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citizen_1347b's Journal  100. What's your profile song and why? I lack a myspace. I see no reason to alter this. 99. Do you have a job? not really at the moment. Hopefully I can start working for my Dad after New Year's 98. Do you have a best friend? most definitio 97. Do you have a crush on someone? meh. 96. Lied in the last 24 hours? meh 95. Ever drank 'til you puked? twice? 94. What's your favorite quote? don't really have one 93. What is the last movie you watched? fuckin' "Hell of the Living Dead" 92. What makes you mad? people who think they have all the answers. But not too mad. 91. What would you like to be when you grow up? someone who makes a decent amount of money 90. What's your name? Eric 88. Do you have a friend of the opposite sex you can talk to? somewhat 87. What's your dog's name? Holley 86. Where are you now? at my computer desk, chillaxin' 84. How would you want to be asked out? whatever, not really worried about a relationship. 82. What is sitting to your left right now? Arrested Development DVDs, Ben's XP disc. 81. Where is your mom right now? reading downstairs 80. Do you have any kids? nope 79. Who is the 5th person on your missed call list? Hutch 78. Closest black object? Keyboard 77. Where did you go last? 7/11 76. What song are you listening to? The Kraken, from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 74. Do you own any pets? the aforementioned Holley 72. Last time you listened to country music? does Soulja Boy count? 69. What are your fears? I trry not to let things worry me 68. What can you hear now? muzak 64. Last person to comment you? Vickie from TCNJ wrote on my facebook wall 63. Do you sing? occassionally. Probably not very well. 62. Screamo or country? country is slightly more tolerable, or at least easier to mock. 61. Rock or rap? depends if it's good 60. Do you like cheese? jah 59. Last four people you called? Andrew, Hutch, Antony, Dennis 58. Who last talked to you on the phone? Hutch 57. What jewelry do you wear daily? dude 56. What are you doing right now? this and listening to music 54. Would you die for someone? probably my sister 52. Are you cold now? sneezy 50. What do you smell? nuttin 48. What are you doing tomorrow? no clue 44. Bed sheet color? green and blue 43. Are you gay? nyet, comrade. 42. Can you swim? dah 40. Have you been kissed during fireworks? no. On the walk back, however... 39. When was the last time you hung out with your family? a wee bit today. Pretty easy to do when you're all in the house. 38. Do you play an instrument? cello. I haven't played in far too long. 37. Do you want a tattoo? no. 36. If yes, what of? Magmar dressed as the Prophet of Truth and riffing on a sweeeeet Gibson guitar. 35. United States or Canada? ultimately the two have almost no differences. 34. What time is it? 11:49PM 32. Jeans or sweatpants? jeans 31. What should you be doing? nuttin 30. Are you going to do it? until I got to bed 28. Do you own big sunglasses? I guess mine are big? I like my Hunter S. Thompson Aviators. 27. Have you ever cried so hard, you made yourself sick? not that I recall. 26. Do you like techno? Not only that, but electronica, rave music, hip-hop, and all other genres that our future retro-mechanical masters will enjoy in their joyless world of tomorrow. 25. Do you like polka? EBHS FOLKDANCING FTW. HONKY TONK STOMP GO NOW! 24. Have you ever tanned? nah. I'm too white. I just burn alive. 19. Favorite TV show? Arrested Development 15. What kind of music do you like? thematic shit 14. Do you know the Soulja Boi Dance? I downloaded "Crank Dat" Why the fuck is it so popular? It's on a "Ricochet" level of badness. 10. Favorite class? Digital Circuits was good, if only because I got an A. 7. Favorite time of day? right around noon can be good. 6. Ever licked someone's cheek? I don't think so. 5. Where did you see Spiderman 3 at and with who? FUCK DAT 4. What is your favorite season? late summer/early fall. 3. What are you looking forward to? New Year's I guess? I hope I don't get guff about my plans. 2. Ever got lost in the dark? Not really. 1. Where is your number one at? what does that even mean?  Hai gaiz, can I be a meme? 1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, your favorite kind of sandwich, or maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not. 2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. 3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions. 4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post. 5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions. 1. If you could have any pet, what would it be and why? Pembroke Welsh Corgi, because of Cowboy Bebop. Yes, it's really fucking nerdy. 2. What is your favorite kind of cheese? Hmmm, it's probably a three way split between blue, sharp cheddar, and processed american. 3. If you had every color pen to choose from, what color would you choose? Black. It's not a color, but you know what, FUCK YOU. 4. When you turn on the TV, what channel do you check first? CNN, or the movie channels. 