The Mimosa Effect 2

For anyone who missed the early version of this one posted for Sun. Scribblings.

I nearly died again today.

You’d think it might lose some of its dramatic impact after the 50th time, but somehow it still manages to scare the crap out of me. Which is good, because that means it’s still working.

I guess that would make today a milestone of some kind. Like an anniversary, or a birthday. Only without the cake and balloons part.

My mom thinks I’ve been trying to kill myself since I was fifteen, but it’s been going on a lot longer than that. Fifteen is when I came out as an adrenaline junkie. Or rather, it’s when my parents found out, by virtue of me ending up in the hospital, again. What with me being out cold, I wasn’t able to dazzle and distract them with one of my usual far-fetched excuses. (There are only so many times you can say that you fell down the stairs, or were hit by a car, before they start to suspect you’re doing it on purpose.)

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Theme: Abandoned

Words/Phrases:
quintessential
gin
tower
release

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My room-mate thinks I’m in a funk over some guy. Which is, I guess, technically true, but not the way she thinks.

I could say that he stole something from me, but that would be bending the truth a bit too far. It’s not like they knew I was there, never mind that I got there first.

For thieves, they weren’t exactly stealthy. They roared in on a pair of motorcycles, for one. Souped up Honda dirt bikes, by the sound of it. The kind of bikes kids buy after saving up for a couple of years flipping burgers and stocking shelves. They were giggling like little girls, egging each other on into the dark unknown of the old warehouse’s main floor. Broke my concentration. The tumblers might have been old and rusted, but they still tumbled. I was on the last number when they blundered in, whispering too loud, cracking dumb-ass jokes. Like they were showing off for some invisible audience.

I don’t know how long the safe had been there, but I was pretty sure no one else knew about it, or it would have been broken into long ago. There was a bunch of crap piled over and around it, but nothing that couldn’t be moved by the judicious application of leverage.

They were both bigger than me, jocks by the look of it. I made myself scarce, gritting my teeth and counting the seconds until they’d had their fill of fun and left me in peace.

They went right for it, the bastards, like they’d known it was there all along. The safe was half as big as the tallest one, a hulking ugly metal box, streaked with rust and grime and water damage. I didn’t wait to see if they knew what to do with it. I closed my eyes, flexed my fingers, and did that thing I do so well. There was a thud, followed by muffled swearing. Not the way it should have worked at all. I opened my eyes to see the shorter one bending over his friend, shaking his shoulders. I tried again, but nothing happened – nothing, that is, except the one thing I couldn’t possibly have expected.

The kid checked to make sure that his buddy was still breathing, shrugged like this kind of thing happened all the time, and turned back to the safe. There was enough light from outside that I could see his face, under the backwards-turned ball cap, scrunched up in concentration. He stuck his ear to the safe wall, and after a few deft twirls of the dial, there was a click – loud in the silence – and he was pulling the safe door open. My door. My safe. And to make matters worse, his friend was already stirring. Like the kid’s presence was somehow cancelling mine out.

They took what was in the safe, and I never even got to see it, to see if it was what it was rumoured to be. They had their backs to me the whole time. When I got there – after they’d left, laughing and high-fiving, the shorter kid ribbing his buddy mercilessly about his supposed fainting spell (“That’s supposed to be my job” – whatever that means) – the safe was empty. I would have followed them, if my beat-up old twelve-speed had any chance of catching up with their motorbikes. As it is, I got to ride home alone in fuming silence, empty-handed, and leave my room-mate to puzzle over my storm-cloud mood for the rest of the day.

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My day just got a whole lot more surreal. Turns out I’m not the only lunatic in town. Seems it’s become downright trendy. I guess it was really only a matter of time before it happened. Before Alan Moore stopped being just some comic book guy and got promoted to the rank of prophet.

