Run of the Mill Fantastic Stories

[dr_mabeuse]

Fantastic Stories all around us. Mysteries without end. Endless mysteries, tales of people's minds.All Around us

LLunch with my friend D. today.

Her father K committed suicide some years ago., He was 57. Cam home from work, pulled into the carage, never got out of the garage, just left it running. No note. He'd had enough.

Why? Married a woman from Croatia (his second wife.) Call her S. Her husband abandoned her and her 4 kids literally on the docks in New York when they stepped of the ship and was never heard from. S moved to Detroit, learned English, workied hard, bought a house, lost 3 kids in a house fire. Went into denial for 3 years, then started to crack . K married her around this time.

K started acting funny. Telling K she was sleeping with "niggers" in his bed, leaving the gas burners on. Told K she was sleeping with his stepp kids. Hospitalized twice. One day, K comes home, finds S has slashed herself to death in the bathtub. SLASHED HERSELF to DEATH! What are you thinking as you're doing that? Your children's pain, no doubt, huh?

S survives. Remarries 12 years later. Wife turns into a big alcoholic. This one he can't handle. 3 years later, he goes into the garage, never comes out.

What do you think did it?

I have to think he's sitting there think about getting out the car and thinking about the evening ahead - the sound of her voice, the way she puts the plate down in front of him. And he's got to be thinking of this other wife who slashed herself to death for love.

Life - automobiles, TV shows, pizzas, vacations, shoes, they cover such frightful terrifying holes in our lives. Holes that swallow entire people, entire families.

Ever day, D, tells me, she asks herself, is this going to be the day I won't find enough reasons to get out of the garage when I park the car at night. There's no guarantees. Life ain't TV.

D herself - one of my best friends, Meets this hero on the net, in person, a winner, 10 years younger than she is, balls up in love with her, good gig, wants to marry, movies in with her, gets a job, his money starts disappearing dn he's acting weird. We're old drug buddies, she comes and asks me - what would make hi act like this? "Sound like an opiate" "But he can';t afford any opiate."

She goes through his car trash. He's throwing away $200 of cough medicine receipts a week! Over the Counter Cough Medicine! People get Off on this crap! Do you know what a bad high that is.

That's why I write. We're the only full time profession that deals with rescuing these people and their stories, and there's so very very many of them...

 

[reignophelia]

Good morning Dr.M. Well, it's 3:30 am here on the east coast. As noble as I think you are in trying to save people from the hells of mundane life, I have to ask:

Why can't they be responsible for saving themselves? I find escape in my daydreams, and in the plans I make for the future. I tell myself that I'll finally rid myself of these hellish things someday. It keeps me going even though I don't know where life will take me.

I've nearly gone there a few times. Despair and depression are addictions in themselves, (especially for a masochist like myself) and I suspect you know this as well. I dunno though. Maybe I just have a different perspective on things. Maybe I just have a strong survival instinct, or maybe I just got lucky. In those moments alone, in my desperation, nothing mattered except ending the suffering. Once you get to that point though, things seem sort of surreal. No time for notes, writing a note would never suffice, and would cause you to rethink, and feel again all the pain.

Five years ago I went to Wal-Mart to buy a better blade because a serrated edge just wouldn't do. I also bought curtains, which I hung up before running the bathwater. My fiance came home early. Finally diagnosed with PTSD, I was able to actually find a psychiatrist who could help me.

I remember now, I made a mistake. I made another mistake and it just triggered something in me. I think I forgot a Dr. appointment or something.
For me it's the fear of failure and not feeling worthy.

I can say though, that it's never been a matter of suddenly deciding out of the blue to end it all. You make a decision. You decide whether or not you're going to go there with your thoughts. You become responsible for your own actions.
I'm at a point in my life right now, where I could "go there" again, but I don't.
It's hard to turn back once you've consumed the potion or taken the red pill. So, I personally stay away from rabbits.

Sarahh's correct as well. There is beauty and art to be found everywhere, even in the darkest pain, or simplest truth. There's a story to be had anywhere.

I'm sorry to hear about your friend. Are you feeling alright as well?
I haven't been around here for very long, but this didn't look like one of your typical posts.

 

[Guest]

. . .

That's why I write. We're the only full time profession that deals with rescuing these people and their stories, and there's so very very many of them...

Indeed.

There are also incredible stories to be told about museums and skylines and Wrigley Field, Home Depots and saganaki and cries of Opa!, paying $8 just to turn around in a parking garage and oh yeah - listening to an phenomenal bass player at 1:00 in the morning.

Just saying.

