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[LMNO]

Day 10-11:

As cliché and tortured as the concept is, my wife and I like to go out on "date nights".  We used the term as a joke to begin with, but that's what it is, at the core.  We make an effort, at least once a week, to put things aside and go out to dinner, maybe a movie, maybe dancing.  As long as it's different that how the week usually proceeds, then it suits its purpose. 

For me, the whole point of this scheduled spontaneity is a simple one: I refuse to take her for granted.  It may be that I sometimes over-learn my lessons, but I have fucked up far too many relationships in my past due to a very simple reason.  I assumed that because of the fact that I was spending time with someone, this was adequate proof that I cared about them.  Turns out, it doesn't really work that way.  This may come as a shocking surprise, but people like it when you treat them as someone special, and they appreciate explicit actions and statements to that end. 

And as it turns out, this creates a feedback loop.  Just like those damn affirmations, if you are constantly in the habit of telling and showing someone that you care for them, you end up caring for them a lot more that you would otherwise.  Of course, it's not a panacea.  If something is broken, or if one person makes the other person miserable, it won't matter how often they say, "I love you."  Effort has to be made from both sides.  And just because you've gotten married doesn't mean you can stop making that effort.  On the contrary, sometimes it means that you have to try harder.  If it seems easier, that's just because you've found someone who doesn't make it a chore.

My wife and I are foodies, so we like going to new places to eat.  Luckily, our city has gone through a culinary resurgence over the past decade or so, and the once dominant Steakhouse-and-Pub dinosaurs have been challenged by smaller, quicker, and more creatively elegant restaurants.  The one we chose this time was nestled on the corner of a well-to-do neighborhood, only walking distance from my office.  It only had about twelve tables, owing to a large private dining room in back that was reservation only, and was often booked weeks in advance. 

Even though we thought we had gotten there early, it was already quite full of well-heeled Brahmins with pinched faces and fur wraps.  Such were the occasional hazards of eating in the city.  While we knew our jobs put us in a comfortable financial situation, these people were far out of our league.  Diamond pendant necklaces gleamed in the candlelight, and the errant sip of wine dripped onto Armani suits.  Sharp, judgmental eyes looked us up and down, classifying and labeling us as part of the ambitions and overreaching middle class, and were summarily dismissed from their minds.  The wait staff seemed to pick up on this, and we were shown to a small table that was situated between the kitchen and the large doors leading to the private dining room, which had already been seated if the raucous laughter and bellowed conversations on the other side were any indication.

I know that tables like these are often considered low on the status totem pole, but I don't mind, because it often means I can see into the kitchen, and if the place is as good as its reputation, the chef shouldn't care which table he's creating the meal for.  And boy, the chef didn't.  The restaurant had a modified tapas concept, and the small plates that came out of the kitchen were amazing in both taste and technique.  We kept trying to see into the kitchen, to make out what the chef was doing; not for nothing, we watch the Food Network for the same reason, to try to pick up/steal new ideas and skills that we can later use at home.  I didn't have much luck, however. The tables were too low to see over the counter and onto the grills and butcher blocks.  All we could see were the faces and the heads of the sous chefs as the prepped and constructed the meals.  But my seat was facing the doors into the private dining room, which occasionally swung open as servers came and went.

The table in there was fairly large.  It could sit about twelve, though there were only four seated around it tonight, two men and two women.  The men were stocky, portly, fat... Or at least, they acted that way.  The glimpses I got showed faces of gluttony, not just for food, but for all corporal wants and needs.  The women had the tight, hard, hateful faces that only occur through forced denial and redirected ambitions.  While they were all laughing and carrying on, as the door swung open and closed like a prehistorically slow camera shutter, their laughter never reached their eyes, pupils wide and darkly gleaming in the dim light.  There was a roast of some kind in the middle of the table, with a large carving knife jutting from it.  I couldn't tear my eyes from the short vignettes that developed before me, just a short distance away in that room.

Their mouths were shiny with grease and lipstick, their jaws chewing rhythmically, never letting up their mechanical grinding even as they laughed, harangued, or bloviated their way through the meal.  Several bottles of wine were scattered along the table, and the glasses never fell below the halfway mark.  I saw one of the men holding the carving knife, and stabbing the air with it, apparently trying to drive some conclusion home, before plunging it back into the roast, hacking off another piece.