People like to blame technology for a lot of things, but in this case you have to admit it was one of the major players. After decades of pie plates on strings and animatronic puppets, technology finally caught up with our imaginations. Close enough, anyhow. All you have to do is slap down your twelve bucks on cheap night, and your dreams unfold before you in full HD, 3D, surround sound magic. First there was the resurgence in bringing comic book heroes to life, on the big and small screen. Then there were the movies about what it might be like to be a real-life hero, in a world where physics and logic applied, and wounds didn’t instantly heal. Heroes without any actual power, unless you count an all-consuming obsession, a decent sewing machine, and preferably some halfway decent martial arts skills – either that, or a really kick-ass weapon (most likely built in the back of a garage).

I guess real-life heroes would all be Batman, more or less. Different names, different coloured polyester, but all relying on their brains and whatever skill sets they happened to possess, to do what needs to be done. Having a crap-load of money and a genius IQ doesn’t hurt, either.

You didn’t need to be a prophet to know that reality shows weren’t far behind. My favourite was the TV show about the documentary crew making a movie about real heroes – which you can read as, real nut-job vigilantes who like to pretend that every day is Hallowe’en. Me, I’m curious to see just how meta it can get. Boxes within boxes – a movie about a show about a movie about a book, promoted through viral online videos.

The only thing missing is the God-like glowing blue guy, although you can always add that part in post-production. You should see the things kids can do these days. Well, some kids, anyhow. I’m not so hot in the computer department. Me and technology have what you might call a failure of communication. But I figured if I could hone my fighting skills, I could compensate for the overall lack of brilliance.

After getting my butt thoroughly kicked more times than I care to mention here, I changed my strategy. Thought I’d aim for the stealthy ninja variety of hero instead. Despite a tendency to suck at pretty much everything, I’ve got a bit of a knack when it comes to locks. It’s kind of a focus thing. I’ve been working on that – focus and concentration – since I was eight years old. That was the first time I fell asleep in class. I remember it like it happened five minutes ago. Nothing that has happened since can touch the feeling of horrified embarrassment that comes from having a whole class-room full of little kids laughing at you. Probably what makes some substitute teachers go postal.

There are things that are more dangerous than humiliation, though. Life-threatening, even. Like falling asleep while riding a bike near a busy street. That was the first time my parents sent me to see a specialist, after I got out of the hospital. I had just turned nine when that happened. My shoulder still aches when it rains, and my left knee still makes a weird clicking sound when I run.

I guess what it came down to, in the end, was survival. Becoming a superhero saved my life. That fact that it puts that life in mortal danger on a regular basis is beside the point.

(…Click here for a sneak preview of the next installment of Dozer’s journal…)

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Theme: failure to communicate

Words/Phrases:
consuming
wounds
prophet

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New journal started Dec. ‘09 – Property of Casey T. Carlysle

I went back to the warehouse today.

Call it foolish if you want, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was sure there must have been something I missed, some clue that would explain everything. Or at least point me in the right direction.

I know what you’re thinking. After all these years I should know better. But I wouldn’t still be doing what I’m doing if I was the rational, practical type. Practical people have jobs, responsibilities. Families. Although families are over-rated, if you ask me. Then again, stupid people like to think that education is over-rated. Same thing with people who aren’t rich, and money.

Everybody needs sleep. Fact of life. Like being born, and dying. Quan Su Li showed me that all I really needed to do was remind them of that fact.

If you haven’t read the first part of this journal – and I wouldn’t blame you (for all I know, this is the only volume that survived) – you might think this all sounds very low-budget B movie of the week. Alliterative name, mysterious warehouses, and someone with a vaguely Asian-sounding name who was probably my mentor and confidante.

But it’s not like that. Casey Carlysle is my real name. Complete with the weird spelling (most people spell it Carlisle, or Carlyle; like the rest of my life, mine ended up being some kind of hybrid between the two). The warehouse is real, too, although it’s not really all that mysterious, or even particularly interesting. Quan Su Li is, as you might suspect, a made-up name – in this case, for the purposes of selling self-help books.

They still have audio books on cassette tape. For those of you born post 1980’s, it’s what came between vinyl records and CD’s. It never really worked all that well. Old tapes got all stretched and started to sound like the singer was on valium, or randomly wandering out of tune. You can find tapes in the library. Well, some libraries, anyhow. Which is helpful, because that’s pretty much the only place you can find cassette tape players anymore.

