#i just kinda feel like a pathetic loser for not doing anything productive ever and i KNOW i shouldn't let that demean my character in any wa

[desire-mona]

can someone please come over and braid my hair and talk about fnaf like im 9 again thanks. can someone please come over and pretend like its all ok thanks.

[thisloveforyourmom]

Sudden Silence, Ch.1

Hey guys! I’ve recently been collaborating with @the-cockbite-syndicate and a bunch of other content creators to make content for a BRAND NEW cow chop au, so here’s my chapter one! If you read/liked Sygyzy, be prepared for another wild ride. Here it is!

Sudden Silence 

Chapter 1: Noise 

There are a lot of things that James Wilson was prepared for. Tattoos, for one thing. Calligraphy. Stray marks. Paint. Sharpie. Even scars, honesty.

But here he is, sixteen years old, watching black ink blossom across his skin for the first time, and he realizes he wasn’t prepared for Japanese.

He thinks it’s Japanese, after googling “asian languages” and clicking ‘images’. The characters seem to line up the way they should, not quite as complex looking as Mandarin and not as spaced out as Korean, but without a Japanese keyboard or the ability to understand pictographic characters he can’t tell what it says. He writes ‘what?’ on his own skin with a ballpoint pen, and the only reply he gets is to see the characters smudge like they were wiped and then wash away.

***

James is twenty-two, and Los Angeles is a bigger city than he ever could have imagined or, really, even wanted. His apartment isn’t bad, but it isn’t exactly good either, and the traffic is terrible in a way that no traffic should ever have to be. Even six months in, he’s still unsure about the decision to move, but he’d assured his mom that LA would have plenty of opportunities and that she shouldn’t worry about him all the way in Pennsylvania, and damned if he was about to come running home across the country just so that she could tell him that she was right. She’d done it enough over the phone, the first month or so when he’d been missing her the most, and then James had remembered that he thrives on spite and he’d made it his goal to succeed.  

He has a job at a “gourmet starbucks”, which is just a starbucks that serves special ice cream lattes and pays an hourly rate with two digits, and it’s not the job he plans to keep but it pays the bills on his apartment with enough left over that he can start an internship sometime soon. The first couple months, he works with Aleks, and as his most frequent coworker he quickly becomes James’ first and only friend.

Aleks then exposes him to Brett, who’s all dry wit and seems to know how to get under Aleks’ skin even better than James does, and they very quickly form a mutual respect once Brett stun guns himself in the leg and James drinks--well, drinks is a strong word--a blend of protein milk and mealworms.  

Then Aleks gets a better job, one that pays him more and doesn’t require him to smell like coffee 24/7, and when he leaves Trevor and Aron take his place. It’s shocking, really, how every new employee at this liquid sugar store seems to fit seamlessly into the group they’re forming, but within a couple weeks Aron moves away and Trevor springs for amateur photography and Jakob and Asher take their place on the morning shift.

And then, two months later, Jakob swaps to the night shift, Asher joins Trevor, and James gets promoted to manager before he finds himself leaning against the counter at 5:30 AM, staring at a Japanese man with a headband and and a nametag that says ‘Sasuke Uchiha’.  

He’s got pin straight black hair, cut choppily as if he’s done it himself, and he stands just a little shorter than James. Giving him the onceover, the first things James notices are the wristbands, and the second is the way he stands, as if he’s ready to move in any direction at any time. He’s skinny, but muscular, and he’s got to be around James’ age but there’s a certain maturity about him that makes him seem much older.

They stare for a while, and part of it is the fact that James got up at five in the morning to open, and part of it is the fact that past a a basic greeting this new guy hasn’t spoken once.

“So how do you say that?” James asks eventually,  and maybe he’s just not a morning person, but ‘Sasuke’ only stares for a moment or so.

“Sa-su-ke,” he eventually says, sounding it out with something that’s almost contempt, and James was going to sigh but he’s caught off guard by the way that this new guy’s voice sounds. Not what he’s putting into it, probably, but...it rings a bell, of some kind, only James can’t tell what. “Welcome to hell,” he says, instead of thinking about that, and he whips a washcloth off the counter and at Sasuke. He catches it, unfazed, and James doesn’t know why Sasuke’s composure annoys him, but it does. “You’re new, you scrub the tables. When that’s done, work the register until the hospital crowd stops coming in, and then I’ll show you how to use the machines. Until then…” James yawns. “Don’t fucking bother me.”

***

Sasuke’s only been working there for a few hours, but James can’t stop stealing glances at him. Sasuke is definitely attractive, but 5’9” with a permanent bored look has never exactly been James’ type, and he can’t figure out why he’s so interested. But he is, and he keeps noticing things that he’d never care about in anyone else. Sasuke moves almost a little too smoothly, like a dancer, and he’s got abnormally fast reflexes. He always keeps his wrists covered.  He hasn’t spilled any coffee on anyone yet, and James gets the feeling that if he did spill it, he wouldn’t care all that much. Everything only adds to the weird air of mystery surrounding him.

God, ‘air of mystery’, he sounds like a fucking author with a crush and that’s not what this is. He’s curious, is all. That’s it. This person is new, and he does things a little weirdly, and James hasn’t seen it before so he’s curious and if he’s going to dissect that it won’t be now.