I saw the woman to his right ... cackling, that was the only word for it, her artfully penciled eyebrows in a cruel frown, lifting her glass as a bit of punctuation, as she let her tongue slide slowly from her mouth.  It looked sharp, and was surprisingly long as it dipped into her wine glass, and then retracted slightly.  The door closed again before I could confirm what I just saw.  I glanced around at the other tables, suddenly unsure about the choice of restaurant we had made.  The servers seemed to be oblivious to all that was going on in there, and kept moving in and out of the room, bringing water, more wine, and generally acting like the exemplary staff they were trained to be.  The door opened again, and one of the men, mouth open with a tongue several feet long, was lapping at his plate.  The other woman was grinning and leaned forward, her tongue springing from her mouth and stabbing into the roast, tearing off a chunk and wrapping around it like a tentacle to draw back into her mouth.

This was apparently a signal, and the men attacked the meat with their hands and tongues, ripping it to pieces and shoving it into their mouths.  As the door swung closed again, I saw one of the men turn towards the woman on his right and lash his tongue around her neck.  She uttered a choked shriek and clawed at his face with one hand, grabbing the carving knife with the other.  Grabbing the check off the table, I helped my wife into her coat, and told her I'd pay up and meet her outside.  I counted off a fistful of twenties and glanced once more through the doors.  The room was a mess.  One of the men had climbed onto the table and was crouched there, lapping at the remainder of his plate.  One of the women was lying on the floor, her head twisted at an odd angle to her body, and the other woman was straddling the other man, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with the knife.  Then the door slowly swung closed again.  I walked quickly to the exit, and we took a cab home.  As we sat on the worn leather seats, I reached for my wife's hand, and gave her a soft kiss on her cheek.  We rode the rest of the way in silence.

[Doktor Howl]

LMNO, I would like for your 30 days to go into The Audio Book of the Dead, as an independent chapter.

[LMNO]

Hopefully, I won't get eaten by ZALGO before the 30 days are up.

[Doktor Howl]

Hopefully, I won't get eaten by ZALGO before the 30 days are up.

No worries.  We'll use what we have, and hire Sarah Palin's ghost writer to do the rest.

We ARE, after all, professionals.

[Jasper]

That was fucking scary.

Have you considered writing horror?

[LMNO]

Day 12:

It's been raining a lot.  I mean, a lot.  Ever since Saturday.  It hasn't been anything gentle, either.  No soft spring showers to usher in a new season.  No flowerbuds poking their heads out of the ground.  Just a relentless, driving, cold rain.  The kind of rain that blows sideways, so when you step outside icy needles jab into your face and fuck up your umbrella.

Not much to do on days like that.  Reheat some leftovers, try to light a fire, and hide under your blankets.  There's something malevolent, something insistent, about weather like that.  It's offensive and rude to hear the hammering of raindrops on the window, but the insult is delivered by something so extraordinarily big, you can't do anything except mope, and pout.  Weather like this just isn't fair.  It's worse than impersonal.  The rain is out to get you.

If you find yourself walking through rain like this, your mind tends to wander.  To escape the constant cold, the drops like cold nails through your clothes, and the puddles that creep into your shoes, you start to think of anything other than what you're experiencing right now.  I usually think about whatever music project I'm working on at the moment.  I don't get as much time in front of the computer as I used to, what with my semi-voluntary work week and my entirely voluntary marriage, so I've found myself working things out in my head before I even sit down at my desk.

Perhaps a point of clarification here:  I know I've chosen to work a desk job for a living, and that it is a choice.  We've gone over this before, the choices and sacrifices to make, and I stand by my choice of economic stability over 100% artistic freedom to starve.  But I could leave.  I've proven from my personal history that I could live without the house and the organic whole grains and all that, so long as I was able to make music.  At the same time I made the choice, however, I'm also forced to play by the rules that get me that stability; and that requires a six o'clock AM alarm and a forty-hour week, which I would change, if I could.  But I can't, so... semi-voluntary. 

My marriage, on the other hand, is entirely voluntary.  I made the choice to spend the rest of my life with her, and for us that means mingling our lives.  That also means you don't get to live an entirely individual life anymore.  You need to make time for each other.  Sometimes, that means not being in front of the computer for six hours, playing around with level differences of only one or two decibels.  And that's entirely voluntary.  So I think about what needs to be done ahead of time.  I'm no Beethoven though.  What I come up with while walking down the rainswept sidewalk is rarely what ends up happening in the studio.  But like every creative project, those ideas usually offer up a stepping stone, useful (if for nothing else) to show what it shouldn't sound like.

