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Mark's mother used to sing him to sleep. He thought about this after work one day, and he wondered why that came into his brain. Perhaps that sleep was like death, and the last thing he used to see many nights was the smiling face of Mom cooing him to a temporary death where dreams took him places but he would return to the land of the living soon enough. Yes, that was probably it. Death.
Once, before Mark went to bed, he saw a shadow on his ceiling that was most definitely a killer clown. Mark remembered that night being the worst of all, because despite closing his eyes, his fate was sealed, the clown was obviously going to eat him, and that was it. Discovering himself strangely alive in the morning, Mark looked and there was no such shadow on the ceiling at all. Yet every night the clown appeared anyhow. Consistent Killer Clowns make for bad sleeping cycles, Mark mused.
The most awful thing, Mark concluded, would be to see something truly terrifying and that was the last thing you ever saw. The end of something always seemed to be the most important. The end of books, the last thing your father says before you leave, the words spoken at the doorstep while you drop off a date, everything always came down to the end.
Mark sat at breakfast while these thoughts brought Mark to another conclusion: A bad death equals a bad life. This was the first time Mark felt guilty about work, he realized. This was because he'd interacted with a man whose final images were of Mark's dark arms pumping into the man's vision until the man couldn't see any longer and the last thing he ever experienced was hearing the sound of his own flesh softening against the continued ramming of Mark's knuckles until the man ceased to think.
Mark looked down at his toast. He decided on strawberry jam. Was what he'd done essentially showing the man a killer clown before sleeping forever? Mark laughed as he thought about this: He'd been dressed as a clown when he'd done the killing. He did it because his boss told him to, the man in the white suit that only appeared while Mark was sleeping. This never seemed to make sense during the day, the idea that a man in a white suit appeared to Mark in his sleep, but the man promised Mark pleasant dreams as long as he kept on working.
Mark's failure to understand who the man in the white suit was and why he was asked to kill people at night dressed as a carnival nightmare by this man resulted in various people's heart stopping. If only he could understand. Over time he learned, slowly, what had been going on, what he'd been doing, but some would say it was too late.
Too late was when he was humming a pleasant tune while washing his face of white pancake powder and red lipstick in a gas station bathroom and a man walked in. Mark payed no attention to this. There were no laws against wearing clown make up, despite the fact there perhaps aught to be. After having shed this mask, he looked up and saw the man standing in the doorway. One would not ask this man's occupation as it appeared that he too, was a clown, based on his appearance. Mark stopped humming.
Thirty seconds of struggle later, and Mark was winded and curled against the wall, already exhausted from when he'd been a clown, only minutes ago, and only now did it dawn on him what it all meant. He knew who the man in the white suit was, why he was asked to work every night, and why this was happening to him right now. He was unable to share his opinions very well as the clown began to beat down on him quite ferociously. Like Mark had. It consumed the clown, the act became him and he was murder, the very incarnation of it. Back and forward, his arms swung and pushed and it became a violent rhythm that was never quite precise, so it lost any artistic virtuosity that previously had--well, it never really had existed had it? The rhythm broke up his thoughts which were very quickly becoming all he had.
An epiphany came to Mark that he'd been humming the song that his mother sang to him as a kid. What was the name of song? He couldn't remember. He never did.
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Listen to this and love it:
I was reminded today while talking to a friend the other day that I'm awful at saying goodbye. For some reason, the timing and proper words escape me and it is an abrupt vehicle often. I like to think it's not a big deal, but if ever i've perpetrated a terrible escape for you in particular, I apologize.
About thirty minutes ago I talked to a guy who seemed cool and then got a little pretentious and spacey as he theorized about the difference between mainstream and indie, in the sort of way that he really liked to hear his own voice. Then I read some things my friend wrote which were things of substance and they managed to come off as not pretentious or spacey, or perhaps they came off as Kevin Spacey, something that's always good.
Sigh. Kevin. No it's fine, just sit there. It's enough.
The point essentially of what I'm saying above is that my friend is cooler than some guy I talked to in the creamery.
I am so easily distracted. One of the worst things in the world must be to have a problem with something that everybody else is pretty okay at. I can say I'm distracted because lots of people are, they mention it in casual conversation often, sometimes every day. It's a social crutch that we are familiar with and therefore tolerate and sometimes glory in. It is what it is.
But how miserable must it be for the one who can barely distinguish reality from fiction and therefore has to avoid all forms of media entertainment or else they walk about decieved.
There are much more common problems or differences that are poorly recieved. People who appear unattractive physically, particularly women, are disdained seemingly out of basic instinct but really that's the worst, because some of those people are screwed for life. If people like having attractive friends, it's safe to say many of them don't like having unattractive ones. I don't have a nice way to wrap that topic up.
I'm going to go bake cookies now.
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