{"id":245,"date":"2021-01-10T01:04:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T01:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/?p=245"},"modified":"2021-01-10T23:46:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T23:46:14","slug":"a-town-by-the-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/a-town-by-the-beach\/","title":{"rendered":"A Town by the Beach; or, Anon-Oedipus"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve sat down at a table with my dear friend, he doesn’t have a name. Guy I knew knew a girl who didn’t have a name either, had to pick one. He also knew a lot about this one game, town with no name. He wouldn’t stop talking about how it replicated scenes from a few different western movies. He knew so much about media, media analysis, and literary shit. Used to browse \/lit\/ a lot, and he said he was partially responsible for a lot of the charts there. He had hundreds of them on his computer, he said before he left the place. He was a really smart guy, I think he’s taking college courses on linguistics right now but a family history of alcoholism sort of fucked him over.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There’s two porcelain tea cups there on this table, stuff I took out of my mothers cupboard, steaming. The shitty wooden chairs keep grinding when I move them forward or backwards. It takes me a few minutes of chair screeching while we sip the tea awkwardly to figure out where I like my legs to rest, on account of their length. Finally, I start to talk to him.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Had a dream I was the leader of a cowboy gang, sort of like Blood Meridian.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That so?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah. I had this crew of cowboys, recently I’ve been watching a lot of anime about mercenaries and reading more cowboy literature so I think this was sort of a response. I was the leader, like I said previously. My men had an issue with me. I’d never execute hostages or shoot prisoners. And I said I didn’t know why I did it. Eventually I found a tied up hostage, and I shot him in the skull. I had one of those old cap and ball revolvers, this must’ve been before the advent of the single action and what not. They didn’t ask anything after that. I think I woke up sometime afterward. You know, I had a dream last night too. This one I was just walking around a theater, and I had to piss. I brought out a glass cup, like one my grandmother has and I kept trying to piss but the piss wouldn’t come out. And I kept pushing and then I woke up and I thought \u201coh fuck my brain is trying to stop me from pissing myself, I only have one good pair of underwear. Shit.\u201d and then I got up and used the restroom. I was supposed to go to work that day, but I was sick as shit. Sinuses were so clogged and draining I could barely feel my throat. So I called in and told my boss, he was fine.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That was this morning, right? You told me you normally go to work on Saturdays.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah that was this morning. So I just wandered around for a bit and browsed \/k\/. My favorite thread that I had a few ideas for was archived which I was kind of sad about, but it’s ok. Soon enough they’ll be another one. We haven’t had a \/k\/ sins thread in a while. I still think my favorite response to one of those was a guy who said he gave his neighbors wife his .22 mini revolver, one of those real tiny types in exchange for her guzzling an entire bottle of soda and burping on his cock. Have you ever heard of 120 days of sodom?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

No, don’t think so.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was this really fucked up novel, one of those old classics that pseuds read. I can’t remember the specifics, I never read it, but people talk about it occasionally. It wasn’t published until like 100 something years after it was written. Anyways, it was an early porn novel but it was just…completely degenerate. Sometimes I think people write their own little 120 days in those threads.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nervous chuckles. He’s doing that one tone wheeze he does when I say something stupid. Or not stupid, just something out of his expertise. I don’t like to think of it but ever since he got that ex-christian girlfriend he’s becoming something of a normie. He’s still my best friend of course, but christ if she isn’t a bad influence on him.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He slides a glass contraption across the table to me. There’s something there, in that little container. I never learned the terminology for this sort of thing. My brother would probably know the terms for it. I forgot the exact procedure, so he lights the little area under it and the water starts boiling. He tells me how to inhale again. His favorite example to use is asthma inhalers since he knows I was on one of them for most of my elementary and middle school years. It works and I can already feel my head getting a bit buzzy. I’m not sure if it’s my weight, or my height, or something about my autism but all weed ever did was make me buzzy and somewhat dizzy. I was always told I looked like I was reliving the Vietnam war when I got high, staring off into space. I think I was just thinking and that’s how it looked. Originally when I started looking into a schizophrenia diagnosis my therapist said medical marijuana might help with the lighter symptoms.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You sure I won’t be high when my parents get back?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah man, I’m sure. Even if you are you can keep your composure I think. Pass it back here.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Do you have a driver home? I can’t take you back, we have to cross that bridge and that always fucks me up.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah, I can call an uber or something.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oh yeah. Hadn’t considered that one.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I sat down and tried to think of something to talk about. Unsurprisingly I had a bit of a fog over my thoughts. Something clicked and I was yapping.