Stirrings in the Desert (intro chapter)

The late night, opiate crazed ramblings of a desert traveler as he edges himself between a psychic orgasm and existential ruin in the midst of candy-flavored all American ultra convenience.

Just about the worst thing that can happen to a person is being born with too many opinions. It’s a lot more real than most of the things your doctor tells you you have. Being over opinionated is not a diagnosable illness, and therefore represents no potential for deliberate victim creation or profits to follow. In fact, they’d prefer you to have no opinions at all, or at least the same ones as everyone else. That’s the right kind of disordered. Like I said, there are more disorders than there are people to have them. Your chromosomes get creative and pair up wrong, they switch dancing partners and usually nature is kindhearted enough to let the left-footed disaster spill out unnoticed, a jettisoned afterthought entombed in mucus. Most things are better left unsaid. But don’t feel alone. It’s already happened in the same stall about four thousand other times in the spectacularly clean mid-desert Pilot Flying J Travel Center’s ultra-convenience gas station you find yourself in; failed regeneration and cleanliness with an offensive citrus zing and enough air conditioning to convince the devil he should’ve invested in the HVAC industry. You’re in there to drive out demons, to drive the dusty red rims from your burning sclera, and it’s all the same because today the purchase of one jumbo iced honey bun at regular price permits you to leave the store with two, as long as nobody sees you put it in your pocket. If you’re going to get pilloried for something, it might as well be stealing. I’d rather someone spot me committing larceny than eating a jumbo iced honey bun. They’re not a snack made for people who are doing well. I eat them frequently. 

Me and you, we’re not so different. Shamble past the automatic doors with the dust caked in your nostrils, rammed in place like powder streaks on the interior of a muzzle loaded cannon. Take it all in, casual sensory overload to the two toned door sensor. The more frequently the self-imposed directive to “appear normal” crosses your conscious threshold, the more you can be assured of your abnormality. Above all else you must appear normal. Remain calm �" maybe my eyes aren’t really as red as they looked in the window. How about that smell? Multilayered complexity with rotting overtones and a strong kerosene finish. COVID’s olfactory theft was a favor to most people. I love a good silver lining. You can’t get comfortable being weird, because the kind of weird is important. Popular culture would have you believe that weirdness is cool, but it isn’t really. Is it an obtuse, potbelly in cargo-shorts weird that, mercifully, could never introspect deeply enough to become self aware? Is it a dangerous, telling your friends not to come to school tomorrow, weird? Or is it a congenital, you never really had a chance, genuine sympathy inspiring weird? Either way, keep walking. I’m watching colors of the rainbow leap from the shelves of candy while cheerful polar bears playfully sip slushies in their sunglasses and hoodies. 

An intrusive rubber squeak with every step. Where can a gentleman go to relieve himself in this fine establishment? 

The black pictograph tile around me pays its irrelevant, lemon-scented homage to whatever indigenous b******s were ill enough to call this place home. Did you ever wonder why some of these people ended up where they did? Pinched off from their sharper witted, geographically fortunate company for chewing with their mouths open just one time too many? Or for their persistent refusal to recognize and apply the breathing capabilities of the nostrils? That’s how you end up in the desert. That’s how you end up scraping lightning bolts and a bear-dog into a rock centuries before the advent of Pilot Flying J Travel Centers, but really just down the street. And back then you could, if you picked your nose up just right, smell the lurid tangerine breeze a few short milenia away. You could travel through the grout, up and down each immaculate tile, and trace the bastardized renderings of your mark on this world. It’s nice to be remembered. 

The Pilot Flying J Travel Centers operate a vast empire of sterile, flammable convenience stores. Highly processed. Jarringly illuminated. Normally, the application of “gas station” as a modifier serves to degrade whatever noun follows. Gas station burrito. Gas station handjob. Gas station employee. In all 50 states their bathrooms are the mute sounding boards of millions of extramarital affairs; of crushed gas station penis extender pills and glue huffing teenage blowjobs; a crooked procession of damaged cervical spines, proving again and again the timeless wisdom that autofellatio is not a victimless crime. Gas station witnesses smelling the second degree genital burns of gas station hot-case sandwich thieves, their scalding, tinfoil wrapped quarry shoved hurriedly into naked crotches to avoid detection�" these walls are the discrete confidant of female road travelers everywhere, too polite to discharge volatile intestinal contents until sheltered comfortably within the unbreachable, lemon saturated security of those freakishly well lit tiles. These walls can hear the lighter’s click as it singes the bottom of a truncated glass tube, then fifteen minutes of analgesic madness beneath the matted hair of innumerable unwashed decades; the drawn up toilet water, unwillingly complicit in shameless misuse of insulin syringes during their delivery of equally lifesaving payloads. These shameless walls and their spotless tile comprise the savage war drum heart of an eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hour work year, every one of them occupying a time slot that is explicitly non-refundable and allegedly anonymous. Annually, the six hundred and fifty Pilot Flying J Travel Centers account for five million, six hundred ninety four thousand hours of disease transmission, dill pickle flavored sunflower seeds, sexual orientation blurring, seething hot corndogs with impossibly frozen innards, marital destruction, pelvic fractures, mop buckets...seated here as I am, I partake deeply in a flowing river of porcelain American experience. This 21st century Jordan of biblical acclaim has a strangely fetid quality, and truthfully I wonder if this might be the wrong river. I am kin to strange, unspoken adventures of all manner and disposition, though the cleanliness one is certain to find within a Pilot Flying J Travel Center is simply unmatched. 

