"Mental" Notes: My Father Lives Here

The Plasma TV
We bought the 55-inch plasma television 5 years ago as a birthday present to the house. It's a large, black television, holstered on steel girders attached to the wall. It has permanent screen-in burn reduction of several rectangles near the bottom of the screen. After a night of unadulterated video game action, the black square radiates intense heat that could make a winter night as blazingly tepid as the summer solstice.

The Bookshelf 
My parents always had difficulty understanding what kind of furniture to get. They tried to impress visitors with really extravagant-looking pieces such as the defunct bookshelf. It sprouts from the desk like Botticelli’s shell, a gleaming white curtain with multiple layers. When it was filled with books, it was the most impressive-looking thing in the living room. Today, it's completely bare. Every scratch and dent is visible and its extravagance fades with age.

The Couch
My aunt had a white couch. After a few seconds of taste, she realized the couch wasn't suitable for her so she dumped it onto us. When the couch finally came to our doorstep, my brother and I rushed towards it and jumped and bounced on it. Today, it's my father's second bed and the dog's home away from home. It's been permanently stained with artificial juices and many spilled water bottles. But for the many vacations spent at home, it was the only place where we felt comfortable. After all, the couch let our asses flatten out onto the cushions and really, what more could we ask for?

The Dog Bed
We bought it for my dog Sonic after my mom suggested he should have a designated place to sleep. It's a leopard-spotted bed only about two feet long, two feet wide. It has a leopard paw on one side, and an opened slit on the other side. Before we left the house, my mom would remember to wash the bed every week; my dad was very busy with his job and left the bed sticky and filled with many uneaten bones. It always upset me since I constantly told him that Sonic shouldn't eat bones. More so than the rest of the dilapidated living room covered with dust and beer cans, I always felt really sorry that my dog would allow himself to sleep in such filth. I finally decided to wash his bed and remove all of the bones, only to find those bones in the exact same place the following week.

The Picture
On the desk where once there was all of my useless papers/drawings, now there are only 4 pictures of my brother and I and many unopened envelopes. One of the pictures is the most hastily made picture frame anyone could ever dare to give to another person. Both of us awkwardly fill up the picture frame and both of our heads just barely touch the corners. We both hold our most triumphant objects, my high school diploma and my brother's championship trophy while wearing our most casual outfits: designer t-shirts and shorts. The picture frame is two shades of blue, divided by dotted lines that crisscross across the frame at a casual speed. The pathetic image of the two boys swallowing their self-indulgence was hastily printed out minutes after remembering we forgot to get our father a gift. Dad doesn't know that. What he knows is that his sons were considerate enough to get him a present. It probably won't last very long, but for him, it'll last a lifetime.

Last summer, I took an online creative writing course for UCLA.  One of the assignments was to select 5 objects from our home and write a short description about them. It had been a year since my parents' separation and I was living in a cramped room with my mother and brother. For inspiration, I visited my father’s house. It was the first time I felt comfortable enough to visit by myself. When I took a brief glance at the living room as it was, I knew I had the objects for my assignment. Good reception from my online classmates and professor was enough motivation to expand the assignment into a full-length prose poem. To prepare, I took many pictures of the house and set aside an entire week to push out the poem. I started working on it at my friend’s house but I could only squeeze out little blips of phrases. It became more painful to divulge further into the disgraceful state of my father’s house. Despite what I’m describing, the poem wasn’t like an autopsy report. Instead, it was like recalling only the pleasant memories during a funeral for a loved one but never overlooking the lingering disease that always existed. What you’ve just read are the remnants of the poem, as I left it a year ago. Someone once told me how difficult writing is because of how personal it becomes. Never was this more true than with this assignment.

The family dogs, Shadow (left) and Sonic (right)

"Mental" Notes: Nothing's Happened to You Yet!!

"Mental" Notes is a bimillenial column that features specific ideas I've had that can't be fleshed out into a full short story/short film/blog post. On certain posts, it's almost meant to be a public brainstorming forum. This post was originally thought up as a continuation to the Now What? series.