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So, I have this idea for a story<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He coughed, hard this time. Must’ve burnt bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah? Tell me.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So like, it’s a subversive sci-fi cyberpunk gun-porn novel. Lots of description of machinery, realistic shooting descriptions. My years as a gun autist are gonna come in handy. It’s not just shitty baseless cyberpunk, neon lights and none of the substance. It’s a commentary. Or not a commentary. I don’t think it’s really anything but fiction, actually. I think I’m putting something into it to try and I guess get it out of me. Like vomiting. Writing is just vomiting, right?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He was laughing again. I didn’t think it was all that funny, but I hadn’t seen him in a few months so I laughed along.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah. It’s just vomiting man. Keep telling me about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alright. So the main guy, he sees shit all the time. He’s a good shot and all, but it just isn’t a good world, right? The material conditions of his world are horrible. And it’s subversive. I’ve tried to explore it in my other writings, where there’s just senseless, graphically detailed violence, but I want to go all out. There’s fat whores, businessmen full of bugs that crawl all along their machined guts. Lots of gun description. Characters who just can’t be redeemed. People from real life.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t think that’s what subversive means, it isn’t just gross-out humor but made sophisticated. You’re supposed to go against good tastes and the ideas of the day.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don’t think we have any ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He hit the bong again. Every time I heard that water boiling all it could remind me of was boiling ramen, the sort I would make back in high school when I was hungry. Every time my mom would say \u201cyou can’t have that everyday. It’s chock full of MSG\u201d or something and I’d get pissed off because she said this every time I had ramen. I’d toss all sorts of stuff into it. I would chop up onions, put in garlic powder, old bay, worcestershire pretty frequently. The bong reminded me of something else I think.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I wasn’t gonna write that stupid shit gun porn thing. I figured maybe I should vomit it all right here. There was a lot of acid reflux in my throat already, a guest of that burning feeling alongside my shitty eating habits. I had talked with this friend plenty of times before about this sort of thing. But couldn’t hurt to do it in this state. Maybe those idiot stoners had a point about emotions.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So like, have you ever watched End of Evangelion? I can tell my speech is starting to degrade a bit, bare with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You’re still using the word \u201cdegrade\u201d. I think your speech is fine.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whatever, I can tell a difference. Anyways. There’s a scene, near the end of the film. I think it’s right before the whole \u201cdisgusting\u201d bit. Anyways, Shinji is in the LCL pile. He has Rei on top of him, right and he just talks about something not being right. Eventually they are just talking while different scenes play behind them, Kaworu, the gay one is there. At one point Shinji is just laying on Rei’s lap and asking if things are going to hurt again. She assures them they will and then Kaworu says something about \u201cthe words \u201ci love you “”. And I remember the second time I watched the film I cried. Or I was close to crying at the very least. I just kept thinking about my scene. You remember my ex? Not the<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nazi sympathizer one, not the one who didn’t do anything wrong, the one who broke you. Yes I know it hasn’t been that long since I was there.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah. It felt long to me. I don’t know. For a solid few months, I think this was after the original shock period. This was the time when she and I would occasionally comment on each other’s posts asking a question or something. Things got worse around that time again.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah, I remember anon.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah. I remember I sobbed for the first time in 3 years when I saw her face one time.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Faggot.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heh. Whatever. This was when 3.0+1.0 was coming out. I remember I had forced a few of my friends to watch the entire series, end of eva(which I had already seen once) and the rebuilds(Which I had not seen) with me so we could get prepared to watch the new film sometime in January. One of their dads had a bootleg app on his TV, so a few weeks after it was in theaters I would take a bus or a train down there and over a weekend I’d stay at his house and watch the film in person, since they all lived down there and I was the only one around my area of Florida. That town was really pretty.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I could feel a few of my motor controls fading or losing their soft touch. I figured I should just resign myself to it now and I sat down on the couch.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So like, it was one of those places that doesn’t have much too it. Just a beach, a mall. A real beach town. It was beautiful though. Plenty of places like that in this state. Anyways, she lived down there too, she was friends with all of them which is how I met all of them originally.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I remember you tried to enlist me to go down there and visit her twice since you couldn’t drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Each time it didn’t work.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yeah. Shame of that, but it didn’t change anything really. But I was gonna go see her. I was gonna talk things out with her, I think my psychoanalyst said it might be good to confront the source of that unresolved pain. I was surprised that I could find a weekend to go. Took a night bus, got there sometime around 6 or 7 AM. I think I had sent her one message about me coming down and wanting to talk and she said she was fine with the concept. I was surprised she got up that early. We were still in school around then, and she was one of those people that stayed up late and wore down their bodies like old shoes. But she was there, at the bus station, phone in hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How long had it last been since you had seen her?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

