The Ancient Shark Of Despair's blog

Thursday, April 2nd 2009

“All of the endings are so happy,” she said. She had three of the grocery kid's book spread out in front of her.
“I know.” I said.
“Even if the guy and the girl don't end with each other, they're still left off as better people from the experience.”
“I know!” I said. I did know.
“It's all so uncomplicated. It's not messy at all.”
“It's how love should be,” I said. “It's how love actually is, in the right situation.”
“Ja,” she said, but her eyes darted around the room. I could see that she needed to read more of the books.

I didn't offer her any just then, though. I wanted first to talk about love some more. I shuffled over to my computer and I made some special movements. A screen appeared and I moved out of the way so she could see it.
“Could you love this man?” I asked. She moved in close, her smell became huge and she inspected @groombridge's dating site profile.
“Did you write this?” she said.
“I helped.” I said.
“Who is he, Sharky?”
“He likes Leonard Cohen.”
“And cars, I see.”
“Would you want to go out with him?” I repeated. I didn't want to get hung up on the details with her. Sarah looked back at the screen. She looked at his photo. I'd told him to change it but he didn't. She saw his earring.
“Nno,” she said slowly.
“What if you lived in America or he lived here?” I asked.
“I don't like older guys, Sharky.”
“How old?” I wondered.
“I don't know, hey – twenty? Twenty five would definitely be my limit.”
“After that, people get so sad,” I said.
“I don't know - ”
“I've seen it happen. Their brains change into a shape it can't change out of. Everything they need to know is locked in and now they're stuck with it.” We weren't looking at the screen any more. I was looking at Sarah and Sarah was looking at me.
“Sharky, you're old and you're not like that,” she said.
“I know,” I said, breaking the look we shared forever. “It's different for sharks.” She crossed her legs and leaned forward. She was so close.
“Why don't you get out there? You could meet other sharks, hey. You could place an ad or go on a dating site yourself – you could join an art group, Sharky. They'd love you! I'm sure there are other sharks out there, you're bound to meet one if you look.”
“No, they're all gone,” I said.
“Come on, there must be one more.”
“Actually, one came to my door,” I said, doing a secret smile.
“What?”
“His name was Francois. He played a trick on me.”
“Oh Sharky -”
“He said that you were going out.”
“Sharky! I didn't know he did that, you should have said right away.”
“I did.”
“We're not really going out. We went camping and thing just went on from there, you know?” I thought of Sarah touching Francois' hand so gently. They are camping. Carolyn's house is there in the distance. There's a thunderstorm in the sky and the rain is coming down upon their little tent. They might not survive this. Maybe god really means it this time. She know he can't hear her so she doesn't even bother to say the words, she just mouths them. Francois smiles. He smells of pizza grease and petrol. He touches her hair, it curls around his fingers with a life of its own. The air is suddenly silent and he says,
“Don't schnaai me, bru – okay?”

“It's fine,” I said to Sarah and I felt like the landlord. I wonder what the landlord would do if he met Francois. He'd probably freak all the way out. “It was a funny joke. We're cool now.” It was pretty funny, actually. A big part of what makes something funny is the surprise.
“I'm sorry he tricked you, honestly, we're not really even seeing each other any more,” she said, but I had moved on. I was rising above everything.
“Sarah, I need you to do something for me,” I said it quiet and I said it serious. Sarah's face hung there and I had to smile to show it was okay. “I need you to find Monopoly for me.”
“Monopoly?”
“Moe's cousin.”
“What, who – Bradley? What do you want to talk to him for?”
“I think he lives here in the building,” I said.
“I know where he lives – what do you want with him?” she said. She wasn't being aggressive, she just wanted to know the secret. I can't tell you the secrets yet, Sarah. You're still in training.
“There's something else I'd like you to do,” I said. I picked up the something else and handed it to her. It was one of the grocery kid's books. “Would you like to read another one?” She gave it back to me.
“No thanks, not right now.”
“Okay.” I trusted her. It was Sarah.