 

[hmmnmm]

I once produced a small neighborhood street rag in an area that had a lot of bars and clubs and such. Mostly about the people in the neighborhood, the bands, 'fly on the wall' observations, etc. No matter what went on or what the contents contained by the end of the week I attempted to keep it anchored around a sense of humor, even if it was sometimes black. But once in a while I'd walk into one of the clubs, like before they opened, and the manager's sitting there looking down or everything's all quiet, and I could sense it right away. Then they'd say something like, "you know so and so?" Maybe a guy who worked the door or a bartender or a musician or...? Sometimes I knew them well, sometimes only knew who they were, but I could never get away with ignorance. They'd OD'd or were killed in a crash or committed suicide or somebody shot them... I'd have to at least mention it, and it was always hard. Especially the suicides and especially if I was well-acquainted with them. I imagine there's a few stories from those years, but no hurry.

 

[impressive]

Ever day, D, tells me, she asks herself, is this going to be the day I won't find enough reasons to get out of the garage when I park the car at night. There's no guarantees. Life ain't TV.

*nods*

And yet, while undeniably tragic, I don't fault anyone for not finding enough reasons.

 

[rgraham666]

Having been in the position of trying to take my own life, and damn near succeeding, I always look for reasons to go on.

The one that keeps me going most often is an unfortunately violent one.

Simply, it's better to die with steel in your teeth than in your back.

If I go down, I go down swinging.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I'm sure this is part of why I've concentrated on erotica all these years, because I never felt strong enough to confront disappointment and conflict and malice-- all those things that are necessary to plot-- in my writing.

Well, now I do, and a great deal of that is thanks to the internet and particularly this board

 

[The_Fool]

There are motions and there are emotions.

Motions we go through in the day to day blur. Hearts beat. Lungs inhale and exhale. Living on automatic. Thinking yes, but not original thinking. Snap decisions based on previous input, because it is in a way, easier.

Emotions slap our faces with the sense of how surreal life is. Sharp feelings offer insight into how automatic life is. The ability to stop in mid flow while swimming upstream and say "What the fuck?" Is that what I do than then I die? In those moments one sees the reality of self and sometimes of others. But these are momentary lapses into thought. Too soon we begin to swim again. Or not. Sometimes we despair and let the current take it where it will until we die.

But living without thought is just another form of suicide. It just takes longer. Writing offers a chance to think. And hope that we can pierce the veil for others.

 

[hmmnmm]

I'm sure this is part of why I've concentrated on erotica all these years, because I never felt strong enough to confront disappointment and conflict and malice

A similar conclusion moments after posting.

 

[Stella_Omega]

A similar conclusion moments after posting.

Yes, I'm sure it comes and goes...

Dunno if you're old enough to remember the Jackson Brown song;

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long

cause I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
Ive been waiting to awaken from these dreams
People go just where there will
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That its later than it seems

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if its too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky
Is this the prize
For having learned how not to cry

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I apologize. It must have been the hour, aided no doubt my the subject matter, and again, it was thoughtless of me, but I wasn't celebrating despair and suicide, but the strange paths that lives take and the fantastic stories we never get to hear simply because no one ever documents them.

These two stuck on my mind because of the bizarreness and because we always remember stories of love and death, and because, yes, I've been terribly morbid lately, but I remember just as clarly how fascinated I was to hear of my grandfather's making his fortune selling rain slickers to workers in the Oklahoma oil fields during the oil boom of the late 'teens. You know what happens when they hit oil. Well, my gransfather was selling down in Oklahoma selling fake persian carpets as was his wont when he saw a need for a service. He remembered playing cards in New York with a man who's father-in-law had a warehouse full of WWI US Army Surplus Rain Slickers. The rest is (family) history. (Until my No-goodnik Uncles squandered the fortune trying to sell furs in the 70's when the Earth First movement was taking off and it was lost.)

Talking to poets at the Green Mill I was told of a reading they gave at a hole in the wall dump called the Get Me High Lounge where the one bathroom was accesible only by walking directly across the tage and was such a scandal that not even the rats would go in there. One night, who stops by to hear the poets read such pieces of prosody like "Your Filthy Love is an Asshole Around my Heart" but Candidate for the Presidency of the USA Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalind, and partway through a reading, Rosaline must use the facilities.

She's escorted by grim-faced SS men with curley ear-wires who walk her across the stage, seal her in and watch the door. The crowd listens as the toilet flushes, and all eyes are on her as she emerges with perfect dignity and aplomb.

She's given a standing ovation.

Stories like that, my friends, are what I celebrate.

And then they found her hacked to pieces in the meat locker.