James tells himself that until he’s distracted by Aleks coming in before work. He ushers Sasuke away from the register, because Aleks is a hassle to deal with on his best days, and if James is there Aleks isn’t going to let him hear the end of ignoring him at the register anyway. Sasuke doesn’t say anything, just nods and goes to make a latte or something--and James was kind of shocked at how quickly he picked up that particular skill, he’d said he hadn’t done it before, but he’d learned pretty fast how to foam milk without getting it everywhere and how not to overtamp the espresso machine--and maybe James was just an idiot but it had definitely taken him a couple days to master the production of caffeine.

“Are you going to take my order, or are you too busy staring at that new guy?” Aleks asks, and James snaps his attention to the bottle blonde standing at the counter.

“I wasn’t--” he starts, but the look on Aleks’ face tells him that he’s either explaining himself, getting relentlessly teased, or both, so he just sighs. “He just looks kinda familiar, is all, stop giving me that look, you fucker.”

Aleks pauses for a moment, and the slow smile on his face is all James needs to see.

“That’s fucked up--”

“Not Aron familiar, you asshole, what the fuck do you want from this stupid hipster fucking Starbucks,” James groans, and Aleks only laughs. He doesn’t order, just offers his card, but that’s okay because if James didn’t know what he wanted by now he’d be a really pathetic friend.  

He writes russian asshole on the cup, and then gets back to actually making coffee while Sasuke takes his spot at the register. It’s a hard battle not to yell cocksucker instead of grande white chocolate mocha, but he manages, and if he gets back to stealing glimpses of the new guy once he’s gone then there’s no one around who cares enough to notice.

***

Sasuke sticks around, and James shouldn’t be surprised because this is his job, but it still seems strange for whatever reason. Like ‘coworker’ isn’t the word he should be using to describe him. Either way, within the week, he’s working more efficiently than Jakob ever did, and probably poisoning less customers, and James can’t deny the efficiency he’s brought. His role in the store is already growing, and with it for some stupid reason, James’ interest in him.

There’s a lot he didn’t notice on the first day. Sasuke takes care with each individual order, as if he thinks they’re important beyond the scope of the job, and at one point James catches him looking around after he messes up a name and James quickly looks away. When he peeks again, there’s a small smirk on Sasuke’s face, and James can’t fight the smile coming to his own.

James’ initial fascination just...doesn’t wear off. It’s stupid, and Aleks notices it every time, and because he has no morals he points it out to Brett, and while he sternly denies their suspicions that it’s a crush, it’s like he sees something new every time he looks over. By Friday, he’s almost disappointed for his days off, and he doesn’t get it. He hadn’t cared half as much about Trevor or Jakob or even Aleks, but something about this guy just...draws him closer. Pulls his eyes away from whatever he’s doing and into some bullshit people-watching session where there’s only one person being watched.

He can’t help it. He wants to, but he can’t. He finds himself noticing the little things, even if they’re the same little things he’s noticed time and time again. How he moves, the way his bangs are cut. The way he asks for someone’s name. But this is not a crush, so he’s resigned himself to finding out as much as he can just by watching his new coworker and hopefully whatever this is--not a crush--will stop.

***

“Taste my wrath, James,” Brett calls, laughing in that little, stupid, infuriating way of his, and James almost throws his controller across the room.

“Fuck off,” he yells as he falls off the level for the fifth fucking time, and the moment the race ends he drops the controller in favor of leaning back with his head in his hands. “I don’t wanna play this game anymore.”

“You’re just a sore fucking loser,” Brett laughs, and fuck Brett because he’s got first in the Prix. “Wasn’t me. That was Trevor.” James still hasn’t moved, but he’s more than happy to move the blame.

“Dude, what?” Trevor asks, but before he can get an answer James stands up and stretches, going to the kitchen and opening the fridge. “Oh, dude, get me a Sprite,” Aleks calls, and he’s second in the prix so fuck him too, actually.  

“No. I’m done with your games.” He comes back with a shitty ten ounce can of Sprite anyway, but immediately regrets it when he sees the look on Aleks’ face.

“If you’re done with the game, we could just talk about your fuckin’ boner for that new guy--” James doesn’t let him get far. “It’s not a boner, you fucker, first of all, and his name is Sasuke.” It’s too immediate, and there’s just a little too much aggression in it, and Aleks only leans back with his eyebrows raised. Trevor, from across the room, does the opposite, and James can feel the attention in the room shift entirely to him god damn it. “I mean, I’m not, uh, well versed in these subjects, but--”  

“Shut the fuck up, Trevor, you can’t listen to this conversation,” James says, throwing a throw pillow at him and then using the other one to cover his face when Brett starts in. “You’ve been talking about him in the groupchat for like, a week, dude,” he says, and James only groans. “Shut up, you baby. It’s a crush.”

“He’s interesting,” James moans, and Brett just laughs.

“I know a lot of interesting people. You didn’t stare at any of them for 8 hours a day.”

“If I had to stare at you for 8 hours a day I’d kill myself.” “So you like staring at him.” God, Brett’s an asshole sometimes. James pulls away the pillow and starts to tell him that, but something on his face must give something away because Brett throws his hands up before he can. “Jesus, okay, calm down,” he laughs, and James just stares for a moment before pulling the pillow back over his face and groaning again.