5. Describe your ideal girl. I like smart girls with a reasonbly dark/ironic (or at least an appreciation of) sense of humor. She'd be a brunette of about average height. Hmmmm, that's about it. I feel pretty confident in saying dating and all that associated relationship crap isn't worth the stress and effort. I'm glad I don't care or deal with it anymore. Otherwise life is pretty good. Gettin through mah school shit, enjoying mah vacation, need a job for winter break so I can make the monies that I won't be using on dates. I'm way too cynical. Too bad I can't do jack shit about it. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. The opposite lane is empty. Sirens in the distance grow louder as two police SUVs speed back to the station, their tires covered in mud. Cross over Route One. Major highway, goes from Florida to Maine. The scene was chaotic, mostly everyone had abandoned their cars, like I had. Traffic in both directions was motionless. How could it be this bad? Was it the lack of traffic lights? I press on. Fewer cars on the street, in fact I don’t see anyone. Then I find them, standing in a small crowd where the road ends. When I say “where the road ends”, what do you imagine? A dead end? A cul-de-sac? This was none of those. The road, buildings, trees, after a certain point all of it was just gone. The asphalt ended in a clean and perfect cut. No crater, no ash and debris, no bomb had gone off. Instead it’s as if the entire thing, as far as I could see, had been replaced by flat, well groomed soil, as if some mad farmer had killed everyone, destroyed everything, and just left an empty, tilled field. I don’t know how long I’d stood there, shocked, as others came and went, experiencing the same mind numbing confusion, the same horror. We’ve accepted it now, it’s been a few months. Police departments got in touch with each other through their CB radios, sent out scouting parties. Across the country, across the world, the same thing, cities, military bases, anything big and concrete, was gone. I heard a rumor that when some cops made it through the miles of nothing that used to Elizabeth, Jersey City, all the docks and industry that Jersey’s known for, they found Central Park intact. A tiny island of green sitting in the heart of the now leveled Manhattan. There were a few survivors there, hobos, late night joggers, all raving and insane. It’s funny how you can get used to not having TV, the internet, all that. Growing a garden and tending animals keeps you busy most of the day. We’re trying to be self reliant, it’s tough. I never heard from the family, I guess they couldn’t find a way to get back. Gas is hoarded, now that we know the refineries, probably the whole infrastructure, is gone. The Cops use it for electricity, keep the radios going. Plenty of the country has already gone dark, no more electricity, no more radio. Now that life is returning to them, we call the blank spots “The Gardens” now. Some people tried to grow crops there, it didn’t work too well, new things grew there instead. Same thing’s happening everywhere. Weird, fleshy, fast growing plants. There’s a rumor they might be alien. I thought that was crazy. But then the masters showed themselves. We didn’t know what to call them at first, but we’ve accepted our place. One went through the New Brunswick Garden, once. A massive collection of eyes, mucus, organs, polyps, at least as best as I can describe it. From what I’m saying, you probably can’t imagine something like that being a cohesive thing. A living, intelligent, awful thing. It slid through the garden, indifferent towards our stares, then vanished, like it entered a blind spot in my vision, disorienting me. Every night I see them, horrible dreams that everyone’s had since day one, we see the universe die, matter itself being ripped apart, every particle accelerating away from itself, we see them escape this, see the universe recondense, they find a world and sleep. We feel smothered, no ones sleeps well anymore. Some think they’re trying to talk to us, at least a little, possible just as a joke. One person put it to me this way. You sleep all fall and winter, then wake up, your yard is full of leaves. You’re going to clean them up, bag them, recycle them. They’re ugly. Do you care if thousands of insects live in those piles, thriving in the moist darkness? Are you removing the leaves out of maliciousness towards them? The fleshy plants are colonial; they’re beginning to leave the gardens, sometimes choking out the local plants. Some people are very worried. There’s a rumor that deep in the biggest gardens, where New York and Philly were, strange cities are rising. Buildings going up overnight. Strange fortresses of ivory, curved, nonsymmetrical, disturbing. Cold and monolithic. No one’s going near them. There was a glimmer of hope once. A military radio in New Zealand. Somehow the whole island was untouched. A police department in California found a big boat intact, sent it out. We waited for weeks with our fingers crossed. Maybe we could escape, survive, and go back to the old life. Then the news came in, the boat had turned back in the mid ocean, and had come home. Half the crew had committed suicide. You know how you recycle those leaves? How would you recycle cement and steel? Melt it down, put it in the mother of all smelters, say the