Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Advice Column the Guy Next to Me at Rustic Coffeeshop Read

So you're the guy sitting next to me in a small, woody coffee shop in a quaint, historic town in central New Jersey on December 28th, 2014. Apart from a haunted building or two, the town is a web of gallery-restaurants with the sort of clientele that is one tapeworm away from never leaving. You live near enough that you're on a first-name basis with the staff and local dog walkers, and you seem to have read an advice column about how to write your novel in a coffeeshop. From my casual observation, here is that advice column:

-Dress like the protagonist in a film about a ragged cyberpunk genius composing his masterpiece while dealing with the transition past middle-age. George Clooney would play you after losing and gaining the same 35 lbs two dozen times.

-Be sure to listen conspicuously to an old Walkman. Rewind emphatically over the parts that resonate with you. Potentially type the lyrics, look at them and nod. The meaningful kind of nod that makes the table shake.

-Speaking of which, your grizzled, serious demeanor should say that you are listening to a grainy Tom Waits bootleg that has been stored in a vault made of chlorine tablets, but the sound emanating from your headphones should say that you are listening to "I Am the Walrus" over and over again.

-Be sure to type very loud. Like, troublingly loud. Strike the keys like hailstones falling on the windshield of dad's silver Lincoln as you and Sarah made love for the first time. Type especially loud for sentences like that one. If the guy next to you (me) is not openly staring at you, marveling at the resilience of your keypad, you don't really mean what you're saying and Random House won't return your calls.

-Throw shit around, but on a tiny scale. Your novel is a house; your phone, Walkman, and scone are power tools, and inspiration is like a wall you see sagging, so you must drop them and reconfigure immediately to nail it before it tumbles to the ground. Pretend you are The Who and this 4-foot ledge is the Waldorf-Astoria.

-Do not acknowledge any males in the room. This part is difficult, because you are sharing a small, wobbly section of countertop with specifically one male.

-Be sure to whisper lines to yourself while looking around whenever a line extends to where you are sitting. Make me, the guy next to you, imagine the parallels you are drawing between the music, your story, events in real life, and current news events.

-Make it clear that the one current event missing from these parallels is the woman who sits next to you, i.e. where I am currently seated. Katja is 27, but her soul is as old as loneliness is hungry for habitude. The contradiction between her black yoga pants and her copy of "Mona Lisa Overdrive" intrigues you, but before you can coyly inquire about her bionic implants, she slides you a note that reads, "36th dock, 9:30". You know better than to speak, but not better than to let your stare linger on her legs a second too long. You try to keep writing, but you can feel her measuring her advantages over you, so you leave. You wander past Giuseppe's Pizzeria & Art Gallery... Nigel's Dry Cleaners & Art Gallery...  Urgent Care Clinic & Art Gallery... Finally it's 9:30, and Katja is at the end of the pier, her back to you because she knows she could kill you with one perfunctory kick, and because she knows you have been thinking about her ass for the past two hours. It turns out that Katja is the young plaything of an aging reclusive billionaire known only as The Walrus, who employs naive MIT graduates too heavily in debt to ask questions as interns. He has them compress code and design bionic microchips, then selectively wipes their memories clean so all they remember is debt, coding, and some residual Protestant work ethic instilled by their upbringing. Before you could ask what they were building, Katja leans in and bites your lower lip, firm yet playful. Her body welcomes you like an indebted stranger, giving you what you desperately want without granting any sense of victory. Once your cock is fully invested but not spent, the voice of The Walrus speaks in your mind, revealing his grand design. Katja's sexual appetite contains enough RAM for The Walrus' personality to thrive as an AI, and they needed a compatibly sexually frustrated body to serve as a host for the transfer. Your body. The consciousness of The Walrus usurps your own, and you begin to eagerly smear Katja's vaginal secretions, enhanced with millions of microchips, all over yourself. They are burrowing into your skin, and in the final twilight of your sentience, you hear "coo coo ca-choop”.

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