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          A             "French Writer Guys"           aNAda #36   A
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     A                by He Talks To Hamsters          04/07/00         A
 A                                                                          A
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        We were sitting in lawn chairs on the roof of a gynecology clinic,
 drinking some kind of east-Mongolian grain alcohol made out of rabbits'
 feet, talking about existence.

        "Life sucks," I told my best friend Cory.

        "You gotta think like those crazy French writer guys," he told me.  I
 didn't understand.

        "What do you mean?" I asked him.

        "Well," Cory said, "some people believe that who we are determines
 our actions.  People from that school of thought would look at someone who
 videotapes himself giving enemas to elderly 82-year-old former news anchor-
 women with 3 nipples, and say "That guy is FUCKED up!"

        "But," he continued, "there are others who are more enlightened and
 believe that our actions define who we are."

        "So, um," I ventured, "When I took too much acid and tried to slit my
 wrists with scissors and screamed at everybody for 7 hours..."

        "You were being a dick head," he told me. "But it's over now, and you
 gotta get over it.  You should at least start talking to everybody.  They
 miss you."

        "I miss my homeys," I told him.  "It's hard.  Everything is hard.  I
 feel like the most selfish person in the world.  I feel like I'm ruining my
 family.  I feel like I'm rotting inside like a bad orange."

        "You gotta stop thinking about the past and the future and everything
 so much.  It's paralyzing you, man.  You gotta roll with the punches, dude."

        It got blurry after that, but only for a moment, like in those
 British DJ rave songs when a keyboard plays a really long note right before
 all that crazy drum machine stuff.  I was sitting in a 1975 Chevy Nova.  It
 was raining out.  I was in the back seat.  The rain hit the car like a
 Spanish xylophone player.  Somewhere in my head, someone was playing a blues
 song.  No one else could hear it.  It was 4 years ago.  Cory was in the
 front seat fighting with his ex-girlfriend over the plot to a porno movie.
 I was wondering how I got off the roof of the gynecology building and into
 the past. 

        "You were thinking too much."  It was Cory.  He turned around so I
 could see him.  "You gotta stop doing that.  You're at the place where you
 used to be happy."

        "Yeh.."  That's all I could say.  "Could I stay here?" I asked him.
 "I remember this place.  This was fun."

        "Sure man, no problem," he told me.  We got out of the car and sat
 out in the rain.  Cory and his ex-girlfriend told me the story of how they
 got stopped by mall-security guards after the condoms they bought set off
 the alarm in a record store.  I closed my eyes and listened to the rain.
 When I opened them I was sitting in a canoe, floating down a river of vomit
 and bad wedding speeches.  The canoe was headed towards a waterfall that
 dropped into a glass of poisonous spiders and day-old vaginal fluid.  Inside
 the canoe was a man in a suit who worked for all the oil-companies in the
 world.

        "Look," he began to tell me, "Your life's been real cutting edge."

        "Um dude, I live with my parents," I told him.

        "Yeah I know, it gives it that retro intensity we've been looking
 for.  Trust me," he replied.  "Anyways, we want to sell the rights to MTV.
 We'll develop it into a show about a bike messenger who lives with a
 culturally diverse, all-white cast of 20-somethings who are in a band and
 own a coffee shop and see dead people."

        "Um.. I don't have a job," I told him, "and I don't own a bike, and I
 don't think I'd ever be a bike messenger."

        "Don't worry about that.  That stuff is for the writers to stew
 over," he told me.  He handed me a contract, which would sign away the
 rights to my existence.  "Look, you sign this and everything goes away.  The
 spiders, the vomit, the vaginal fluid.  It all goes away.  Hurry up pal, MTV
 is waiting."  The canoe was almost over the edge of the waterfall.  The
 sound of rushing vomit was getting louder.  Bad wedding jokes permeated my
 brain.

        "Take my wife... please..."  It was the river.  We were over the
 precipice, plunging toward the glass of spiders.

        "I'm not a bad person," I said out loud, "I'm not.  I'm lazy and
 selfish and self-absorbed but I've just been sad.  It hurt sometimes.  But I
 can get happy.  It's something I can find.  I gotta change a little but it's
 just things to do.  It's things I can do.  I can."

        The roaring of the vomit stopped.  I was at an intersection on the
 way to school.  I crossed the street, ducked into a store and bought some
 smokes.  Then I went on my way.


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 {  (c)2000 aNAda e'zine *            * aNAda036 * by He Talks To Hamsters  }
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