The Social RehabA Story by Luxovious Sloane This is my attempt at fiction writing. It's about the cyber era.... enjoy!
The smell of the Caramel Americano brew sits next to my computer as I’m typing 12 words a minute. The book called, “The Philosophy of Gender” cemented to the left corner of my desk to intimidate me, challenging me to study before the bedroom alarm clock rattles my eardrums. And my brain is tormented by various distractions, forcing each “nice” word through the tips of my fingers, slapping on the black keyboard - in a laborious rhythm - trying to encourage my heart to somehow ignite the lazy adrenaline simmering through my veins. I finish the topic sentence of my 2nd paragraph. But the desolate space to the right of the last period pleads to me to rest. My mind drowns in the white, glowing haze of a dazed reverie. The computer screen dazzles at my eyes and my buttocks melt to the leather cushion. My back feels like leather straps stretched up to the neck ready to snap. My stomach is a caldron full of boiling water producing excessive saliva drooling from my mouth, mouthwatering call-order a late pizza delivery. The steaming cheese pizza would feel thick in my hands, imploring me to quickly bite before the tomato sauce spurts freely; and if it does, I’d wipe my tongue over the soft lump-drops of tomato sauce from my index fingers. But there’s only 2 dollars in my wallet, and my fellow students frown at their computer screens, compulsively checking their Facebook profiles. I’m only on the 3rd paragraph, and the rest of the page is snickering at me. But I drown the laughter with Arabic music blaring on Pandora’s radio, imagining three flamingo women trilling their tongues in their Jasmine tunics and beating their jewel-adorned hands on the drums, or belly-dancing around a sandy area with their scrumptious lips puckered and sapphire eyes gazing at me. Only one controls all my soul’s desires, Sarah. She’s not the most beautiful at the first appearance, but her sparkling body swings as her bare feet slips through the sand, kicking small clouds of dust. She has this smile of that reminds of me of watermelon jolly rangers, sweet and innocent, as if she were dancing naked on hilly pastures where I’m the only one watching her long black hair frolic in the wind. She knows I’m there, eye contact and her body facing my direction, enticing the blush in my cheeks and the pressure in my jeans. Oh screw my Attention Deficient Disorder! I’m in the library and my coffee is getting cold. 3 paragraphs have been written and 9 more pages to go. How am I supposed to focus on my paper with Sarah dancing around my mind? Boy, I’ve seen her dance. The green and blue light beams bounced off the glass disco ball spinning at the center of the ceiling while Sarah belly-danced with her friends near the explosive amps blasting out the dance rhythms of a song. I watched her leather pants dandling underneath an oversized black and gold T-shirt hanging on the side of her delicate shoulders. And suave fraternity brothers in multi-colored popped collared-shirts and suspicious aviator shades paced up to her with bright, snowy smiles. One by one, they repetitively yelled at her ear in vain, amid the cataclysmic party noise, taking a subtle whiff of lavender in her hair. She always shook her head with polite smile and turned to her girlfriends to continue swaying her hips. But I cowered invisibly in the corner of the dance-floor holding a red plastic cup, wondering if I should approach her with another drink. There were Keystone Light beer cans, a plastic trash bin of blue Hawaiian punch mixed with vodka called the Jungle Juice, or a simple cup of whiskey and Coca-Cola. What drink did she want? I spent a rather long time second guessing which drink she might prefer, what words might woo her, and whether it was ultimately a good idea. But I waited too long. I searched for her. I still have 9 dreaded pages to write and 5 paragraphs had been arduously written. The sentences are always carefully crafted and immediately revised despite the party music echoing inside my skull. 