Chapter 3: The Odd-yssey Begins

Joe had been through a lot to get to Los Angeles. That was an unfortunate way to phrase it, however, as it implies that getting to LA had been some type of goal. Ah, the land of movies and known quantities, the golden dream. Joe had in fact planned to move to New York, which might have been even stupider, since New York had failed to build alleys, and therefore all their trash sat there accusing them all the time. No wonder they were so neurotic there—at least that’s what the TV said, and they wrote it themselves, so it must be a true confession: At any moment, just as a neighbor passed, a condom could plop.

But an appallingly dull series of betrayals had left him stranded on the opposite side of the continent. Joe knew not a single soul in the teeming sprawling town of Los Diabolos that he could call a friend. This was probably the only reason he hadn’t killed Borriss. Borriss was familiar.

One night, when even Boriss was asleep, Joe was fantasizing about somehow kidnapping both of his former boss’s little gay assistants and forcing them to service him like a woman. Joe was pretty sure he wasn’t gay, so it was more of a humiliation fantasy than a sex one. This began to bore him so he turned over quietly in the blankets and made a snap decision to write a story. Those are the best stories: the bad decisions when you have other things planned. Was it his story? He wasn’t entirely sure; his memory had begun to do things that he knew couldn’t be right (for example, Louis XIV had, according to his memory, been over for a visit the day before, but that guy was almost 100 percent likely to be dead, even if you wanted to play idiot games with statistics). Had anyone but a movie star ever decided to wind up anywhere? Joe was beginning to be inclined to doubt it.

Anyway, Joe thought about sex for a moment, which led to mermaids somehow, which led to Homer, and that is when he began to type. People who proudly call themselves authors and writers will often claim, with a shyly boastful little grin, that typing away about difficult emotions makes people feel better.

Most people who say things like this never grow up enough to realize they should be embarrassed for having ever thought they were the thing to say. No one had ever believed them sincerely, or at least that was Joe’s educated guess. They only believed they were things they should be thinking and feeling, and so they said them and tried to feel them, and then they grew up and either took it back, blushing, or they went the more common and cowardly route and simply hoped no one would remember. You should be punched in the eye until you stop saying such things, thought Joe. But then, where’s the personal development in that? On the other hand, forcible personal development might be the best you could hope for from most people.

Joe, in fact, felt worse and worse as the keys pumped and clicked, pumped and clicked, their little key voices almost as annoying as Borriss; getting these things “off Joe’s chest” in fact affixed them there more permanently.

There was a moment’s respite as he thought of mermaids again; but would mermaids even like him? If he were a sea creature, would Joe have muscles and mermaid lovers? Doubtful… Hell, would he even be motile? Would Joe float, or would the words and resentment and barnacles drag him along the ocean floor, feeding on shit from the party floor above?

The shit-vacuum of the barnacle reef; that was Joe.

The Odd-yssey

The title of this book, like most of the shit you animals do, is false advertising.

Fuck you.

Unlike the actual Odyssey, by Homer, in which the hero returns home at the end, this story has no such wholesome outcome.

It can’t. The author has no home. Technically, she was born someplace, and subjected to “ha ha, you’re a child and get no choice” type of shit in a place, and then lived other places.

But there is no place I would swear on an Iliad, gun to head, “Yeah, I was home!” (Homer wrote about home a lot. So why is the English word for home more like his name than the Greek one? Everything is false advertising.)

I‘m not the only person who feels homeless. It’s like a shit syrup in the air. Maybe it’s because everyone goes nuts if they show up anyplace on the globe and can’t find all the stores they’re used to. Or maybe it goes deeper, or wider, or something.

I don’t know, I’m not a sociologist, and most of them are faking it anyway.

Nice, in France, is beautiful, but I’ve only spent a few days there and it seems isolated.

Paris, France, is great, except now there is so much rape there. SO MUCH RAPE. French women are like battle prizes, but where are the tanks? We thought warlike chivalry—not holding open doors for girls, I meant the knightly spirit altogether—died in 1914 but clearly it has several deaths yet to go. Modern wars are so passive-aggressive they need a shrink more than guns. There are the ones with drones. There are the ones where people move places and refuse to join the culture and try to take over; usually without success but it leads to rape. There are the ones where they move in and insist you join their culture instead.

That’s rude.

But that gets into politics, and politics are something you fucking animals love, literally to death, so fuck you. (Ffffft, and why am I pretending to be surprised that people are being rude? Water is wet, people are worthless.) People will argue that the United States should have never been colonized while arguing that it should be colonized again, or vice versa. Is consistency the hobgoblin of the autism spectrum? Just because I’m mildly autistic doesn’t mean you aren’t an idiot.

Anyway, I’ve had too much rape. I can’t handle any more rape.

Yeah, sorry, there’s something I can’t handle anymore. Fuck you. You’re all pussies compared to me, believe me, but I’m at my limit in that department.

Let’s be clear about the term “rape…”. I mean actual brute force rape, where someone is stronger than you are or they have a weapon and you have to do it or you’ll probably be killed, and jesus, they might even kill you afterward anyway, because my god, you’re going to tell the cops, and then they’ll have to suffer too! Spend five minutes of your life not really paying that much attention to being raped because you’re wondering how it will feel as he snaps your throat.

