The Electric House
Hello, I'm Konish. This is a playground for my ideas.
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I witnessed this at lunch yesterday outside my workplace —
. . .
The two men who sat on the steps of a salon on Abbot Kinney Rd. were associates, but didn’t want anybody else to know that. Too bad they were bad at being inconspicuous. Their Mohawks and outlandish shoes from the latest American Apparel catalog didn’t help their case either. At lunchtime, Abbott Kinney was filled with the office crowd grabbing a bite and the jobless walking their dogs. One of the men – the African American one – pointed to a lady with dog. His Caucasian acquaintance turned to look, but by the time he turned back, the African American was leaning against a lamppost five feet away. The Caucasian man threw him a quick glance – one that only the astute passerby would have registered as fear – but fortunately for these men, this was Venice, CA, land of Los Angeles, haven to the self-absorbed.
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Alarms blare in a Los Angeles skyscraper. People rush to the “safe room,” not knowing why the alarm’s ringing. The desperate ones crawl over others to make it inside. The safe room isn’t big enough for everyone to fit in. Once, it’s filled to capacity, the people claw it closed despite the outside crowd trying to keep it open so that they can get in. But with a little force, we shut and lock it.
“What’s the matter? Why did the alarms blare? Does anybody know?”
“I do,” says a voice, throaty and grim.
Everyone turns to find the devil, red and horned, but in a business suit like everybody else.
A realization dawns — we had crawled over the less fortunate, sold our souls for safety. And he was here to collect.
I woke myself up I was so scared.
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This is a short story I wrote today. I hope you enjoy it.
“Killer Bats Again” — a study in stream of consciousness and unreliable characters.
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Why do I have blood on my hands? These tight walls make my head hurt. Where am I… wait, there’s a woman on the floor. Bleeding. Dead. A baseball bat next to her. Blood on my hands…
Was she an unfaithful girlfriend or an exercise in cold blood? Police sirens. Hide my hands in my jacket. The end of the alley pours into a sea of hats. I’m wearing one too. Blend in.
A café. My throat’s parched. Wash my hands before a meal. Man with a newspaper in the next booth. Headlines read ‘Killer Bats Again.’ How many murders have I committed? Must’ve been in cold blood.
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I learned a coin trick last week or at least the mechanics of one. I don’t know whether I’ve developed the skills to succeed at misdirecting a live audience, but I learned something important through the trick. Every trick has a setup, then an action, then a reveal — just like every story. And isn’t it funny how we say magicians cast a spell. There’s that word — spell. And what do storytellers do? They spell things out. Magic and stories. Come to your own conclusions. I’ve come to mine.
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Compliments can kill an artist. If you’re not careful, they can put you in a box until you suffocate. Before I received my first compliment on my work at the age of eight, I was free to write and make whatever I wanted without fear of losing something. As soon as somebody said, “Wow, that’s good,” I had something to lose. So the next time I wrote, I tried to emulate what was good about my last piece, a process that continued until I was writing diluted piss.
Even now, I cringe at compliments because of the double edge they carry. I love the attention, who doesn’t? But even the attention can kill if I were to write for glory and not myself. I wish I was eight again when my mind wasn’t contaminated with the thoughts of others. As I write this, I am judging how many people will like this post and whether they will think of me as a good writer. Getting rid of such thoughts is a daily practice, so everyday, I force myself to fail at something because I’ve realized that the only way I am ever going to make something good is if I make something bad first.
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Photo reblogged from Girl From the North Country
I like bars, actually. Only in Berkeley/Bay Area so far, I’ve come to notice its all about the crowd. Tonight I went to Thalassa with old friends and tried to catch up. The music was too loud and we were interrupted twice, once by a very friendly cartoon artist and again by two drunk USC underage bros who were stoked that their fake IDs worked. One of them looked like Patrick Feugit! The other was indian, and tried to pull the “we’re both indian, soooo….. this should be inevitable right?” card. Elliot and I came up with a game of “What Would Konish Do?” and asked the indian, named Red, what Konish would do for everything he brought up.
I stayed long enough for the indian to start spitting on the ground because he couldn’t handle the taste of alcohol, then drove home to an elated and somewhat gassy Murphy.
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There’s no line between human and animal.
Some say we have higher consciousness than animals, but how do we know that? Can a scan of the brain really prove that? We’ve never been anything other than human. We don’t know what it’s like.
Some say we can make decisions based on reason, but do we really? Are our decisions actually based on purely rational thought? I argue that’s not the case. Why do we go to school? To educate ourselves in order to make ourselves suitable mates to the opposite sex. Why do we put on make-up? Why do we play sports, music, chess? We do those things because we believe they increase our chances of finding a mate. We do those things to survive. Of course there are other reasons to all of these (spiritual, emotional, even rational), but I’m just pointing out how our decisions are colored by primal instincts, just like any other animal. And who’s to say animals don’t have other reasons for their actions either?
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My first experience with death was a red balloon and a dusty shelf of books. At seven years of age, I didn’t think about dying. It wasn’t something that struck people I knew; it just happened in Saturday morning cartoons and books. And I loved books. I devoured them. Actually, the honest truth is I only pretended to like books because reading made me seem smart. And in my family, being smart is the fastest way to attention and love. I made my grandfather, an English professor in India, buy me 1984, Ivanhoe, and even War and Peace the summer I discovered death. I “read” them all, and by “read,” I mean I glanced at a page for 30 seconds, then flipped to the next one, and so on for a thousand pages. At the end, I didn’t grasp a thing, but I could boast about how I had read War and Peace as a seven year old. My grandfather had a huge collection of old books. If people were so impressed with me after reading a few classics, how impressed must they be by my grandfather, who had a shelf full of classics, and by their tattered condition, I figured he had read every single one. Milton, Paradise Lost. Cool title, but I couldn’t understand even the first line. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. Wow, a book on Superman! Not exactly.
My grandfather noted my obsession with his shelf, and so he told me, “When I die, I’ll give all this to you.” When he dies? The casual way my grandfather brought up his own demise chilled me because it meant he had accepted death. It wasn’t something that might happen. He was going to die, and this bookshelf was going to be mine. I tried to wrap my seven-year-old mind around death, and found I couldn’t imagine it. What happens when you die? Does death hurt? And most importantly, why do we have to die?
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Winter Formal was an awful dance for me. I hate to admit that the only time I actually went was in my freshman year of college because my girlfriend at the time was still in high school. She broke up with me at the end of the dance.
But the story I am about to tell happened three years before, when I was a dweeby sophomore attempting to snab a hot date for winter formal:
In high school, I had no idea how to talk to girls. I didn’t think I was very good looking, and every time a decent looking girl spoke to me, I’d get a bad case of the stutters. Since I wasn’t very good with girls in real life, MySpace offered the wonderful opportunity for me to learn to be smooth with girls. With MySpace, I could receive a message from a girl and spend a few hours composing the wittiest response I was capable of. MySpace also allowed me to create an online image for myself. I could be cooler than I was in real life.
For my image, I decided to go with the rising indie/emo crowd and grew out my hair. This was what I was going for:
This is what I actually looked like:
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Gandhi has a quote about finding peace when you think, say, and act in harmony. Good idea, but is it really possible? I mean I definitely say my share of white lies in order to save face. I just feel like it’s not worth being honest for the sake of being honest in situations where honesty will hurt someone you care about. So following Gandhi’s equation, I am sacrificing my peace in order to keep someone else from getting hurt, which makes me a hero. I like that.