I wanted to continue Now What? as a way to update all of you on my life as it was happening and as it was going so far. But as I started writing this post, I found that I had a very angsty/bitchy tone to what I originally thought was insightful. In fact, even the opening I was intending to use now seems very pretentious in hindsight. Although halfway through it, I acknowledged my dismissive atttitude and made fun of it in the end, I thought the post itself was too short and that it needed more depth before I was willing to post it. As it turned out, however, during the summer I wrote this, I accomplished many, many things which make this post, for me at least, very outdated. As I looked over this again to revise as a "Mental" Note, I also realized that I misquoted Louis CK's joke about 20 year olds, and that nearly derailed the entire point of the post. I'm finally posting this, exactly as I typed it almost a year ago, so that I can finally put it to rest and focus on other things...hint, hint. Questions/comments are always welcome!  

 

I am twenty years old, a fourth of the way to the promised land. This has been the most profound statement I've made this year. I have recently completed my second year in college and am now a junior.

Becoming 20 years old should feel like a profound moment filled with truth and responsibility but that should exemplify as to how naive I am if I think becoming older is equivalent to gaining life experience.

I constantly feel imprisoned in "my" own home, and I always think that life continues going on repeat; every day my man-boobs become more developed, my eyeballs more agile due to constant stimulation from the internet.

But every time I come up with complaints about how life is going, the words of Louis CK emanate in my brain, "Nothing's happened to you!" 

Louis CK: Live at Carnegie Hall (20 Year Olds)

Yes, nothing has happened to me. In fact, at this point, life has never been so fucking pleasant. There is very little conflict between all of my family members due to my parents' separation, my brother is doing well in school, I am fulfilling my parents' dream of going to college, getting an education, getting a job, retiring comfortably, and rotting in the ground.

I am a terrible example of Louis CK's very poignant statement regarding the young, how we seem to entitle ourselves beyond everyone else and can only be satisfied with our own lives if our goals have been met. If any complaint I make can be easily solved by effort, I have no reason to complain ever again. But if my brother beats me in another Mario Party session, I will fucking kill everything. Because life sucks. Man.

Thanks for reaching the bottom. I have both a YouTube channel and a Vimeo channel. I'm also on Twitter and Tumblr. If you like being continuously annoyed by extremely obvious hints about future posts, join the RS Facebook group for updates and info on my projects. Take care, everyone!

"Mental Notes": More Unrelated Sentences.

More irrelevant words. Enjoy. 

A Bolshevik revolution that only resolved the issue of whether or not everyone involved wanted a free tea cozy in their sex dungeon.

Four men walking in the desert searching for the meaning life via some stone tablets only to realize that one of them will die from stomach cancer to which God laughs and runs away at the plight of the humans being distracted by reality once again.

Sweat pouring down his face fills up the bucket the miners use to put out the fire only to forget its a gas fire and the sodium makes the fire become a basketball hoop that collapses into the nearest day-care center.

The first film ever invented was about to people playing ping pong while the camera person screamed in pain the entire time and begged them to stop.

Edison company is driven to bankruptcy due to the amount of people pirating electric currents from the Navy Bay.

The nicest Neo-Nazi in the world gets his own talk show and convinces all of America that Nazism is at least an option to consider only to die from choking on a blunt toothpick.

A notebook filled with many references to throwing up on command which is being used by the military as a more humane form of chemical warfare.

The power plug stays plugged into the wrong socket which sucks out all of the muscles from the bodybuilder's thighs.

Arley walked down the street while everyone spat at him every second which was the happiest day of his life...until he gets married to a bear.

A dog blasting out fire from his eyeballs as all of the other dogs in heat spontaneously combust from the impracticality of the scenario.

The malfunctioning laptop jumps into the air, spins around, throws itself out of the window, twirls around into the air until it smashes and blows up a school bus full of incestuous children.

An acrid smell wafted into the air, entering into the pipes and doing something predictable.

The punished writer whips himself in the back with an infected electric coil that grabs his ribs and pulls them out, playing them like faulty bagpipes.