That’s what I mean by “rape.” Not the “I was drunk and I felt bad afterward and he was manipulative and I think that’s rapey” kind of bullshit. Although that’s what gets attention and money and keeping your boyfriends these days.

(Honey, if you accidentally cheat when you’re drunk, is the boyfriend who inspired this piss level of loyalty worth destroying an innocent person’s life? Is he worth putting another being like yourself in a cage? Is he worth the moment when your victim looks at the slamming prison door and knows he is just beginning his years of slow moments of unfolding horror that he is powerless to stop? He’s in there, currently wondering why, exactly, there’s blood all over the only chair that’s left at the lunch table — but that’s worth it, so you can still be cuddled up with your impotent boo and Netflix. You’re a worthless beast and should not have been born).

(Yet it must needs be said that using manipulation to get laid makes you a horrible man-girl and something of a cow yourself.)

Anyway… I mean RAPE rape.

I’ve had enough.

I’ve had more than enough of RAPE rape.

Although it is pretty interesting, as a study of human character. Not just of the rapist — although we’ll go into that a bit, too. People do some real weird shit when they’re forcing their pathetic dick into your body.

However, the more interesting shit is the way rape (real rape, you moral monster, you hog, you idiot filthy cow) brings out the secret character of everyone around you. I have never known so many people so well before.

Hint: Most of you will come out looking awful after your friends are assaulted.

Religion doesn’t confuse me anymore. Especially Satan.

People love Satan because most people are exactly as bad as Satan is supposed to be, but they don’t like thinking that thought, because it feels bad. People do a lot of shitty thinking because truth feels bad.

You know how we like to put trash in piles, over there, in the corner? Especially if the house is breathtakingly dirty (oh, we’ll get to that, too)?

So think about how much trash there is: 98 percent of people are at least 85 percent trash, according to my on-board sensors. They can feel the evil in themselves and in the worthless creatures on every side of them. And they pick it up in their hauntingly tiny minds and, boop, they plop it in the garbage pile they call Satan. Now everything is clean.

Evil is a helpful concept, if you are mostly evil.

Sure, the only part of their entire home that is usable is the chair where they sit in front of the screen and the paths to the shitter, door, and fridge.

But as long as they can get to those comfy bits and they have named the rest Satan, they can go on stealing oxygen (that’s the only way to describe most of human life: stealing oxygen; I stole that phrase from a roommate who, with his girlfriend who lived in our apartment rent-free, filled every common area to waist height with the wrappers and bottles from their feeder fetish) with barely a mental hiccough.

They think their garbage pile is a pretty normal in size.

The horror lies in the fact that they’re right. That’s the garbage pile size that is the norm: The entire house, ‘cept for your nest. Your beautiful comfort zone, which is the only area we count.

That’s the norm. And the norm is what people default to when they try to think of what goodness means.

Not excellence. Not above average decency, which would mean decency. Nope. The norm. The norm is OK!

Shit, am I habitually writing in these awful, gimmicky short paragraphs now? Jesus Christ, that’s what I’m doing. Hey, it s good for your blog’s numbers! People can’t visually digest those long thoughts. Spew, spew! Heminway psychically. Predicted. The. Internet.

The garbage is choking me.

FUCKING CHOKING ME. (That reminds me: I guess I should be thankful the rapist didn’t make me suck his dick. He did all the work, poor thing.)

So don’t look for Odysseus to get home at the end of this story. I don’t have a home. I never will. Tonight I will sleep on a mattress that is still covered in its plastic wrapping, because I don’t trust the people around me enough to assume I won’t have to move all my shit all over again at any given moment. It’s way harder and dirtier to move your mattress if you take off the wrapper. I don’t want to choose between A. Buying ANOTHER $300 mattress, and B. Carrying this fucking thing that weighs as much as I do to yet another place where I’ll pay someone to potentially harm me.

And this is the most stable I’ve been in… well, I was going to say two months. But it was over a year ago that Margery lost her job, and I found out for sure about his garbage pile.

Too big for me, Margery. Your garbage pile. Too big. I’m not a very good person, by MY fucking standards, but I’m not quite bad enough for your garbage.

The tale begins in Chicago.

This was when Joe suddenly stopped typing. Who the fuck is Margery? he wondered, with a panic that began abruptly and began to mount very fast. He had meant to write his own tale. He had not been raped. He knew nobody named Margery. He recognized none of the events above, and yet as he typed, he had remembered each, plain as day, as though they had happened yesterday and he was writing a police report.

He heard a faint snicker from the darkness above.

“You thought I was gone?” hissed Borriss.

Joe looked up in terror. Yes, it was Borriss. As hairy and repulsive as ever, it was Borriss.

“I don’t take days off, you fucking pussy,” Borriss hissed with a grin.

Joe began to scream. Then he realized it was doing no good, and the neighbors would probably call the cops. And god knows what Borriss might have planted around the apartment. Stolen gold from the national treasury, dead bodies, other spiders…

Borriss snickered quietly. Joe folded his hands in his lap and sighed deeply. He was completely at a loss. The snickering intensified; this seemed to be the funniest thing Borriss had heard all day.

“Is familiarity overrated?” Joe wondered aloud. He had no idea how to answer his question; he had nothing else to compare it to.