And so there you are, safely locked in your black plastic partition, far flung in some opaque unwatched corner of the earth with the ivory colored floor tile leeching up into your skeleton. The ashy footprints leading up to your stall are the hurried final steps of any of the hoofed or winged or footed creature crossing Noah’s gangplank, under black skies and peppered by the first drops of rain. Take a seat. Hours of the acid in your stomach dragging away its lining like the jagged peaks of mountains violating the membrane of the night sky. The blister’s full life cycle experienced again and again on each foot - from simple heat and irritation all the way to the agonizing introduction of liquid to the interior of your shoes, stinging throbs while you think about how many cumulative hours of sweat and funk you’d forced upon those socks before rubbing them into wet open wounds. A sigh of relief. 

 Illumination is key. Apocalyptic meteorological rage of any god, no matter how furious, can do nothing more than wait patiently for you to come back outside. The sky can crash and boil and vomit and seize and the spotless automatic doors seal it off like a crime scene, sentries between the real and the imagined. The Pilot Flying J Travel Center welcomes you into a brilliant bath of dazzling electric light, the gleaming forecourt and parking lot plainly visible from high Earth orbit. After all, overnight foot traffic is heavily correlated with brightly lit forecourts, bringing in nearly twice as many hoofed or winged or footed creatures as a similarly sized, similarly equipped convenience store sitting around dimly as if trapped in the medieval era. This traffic of course translates directly into overnight sales, overnight piss stains, and overnight condom theft. And since everyone’s already been blinded in the parking lot, the same degree of luminosity must be maintained indoors to satiate the customer’s newly acquired photon tolerance. 

When you’re sitting in a stall, but only to text or shoot heroin or watch TikToks or whatever weird s**t it is that you do when the whole outside world becomes sliding locks and tiles and fluorescent humming and disembodied feet, do you feel that sigh of relief when the door shuts? And then it’s just you and the strange intimacy of the sharpied messages of travelers whose entire separate lives share nothing with yours except a toilet seat.

Take a seat, wouldn’t you?

Do you pull your pants down around your ankles anyways just so someone walking by doesn’t think there’s a fully clothed pervert sitting behind your door? 

You get everything out, working through the same old lifesaving routine. Spoon, water, lighter. Shake it a couple times. Still won’t light? I’m staring at the tiny ball of white cotton sitting on my thigh. It should be brown and submerged in an ionic solution of tap water and diacetylmorphine, but it’s not because I can’t make a fire. 

You’ve been there too I bet. Same dead lighter and everything. 

I sigh again.

Most things are spoken in languages nobody has any understanding of.

My mind’s racing, so I pull my pants up. I didn’t want anyone to think there was a fully clothed pervert sitting behind this door. I can taste my heartbeat accelerating. But there are preordained priorities at work here. And this stall is immaculate. But how? Who’s the one with the latex gloves and regular carcinogen exposure on behalf of a pleasant olfactory experience? Who are you? I can see the underpaid, trembling hands, piloted by countless hangovers and amphetamine powered overnights. Who’s fighting the thankless war against graying tile grout or spotted mirrors? There’s nothing sexy about empty trash cans. I just b***h about full ones. 

But where does it come from? Where do they find the strength to carry on cleaning? It’s not because someone told them to. That’s not how anything works. This is sincere dedication. This is nothing short of bonafide integrity. 