No, I uts found when I write now, every one of my minor characters wants to run off and spin his own ittle yarn of opportunity and disappointment, success and failure - how the world looked to him and what he thought he'd do about it. There's so many of and each of us different, each of us so precious and so cheap and disposable. Here once and never to be seen again, and ye we pic them up and throw them away, stories untold, unkown, with nothing to mark their passing.

Someone ought to do something about that. Like invent God or something.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I'm sure this is part of why I've concentrated on erotica all these years, because I never felt strong enough to confront disappointment and conflict and malice-- all those things that are necessary to plot-- in my writing.

Well, now I do, and a great deal of that is thanks to the internet and particularly this board

Porn saved my life, literally. When my job was outsourced I went into a terrible depression and stopped caring about everything. Everything. The only thing I'd do was sit at the computer and look halheartedly at porn. And that made me think: there was still a spark left. I still had a spark of interest in something, In sex. No matter how perverse or twisted or sick or degraded it seemed to me at the time it was alive. It was life . A little dirty ember of lust left in the ashes of apathy.

And I nurtured that little spark and I blew on it and I fed it and kept it sheltered in my breast, and I remember, literally, these long, dark, cold Chicago winter nights, hunched over my old computer staring at nipples and pussies and the girls' faces and men with whips and the angle of a foot or a man's jaw just fascinated, captivated by what these people were feeling, by the juice and cum and frantic muscular energetic life and I wanted to know what was happening! I wanted to be that! I didn't want to just do it. I wanted to be it. Sex! That energy, that union.

Then I found Literotica and I already knew I could write. I'd been writing since I was 11. I had a degree in English Comp from a good school. I started writing and at first they were just fuck stories - stories about people fucking, that's all, and in writing them, I got to fuck too, in my mind. But then I started asking myself questions about what my characters were doing and why they were feeling the things they were feeling, and suddenly I was writing literature! And then agents were calling me, and I was published!

And now... I think about that thin tissue between a life worth living and death every day. The choice is no longer mine because I have a family and when you have a family your life is no longer yours to throw away as you wish. There are people who love you and need you, so you're condemned to life by love.

But I don't take life as a given. I don't assume that, given the choice, the choice to live is always the right one. I know that things don't always turn out for the best, and I know that most stories don't have happy endings. Sometimes, things get really bad and people tell you to cheer up because they've got to get better, but of course, that's onlu tru on TV. In real life, they can always continue to get worse.

They say that suicide becomes a logical option when the level of one's pain exceeds one's ability to endure it. That sums it up pretty neatly.

And then there was George Sanders, the debonaire British character actor whose suicide note said, "I'm bored."

 

[MagicaPractica]

Fantastic Stories all around us. Mysteries without end. Endless mysteries, tales of people's minds.All Around us

Her father K committed suicide some years ago., He was 57. Cam home from work, pulled into the carage, never got out of the garage, just left it running. No note. He'd had enough.

What do you think did it?

Considering the women he chose to marry it makes my mind go to a phenomenon amongst my family we call "the save the world complex." Choosing mates because they "need" you. After everything that had happened in his life, perhaps he finally realized he couldn't save the world.

And then they found her hacked to pieces in the meat locker.

Think I missed something, who was? Rosalind Carter?

Stories like that, my friends, are what I celebrate.

The strange stories that are told in the middle of the night around the kitchen table, hence we call them Kitchen Table stories in my family. Our own oral tradition.

 

[angelicminx]

It's amazing, isn't it, the stories never heard? Everyone has a story to tell, even if it seems humdrum to them.

 

[lisa123414]

We adapt, or we don’t. That is about all there is to it. When I was 23, I worked for about a year in Manhattan. I came from the suburbs of the Midwest. Going to work every day, I ran across what I would call now, looking back upon it, a fair section of the world. I gave away so many dollars, to the people in the streets.

On my way to work every day, because I walked a good deal of the island, I encountered thousands of people, many of whom appeared to have nothing. At the beginning of the year, I opened my purse constantly; at the end of the year, I stepped over people sleeping on the subway grates, hardly seeing them.

In my defense, when I moved to a different city, one of the first things I did was to volunteer for the city mental health department. My penance was to spend hour after hour, answering the suicide hot line. But I still feel guilty, for the human beings, I taught myself not to see.

It’s a huge world. I look for the beauty. When I can, I try to do something about the tragedy and pain. It’s overwhelming, and always has been, throughout history. I don’t know any other way to deal with it. I can say, that helping out someone less fortunate helps me way more than it helps them. It's part of how I survive.

 

[hmmnmm]

A neighborhood could be likened to a person? Birth, growing pains, branches, influences, parties, invasion, deterioration...
And do they keep coming back in dreams because they cry for someone to tell their stories?