The talking doll with its bright and colorful teeth blind every woman that entered the bachelor's room who was being led into his room so that he could have an intense political discussion with them.

A figgy banana pudding was snuck into every fried chicken in the tri-state area, causing an abnormal amount of flow.

People wearing glasses have a certain amount of self-respect that people wearing contacts does not but they just have not figured it out yet.

A yellow jacket with red stripes and blue zippers and green slacks and purple underwear and yellow socks and a red tie and a brown shoe and a sky blue imagination.

Lights illuminated the runway, leading the plane into the magic pool full of howler monkeys that hurls oranges at the tinted windows.

Bubbles sank into the ground, dripped into the ground, dried up on the stripper's back, warmed up on the interpreter's lips, burnt up in the lawyer's briefcase, and exploded in the center of the universe.

People picked up the cross and threw it to the dumpster which became a gleaming gold dumpster that spit all of its garbage back at the people directly into the face.

The dominatrix whose night job was a teacher for the blind who instructed them on the proper ways to wail in pain while being typed up into the college student's dissertation.

The cat who wagged its tail every time a child died of terminal cancer.

The cute couple who had their tongues in their mouths at every hour in the day even when they had to take a break in the public common room with all of the virgins and homeless people and such others.

Facebook, the maitre'ds escape from reality, the plumber's descent into the plum tree, the lawyer's regression into a natal state, the entire planet's favorite form of fornication.

A couple of guys went to a bar where they saw a rabbi, a priest, and a racist. Afraid of becoming a punchline, the four guys left the bar and went home and killed themselves.

The fan floated into the air, its individual blades slicing through the floors of the basement, white gleaming sheaths of brightness cutting through the random black hole that wandered inside, emitting a golden shower of lollipops that stuck themselves onto the walls and were nearly impossible to remove when it was cleaning day.

A computer made to cater to the needs of the entire public imploded into itself due to it being a time paradox and led to the end of the universe.

A table at midnight, the glow from the outdoor lampshade lighting up the immigration papers strewn about, its individual screws loosen up and hitting the floor, the weight of the table scrounging down from the immense weight placed against it.

The romantic weights danced together in the sweaty weight builders room, rolling along the pavement the weight builder spat on after his 20 years of cardio workouts.

The trumpets blew, the waiters waited, the Davids sat at their chairs, the prostitutes hid the cash, the Jews did Jewy things, and the politically correct people decided to leave the sentence.

A bright sunny day appeared out of nowhere for the holocaust survivor, chewing on the latest supply of sympathy bread from the Russians, who cried out when the rain poured down and metaphorically melted the bread.

A cup of Raisin bran cereal is all you need to get ahead in the morning, just a couple of cupfuls poured straight down your gullet then forced in further with your trusty rusted plunger, and you are ready to conquer the day and be rejected by every woman you know who do not know how respond when they see the plunger sticking out from the back of your neck.

We're not using that one stick of butter.

A woman walks outside of her door for the first time in eight years and dies when a single dog chew of her leg and all of her hot air fly out.

A wrist popped out of the ground to the horrified sight of no one, and walked over to the next tomb and asked for my peanuts to which the shotgun-wielding monkey replied, "No," and fired, blasting away the pregnant woman's left index toe finger.

In the darkness, the windows only revealed the remnants of the few light sources still lurking about in the rat's cave.

Words landed on the page one by one, smacking the plain white paper like the most effectual gears on a bicycle, continuing the pattern without haste as the groundbreaking novel was on the verge to be made.  

The problematic issue of the company's currency confused the coffee breaker's conversation about their compensation in the controllable company picnic that coalesced many captivating complaints that all the cun...oh dear...I seem to have run out of words.

Consider this post as a mental exercise. The blog will return fairly shortly with more insightful posts. Thanks for your patience and be sure to follow the diddly-dos. 

"Mental" Notes: Unrelated Sentences.

No explanation necessary. Enjoy.

A giant turkey sandwich balanced between two prostitutes on a giant building that's been evicted by the city.

The most beautiful man in the world strolled into the dry cafe, wafting his long hair around in elliptical, bringing out the boners in every straight male around the block.

