The Broken Home Collective

Spontaneous fiction, another attempt at flash.

It was crushed up amphetamines instead of coffee which helped to get us out of bed, and benzodiazepines that enabled us the detached courage needed to force our way through the tribulations of the waking world.  We were the broken home collective, a cadre of assorted misfits trying to find meaning in an existence ravaged by neglectful parents and being impoverished in a middle-class town.  Why shoot for the stars when the gutter was so close? 

We followed the endless and unbroken path of the cyclic counterculture, but unlike previous generations, what we stood against couldn't have been less clear.  Maybe it was our hazy eyes.  I stayed cool in the summer with high-gravity beer.  I stilled my heart and warmed my stomach with cheap whiskey when the winter came.  As far as we were concerned, the world was ending around us.  Al Gore had warned us about global warming and we didn't see what was so bad about swimming mid-Winter.  It was another chance to drown.

I replaced oxygen with smoke, because as far as I was concerned black lungs were better than being filled with hot air.  The burn of stimulants rifling through my nostrils awoke something visceral in me, a slumbering colossus of nerves set ablaze in a way that all the posturing in the world couldn't hope to achieve.  I was an antediluvian titan, descendent of the Nephilim, waiting to be purged by the flood. 

We disowned our families and lived like post-apocalyptic raiders of the irradiated wasteland.  We became scholars of the road, abandoning the confines of conventional education for the lure of the occult.  We soaked up what had been hidden from us by the greedy elite and reveled in forbidden knowledge.  We were young enough to know it all, and old enough to know it was all hopeless.

We stored acid in our spinal columns for later use, and told stories around campfires while under the influence of psilocybin, channeling something more than ourselves and tapping into some forgotten truth.  We were free form organisms, constantly evolving like the structure of a jazz song that constantly sought its own deconstruction.  We were entropy defined.

It was an autumn day when the fall came.   Our eyes were sensitive to the nervous light of the morning, and we wiped our sleep encrusted eyelids with dirty fingers.  The bad news came over a prescription breakfast.  My best friend hadn’t woken up.  We were too careless, and some us too illiterate, to read warning labels. The combination of Percocet and 160 proof vodka had put him into a sleep too deep to wake up from.  We'd hoped that he’d went peacefully, but we couldn’t quite shake the image of our friend, alone, choking on his own vomit.  I felt sick.

We were waging a war against an invisible threat and never thought that we’d see casualties, but as time passed our soldiers began to drop like flies lining up in front of an electric trap.  We frequented funeral homes, and the uneasy looks of the parents whose houses we’d inhabited while growing up signaled the end of an era that we’d thought would last forever.  High School was long over and the stakes had reached a newly heightened sense of realism. Some of us “sold out”, including myself.

We found jobs and scraped out a living, often relying upon the pity of the parents we’d shunned in order to shoulder our weight.  Some of us went to school and found desk jobs, while some of us toiled in physical labor with the hopes of making an honest living.  Still, yet, others continued to ignore the troubling signs of reality’s knock and refused to open their doors to embrace it.  It has become habit to check the paper each Sunday and glance over the obituaries, scanning with sad eyes for fallen comrades and brothers-in-arms.

Eventually, it was coffee instead of crushed up amphetamines which helped to get us out of bed, and sheer willpower that enabled us the passion and courage needed to force our way through the tribulations of the waking world.   We were the broken home collective, a cadre of assorted misfits trying to find meaning in an existence ravaged by neglectful parents and being impoverished in a middle-class town, but instead of shooting for the gutter and making it, we shot for the stars and weren’t afraid to miss.

Reviews

[. serah .]

-- i've been through a similar phase... -- substance abuse can be extremely damaging and debilitating... -- someone i knew really well got derailed and became completely delusional... (he's alive though his life is hardly a life)... -- i think that the space which we inhabit... beyond severe addiction and self-destruction is extremely harsh, shrill and jarring... -- i nearly had a relapse in the winter of 2014 and just to remain clean, i started rolling my own cigarettes... (regular tobacco and not anything else)... -- "sheer will power" is definitely what it takes... -- your account is heartbreaking and reminds me of what it was like... but it's also a dose of real hope for those of us who don't want to get derailed again... -- i'm sure it was really tough for you to write this piece, but i'm glad you did... -- it's a very giving piece of writing... -- i appreciate your generosity...

[M. Shepherd]

I feel like you make a pretty convincing case for nihilism here thus I loved every breath of it but I'm not swayed by the turn at the end. I remain skeptical of hope, having so little evidence to convince me that shooting for the stars is a worthwhile endeavor not leading you inevitably to cheap disappointment. Or maybe that's the sad bleak point?

[M. Shepherd]

I glean the point (I think) that being so close to death makes you unafraid of failure, but I guess I felt so despondent by the end that I didn't feel the weight of the passion required for trying, if optimism is absent.

[M. Shepherd]

Tell me if I'm full of s**t here.

[N.D. Gurrola]

wow. very well written. love how you tie the piece together with the phrase "why shoot for the stars when the gutter was so close?". that really solidifies the air of hard-fought victory over circumstance that this has.

if i had to give any sort of critique, it's a bit wordy. i.e "antediluvian". that being said, i love words and i wholeheartedly implore you to continue throwing uncommon words in your writing.

[Marie]

THis is not bad at all.I have no use for people who get into drugs,whatever their reasons, but I like thie way this is built. Those who couldn't make it didn't. Obviusly, only the strong survived. And the ending sentence was really good.