wr_post14:subj_fict

URBAN ANTHRO: KNOW YOUR 'FUCKER'

when you're in love, it shows. you glow, i guess, but glow isn't really the word. you exude the inner peace that having someone to confide in grants you. there's a spring in your step (an expression that must (and here i have chosen my words insensitively) sit funny with the paraplegic. can one have a spring in ones' roll? a question for another time). there are those who will resent your newfound or longstanding happiness and in turn find you absolutely repulsive. you must, above all things, ignore this jealousy. it can ruin a relationship; make you question your motives; give you a repulsion towards yourself, and by extension, the one(s) you love. instead, as with any pack animal (and humans are most certainly pack animals), you must establish dominance. there is nothing wrong with your behaviour. you are entitled a healthy amount of pride in finding that someone who does it for/to/with you.

begin your training regimen by establishing boundaries. to truly instill a sense of inferiority in the unlucky few, for simplicity's sake we'll call them 'losers,' who cannot adapt to the necessities of reproduction and subsequently, the passing on of ones' genes (and in many cases, jeans), you must catch them out of their element and repeatedly emphasize their aloofness. invite your single friends out to bars and doubles tennis tournaments. next, startle them with gestures that emphasize your superiority. grab a sensitive area on your significant other's person while grunting loudly. proffer it to your single friend. when they make to accept the gesture, strike swiftly. it is crucial that they perceive no hesitation on your part.

repeat as necessary.

when they are sufficiently demoralized, you may reward them in some small way. offer to hook them up with another single friend. so that they don't react too strongly to this gesture, it is important to temper it with characterizations of their attire, build or personality as undesirable.

remember, above all else, that you are better than they are: more virile and lithe; sexier. it is entirely acceptable to goad them into self-mutilation. it will indicate that they have accepted their role in the pack.

kill yourself.

wr_post13:subj_fict

OH, HENRY!

Henry Benson.
Hank to his friends...if he'd had any.


So already, we've established Hank as an outsider. He probably could've had friends if he weren't so particular about the friends he (would've) kept. He worked in finances and made enough money to retain a substantially well-endowed girl. He'd never tried the gay thing, he was just waiting for the one, as they say. Generally reserved was he in two words. Sure, he went out on weekends and got drunk and social, but he'd never felt the need to take anyone back to his rat's nest. He wasn't a pack rat, per se, just disorganized. He kept ill-kept records on potential terrorists, do-badders in his neighborhood and people who had pissed him off in one way or another. They occupied the rooms Hank didn't and waited for their date in court.

Late in the afternoon, one August day, he slit both wrists and died on the phone with his grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer's. She told the rest of the family that he had decided to move to Swaziland. No one looked into it and his firm replaced him.

wr_post07:subj_fict

FADING EMBERS

She used to greet him as he'd walk in the door. And it used to perk him up. No matter how hard the day had been she would be waiting for him. Now when he came home, he seldom saw her before he was back out the door to the bar. He had turned to drinking shortly after her accident. It was no one's fault really. But he blamed himself. She wasn't the same anymore. She didn't glow with the same passion anymore.
One night he came back to find her sitting in the kitchen. He couldn't bear to look at her. He knew how she disapproved, but damnit, it wasn't fair.
"Why did it have to be this way?" he shouted. No response. "The least you could do is talk to me!" he grabbed her and wrestled her to the floor. "WHY???!?! Having you like this is all the more frustrating because it’s a constant reminder of what you once were. The vibrant self is gone. NO!" he popped the lid off the bottle he had in his coat pocket and took a swig to help swallow the pills. "It’ll be over soon,” he whispered. As his muscles clenched he thought of all the times they had had together. And so it goes sometimes. Love is temporary. And we either learn to cope or we crack under the tremendous weight of it all. He was just a man alone in this world. In this world that has no place for a man...and his toaster.

wr_post02:subj_fict

SMALL WORLD, AIN'T IT?

Tony worked in an office processing forms. He picked them up from Jake and then sorted them by urgency, subject matter and product code to be sent on to Mike and Sheila respectively. One day instead of reading the forms and sorting them, he jumped out the window of his 22nd floor office. Later that day, Sheila got word of the note on his desk. Looking back she could see the signs. She didn't know why, but she felt somehow responsible. So she quit, changed her name, got a new job and pretended her old life had never existed. Mike never actually spoke to Tony. He had a germ phobia and would only receive the forms through inter-office mail and only handle them once they'd met his exacting standards for cleanliness. Tony's death had no effect on Mike, who assumed it was all the work of germs. Jake hired a replacement the next week. Her name was Cindy, a young girl out of college who he hired mainly for looks. He began an affair with her and one day during a rendezvous in the conference room he called her "Tony." Things were awkward from that point on and Jake fired Cindy rather than deal with seeing her in the halls. He cut out Tony's position in the office infrastructure and assumed the responsibilities of Sheila, who's replacement had refused to work with Mike on the grounds that he often sent her emails critiquing her hygeine. With less people on the payroll, numbers began to move out of the red. The company was purchased by a conglomerate and the work was outsourced to the Dallas office. Mike moved back in with his mother and took up coin collecting (an odd hobby considering the number of unwashed hands such old coins must have come in contact with). Jake stayed home with the kids and watched his wife's crafts shop blossom into a successful chain. He envied her. When his company had begun to succeed, they gave him the axe. He had thought about killing her. Make it look like suicide and take over the crafts game. The only thing stopping him was a strong distaste for crafts. He began putting out ads for a nanny in the hopes that he'd find a cute little thing to remind him of Cindy. He coached his daughter's softball team and flirted shamelessly with the young mothers. One night he was beaten senseless by a father who happened to be in earshot. His wife divorced him and took the kids. He moved to Illinois and got a job at the Kinko's. His shift manager looked like an old co-worker, but that's too contrived. Sheila was actually in Ohio working as a waitress. Mike tried to keep in touch with people, but he didn't have their new addresses. His life came to a fitting close when he contracted West Nile at the age of 34. His dying words were, "Germs! The only way around them is to nuke the whole damn world!" Jake's wife, Olivia, read about it in the obituaries, but the name had no significance to her. She married a guy named Terry, the regional manager of her Midwest offices. Terry secretly hated kids and tried several times to asphyxiate them in the garage. Sheila, who now went by Trisha, moved in with another waitress and they moved to Toronto to start a bed and breakfast. While making copies one day, Jake met a casting director and landed his first acting part as "Bus Driver #2" in a low-budget porn. Terry took Olivia on a vacation for their one-year anniversary to Trisha's B&B and their first night there, they rented the porn that Jake was in. It was a bit part and Olivia didn't even recognize him, but the sequence of events leading up to that moment was altogether too strange and the world abrubtly ended.