***

They drop it, and James thinks it’s because they can tell they’re pushing something and he doesn’t like that there’s something there to push. At the same time, his whatever-this-is with Sasuke isn’t going away, and might even be getting worse, and judging by the look Aleks gave him Monday morning, if he doesn’t acknowledge it soon his friends are going to kill him.

Nothing comes to a head until Wednesday morning, where one of them is greeted by a platinum blonde and for the first time in two weeks it isn’t James. “Sasuke!” Someone calls, and both their heads turn at the sound. James quickly looks back to his customer at the register, but his ears are open to the conversation going on beside him. “Why did you come?” Sasuke says, and that one sentence holds more emotion than James has ever heard from him.

“Because you’re my friend, idiot,” the blonde replies, and then there’s a scoff and a laugh. “I’m an adult--” “I wanted to see how you were doing,” the blonde says, and it sounds...more subdued. Serious. There’s a moment where they don’t speak, and it’s filled by the sound of Sasuke turning on the ice machine. Then it goes off, and one of them sighs.

“I’m fine, Naruto.” Sasuke sounds tired, but not...ungrateful, and when James sneaks a look over he can see ‘Naruto’ smiling slightly. “Good.” Apparently that’s all he needed to hear, because he then starts in on a coffee order, and the look of pure exasperation on Sasuke’s face is enough to make James stifle a laugh. “Go to the register and order like a normal person, you loser,” he says, and Naruto makes a thoughtful sound for a moment.

“Fine,” he says, and James can see a flurry of motion out of the corner of his eye. “Naruto--” “This is payment, what kind of a friend won’t even make his friend a coffee, it’s a ransom headband--”

James doesn’t know what’s going on, but it’s getting closer and closer to him, and he turns to look just in time--

For Sasuke to spill hot coffee on him while trying to reach over at whatever Naruto’s got in his hand and time seems to stop.

He should be angry, probably, but really it isn’t hot enough to bu--okay, yeah, it’s hot enough to burn, but for some reason he doesn’t care. The sliver of skin where their arms brushed against each other feel electrified, as if they’re burning with black flames, and James doesn’t know why he chose black ones but it just seems to fit.

Sasuke’s eyes widen, and then meet his, and then for one long, slow moment, the world around them fades away, and all James can really focus on is the fact that Sasuke is pressed against him, burning and electric, and that he doesn’t ever want this moment to end.

And then it ends, and the seconds fade from minutes back to seconds again, and when Sasuke pulls away James is left holding the cloth away from his skin so that his torso doesn’t get burned too badly.

Sasuke just stands there, with his eyes wide and a mostly empty coffee cup in his hands, and for a moment everything is silent. And then Naruto jumps in with an obscene amount of concern for someone that he’s never met. “Are you okay?” He asks, reaching across the counter with some napkins and dropping Sasuke’s headband next to the register. Sasuke doesn’t reach for it, still just standing there, and James is still dazed enough that it takes him a moment to reply. “Wh--oh, no, yeah, yeah, I’m fine, I guess, I’ll just…” He stops. “I’ll just need a new shirt or something, yeah,” and he can tell from the way Sasuke relaxes slightly that he was expected a whole lot more anger. Well, James can’t really blame him, considering how he is normally, but it’s really hard to be angry when...well, when it’s Sasuke.

It’s only hard for James, though. “Sasuke!” Naruto practically yells, and Sasuke jumps some, finally blinking away that deer-in-the-headlights look. “You have to take him to get a new shirt.”

“Woah, wait a minute, it’s really fine--” James tries, but neither of them are listening. They seem to be having a silent conversation, and it looks like Naruto’s winning.

“Fine,” Sasuke finally concedes, and then turns to James. “After work?” He asks, and he’s not meeting James’ eyes, but he’s not sounding as...sullen as James had expected him to. Sasuke looks almost shy, and it’s...really cute. James realizes that he’d been staring for a moment, and shakes it away. “I--yeah, after work, that’s...fine…” He says, and then he has to turn away to help the next customer because the line is getting longer and also if he lingers in that moment any longer he’ll combust and fuck, fuck, fuck it’s definitely a crush.

(“I have a date”, he texts in the groupchat next time he gets a break, and then, “I’m fucked.”

He looks at his arms, and the rest of his body. Bare as they’ve always been.

Fuck.) @naruto-chop

[works-of-evection-blog]

I was a product tester for an app similar to Uber. Final Part.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Needless to say, something took over me from that moment. I no longer felt scared or vulnerable. It was as if a slow-burning adrenalin had finally filled my entire body and all of my systems were ‘go’. I went back to my laptop, staring defiantly at the black box.

“Alright, you fuckers. What is it this time?” I clicked the box and a webpage opened up. It was loading a video.

“Cherie what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m fed up of waiting for answers! Dean, this game ends today. Those assholes are going to get what’s coming to them and I’m going to be a part of it.”

I stared directly into my webcam as I finished that sentence. No fear, no sense. I wasn’t sure what the look Dean gave me translated to, but he didn’t try to stop me.