30 minutes have passed, only 5 paragraphs had been written, and my mind narrows in on the “minimize” button on the top right corner of Microsoft Word, urging me to trace the curser toward Mozilla Firefox. I don’t know Sarah very well, but the recurrent images of her godly beauty lure me like Sirens plucking their harps and singing for me in an everlasting dream. Focus please! This is my 6th paragraph when it should have been my 13th or 14th. This is an epic scuffle between the electrified heart and the moribund mind. The shrinking company of the students, one by one, forces their books and papers inside their backpacks before sauntering to the door. And my drowsy frustration warns me that I’m far behind. My eyelids hang carelessly and my pupils feel the light-burn from the computer screen. I need a break from work to stay awake, and my Caramel Americano brew chilled into a cup of black oil, subtly undulating by the pattering of my fingers. The dancing coffee reminds me of Sarah’s pear-shaped hips popping left and right. And my paper grows progressively redundant, manifesting my tendency to rephrase the topic sentences in 5 different ways. I need a break, but the earlier I work, the more awake I’d be. As the night gets older, speed of my fingers decrease along with my train of thought. And the railroad of my mind is cloaked by a thick fog heading towards the beacon of light, Sarah. This is a problem. Will somebody help me focus? I spent the majority of my time wanting without satisfaction, my heart electrifying my mind with imaginings of Sarah in latex exercise clothes, raising her buttocks to the sky and stretching her arms, her exotic hair exploding in humidity, and the damp salty dew glistening on her chest. But the fog of my mind continues thickening. The recollections of Sarah’s smile blurify as if the Caramel Americano brew spills over a Polaroid photograph of her, amalgamating all colors within. But I have no picture of her. I have no way of proving the veracity of her scrumptious sugar smile. My right index finger clicks on Mozilla Firefox. My right pinky finger taps on the “Enter” key after the rest of my hand typed “facebook.com” on the Google search engine. The arrow curser morphs into an in hourglass, slowly, slowly spinning to indicate that Facebook is loading. The computer monitor blinks from Google Search into various shades fluorescent blue and white, along with a particular hue surrounding the quote, “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Underneath, the tangerine-orange heads are placed on the major countries across the map of our world, and a thick block-dotted line connects everyone, inviting me to hope… Do I have a chance with Sarah? Will I have the opportunity to speak to her again? Will I ever seize her hips, inside a crowded club-extravaganza, everyone squeezed against everyone, while Sarah rubs her buttocks, forcefully against my zipper, her arms hanging, around my perspiring neck? Email: [email protected] My Facebook home page heaves me into a social hurricane: 50 notifications, 7 personal messages, 5 friend requests, 4 events, 3 invitations, and 1,293 friends online available to chat. 3 chat messages simultaneously appear. But I hesitate to respond to people’s “hey” and “what’s up” to skim through the thick “social feed” down the middle of the page: Holly Matlicker is now friends with Henry Ming and Patricia Wellspring. A small pink heart indicates, “Kirsten Deadpound is in a relationship Luxovious Sloane.” Lance Winkingston completed a cursory online survey to determine what kind of lover he’d be in bed, 2 minutes ago. Everyone knows he’s the cuddly kind now. Timothy Carlin changed his profile picture to display his lifeless body sprawled upside down the staircase in drunken stupor. Bryan Alimino updated the status, “U TALKING BOUT THAT NIKE JACKET I GAVE U THAT S**T FRESH!” Lauren Wehmeier is no longer in a relationship with Andrew Hoffman. Kirsten Deadpound wrote, “Oh Luxovious… I love your windmills X===D”, 23 seconds ago. But Caroline Deadpound, her mother, commented, “What do you mean by windmills? And what does that symbol mean?” It must have been inside joke, I wouldn’t know. Almost as if Facebook is an everlasting cosmopolitan magazine, people tirelessly update the manifestation of their hidden egos, their naive teenage manifestos, their favorite songs and YouTube videos, their passionate sense of humor, or their intense inquisitiveness when reconnecting with friends from decades ago. A small box sits on the top of the page, with grey faded words and a blinking curser, asks me, “What’s on your mind?” Sarah is a luminous light twirling around, through the dark corridors of my discombobulating brain, but I wouldn’t write that on Facebook. People don’t need to know that. But I type in “Sarah” on the search button hoping to track her