Unedited Rant No. 1

Act 1: Outrage

You sycophant! How dare you jump me at the threshold, quarter after 11 with your pseudo adoration and your complete shimmering veneer, almost coated with sticky shitty shtick! I have a sudden flashback of when Mrs. Hohman would tell us to stand in the door frame in case of an earthquake.

It's like a play! Almost as if Arthur Miller wrote it with the skill of a fifth grader and the attention span of a 103-year old vocal sea turtle, shell cracked and swimming/floating on shoreline! My apartment might as well reek of carbon monoxide, but who's Willy?

Act 2: Homecoming

It's 11:45 pm. His boots are soaked. Half due to the Chicago bite and half because his walk from the blue is 15-20 and the webbing between toes is starting to drip.

He unlatches the door.

"Oh, hey!!!!!!!!!!! You just getting home too????????!!!!!!!?????????"

Just getting home - /dʒʌst/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [juhst] /gɛt/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [get-ing] /hoʊm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [hohm]: to arrive suddenly, and generally within a time frame coinciding in a timely manner

Apparently this is not the case. In an attempt to show that the person speaking shares-in-the-14-hour-work-day, the person is obviously lying. If it was the case, the living room would not have her dinner (finished and probably well-cooked), her homework, and two beers deep while watching syndicated cop dramas.

But it does not really matter to him. He grunts and heaves his satchel onto his desk, knocking over a book and a bottle opener. Destination - bed, shower, beer. ETA - as soon as possible.

Another grunt and he is in the hallway. Almost to his room. Almost. And then.

"Oh hey, just a heads up, I had one of your beers. Sorry man, I just had to have one."

Flapping at the wind with helicopter arms, he's trying to make it to the fridge. Trying to see. Needs to know. Yes, he confirms it - the last beer is not there.

Act 3: Turn the key

He is now in the shower. The steam is rising high in the isolated space. Arthur Miller style. Only substituting waiting for death with sleeping, and the search for life fullfillment with being content to end the day with a frothy beverage. Both of which have escaped both Lohman and Spanner.

91 days until move out.

THE END

(Editor's note: This was not meant to be depressing, as it was a character study in the WHAT IN GOD'S GREEN EARTH IS WRONG WITH MY ROOMMATE sort of way. She's a nice girl, just out to lunch. Constantly)

Umbrellas

Anger has no place in constructive thought and neither does the ability (or inability) to explain yourself. Thinking isn’t speaking. It isn’t even monologuing. Sure, we may, from time to time, convince ourselves cognition is some perfect sentence. I can catch myself saying, “At noon I’ve got to go get sauce for dinner tonight,” but that’s rare and (quite frankly) boring.

What supersedes language?

Sure, emotions are the “true” answer. I’m even sure if I ended up pontificating about them you’d turn to your friend (or pet) and say, “Why am I reading this shit if I can get it and a plot line (somewhat) from a Ms. Steel novel?” (1) - that's a footnote, go ahead, check it out.

Think about it, we give things names that aren’t relatable. For example, imagine an umbrella. It’s utility, at its most essential, is to keep rain, sun, snow, or frogs, from tumbling down onto your clothes (2). Take that same umbrella and poke holes in it. It’s suddenly lost its function and is deprived of meaning. Yet, if the fabric is torn away and the parasol is like the rusty skeleton of a bird, we’ll call it an umbrella. What's the deal? From name to moniker, I guess.

I had a rough day today. I don’t know why, but I can’t explain it. Sure, I could give you a sense of what happened - tell you about how work was frustrating, how I wished some things in my life were different, but it wouldn’t give you the exact feeling of what I think. Sometimes the “rough” days are the worse because you realize, with growing maturity, that you’re healthy, loved and well - and that some things aren’t worth stressing over. But we all do it anyway. In fact, this evening I had a small conversation with a friend about how “people just want universal relate-ability. Every medium of human discourse, interaction and social dynamic is saturated with a lust for relate-ability.” My friend was one the wiser, and reminded me of the beauty of it all - this feeling and its relentless pursuit creating originiality and brilliance. She was right, I was wrong. Typical outcome.

So language fails me on days like today. Hell, it fails me most days. Sometimes I even feel like it fails everyone and every good line is just parallelism - words that run side by side with the real emotion; and we reward them

every time

for being “ooooooooo just so close.”


Footnotes:
1. I assume Danielle Steel, however “oooooo just so close” with romance and her uncanny ability to process it, is not married. I was going to look it up, but then I saw a shirt (probably going in the hamper anyway) that needed folded and had to make a decision. I flipped a coin.
2. P.T. Anderson reference. Look out!