The Odd-Ball

A short story about a young male writer who takes a break from writing to THINK about writing and what he's doing.

 

He was always trying so hard to be someone he already was, but that wasn't good enough, not really. He found himself to be a creature of few habits, said more than he actually did, read more than he actually wrote, took more than he actually gave, thought more than he moved. He'd sit at his desk, on the flood by his bed, with a mess of covers, and an empty room that felt more like him than all of the possessions that he'd once had in there. For now it was a couple of dressers, a desk, a makeshift TV stand out of a heart-shaped wooden table that had been his sisters, and on top of that side-table that made it all high enough. It sat in the corner of his room, with a small TV perched on top, and that was about the extent of his interest in the outside world, anymore, outside of his windows; he had two windows, one that looked over the cheap backyard which really looked out over another roof above the six-foot-tall fence, and one that looked out to the patio, but he didn't open it in the summer, because the heat often brought the smell of old sweat and dog piss, but sometimes his room did, too, when he wasn't looking, smelling, or caring, and it was on the rare occasion that he did seem to care, like when he woke up at twelve in the noon-time, went to the bathroom, and then came back into his room that might have been peaceful had it not been for the random belongings that, while interesting, made no sense to him. Slowly, slowly, he'd come to the conclusion that things had had to go, to go far away, or it would be he who would have to leave, but he did not have means to pack up and leave, and he was far too comfortable in his tiny room, at twenty, to gather up a few shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, a journal, and an old newsboy cap of his dad's, and set out to travel the country and come back with some brilliantly written novel about the great Americana, about kids in apple fields, kids walking along rivers, or kids not walking at all, lounged out on their backs and doing nothing. He figured that he'd be one of the latter, with a couple of runs in the apples fields and maybe a walk along a babbling brook, in search for some nice stone to take home and put into a non-existent collection of things he'd casually picked up in his travels.

 

There he sat at his desk, though, his walls empty, minus one clock above his bed, and a cross that hung above a sonnet, that was not of his own articulated thoughts, he'd written on the soothing baby green paint, right index finger tapping incoherently. He didn't think anything magical came out of that tapping, but it took up some time, and he thought maybe it stimulated some part of his brain for the words he was searching for. He sat at that desk a lot, searching for the right words, and sometimes he sat at that desk and just wrote things that didn't even make sense, but people sure did fawn over it, people sure did relate to the obscurity of it. They would take out of it what they always did, always would, until he started writing honest somethings, instead of empty, vacant, stolen somethings. It was at this point, this point of honesty and curiosity, that he couldn't help but think if anyone was really solely creative, if the individual had anything of importance to add to whatever he had to put down and say. What he wrote was for his sake, things he kept private and didn't show to anyone.

 

It was the other stuff that he let them see, the stories where he didn't even tell a story, where he wrote twisted sentences full of words that contradicted each other and weren't usually meant to be put together, and so that, somehow, made what he wrote more deep, apparently. He could tell a story in a traditional sense, and he had a bookshelf full of journals proving so, but people so easily ate up the things they couldn't understand, things that the mind could churn out, things that were ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous, angst for the sake of being miserable, and bad metaphors for the sake of being hailed and praised. Sometimes he laughed at the sheer game he played with them, sometimes he felt disgusted that he'd waste his time telling stories that didn't have a beginning, a middle, or an end, and that really was what story telling was, what writing novels was, what writing stories was. It wasn't about who could be dark enough in his words, was not about who could be the most dramatic. He found that his most solid stories came just from the basis of the ordinary day, even if they were boring, but who wanted to read boring? Who didn't want to write boring, though? Boring was beautiful, because it was precious, and it was normal.

