All Love Stories Are Actually Ghost Stories

I don't believe in ghosts, at least not what others might think of as ghosts. The only time I ever believed in ghosts was when I was little, I would have this dream where a little girl would be standing in our living room pounding on our front door. She would be dressed in these old, little house on the prairie-esque pajamas and would be screaming and pounding on our front door. My whole family would walk out and see her, my step dad, being the brave one, would step over to the girl and gently open the door. We wouldn't see her run out, but we would hear her little feet crunch quickly in the snow through the darkness that in dreams seems incredibly more opaque than real darkness. Keep in mind this is a dream and it happened often. No one else in my family had the same dream and eventually I just stopped having the dream altogether, though I never forgot it. When I grew older I realized that I don't believe in ghosts, but the power of unconscious imagination. We are so unaware at our own subconsciousness' ability to pierce our view of reality that we believe that it can only be ghosts, or some other inexpiable thing. I understand many people might disagree because they believe in ghosts and nothing can shake them of that, I can respect that and I do respect that. I just don't believe in those kinds of ghosts, what I do believe in though, is not too far off the mark of what a ghost is to some people. Let me explain:

I believe in the past manifesting itself into a physical presence that haunts you. This could be via dreams, or dejavu, or what we interpret as ghosts, or the last few unfiltered thoughts we have before we fall asleep. These are the most frequent for me. These instances, when you're faced with fairly large periods of time with no access to distraction. This could be when you're in the shower, before you fall asleep, just zoning out, et al. In the response to potential boredom the inner most parts of your mind will often project these memories in a mad dash effort to distract you. Often these memories have to be traumatic enough to catch your attention, but not so traumatic that it's uncovering things that have been buried in your mind forever. For example, moments before I fall asleep or into prolonged awake unconsciousness, instead of getting memories of the few and far between near death experiences I've had in life, I get ex girlfriends. Floods of memories of ex girlfriends. Generally, if I'm not sleeping or about to sleep I snap myself out of it, but it's usually too late; the damage, the haunting, has already been done.

Each of the three of my former relationships ended in something terrible I did, as well as several terrible things that I did in the course of them. When I'm bored and rely totally on my subconscious to kick in the way I trained it to, it usually gives me cut scenes of me cheating on them, saying something terrible and callous, lying through my teeth, all in an effort to leave one and get with another. All the times I said I love you dashed against the ground as I crash and burn the relationship in a maddening attempt to get out of it without being honest with myself. This is coupled with the total reality of these people in my day to day life. I may see them across the room at parties, catch glimpses of them on social media or via mutual friends. In the sense that I completely avoid contact with them (and they with me) it is like these three women are ghosts; they haunt my subconscious and appear in subtle uncommunicative ways in my day to day life. They are constant reminders of  my deepest human failures and they are completely unavoidable. I know this because two of them don't even live in the same state as me and yet they seem so much closer, if not in tangible proximity, then in a realm that would put any seance to shame.

In many traditional ghost stories, the reason for the lingering spirit is that it has some unfinished business that is keeping it from transcending to wherever the hell ghosts go. This could mean they need to pass on some warning, or expose who really stole the family jewels, or restore honor to themselves or others, or be a better parent or whatever. Yet it seems my experience with ghosts are the ones that Scrooge encounters in a Christmas Carol. These ghosts do not have any duty to themselves, but rather a duty to expose other's flaws in some existential way and these ghosts don't go away, but are instead sentinels, keeping tabs on whether you're living the life you promised that you would as you got on your knees and sobbed and begged a second chance for. In this way, those that are haunting me are saving me from this selfish condition I've been living in, showing me that I was not born doomed to this miserable and insatiable selfishness, but that I have a means of choosing to live a different and responsible way. In other words every time I accidentally see or think about one of my ex girlfriends, it is their way, my own mind's way, of showing me my grave; cold, dark and alone, then pointing me down the right path.

And of course they don't know this or do this willingly, I'm fairly certain they all hate me and would not like to think of themselves helping me in anyway. I have nothing, but immense respect for my ex girlfriends, they are all amazing people and not one of them deserved to be treated the way I treated them. On that note, Scrooge's life was made all the better on the backs of the people he screwed over. This is something I can choose to dwell on or, as I prefer, cower in fear of.
Whew.

