An hour a day. That’s all I need. Why is it so difficult to set aside one hour? I hear professional writers give advice. I read their blogs. They say write every day. Set aside the time. Set goals. Five hundred words. A Thousand Worlds. Whatever works. If it’s that easy, why do most people find it so difficult to chip out an hour out of their busy days?

Spending more than two hours a day commuting to and from work. Playing video games (a big no-no according to Bradbury). Trying to figure out how to read Naked Lunch. Cleaning the kitchen. Cleaning the bathroom. Learning to speak French. Writing about how I never find time to write. Finishing up some things I left unresolved at work. Ironing clothes. Watching baseball. Finding the best B zombie movies.  Creating the greatest playlist ever. Going to the zoo. Answering the phone. Sending a text message. Sending sarcastic IMs. Cooking dinner. Eating dinner. Watering the plants. Scratching my head. Brushing my teeth. Sleeping. Taking a shower.

I’m sure I can pull one measly hour out of that.

I have to apologize to the Five People Who Read This Blog (FPWRTB). It’s unfortunate when you make a plan and you commit to it, and then you hit a roadblock. I’ve been sick since Sunday. I couldn’t update the blovel or write anything new. I was lying in bed most of the time feeling sorry for myself and contemplating what it is about soup and cookies and ginger ale that seems to comfort us during these tough times. It’s just food. Why is it that when we eat chicken soup when we’re sick it’s the sweet elixir of life, but when we eat chicken soup any other time it’s just boring old soup?

I was disappointed when I ruled out swine flu (H1N1). I wanted to give my friends something to talk about. I wanted them to be able to go to their other friends and co-workers and say, “I know a guy who got swine flu and he didn’t die. And he’s not from Mexico.”  I guess I’ll have to wait until the next big pandemic hits. Let me make a prediction. It will be called “Moth Influenza” and it will kill three people in Siberia.

Time for a reset. I’m actually going to move the blovel from Blogspot to Blovelspot, an application created by Jorge Escobar for the specific purpose of bloveling. I will try it out since I only wrote one “chapter” so far. Unless I get hit by a car or unless a meteor hits the Chicago metropolitan area, I will try my best to stick with the schedule this time.

I’m a few days late. I was planning on updating my “blovel” once a week. Every Wednesday. It’s been a busy week, so I never got around to posting the link like I did on twitter. The word “blovel” is a combination of two words: blog and novel. It’s exactly what it sounds like. A novel that’s written in blog form. For an explanation of a blovel and the rules, you can check here.

With this in mind I now have sort of a blogging schedule. I read somewhere that scheduling your blog updates and sticking to that schedule is the key to having a successful blogging experience. What that means in my case, I have no clue. I supposed it’s good for the Five People Who Read This Blog (FPWRTB). I will be updating the blovel every Wednesday. Short story day will be Saturday. Every other day can be used to post something different, random or otherwise, such as commentaries, reviews, etc.

This is the first time I’m actually going to put my work out there for the public to see. By “public” I mean the Five People Who Read This Blog. This is the first part of a short story I’m writing tentatively titled “Patient Zero”. If you’re going to criticize, be as blunt as you want, just keep in mind this is a first draft.

Carl Tapping swung the frilly pink curtains open to let the sunshine in. Beams of light revealed a living room which hadn’t actually been lived in since the pandemic. Everything was in order. The flowery sofa, the love seat, the glass coffee table, a vase with a single red plastic flower. They were all untouched. A thin layer of dust was already starting to form on the table, which Carl ignored. The suburban street outside the living room window looked as quiet as all the other streets. And this was beyond typical suburban quiet, Carl thought. This was left behind quiet. He remembered walking the busy streets which were no longer busy. There was organ music pouring out of St. Paul’s Methodist Church.

As Carl past the church, a man, tall, lanky and looking like he hadn’t shaved since the Dark Ages was watching him. The man’s eyes were wide and watery. He looked crazy. He may not have been crazy, but to Carl, the eyes and the accusing wails said it all.

“We’re in hell you know,” the man pleaded. “This is our punishment. We’re in hell because we destroyed our planet. God rained his wrath upon us. Now His children are delivered to death, but we remain. This is our punishment. This is our hell!”

Carl didn’t know if this was really hell, or if this was one of the end times that he always heard about in Sunday school as a kid. He always thought those stories about horsemen and water turning into blood was just meant to scare children into going to church every Sunday. The thin man on the steps of the church seemed to think it was real. He screamed about rapture and wailed about penitence. His voice, cradled by the dramatic organ music, faded away as Carl made his way around a corner. It was almost like those shows he always saw on Sunday morning television. A clean cut preacher with a southern accent gesticulated robotically with his arms while preaching about Jesus. Carl wondered where he was now, if he had the pig flu or if he was now a slave to the Cow, or if he was food.