 

He understood the fascination with the false sense of intelligence via words. He knew there were peers of his who would look at his work and tell him it was great, and while they weren't lying, he knew they thought it was great for its structure—for the grammar, the punctuation, the art of it all. After all, it was hard to say a piece of writing was bad—well, that was subjective, anyway—if it was well-written, and he knew so. It was so much easier, with this considered, to sit and write a story and steal ideas and styles from someone else, because nothing was original in fiction. Sometimes he would see that people, his peers, even, would steal an idea, a line, an over-all scene, a style, a dialect or conversation, and he'd wrinkle his nose and think nothing of it, unless, that was, it was a rare snippet of something that had been even more rare in those works: a moment of honesty, a few words of truth, a paragraph stating only the simplest of descriptions, stating that a curtain was blood red, and not that a curtain was blood red like the crimson tears of blood-cells that drained from his bloody wrists two weeks prior—but people loved that, loved the art of pain for entertainment's sake. Call him crazy—which he did call himself, but others thought him too sweet and cheery to even consider that a possibility, just like the hungry fools they were—but he no longer found pain to be worthy of writing about for the sake. He did not get an arousal out of reading things that were artificial, that brought his state of being to an even more morose place, so he had stopped reading, long ago, mostly, what other people had written, and started reading more of his own material, and he did like it that way. He liked that, somehow, there was another part of him that could read over his own story and still be moved, still be surprised, still be excited to read that one line where this character says that, and that character pulls at a thread from a blanket he's wrapped in, because that, he knew, was specifically human.

 

Fiction, he'd written at the top of an empty journal page, and beneath it he had nothing. He'd even put his pencil down, and now he was just left looking down at the utensils below him, asking himself where he could possibly begin, or even why he'd begin. He'd wonder who would possibly want to read his take on fiction, because, really, he wasn't sure where he stood. He did not want to write this for himself, which was precisely why he found the article writing itself in his head and in his head only. The pencil did not seem prudent, and the paper seemed too dull, and the thought of further hand-cramping just turned him off all the more, and so he stood up and walked away from the pencil, the paper, the journal he'd paid for with money that was not his own, the desk he'd inherited from a family member, and walked across the floor he hadn't had a hand in laying down, and to a simple empty chair resting against the wall under the cross and the sonnet. He pulled it away from the wall and sat it in the center of his room, bare feet not feeling a thing against the carpet other than the carpet itself—not cold like that time he'd been running around on pavement, in the spring, when it was raining, and each droplet had felt like an icicle, and not hot, like the momentum of heart-palpitating heat from the very first burst of a thousand suns exploded on the coldest of days—and that it was dull, packed down, from having been walked on too much, and he probably needed to vacuum, but he had no urge to.

 

He let his feet press down against the carpet, not worrying about his arches or what they were doing, because this wasn't a book, it was real life, and he did not need a description as to how he was sitting and how his feet looked, but he did fold his fingers together and let his wrists fall between his legs as he leaned forward, not feeling anything in particular other than relentless emptiness. It didn't really go away, and fiction usually filled that void of lack of caring, lack of friends, lack of living the kind of lives he wrote about. Bothered him before, no; it had not, but things had been getting to him, lately, as if there was some sort of wall that had come down, and he wasn't sure where to go, now, without a boundary to hide behind. He really was hiding, he knew, in some way or another, but when he was writing, he didn't mind. It was the fact that, lately, he'd been having trouble figuring out why he was writing, but he didn't have an issue with the actual process. He could look at a phone book, or a plan white piece of paper, and be inspired to write an entire novel of it of, because ideas were ideas, and they did not suddenly disappear. Inspiration was everywhere, and while he often thought most writers were selfish in that they only wrote when they were inspired, he could not blame them. They threw around terms like Writer's Block, saying they had no inspiration, that they could not write. In actually, it was that they did not want to write, didn't feel in the right mood to write; it was hardly ever that they could not write, unless their hands were broken, but he humored such terms anyway. This was a mood, he might have once figured, but it was something different. There were undoubtedly times that he didn't feel in the right mood for writing, when he felt like doing other things, but he never felt he couldn't write, and he still didn't feel that way. He wrote through those moods, usually, if he wanted to. This time, he did not want to write words. He wanted to think about them, really think about them, but found himself not thinking about them at all.