About 3 years. I think I still had a baby face then. She had been there for my birthday. But she recognized me, and went up to talk to me. Took all my composure to not break down there. But we talked. I eventually returned to her house and<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The dream ended there. Or not the dream, the idea. The daydream. I wasn’t high. I was retelling a story in a daydream that itself was a story.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I missed my friend. There lay my cat, she was about 17 or 18 by now.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stuffed animal I had gotten at a secret thing that still smelled like old friend\u2019s scented candles, if I smelled it at just the right angle.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There was a constant fixation In the last few months over her. I was gonna meet her at that bus stop, we’d go back. I’d be lying there on her legs, looking up at that ceiling covered in shitty manga printouts and unfunny jokes. And I’d ask her not to kill me. I wasn’t afraid of her killing me. She may have resented me for the way I \u201cabandoned\u201d her, but she wouldn’t have killed me. I’d just keep repeating that and the scene where Asuka covered Shinji in scalding hot coffee while he yelled for her not to kill him would play in the back of my mind. I wasn’t afraid of being killed. I was afraid of being forgotten.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I didn’t want to be forgotten by her, or left in that part of her memory or not be able to know of her anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And as I lay there a scene would play in my mind of her pulling a cinderblock and crushing my skull as I put up no resistance. But she wouldn’t, who keeps a cinder block in their room. And maybe we would make out in sweat covered clothes, saltwater on the wind from that stupid beach they built their town on pouring in.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And I’d explain to her I never wanted to abandon her. There were ghosts in my dreams, waking nightmares I suppose. Old delusions and hallucinations that haunted me. But she wouldn’t understand but with the caring eyes of a mother she said she understood. There would be a tense silence for a moment as I went over to the house of the guy whose dad had a bootlegging app and I said goodbye. I would watch that film quietly with them and cheer when they would cheer and cry when they would cry at the conclusion of that series.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And I’d go to bed in an unfamiliar house and wake up early so I could get home before monday and there she would be, a specter at the bus station. Offering a kiss and goodbyes as I got onto the greyhound, filled with all those elements of humanity we’d like to forget. Here was I, one of them, forgotten. There would scarce be an exchange of words between her and I afterwards. There wouldn’t be a question of \u201cwhat are we?\u201d over text. Hurried exchanges and hasty made commitments that would damn me as a pact with the devil made afterwards. The sort of thing that wound me up in that mess a few months back, nearly a year back. That sort of comatose feeling, being broken. Your memories are slowly suppressed as you try to fight back that time in your life. Being unable to recognize yourself in a mirror, slowly convincing yourself she wasn’t real.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oedipus had me in the grasp. Why couldn’t I stop returning, those caring eyes, the agony that had been done. Those months nearly comatose afterwards. Yet I returned in some part because I couldn’t see myself not. There wasn’t a way to escape it. The bus ride home would be quiet, as I scrawled into a journal. Oedipus knew my fears, knew I was afraid of being forgotten by the nurturer. Cast out.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was gonna play out the same thing over and over. And I would imagine myself happy the whole time. And I’d come out tired of course.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I’d keep seeing things that weren’t there and hearing voices and convincing myself of nonsense in a haze. My face would be raw from a shitty shaving job and I’d write shitty novellas and my friends would have to bear with my crying.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And on that dark, dirty greyhound bus, reflected in the fogged windows I’d see another foreign face. It would be my own of course, but I’d be unable to recognize it nonetheless. I’ve been forgotten again, by myself rather than her. She was just a tabula rosa, was she not? Project yourself unto an unwilling subject. You hate yourself more than you could ever know.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Have you ever run your finger under an electrical socket, the sort that’s kind of open on a light switch?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve sat down at a table with my dear friend, he doesn’t have a name. Guy I knew knew a girl who didn’t have a name either, had to pick one. He also knew a lot about this one game, town with no name. He wouldn’t stop talking about how it replicated scenes from a … [DO NOT CLICK]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-anonymous","4":"post-245","6":"format-standard","7":"has-post-thumbnail","8":"category-fiction","9":"category-slush"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}