Why I Didn't Write This Story Yesterday: Connor Moloney vs. The Ambiguous Rat-Man Stimulus Pt. XVI
October 19th 2006 01:16
This is the story of a story, or lack thereof, which became a story. It is the latest installment in the author’s time-honoured tradition of getting drunk in the face of adversity; when I should be studying, when I have to go to work, when I have an exam to do, when I’ve got a Sunday class. No tedious academic or career-related obstacle can stand in the way of this bulldozing force of irrational binge drinking.
This harrowing tale of beer vs. academia begins on a lazy Thursday morning, which preceded a lazy Thursday afternoon and a lazy Thursday night. I was in English, musing over the witty antics of my comrade Mr. Murphy and attempting to structure a coherent philosophical argument against old Nick, the intellectual pragmatist as usual. My cognitive functions were impaired by the hangover incurred from the amount of beer I had consumed the previous evening.
Although we were merely debating the merits of some God-loving sloth from our Philosophy class – hardly serious subject matter – Nick seemed to be placing utmost importance on winning the argument with infallible logic, as compared to my hazy grunts of contempt for the subject’s lack of charisma. I submitted to the unstoppable might of Nick’s rational mind and turned my attention to the front of the class, where Julie, the faithful English teacher, was making an announcement which I thought would almost certainly be less mentally taxing than Nick’s barrage of logic and reason.
I was wrong. I learned that a “creative piece” must be submitted by the next Tuesday, or we would fail Unit 3 English, and hence the final year of senior secondary education. I cannot describe the intensity of the stabbing pain that suddenly developed in the frontal lobe of my brain. I was in no state to deal with this psychological stressor. Simply submitting the dread-boring spirit-crushing soul-consuming bullshit work that was required to stay in school for the past 6 months had almost killed me – I suspected that repeating year 12 the following year would cause me to spontaneously catch fire where I stood.
This “creative piece” suddenly became the linchpin of my very existence, its creation necessary lest I die a horrible burning death. I knew that to forge this stunning step in literary history would take a heavy toll upon the mind, and as such, I set aside a whole night to do it in – the next Monday, when my cerebral cortex would not be in such a flabbergasted state. I leaned back in my chair, immensely pleased with my own spectacular powers of organisation. I did nothing that night and spent the entire weekend getting heinously bent.
Monday afternoon rolled around slyly, like the scent of hundreds of live pigs after a meat wagon rolls by. The prospect of an evening writing a story with no criteria on which to base it caused me to raise my pierced eyebrow in distasteful apprehension. Anyone who has ever attempted to write a story without a premise in mind knows that it is like trying to give birth without getting pregnant first. The usual means of procrastination were employed. My standard after-school eating binge was undertaken, at unnecessary length and with great relish. Strenuous exercise wracked my pale, malnourished body and possibly caused a stress fracture in my sternum. Finally, however, I could put it off no more. I sat down at the computer.
My first foot wrong was connecting to the internet and logging on to MSN Messenger, never a sensible direction to take when trying to kickstart a productive evening. I was immediately assailed from all sides by ill-tempered fools, seizure-causing pop-up advertisements, and mind-altering digital propaganda. By God, I thought, I need a beer to calm the nerves. The pair of six-packs staring me down from the shelf in my refrigerator seemed more appealing than ever at the prospect of having to do actual work. The hops beamed their sweet siren song deep into the part of my brain which longs to be a hopeless alcoholic.
It was to this end that I went and retrieved one of the 375ml decanters of ice-cold amber goodness from the kitchen. I received a few disturbed enquiries from befuddled family members – “It’s Monday night, Connor” – to which I blithely replied “It’s always Monday night where I come from, baby.” By the time my bewildered mother had had sufficient time to realise that the statement was not merely irrelevant to the situation, but completely irrational, I had escaped to my bedroom with the beer unmolested.