Saturday, April 11th 2009

I wanted Francois to be the one to come and bring the pizza on Friday night. Normally, if you want this to happen, you tell the pizza girls who you want when you're on the phone and ordering your pizza. I was just about to do this when I realised that Francois would find out that I was expecting him and he might do something tricky. To talk to him properly, I'd have to catch him by surprise. The bad thing was that I only realised this while I was already talking to the pizza girls. It was like this:

“Will there be anything else, sir? Would you like anything to drink with that?” said the pizza girl.
“I'd like to request that a certain boy bring the pizzas to me,” This is me talking.
“Certainly, we can arrange that if he's on tonight. The pizza might come a bit later though,”
“That's fine, I'm fine with that. I always burn my mouth if the pizza is too hot anyway.”
“Who would you like, sir?” This is when I got stuck. I had wanted to surprise him but if I told the ladies that I wanted him in particular then he'd know that something was up. When you make a request for a certain boy, it gets printed on the slip. I've seen it. I suddenly didn't want to ask for him any more. I tried to think of another name, of some other pizza punk who'd visited me. They all had names but only one came to mind.
“I want Moe. Send Moe please,” I said. There was some talking that I couldn't quite hear on the other side of the line.
“Moe doesn't work here any more, sir. Is there anyone else you'd like.”
“No thank you, Moe's the best one you had.”
“Yes, we all miss him.” I could hear that she was smiling. I think she meant it.

If Francois had come and I'd caught him by surprise like I wanted, I imagine at first he'd been shy and maybe dangerous, but then I'd invite him in and ask him to play TV games. I have a pretty good idea of how good he'd be at them. He wouldn't be as good as Moe, because I don't think Francois is nearly as clever as Moe, but maybe he's better than Monopoly, who didn't have a good style for games. I'd play with him or, if he didn't want me in the way, I'd just watch. He's probably not used to people who can just watch another person play TV games like that. After a while I made him some tea and I brought out the biscuits I had. We started talking about music and Leonard Cohen and he liked that. I told him the meanings to some of the best Leonard Cohen songs. He didn't know that they meant that, he had his own interpretation of them that wasn't anywhere close. It's cool, you can keep that interpretation. It's your truth.

We sat and talked for ages about all kinds of things. I told him about Carolyn and about Sarah, how she's so aware of what's going on in the world. I don't think I was ever so aware, not even when I was her age. I don't even know half of the things she talks about, I've got to look them up or ask her or connect them up to something I've seen on TV. Sometimes it seems that she can go anywhere, that there are no secrets from her. If there's something she wants to know about, she'll just go right out there and find it. It's the way she talks to people – they want to automatically tell her their secrets. I told him about Sarah's parents. You have to be careful around her because her parents are really sad. Her father is this alcoholic who doesn't do anything all day. He's done, he's all out of dreams. Her mother works so much that she isn't even a person anymore. You have to know that Sarah still loves them even though they are holding her back and keeping her stuck in their bad ways. But then she's got these really great friends like Nikki, who smile and back her up and are always on her side but not at the expense of people who aren't her. They don't want to fight you. They want you to join them.

At any point during my telling of Sarah to him, I could look over into Francois' eyes and see that he was learning to love Sarah the way I did. I don't think his way of loving Sarah was right. I think it lead to problems. I think Francois knew this too.
“Listen bru,” he sad, “I've got to put it all right. I've got to love Sarah the right way,”
“You're young,” I said. “You can do it.” I think that was the point where Francois and me became friends. We drank some more tea and we played TV games – neither one of us was better than the other, we were exactly equal – we ate the pizza we ordered and then we ate the pizza he had in his car (it was free) and then we just jumped about and shouted until it was time for him to go. I asked him if he wanted to help me make a television company and he said he did. I don't know exactly what he'll do in the company. Maybe he can be the pizza guy, like he's always been. We'll need a lot of pizza when the company is up and running.

