J2 – MY FRIENDS AND I ARE WEIRD, DARK CREATURES

DATE: 6/12/20XX

LISTENING TO: Oingo Boingo: No One Lives Forever

MOOD: Tired -_-

I keep waking up minutes before my alarm is supposed to go off. There’s no chance to salvage sleep when I’ve got to be up in three minutes. That three minutes shouldn’t even make a difference but there’s something about seeing that blocky, red :57 blink on the clock face that almost makes it seem sinister. It’s almost like it’s mocking me.

Despite waking up “early” this morning, I still had to rush to get my clothes on and get out the door. I really need to talk to my apartment manager because, for the third time this week, I tripped on the unruly berry bushes right outside the building’s back entrance. Those things are supposedly there to keep the place looking “kempt” but to me it looks more like the back door has gangly, thorny pubic hair.

As I laid there on the pavement with a new hole in my khakis and a rough scrape on my knee, the crows that plague the campus gathered on the stoop and, I shit you not, they started loudly cawing at me. If I didn’t know better, I would say they were laughing at my misfortune. Crows are supposed to be smart but are they known to actively taunt other animals? It would be great if some ornithologist or bird expert or whatever could weigh in on this.

Between the clock and the crows, why does it seem like everyone is laughing at me lately?

There are no stops between my apartment and the station so I had to limp as fast as I could the eight blocks to catch my bus. I made it but, as I went to pay my fare, the bus driver informed me that there was a price increase at the beginning of the year. Whatever, what’s another quarter? I paid, I meandered past the grungy homeless folks and the disgruntled day workers, and I sat at my favorite seat in the back. At least no one took that from me today.

Look, I’m not try to bitch too much here but sometimes it seriously feels like the world is against me. “That’s just how you feel when you’re in your twenties,” my mom always tells me but I’m struggling to remember a time since I moved here that I felt any sort of genuine satisfaction or accomplishment. I’ve got no friends and no prospect of a girlfriend. I even asked myself the other night if I was gay. I pulled up gay porn on my phone to see if that worked for me. It did not and I instead escaped to the same three videos of girls that I always escape to. Even if I was gay, it’s not like I belong to any dating pool of any gender.

Am I creepy? Everyone tends to avoid me. I thought I had started a “thing” with the girl at the burrito shop but her flirtiness turned cold after only a few times I had come to see her. Come to think of it, I was stopping by that place 3 or 4 times a week. I think I just answered my own question. In my defense, those burritos were really good.

I usually like my rides to work. Most of the time I can just pop in my headphones and disassociate to whatever band is on my mind for the week. Of course, I had no such luck today. When the bus got to Platte and 32nd, a homeless lady in her 60s or 70s boarded with her ratty, old dog and sat in the back near me. The dog was some sort of German Shepherd-mutt-thing with one eye and weird tufts of white around its ears.

I don’t know if I was just feeling paranoid from the crows from earlier, but I swear this dog was staring at me for the remainder of the ride. Every time I looked its way, it locked eyes (or I should say, eye) with me. I don’t know if I was pissing it off, if I looked like food, or what. It just sat on the bed of the bus, between the old woman’s knees, and stared. At one point, I pulled my hood up over my face but, when I went to look again, it’s eye was still fixed to me.

When we got to my stop, I made a complete ass out of myself. I practically sprinted to the door to escape the dog and, without looking, barreled into this girl trying to get on. We both tumbled onto the sidewalk and she screamed into my ear. I apologized profusely and as I helped her up I saw that- of course she was cute, of course she was my age, and of course I had caused her to scrape her fucking face on the road. I nearly burst into tears as I kept apologizing (very manly) and she kept telling me it was okay. I asked if I could give her money and she laughed. Then the bus driver yelled at me to get a move on and that was that. The girl boarded and the bus left me there feeling completely humiliated. To make me feel worse, I swear I saw that fucking dog staring through the side window at me.

I got to work at the library and it was another 6 hours of tedium. It’s not like I hate this place- I’m actually quite proud of working somewhere as pure as a public library- it’s just that I don’t think I’m meant for menial work. That was why I dropped out of college after all. I felt “too good” for the collegiate world. I was supposed to be an artist, a writer, a musician, a genius. My friends and family all raised me up as such when I was a kid. Now, I’m barely anything, just another pathetic burnout with a part time job and clumsy scrapes all over his body.

Got home around 8:30. I have no friends so I didn’t have any plans. The fucking crows were waiting for me, though.