And so it began. As the empty bottles piled up on my bedroom floor like so many abandoned tumors in a medical waste dump, my blank page in Microsoft Word seemed to grow longer and blanker, mocking my futile efforts to conjure a story from thin air. In desperation, I turned to my digital acquaintances on MSN Messenger, begging shamelessly for an idea, some sort of profound inspiration.
It was at this point that my tendency to befriend exclusively morons and hoboes came back to bite me on the ass. Every suggestion put forth was almost mind-bogglingly inane. In fact, after I had harassed every moron/hobo whom I could contact without leaving my chair, the pile of intellectual tripe steaming away at my feet was so bland that the only suggestion which floats out of the drunken haze into clear memorial focus is Brad Kurzke’s single word response to my enquiry: “Robots”.
There is a suggestion with clear literary merit, I surmised, my internal monologue slurring its words somehow. Alas I was not up to the task of writing a story about “ROBOTS”; it would take a greater mind than mine to take that raw slice of brilliance and carve it into a science-fiction epic. After a few ill-fated attempts to get a story about ROBOTS off the ground, I turned my tail in bitter disgust and again stared, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, into the maw of total defeat.
By this stage the pile of bottles had grown to Herculean proportions. If the same family members again harassed me on my stumbling, incoherent crusade, I must have destroyed them with such ease that it did not even register in memory. It was about eleven. My conversations over MSN Messenger had degenerated to retarded, mangled wrecks, the inferior state of my co-ordination being largely responsible for an utter lack of coherence on my part. My spelling and grammar were atrocious; Julie, my faithful (yet heinous) English teacher, would have been disgusted. I ate steak with an inhuman ferocity. I poured a corrosive combination of vinegar, lemon juice and Tabasco sauce over all foodstuffs consumed with a blatant disregard for my own safety and well-being. It is not out of the question that the combination of condiments described above has indeed been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. The beers disappeared one by one.
It was at nearly one o clock, exhausted, bleary-eyed, frustrated, and intoxicated, that I threw in the towel to my permanent case of writer’s block. I stumbled in to the bathroom and stared at my haggard reflection in the heinously oversized mirror attached to the wall. I have always despised that mirror. Its sheer size makes it necessary that to face directly opposite the taps whilst showering affords you a spectacular view of your own naked body, which is not what you feel like seeing at 7 o’clock in the morning. Now I gazed into this quicksilver pane at the dark bags under my hollow eyes, the 3 days’ worth of stubble that had accumulated, the way I could not remain in one position without swaying hypnotically.
I realised that Julie had won, and I had lost. Good doesn’t always win over evil in the real world, I realised; that sort of fairy story belongs to a generation of children I am no longer a part of. I think I learned something as I stared at that mirror. I matured. I grew. My beer-induced frenzy of relentless mental reconditioning raged unabated. I lost something that night. It was not just several hours of my life. It was not just faith in my own academic ability. It was not just the batteries from my stereo remote control. It was not just several million brain cells, although I definitely noticed that in the exam the next day. It was innocence, my friends, the grim reality of being defeated by a mere English teacher. No just God would allow an innocent child to be so horribly and utterly destroyed by an education system designed to nurture the gifted and discard the rest as expendable, garbage men, supermarket clerks.
Anyway, I unintentionally used my toothbrush to scrub my cheek and shambled to bed amidst the blasted wreckage of socks, beer bottles and CD’s which my bedroom was buried under someplace. I entered the tattered, unmade chaos of my bed a broken man. Yet I stand before you (probably metaphorically) as a man who has successfully completed Unit 3 VCE English.
How?
Long story short, I came to school the next day and discovered that, in fact, we had another day to hand in the English work. Julie had LIED to me, obviously with the intention of shattering my fragile spirit. But in this case the lie was my redemption. Realising that some deity had smiled on me and my stringent alcohol abuse (it’s a hobby, not a lifestyle) I rushed home after work that night to create the ‘Creative Piece’. If I hadn’t have gotten drunk and frustrated then, I wouldn’t have anything to write about now. Utilizing only my disdain for my liver and a lack of concern regarding my own future, I have rejuvenated the rotting carcass of the education system in this new millennium with a resounding bang - alcohol abuse as a study aid...