Just as he was leaving, a bird walked down the corridor towards him. He told me to come out and look. I did. The bird walked right past him, around the corner. He was amazed but I knew what was happening.
“Some birds,” I said to him as he looked around at me to share in the crazy thing that had just happened, “Have been living in buildings for so long that they don't fly anywhere, they just walk around like they own the place.” He didn't believe me but I smiled it away. “Scientists have observed that they only appear when you're doing everything right.”

He looked down the hallway. It was empty now. Before him lay the whole world.
“You're on the right path, chugger. Keep going.” And then he ran out to the world, to Sarah, to everything.

That's how it would have gone. Instead they just sent some random guy. He didn't want to talk about Sarah or anything else, he took the money from the plant and went.

Sunday, April 12th 2009

So a few days ago a strange thing happened. @groombridge got a message on his dating site. That's not the strange part. The strange part is that the message was from Sarah. He told me about it and I acted cool. He said that she looked so young and pretty in her photos. She was making tea in her photos. I warned him that she wasn't into older guys. Then I told him that he could get around that. He said he'd send the e-mails to me but I had to do was one thing. I had to trust him.

Burzumfan9999: I trust you.

I said.

So Sarah got talking to @groombridge and he told her all about how the school that his kids go / went to was a bad school, and that all the schools in his country were bad schools unless you had a lot of money to send your kids to the good ones. Even the good ones are bad because then what matters most is who your parents are and what kind of car you come to school in. Anyway, the schools that he can afford don't work. They don't respect his kids' individual strengths and weaknesses and all they care about is targets and budgets.
That's great, says, Sarah back to him, but she's got problems too. Her dad won't let her leave the farm. He doesn't want her to love by her own rules, he wants her to marry the pizza punk who delivered to them this one time. He's already written their wedding as a play and he wants them to perform it to a whole room of his old drama buddies who he hasn't seen for years and years. This is his big chance to show them all that he was worth it the whole time and he wants it all to be perfect. Her dad is kind of a jerk. As soon as she gets the chance, she's going to leave home and never really talk to him again. She'll only see him at funerals or sometimes at christmas. That's what you get for being a jerk.

Sarah tells him about her brother and sister. They're suffering under the grocery kid's bad parenting skills too, but in different ways. Her brother is an alcoholic, straight up. He never sleeps in his own bed. At night he's either passed out on the couch or, if he's upset Sarah's sister, sitting on the front doorstep with an empty bottle of wine. Sarah usually goes outside and takes him a blanket. In the past she would try to get him to come inside but he didn't want to. He was too proud. He'd been told to go out, he'd say. He was just doing what he'd been told.

Sarah's sister is the brawn of the family. She's the one who supports everyone and works and keeps things running. If it wasn't for her, the crops wouldn't get watered and the trucks wouldn't arrive at the right time and the farm-boys wouldn't get paid. She is always tired and always being bossy but she knows what's best and what everyone should eat for dinner. She used to cook dinner herself but now she doesn't have the time. It's all oven meals in plastic trays. It's okay though because she buys the fancy ones with the vegetable chunks in. She says that Sarah should cook once in a while, you know? But it's not like those things are hard to cook and Sarah says she's busy with guys a lot of the time. She's not afraid to say this to @groombridge. Guys are a part of life.

Sarah's father is too old to do anything useful on the farm any more. His back hurts too much. All he does is fetch the groceries from the shop once a week. He treats this like it's a really big deal and he uses it to show how much the family needs him, but they all know that Sarah could do the whole job just as easily or that they could order food off the internet if they wanted. He's aware of all the problems in his family, though. In fact, he doesn't think of much else. He's always calculating how much inheritance each of them will get when he dies. He's always changing the ratios around in his mind. A lot of the time, Sarah's sister will get most, if not all of it, because she's always cooking dinner and looking like she's in charge, but from time to time he'll look favourably on Sarah. If she goes through with this wedding to Francois and makes him look good in front of all of his old drama buddies, he's going to give half of everything to her. That's the farm, the house, all of it. It's a big farm. They grow important things there and it makes a lot of money thanks to Sarah's sister. The brother won't get anything, of course. He's not very good with money. If he got it he wouldn't know what to do with it. He'd probably try to give it back. That would be funny, seeing him do that.

