Anger in America

Hate is a drug, and Americans like their drugs.

Pushers line the airwaves of various television and radio talk shows calling out to passersby for a free sample of vitriol and bile. They start you out with the tame stuff such as a visit by former politicians pushing their biographies and getting in digs about how no one really understands how bad the other party is. Then it moves on to the daily soundtokes of anger that spew from candidates or politicians on a daily basis in Washington,

But hey, it's OK. You can handle it. Then before you know it you're mainlining O'Reily and rubbing your gums with Madow residue. Oh, you're hooked now.

That's when you can't get enough hate, so you branch out and start watching anything you can use to get your dander up. You'll find yourself watching Hoarders just so you can look down on someone. You laugh with evil glee at Toddlers and Tiaras because you need to feel the hate of being superior to those awful parents and their messed up children.

Soon, the caring person you used to be is a burned out shell of hate and anger towards everyone around you. You are a wasted thing with red-rimmed eyes from the high blood pressure.

The real war in this country should be the war on hate. We spend so much of our time hating people, situations and supposed problems that it paralyzes us. More than anything, what's wrong in this country is that we spend our time finding new things to hate rather than fixing our problems. Hate ruins you when it gets into your soul. You become this purveyor of anger, infecting others with your hate.

Hate ruins love. I had a friend once who loved, just loved, the Star Wars franchise. When the new movies came out, he took each one of those movies and turned them inside out and upside down until he found something to hate about each and every scene and character. He still calls himself a fan, but in reality he has taken the films and embedded them with hate and loathing. This person does the same thing with friends, picking at them until he can't stand them anymore.

I find myself stuttering and stumbling out my Rodney King-like plea to stop hating. It sounds simplistic, but really, "Can't we all just get along?" 

Dance of the Masks preview

Dance of the Masks
By Kevin Lindsey

Mist. It always starts with mist. The world is fuzzy at the edges with the wet vapor.

Gossamer tendrils lick across the surface of the lake as he looks through the branches of a bush. It's fat green leaves brush his face as he pokes his head through a thin patch hoping to catch a glimpse of her. No word, no sound, he must be as quiet as the smoky wisps at the water's edge.

She stands alone in the water. Always the same she. Dark skin beads with water and her long chestnut hair clings to her wet body. The dripping shift she wears has turned translucent, and he can clearly see her large brown nipples standing erect against the fabric. The curve of her hips called to him. She turns her head and her dark green eyes star straight into the bush where he is hiding and he knows that the she can see him. The eyes pierce him, stir him with a small warm rush.

That's all there is to the dream. The dream never changes. He never changes. Qarl is 12 in the dream, thin as a reed, all arms and legs with an unruly mop of black hair. He is wearing nothing more than a breachclout. Yet he doesn't feel naked. He feels right.

Was it a truly a dream or a memory? Qarl doesn't know anymore. The fires of the masters had purged his memories and made him one with his masked brothers. That's what the priests of Jah'l told him and it was true. Besides his name, he did not remember anything about his life before the dance. 

The Edate scene

OK, I'll admit to this: When the dating scene runs dry and there's no real prospects on the horizon, I occasionally give Internet dating services a whirl.

I figure, if nothing else it opens you up to meeting some new people from other walks of life. I don't do it a lot or for any protracted length of time. Usually I'll give it a couple months every few years just to shake things up.

Honestly, I've generally end up with a couple dates out of the experience. Not great, but not a total waste either. Turns out I'm not exactly a super chick magnet, but I am just odd enough to get a little attention.

The women I've met from online dating sites are generally very nice people. No real magic or sparks, but then how often is that really the case? I've even kept a couple of them on as friends. I even went to the wedding of one -- as a guest. There have been very few no ways who made it through to an actual date. I can usually weed out the wackos.

I bring all this up because I recently gave eHarmony a try. And after going through the little test they give you, it's kind of obvious how it works. 1. They are really gauging how cranky you are and are looking for people who are either similarly cranky or willing to put up with your crankiness. 2. They really ratchet down the age range to within a few years of your age, but not usually above. At least, that's what they do with men.

I think that accounts for pretty much all of the success stories that they claim. You are obviously going to have more in common with someone closer to your own age and crankability.