These days people fell into three categories: the dead, the enslaved, and the ghosts. Carl often wondered if it would have been better if he had the flu. He watched his parents die, his brother and sister, his friends, his neighbors. People he didn’t know, he watched them on the streets, collapsing, crawling and no longer able to stand as the snot and tears oozed from their faces. The sickly coughs sounded like dogs being kicked. The hospitals were full and the sick were coming in faster than they could be treated because the doctors were also getting sick and dying. People like Carl could only watch helplessly, either barricading themselves inside their homes or venturing outside wearing fluid masks and trying their best to pretend it wasn’t happening, driving to work every day amidst the uncharacteristically light traffic and the dumpsters and garbage cans that were overflowing into the streets because all hell was breaking loose and the public works were being halted to deal with the epidemic. The garbage was rolling down the street, around abandoned cars and through broken windows that were never going to be fixed.

Some streets were now covered in layers of waste. Old newspapers, paper cups, aluminum cans blanketed many of the streets like an old unplowed snow. Carl kicked through it, having given up stepping over and around the piles of garbage. A newspaper page was pinned against a no longer functioning utility pole by the wind. It was a sooty remnant of the day when the last newspapers were circulated, back when people wanted to know what was happening to the rest of the world, before they turned their heads in disgust and gladly began to accept ignorance. The black and white photo of the President on his death bed took up a majority of the front page. Below it was a photograph of a grotesque creature. “Patient Zero” they called him, or it. Nobody cared if it even had a gender. All they knew was that it was probably the cause of mankind’s downfall. But nobody cared anymore. As long as the new world leaders stayed away from their corners of the Earth, where they were free to scavenge and rape and cannibalize their own people. The newspaper was dated May 30, 2009. Carl stared at the sky. At least some things stayed the same. The sky was still blue. The sun still rose in the morning. He couldn’t remember how many times it rose since May 30, 2009.

One winter had passed since that day. The church was emptied and the tall skinny heretic was long gone. Carl guessed he moved on to the next city to preach his apocalyptic verses to people who weren’t sick of him. He stood in the living room that hadn’t been lived in at least for a few months. It wasn’t his living room, but it was the third living room he had lived in since he was driven out of his own. He wondered how long he would consider this one to be his before nomads, rapists, or pigs came to take it away from him. He immediately closed the curtains when he saw movement in the distance. It was probably leaves rustling or an oblivious squirrel but he didn’t want to take the chance. For now, this was it. If he stayed low, nobody would see him. If nobody saw him, he stood a chance to survive until the next living room.

I was stopped on the road yesterday by a guy who was holding up a red inhaler and pleading with me regarding his sick child. He said he needed to buy the kid some medication and he just needed fourteen more dollars. But the first thing he actually asked me was if I spoke English. I answered the affirmative and he gave a performance that would make some believe he was auditioning for dramatic theatre. The dilemma was whether or not I should believe him. He was convincing. He either truly had a sick kid, or he was a crackhead with really good acting skills. I could have avoided the dilemma to begin with and I mentally slapped myself in the face about it. Not like that could have changed the past.

Scenario 1: After he asked me if I spoke English, I could have just repeated the word “que” over and over again until he gave up. But what was the point? If I wanted to be that much of a dick I would have just driven away, potentially ripping his head and part of his arm off. I didn’t even know if I was able to pull off the ruse because I don’t sound Hispanic and when I try it ends up sounding like a stereotypical caricature.

Scenario 2: Tell him I have no money. But who the hell would believe that? I’m willing to bet that more than 50% of people who tell beggars that they have no money are lying. They either don’t want to reach into their pockets for a buck or all they have is a couple of $100 bills they got from their last drug deal. A lot of people don’t carry cash anymore. The convenience of the debit card eliminates the need to carry cash. If I was an entrepeneur I would think of ways to market card readers to beggars. This way, your average card-carrying Joe will have no excuse. Then again, I don’t envision making any profit off of this venture, since if a panhandler had enough money to buy one of these contraptions, then he wouldn’t be panhandling.

Scenario 3: Just give the asshole some money. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a buck and handed it to him and lied that it was all the cash I had. (I had at least $30 in my pocket which I was probably just going to waste on useless trash that I couldn’t possibly need, but I wasn’t going to mention that). If he was, indeed, a crackhead then he was $1 closer to buying more crack. I convinced myself that if this happened it will not be my fault. It will be the fault of the people who gave him money after I did, since they brought him closer than I ever did to buying more crack and contributing to the drug problem in this country.

Check please!

It doesn’t take long to realize that your face is melting. You can’t breathe because your lungs have turned to liquid. All you hear is a sick gurgling sound like someone is taking a bong hit off of the top of your head. It’s ugly. You claw your way out of a puddle of toxic waste, begging for help. Nobody can help you. It’s too late. But you should have thought of that before challenging a virtually indestructible cop made of titanium.