The grocery kid has even told Sarah about his plan to give her the inheritance but Sarah doesn't care. She's not going to marry Francois. They're not even going out. They just went on this camping trip and things went from there. Love is the most important thing to Sarah but nobody has told Francois the right way to love her. Until that happens, he'll just be another guy, another pizza punk, all adrift in the world, eating popcorn off the stove and living a life of shallow necessity. She knows enough about @groombridge from his dating site profile to know that he's not like that. He's into deep stuff, like cars and Leonard Cohen. His life is the exact opposite of someone who takes a blanket out to the porch to cover up their drunk brother. He's been a parent and he's been rejected by everything that ever made him attractive. He feels sometimes like his job his done, he got some new people made and he got them to a certain age – maybe that's all there is to life. She can show him how wrong that thought is.

She said all this to @groombridge and he asked me what he should do. He was kind of suspicious of everything. This wasn't how things had gone down with his ex-wife when they had met. So I told him all of the thing I would have said to Francois the other night if he had showed up. I told him to tell her that she was special, so much more than a simple farm girl. I told him to warn her that the city is strange and very noisy and there isn't much space, but if she was with him, she would never have to work so hard to please her jerk father. Every day would be her day that she controlled and she'd be able to wear fancy clothes and everything. I felt a little weird about losing Sarah to him, but I knew that we could all still be friends and hang out. I thought of what Nikki would say when she found out about Sarah and @groombridge.
“How could they possibly have met and hooked up and fallen in love?” she'd ask me. “The chances against it were so astronomically high!”
“How do any two people end up in love? Aren't the chances always as small as nothing?” I'd say back. “You just have to believe that love can beat the odds.” I'd know that it was really me who made it all happen and I'd wink then she'd know and she'd smile and then... who knows?

@groombridge asked me why I was always online at the exact same time as Sarah was on the dating site.

Burzumfan9999: It must be a coincidence.

I said

Friday, April 17th 2009

I don't think that I'm friends with @groombridge anymore.

We drifted apart. Yeah, it happens. It's been coming for a while now actually. I saw all the signs. It's cool, he can do what he wants. He changed his profile on the dating site back to the way it was before I wrote all that stuff about astronauts for him. It's boring now, but whatever.

He also made it so I can't see Sarah's profile on the site. He must have given me a virus.

It's a pity, really. He needed me way more than I need him. I was giving him advice and help. Last week he said he was afraid of what his ex-wife would do if she found out he was on a dating site and what she'd say when he met someone through it. He didn't tell me what he thought she'd say, exactly, but I bet it would have been really sarcastic. I told him not to worry. When the time came, I would fix it all for him. If there's one thing I know, it's ex-wives. I know a lot about kids and being a parent too. I know how it is. I think I had a pretty good handle on solving the problems he had with the school too. I've some some really good ideas for how schools should be run.

So it's pretty weird not having @groombridge around on the internet. Whenever I see something weird or interesting go down on IRC, I usually mail him a transcript and then we talk about it, especially if it involved someone who's on our 'watch' list. Yesterday, in a chatroom, I saw a guy have a fight with another guy, only this fight crossed borders of reality. First, the cooler guy we watch called the bad guy we watch a paedo. This part actually happened a few days before. He called him that because he was always defending his choices of bad music he liked and was really friendly with all the admins on this one forum. Anyway, what happened yesterday was that the bad guy found out that the cool guy had called him a kid and had found out the cool guy's home phone number from a link in his profile and had called the cool guy's wife. The wife wouldn't let the bad guy talk to the cool guy and the bad guy got really aggressive and called the cops. The chat I saw yesterday was the bad guy taunting the cool guy because the cops didn't do anything and actually made the cool guy apologise for making a big deal out of everything. They were both explaining their sides of the story to everyone else in the chat while trying to correct each other's story and call each other names. At one point the cool guy pointed out that the bad guy could only use sentence fragments, which is incorrect and the bad guy said that he only needed fragments to prove that he was a douche. People took sides. It was life.

