The Peanut Gallery – James

I grow tired. Seriously. I’m getting to the point where I need a break from writing. November is almost over, two months of the Moose left, eight days of NaNoWriMoing left. Then I’m not going to write anything for like a week. I’m just burning out. The novel’s falling apart, I expected that to happen. I deviated from the original course, inserted entire characters, changed around the ending – so many threads I tried to hold onto but lost – it’s becoming obvious that I’m doing a fair amount of explaining why I’m deviating from the planned course, my character’s voice got really big all of a sudden. In case you’re one of the poor bastards reading this and you have no idea what’s going on lately – he actually loves her, you see, but he can never fess up to it – that, in turn, is his own complex. He has his own way of keeping her close and that’s by introducing problems into his life that cause him to delay what her considers to be his grand plan which is, admittedly, also very weak right now. It’s buried there; it’ll come out more in the second draft. But I think it’s shaping up to be a pretty decent first draft, especially since I’ll have written it in a month. It’s missing a lot, though – a lot of things didn’t come across the way I wanted them to because I’m just writing it too damn fast. I look back at some of the language and I cringe, as well, much like when I look back at earlier MITC stories. It’s moving along, though – moving along. I just want it all to end.

On a different note I got invited to do a back-up story in someone’s soon to be released mini-series. I don’t want to talk about it yet because I still need to pitch some ideas, get the thing drawn and the book still needs to actually be printed. I’m just excited because this is the first time someone invited me to do something for their book without me soliciting them first or without them asking for money. And do you know why? Because I’m on course to right 240,000 words this year between this website and the NaNo, bitch! And, like, 130,000 of those words are good!

Plus I’m free advertising, just by being a loud-mouthed son-of-a-bitch. My buddy Jacob Warrenfeltz from the DC Conspiracy is drawing it as of now.
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I’m a pretty accepting guy. I’ve had friends from all walks of life – every religion, lifestyle, ethnicity and economic background. I even had some asshole friends although they’re special circumstances. But I never really discriminate – I give everyone a fair shake. Robin used to be amazed about how I would be able to walk from point A to point B on campus and not only say “hey” to more than 50% of the people we passed but how the demographic would vary from Goths to athletes to Muslims to Orthodox Jews. And the thing is, I just liked all of them – I never became friendly with someone because I felt like I had to, I became friendly with people because I liked them.

Except James. I became friendly with James because when he finally flipped out and shot up our school I wanted him to spare me.

Again – I don’t discriminate based on physical appearances. James was the guy that when you looked at his picture in the yearbook you instantly think Columbine. Long greasy black hair, oily skin, always wore dirty black clothes (a bit on the rank side) and a worn and tattered black trench-coat. Again, nothing wrong with that if that’s your thing. But when you couple it with the fact that he was fucking nuts – it was a bit scary.

He was probably a couple of fries short of the Happy Meal, that’s for sure. Stared into space a lot, didn’t comprehend much, occasionally decided to just downright ignore you and pretend you didn’t exist. He’d have this violent streak that would come out of left-field. Like when I went to a Depeche Mode concert junior year and decided to tell him I was going. He decided to tell me that he hopes their plane crashes because ever since they went mainstream all he can think about is their burning flesh.

Melodramatic, true. Fucking nuts, also true.

When I saw him in class the week after the concert he’d ask me “So. How was the fucking concert?” in such a way you would swear that me going to the concert was the equivalent (if not worse) of me anally raping his dog.

But I kept him close, I was always nice to him – invited him into our study groups despite the protests from everyone else (even though he never really showed up). When he did it was never fun, he’d hang over your shoulder and watch how you did the work, occasionally asking questions and melting your face off with his corrosive breath of death.

I didn’t like him, didn’t trust him and was honestly scared of him. But, I had to see him almost everyday (same major) and knew that when he flipped out and killed people there was a good chance it would be in one of my classes. I had this whole scenario in my head that consisted of him brandishing Uzis and a fucking katana, taking out my Fluid Dynamics class, turning to me and saying, “It’s finished” before blowing his fucking brains out. And as I stood there amidst the bullet-ridden bodies of my friends, I thank God for making me so tolerable of that greasy freak of nature, go home and get pity-sex from my lady.