Thanks for Listening,
Kyle

On the Ethical Question of Zoos

Most people who know me know that I have a very good, near impeccable memory of events (as opposed to dates or more trivia type of memory i.e. I would be terrible at jeopardy). This is not me simply patting myself on the back or trying to balance modesty with honesty. It is a cold fact that my memory is great. For example, I remember this from when I was very, very little: when I learned that we, as humans, should not drink out of dirty glasses after I had poured milk into a glass previously used for orange juice, the small remnant of pulp and saliva mixed with the milk making a concoction that makes me skeptical of both of these beverages even today. This is the sort of memory that we don't recall, but that we wonder about every time our stomach lurches when we see unclean glasses. The point of all this is to build credibility when I describe my first visit to the zoo, which might be seen by some as a "there is no way you could have known that as a child" moment or a "that's just hindsight" moment more specifically. Regardless:

I remember my first visit to the zoo, when it was just my mother and I. I remember the car ride being longer than it actually was and being incredibly excited to see "the animals", which I thought would all just be gallivanting around main walkways for me to pet and talk to and eventually take home. In the car I was drawing what probably looked like sad attempts at drawing people in Easter Bunny costumes, but to me was every animal the zoo would have to offer. I also distinctly remember the drawing making me sick and having to stop at a Burger King to walk around and also having to stop drawing for the remainder of the car ride, this again is only for credibility purpose. When at the zoo, I actually don't remember seeing too many animals, I remember the Tiger, the lions, the otters (who so appealed to my childlike sense of wonder I was convinced had cognizance beyond what people attributed to them), the elephants and of course, my favorite, the Rhino (the capitalization is actually a typo, but I'm leaving it, because I was that impressed by rhinos). My mom had to drag me away from the rhino exhibit, I remember her only appeal that eventually worked was telling me that the other animals would be sad if I didn't see them too. Curses mom, you had to appeal to pity. I remember feeling so much joy, I remember having felt like I learned a lot, but it is impossible to discern exactly what I learned now and I remember being sort of shocked that animals were there, in front of my face...walking around.

What I don't remember is sadness. I don't remember being upset that the animals were in pens or cages or "exhibits". Yesterday at work I was discussing zoos with some coworkers, one was named Liz, which I say now only because of her insistence that I not refer to her as an "unnamed coworker" when writing this. Her argument was the appeal to pity, one that I am so prone to fall victim to. She is disgusted with the institution of zoos, not that they house rescued animals, that's fine, but that they breed animals for the soul and solitary reason of being looked at in a cage, for mere entertainment. And please, when I say appeal to pity I do not mean that it was some half caste argument that only tried to evoke feelings, her argument was based in fact, that animals are bred and born in the zoo, to exist in the zoo and live their lives for our pleasure, education and entertainment, which is unfair and therefore should factually appeal to our emotional side, spurring us to hate zoos. 

And I think it's a fair point, one that another unnamed coworker and I could not seem to dissuade her of. Not for lack of trying either, we brought up article after argument after article after google search. For example, it is true that tigers in the wild have problems with inbreeding due to humans destroying all of their habitats, in order to try and remedy this problem there is a complex and massive global network of zoos breeding tigers in order to add variety to the gene pool and subsequently stabilize the tiger population. The same is true for other endangered or ecologically vulnerable species such as rhinos, polar bears and elephants. Apparently though, according to Liz, this is not worth the animal living life in captivity, which is a hard viewpoint to change. Should humans be playing God and raising animals for purposes they see as important?

My answer is still yes. Although in an idea world I would like to see massive ecological reform, habitat rehabilitation and people letting tigers exist naturally in the wild, it is simply not happening. The fact is we would lose the entire population of tigers if the zoo did not launch such expansive measures to ensure their continued survival. I am of the firm belief that if one part of the human population is being so disgustingly reckless to have endangered or eliminated the existence of an animal, it is the ethical and moral responsibility of other sectors of the human population to, in an act of accountability, do everything in its power to stop or reverse any process or action that led to this.