The video started playing. It looked like surveillance footage from some sort of warehouse. Apart from a few shelves, there was nothing else in the shot. Don’t ask me how, but my gut, my gut that I should’ve listened to from the start, told me that this was where they held those hostages.

“This is the key, Dean. I just know it. We have to figure out where this is-“

Suddenly a person wearing a balaclava walked into view and stared up at the camera. As we watched, he slowly drew a phone out of his pocket and brought it up to his neck, where he made a slicing motion, as if it were a knife.

“Hey, turn up the sound.”

On Dean’s order, I turned the sound up as far as it would go. Faintly, we heard what sounded like a vehicle approaching. The hooded man walked out of view. Norman’s phone buzzed. Dean picked it up, “It says ‘keep watching’.”

Turning our heads back to the screen, we saw the warehouse door moving. Someone was outside, trying to get in. After some heavy banging, the door didn’t budge. After a little more time and some quieter sounds, the door cracked open. Greg and his team emerged from the sunlight outside. I picked up my phone and dialled him. I watched as he answered.

“Cherie I’m kinda busy at the moment,”

“I know, we can see you guys on a surveillance camera to your left. They sent me a link on my laptop. Someone’s in there, we saw them.”

I watched as he hung up and took out his gun. He nodded to the surveillance camera in recognition. I didn’t even realise how tightly I was clenching my jaw. All we could do was watch, we had no idea where this warehouse was or what would happen next.

Suddenly, Greg seemed to stiffen up. He dropped his gun and the other four cops lowered theirs slowly. We watched as a woman stumbled into view and dropped to her knees. Greg was visibly shaking as he uttered the name, “L..Lauren.”

His wife. Those bastards had his wife. The hooded man came back, standing behind Lauren, pointing a gun to the back of her head. I let out a gasp. I couldn’t believe this situation. What’s more, I wanted to be there, I wanted to intervene. This had to stop. No more killing.

“We need to get there, Dean. We need to go. How the fuck do we figure out where it is?”

Dean suddenly leaned in close to the screen, staring into my webcam.

“They’ll tell us.”

That was all it took to get a text sent to both of our cheap phones.

Wait outside.

I didn’t care where this led, I was going. I went to my kitchen and grabbed a knife – the only weapon I had in my house.

“Geez, Cherie, you sure about this?”

“One hundred percent.”

I grabbed my jacket and walked outside, not waiting for Dean to follow. Minutes later, he joined me. After a few minutes, a car turned up with two people inside.

“That’s them. The twins I met – Bella and Johan.” We got in the back seats, the twins stared straight ahead, robot-like. They took off calmly, as if everything was normal.

“So who are you guys, really?” Dean asked impatiently.

They didn’t reply straight away, but the man looked like he was pondering an answer. I had to cut in. “Don’t think about it, just fucking answer the question.”

“Wow Dean, your little girlfriend here is rather rude. How on earth did she pass the interview?” I watched Dean clutch something under his jacket. His face was turning red with anger.

“Give us some answers, now.”

The man let out an exaggerated sigh, then spoke, “Look, guys. All we know is, these people are giving us a loooaaad of cash to do this shit. We’re not a part of whatever the hell they are, we’re just professionals.”

“Professional what, exactly?”

It was the girl who spoke this time, “Oh, you know, professional…errand runners, I guess.”

“Like hitmen or something?”

“Mmph, nothing that morbid on our portfolio yet, but I mean, we just do illegal shit for companies and very rich people who can pay the right price.”

“So how’d you get involved with this?”

“Reddit.” They both answered in unison.

I was taken aback by their nonchalant nature to this conversation.

“You’ve been working for them all this time?”

“Yeah, they get us to do a bunch of seemingly harmless stuff. Interview people, courier people, that’s really it. Apart from that, we don’t know much else. That’s another thing about us, we don’t ask questions.”

“Huh. So where are you taking us now?”

“Same place they get us to take everyone else.”

“Big warehouse out of town, I’m guessing?”

The guy seemed to mock surprise, “Wow, Florence, we have a detective in the car!”

These people were Grade A sociopaths if I ever did see them. Dean scrunched his face up in disgust.

“You’re hurting innocent people!”

“Darling, we’re following orders. By the looks of it, so are you.”

That was a stab to the gut. She was right. We were no better than them. The rest of the drive was silent, until we reached our final destination.

“Off you go.”

As soon as we closed the doors, they sped off, down the dirt track we’d taken to get here. We stared at the typical, out-of-town abandoned warehouse looming over us. The police car was still parked out front.

“This is it. This is where we end it.”

I looked at Dean, and he looked back and nodded. We approached the warehouse door that was still ajar from where Greg had entered. Without missing a beat, we walked in, not knowing what to expect. The scene became familiar, and I glanced up to find the surveillance camera that we must’ve been looking through. It was too quiet.

“There,” Dean pointed, “that back room. C’mon.”

As we approached the door, it opened and the balaclava man presented himself with a low bow, inviting us in. We slowly walked into the room to find each of the four cops standing in the corners of the small room, their backs turned. Greg and Lauren stood, clutching each other in the middle of the room. The balaclava man produced a knife, and teased Lauren's jawline with it. She whimpered and pleaded, her husband's attempts at comfort worthless. He turned his head to us.

