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Fred boarded the school bus and felt the tingling in his groin from the coke he had just snorted in detention. It was 1987, and he had the self-awareness that this day would be emblematic in his future. He would later say that the day was “characterized” as having had “a certain sentiment”, in a conversation with friends at a bar in his hometown in 1993, a conversation in which he was prematurely nostalgic, he realized as he wrote the short.

Fred’s memories folded back on themselves as he continued writing. “Fuckin’ Motorhead are speed freaks,” barked the school bus driver, and did a bump of the coke from the small yellow canister Fred gave to him. Fred’s strategy then and now was to build up a meta-elegy of these emblematic moments that cloyed impishly at his consciousness. He would write his way out of these essentially specious memories that suffused the present day reality with a doleful subtext of regret and longing.

His gambit was a constant reference back to himself, and the paucity of other material in his narrative was a willful decision. But was it? - or did he have to understand it that way; was he merely blowing on the weak flames of his own creative indigence, in a baleful attempt to give his burnt offerings a veneer of authenticity? Fred’s hope was that his fucking ‘meta-elegy’, dutifully bracketed there in strategic single quotes, pejoratively qualified, would eventual collapse into itself under the weight of its own irrelevance and implode like a tiny black hole, leaving a vacuum. This would exculpate him from his own tongue in cheek self-loathing once and for all, and would occlude any future recollection from beginning in the first place ever again. “Rod,” said Fred in a hushed voice to the school bus driver, “Can I buy any more of that coke from you today?” Once these recollections were played out, as it were, Fred imagined that he would achieve a kind of ataraxy, a suspended state of bliss maybe similar to what some chick described to him when she was meditating.

Fred, though, could not willfully short-circuit his own damaged, constipated faculty of memory, as he had already mused that night in 1993, driving drunk back to his parents' house from the bar where he had been. He fancied that he could at times, and imagined a starkly beautiful act of self-immolation. With increasing dismay over the years, though, Fred saw that this wish to jump out of his own self-referential hamster wheel was in itself just so much self-obsession, the most ultimately contemptible wish of them all, the one that liquidated any remaining pride he felt for himself. “I am a maladroit fool,” Fred thought, once later that day in 1987 while doing more blow, once drunkenly in 1993 driving home, and then that evening writing the short in 2004, dead sober.

Date Written: April 26, 2004
Author: Phony Millions
Average Vote: 4