Writing challenge...
I don't write as much as I need to, and it scritches away at the inside of my soul. I'm in the middle of a epoch so massive I can't even see if there is an end yet... I don't always enjoy going to that world.
Anyway... Chuck Wendig throws out this challenge... and on a whim I give random chance a whirl...
Rolled an 8...
What the hell kinda genre is "weird"
Rolled a 5, then a 7...
weird + climate change + Man vs Himself
...and just like that, I know what kinda genre
"weird" is.
Earl belched. Belching made him sweat, not that you would notice on a day like today; the vast expanse of forehead on the twenty-seven year old man was already speckled with tiny globules pitting gravity against surface tension in a war that would always end with Earl's stretched of Earl’s shirt mopping up the battlefield.
He had been staring at the pause screen for more than a
minute, thinking about getting a snack, taking a shower, or checking his
email. Any of plethora activities
that all started with “get off the futon.” Nice as they seemed, the pre-requisite was a burden he
wasn’t ready for.
It was 84 degrees.
Farenheit, Canadian, if it was Celsius, or even centigrade
he would already be dead. That was
a stupid question. Sit down.
Earl was of two minds on the classic adage “It isn’t the
heat, it’s the humidity.”
For the two years he did manage to attempt college, he had
done so at Arizona State University, believing that if he was ever going to
have a wild and debauched life it wasn’t going to be at a school known for it’s
button down hard working attitude.
The school’s hard partying reputation seemed like a guarantee of a
social life.
Often in his ASU dorm room, on those frequent nights that he
grew tired of lamenting his lack of a social life in the pink and red and
mostly naked glow of his computer monitor, he would consider the temperature.
Sure, that is a thing.
Had you ever lived in Arizona or North Dakota you would not question the
idea of sitting around considering the temperature.
It was there that he first took offense to the phrase. After the temperature hit three digits,
it was just fucking hot. When
people from New England would ask him about the heat, he would cringe. He knew these people; he knew they
would make a comment, and he would have to chuckle, determined not to be one of
those Aspergers who had to explain why they were wrong, no matter how much he
wanted to. He wasn’t sure if the
ones who did let themselves explain had to swallow back the urge to beat the
offenders to death (for the betterment of mankind) the way he did.
It is hard not to be violently irrational when it is 103
degrees two hours after sunset.
On the other hand, when he returned to New Hampshire after
18 months and he remembered that 85 degrees could be debilitating if the air
was wet enough to swim through, he softened slightly to the idea that it might not be the heat and it could be the humidity.
He was of two minds on the addage, but both of them were
hostile and unapologetic, and his opinion of people who actually spoke it out
loud remained consistently negative.
“Earl.” his mother, whose house he lived in, stood in the
doorway Saturday spoke his name as though it were a complete sentence. She had reached the “you already
know what I’m going to say” point in their relationship more than a decade
earlier. The likelihood he was
going to do anything positive in response to her Wesleyan educated dialog
seemed exceedingly unlikely, and as a hobbyist logicist philosopher, she had recognized
that there were more rewarding paths for her words to travel down.
“Mom.” Earl responded in an equally terse fashion. He was a latecomer to this extremely
efficient method of communication.
His philosophy was wildly different, believing that just because he
already knew exactly what she was thinking, there was no reason for her not to
treat him with the dignity of complete sentences. He chose to respond in kind out of spite. He was vaguely aware that he would
ignore complete sentences if they were offered, but his adolescent mind refused
to accept responsibility for his mother’s defeatist behaviour.
Yeah. With a “u.”
Because the British do it that way, and people think the British are
smarter than Americans. If I use a
“u” you will believe I’m smarter, or at least that is the logic employed by
beer commercials. How can you
disagree with anyone who can get millions of people to buy Budweiser on purpose?
“Why is your room so hot?”
“Cause I’m on fire.
Do you need something?”
The reality was that on a hot day, if he didn’t bother to
open the windows, or turn off the mind boggling collection of video screens and
speakers in his room, his attic room would rocket up to the high 90s by
mid-afternoon, forcing even someone as committed to lazy as Earl off his ass
long enough to open a window.
“Why don’t you turn off…” Mom gestured vaguely around the
buzzing and glowing that was Earl’s room, “…something?”
“First law of thermodynamics Ma: ‘If you can’t take the
heat get out of my room.’”
She did.
Earl looked around his room. Mom hadn’t mentioned the stench. Somewhere beyond the reach
of his consciousness he was upset about that. If he had he been fully aware he wouldn’t have known if
it upset him because it was a missed opportunity to get a rise out of his
mother, or because it might have motivated him to do something about it.
Earl considered himself. At somewhere between a large cat and a medium sized dog more than three
hundred pounds, he was at contributing as much or more waste heat in the room than
the Xbox. Lazy and Justified
collided in his brain and talked it into accepting this as a reason not to turn
anything off. He looked at the
window, sealed against the cool breezes running free outside. His internal bullshit alarm tried
to call shenanigans, and he encouraged it the best he could. In the end Lazy and Justified reminded him
about “the prerequisite.”
“Fuck it,” he sighed, mumbling to himself, “I’ll get it in a
minute.”
From down the hall, Earl’s mother saw him unchanged. At a distance of astronomical units,
the inner workings of planet Earl couldn’t be perceived, it just drifted along
like it always had.