down. But over a million results appeared and I stubbornly scroll down the pages, looking entering the profiles of mutual friends and searching their buddy lists too: Sarah Alimino, Sarah Busch, Sarah Casterone, Sarah Dan, Sarah Everly, Sarah Fugarino, Sarah Granger, Sarah Hupp, Sarah Iero, and Sarah Jacqueline… I don’t even know the last name of the woman dancing in my mind! I’m impetuously clicking on every profile picture of women with long black hair, sapphire eyes, and a jolly ranger smiles. I scanned their profiles, analyzing the public information on their walls, determining if this particular woman was really the woman dancing in my mind. Time quickly disappears. After a few hundred profiles searches, she magically appears. Sarah Kumar Ballsmastada! Her name is classical music playing the piano in my ears. I study her personal Facebook information in the “About Me” section:
Education and Work
Likes and Interests
Before sending her a Facebook “Friend Request”, I must prepare myself in order to win the heart of the belly-dancing girl of my mind. I return to my profile page to delete my status update from days ago, “Just looked up the definition of a menopause and realized there's something fishy about me.” Then I analyze another status that 34 of my Facebook-friends found hilarious, “Yes, I feel pregnant…Okay... took a s**t... it’s all taken care of.” If she read that, would she flicker with smile and feel compelled to talk to me because I’m the most interesting man in Facebook-sphere? Another status, “I had an interview with the mirror about it complimented on my good hygiene.” Could she perceive me as a bombastic chap with an obsessive sense of himself? I study my profile picture on the top left corner of my home-page, trying to determine whether my yellow smile expresses marvelous optimism or whether it depicts my life as a lawless fiesta that would arouse Sarah to engage in a spontaneous rendezvous. Will she stare at my black hair leaning over the redhead band as long as I am? Will she think my face is symmetrical like a suave Italian male super-model with sharp facial hair, or like a Viking with burly eye brows and bushy beard? Will she notice the protruding battle scar on my nose from the time my younger sister tripped me on rollerblades? I still have a paper to write, 3 more pages to go. I click on Sarah’s friend request button and logged off Facebook to hurry through my paper. I’m trying to complete this sluggish paper even though I can’t even convey my ideas as clearly as before. My fingers keep hitting the wrong letters on the keyboard and Microsoft Word obsessively underlines my misspelling and unfairly denotes all my sentences as “fragments.” The page is now enduring a painful birth at the rate of 5 words minute, and my philosophy professor probably will identify my overacting, distracting pheromones as symptom of mental retardation. Am I even making sense anymore? I think I am, but every clear and excellent word choice on the page appears cryptic, befuddling my brain. But my heart ensures that I’m making sense. Sarah is always dancing in my mind… And every minute of the torturous night, I wonder, “Will Sarah add me as a friend? And when she does, what will I say? What do I do? What jokes would I tell?” There is only one operational area of my brain: the dazed reverie of Sarah and I guffawing in the middle of a hilly pasture, conversing about nonsensical ideas and having life-transforming philosophical discussion, saying “I love you” for the first time under dense pressure that’s suddenly relieved by Sarah’s alleviating smile, and asking her “marry me” the following day and laughing at the fact I didn’t know the ruby engagement ring shouldn’t be on the flip-off finger, and having an Arabic wedding reception in the middle of the Death Valley while the little kids play Indian and Cowboy games. And Sarah and I wouldn’t think Rattlesnakes are funny at the time, but laugh about it in the future days. I type my username and password on Facebook for I-don’t-know-how-many-times. The sun breaks through the surface of the waving cornfields. My eyes seem to bleed, but it’s too dry for bloody teardrops to be trickling down. My mind is suffering radioactive poisoning, and I feel the cancer cells repeatedly attacking the temples of skull, pummeling me into a snooze. But I continue to struggle. I continue writing. This paper is a perpetual curse that convolutes my perception of reality. The Computer is black and