WetWorks
Arcane
My name is Sonny Jones and this is the story of my demise.
All right, so this is quite the dramatic intro, but it is nevertheless the truth. Even before I found myself face to face with the unnamable, I had already decided to eat a slug sandwich. Out of some perverse sense of perfectionism or a hidden desire to make a final mark on the world (however small) I had also promised myself to finish my article, even if I found the subject matter dull.
So why would I want to kill myself you ask? The answer is not as simple as I would like it to seem, and I can’t say my answers will leave you with any respect for me. But obviously I digress, so here it is: The most pathetic reasons is the state of my personal life: I’m fucking 42 years old, I am divorced, childless, partial to drink, and while I’m a decent writer my morose and bleak attitude meshes poorly with the corporate world of magazine editing. While I can appreciate the value of life and the possibilites in the promises of tomorrow and the chance of falling in love, encountering some earth shattering revelation that puts my joie de vivre back in the old bottle, or even some great and loving religious revelation, I am also beset with what I like to call my “macrovision”.
We humans spend our lives living in our 2 room apartments, call our mothers, worry about our bills. We concerns ourself about dogfood and whether to vote for a demopublican or a republicrat. We look for deals for diet Coke, fight our nicotine addiction and like travelling to the old country on vacations. This is “microvison”, ladies and gentlemen – the act of being consumed and content with the little things in life. Now macrovision is the opposite: It is the unmitigated realization of the insignificance of the microvision when measured against the standards of the wider universe. So our Pepsi vs Coke and prop 8 becomes insignificant, as culture itself is insignificant in the wider scope of things. Facts are that we are advanced jellyfish in a vast ocean, we are ants (if you will forgive the tired metaphor) in a wide, wide forest- we are but a component and the forest will keep on living despite the absence of our particular anthill.
Yes yes, I know this is all rehashed nihilism, that we have seen it all before, but nevertheless it is there. “I’ve got it”, as they say, as if it was some kind of existential virus (which it might very well be).
However, to get back on track and not get lost in the vast indifference of greater revelations, this is why I decided to shoot myself in the mouth. My gun was lying in the glove box just itching to discharge its powdery load up my brain. I like to imagine the bullet taking the part of my brain that holds memory one millisecond at a time. First my childhood goes, and I won’t be able to remember it as I am dying, it is simply erased from history by a metal projectile. Next the adolescence and the embarrassing failures of sex and self consciousness, all the bullshit that was irrelevant anyway. Later my fucking ex-wife and her new husband and their kid goes as well. While I might not have the guts or the venom to actually shoot them for real, I can at least shoot the part of my brain they inhabit. Seriously, fuck her. Fuck them. Fuck their little fucking kid.
Sounded somewhat miserable there, huh? Fact is I think I’m handling my exit from this world like a champ; I’m calm collected and stoic like some great greek marble statue. I’ve left a will with Greg, my fat slob of a lawyer, and all I have to do is to finish the goddamn article. Or, at least that was the last thing I had to do, when my car was rammed by something large in the black night.
It slithered out of the damn darkness and it was visible in my headlights for less than a fraction of a second. Still, what I saw was fucking huge. It seemed like some kind of whitish mass that slithered, maybe poured or even pooled, across the old forest road I was driving on. It looked like it was sliding it's bulk on top of itself, (as if it was building mass?), like someone pouring half-solid cream in a bowl. My first thought was that it was some kind of dairy related accident, however absurd that might sound, but something in my brain retracted from the strange movement of the white mass, like you would instinctively recoil from a previously unseen arachnid.
It seemed to stir something primal in me and I remember panicking like some feral ape gibbering to myself in the car as something large and powerful struck the cars left door. Next thing you know reality contorted into an inferno of glass splinters, twisted metal, the smell and taste of blood and a high-pitched sound of creaking aluminum. It all coalesced to fill my entire world, my entire microvision if you will.
The night, barely illuminated by a shard of moon, was suddenly visible, and the road and its cracked asphalt was gone. Trees ascended, blood descended and a cloud of smoke rose to meet the night sky.
When everything was still, i heard myself groan even though i barely felt conscious. My hands felt wet and were red with my own blood, and I could taste the heavy scent of blood in my throat and neck. For some reason I could feel no pain even as the blood kept trickling in fat drops from some unseen gash in my skull, and something inside me started to chuckle. I think I might even had laughed sitting there in the wreck of my old Honda, broken windows, torn metal and dark woods being my only audience to act of mania. Perhaps it was the cynic in me but I suppose it could have been some kind of shock reaction. Guess we will never know.
I was almost smiling when I remembered the thing that had struck me, and it instantly wiped the grin off my face and put me back into a state of unnatural fear. A few thoughts of rationality came back to me, but with them came an intense pain in my brain and, strangely, in my eyes. I could smell a mixture of engine smoke and blood, and the mixture seemed almost sweet in my nostrils. With painful eyes I regarded the wreck with a kind of shell-shocked disinterest while blood dripped down my face soiling my shirt, turning it pink.
Do you:
Search the car for gear.
