I'm a black-pilled hopeless romantic
A Short Story
ABOUT THE WRITER
Mr. Bread was born in 2002 in the salad bowl of the world. Currently, he spends his free time obsessing over arts. He has an upcoming book through Nut Hole Publishing entitled The Panifesto, and an English translation of Michel Houellbecq’s essay collection Rester vivant et autres textes, both coming soon.
I’m a black-pilled hopeless romantic. Trampled decades of memories on slight soulstone compress to stains and marks as I’m pushed into being. Cheap rubber chambers of decrepit nature house my fleeting pigs. I pulled and shoved and raised and lowered myself over strings. I’m addicted to living, watching Monk, and leaving girls on read. Wooden shields of do you believe in love at third sight. Ribbons pixie-swipe through the straw to rest upon your land. I’m in love with every barista I’ve ever met. Wheezing flesh bag of a man. Melpomene with prodding white bra straps whistles behind Plexiglas. Just a drip.
Approximately eight millennia ago, around the time of the early Holocene sea level rise, an unknown number of Holstein Friesians suffered a single-gene mutation in which its beta-casein’s gene’s position 67 had swapped its proline out for histidine. And when this new beta-casein underwent proteolytic digestion, the notorious exogenous opioid peptides known as beta-casomorphins are formed. These little neuromodulators then bind to the opioid receptors, and stomp the hopes of any neurotransmitter by changing the electrical properties of their target neurons. Of course, this is all said without taking into account that modern milk has approximately 0.03 becquerels per liter, so with this, it can only be assumed that the histidine would undergo a mutation and with that inflict even further complication in the realm of opioid peptides. No room for cream, thanks.
A bright white billboard of a tablet with an invitation for fiscal ruin toddler glances up at me. Mathematical percentages of unnecessary predetermination and over promised admiration tugs on my sleeve. In chapter and verse a set of laws for me to follow are opaquely slid between the other between. Twenty-five percent of love. Slip the paws of untouched brutality into the crevice of comfort. Post-coinage tristesse. Love has myopia and wears -2.75 glasses. I give my life to know kings. If a king is on my two-tone hat, it is merely a crown. Wallows and trees rush stage right into a spotlight. Sleep under me, it says. But your stomata.
I live with open hands, receiving, touching, cursing, discomforting, but largely receiving. And when I curse I do it with open hands but they’re behind my back. I curse the lovers who flaunt their quack-up of lust onto the bulges of the innocent. There is more to love than sex with girls and a lot more. There’s more to love than going to the coffee shop and sipping one another’s lattes. There’s courtship and daydreams and martyr complexes and visions of grandeur. There’s way too soon I love you’s that are meant wholeheartedly regardless. There're years of crying and lurking on forums and envy that you must endure before you can begin to understand even the concept of love.
Damn! A top over gesture of over the top heat cracks into the slips of my hen heart. Open handedly, my predetermination of odd little soaked beans triumphs the within seconds realized dream of amity. A lively hibernation calls me behind Washi walls. 212 degrees of purely charged defeat. And sleek cast iron and steel to balance the wobbling sincerity I’m forced to engage in with a knock on the nose. The room is empty. Empty with a minorly major exception of the situationally inherent member of the bourgeoisie controlling my needs. From each according to their something, to each according to their desires. In the traditional Fourierist dream of utopia, we are all promised a lover.
A purse of liquid can in a sense be compared to a Schrödinger’s cat. All is tasteful, scalding, bitter, slime-like, ice-cold, until the moment it is met with our precious little nerve cells. Warning signs, such as perspiration or steam, may assist in some understanding, however objects with low thermal effusivity will easily render that perception of understanding useless. Fate is obtuse. Smashed pumpkin carriages and my bay of pigs. Unmanifested autonomy will lead me from her. Here I fear the lack of nothing. A fulfillment of an unsolicited something quite unlike a petty case of lèse-majesté. Orificial speaking and whipping quips of shivering thrusts Cromwell onto me. Rejection leads to dejection and perfection is absent. An inbred deliverance of hope from the age of four. I can smell it. Taps and clicks and cliquey clicks to say hi. All I have now is pixels and you’re gone for summer. The empty room is emptier. The nothingness is now more nothing more.
A few Sarmatians and a handful of martians bask in the harmony of one another’s fellating voices. And there’s disdain. From black hair she says that there are too many hours in a day two which brown hair says there are two little hours in a day. There’s time and it hurts you and it will kill you slowly and bleed you quickly and there’s time and you love it and you hate it and it's there. It will all all happen too late too soon. But. And then I saw her. Tete to toe. Which past life’s wretched actions am I paying for? Which life will pay for me? For now, I am living for my sins. I am living for my sinful thoughts and other’s drying faces. I am living for the bow in her hair and the wiry catalog of hurt it stows. There’s space in hell for me and maybe someone else. Stray hands in use by the devil to tap keys. Lonely nails with occupying trust. A part of. My hands are not me. A flag of subtle advertisement with a matchbox of a conversation. Stolen flint and kisses on the cheek. Can I buy me a drink? A mirage of Chomsky versus Foucault. A portrait of a faceless sky. Goodbye.
