nanowrimo 2k9

Farther south, tracking away from the old cabin off the road, back through the highways, as the trees thinned and the hills were overrun with roads and loud noises, dust, filth, pollution. The road stretched back down through the cities, and from a birds eye view, you could see the traffic moving across the coastline, branching off into higher concentrations and feeding into the cities. This was different though, the large storm that had buried Chuff and his mentors had continued unabated, but moved slighly inland. Instead of just dumping its payload of rain and evaporating it seemed to draw from the countryside, it grew larger, blacker, rumbling thunder and gusting the minutiae sitting under it. It wasn’t always raining, but it was impossible to tell when it would. If you were to watch it through a timelapse from space, it would appear to pulsate and hover aruond the large city. The vegetation seemed to grow lighter, where it could be seen, but the cloud never seemed to grow lighter, it held on to the heavy darkness of its core.

On the ground underneath, it was impossible to see the sun. The storm would seem like it was relenquishing, but it was just moving outside the city. The rain came and went, never flooding, but still kept the air oppressive. It was already the winter, so the days were shorter, and more likely to at least be overcase, but the wind never stopped. The locals seemed non-plussed, mostly because they were used to spending their time indoors, and being out of bad weather was at least one time when it felt good to be in the office. The local restuarants shifted towards soups instead of salads.

It was in the middle of this that Chuff had flown into town. All he really needed to do was sit around and listen. Early on, it was one of the best ways to make money. In fact, many marketing assholes had worked their way through the industry just being a mini parasite, they called these consulting assholes. These were people who had just sat there and took notes during meetings, and then eventually would have a meeting that often involved firing people they didn’t know and then leaving. Since there was no follow-up of efficiecy, it didn’t really matter weather or not they had good advice, just if they were able to sound convincing and make people know that they felt good spending the salaries of the people they fired for fictitious advice. Also consulting assholes could occasionally get follow-up work for “execution”, which actually involved murdering peoples livlihood. This was an excellent supplementary job because they had no attachment to the people they were firing, and in fact had made the recommendations. These recommendations usually involved playing hop scotch darts with a pile of employees deemed “non-critical”, basically, anyone who wasn’t a manager or a consultant.

Chuff was not going down this route. At least not yet. He was just drunk stupid and lying in a cot, listening to two middle-aged men snore. He had rolled to the side, and was listening to the storm. The rain was whipping against the windows and faint lightning out of the eye of the window was lighting sillouhettes outside the window. The ambient light from the street and the rustling storm made flickers on the tv right in front of his face. The TV itself was small and cheap, the remote control bolted to a nightstand on the other side of the room, and the top of the set was covered with small triangle-folded schedules of premium channels and local pizza shops. He was still full of the bar food he had been sitting on all night, now buried under several shots of taquila.

The anecdotes were still running through his head, but he couldn’t make much sense of them. They had all just flown in that day, and were buried in drunkenness, he wondered how they could do this before their actual meeting. Before the money making, before the deal had been closed.

“It doesnt matter”, he thought to himself, “I dont have to be good, i dont have to be anything, well, i might end up smelling like tequila but some aftershave, and cologne and maybe brushing my teeth with shampoo should take care of it.”

His thoughts drifted for a while, but he had a hard time falling asleep in such a strange place, with such an upset stomach, listening to the bizarre sleeping sounds of his companion.

Chuff was somewhere in his 20’s, fanatical devotion to short-cropped hair and being clean shaven seemed to knock a few years off, and his terrible fashion sense, and quiet demeanor made him oddly imperceptible. He had managed to hit a sweet spot where people unconsciously tried not to look at him. There was nothing about him that was ugly or unappealing, but there seemed to be a vortex of interesting things by him, something that had a magnetic repulsion of looking directly at him.

This had to change if he was going to carry on the proud tradition of being a marketing asshole. If you are trying to properly sell things (in a business to business sense, as this brand was), you could not scrape by being unnoticed. You had to command the attention of your prey. You need pretty much the opposite of what Chuff had going. It was important to be almost hypnotic, to not let the other party speak, or even reflect on if what they were selling was good or not. You needed fanatical devotion to the customer to the point that they would feel bad even trying to weigh the consequences. In short, you needed to be a mesmerizing eagle, going for the throat with a mighty screech.

Chuff was only vagely aware of these things, he had tried to dress like the other people in his community, which was hard not to do since they were just a nomadic tribe of marketing assholes, he wore just the traditional garb, something that had evolved from the culture, as being the type of gear that the most successful marketing assholes before him had done.

I might have mentioned before that they existed only on subsistence and the thrill of the hunt, but in this case subsistence meant keeping the community together. They ranked the rest of their money as disposable as a way of not being stuck completely in the idea of gaining wealth just for the sake of greed. This led to an ironic sense of frugality for how they lived and traded amongst each other. The currency they got was not valued, and was only held in reserve as a buffer to get around or for raw goods so they could keep tailoring their clothes and mending their humble abodes.