 

It was not so much words as it was letters, as how twenty-six letters could form into patterns of twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens, eights, and he supposed there were words that were very academically long, but he couldn't think of anything impressive-enough off of the top of his head, but he wasn't really trying to, anyway. He was thinking of how people tried so hard to be something through their writing, tried to be deeper, tried to get clarity, tried to appeal to emotions. He never tried to do anything, and he didn't know how people really felt when they read his things. He would get responses that would confuse him, but flatter him all the same. He didn't write for responses. He wrote, because that was what he felt best doing, writing. That was what he wanted to waste his whole life on, even if no one ever read a word. He did not sit and stew and think of a way to phrase a sentence to give it the most vivid descriptions for the most monumental reactions. He did not try to think of ways to be anything more in the writing than what he was, but he found that, often, people did, and it confused him, how people could read such things and become so emotionally overdrawn that it was pathetic—how he could read it and not feel a thing other than a typical response to something typically written in the most typical form of that typical disorder of trying too hard.

 

Even in music, now, there were differences that threw him off. In life, in general, there were times, he knew, that one day he could wake up, anyone could wake up, and something would be so incredibly different—a view on a stance, a perspective of music, a new way of looking at something—even though it hadn't been planned that way, hadn't been planned by anyone, at least on earth, to happen that way. He enjoyed the sweet creativity that came out of something new, but his downfall was always trying to get to know the source of where it came from, and he was merely always sorely disappointed sometime down the line. When things were new and fresh, it offered a sense of a new viable universe to create memories in, especially when it was music. A song on the radio, in his car, could take him back to a time he was eight, because that song had come out, and been refreshing, during the cusp of something exciting in his own life, or maybe not even anything exciting at all. But then, eventually, the magic faded, and the sources were revealed to be unoriginal, to have stolen, to have copied, to have traced, to have taken someone else's work, or their essence, and somehow thought it okay to actually incorporate so much of the material that it was barely new at all—stolen from other poets, other bands, other authors, other artists, other speakers, other painters, other sculptures—and there was some intrinsic part of his values that was disgusted by this. Things were tarnished so quickly, because nothing was solely related to one thing.

 

A musician, for example, he thought, when he noticed there were no longer any posters on his walls that might have once featured a musician he had liked for a few months, could be brilliant, until he found out that he was an awful person, made fun of a certain group of people, smoked weed and, worse, boasted about it, was a drunk, and then actually stole the entire soul out of one song to put into another. Inspiration was one thing, but to be inspired to create nothing new of your own from that inspiration was nearly criminal. He had a particular problem with this, had a particular problem with things that did not make sense, blatantly, for the sake of art, for the sake of money, for the sake of praise. He wasn't one to outwardly judge, but who didn't take a stand back, once in awhile, and ask himself what was going on with this, with that? Where'd it come from? Why was it written? Why was it drawn? Drawing was so much more pure, he'd think, and easier to be more of an individual. Writing was harder, and so was music. Drawing was infinite. Music had a limit to its melodies, albeit maybe in the billions or trillions, but it still had its limits, and writing, well... writing meant everything to him, and story-telling meant the world to him, and writing for the sake of things un-pure was the anti-universe that he was only comfortable living in; he didn't want to be around them, anymore.

