conversation.”

I would be lying if I didn’t say I was a little bit shocked but I’ve met guys like this. They think if they’re mean they’ll get you interested.

“I am not vain.”

“You’re right. That’s not the right word is it?”

He took the napkin that came with my food out from under my plate used my pen that was on the table to write something down. He slid the napkin over to me and stood up.

“It was nice meeting you, I didn’t catch your name.”

He stuck out his hand again. I shook it without thinking this time.

“It was nice meeting you too.”

“See you around,” he said with a smirk.

            When I read the napkin later it just said:

“You’re arrogant.”

Wooden Booths

“This is a grubby place. Who has wooden booths anymore? I guess they were going for that rustic feel.” As soon as she sits down in a restaurant, she always lists the pros and cons, before we even get our drinks ordered. I don’t think she understands the concept of “bar and grill.”

“I’ll go order some drinks at the bar, be right back,” she says. I guess she did understand the concept.

I lean back in my seat and relax, but all of a sudden I start to catch the conversation going on in the booth behind me. 

A girl’s voice, “Have you ever thought about suicide? Not considered it, just thought about it.”

I can only imagine the person sitting across from her being taken aback by the first question then becoming even more confused after she revised it.

She continued without waiting for an answer, “I mean life is so messy, but isn’t death even messier? I mean not just literally, it’s messy for everyone around afterward.”

“At least you wouldn’t have to clean up,” the person across replies, probably attempting to lighten the mood, but maybe she didn’t hear the sarcasm, or maybe she just ignored it, but she still gives a serious response:

“Exactly, it’s complicated. You make this conscious decision to make this huge mess and create this new image of yourself, but you don’t even get to be there. Now you’re known as the person who killed himself or herself, and people talk about you in this sad way, and you forever live in infamy, or glory depending how you look at it, but you’ll never even know that you’ve become famous. Besides all of that, living is the real messy part. Suicide is an instant, life is years and years of mess and cleaning and mess again, and only a few of us become legends for living, and we all have to do it. One time I had this-“

“Hey honey, got you a beer. The bartender here is from my old town, isn’t that funny? Did you ever think that would happen?”

“No… I never thought about that.”