Monday 19 March 2012

Three Towering Office Buildings

Three towering office buildings sprout limbs and uproot themselves. It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the employees of Borizon Family Research are out lunching together at the nearby mall.  Every one of them eats shit infected burgers and they puke so hard their lifeless eyeballs rocket from their skulls. This is fortunate, because their work place has found them. The food court is torn in half like cheap bread and the ineffectual workers are picked up and tossed back into their workstations.
Mitch Ronson awakes in a heavy sweat. He gets out of bed determinedly and packs a few articles of clothing into a dusty duffel bag.  Into a large suitcase, which he joking calls his “valise”, he tosses his children’s laptops, his wife’s jewelry, and his dad’s collection of rare sports cards and other autographed memorabilia.  He heads west for San Francisco and spends a few sleepless hours in a deceptively clean hotel.  In the morning he sells his Subaru to the first used car lot listed on Google, and the contents of the “valise” to a pawnshop in the Mission District.  Before hopping on Bart he withdraws all but one hundred dollars from his joint account at Bank of America.  He takes BART to SFO, nervously eyeing his duffel bag the whole way. A talkative blonde with wiry, dog-like hair sells him a one-way ticket to Amsterdam and he is gazing pensively through the murky window of a 727 plane only three hours later.
After checking into a hotel, he goes to the nearest smoke shop and smokes himself into an anxiety attack. He spends the next nine hours thinking continually about his decision. In the bathroom of a McDonalds he verifies that he is not, in fact, transparent, and that no one knows who he is or what he has done. He vows to leave in the morning for a place more alien.
He travels South-East Asia and then heads to South America with maddeningly alacrity. Enmeshed by his new life, his family rarely surfaces in his thoughts. He simply doesn’t have time for reflection because he is never bored or unhappy for long enough.  Eight years later, while walking through Bolivia, he rolls dumbly down a modest mountain and dies.

Sadly, I'm Mitch Ronson, and I've not died, so my mostly factual recollection is incomplete. Eventually, I met someone in Nicaragua that became fond of me, and I of her. We drank heavily together, laid in the sun, and laughed idiotically every night, even when fucking. After being married for 17 months, her silent presence pulled overwhelming guilt from my mental wastebasket and I was ruined. As of now, I'm back in America, living in Sausilitto and working in the city.  No matter what, I'm a fool because Kelly left for Utah 9 years ago with my kids that I'm legally forbidden from seeing and she remarried. I should have kept a journal while traveling, because I barely remember it all now, sitting in my 1 bedroom apartment, nestled in a newly built complex. Sitting down to collect my regrets has been cathartic, but I've been compelled to die since my fleshlight arrived in the mail, and I'm so tired of whimpering through my 40's.

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