Stop the bleeding.
Run for your life.
All right, so this is quite the dramatic intro, but it is nevertheless the truth. Even before I found myself face to face with the unnamable, I had already decided to eat a slug sandwich. Out of some perverse sense of perfectionism or a hidden desire to make a final mark on the world (however small) I had also promised myself to finish my article, even if I found the subject matter dull.
So why would I want to kill myself you ask? The answer is not as simple as I would like it to seem, and I can’t say my answers will leave you with any respect for me. But obviously I digress, so here it is: The most pathetic reasons is the state of my personal life: I’m fucking 42 years old, I am divorced, childless, partial to drink, and while I’m a decent writer my morose and bleak attitude meshes poorly with the corporate world of magazine editing. While I can appreciate the value of life and the possibilites in the promises of tomorrow and the chance of falling in love, encountering some earth shattering revelation that puts my joie de vivre back in the old bottle, or even some great and loving religious revelation, I am also beset with what I like to call my “macrovision”.
We humans spend our lives living in our 2 room apartments, call our mothers, worry about our bills. We concerns ourself about dogfood and whether to vote for a demopublican or a republicrat. We look for deals for diet Coke, fight our nicotine addiction and like travelling to the old country on vacations. This is “microvison”, ladies and gentlemen – the act of being consumed and content with the little things in life. Now macrovision is the opposite: It is the unmitigated realization of the insignificance of the microvision when measured against the standards of the wider universe. So our Pepsi vs Coke and prop 8 becomes insignificant, as culture itself is insignificant in the wider scope of things. Facts are that we are advanced jellyfish in a vast ocean, we are ants (if you will forgive the tired metaphor) in a wide, wide forest- we are but a component and the forest will keep on living despite the absence of our particular anthill.
Yes yes, I know this is all rehashed nihilism, that we have seen it all before, but nevertheless it is there. “I’ve got it”, as they say, as if it was some kind of existential virus (which it might very well be).
However, to get back on track and not get lost in the vast indifference of greater revelations, this is why I decided to shoot myself in the mouth. My gun was lying in the glove box just itching to discharge its powdery load up my brain. I like to imagine the bullet taking the part of my brain that holds memory one millisecond at a time. First my childhood goes, and I won’t be able to remember it as I am dying, it is simply erased from history by a metal projectile. Next the adolescence and the embarrassing failures of sex and self consciousness, all the bullshit that was irrelevant anyway. Later my fucking ex-wife and her new husband and their kid goes as well. While I might not have the guts or the venom to actually shoot them for real, I can at least shoot the part of my brain they inhabit. Seriously, fuck her. Fuck them. Fuck their little fucking kid.
Sounded somewhat miserable there, huh? Fact is I think I’m handling my exit from this world like a champ; I’m calm collected and stoic like some great greek marble statue. I’ve left a will with Greg, my fat slob of a lawyer, and all I have to do is to finish the goddamn article. Or, at least that was the last thing I had to do, when my car was rammed by something large in the black night.
It slithered out of the damn darkness and it was visible in my headlights for less than a fraction of a second. Still, what I saw was fucking huge. It seemed like some kind of whitish mass that slithered, maybe poured or even pooled, across the old forest road I was driving on. It looked like it was sliding it's bulk on top of itself, (as if it was building mass?), like someone pouring half-solid cream in a bowl. My first thought was that it was some kind of dairy related accident, however absurd that might sound, but something in my brain retracted from the strange movement of the white mass, like you would instinctively recoil from a previously unseen arachnid.
It seemed to stir something primal in me and I remember panicking like some feral ape gibbering to myself in the car as something large and powerful struck the cars left door. Next thing you know reality contorted into an inferno of glass splinters, twisted metal, the smell and taste of blood and a high-pitched sound of creaking aluminum. It all coalesced to fill my entire world, my entire microvision if you will.
The night, barely illuminated by a shard of moon, was suddenly visible, and the road and its cracked asphalt was gone. Trees ascended, blood descended and a cloud of smoke rose to meet the night sky.
When everything was still, i heard myself groan even though i barely felt conscious. My hands felt wet and were red with my own blood, and I could taste the heavy scent of blood in my throat and neck. For some reason I could feel no pain even as the blood kept trickling in fat drops from some unseen gash in my skull, and something inside me started to chuckle. I think I might even had laughed sitting there in the wreck of my old Honda, broken windows, torn metal and dark woods being my only audience to act of mania. Perhaps it was the cynic in me but I suppose it could have been some kind of shock reaction. Guess we will never know.
I was almost smiling when I remembered the thing that had struck me, and it instantly wiped the grin off my face and put me back into a state of unnatural fear. A few thoughts of rationality came back to me, but with them came an intense pain in my brain and, strangely, in my eyes. I could smell a mixture of engine smoke and blood, and the mixture seemed almost sweet in my nostrils. With painful eyes I regarded the wreck with a kind of shell-shocked disinterest while blood dripped down my face soiling my shirt, turning it pink.
Do you:
Search the car for gear.
Stop the bleeding.
Run for your life.
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