IN SHORT: I am willing to posit that the life of a tiger in a rapidly declining environment, a life wrought with starvation and lack of available mates and shelter, in other words a life devoid of food, sex and shelter, is worse - significantly, irrevocably, horrifically worse - than an artificial life in which all of these necessities exist. Is this argument enough to dissuade Mrs. Elizabeth George? Probably not, but it isn't for her lack of reason, it is in fact because she is a kind person that simply wants the best for animals and people alike and no one can blame anyone for such a desire.

ASIDE: The reason for the story in the beginning is because I want everyone to know that 1) I am an avid animal lover 2) I have sympathy for the appeal to pity as evidenced by my mother's ability to use it against me at the rhino exhibit and 3) I thought it was kind of cute and memories always help me get started with these things. My reasons for explaining the reason behind the story in the beginning are fare more numerous, but include my wanting everyone to see this piece as more of an argument than an opportunity to talk about myself. Which I am simply doing now. Without further adieu, here is an awe inspiring picture of a tiger: 

Wow.

Sources can be viewed by clicking linked text or alternatively clicking the below links: 

http://www.futurity.org/inbreeding-threatens-indias-wild-tigers/

https://www.zsl.org/education/the-modern-zoo/how-breeding-programmes-work,100,AR.html

Thanks for Listening!

Kyle   

The Hardest Prompt

I usually come up for ideas about what to write about in the shower. This is mostly because there is nothing to do in the shower and for some reason pure, disciplined thinking is easier to do. So a couple of showers ago I got it into my head that I wanted to write something about suicide. I had planned it out, I'd write about people who've had an impact on me, who have also committed suicide and then, through the course of writing, get to some higher understanding of the matter. 

Because this is the way it works. For me. I'm sure it's very different for other people, but I rarely ever have the conclusion already hammered out. Usually I just regale a story and via writing reflect on the answer. Usually writing the experience or story down is a good way to organize my thoughts and from organized thoughts, opinions are born. This is not new, any high school student who has had similar language arts assignments could tell you this, but my reason for telling you is that suicide, I've discovered, is an entirely different animal. 

"Suicide is a hard line subject" "suicide is difficult to write about because..." "my first experience with suicide". These are my first three attempts at writing about the subject. Each individual premise when looked at as an introductory sentence seems far too juvenile to breach anything complex or lead me to anything profound, but conversely each premise is not necessarily a bad thing to write about. Suicide is a hard line subject because you have the ability to speak so juvenile about it that you could cross any number of lines that might speak to you as a person without you even knowing it. Suicide is difficult to write about (beside the obvious) because those of us who have never been so close to it get lost in trying to capture and describe the feelings associated with it and ultimately just end up talking about ourselves.

My own first hand experience with suicide is when my uncle committed suicide when I was in the 7th grade, it is in fact so hazy of a memory that the only thing I remember concretely is coming home from the funeral and just pacing around my room looking for something. I was not sure what I was looking for even at the time, thinking back I might just have been looking for something to do to distract me from the awkward sadness that I seemed to so bluntly be feeling, regardless I never found anything and the memory just stopped like someone cut the film strip to it. I remember crying too, but mostly not knowing what to feel, so just feeling awkward, then guilty because I thought I wasn't supposed to feel that.  

A lot of famous people who had an effect on my life also committed suicide. I made it through high school's crippling phase of self consciousness by listening to Kurt Cobain wail about teen apathy. I never really came to be an art lover, but there was something that always touched me about Van Gogh. I've never been able to read Hemingway without feeling a deep pang of relevance in my life, a feeling that is trumped only now by David Foster Wallace, who also killed himself. I actually don't know if this constitutes as a lot, but it seems like it is compared to the number of famous individuals that did not commit suicide.

Over the span of my life I've met so many feelings in the face of suicide. I've seen guilt that is so inconsolable that every attempt to do so seems too morbidly bad to work. I've seen indifference whether genuine or not didn't matter because I've seen indifference played as genuine, but coming off as not as well as the other way around. I've seen sadness too, but that goes without saying. 

