Monday, June 01, 2009

This was the e-mail I was going to send to Douglas Coupland

I want to be a stalker.

I am not hungry yet, so I am not going to wake up and get out of bed. Getting up and going out to eat was my only plan for today. But since I am not hungry I can't decide what I want.

I was thinking about going somewhere where they make subs. I would, but I have been eating sandwiches all week.

I get home from work and slap together turkey and ham and throw on some bell pepper and wilted salad mix for lettuce. I drown the bread roll in mustard and scarf down on Frito's. I eat late at night after getting off work. I eat so much that I am not hungry even 12 hours later.

The only good thing about leaving the house to eat would be the chance to real life stalk some one.

She is young, hip, and does drugs. She is still so young and hip that listing her drinking accomplishments from the previous night can sound rebellious.

I just took a shower. I am not hip, cool or beautiful.But I could still go down to her work and talk to her. But if I did I would talk to her in the third person like she was not there. I would stare off at the corner of her face instead of looking her in the eye. That way I could be a story for her to talk about. I would exist only as someone she could make fun of to her friends.

It would be a relief not to be seen as a person.

I would just be some old creeper. A stalker that saw her at work and tried hitting on her. A loser with no money. The kind of guy who spends his last 10 dollars to "treat" himself to lunch on his day off. The kind of loser who grabbed his bus fare from his change jar. A loser who winces in pain when he walks in the shop from his ingrown toe because he can't afford to see the doctor so the doctor can tell him, "he's going to die soon."

Isn’t it time to die yet? It should be. I wouldn't mind. My only concern is that I bought a Mach 3 razor and none of the replacement cartridges that I own fit the new razor, so now I have to go back to work without my receipt and try to convince them that I need a different razor and that I am not stealing.


Speaking of dying.

I am just going to wait. Wait for my big toe to fall off. Maybe when I get it amputated I could start to date some of the weird fetish girls who dig men with amputations. I could join a support group to meet them. I could apply to have my psychologist recommend that surgery is the only option. That since I was a child I never felt "whole" with my big toe attached to me. I need to have the damn thing cut off. What I need are the stares of people as I walk down the grocery aisle in flip flops "sans" big toe. At least then I will have an identity.

Maybe it won't be the identity I wanted. But all I ever wanted to be is uppercase "Douche Bag" a self aware bro' that quotes the history of Rome.

I am not that guy. Though I am overly self aware. I have to be. I am slowing disappearing. I am going into the void where fat people live. People avoid eye contact with fat people because they think fat people are so ashamed of themselves that they'd prefer it if people pretended they did not exist. Only not existing is the one thing fat people and losers are afraid of.

Poor me. Old, fat, and broke. I am irrelevant. People stumble over me on the bus. They don't see me till it's too late. Then they half apologize. They throw a few words in my direction like an after thought. Like I was a ghost or shadow of a memory they instantly forgot as they embarked on the bus and looked for a place to sit.

The couple can't remember tripping over me. They only think of themselves. They lace their arms around one another and then the boy lets his fingers wander around her leg. He carelessly traces his fingers on my knee. It never registers to him that he is feeling me up. I can't move much. I can only squirm a little. I try to get out of the way and let the lovers go at each other. But I am blocked in the seat with them.

I would like to be someone different. But I don't enjoy Halloween. I can never get over the fact that it's all made up.

I only get to be what I am. An amorphous mass. A bag of gelatin. A giant puss bag filled with smelly oil. My mode of locomotion is like that of an amoeba. Instinctual. I wander pointlessly, extending my Amoeba arms outward.

I am just like the character of Roger in the Douglas Coupland book The Gum Thief.

Only I don't have a novel in me like the main character does. And I never had a career to goof up. I don't have a redemptive bone in my body. But at least I won't drink myself into oblivion like Roger. I have a liver problem, remember?

In the novel Douglas talks about change and how nobody ever really changes. I think that is true. I am never going to change. All I am going to do is think about changing, because for some reason thinking is enough "doing" for me.

In the novel one of the characters sends an e-mail. The e-mail address is real. I sent an e-mail to the address and my e-mail did not come back as "unknown" or whatever e-mails do when you send them to a fake addresses. So I assume the address is real. I wrote a message that I wasn't going to write anything.

I did not write anything because I was at work. My break was over so I stopped reading the novel and started writing a text e-mail. I wanted to send something out fast before my walk from the break room to the sales floor of the grocery store. It was a moment right of one of Coupland's own novels. A guy at a McJob who yearns for something "more" worries that his break time is being monitored and rushes to send a few words to his idol via an e-mail address from a novel just to see if the idol would get the e-mail and respond back.

Would it have helped if I had sent this blog post to Douglas? Maybe. Then maybe we could have become friends after I shared with him how I was one of the first 100 hundred people to sign up and follow his twitter.

Nah, I doubt it.


2 comments:

midwest woman said...

the flaw in your arguement that you can only be what you are is nothing is stagnant in the physical world. On a very basic level our molecular structure is constantly changing and adapting to its enviroment. To say you are what you are only means at a very specific point in time. Nothing remains stationary..we are compelled by our nature to change and adapt. The fact we can't recognize it does not negate or deny the process only our ability to utilize it.
This is a philisophical as I get...go UFO!!!!

Romius T. said...

I think I wrote the the constipated life as an answer to your comment...lol. I suppose we change, i mean i am no longer a boy..etc. but to put it in terms you might accept...my destiny lies more toward failure than success...