Earth’s mantle. What about organic matter? Compost it. Let it rot, out of sight, out of mind, let little animals eat it and crap it out so plants can be fertilized to feed more animals, the circle of life. In the middle of the pacific, for hundreds of miles, float millions of bloated, blue bodies. Rotting away as millions of fish chow down. They float there, slowly becoming waterlogged, wearing the same clothes they wore at the moment in question, the split second that all the cities vanished, unimaginable technology separating organic from inorganic, dropping millions in the middle of the sea to drown, die, and rot. While their buildings, cars, and machines melted away almost instantly in the inferno of inner Earth, returning to the ground from which they were mined, the people rot slowly, indifferent nature taking her course. The bodies sink to the sea bottom, nibbled at, becoming the nutrient rich sludge that fuels bacteria and simple plants, added to the base of the food chain. Recycled in the most efficient way possible. Drive off, roll the window back up. Hadn’t bothered trying my cell phone. I pull over and turn it on. No signal, no surprise. I’m almost home when I decide to swing by the police station. Chances are they know something. More people are on the roads now, it’s almost noon. Surprising, very few cars at the police station, guess people haven’t gotten curious yet. It’s starting to heat up, the walk from my car to the station is eased by the shade of the old trees. A cop is standing at the door; my outfit makes it pretty obvious I don’t belong here. A few lights are on inside, I hear a generator humming somewhere. “Go home, kid.” “Officer, what’s going on?” “Just go home, I honestly can’t tell you.” “Has it been some kind of attack?” “Leave.” Never piss off a cop. It’s a simple rule to follow so I do as he says. The birds chirp in the trees, a squirrel sitting on the sidewalk dashes up a tree. A perfectly normal scene. Without my cell phone, without a TV, without the internet, I’m sunk. Family’s out of town, which makes them now unreachable. No way of getting the news. I wish I could check up on some friends, but I don’t know most of their home numbers. I’ll drive to them eventually. Or should I? I realize that without electricity getting gas might become a problem. Are the cops expecting this to last a while? Are they anticipating riots? Without refrigeration food’s gonna go bad fast. It’ll rot in homes and on store shelves. People might start getting desperate for nonperishables. Is the National Guard coming online? FEMA? Can civilization collapse overnight? I’d heard of peak oil, global warming, but that couldn’t cause this, could it? I sit in my car, roll down the windows, it’s boiling inside. I stare out the windshield for a second. This is the same lot I parked in for two years when I worked at the library, on beautiful days just like this. But now things had an unsettling sense about them, a surrealness, an undertone of gravity. Is this what 9/11 had felt like? I had been rather young then and hadn’t really grasped the immensity of that day. But then you still knew what was happening, this felt bigger. A strange urge wells up inside you, and urge to know that deep down the world is still ticking away, that although something is broken, you can pick up the pieces and fix it. I start the engine, get on Ryders, head toward New Brunswick. College town, Rutgers is there. The safety of big buildings, civilization, surrounded by hundreds of human beings who must be up and active now, in such a large crowd someone must know something. I’m a couple miles away when I hit the gridlock. Maybe because the traffic lights are dead? Maybe a bad accident on Route One, people must all be rushing to work, now. Fuck waiting. I pull into a parking lot, and begin to walk towards the city. The opposite lane is empty. Sirens in the distance grow louder as two police SUVs speed back to the station, their tires covered in mud. Part One of a story I've had brewing in my head the past few days. (all three parts now double spaced to redue eye-rape) I had overslept. A night of bad dreams and sweaty sheets, and now my alarm hadn’t gone off. Fuck. My now open blinds revealed a beautiful summer morning, early enough that the sun isn’t baking you, but high enough in the sky to make the world look perfect. Ten thirty in the morning and my alarm clock was dead. I climb out of bed and, as quickly as my groggy body could, shuffled to the bathroom. Hit the switch. Power’s out. Fantastic, at least I have an excuse. Hot water hisses out of the head. I jump in. Lather, rinse, repeat. Dry, brush, deodorize, hurry up, you’re late. Boxers, black dress pants, tucked work shirt, have to look good for the customers. No time for breakfast. The neighborhood is no different; a lot of cars sit in their driveways, though. Guess everyone lost their power, maybe coming in late won’t be so bad. The Honda starts without a problem, and I speed off. Switch from CD to AM, maybe the news has something. Every station is dead air, that’s a bit spooky. I don’t remember any storms last night. My dreams were weird, half remembered now, unnatural forms moving, writhing, speaking in