so are the words, and the page is white…what was the point of what I just wrote? Sarah, stop dancing in my mind! The Facebook page loaded, and there’s 1 notification. Sarah accepted my friend request! And I look on the chat box resting peacefully on the bottom right corner of the screen… Sarah is online, probably rambling around her apartment partially nude with a towel wrapped around her glistening black hair, and painting ivy green gloss on luscious lips. Should I message her now or should I act cool and wait for her to message me? Peter Fallimore (7:23 am): Hey whaddup? Peter Fallimore (7:40 am): So… ur probably freaked out because i appear to be some total facebook creeper. I don’t know if you remember me from the party like 2 days ago but im about 6 feet tall, medium length hair, mildly sober, introduced myself while u were kicking a*s at beer pong, and u said, “Hi im sarah.” And we talked for like 2 minutes about the cruelty of slaughtering chickens at Mcdonalds, which was incredibly hilarious cuz I don’t know anyone else who’d have talked about that in the first 2 minutes of meeting each other lmao Peter Fallimore (7:45 am): So… yeah… im writing a paper now. im mildly insane because i haven’t been to bed yet. But it was a cool night… a really fun night. im pretty optimistic that this paper is a solid A. The professors love me and what can i do? It aint even that big of a deal lol Peter Fallimore (7:47 am): Is facebook chat even working today? Facebook chat sucks aassssss. We can converse skype if u think that’ll be easier. I mean… i think it’ll be easier, but if u don’t that’s ok. But if u do, my skype name => PeterFallinMore… pretty clever skype username eh? Peter Fallimore (8:00 am): There is something seriously, obviously wrong with facebook. Y did society get addicted to this? People r soooooo retarded. Hahaha Peter Fallimore (8:14 am): U know.. I don’t know if u’ll get this, but i really enjoy having conversations with myself via facebook chat. its so fun and self-enlightening, and probably reflects my personality more clearly than a mirror. Hah! That was a good analogy wasn’t it? Or is that an analogy? Maybe it’s a metaphor? Or a simile? Gahhh… lets just live an easy life and call it a comparison ;D Peter Fallimore (8:30 am): Well…i really gotta start heading out for class. it was really an honor to reconnect with u. But if u ever want to talk about anything at all… and it doesn’t have to be a facebook chat with urself even though i prefer it… u can always talk to me cuz i’m a facebook friend, and facebook friends are awesome right? Peter Fallimore (8:40 am): okay… well… have a spectabulous, fantacular day. ill talk to u later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Professor won’t accept my paper since I arrived in class 20 minutes late. Was Sarah worth it? She’s not dancing anymore, but I can see the faded glow of her laptop illuminating not only her face, but her best friends giggling over her shoulders. They probably think I’m a lonely, enormously horny guy with a nameless social disorder, always on Facebook, continuously chatting on Facebook, impulsively examining my 1394 Facebook-friends’ profile for the clues of where various parties are, what other people are doing or who they’re spending time with, even if I have no concrete friendship or relation with flat, apathetically quiet strangers gluing their fingers to their keyboards, feeling the short spurts of excitement when a somebody replies, or they’ll keep waiting until a new Facebook friend arrives. I’m thinking of only a few friends whom I see physically moving, and hear them laughing instead of reading “lols”, and feeling the wrinkles of their cotton shirts on their back, or the biting pain when our high-fives crack in mid-air instead of the plastic keyboard upon my fingertips. On Facebook, my ego becomes manifest. My world shifts from reality to a cyber-social atmosphere of addictive loneliness. And Facebook is just another world crashing into my own concept of reality, as if the moon and the earth chaotically converge. I really could have worked harder on that paper. I doubt Sarah will ever reply. © 2011 Luxovious SloaneReviews
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Added on January 26, 2011Last Updated on February 1, 2011 Author
Luxovious SloaneCrawfordsville, INAboutI really don't know what to say... My writings are a reflection of myself haha. more..Writing
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