The storm raged on and Chuff grew more sober, but still couldn’t sleep. He wanted to turn the tv on, or maybe get a little light just to read, but didn’t want to disturb the elder marketing assholes. He rolled over and looked at the clock. 2:37. He started thinking of the morning approaching, having to get up at 6 and wash his hangover down with a cheap continental breakfast. He thought of the sandwich still sitting in his system. Then he wondered if society was made of bigfoots, if theyy would feel the need to shave or if the lady bigfeets would get their breasts waxed. He let out a sigh, and turned back, staring straight at the tv. The rain picked up, and he shivered softly with the change. Finally, growing tired of weird modernized bigfoot thoughts, he hatched a plan. A plan to watch some tv.

First he folded his thin blanket into quarters, and then swept his arm across the top of the tv, knocking the channel guides off the side. He got up and moved the cot another foot toward the door. so he could lie with his face staring directly at the tv. Then he laid down, propped the blanket over the top of the tv to make a viewing tunnel across his head. Finally, he hit the power button on the front of the tv, in the split second when the tv began warming up, he found the volume, and turned it all the way down. Success! Since he had managed to block out the light and sound, he could lie there and stare at the images. Fumbling around more, he found the front panel, and began to thumb around the various tiny buttons he could barely make out in the dark. At last he hit the close caption button and found the glory of late night hotel tv.

With his head buried in the blanket, and distracted by the flashing screen, concentrating on the subtitles focused out the lapping of the rain and the rumble of thunder in the distance. The snoring faded, too, and Chuff just sat there intently reding the subtitles in his own oppressive silence.

When his eyes finally focused, it was some kind of commercial. There was a man in blue jeans and a checkered shirt holding a rake in one hand and a spray bottle in another.

“And I know you folks are tired of this: every year the trees turn brown and the wind blows them all over the place. You’re stuck with something like this”, he motioned to the rake. Well now there is a way that you can take care of it with leavaway.”

The video changed to a split screen showing four different people struggling with rakes. In the upper left corner, an old woman in a pink jogging suit held the rake upside down and was stabbing at the leaves with the rounded end of the handle, the upper right corner was a middle aged man making a brushing motion towards his teeth with the rake. The third and fourth split were greasy nerds trying to wave them around like lightsabers.

The captions continued. “Why struggle with hard to use tools when you could just spray your problems away!”. Starwipe back to the announcer, who throws the rake on the ground with contempt, and forcing the spray bottle towards the camera.

“Yes, thats right, there is nothing in this world that is easier to use than leavaway! Thats a money back guarantee. Let me just show you how it worked.”

The camera followed him as he walked between scenes in a tv studio from a lawn setting to a kitchen setting. He stopped in front of a counter. The counter had a bowl of old wet leaves piled in it, and a pile of wax paper. He walked over to the stand and faced the camera.

“Just watch leavaway at work!”

An audience that didn’t exist clapped wildly.

“Thank you, thank you, please hold your applause until you are really wowed by this fantastic product!”

He was now wearing a pair of heavy yellow rubber kitchen gloves. He grabbed a handful of leaves slapped them on the wax paper with aplomb.

“Look at this, yucky, nasty yard garbage, i wouldn’t even touch this if i wasn’t wearing these gloves. Who knows what kind of diseases or slime could be on here. There should be a better way, right? Well now there is, with leavaway, you can just spray your problems away!”

He sprayed the pile of leaves and shunted his eyes away.

“Now folks, this is strong stuff, and you need strong stuff to do a dirty job, but its very important that you keep your eyes, nose, ears, mouth and skin away from leavaway at all time. Not to worry though, each leavaway shipment comes with a set of PREMIUM gloves and some stylish eyegoggles which I can’t wear because I think I’m handsome enough.”

As he sprayed, the leaves melted into a thick black liquid.

Chuff watched intently. After all, he was still just in training and mostly just there to observe, but this made almost no sense to him. So he changed the channel.

A repeat of a golf game. Or maybe live coverage from somewhere around the world. It is pretty much impossible to tell one from the other when you are watching a golf game because it is mostly just long shots of an almost invisible speck flying across perfectly manicured lawns.

A cable news channel, and another, and another. Almost indistinguishable, 3 layers of tickers at the bottom with stocks, headlines, and incomprehensible self-referential advertising. Old white men, attractive middle-aged women, they all seemed to be yelling or explaining what it felt like to be constipated. The subtitles were hurried and mistyped, and clashed terribly with the different speeds and colors of the tickers underneath.

A nature show, kangaroos versus dingos. The video was hard to watch because the captions had bracketed each sentence with “breathless, hushed voice”. It averaged half a sentence a screen and ran twice as fast.

Chuff was growing more and more sober but was so unsatisfied between the concentration of being focused on subtitles and the inability to do so that he had grown even more agitated and sleep was the furthest thing from his mind. He pulled his head out of the blanket and looked at the clock. 2:43. Six munites. He was overwhelmed by the snoring and dim flash of lightning, and retreated back into his blanket womb.