There’s no time for contemplating virtue when real things are happening in your life. I take the plunger out of the syringe and delicately raise the spoon to it, tilting it carefully while the water lurches into a bulb and trembles there like grandpa’s morning shakes. I can’t think of a time in my life I’ve been less grateful for friction. Surface tension is great for mosquitos but not for junkies. Dangling precariously in space, the bulb leans further from the edge of the spoon and then unceremoniously drips straight past its intended target and into my lap. Have you ever truly experienced loss? Probably not like I just did. Like I was saying, someone told me the only thing that you actually own is your character. I used to think that people with character were suckers. Fifteen people must have washed their hands and left since I first sat down, and most of them are really just getting them wet so their families will think they’ve been good boys. There’s some undissolved tar obediently perched in the spoon so I take my pinky and flatten it against the metal before delicately replacing my supplies into my blazer pocket. Your mind will take you exactly where you need to go as long as you let it. Mine is taking me to buy a lighter, and then it can have what it wants. 

People say that nighttime makes them feel alive. I would accuse these people of trying to appear edgy. There's a small rebellion inherent to waking through the dead hours of the night, but the satisfaction of doing wrong for its own sake perishes in normal people by about age five. All I’d say is that night makes everything equal opportunity. Colors quiet down into a single, easily digestible hue. Daylight is wheat protein in the gut of a god damn Celiac sufferer. I eat wheat though. You can believe that. Celiacs are p*****s. It's true that in the dark depth perception takes a toll, but only a small price to pay. Mostly, I appreciate the equality in the death of all the in-between colors. White and black, what else do you need? Daylight talks too much. Too many opinions and wardrobes. I want it laissez-faire. Nuanced. Nighttime grants permission for what the daylight could never think to ask. 

I looked at the ash on my shoes and the buzzing fluorescent lights. Nerves striking one another into the dawn of a new idea, that a beer would be fine company for my lighter, flashed between my ears. They weren’t the only ones. Fortunately my knees had the good sense to spread apart with just enough time for me to vomit between them. This stall had just become a place I no longer desired to sit in. Out of three total expulsions occurring within the store that night, three belonged to me. That’s the kind of certainty I needed. The kind of purpose. Your body doesn’t play around when it’s time to vomit. Delicately, I stepped around the puke near the refrigerated doors and repeated the scene into an aisle. The hispanic family who’d stopped their snack purchases to stare at me in terror had surely seen worse. There must have been like twelve of them in there, dressed all formal like someone had maybe died or graduated. Either way, they all had birthdays. That meant they were all guilty of something. I gave a disapproving shake of my head, lighter in one hand and a cold quart of Corona Especial in the other as I walked out the automatic doors to the sound of a familiar two-toned goodbye.

The point is, something had been asking why, and what’s wrong, too often. I don’t know where it was coming from. I just know that it wouldn’t leave. And I really couldn’t stand it. Not that I’m particular�" there’s very little I have preference for. I wasn’t ever looking for answers. Only trying to turn down the volume, like anybody would. Without violence or firearms or morphine, there’s only so much you can do about yourself. Tolerance is fine, except when it comes to escape. Escape is fine, except when you want your way back. Getting back is fine, except when you don't know where it was you started. And starting is fine, as long as you don’t care where you end up. 

I’m not taking questions anymore. It’s my turn to talk. And like I said already, I don’t have any left to ask. 

Author's Note

Given that this is my opening chapter, does it peak your interest enough to read the rest of the book?

Can you tell what's going on here or is it just confusing? Does the rambling tone detract from the overall style or does it work?

Reviews

[Brokenarrow]

It doesn't work. There are far too many descriptive narratives and rhetorical questions for the reader when the answers are obvious. You're points are things everyone is ignorantly aware of. It drags out too far to keep anyone's interest and the cynical sarcastic depression isn't likely to draw anyone in or keep them around. I'm not sure how many paragraphs I got through before it all melded into a single point. Life sucks, we're all disgusting, lets do some drugs and feel better, but for some reason I'm going to focus on all the horrible things that made me want to take them to feel better only to mention colors melding together and not mattering anyway. Short lived excursion from the point. There's no balance but damn you have a good vocabulary. You're writing in first person which isn't usually something I write or read, so I hope not but know that some of this is your own thinking, and its very sad. That is the entire impression

[Cat Armstrong]

First of all thank you! I appreciate your feedback very much.

What do you mean when you say that everyone is ignorantly aware of something ? Seems contradictory.

“Short lived excursion from the point?”
I don’t understand what you mean.

In fact, it sounds like you made it through exactly 2 paragraphs before penning a scathing diatribe where you’d prefer my character to do what, exactly? Breathing exercises and a f*****g gratitude journal ?

Sounds like a great source of conflict.