"You know what's been the most fun part of this whole...adventure?"

We said nothing.

"Getting away with it."

"Enough of this, who are you?"

He let out a guttural laugh and removed his mask.

"I...I don't believe it." whispered Greg. Lauren fell to the ground. Dean took a step back. Greg stumbled over his words, "I...saw you die, Norman."

"No dad, you watched someone else die. Just another poor soul, following orders like the rest of you idiots. Do you know how much it scares me? Being able to manipulate all these people, dad? You should know how that feels. You do it every day, after all. And mum, you're not much different. You think you're independent but I've seen the texts, the emails. You both make me sick. You all make me sick."

Norman's parents hung on their son's every word, each syllable seemed to hit them like a bullet. Lauren looked like she couldn't take much more. Greg was silent, statuesque. Why was nobody doing anything? There were literally four armed police officers in every corner of the room, standing with their backs turned. I had to say something.

"Hey! What are you all doing?! Fucking shoot him!"

"They won't listen to you, Cherie. They, just like everyone else in this room, are under my control."

"And what exactly is controlling them?"

"Money. What else fuels motivation more than paper?"

I was disgusted. This absolute psycho was toying with us from day one. And he had started with his own father.

"Norman," Greg spoke, "tell me who you killed in that video, son."

"Don't 'son' me! You're not talking your way out of this one!"

Nobody was acting, we all stood in stunned silence, listening to him talk.

"It doesn't matter who that kid was, he was nobody. The only purpose he served was mine. Now he's dead and no one will care. Can't you see the correlation here? Look at you all. Pathetic. Alone. Nothing going for you. You should be thanking me, I've given you purpose. And now we're all here."

"WHY?! Why the fuck are we all here?" Dean portrayed the resentment I felt.

"Well, now that you're here. I can get to that. Dean, you follow instructions blindly. Selling your soul on Instagram to desperately hit 1000 likes a post. Because that's all you have. That's all you live for, gets you through the day. And that promise of influencer status really got to you, didn't it? Thanks for leading me to Cherie, by the way."

"What?" I stared at Dean. His eyes twitched.

"Don't act so surprised," Norman turned to me, "he knows exactly what I'm talking about. Four weeks ago, when my people met him, they asked him a fairly mundane question. 'So Dean, answer honestly: name someone you see every day, that you wouldn't look at twice. Someone who doesn't make a difference in your life.' He perfectly described you, and it took about a day of investigating to find you, Cherie. The 'random girl who buys a coffee from my shop every now and then, basically insignificant.’”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was fucked beyond words.

“Bust most of all, thank YOU, dad. You were the one that started this all. Telling me about this opportunity to join something cool. Cause at the end of the day, that’s your biggest fear, your only son, becoming a loser.”

Greg was crying alongside his wife at this point, “Norman, no. Norman, please!”

”It’s too late for that! SHUT UP!”

My thoughts of Dean calling me an insignificant girl, before he even knew me, that…triggered something. A kind of resentment for people that was always there, I guess, bubbling away deep inside. But that moment, the moment confirmed my deepest, darkest fear. That people I didn’t even know really did judge me, they really did.

“Norman honey,” Lauren’s voice was so broken, it barely broke through the air, “what about your friends? They’re all going to find out about this…”

“You just don’t get it, mum, do you? I could not care LESS about my ‘friends’. They’re not friends anymore. They’re all fucking drones. Sure, ‘come over Norman, let’s hang out Norman, it’s been ages’, only to come over and watch them bury their faces into their phones. OBSESSED with whatever is on that fucking screen! Barely saying a word to me. Yes, I really wanted to come around to watch you communicate with others!”

It started to make sense. The manipulation through mobiles, why he saw taking over the app as a good opportunity. I was twitching all over. Still, nobody moved.

“Phones. And money. People will do whatever they say. And since I do not wish to become one of you, I will simply  go above you. All of you.”

It was enough. A blatant psychopath stood in front of me. He’d killed at least one person, admitted it in front of 5 police officers, and they all stood, backs turned, because they were getting paid. Dean was the reason I was here, because I was ‘insignificant’. His parents could do nothing but tremble and shake at his every word. I felt angry at everyone in the room. I wanted them all to take action, to do something. Couldn’t they see what would happen if they just let this guy live?

“I know what you’re thinking, Cherie. Pathetic, isn’t it? All these people, not doing a thing. Weak. But you see, you, too, are simply standing on your two weak legs, nothing better to do. And that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? Letting everyone trample over you, keeping inside your passive, little shell. You say it’s fine but things bother you,” he started walking towards me very slowly, taunting, “they always bother you. And then you go home, cry it off into your diary and simply get up hoping tomorrow will be different. Newsflash, Cherie, tomorrow? It never changes for people like you.”

People like me? He knew fucking nothing. It took me exactly 1.2 seconds to take my knife out of my jacket pocket and dig it deep into his throat. As his blood spurted onto my face, I watched his smirk transform into a reddened smile.