What I've never known, is how to feel about suicide. I don't think anyone sits down and decides how to feel, I understand that's not how it works. But then, I've only ever felt kind of awkward around it because it didn't make me sad. I even tried to feel sad. It's not like I didn't miss my uncle or feel bad for my step dad or feel a certain measure of pain at the loss, but the suicide itself was like something else, something that just hovered over everything. In other words I was sad my uncle died, but the fact that it was suicide did not make me any more or less sad. Try as I might I couldn't convert the sadness of the loss into the sadness over the suicide. 

This is essentially why writing about suicide almost seems like a frivolous task now, simply because I can't think my way into feeling a certain way like I can about freedom of speech or life after college. I wish I could write to David Foster Wallace and tell him thanks for everything, I wish I could tell my uncle that I never stopped praying for him and I think if he were alive right now we would have known each other better. But for now, writing these things down is just organizing them, next time I think about suicide I'll probably reread this and just kind of feel better.

      

Thanks for Listening

Truly,

Kyle

I Love You Like The IRS Loves...

Ours is a thoughtless love.

I love you like a fat man working in internal revenue loves cake, not for any stereotypical reason having to do with his weight, but because the presence of cake means a distraction from the usual routine that so fails to distract him from his self confidence issues. Our love is not warm enough to heat the overly air conditioned confined spaces of the office, but it is enough to sustain you like the overabundance of coffee you drink, partially to stay awake, but mostly to warm up. 

Our love requires zero thought processes, it is done day in and day out like a typical 9 to 5 job that has been worked for more years than you would care to celebrate with an anniversary. It's thoughtlessness and repetition are not genetic or predetermined or even deliberate, but rather practiced, not rehearsed, but practiced. Not like practicing hockey or baseball or the "I think I can, I think I can" of childhood practicing to get better, but more like the way we've gotten better at standing on two feet because we've done it all our lives and, excepting any tragic circumstances, will continue to do for some time. 

"This is what's wrong with America" they'll think and say and blog about. They'll think our love is the reason for the divorce rate because it doesn't have any thought behind it, because to them, the lack of consideration seems wrong. But they're wrong. Divorce and "what's wrong with America" and marital affairs are all for the adventurous. It's for the people who consider love and marriage and relationships a toy that can be broken. It's for people who consider their love at all. And maybe we thought about it in the beginning, we questioned why it was there and what it's purpose was, where we were going, where were we going, so many W's with question marks. But that time is long gone.

When we tell each other we love one another it is so automatic it could potentially be delivered by a telephone operator through static cracking lines twice a day like abandon machine operated church bells keeping the neighborhood awake and giving them the feeling of guilt despite knowing that the church is empty and even if they wanted to could not attend. Could not show up early to and take their seats at the front row out of some unconscious desire to fit in that these types of people have felt since grade school. This is our love. It is not our conscious decision to sit in the back of the classroom so we can goof of nor is it our conscious decision to sit in the front to the classroom to better take notes, but rather a built in seating chart that has been constructed over the course of years.

Years of waking up at the same time every single day to do the same things every day to meet the same people everyday to eat and drink the same things everyday to fall asleep next to the same person every night. Our love is thoughtless, but it is felt. Felt in such a way that it is automatic and requires no thought. Everyone else seems so lonely, trying to think and understand their love, like fireflies, who have always seemed to look so far away from ever finding one another. It is not automatic like God's love, which at times feels so automatic and unconditional that it might almost cease to feel special for some people. But an automatic a tax calculator, taking in every aspect of your life as though it's affect on your life is the simple addition and subtraction of a number. 

That's what it feels like, overwhelming. So thoughtless because to try to consider the mathematical trajectories and economic theories alive in your taxes, the mind numbing crap your CPA goes bonkers over, is so impossible that it is best to just stop thinking and let the enormous effects wash over you while you continue on with your life. This is how I love you, so recklessly thoughtless and automatic that to even consider what it is I'm doing and saying is so irreversibly more reckless that I would rather just let you wash over me, like a tidal wave unconcerned with the fiscal emergency budget of the top five most likely to respond industrial countries as it washes away everything we have built together.

