Wicked Prompts

MONGREL HORDES

I was a prisoner and I was surrounded. I was kept to a strict schedule. Tuesdays at 8 pm I was committed to watching "Dangerous Catch." Wednesdays at 9 pm, I watched "Pimp Your Ride." Thursday's at 10 pm, "Amish Mafia." Saturday's were reserved for "James Bond Marathon's" or "Re-runs of Mork and Mindy" I ordered special from a network website. And when I wasn't absorbed in a show or a movie, the remote control demanded constant attention. It wanted to be caressed, to have its buttons pressed and it's owner's big screen gazed upon no matter the hour. And there were hours upon hours of just sitting there hypnotized by the randomness of channels, shows and infomercials.

Looking around on a Friday night, sitting on the couch alone, I realized that this pixilated alter, mounted on my wall, fifty-eight inches wide and thirty-six inches tall, was my only friend. It was more than a friend. It was more like a demanding lover. It drained my time and energy and made me wish for more. It made me envy and lust and fade into sleep in the late hours of the evening, with nothing to dream about. But it wasn't real. It was a giant tool for masturbating life instead of living it. I had to get it out of here.

I looked around at the living room, and then the kitchen and then the bedroom. It wasn't just the television. Stuff crowded around me and slammed into me as if I was in the center of a mosh-pit. I stood in the middle of the main room of my small apartment- the walls of stuff closing in. There was the flat-screen television in front of me, the coffee table just behind me and another foot behind that the couch. A lamp to the right of the couch, another overhead, and two more on top of the desk which held up the wall just next to the television. On top and next to these seemingly necessary and purposeful slices of furniture sat an endless string of extensions cords, appliance plugs, transformers, adapters and headphones wrapped around one another like mating snakes and matted in bunches like the small intestines of C3PO, after he'd been disemboweled.

Books stacked to the ceiling on top of a book shelve which itself had chosen to sleep by the fireplace, grabbing the last bit of real estate no matter how improbable. Assortments of papers, documents, envelops, unused checks, bills and post-it notes littered the desk and the kitchen counter and the coffee table as if flakes of ash from a firestorm. An old computer that lost its relevance more than five years ago, a laptop big enough to sit on the laps of two people sitting side-by-side, stood menacingly on the corner of the desk. It begged me to find a useful purpose for it, or to find it a new owner, or to open its guts and create some new magical technology from its has-been wreckage. Slowly, one-by-one they all called to me.

The giant microwave oven with the picture of an atom on its door, the pile of obsolete mobile telephones screaming to be put to rest, the scourge of ripped and tattered notebooks containing meaningless secrets from the past too haunting to let themselves be forgotten, the broken weather tortured ice-chest squatting on the five square feet of unmolested balcony space, they all moved toward me. Screaming in a high-pitched inaudible squeal that pinched my sinuses and my temples, they pleaded to be near me and I yearned to be rid of them.

Waking in the middle of the night, their shadows leaned over my bed and reached for my throat. I snapped. At first light I called a storage facility. I asked how much it cost but it didn't matter. I gave them my credit card number and asked when I could come over. Finding a rental truck was more difficult and I betrayed my desperation over the phone, no doubt costing me but again worth it. At first they resisted. I wrestled with that old laptop until we both collapsed on the floor together in tears - entangled in our long lives as roommates. My arms were sore but I dragged it to the doorstep and slammed the door shut. I knew it would refuse to leave. It would still be there when I opened the door an hour, a day or a year later but it was a first step.

The notebooks were next. They had never given me anything but I still clung to the hope. Maybe another day or a week and they'd say something inspiring, but I'd had enough. If it weren't for the fact that my shredder had broken I'd have shoved them into it, but they were too thick and too numerous for that. They had to be dragged out in boxes, scraping along the wood floors to the very last, demanding one more chance. But I didn't relent. They went straight to the dumpster in the alley. Only one precious notebook made it to the storage box, just for old time sake.