A tree scorched by injustice, caving in to the squalor of ineptitude, tasting the nastiest portions of a chicken sandwich that's vomited out by a rabid squirrel.

Wheels spinning out of control, driving away the skin of several pedestrians and only one leper.

A bear with tiny claws ripping apart the package that landed nearby.

The rape to end all rapes.

A bulging pulse that broke into the book depository, breaking every window, floor, and law of physics in one clean swipe.

Mega Man blasted away at the all the robot, tearing them apart bolt by nut, dismantling them each without every lifting a finger.

A tongue infected with disease, bulging out from the lips like someone with their pants around their legs, skipping along with their briefs sticking onto the legs, dignity sapping away from a villain's evil exercise machine.

Big old flopping penis, smacking around the legs in rhythm like the most coordinated ballet dancers, ticking along in a hypnotizing pendulum swing meant to intimidate any suitors like the horniest chrysanthemum that would pollinate it to death.

Earmuffs that powdered your nose at the same time, the gray cloud emitting its own weather patterns like the Coriolis effect, managing the movement of the hemispheres like Galileo on his day off.

A laminated license plate that would trick all but the most incompetent police people, gleaming in the suns with more irritating reflections than a bully's watch directed at the chalkboard of hell, where every teacher who molested their students would go to.

Words of pleasure that had to be defined since Caleb would get the wrong message regarding the word pleasure, always assuming that it was referring to something kinky and hot like a volcano's fishnet legs.

The wimpiest baseball glove, rotting in the dugout scene, the autographed gloves laughing at it with their rough and salty hacks with eyeballs emitting from every cough.

A smashed hood dancing like a newlywed couple at the beach, bodies vibrating at dangerous frequencies, like the most potent nitroglycerin.

Pills sitting on the shelf for days, waiting for the suicidal newspaper writer to chug down at an instant, forgetting the appropriate dosage amount, collapsing to the floor, tongue sticking out, body writhing on the floor.
A gorgeous straw hat placed gently on top of her head, each strand of her hair tying knots into every opening, a red and green ensemble that appealed to the color blind people, whistling obscenities to her at every direction she went.

"Shut up!" said Louis CK, his wonderful bald head exuberating brilliance at every turn, direction, and inconsequential stripper mall, the newest implementation by Larry Flynt to expand his horny enterprise that was surprisingly run by nothing by women since they knew what superficially appealed to men more quickly, leading very prominently to the collapse of the economy due to the amount of surplus being delivered to the stripper malls.

A video game designed by conservatives who aren't against gay marriage where players will have to sit in at every congressional meeting held at the senate so that the young people could understand how difficult it is to maintain your sanity for that many years doing the same mundane tasks and being blamed for holding America back from progress.

A barrel roll to impress other barrel rolls for centuries, the stunt others would have to look up to aspire to if they wanted to aspire to greatness.

A distracting amount of beeps and boops simulating the legendary brown note, paralyzing every driver in the tri-state area who crashes into the nearby gay bars.

A match to determine who would the intercontinental heavyweight undisputed champion, a battle of wits between a table and an plastic chair, the crowd waiting to see who would rust first since they weren't educated enough to know that plastic doesn't rust.

A man complaining about how pathetic his life was to the optimistic woman who just got a promotion in her job, the man's sweat beating from every orifice and landing into her own pores, bewildering her but at the same time calming the man down, allowing him to make the proposal, causing her to weep uncontrollably and die from a stroke.

Oh. That's a bummer, man.

This is an unofficial endorsement of 750 Words. 750words.com is a place where you can write whatever you wish like a perverted fantasy you have always wanted to fulfill in word form. The site's very simplistic yet inviting format allows you to focus on your writing without distractions until you reach 750 words. It's been a very useful tool for me, especially when I get into debilitating writer's block that prevents me from updating the site (sorry about that). If you are an aspiring writer/screenwriter/...poet, please try out 750 Words. You can start out with a free trial for 30 days, after which you only have to pay $5 a month to continue. If you do try it out, don't tell them I sent you. They'd be embarrassed.