Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Back Patting, Awakenings and 5 Nights at Jillian's: Bad Night

Awakenings and 5 Nights at Jillian’s: The Bad Night

1AM, updating from WORK! I generally don’t like to brag. I do this story telling thing, five days a week, over a thousand words a day for six-months straight so far and I never look for props. I’m growing as a writer – this is good for me. But this week, man. 12+ hour days at work back-to-back plus extra work once I got home, a 16 hour day tonight and I’m still dropping a story on this bitch.

Props, son. Props.

Seriously, though. Everyone who wants to write should try something like this. It’s an amazing experience. Just tell a new, somewhat self-contained story every day. Even if it’s about your past, like mine. Even if it’s a stupid story that doesn’t make any sense, like some of these do. Once you do it for a couple of months, you start banging them out in ten, fifteen minutes and you look back to those first ones and realize how much your writing improved. It’s pretty fucking awesome. Seriously, try it. Set the level at a thousand words a day of self-contained story-writing. Writing!

Awakenings 1-4 is the fourth set of books from Chicago I’ll be highlighting. Storytelling wise, it’s good but not great. Eric Hobbs writing is a little sloppy, I don’t think certain things are conveyed effectively (such as the fact that the story takes place in the future) but the mystery, aside from the parts that are projected a little too strongly, is well written and really hits its stride around issue 3. But the art – Gabe Pena is my dream. It’s just such a clean style, great inks, great energy. The pages just pop. I think Gabe’s the main man on Jason Rand's new project but Eric said that Gabe is dedicated to finishing his project as well – I hope so, it’s always encouraging when an indie guy strikes artist gold. Mitchell Breitweiser’s covers are fabulous, I’m on-and-off when it comes to his interiors but hot damn - that cover for issue two was what pulled me in. Well conceived, well executed.

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Apologies in advance for any bad spelling/grammar. I'll do a check tomorrow morning.

Some of you don’t understand a very important rule. Robin does not read this site. She acknowledges its existence and read it a few times but that is it. She doesn’t want to know this much about me and she doesn’t want to know that I talk about her. So, when you see her, you can talk about the site all you want, just don’t ask her about a story pertaining to her. She doesn’t like it and I get in trouble. She’s happy to be ignorant. So, John (and anyone else), next time you’re drunk please don’t talk to her about stories from our past because she gets uncomfortable and I need to deal with it. Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

I timed my last night at Jillian’s to coincide with the beginning of RA training my senior year. By the time that night came, I was ready to get the fuck out of there. It was a shitty night, too. No other game-techs were on, the place was packed and I was busting my ass. The last day at any job is supposed to consist of 1) cake 2) slacking and 3) photocopying your ass and leaving it on your boss’ desk (cheeks spread, of course).

But not this last day. This last day was running and fixing and refunding with hardly a moment to stop for a smoke. I was stressed out, tired and just wanted to get the fuck out of there so badly. And then my cell phone rang at around eleven.

I was with Robin for about two months by this point and we were doing pretty good. One small hurdle fixed with some flowers and everything seemed to be on stable ground. So we were totally in the lovey-dovey “I’ll do anything for you” phase at that point in our relationship (which, I should add, we’re still in but after six-plus years it becomes “I’ll do anything for you provided I’m not tired and it doesn’t involve my anus”).

So, when Robin called me and told me that she got – well – a very bad phone call, I was worried a bit. Then she gave me the details and I worried a lot more.

You see, Robin had this stalking problem in college. I joke about how she stalked me (which she denies) but the fact is, she most likely had a really weird phone stalker. No matter where she lived (and she had three different rooms and phone numbers throughout the years) she would always get these phone calls with this guy breathing heavy – occasionally from the lobby of her apartment building. She went to the cops about it but they had thumbs up their asses and the calls never happened frequently enough.

Except this time the stalker talked. And pretended to be her best friend, whispering so the best friend’s boyfriend didn’t hear. And over the course of a five minute conversation, figured out that she was home alone – I wasn’t there (and mentioned me by name, I should add). When Robin began to figure out something was wrong, the questions weren’t quite right, the person on the other end hung up the phone.

I can’t say whether or not this was the person that liked to call Robin up and breathe into the phone, but that’s the first thing Robin assumed and she called me up panicking.

I told her to hold on, I’ll be right over. Walked up to the manager that was on that night and let him now that I was out. He tried to protest but I was gone. Ran all the way to Robin’s place (about a mile away, a little more) in around ten minutes (in shoes, no less).

Her upstairs neighbor was inside with her. She called him up and made him go down the fire escape because she was too afraid to go to the door. I got there and took over, her neighbor left and I thanked him for helping out. We called the cops, they filed a report and we never heard from them again.

Last day of work, stalkers and cops aside, I think that was the moment Robin and I decided, albeit silently, to set-up for the long-haul.

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Back Patting, Awakenings and 5 Nights at Jillian's: Bad Night

Thursday, August 11, 2005

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