 

Trivial things seemed to be mostly everything. His possessions made him sick, his friends made him roll his eyes, their obsessions and worries and stresses made him care less for them, and he really didn't understand the meaning of what it was he was living in, what it was they were all living in. He'd open his eyes, sometimes, and not see his room, not see the day; he'd see pixels, and static, and he'd truly ask himself if any of it was real, how any of it could be real, how mind-blowing it was, and how lifeless he felt to go out and not concentrate on how enormous the state of his existence was. Living for anyone else but his family was not really an option, and he wasn't sure if he was living for himself at all, rather more for the characters he had written, and those he would. It fascinated him that reality could be such a tease, that he could sit down at his desk, this object made of atoms and molecules, the same material that made him, and create a world that had no matter at all, physically. It was a happy place, a place of joy and, sometimes, there were sad happenings, but it was still beautiful there, very unlike the settings outside of the center of his green haven of peace. The only things outside that made him feel okay were the stars, but it was winter, and it was too cold to always be out looking at the stars. He thought that, if he made it to summer, he'd spend most of his time laying out in the yard, on the ground, looking up and up only, where he could not see the shingles of roofs, ugly blue tarps, and useless, wasteful stuff. He just wanted it all gone; all but his family. He wanted them to be alive, and okay, but mostly he just wanted a room—maybe one in the sky, or in a glass house, built like a water-tower, where everything was see-through, in the middle of some field, in the middle of no where, with no civilization within twenty miles, surrounded by trees and flying birds and some peace—a few pencils, a pencil sharpener, a desk, his laptop, a newspaper, every now and then, a bed, his clock, and his cross. A bathroom would be prudent, as well.

 

He knew very little about where he would be a week from that day. He did not know if he'd still be alive, but he couldn't kill himself, because that was unacceptable to him, at least that day, because he'd seen what death had done to his remaining family, but he also couldn't see himself dying as an old man, so he worried about getting groceries, one day, and being shot by some random ghetto man in a beat up old brown piece of s**t, and that wasn't unlikely, because, hey, there were a lot of fucked up, disturbed, disillusioned people out there, and he didn't want to be part of their world, either. He didn't want to be part of anyone else's world but his own. His mother would tell him that he had so much to offer the world, and his father would tell him that he was special, that he could help people, and his siblings would tell him that he was talented, that he was wasting his life, but to him, he was spending his life living every dream possible, even if it wasn't in a physical sense, but that was not how he defined his life; the physical was only one dimension of existence, and the only ones to have set a standard for his way of living had been man, but since the beginning of time, there had always been the odd-ball sitting alone in his house, reclusive, miserable, most of the time, and feeling mildly suicidal nearly constantly, but it was never that man's fault that no one else saw what went on in his house, or in his mind, or in his stories, or poetry, and no one else could understand the events of his life that had made him out to be who he was. Every word spoken, every step taken, every decision made, every opportunity taken or not taken, the making of his name, the town he grew up in, his bedroom, deaths experienced, words spoken, the streets he lived on, the television he'd watched, the amount of time his parents had spent with him, the books he'd read, the names he'd been called, the empathy he'd been shown, the planetary alignment: all of these things, and a probably a million of other factors, had crafted him into who he was by the order in which they happened, and by the life he had chosen to lead when he'd been able to decide for himself. It was so easy to judge when leading a life already set up from birth, to believe it was only logical to go from Point A to Point B, and from Point B to Point C and so-on; well, some people liked to go backwards, and some people didn't care to go at all, and what happened, even if those ABCDEFG people never knew, would always happen. Yes, maybe it'd be easier for them, to have a set life, to go to school, get a job, go to college, get a job, find phony romance or real romance, and have kids, and then die, and maybe that life was full of happiness, but there was not happiness without sadness, and there was no order without disorder, and there was not standard without the odd-ball, and there was not the odd-ball without the straight-balls, and life without one or the other would be very boring, he knew, because one could not survive without the other's inventions, ideas, and ways of life.

 

A chair; a chair. A chair in a room, just wooden with four round pegs for legs.

 

It was wooden, and that was all.

 

He walked back to his desk, sat down on his other wooden chair, and erased Fiction.

 

This was real, and fiction was not worthy of the silent stories and truths no one ever heard, anyway, after all. There would be no more mindless babbling for the sake of twisted words in confusing sentences, and no more metaphors that didn't make sense. No, no. This would just be wooden, because wood was solid, and it was there, and even in the universe he lived in, it was the only thing he had not come to dislike.