strange ways. However I never once woke up, the sleep was deep, but far from restful. It had been hot; I know my AC was on. Maybe the grid blew, it’s possible, but this must be a monumental scale, as I wasn’t getting stations in New York, Philly, and everywhere in between. Terrorism? I’m not big on yellow journalism, and I don’t like jumping to those kinds of conclusions, but it’s another explanation. Very few people on the roads, most of them don’t seem to be going anywhere specific, just driving, lost, confused, weird. Am I still dreaming? No, I never dream this vivid, this real. The parking lot is empty. I work on the floor of one of the big chain electronic stores. TVs? Not my department. Computers? In the back, ma’am. You want a DVD, a CD, a game? I’m your man. If you want to meet cute girls at work, don’t bother. My manager’s sitting on his hood on the lone car in the lot. I pull up, roll down my window. “Power’s out, you’re the first one here, actually.” “All the radio stations are dead, this is freaky.” “Yeah, see you on your next shift?” “Working Friday?” “Yeah.” “See ya then.” Drive off, roll the window back up. Hadn’t bothered trying my cell phone. I pull over and turn it on. No signal, no surprise. 1. What bill do you hate paying the most? Credit card payments that I still owe Mom, essentially still paying for books :( Not to self, buying textbooks is for suckers 2. Where was the last place you had a romantic dinner? I wouldn't consider Alfonso's to be romantic (go ahead and disagree, Trish :p) 3. Last time you puked from drinking? secret party couple weeks ago 4. When is the last time you got drunk and danced on a bar? never, but guys don't dance on bars, except for "Stella" ("I'm not even wearing a bra!!!") 5. Name of your first grade teacher? Mrs. Henney? 6. What do you really want to be doing right now? prbly still chilling with Sam, but we were both tired 7. What did you want to be when you were growing up? A Ghostbuster 8. How many colleges did you attend? One 9. Why did you choose the shirt that you have on right now? I look pretty good in simple dark shirts, IMO 10. Gas Price? Going down, but more income would be nice around now. 11. If you could move anywhere and take someone with you? dunno 12. First thought when the alarm went off this morning? It didn't. First thought getting up: "Why didn't Dad get me up for work?" 13. Last thought before going to sleep last night? no clue 14. Favorite style of underwear? Thongssss (preserved for comedy, actually, boxers) 15. Favorite style of underwear for the opposite sex? no real preference, granny panties would be weird though 16. What errand/chore do you despise? cleaning the basement 17. If you didn't have to work, would you volunteer? Occassionally. I'm a lazy bitch 18. Get up early or sleep in? Sleep in, see my previous self assessment 19. What is your favorite cartoon character? hmmmmm, Clone Emperor, if he counts. 20. Favorite NON sexual thing to do at night with a girl/guy? Cuddle (Dara's answer works) 21. Have you found real love yet? bleh 22. When did you first start feeling old? Don't feel that old, although all my memories blur together so my sense of time is all screwy. 23. Favorite 80's movie? BERNIEUHHHHHHH. Big Trouble in Little China 24. Your favorite lunch meat? toss up between Salami and Roast Beef 25. What do you get every time you go into Walmart? McDonald's dollar menu. I don't go to Walmart too often 26. Beach or lake? Beach 27. Do you think marriage is an outdated ritual? Not really, but I'm in no rush 28. How many people do you stalk on Facebook? 0, I'd bet 29. Favorite guilty pleasures? obscene DVD collection 30. Favorite movies you wouldn't want anyone to find out about? maybe "Contact"? 31. What's your drink? Jack and Coke 32. Cowboys or Indians? Robocop 33. Cops or Robbers? Predator 34. Who from high school would you like to run into? Steve Mo, or Pellicane 35. What radio station is your car radio tuned to right now? usually just listen to an mp3 CD 36. Norm or Cliff? I'd take both in the bedroom 37. The Cosby Show or the Simpsons? Simpsons 39. Do you like the person who sits directly across from you at work? huh? 40. If you could get away with it, who would you kill? no one, I promise. Because I want...to fit...in. 41. What famous person(s) would you like to have dinner with? Malcolm McDowell, or some sick fuck studio exec who would let me make a movie 42. What famous person would you like to sleep with? hmmmmm, I think I'd bust a nut up in Martha Washington's fanny. 43. Have you ever had to use a fire extinguisher for its intended purpose? nyet 44. Last book you read for real? hmmmmm, Clockwork Orange? 45. Do you have a teddy bear? nope 46. Strangest place you have ever brushed your teeth? weird question 47. Somewhere in California you've never been and would like to go? Never been to Northern CA, but I hear it's homocentral. I'm awful :p 48. Do you go to church? not since Easter. Obi-Christ tried to convince today, though. 49. At this point in your life would you rather start a new career or a new relationship? Careers are for chumps and cumswappers. Yes, I went there. 50. Just how OLD are you? 19 
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