Then they really limit the choices so you actually have to read the profile instead of just going, yup, nope, yup, nope based on photos alone.

Having said that, there's still a certain amount of looking at the photos and going yup and nope. So, I just kind of let my profile sit a week to let it marinate with the matches. I looked at some of the ones they said were my best matches and I went "Looks pretty much the same as other sites." I only really went absolutely no on one person and invariably that's the one who sent me something. I'll be nice and reply in kind and if she's a good person I'll talk to her, but I won't get her hopes up.

That's the edating life. 

Preview

A few pages from The Lonely Zombie. I have a backlog of stories to finish and post. This is the first one. Stay tuned for it.

The Lonely Zombie

By Kevin Lindsey

“Oh honey, you should have seen this guy at the bar. He was all rubbing up against me and trying to talk me into going home with him. and I wouldn’t give him shit,” Glenda purred into the phone, talking to Wendi in accounting.

As she spoke one of her  perfectly manicured hands with their glitter-speckled nails reached out to shuffle the papers on her desk  to make it look like she was actually working.

“Oh, yeah, I made him buy me drinks,” Glenda  laughed. “That’s the minimum you have to pay just to talk to me.”

She tossed her raven-colored hair from one side to the other and saw something she definitely didn’t like over the top of her cubicle. “Shit, I gotta go,” she said hanging up the phone with a quick slam.

Walking her way was her boss. He had that set, focused look on his face that accentuated his double chin. He obviously had actual work in mind for her.

Without a word he strode into her cubicle and dumped the paperwork on her desk and quickly left.

Glenda looked down and saw why he wasn’t going to chat her up like he did last night at the bar == she had to run this down to shipping.

“FUUUUUUU” she said softly to the cubicle walls and reached into her desk drawer for her air freshener.

Placing the little pine tree on a string around her neck like a talisman, she got up and grabbed the paperwork.

The massive freight elevator door slammed down and the lift lurched into life, descending down into the bowels of Millhouse Paper Co. With a thud and a shudder it came to a stop at the basement floor where the shipping department was.

First the outer doors went up and then the inside metal grating flew up with a grating noise. Glenda looked out at the long corridor in front of her and she thought that she could already smell it.

The faded yellow paint of the hallway seemed greasy with years of neglect and maybe, in her mind, putrefaction. She stepped out onto the curling linoleum floor and her footsteps echoed out ahead of her.

She clutched the shipping orders close to her breasts and pulled the air freshener to her face and took a big whiff.  She jumped a little when the elevator doors closed with a grinding thud of finality behind her. As they did one of the overhead fluorescent lights that bathed the corridor with unflatteringly white light began to flicker.

“Oh great, I’m in a fucking horror film,” she whispered out loud as she headed towards the end of the hallway.

At the end of that hallway was a door with a shelf on it. It wasn’t a scary door; it was a wood door. The paint was peeling a little around the hinges and there was one more interesting thing about it – it was split in half so the upper part opened independently of the bottom half. On the backside of the door, which appeared to be the front side, since it was open, was a large sign that read “Shipping Department”.

The counter showed obvious signs of wear, but not badly so. On it were two large stamps sitting on ink pads and two wire baskets marked “in” and “out”. There was also a small bell.

Yet, as Glenda slowly approached the mostly normal door, her dread increased. She began holding out the air freshener in front of her, somehow hoping that it’s magical freshening powers could stop what was going to happen. She was sure she could smell it now. Rotten pork. That was the smell her brain told her she should expect. Her morning eggs threatened to make a return visit to her mouth, but she held it down.

It felt like time had slowed, but in truth she was just walking really slow. She reached the door just as her fear reached fever pitch. A little pee escaped her bladder’s control. She didn’t notice.

She placed the paperwork on the counter and her hand reached out to ring the bell when it happened.

A ghastly ghoul popped up from the other side of the door. Glenda screamed a little. It was like a whispered scream. She was so frightened that her vocal cords had mostly locked up.

The man-like thing was tall and very pale. The skin around its eyes was black and slightly sunken, making it look like a skull. The lips thin and colorless stretched tight over its massive teeth.