It took me exactly 30 seconds to kill everyone in that room. Once Norman fell to the floor and started convulsing, I interrupted Dean’s “What the-“ with a brutal slash to the throat. I then stabbed him twice for good measure. 15 seconds, I moved on to Norman’s shocked parents. First Lauren, she had nothing left in her. At this point, neither did Greg. They both went down without a fight. 24 seconds and I took Greg’s gun from his holster, cocked it and 4 bangs later, those cops made the first motion they’d made since I walked into that room. Straight to the ground. I had never held a gun in my life.

I barely heard the sounds of the struggle, my mouth and brain screamed the whole time in unison.

I stood there, breathing heavily, staring around the room, which I had painted red. The way all of those years of built up emotion came out…there was only one word for it. Orgasm. The blissful release of all pain, all happiness, sadness, anger, hatred, love…and the calm that followed. I was at peace. And for the first time since I became caught up in this mess, possibly the first time in years, I felt true liberation. I stayed in that warehouse overnight, lying among the bodies. Not a single thought of regret or guilt swallowed me. Just calm, clarity, everything was okay.

I went home the next day. Norman’s car was parked around the back. It didn’t take long to locate his keys. Even if I ended up getting caught and sent to prison for my crimes, I didn’t mind. I found something I didn’t know I was searching for. I found what everyone secretly searches for. My purpose.

I got home and enjoyed a cold shower, followed by the deepest sleep I had ever experienced. It was over. I was free. I was unsure where I would go from here, I didn’t feel a need for anything more. I simply existed contentedly now, knowing I had full control over my life. I opened my emails with full intention to resign from my job, checking my new messages – just a bank statement and junk mail.

I opened up the statement. What I saw made me frown. Immediately, I felt those human emotions of dread and suspicion crash into me once again. The final deposit into my account was made last night at exactly midnight.

$1,000 from an unknown account.

I wasn’t in control after all.

[thebigcitynightsband]

ALMOST AWAKE

We knew from day one that we’d never see fame or anything remotely like it with this endeavor, but in the words of Robert Pollard, “we began making records anyway, just to have them.” That’s right. Just to have them. Lord knows we have nothing else. Doomed to obscurity. Born to bar band.

That’s our old MySpace bio, written in 2007 and remaining unchanged for our entire tenure on MySpace, from Tom to Murdoch.

I’ve talked about how much I miss MySpace on this blog before ( “Her Geography” was originally called “MySpace Memories”), but I suspect that I miss that particular time in my life, not MySpace itself.

I’ve also written about internet nostalgia before and how strange it feels. The architecture of the internet makes the experience of being online feel seamless from day to day because the changes are small and rarely jarring. A feature added here, another feature deleted there. A new interface, a new button. Small novelties are revealed in comfortable increments. But small changes add up to big ones over time, and although the pace of this accumulation might seem glacial, often I glance up at my computer screen and think about how fucking different the internet was ten years ago.

But, as you know if you’ve followed this band for any length of time, my tendency to look back with wistful longing is not reserved for the internet. Nostalgia is the defining condition of my life.

Back in 2011 me and my friend Russell released an album called Brampton Comes Alive under the moniker The Flower City 3, a band we’d been trying to start since I emailed about it in 2006. We tried to enlist Ryan Hacker and make an album about Brampton, but Hacker was less enthusiastic about the idea. Russell and I saw it as a challenge, writing song about Brampton, but Hacker saw it as a constraint. So we told people that Brampton was the third member of the group and made an album. I’m really happy with the finished product, even if the second half gets a little depressing, care of a tune called “Never Gonna Be Back Home” that I wrote. We did the vocals in a room I stayed in briefly on Cecil with a testy roommate who hated noise, so we only had one take to do the song before he came home and told us to stop recording, and I was happy that I got the screams right in the chorus. You can hear the song here: https://theflowercity3.bandcamp.com/track/never-gonna-be-back-home-2 For the packaging, we got Russell’s brother Luke to drive around Brampton and take photos. We chose one of Shopper’s World for the front cover, but the physical record had a booklet with five or six other photographs. The lone review we got for the record, by a blog called iheartmusic, was savage. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, which hurt a little, but I was glad that we made it. It was a nostalgic collection of song, to be sure, our mission statement being: this album is dedicated to Brampton, not as it is, or even as it was, but as we remember it, echoing the old maxim that what happens isn’t as significant as how you remember it. 

I thought that finishing and releasing that Flower City 3 record would finally cure me of my nostalgia, but it didn’t. I became more and more introspective, to the point where most of BCN songs are about the loss of friendship or the loss of youth. I don’t just want the band to be a self-therapy vehicle for me, but it’s hard to fight what comes naturally. Metal bands write about ancient medieval battles or zombies climbing mountains. Punk bands write about pizza and girls. And The Big City Nights Band writes songs about nostalgia and friendship. So here we are, with a new record that serves as a callback to the past.