       

Victims Pt. I

It's Friday, mid day in a city that never sleeps because of something obviously stress induced. Powerman, as he has chosen to call himself, is responding to yet another distress call. The local police force, being fully under prepared as well as underpaid enough to handle any situation let alone that of a supernatural tendency, has called him in. The police chief, an ordinary, but proud man, usually refrains from doing so unless he is at risk of letting good people die on his watch, decides to call this one in personally. In a world that possesses even a single superhero, there must invariably be at least one super villain. This is of course reality's way of maintaining constant accountability. In this reality, the villain goes by Hell Raiser. After the death of his girlfriend the young and bright engineer attempted to give himself the power to raise the dead using some rather technically advanced gauntlets or something. It worked, but as is the case with the reanimated dead, the newly resurrected hardly kept the charm exhibited in their former life. Since that time, Hell Raiser has been trying to kidnap young women and harvest their living nature into the corpse of his past girlfriend. Anyone who attempts to stop him will be forced to answer to an army of zombies that Hell Raiser can summon and command. Today, Friday, he has Elizabeth (Liz) Destin strapped (once again) to his U.S. patented "Life Harvesting Machine", in the middle of his secret layer, deep underground, in the 3rd largest cemetery in the country. Enter Powerman.

Powerman, power being the obvious addition to the title, but man? He was little older than 22, which true enough is older than eighteen and technically qualifies him as an adult, but rarely do we look upon 22 year olds as men and women. Still, man is and has always been the official title, even since he was a small boy. Little Adam was his real name, rather, Adam Little and he was definitely not an alien, nor a product of science or tragedy. Adam was no victim of magic or cosmic energy and certainly not genetic malfunction, there was nothing. The universe simply willed him to have superpowers and he did. Just the usual stuff; the ability to fly, super strength, laser vision and completely impervious to anything. Yet there wasn't much excitement over the ordeal, this is a world whose imagination has produced thousands of Powermen and Powerwomen alike. When Adam Little stepped up to the role of hero when he was 18 years old, the world of mass media and globalization was not surprised, but rather expectant. His youthful demeanor made it difficult for world leaders to take him seriously, so instead of an arbiter for peace, he became a protector of the innocent, but lacking any political context Powerman was reduced to stopping plane crashes rather than stopping genocides. Without anyone telling him what was truly right or wrong and with a crippling fear of getting it drastically wrong, Adam sought to act only when the right decision was something quickly and easily agreed upon by the whole of society. Saving Liz Destin was obvious because she did not need to die for any purpose, especially for the need of a selfish individual. Plus Liz and Powerman were kind of dating, so...

So Powerman crashes into the 3rd largest cemetery in the nation, tells a beleaguered group police officers to go home and proceeds to smash zombie heads in with very little regard for being bitten. So, with the use of x-ray vision, Powerman finds the secret layer and zaps a few more zombies to smithereens. So, before Powerman can get much further Hell Raiser covers him in zombies and surrounds Liz Destin with a bunch of drooling undead before screaming "it's me or the girl Powerman you fascist!" while escaping out an emergency hatch with the corpse of his dead girlfriend slung over his shoulder. So Powerman swats away any remaining zombies, unstraps Liz Destin from the machine and flies them both to their favorite Thai Food restaurant on Main Street.
"Well Elizabeth, are you feeling alright? Have you been bitten?" He speaks with a false authority, he knows this is what is expected of him. He really loves Liz, but he feels he can only really love her in a limited capacity, with a doting fatherly love often bestowed on a damsel by a hero. The public thinks his life too complicated, mysterious and dangerous for any real love to take place, so Adam projects this. Though he truly wants to tell her everything he feels for her he can't. His secret identity is Adam Little and everyone knows it, they just enjoy believing that Powerman is a tool, no different than the threat of Nuclear warfare, that he goes away when he is not needed. This doesn't mean that Adam is free to feel things like a normal human being, but rather, is expected to exist out of sight, like a true secret identity.
"I- I'm a little scared, can we just order? I'll have the Pad Thai please" A passive, but friendly Thai waiter briskly leaves knowing that Powerman is perhaps the greatest tipper of all time.
"Scared? This has to be the tenth time he's kidnapped you this month? Why you? Why is it always you?" He can feel himself slipping, but this is getting ridiculous.
"I don't know, I think maybe it's because I remind him of his passed girlfriend, it's so creepy!" Powerman pours some of his water over, presumably zombie spit on his bronze costume before continuing.
"Neigh" he's taken to saying Norse-ish words after seeing the Avengers in theaters and feeling a particular likeness in Thor. His super senses notice Liz blink hard when he says it and makes a mental note to never say that again. "I believe he knows you and I are...an item and wishes to destroy me through you. He knows that my one weakness is my love for you and seeks to use it against me" and before the last word even leaves his mouth he thinks of a hundred things she could respond with. The obvious fact that he doesn't wear a mask, the fact that everyone, including the Thai waiter, knows they are an item, the irritation that he asked a question despite already knowing an answer, the "Neigh", this idea that he has a weakness when he really doesn't, the idea that she knows what he really wants to say to her and can't or won't or whatever. But she only smiles.
"Thanks for saving me Powerman, I just don't know how I'll repay you!" It's the same line he's always fed, followed by a small kiss on the cheek and the same line shortly after: "I just don't think I could eat another bite!" he flies her home, then flies to his house, a two story ranch that a generic, but wealthy architect had built for him after he saved the man's daughter from a snow storm. That night be perused Reddit for a couple hours before he went to sleep.