It grabbed the paperwork and with the devil’s speed grabbed the top sheets and stamped them with one stamp, then it stamped the bottom sheets with the other stamp and shoved them at Glenda.

Her startled, frightened face just looked at the skeletal hands with their ragged nails. It shoved the papers closer and she recoiled. It looked deep into her sparkling dark eyes with its slightly milky green ones and the colorless lips parted as it grimaced at her.

The teeth were large, brown and irregular. Some were jagged where they had broken. A little bit of spit began to drool down the right side of the mouth and the thing grunted at her.

Her mind began to work again and she grabbed the paperwork being offered by the dead thing.

She said a fear-filled “Thhhhhankyou,” and ran away back down the hallway. The entire ride back up to the first floor she dry heaved.

Brian the zombie stood at the counter and watched her run. He thought his smile wasn’t all that effective; he would have to work on his people skills.

Memory loss was one of the biggest problems for zombies. Sure being an animated corpse with a hankering for brains was a real bitch, but with the right training, drugs and a steady supply of animal brains it was manageable.

The biggest problem was recovering  all of the mental abilities you had when you were living. You see dying involves a certain amount of brain damage.

Brian remembered how to speak, he just couldn’t quite find the right pathway in his brain to link up the speech centers of the brain to the mouth. Brian wasn’t his real name, it was just something people called him because the only thing he could say clearly right now was “Braiiiiinnnnss.” Brian guessed that they thought it was funny to twist around brain into brian and use it as his name.

He wondered if he was that cruel to zombies when he was alive. Probably, he thought. It sounded right in his head.

Speech would come in time and with hard work, Zombie Jesus willing, he thought to himself as he sat back down at his desk in the shipping and receiving department.

At the foot of the wall

I am impotent in the face of the world
Friends, family innocents and myself are subject to the whims of fate, sickness and the evil of other men.
Some turn to religion. Fine
Some turn to drugs. Fine if you want to make things worse.
I stand at the foot of the vast wall of the world, made from my own fears and anxieties. Made from those things I have no control over that weigh me down.
What I strive to find is a way past the wall.
A way to see the truth. That the world doesn't matter. Sickness doesn't matter. Pain doesn't matter. Evil doesn't matter. Good doesn't matter. All of these things are my perception of the world. All that matters is the now. All that matters is  how I perceive it all.
If the wall has weight, it is because I believe it has weight. If there seems to be no door it is because I think there is no door.
Yes, I am impotent in the face of the world. But that's just my perception.
Building a door is my goal.

What would be nice

You know what would be nice?
If one single person believed in me. That's all I'm asking for and it seems to be too much.
And yes, I believe in myself. But we all need other people to believe in us too.

Early morning annoying phone call

As a prelude, I'm notorious for not answering my phone unless I know the phone number.

7:15 a.m. Phone rings. (Riders on the Storm). I wake up, look at the number, don't recognize it. Ignore.
7:18 a.m. Text message from same number pops up on phone. "Hey, Kev. How's it going?"
(Crap, it's early for me. Who is this?)
Me: "Fine. Who is this?"
Unknown texter: "It's Xxxx. I changed my number a few months ago. I thought I gave it to you.
Me: Ah, Xxxx, I guess I forgot to write it down. (Nope. You didn't give me your number)
Xxxx: So, anyway. What's going on with you? I just wanted to check in with you.
Me: (Bullshit. You want something. Just tell me what you want.) Things are fine.
Xxxx: How's work? How's life?
Me: Busy and busier. (Works been a living nightmare for years as we cut, cut and cut. It's not like it's getting better) Everything else is going along pretty good. (Mostly true, now, let's cut to the chase) So, how are you?
Xxxx: Well, things are great. I just started doing this new thing and I was hoping ... (Me: Here it comes. Lay it on me. How can I be of limited use to you today?)
Long conversation ensues on how he's got a new direction and business and wants my advice and if I felt like it I could help him get started with contacts.
Of course this is a guy I never hear from unless he needs something, and he thinks I can help him. Otherwise he probably wouldn't take my calls.
8 a.m. Texting ends with me trying to give the least help I can and still be polite.
Ugh. Thanks for waking me up early and picking my brain for your profit while giving me nothing in return. Now, I'm up for the day.