Quan Su Li is the pen name, if you will, of some guy who was tired of being a boring middle class white dude and decided to become a Zen master. I doubt he bothered to learn Mandarin while he was at it. If the name isn’t just complete gibberish, it probably translates to something like “duck who quacks upwards”, or “chair of no fixed income”, or something like that. It might even contain an unintentionally (or intentionally) naughty word, if you gave it the right intonation.

But enough about my brief flirtation with the Zen no-mind and quantum meditation breathing techniques.

I need to find that kid. Call it an obsession, call me crazy. Whatever. The thing is, it’s a distraction. And I can’t afford more of those right now. In seven years, he’s the only one who didn’t fall. The only one who didn’t listen to the whispering in his ear, telling him how tired he was, how hard he’d worked, how all he needed was a short nap, and everything would be all right.

I need to find out why.

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My name is Clifford Tyson, and I am a superhero.

The first time I said that out loud, the twelve people seated in front of me said “Hi Clifford”, in unison, and a portly man in a sweater vest smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that said, “Congratulations, you’ve just taken the first step.”

The group met every Thursday evening in the basement of the Church of the Holy Saints. They sat on rickety metal folding chairs, talked about their problems, and drank apple juice out of paper cups. Gretchen Filchner was convinced that some of the others were only there for the free food. Considering the free food consisted of stale store-bought cookies and the occasional home-made brownies, it was probably knee-jerk cynicism on her part. Then again, cynicism does kind of go with the job description. That, and paranoia, and what Mitch Baker liked to call the NPD complex.

Mitch was the group leader (I imagine he still is), and he wasn’t any more of a qualified psychoanalyst that I am. He was, however, a big fan of acronyms. It never occurred to him that calling it “NPD complex” was redundant, considering the D stands for Disorder. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the whole mouthful. It’s what most wannabe vigilantes have. The real vigilantes usually have a hefty dose of psychosis, or at least sociopathic tendencies, to go alone with it. For the eleven recovering altruism addicts in our group, it got about as far as the grown-up version of playing dress-up, and that was about it. They didn’t catch bad guys, or rescue babies, or stop bombs from exploding at the last minute. They never raced to save the world while a clock ticked off minutes in the background. What they had, was an obsession with costumes that would put a drag queen to shame, and a penchant for secret identities.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Almost all of them were saddled with awkward names, a distinct lack of charisma, and uneasy, restless spirits. They were people uncomfortable with themselves, people who never felt at home, not even in their own bodies. They were doomed to the bottom rung of the social ladder from day one – teased at school, never taken seriously, destined to spend the entirety of their miserable lives looking out at a tragically flawed world that they could do nothing to fix. They spent the majority of their time imagining how the world would be a much better place, if they were in charge. Hence the narcissism part. Not to mention all that time spent in front of the mirror, getting the cape to fall just so.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this is one of the many times I strayed from the classic superhero path. I never had a cape, or tights, or a mask. At least, not outside of the annual celebration of All Hallow’s Eve, or past the age of ten years old. It kind of makes you wonder, really, why people who were constantly ridiculed by their peers would think that dressing up in silly outfits was the solution to their overall lack of coolness.

But we’re getting away from the point, which is that I was in that church basement under duress – by which I mean, against my will. Sometimes even superheroes have to make compromises. The ones that don’t – the ones who see this crazy technicolour world in black and white – they’re usually the ones who end up going dark side. Unfortunately for everyone else, they’re not always pretending, either. See, the thing is, it’s a lot easier to be the bad guy. A lot easier to blow something up than it is to stop someone from blowing something up.

I learned that the hard way.

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Theme: A matter of time

Words/Phrases:
genius
viral
raincoat

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Theme: Change of plans

Words/Phrases:
church
exploding
sinister

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Theme: Hello, my name is….

Words/Phrases:
group
live
disorder

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