Meanwhile, is a word often used in comic books. It denotes that while something is occurring in the main story arc, something else is afoot that will have an immense impact on that story line in due time. Meanwhile is the perfect word for what is currently happening because currently, Liz Destin is driving across town to a crummy apartment complex with nothing, but her 2002 Lumina and a small box of left over Thai Food. The man who answers the door is Sam Burton, an engineering teaching assistant at the local community college and also known as the super villain Hell Raiser.
"Hey, did you-" before he can finish his sentence Liz Destin's lips are on his while a small box of Thai food is thrust into his hands simultaneously. "Thanks!"
"No thank you for getting me off work today, there is no way I would have had time to get the story in by the deadline, that kidnapping was enough to buy me a week extension at least." Liz has used everything to ever happen to her in life to her advantage. She did not do this in a sleazy way like one may think, but rather in a way men might revere in other men. She had good looks and noticed she attracted the teachers aide that works at the local college she studies journalism at, she decides to casually date the young man and hopefully glean some special access to the college off him, but soon learns that this man she is dating has a rather painted past. This is where many women would be turned off, Liz on the other hand, is not, she is calm, she tells him that there is a silver lining to all of this. Sam tries explaining that he cannot simply go to the world governments with his technologies as that would be unethical, reckless and may cause the deaths of countless innocent people. So Liz creates for her lover a back story, a persona, a character for him to play in the world stage. In the mean time, she, an aspiring reporter, would be following his and Powerman's epic battles. Her and her camera became the official documentarian of these two super powers. She fed him lines and knew just how to get him out of range of being caught every time there was a battle. The public ate it up, it was like watching a real life superhero movie unfold at any given time and even more tantalizing was the relationship that developed between Powerman and this lovely new reporter. She was smart, she knew every angle, but what she couldn't seem to grasp was
"Liz, this isn't working anymore. This has to be the tenth time I've kidnapped you this month and the public just seems to be getting more and more annoyed. These stunts are expensive and they're not paying like they used to. I know you're getting more and more pressure to cover other things too."
"Well I'm sorry Sam. Shame on me for funding our lifestyle, shame on me! How am I supposed to know that people don't give a fuck anymore."
"You're the one writing this shit. You should know. I'm just playing along, just another victim of the Puppet Master" He would sometimes lovingly call her this in the beginning of their tirades, he would call her a super villain too and they would laugh together. Of late, the nickname has taken on a more sinister meaning.
"Hey, I got this ok? I know what I'm doing. I just need you to kidnap me one more time, in about one week. Same old story, but I'm going to spin it different in the paper, you'll see, it'll be a good one. Now pull up Netflix while I warm up the Thai food." Sam trusted Liz enough to leave it at that, besides she was placating him with his two favorite things in the world.

That night, Sam Hell Raiser Burton lays on the couch with Elizabeth Puppet Master Destin. She strokes his hair while they watch the season finale of The Walking Dead. That night they sleep together, but not before embracing each other wholly.