So, that's what I was doing while walking in that shitty, awful weather.  I was thinking about delay pedals, and putting distortion effects on reverb pedals, and whether I should compress before or after the EQ, and what kind of room the drums should be in, and I went ankle deep in a half-frozen puddle.  Fuck.  The road was next to the river leading down to the local pond – more of a stream really, except the weather had swollen it to the point it had broken the banks and made a run for the street.  At which point, it successfully made it inside my shoe.  I cursed again to myself, and headed for higher ground.  Specifically, the bridge that arced over one corner of the pond, and led back to my condo.  I kept my head down against the wind, which is why I didn't see her until I was already on my way up.

She looked like she was in college:  At least, the grey hooded sweatshirt with Greek letters emblazoned on it, khaki shorts and flip-flops made that impression.  That, and the fact she was wearing shorts and flip-flops in this weather were a good hint, too.  Her hair was blonde, pulled back into a ponytail, and was absolutely soaked.  She was standing at the apex of the bridge, facing out towards the pond.  Not surprisingly, she was shivering.  I kept walking up the bridge, wondering why she'd be out here on a day like this, dressed like that.  I guess she must have caught my movement from the corner of her eye, because she turned her head to look at me, expressionless, then turned her head back and leapt from the edge of the bridge into the pond.

It was a graceful jump, her arms extended, and her body carved a smooth parabola in the rain.  She pointed her toes, and one flip-flop came off, twisting and fluttering in the wind.  As she descended, I looked down into the pond, thinking she might not have judged this right, but it looked like she was heading directly into the deepest part of this part of the pond.  Which is when I saw the water surge, break apart, and the mouth opened up.  It was almost circular, two giant arcs, ten feet in diameter at least.  A stubby, blood red tongue twitched in that dark hole, framed by razor-sharp teeth.  They weren't like a shark, triangular and sawtoothed, they were like needles.  Huge, monstrous needles like giants would use to stick under the fingernails of other giants to get them to reveal state secrets. 

The water in the pond was dark, and the rain made it impossible to see what was below the surface.  All I could see was that mouth, and the descent of the girl, sweatshirt flapping, one bare foot, face calm and serene as she fell down towards that gaping maw. 

Snap.  Faster than my eyes could track it, the jaws closed on her falling body, the wicked teeth piercing her stomach and her back, slicing her in two.  A dark gout of blood splashed into the pond, diffusing into the black waters.  A twitch, and the other half of her had disappeared.  Then the mouth, and whatever was behind it, slipped back into the depths of the pond.  The rain continued to beat down on my head, getting under my collar, chilling the sweat that had broken out on my skin.  I really wished I was home right now.

[bds]

Holy fuck, the last two were amazing. Actually, fuck it, they're all amazing.

[Doktor Howl]

I want to live in LMNO's world. 

[East Coast Hustle]

hot damn. I just read this thread for the first time and this is some of the best writing I've seen on here in ages.

[LMNO]

Day 13:

On the train again.  The rains have stopped, but the effects remain.  There was some pretty major flooding, which of course affected the already weak infrastructure of the public transportation system.  It's hard to believe that something this crappy could still be losing money, even with the constant fare hikes. 

I had managed to get a seat this time, and was trying to pass the time with a book.  I couldn't concentrate, though.  My eyes kept sliding off the page, seeming to prefer the flickering through the window of the tunnel lights as the train barreled past them.  I closed them briefly, eager to get home and get dinner started.  Call it another kind of escapism, if you want.  It sure makes a good excuse not to go outside your house when you choose to spend a few hours preparing food.  You can get as complex as you want with the techniques and ingredients, and really stretch it out.  And once you start down the road of ingredients, any considerations of the outside world just fall away.

Sometimes, I just get lost in the knifework.  Slicing, chopping, breaking down the food, all the prep work... well, I often think that's the most important part of cooking.  The rest is just adding heat.  When I have a vegetable, or piece of protein in one hand, and a knife in the other, I just zone in and shut out everything else, making my cuts, concentrating on the motion of the knife, and how the food is reacting to it.  I was almost upset the day my wife picked up the same obsession and started doing some of the prep work along with me.  But since I usually get home before she does, I get plenty of chances.  Looked like today wasn't going to be one of those days, though. 