We have an old song on Deep Space Bistro called “Almost Awake,” an off-kilter, shoegazey kind of thing, with a lot of delay on the guitar. The song was recorded in late spring 2008 around the same time I was finishing up the final mixes for A Steamroller Named Desire. I was with Jessica at the time, and I remember meeting her somewhere in Chinatown to grab food. She'd taken the bus down from Brampton while I'd spent the day recording the song. We brought the food back to my attic bedroom and ate while I played her the mix. I tried to get her to sing on it, but she wasn't comfortable with it. Previously she'd been excited to sing on songs, and we did a lot of recording together. Her voice can be found on "Be Mine This Xmas," "Hockey Night In Canada," "Greensong," "Canadian Baseball," "I'm A Skymaker," "Until They Smile," "Between Important Syllables," "Jawbreakers," "Summer Sports," "Carry Me Ontario," "Happy Man," and probably a few more I'm forgetting. But she wasn't down with singing on this one, and it was a turning point in our relationship. After that afternoon, it was much harder to get her to sing on my songs. She was struggling with depression and malaise at the time. She dropped out of school and spent most days in bed watching The Office. We moved in together in September 2009 in an attempt to salvage the relationship but it didn't last long. We broke the lease and went our separate ways in June 2010, a few days before the band released Might Minutes.

Almost Awake is our twenty-first album, meaning our discography could now legally drink at a bar in the States if it were a sentient being. The idea sparks one's imagination. If our discography were a person, it’d be an older man, NOT a gentleman but a bellowing boor lurching down the sidewalk, trying to make friends with people who have their headphones on. Friendly enough, and not a bully, but a guy who has a surplus of things he wants to say and a deficit of sympathetic ears. Enthusiastic, to be sure, yet caustic and poorly dressed to boot. He stands upwind while smoking at the bus stop. He's maddeningly inconsistent to employer and friend alike: no one knows which version of him will show up, the slick professional or the shambling, drug-addicted hustler. Always interesting though not always inviting interest. Loving but not loved. Fetid, not feted. Musical garbage. Gasoline rainbows. Yesterday's slice of pizza. Tomorrow's heartburn. A pile of newspapers in a language lost to the world. Twenty one albums of shambolic, mono, sometimes beautiful, sometimes acerbic, rock 'n roll from the metaphorical garage.

Almost Awake has some rock n roll on it, especially the first half, but it’s got plenty of balladry too. As an album it can stand on its own, but it might need assistance walking. It's helper and brother is High Hopes, our other record that came out in 2016. The two records are bookends that mine similar sonic and lyrical territory. I've been battling a drug problem for a few years now and finally starting to get the upper hand, though there have been falterings here and there. I write a lot of songs regardless, on drugs or off them, drunk or sober. A recurring lyrical themes of the early albums was friendship. I wrote a lot of songs about my friends. 

"Born to Bar Band" is about my friends who were in bands, working all day and week so they could play music at night and on weekends, hence the line "days seem long waiting to sing our songs." "Murray Street" is about Emon. We had a fight summer 2006, so I wrote a song about it. It's not Shakespeare, obviously. I preferred to put it bluntly back then: "Please don't not call me your friend." "Wedding Day" is about a friend of mine who had gotten engaged to another friend of mine. They started acted differently, didn't come out as much, which was fine and understandable, except that when they DID come out, they were awkward and kinda rude to us. It was as if they thought we were all immature losers and they were better than us because they had decided to do something adult while we were still playing in bands and drinking in bars. So I wrote a song about how I was mad about it."Why I Didn't Hate Summer 2003" is another friendship one. "Tell your friends this summer I'm just stuck working.""She Dreams Of Airports" was about my friend M___. Any song on Born to Bar Band that isn't about friendship or hanging out with friends is about love and/or relationship problems. "Bicycle Man," "Waiting," "Mathematics," "Don't Tell Me" and "Don't Fuck With Me," written about my ex-gf D____, "Run Home" and "Big Ears" about my gf at the time, N_____. "Leave Your Man" was directed toward a girl I really liked at the time. "Soda Song" is also about her. 

Later on, starting with Might Minutes I'd say, and in FULL swing by the time we got to Under the Overpass and Gimme Gardens, our songs were about nostalgia, and this nostalgia was brought on by the dissolution of many of my friendships. I'm not saying my friendships had ALL crumbled by 2010, but there had been a fundamental change to each one of them, I still don't know why, that started to drive wedges between me and my friends. These wedges were creating distance between us, inches that grew to canyons, until eventually some people disappeared altogether from each other's lives. Me coming to terms with this has not yet happened. I'm still upset over it, and I still think about it all the time, which is pathetic because I'm 31 years old. I should be married with children by now, instead of living with my parent and yearning for my lost youth.

Ember Nights

Taken from a collection of demos written last summer. The title was "Memba Thenz" for a while but I changed it to something less silly. An ember night could be any night in September, November, or December, take your pick, or a night that burns and glows, which is more poetic I guess. The song, lyrically, is about coming to the end of a long period of debauchery, and your brain is dead and your nerves are shot. The lyric is deliberately dumb, “mind like a DOA,” to match the brain deadness of the subject or something. I dunno. I like the line so I kept it. I like the lead guitar lines too and Kuehn drummed the song well. Love that tapping on the top of the bass drum, which James does sometimes too, often to great effect, as in "In The Street."

Two Packs A Day Also from last summer. This one turned out a LOT faster and punkier than I expected. The vocal is not strong at all, but it has a charm to it. There's a friendship vibe to this one, a territorial one, as in things are like this “round our way."