"This has to be kidnapping number twelve" Powerman flies to a small pet cemetery on the outskirts of town. He pauses briefly in his thoughts to acknowledge the notion that a pet cemetery hasn't been done before and what the motive here could be, but never the less he's getting a little sick of this game. Just today Powerman saved 15 drowning men, thwarted a school shooting and did his best to prevent an oil spill. Now this. Now he has to take care of this ridiculous business of saving his own girlfriend from peril for the twelfth  time this month. He's received keys to cities, gotten paid hundreds of thousands in reward money, was even in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize and now he has to continue to pretend to love a girl he actually loves from a safe enough distance to appease the very people he works for. Needless to say, when Powerman lands he is fuming. He half ass waives the police officers on, pauses to note that a zombie dog tried to bite his leg, notes that maybe this is all because Hell Raiser ran out of people Cemeteries for secret labs and continues thwarting the plan like always. When he enters the secret layer he is tired of being calculated and deliberate with his unwanted arch nemesis.
"Look Hell Raiser, this is getting fucking stupid." Silence, no one can believe what was just said. Hell Raiser almost seems to look alarmingly at Liz strapped helplessly (once again) to the machine.
"It's me or the" before Sam can finish his theatrical, rehearsed threat a beam of laser vision pelts the machine and a half a second later incinerates Hell Raiser's former girlfriend corpse. Powerman stares his foe down in a demeanor that only reads as unimpressed. Panicked, Hell Raiser loses all nerve and sends 250 zombie rats straight for Liz, who lets out a legitimate scream. The scream seems to snap Powerman out of his own head, now Adam Little is wondering if he has actually ever heard his "girlfriend" legitimately scream before. He saves her and flies her to Thai Food as per usual. Maybe it was the zombie rats or maybe because they have both noted a feeling of deep change in one another, but neither is hungry for Thai Food.

That night Adam Little peruses Reddit. There is an entire subsection devoted to him. He occasionally will skim over it looking for pictures of him and Liz to pine over. He does this so haphazardly that he almost glosses over the Hell Raiser Sex Tape thread. But he doesn't. He goes back up and watches a very popular Youtube video of Elizabeth, passionately and quietly making love to Hell Raiser. To Sam Burton. Hell Raiser indeed.

Adam Little found his adversary quicker than even he expected. He did not burst into the apartment, but he did not enter through unlocked doors either. When he opened the door they almost didn't recognize him without his bronze costume on. It dawned on Sam first, who simply dropped his box of Thai food and said "Oh." Adam facetiously imitated Sam's painful, embarrassed expression.
"Oh? Oh what? You think I wouldn't be able to find you, you fucking peon?" Liz just dropped to her knees and started to cry. This phased Adam for all of one second, when that second was up, he went on behaving like what he thought was a real man. He was across the room faster than the human mind can comprehend and his fist was into the stomach of Sam Burton and into the stomach it continued. As blood ran down his forearm, Adam began to burn everything in the apartment with his laser vision, burned it all while holding a dead Sam Burton on his fist; all the ridiculous technology that only the imagination of a child and the ingenuity of a psychopath could create, all the technology that was reserved for the use of super villains when they chose to be mere mortals and everything else that was of little importance to anyone, but for some reason still needed to burn. Adam put out the fire with his freeze breath before he left that night. He floated above the apartment for a short while, thinking. He knew she escaped the fire, he knew he couldn't go after her too, the public wouldn't allow it. So Adam would simply fly home and continue to know nothing. He would continue to know nothing about the plot of one journalist to engineer the end of a story. He would continue to know nothing of the camera catching every second of his killing Sam Burton. He would continue to know nothing of his girlfriend's motive for putting a video of her making love to another man all over the internet. When he finally did put it all together and figure out that he was just being played, he might consider it only one more play in an infinite play book, and force himself into quiet, unknowing, contentedness.

Where's the Brown Stuff?