Your bones become malleable under the strain of your weight, and your legs bend like a bow causing you to limp. You weakly drag your right leg, which is now rendered useless, behind you. Your clothing starts to dissolve and tear away, and your poisoned skin is softened. It rips away like a slow cooked piece of meat as it drags along the gravelly service road. You look back momentarily. You hope that there is something left, something salvageable. But all you see is a melting piece of flesh, eating through to pink foamy bone. There’s some red. To your horror you guess that it has to be muscle, not yet broken down by the toxic fluid.

When you call for help, you’re hoping that it isn’t to save your life, but to end it. Your eyes cloud over. It’s a combination of the sagging skin of your forehead obscuring your vision and the surface of your eye melting away. The sensation is beyond a simple burning, like getting soap or pepper spray to the face. It’s a dull pain. Whatever was there to transmit pain to your brain is no longer there, oozing away with everything else.

Through the liquid blur you see something coming. It quickly makes it’s way toward you. You hear a hum and the crackle of gravel being kicked up by tires and the growl of an engine. It’s a car. It’s dark in color, but that’s all you can make out. Someone is coming to save you, you think, but as the vehicle doesn’t slow down you raise your arms and hold them in front of you, palms forward in a futile motion, to get the psychotic driver of the vehicle to slow down. The front of the car, still a blur and fading as quickly as it rams your thighs, crashes through you. It doesn’t take you with it as you would have expected. Instead it moves through you as your already liquefied insides separate and splatter onto the hood, the windshield, the tires.

Before you realize what is happening, your head starts to spin. Literally. You view a blurry montage of the sky, the road, the car, the tires, the sky again, and the road again. It begins to slow down as the blur darkens into nothingness. The last thing you hear is your eardrums melting and pouring out of the side of your head.

Shit That’s On My Desk

Empty paper coffee cup
Grande
Telephone. Three month old candy.
Stapler. Scissors.
CD of which I know not the contents
Hoarded napkins from the cafeteria.
Pad of paper. Random junk.
Cisco systems business card.
Lonely thumbtack.
Calendar turned to April
Water in a bottle.
Dust

Why do dog food manufacturers make dog food that looks like human food? Is it more for the benefit of the dog or the human?

I’m thinking it benefits the owner more than it does the dog. Dogs eat anything regardless of odor, consistency, origin. They pick food out of the garbage. They eat cat shit out of the kitty litter box. They lick their own balls. So what makes beef stew more delectable than just plain old kibble?

My answer: Nothing. However, it does give the owner peace of mind that the dog isn’t eating anything resembling vomit or smelling like sweet garbage.

Script Frenzy begins today and I’m still debating whether or not I should take part. One hundred pages of movie screenplay that’s going to end up horrible, yet probably better than 50% of the garbage that’s been excreted onto the big screen in recent years. I have a basic plot and characters. I’m just not sure that I have the patience to put it all onto paper, most of all in a script format. Writing stories is so much easier. You don’t have to worry about what is supposed to be in caps and what’s supposed to be indented and by how many spaces. I’ve listed some pros and cons. By no means is this list complete. I could think of infinite reasons why I shouldn’t even bother. I’m not even going to mention the part about having ADD.

Pro
I’ve never written a screenplay. It could be fun, interesting, and educational. I’m not expecting to do anything with it after it’s done. It will probably teach me a lesson not to underestimate script writers out there, regardless of how horrible the movie/play/television show is.

Con
There are so many bad screenplays out there, why dilute the market with my own piece of crap excuse for a screenplay? Novels are different, because the truly bad ones never see the light of day, although some actually slip by. In terms of screenplays, it seems like the good ones are never picked up or are relegated to independent studios and produced with a low budget. The bad ones are sweetened up with expensive special effects and A-list actors to mask how truly horrible they actually are.

Pro
I like writing. This will give me something to do for the next 30 days that doesn’t involve killing computerized zombies.

Con
Why waste my time on a screenplay when I could be writing something readable or editing or rewriting? I could end this 30 days feeling like I wasted the entire month. I already waste enough time writing this blog and updating my status on Facebook.

Pro
I can come out of this feeling like Judd Apatow, John Carpenter, or Diablo Cody

Con
I can come out of this feeling like Roland Emmerich

pizza cone meat cake
diarrhea heart attack
porkgasm. eat it. yum!

bacon wrapped sausage
it looks like shit. deep fried ass.
but i’m still hungry

this is why i’m fat
five pounds of meat. two bacon.
vegetables? what’s that?

i’m not from england
that’s where they wear pants to work
we’re corrupt. we don’t.

barack obama
he hates retarded children
who just want medals