Summers End Wrote this one last April. Again, turned out way different during the tracking of the drums, so we went with it. There is a vocal melody but, as with "1985," I really liked how punchy and strong it sounds without any singing, so I left it alone. I still might get Ryan to sing on it and put a version with vocals on the next record. We'll see. More & More Mortified Recorded this one with Courtney on vocals. A sad song about dashed expectations and getting older. I love the blend of our voices. My mother loves this song and made me play it for my sister and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve, which was awkward, but my Mom said she still had the song in her head three days later, which is a good sign. When your Mom, who has previously not expressed much interest in your band, has a hook in her head three days after hearing a song, it gives you more confidence in said song. There’s a bit of Twin Peaks vibe.

No Window My first bedroom in Toronto was in a basement and it was windowless. I felt trapped and encumbered. No window = no escape, obviously, but also nothing to look at. Some Glum Alumni

Another song about days gone by. Before Instagram, nobody had photos of the truly good times, because everyone was having too much fun to take photos. In The Dark This is a really old cover of a Paddington song, recorded in Orangeville in 2005 in my Dad's basement. That was the first iteration of Little Ghost Recording Co and I was just learning how to record. I could barely play the drums but I got through this song okay. If it were any longer I surely would have faltered and made mistakes. The drumming as it is, is really tight-fisted on the hi-hat, which was how I played back then. I'm a much better drummer now than I was then, but still not very good. The Paddington album this song is on is called These Monsters That You've Been Chasing, which is a fantastic title. You can hear the (superior) Paddington version, which is a prom date waltz, at the following ancient MySpace page: https://myspace.com/paddingtonband/music/songs Paddington was a cool band I played in for four or five months back in 2004. The bass player Jordan hated me. A year later, frustrated at the glacial pace with which Andrew preferred to rehearse, record, and organize live dates, he organized a coup. Although he claimed that he left the band, along with Lindsay Gibb, the singer/keyboard player and the drummer whose name I forgot, what they really did was kick Andrew out of his own band and reform under the name Bedtime, Sleepyhead, which is BS if you ask me. Lindsay never cared for me much either. I didn't speak much at Paddington practices because the other members had known each other for years and had all the accrued inside jokes and experiences that come with close contact, but anytime I did try to speak or contribute to a conversation, Lindsay would wait a beat and then go: "...well, anyway..." then continue speaking as if I'd never said anything. After a while I stopped speaking entirely. I left the band unceremoniously in July or August 2004. Like The Beekeeper’s Society, another coed indie band with a polite approach to songcraft that I once played in, I never played on any recordings, so my time in those bands is lost to the ages. High Hopes A full band, electric version of the title track of our last record. I prefer the other version, but this one has its moments, particularly the break down when the bass goes for a walk and the whole band smashes back in on the A chord, those three hits, then back in. The harmonies are off kilter, but I didn't have much time to do them, so I just hoped for the best. People & Places I was digging through old demos last year, demos I'd done in autumn 2013 while living at my Dad's in Guelph and attending the University of Waterloo. I found so many forgotten gems in that pile of songs. and this was one of them. Others include "Cocations," which has already been recorded sans vocals and will be on our upcoming double album, and "Throwing Copper," which will also be on Keep It Beautiful. Sad Shitty Supermarket Holds Senior Citizen Day Again, in keeping with the theme of the album, a song about getting older and having one's expectations dashed. One & Only A love song to drugs. Western Sweepstakes This was going to be a demo, part of the collection of songs I did in autumn 2013, but I liked the song enough to dress it up with synth strings and harmonies, the usual BCN fare. I tried to record this one with Ryan Mills when James and Ryan had taken a short break during the Chords for the Bored sessions, but it didn't come out very good, so I kept that song off that album. I knew I was going to use this version on an album eventually, it was just a matter of finding the right fit.

Make It Mine A reviewer of our first album described "She Dreams of Airports" as a "hobo strum" which has "enough brio about it to win you over." He also said the song had a great title. "She Dreams of Airports" was written in a feverish afternoon during a Neutral Milk Hotel phase, so I was trying to ape Jeff Mangum by strumming loudly on an acoustic and trying to jam as many words into the song as I could, using the specific topic of travel. But the whole “hobo strum” thing wasn’t true...I wrote the song in the comfort of the basement of my Dad’s house in Orangeville. “Make it Mine,” however, was written while I was busking at the northwest corner of Queen and University last April, a transient month spent mostly on the street, trying to get enough money to get by. I’d usually make at least $20 if I played for three or four hours. I’d get bored doing CCR and Oasis though, and write my own stuff. I wrote this one on the spot, which is probably why the lyrics are so repetitive. I couldn’t write them down so they had to be basic. There’s another version on High Hopes but it’s not much better. Both version fail to get the essence of the song, which is an authentic “hobo strum,” not an ersatz one like “She Dreams of Airports.” I’d like to try it out with the full band someday soon. One Last Rodeo A song about doing drugs one last time. And doing them again the next day, just one last time. And the next day, one last time, the cycle continuing for months until you're barely alive. Drug users call the last night the "last rodeo," depressingly enough. Big City Nights Radio Report #1 A bunch of demos sewn together and presented as a radio station. A radio station I'd put on my presets, indubitably. Look for more BCN Radio Reports in the future, $2 and #3 and so on. Why not, eh? Some of these songs will be on our upcoming double album, Keep It Beautiful.