Bang.
This harrowing tale of beer vs. academia begins on a lazy Thursday morning, which preceded a lazy Thursday afternoon and a lazy Thursday night. I was in English, musing over the witty antics of my comrade Mr. Murphy and attempting to structure a coherent philosophical argument against old Nick, the intellectual pragmatist as usual. My cognitive functions were impaired by the hangover incurred from the amount of beer I had consumed the previous evening.
Although we were merely debating the merits of some God-loving sloth from our Philosophy class – hardly serious subject matter – Nick seemed to be placing utmost importance on winning the argument with infallible logic, as compared to my hazy grunts of contempt for the subject’s lack of charisma. I submitted to the unstoppable might of Nick’s rational mind and turned my attention to the front of the class, where Julie, the faithful English teacher, was making an announcement which I thought would almost certainly be less mentally taxing than Nick’s barrage of logic and reason.
I was wrong. I learned that a “creative piece” must be submitted by the next Tuesday, or we would fail Unit 3 English, and hence the final year of senior secondary education. I cannot describe the intensity of the stabbing pain that suddenly developed in the frontal lobe of my brain. I was in no state to deal with this psychological stressor. Simply submitting the dread-boring spirit-crushing soul-consuming bullshit work that was required to stay in school for the past 6 months had almost killed me – I suspected that repeating year 12 the following year would cause me to spontaneously catch fire where I stood.
This “creative piece” suddenly became the linchpin of my very existence, its creation necessary lest I die a horrible burning death. I knew that to forge this stunning step in literary history would take a heavy toll upon the mind, and as such, I set aside a whole night to do it in – the next Monday, when my cerebral cortex would not be in such a flabbergasted state. I leaned back in my chair, immensely pleased with my own spectacular powers of organisation. I did nothing that night and spent the entire weekend getting heinously bent.
Monday afternoon rolled around slyly, like the scent of hundreds of live pigs after a meat wagon rolls by. The prospect of an evening writing a story with no criteria on which to base it caused me to raise my pierced eyebrow in distasteful apprehension. Anyone who has ever attempted to write a story without a premise in mind knows that it is like trying to give birth without getting pregnant first. The usual means of procrastination were employed. My standard after-school eating binge was undertaken, at unnecessary length and with great relish. Strenuous exercise wracked my pale, malnourished body and possibly caused a stress fracture in my sternum. Finally, however, I could put it off no more. I sat down at the computer.
My first foot wrong was connecting to the internet and logging on to MSN Messenger, never a sensible direction to take when trying to kickstart a productive evening. I was immediately assailed from all sides by ill-tempered fools, seizure-causing pop-up advertisements, and mind-altering digital propaganda. By God, I thought, I need a beer to calm the nerves. The pair of six-packs staring me down from the shelf in my refrigerator seemed more appealing than ever at the prospect of having to do actual work. The hops beamed their sweet siren song deep into the part of my brain which longs to be a hopeless alcoholic.
It was to this end that I went and retrieved one of the 375ml decanters of ice-cold amber goodness from the kitchen. I received a few disturbed enquiries from befuddled family members – “It’s Monday night, Connor” – to which I blithely replied “It’s always Monday night where I come from, baby.” By the time my bewildered mother had had sufficient time to realise that the statement was not merely irrelevant to the situation, but completely irrational, I had escaped to my bedroom with the beer unmolested.
And so it began. As the empty bottles piled up on my bedroom floor like so many abandoned tumors in a medical waste dump, my blank page in Microsoft Word seemed to grow longer and blanker, mocking my futile efforts to conjure a story from thin air. In desperation, I turned to my digital acquaintances on MSN Messenger, begging shamelessly for an idea, some sort of profound inspiration.