There are bricks with your name on it that will be thrown at the sun. There are Spek’s Centennials that will find a way to poke you. There are coulter pines ready to drop their cones right on your pretty little head. And there is a firing squad ready to meet me in the Camelia grove. Leland Stanford created a beautiful park. Leland Stanford Jr. died on March 13, 1884 from typhoid fever. It is said that typhoid fever led to Athens’s surrender to Sparta. Jane Stanford died 21 years later from an unsolved strychnine poisoning. In S3E6 of Monk, Meredith Preminger’s husband died from a heart attack. It is later revealed that Meredith, Sharona’s creative writing professor, had stolen the premise of one of Sharona’s short stories to use as her own murder method. This method itself, Sharona notes, was taken from a real life event in the show. The plan was to lace tomato soup with carbolic acid, which would allegedly mimic symptoms of a heart attack and leave the true fact of malice completely unknown. I am confident that Adrian Monk could solve the murder of Jane Stanford. Leland Stanford created a beautiful park and a lovely rail system.
In a collection of concrete, echoes of distress ring. The mimicry of birds reminds me of my wandering soul. The first auditory bird repellent is clapping your hands and shouting at the birds. The second is to use a rock or shell or branch to strike another rock or shell or branch and create some sound that offends birds. Third would be scarecrows with chime-like rattles. The fourth form of auditory bird deterrents would have to be the Shishi-odoshi. After first being used to deter legged herbivores, it became largely popular in the Muromachi period for its aestheticism as well as its connection to the Japanese Buddhist concept of mujo. About 600 years later, somewhere in the mid 1950s, the fifth auditory bird deterrent, propane cannons, aka bird bangers, were created. On February 2, 1659, Gironima Spana was arrested for selling more poison than hair she had on her head. I wish birds had Aqua Tofana.
Detour. Detournement. Makes no sense to block off this sidewalk. Quiet. Quiet day. Quiet quiet day. Quiet park. The coarse live oak is uninteresting. But the. Dog. Squirrel, Oh look at him. But the tail. But look at him. Or her. And the man feeding him. Or her. The big yellow bag. Big and yellow. Like dog food. There are bagpipes somewhere. A shiver of something down my leg. Blue hair. And a frisbee. What is this the capitol of? The sweet scent of pine. Nice catch. They’re louder. And louder and louder. Who is it? Oh how the cute little branches of the red ironbark hang like little ornaments. And the youthful spirits dashing beneath. Ah a trio! So spread apart. And so close to the restrooms. Wait no restroom. Tip? Anyways. May I have the cross? A baron nothing. But? Hmm. The statues have no face. None that I recognize. But they do have kisses on their cheeks. The pink of her hoodie. Nothing. And the pink block. Salt. Stone. Maybe I’ll cross here.
Soulstones are ceased into a rubble of thoughts. An arid bench with nothing to support. A bench is still a bench if nobody sits on it. With this, hope can still be hope even if nobody believes in it. And Santa’s sleigh will always fly. The stab of corporate America is always there to laugh and say hi. A scooter is a scooter even when nobody rides it. Love is still love even if the feeling isn’t mutual. To walk aimlessly is to fight capitalism. What is a dekafit. I think it is a human right to park. I think it is. And the empty room is an empty sphere of open space. The empty parking garages, the empty mailbox, all overflowing with emptiness. Is a world filled with empty emptiness?
It’s all full and there’s no place to go except somewhere. Pigeonholed colonialism and dangling stars of danger. Hurt by Johnny Cash rolls off the lips of my ears. This is the street of pain and part-time lightheartedness. This is where health happens. This is where I interviewed pulls of wooden architecture and truthful facades. A man with faceless pain stood here. A painless face shall insurrect. There will be one million kisses for the enemy. Sunshine and brows stenciled on with a mark of the beast. But the distance is a cement valley of dolls. Do you remember where you were when it happened?
So much for morning skinny and parking lots. Perpetual marathons of freebased masons atop suppressed history. The girl is gone and I’m not. Everyone is a refugee. Everyone is a prostitute. Whispers of daggers shake from the tree and she’s gone again. My hands will stay open and empty. I will stay anchored to a blank submission. I wonder if there’s pain in staleness, if there is suffering in the expanse. The streets are crooked and it's mankind’s fault. It’s my fault. Every piece of decay and piece of no decay and decaying piece of nothing is my fault and will always be my fault and if it’s not, then it’s my fault then it’s not.
I don’t like streets and I don’t like cars, but I like promenades and e-bikes, but I don’t like e-scooters or normal bikes. I want to run over every California Highway Patrol officer who rides on a bike. I want to crash every car into a bridge and let it burn. I want your average office plex to mean something. There’s buried treasure under every hope you hide while hopped up on hope-pills. There’s seventeen shots with no thirty eight. There’s fucking zombies! There’s no plants, but there’s trees. I like trees and I like ivy, but I don’t like succulents. I like love and I don’t like pain, but I’m ambivalent to the presence of either. I don’t not like anything. 1 million smiles: 1 million bullets.
It’s not the words that get me. Walkman stuffed with white noise in my lap. The whistle of the throw of a football lies in my imagination. It’s the absence of words. It is nothing that gets me. It is nothing that hurts me. It is the nothing that leaves me and leaves me in a blood eagle position. A sense of awkwardness with every thought. Windows lowered to sing to you. What’d I mention to her? Hi. But she’s gone off and gotten overthrown and somehow Quintianus is involved. David Blaine turned to Mystery and I got angry with the TV. I told myself that I’m going my own way. They knocked over my beloved.
There’s no place to walk. I’m back in the coffee shop. Did I ever leave? In front of me lies The Solar Circus by Gustave Kahn with a bookmark from The Beat Museum tucked into page 13. The lighting crushes without an accent. It's a colonial glow. How can one deduce when there are too many chefs? Was I ever here? I’m standing behind somebody in line and they’re attempting to flirt with the barista. I’ve been standing for seven days and now I’m typing it all down into my notes. I’m…something.
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