Lies

Everything I write is a lie.

I am sitting down in a chair that I never sit in. I am typing on my brand new iPad. It is perfect and it completes me. I waited online with pirates in the valley for over 2 days to purchase it. One fellow with a beard and not from this country was set to buy more than one. We argued about that for a short time, about only being allowed to buy one and it escalated quickly. He seemed to know the rules. He offered to settle it by, “cutting my fucking balls off if I didn’t shut my fat fucking face.”

Pretty sure that’s what he said.

I wanted to be the first in my neighborhood. I wanted it more than that ice cream sandwich the ding ding man sold in the summertime on my street just outside of Bonneventure.

So now I have one. It is fast and shiny and powerful. I can now begin my novel and or screenplay.

The rain has started again.

A dog barks at the approaching mailman. The mailman maced a dog down the street last Friday, but the dog kept charging. Got a good piece of the mailman. The dog will be destroyed tomorrow if no one comes and adopts him. I think the dog’s name is Chet. He was a mixed breed mongrel. His owner came to my house and asked if I had heard anything, if I’d be willing to testify in a court of law. He had a beard. And his wife who stood five feet behind him as he did all the talking also had a beard. They were curious to me. He spoke fast with an Albanian accent. His hair was almost gone on the top of his head, but he had a strong beard.

Once when I worked at a bottling plant there was this married couple Pat and Pat. Pat ran the label machine. It was an archaic machine that slapped wet labels on glass bottles of soda. It was the last step in the process before they were boxed and then laid on pallets. More than once a week the label machine would fire up too strong and the metal slappers would miss the labels completely and then they would slam onto the bottles, smashing one after another, spraying glass and soda everywhere. Pat wasn’t deaf but he spoke as though he never learned to speak properly. He had a high-pitched squeak. He was able to form letters but his voice was so high and raspy, it was uniquely odd, especially when the machine would go berserk and he would yell and scream, never really knowing how to shut the thing down. Hundreds of bottles would explode before he could stop the line.

Pat’s wife Pat was perhaps the ugliest woman I’d ever met in that town. She too sounded funny when she spoke. Maybe she took on Pat’s voice the way couples take on the queer patterns of their partners. She was shorter than Pat and wore glasses that fell off her face. She was short, with short blond hair, average body, bloused in work shirt and pants one couldn’t gauge much. She was smelly up close however. She worked on the line somewhere else. She and Pat barked at each other on and off work, in the warehouse, in the break-room when we played spades. They were a freakish couple, but had senses of humor. One afternoon Pat put a live boa constrictor someone found in the warehouse inside Pat’s locker in the break-room.