It was at this point that my tendency to befriend exclusively morons and hoboes came back to bite me on the ass. Every suggestion put forth was almost mind-bogglingly inane. In fact, after I had harassed every moron/hobo whom I could contact without leaving my chair, the pile of intellectual tripe steaming away at my feet was so bland that the only suggestion which floats out of the drunken haze into clear memorial focus is Brad Kurzke’s single word response to my enquiry: “Robots”.
There is a suggestion with clear literary merit, I surmised, my internal monologue slurring its words somehow. Alas I was not up to the task of writing a story about “ROBOTS”; it would take a greater mind than mine to take that raw slice of brilliance and carve it into a science-fiction epic. After a few ill-fated attempts to get a story about ROBOTS off the ground, I turned my tail in bitter disgust and again stared, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, into the maw of total defeat.
By this stage the pile of bottles had grown to Herculean proportions. If the same family members again harassed me on my stumbling, incoherent crusade, I must have destroyed them with such ease that it did not even register in memory. It was about eleven. My conversations over MSN Messenger had degenerated to retarded, mangled wrecks, the inferior state of my co-ordination being largely responsible for an utter lack of coherence on my part. My spelling and grammar were atrocious; Julie, my faithful (yet heinous) English teacher, would have been disgusted. I ate steak with an inhuman ferocity. I poured a corrosive combination of vinegar, lemon juice and Tabasco sauce over all foodstuffs consumed with a blatant disregard for my own safety and well-being. It is not out of the question that the combination of condiments described above has indeed been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. The beers disappeared one by one.
It was at nearly one o clock, exhausted, bleary-eyed, frustrated, and intoxicated, that I threw in the towel to my permanent case of writer’s block. I stumbled in to the bathroom and stared at my haggard reflection in the heinously oversized mirror attached to the wall. I have always despised that mirror. Its sheer size makes it necessary that to face directly opposite the taps whilst showering affords you a spectacular view of your own naked body, which is not what you feel like seeing at 7 o’clock in the morning. Now I gazed into this quicksilver pane at the dark bags under my hollow eyes, the 3 days’ worth of stubble that had accumulated, the way I could not remain in one position without swaying hypnotically.
I realised that Julie had won, and I had lost. Good doesn’t always win over evil in the real world, I realised; that sort of fairy story belongs to a generation of children I am no longer a part of. I think I learned something as I stared at that mirror. I matured. I grew. My beer-induced frenzy of relentless mental reconditioning raged unabated. I lost something that night. It was not just several hours of my life. It was not just faith in my own academic ability. It was not just the batteries from my stereo remote control. It was not just several million brain cells, although I definitely noticed that in the exam the next day. It was innocence, my friends, the grim reality of being defeated by a mere English teacher. No just God would allow an innocent child to be so horribly and utterly destroyed by an education system designed to nurture the gifted and discard the rest as expendable, garbage men, supermarket clerks.
Anyway, I unintentionally used my toothbrush to scrub my cheek and shambled to bed amidst the blasted wreckage of socks, beer bottles and CD’s which my bedroom was buried under someplace. I entered the tattered, unmade chaos of my bed a broken man. Yet I stand before you (probably metaphorically) as a man who has successfully completed Unit 3 VCE English.
How?
Long story short, I came to school the next day and discovered that, in fact, we had another day to hand in the English work. Julie had LIED to me, obviously with the intention of shattering my fragile spirit. But in this case the lie was my redemption. Realising that some deity had smiled on me and my stringent alcohol abuse (it’s a hobby, not a lifestyle) I rushed home after work that night to create the ‘Creative Piece’. If I hadn’t have gotten drunk and frustrated then, I wouldn’t have anything to write about now. Utilizing only my disdain for my liver and a lack of concern regarding my own future, I have rejuvenated the rotting carcass of the education system in this new millennium with a resounding bang - alcohol abuse as a study aid...
Bang.
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Comment by J-Dogg
Comment by Cat
'Thou must beget imagery of thyself naked in thy shower.'
Aaaaaaaaa-men.
Comment by Anonymous