[Brokenarrow]

Maybe I'm one of those ****tards who thinks too much on the back alley musings of life itself or you and I think too much alike. Nothing I commented on was meant to be hostile but seems to have been taken that way. Ignorantly aware of- How do you not understand that when everything you wrote is exactly that? No one goes to a pancake house and sits at a table wondering if the cook was banging the waitress in the seat they're using or how well the table was wiped down after having a*s juice where their plate is now. They don't sit on a public toilet wondering how long it took for some piss poorly paid clerk scrub all the s**t off the wall they're leaning on. People choose not to think about it but most people know it happens. They don't ask and no one would tell. That's blissfully ignorant. Assuming things are cleaned or handled to their personal standard and ignoring that its done well enough no one will notice. Its not just in the few circumstances I've mentioned. A short lived excursion from the point is there was little to nothing regarding the positive aspects of taking drugs. Contradiction in itself to popular and legal opinions, but it is what it is. You're brilliantly colorful in your musing about the negative avoidances that led to using drugs (S**t no one talks about like this because its too deep for most to handle) But you lack to do the same explaining why the drugs are an escape from the thought process. There is no balance from negative to positive. If you want readers to return to your work and finish more than however much I read, find a hook and some balance. See it from someone else's perspective. IE- If I see this and feel this everyday, why would I want to read about it described in a way that points it out in more ways than I thought of with no end in sight. When you write dark, you have to give the reader light or mystery. As for reviews, there are trolls everywhere but it doesn't mean everything negative is meant to be nasty and I've proven my point with your reaction to how I wrote it. Read reviews flat without reflecting what you feel into what was written by someone else. I'm not mean or hateful. I'm honest. Accepting criticism and/or advice is how your writing will grow

[Cat Armstrong]

Well, you got me.

I'd never considered phrasing it like that, but the ignorant awareness you're describing is precisely what I'm talking about. I want to use those seldom thought but always noticed things to create a feeling of strangeness on this character's odd experience in a super public place that everyone has been in, but almost certainly never experienced in the way he is.

"The cook banging the waitress in the seat they're using..." lmfao :p Thank you for using the term "banging", it's my all time favorite

As far as the positive aspects of drug use, you're right. I don't say anything about it here and I probably should. there are so many other times in my book that I lay them out in excruciating detail--I wanted this to symbolize how my character (Echo) still isn't satisfied. He still has to keep searching. That's the change in him that is the beating heart of this story.

I think what I want to do is give this intro more of a context within the events of the book, because it's the intro chapter but it's actually the very last thing happens chronologically. This scene occurs after the final bit at the end.

Sorry for being a dick. Thank you very much for your input

[Lizzylou2004]

your writing is really good, I think you have a good introduction, but it seems kind of wordy, but overall great job! I'm excited to keep reading

[Dennis Wolf]

Well, I've wended my way through the introduction, there are quiet a few things that work really well... Especially given your chosen topic, point of view, and there's quiet a decent bit of character shaping done, even though you may not realize it... Thinking that it's all probably just confusing to most people..

There are a few sentences that are a bit too long, but hell, if I had a decent idea of how to shorten them...

Anyhow, I've never done anything more serious than weed... Everything else you describe here... Yeah, been there dun it.

Solitude is something I like, and sometimes the best way to get it is to go to a city or town where nobody knows you and you don't know anyone, and with an icy detached glance you let them all understand that you have no intention of changing that.

Cheap motels, cold food, intoxication and... The return of your meals and drinks at the worst possible moments... Haha spent more of my life in that than I care to admit.
Soooo... Yeah, it's relatable.

Now back to the writing, there are a few places you had me laughing at the way you described some things.
I'll get on pc later and point out a few things that worked a lot better than the rest, if you want.

I'd really like to read the next chapter at least.
Cheers

[Cat Armstrong]

Dennis thank you so much for taking the time to give it a read. A legitimate, thoughtful review is damn near priceless.

Immensely appreciate the depth you were willing to put into your review.

Sounds like I've at least whet your appetite for what follows. I'll go ahead and continue posting the chapters I've completed, I'd love to chat more about it too if you're game.

I see you've got quite the repertoire of uploads. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time and I will certainly return the favor. Is there anywhere in particular you'd prefer my feedback? Which story/what chapters?

Cheers buddy.

[Dennis Wolf]

Well, it was a good read, descriptive and at places way too real, at others kind of fun.

read moreWell, it was a good read, descriptive and at places way too real, at others kind of fun.

Uhh... Mostly just needing feedback on my Current WIP, chapter 4 or 4b... They're part of a crappy fantasy story, chapters are disorganized, since it's all just still the 0 draft, trying to get everything down so the POV and time are jumping back and forth between chapters.

At any rate, it's been hard getting input since the site is apparently focused on poetry and anything longer seems to dread readers haha

[Cat Armstrong]

I don't know why the "read more" part of your comment isn't an actual link and I can't see anything past the first sentence :[

[Dennis Wolf]

That is beyond me as well.. It is probably some bug on site, not the first time it happened