The train had stopped just as it emerged from a tunnel after leaving the previous station.  I could hear the faint hiss of the airbrakes, and then the distorted speakers crackled to life and a fairly bored voice announced, "Zzzzzdue to a sssssssssshhhhunknown problem on the trackzzzzzz we will be zzzzztanding bysssssshhhhhh momentarily."  If you have ever been on these trains, you know that "momentarily" is a code for "really long".  I sighed, and tried to go back to the book (if you must know, it was Guns, Germs, and Steel).

A few minutes went by, and the people on the train started to get restless.  The cell phones came out, and the overly loud conversations started:  Melodramatic bitching to invisible, imaginary friends on the other end of the line about how unfair and infuriating these trains are.  Sure they're annoying, but you pretty much knew that when you got on, right?  I complain about it, obviously, but the entire train doesn't need to hear histrionics about the whole thing.  You use the subway, you plan for delays and fuckups.  The voices and attention whore antics were so overwhelming, I almost didn't hear the explosions at first.  They were faint, I suppose, but then again they had to compete with the walls of the train, and then the yammering of the people inside it.  But they were there.  With each concussion, I could feel it through the train's floor and into my feet, and there was no mistaking the sound.  Then, a faint crackling of gunfire.  As I was puzzling this out, the speaker overhead blared out, "Zzzzzzattention passengerzz: There issssshhh an obzzzztrucssshion on the trackzzzzahead.  Pleazzzzsssssstandby as we correctzsh the problem."

I wasn't sure if the other passengers even noticed that there seemed to be a warzone happening just ahead of the train.  If they did, they weren't showing it.  They just kept blabbing away into their phones.  Eventually, the battle sounds outside of the train stopped.  It must have been about fifteen minutes after they ended that the train lurched forward again, to the exasperated relief of the passengers.  We were only moving about five miles an hour, but we were at least moving.

I turned in my seat to look out the window, looking for any evidence of what I had been hearing.  Crews of men in tough-looking coats and heavy boots were manipulating a water hose that was aimed at a large, smoking pile.  As the train drew closer, I saw a human arm flop out of the pile, blackened and charred.  One of the men, holding an axe, stepped up to the pile and with a determined swing, lopped the arm off, and kicked it back onto the heap.  Water streamed along the ground from the pile, blackened and viscous.  I stared as I saw things moving at the base of the bodies, small things, like worms, or slugs, but about a foot and a half long, and maybe an inch or two thick. 

I looked around the train, but no one was looking outside.  They were absorbed in their cellphone conversations, iPods, newspapers, and the primary-colored ads plastered on the walls of the subway car.  Nothing was more important in their lives except them, and their petty inconveniences, their tired and worthless complaints.  To them, the solipsistic trials and tribulations that they were forced to endure were paramount, and nothing could possibly be more interesting to anyone else in the world than what their next Facebook status update would be.  I turned back to the window at what was going on outside.

There was a brief commotion from the crew as more of the things emerged from the bottom of the pile, squirming as if unused to the daylight.  The train passed by not twenty feet from the mass of corpses, and I could see that one end of the slug things ended with teeth, like a lamprey.  The crew dropped the hose as the slug things began to squirm in a particular direction; mainly, towards the crew of men.  The man with the ax suddenly dropped to the ground – while he was chopping off that arm, one of those things must have attached itself to him, because it was now wrapped around his leg, above his boot, the mouth end attached firmly to his thigh.  As the train continued on, leaving them behind, I saw more of the slug creatures slithering over to him.  The speaker overhead squawked, "ZZZthank you for your patientzzzz.  Nexsssht shhhhtop, City Centerzzzzz."

[Doktor Howl]

This has become the high point of my morning.

[Freeky]

 

That was awesome in a "horrible oh god why, why, I can't get the imagery out of my head" kind of way.

[Nast]

LMNO, I must say, I enjoy your detailed descriptions of life's routines and the mental states that go along with them. It somehow elevates the mundane above the mundane, or at least to a different plane in which all sorts of horror can happen.

[Dr. Paes]

 
Moar fantastic works.
This thread wins.

[Eater of Clowns]

LMNO, I want to say I just decided to catch up with all you wrote.  I"m at work.  My bladder is about to explode from not wanting to leave and I'm needing that meal I've got in the back pretty badly by now.  Couldn't pull myself away.  Excellent stuff.