“You’re in high school again. It’s 3:03, and you’re waiting for the bus. Two kids are pummeling each other about twenty feet away. What do you do?” He looking at me like he could eat my brain. Only way I could describe it.

I stall; eyeballs roll around my head as they flit from each ceiling tiles to the next. “Are you serious, man?”

It sounds like someone has sent an electric current through his vocal chords when he opens his mouth again. The whine of an electric motor. Charging. Charging. Zap!

Louder now: “While you’re pussyfooting around, kid’s got the other kid on the ground. He straddled his prey with his bony little grade school knees, and now he’s smashing his victims face in the dirt. What do you do?” He’s grave, like he’s some sort of tin cup prophet—get down and dirty because it’s not pretty and clean. He thinks he’s anti success. You know, in the void and all that stuff.

“Well,” I say in between slurping my soda. Little bubbles jump up and down my throat. I cough. “I’d go home after doing not a goddamn thing. And then I’d spin a little gold into the fact that I’m a lazy ass, and to do that I’d make real deep philosophical observations about it, then annoy people who just want to go and get a damn soda, you stupid phony sonuvabitch.”

A/N For all those phonies out there. I keep feeling the urge to explain these things, but that'd be going against the whole point of this. Hopefully the central...theme?... is understandable. Ah well. Hope you guys are having a good week. TGIF...tomorrow. haha