Over the past week I have had the pleasure of consuming an abundance of home cooked meals. My girlfriend's parents and grandparents insist on feeding me only the best vegetarian recipes their Italian heritage can muster. Whether it was vegetarian lasagna, spinach pie or eggplant parmesan; I was well fed. Usually after a victorious, digestive sigh, I make an off hand comment about not usually eating "like that". Which is nothing, but true. Often times I rely on the microwave to cancer my food into a warm facade of edible, moist dinner. Or restaurants who charge 7 times the amount of the ingredients it would take to prepare the food, with three times the salt and one hundred percent more convenient. Though the comment itself is always taken in a different direction: "your mother cooks doesn't she?" a harmless enough question with a harmless enough retort: "not that well, but she does cook", oddly enough, another retort generally follows: "she can too cook well! Of course she can!". I generally respond with a smile and an "if you say so" while I contemplate how anyone who has never dined on my mother's cooking can possibly know that she can, in fact, cook well. And of course my mother can cook, she's not an idiot, she can probably hold her own against most moms, but the fact of the matter is, I know best. My mom was my age when she first started cooking meals for me, this was an age of burnt grilled cheese, hard craft noodles from the box, steamed vegetables that would don the consistency of puree with the lightest subjection of pressure from a fork. This is no knock on my mother, in fact quite the opposite, her cooking to this day has taught me the most cherished ability I do believe I posses: the ability to pretend.

In the beginning I was none the wiser. I ate burnt grilled cheese with nothing, but bite after contented bite. One day, in an act of a truly aspiring mother, my mom decides to cook as carefully as she can, a perfectly bronzed and fresh grilled cheese. Proud as can be she places in on a plate in front of me. I'm appalled. "Where is all the black stuff?" I ask in such an adorable way that my mom has no choice, but to return to the kitchen and burn the grilled cheese she worked so hard on. As I grow older and those finicky taste buds take on the same curiosity as a child, always wishing to try something new, but never contented enough to settle, I took on new tactics. Pretending that the texture of squash makes me vomit, pretending that I can't swallow corn, pretending to throw my napkin away when in reality it's a ploy to also throw away the green beans I have conveniently wrapped in it. I was creative, I might not of had to be had my mom prepared better meals. She always caught me too, forcing me to get more creative. Then later in life, there are still lessons to be learned. A little while ago I pretended to like a key lime pie despite it being more lime than anything and in all probability might have given me a stomach ulcer had I eaten much more of it. Pretending to like the yolks on my fried eggs broken before I get a chance to eat them is also a regular occurrence.

Society might consider this lying, has even branded it with the rather benign title of white lie. While we think of this as a means to avoid attaching any weight to the lies we tell our loved ones, I think of it as something else entirely. I think of it as pretending, I even get really good at it. Let's take the most commonly used white lie, the old "does this dress make me look fat" conundrum. If we say yes, we are liable to offend the individual posing the question and if we say no, we are lying to them. But if we can imagine, in our own mind, the dress is indeed the most slimming of clothing choices, to the point that we actually see it that way, we are only lying to ourselves. I pretended that squash made me vomit, so much so that it eventually did make me gag. When I played with action figures, the scenarios came alive if only for a moment. Sometimes I would pretend that the teacher and I would be having a one on one conversation and I'll be damned if I didn't pay attention better. If you are truly good at pretending, you could pretend that this blog post is the greatest thing you've ever read and it may even bring tears to your eyes.

 It is not just my ability to get by in awkward situations, it is my ability to find the best in any situation and convince myself to believe in it. My car was backed into this past weekend. There was a white paint mark on the front bumper when I found it, when I looked up I saw a car parked directly in front of it with the exact size of white paint taken off the back bumper. I know who hit my car, it didn't even look like they hid it, it's like they wanted me to see. I wanted to get angry, but I pretended for a second that maybe the person who hit my car was going to go out and do harm to someone else or even them self. They had a horrible week at work and wanted to take numb it by drinking and driving, by doing some horribly reckless act they wouldn't normally do, when they backed out they hit my car and it jolted them out of there head for a minute. They thought about what they were doing and they went back into their house and watched Netflix. I was able to pretend, fancy, imagine, maybe even believe that turn of events to be true that I became at peace with what happened. I'm not always able to do this, but I do love my ability to do it at times and I attribute this skill, this way of life, to my upbringing. To my mother's cooking and everything it taught me. So no, my mom couldn't cook that well at first, but I'm glad, thanks mom.

Thanks for listening,
Kyle