I don't think @groombridge saw any of it because he would have been asleep when it happened. I guess that's another thing he's missed out on now.

Sunday, April 19th 2009

We had a TV company meeting today in my kitchen. Monopoly was there. Sarah said she'd come with her friend who is into photography, but she didn't. I guess she must have forgot.

The meeting went pretty well. We got a lot of stuff sorted out. Monopoly said he'd been talking to some guys he knew who were also street and he said he could make it all happen. He knew a guy who made hiphop music review videos that he put up on the internet. He can be the director. Apparently, this guy is pretty popular as a music reviewer. He gets a lot of people talking. It will be good to get someone with a built-in audience. Monopoly said he knew a lot of sound guys who could do mixing and he would do all the music himself. It would be hiphop and it would be uncompromising. But there was one thing:
“When's the money coming?” he said.
“Don't worry,” I said. “It's coming.”
“I'm not doing anything until I've got the cash in my hand. My time is precious, do you understand?”
“Yes, I will get the money.” I said. I understood him. He didn't have to ask if I did.

I got down to telling him what the sitcom we'll make is all about. I told him it is about families and how sad parents get.
“The main character is an astronaut called Ric,” I explained.
“An astronaut?” he snorted. “That shit's all fake. You don't believe in that stuff, do you?”
“I do,” I said, off-guard.
“You've got no idea what's going on in the world,” he said. He didn't seem upset and I wasn't too sure what he wanted me to say to that, so I told him some more about the characters in the sitcom.
“His wife's name is Carolyn and she's kind of magical. He had to leave her to go to space and she got into a relationship while he was gone with her psychiatrist, Burzum.”
“Burzum?” he said and he snarled up his face when he did it. “The singer?”
“In this he's a psychiatrist,” I said.
“He's a skinny-ass pussy, that's all he is. I could take him in a fight, one time. If he was here right now I'd stomp his ass. Understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
“So when are we going to make this happen, when's the money coming?” he said.
“I just need to talk to the landlord about that,” I said.
“I just need the money,” he said back very quickly. I stayed quiet for a while and he claimed a victory.
“How come that Sarah chick's not here anyway? You said she'd be here.” he said.
“I thought she would be.”
“Did you call her?”
“I've already called her,” I said.
“When? Call her again.” I didn't want to be rude and call Sarah a lot of times in case she was doing something important but Monopoly made it seem like it wouldn't be rude and it wouldn't matter if I disturbed her.
“That chick's so fine man,” he said while the phone was ringing. “And she's such a skank, too. She'd go with anyone. And listen, when she was going out with my cousin I took a video of them doing it on my phone. He was giving it her doggy, it was like - ” he grabbed his chest in both hands, closed his eyes and shook up and down. Then he opened his eyes, picked up his phone and said, “Do you want to see it?”
The call to Sarah went to voicemail. I hung up the phone but made no sudden moves. Monopoly grinned. “Yeah you want to see it. Let me show you...” he pressed some buttons on his phone but then he suddenly got very angry and crammed it back into his pocket. “Ah shit, it's on my other phone!” I slowly put my own phone down. Sarah wasn't coming. My mouth was dry. “It's cool though,” said Monopoly, “I know you wanted to see it. I'll bring it next time. Just make sure you bring the money.”

After he'd gone, I e-mailed David again. I said how great it was when he lived next door and we hung out, before he moved out. I told him that everyone was moving out now. I said that I hardly play TV games any more. Not even Monopoly wanted to play TV games today. He said that my games were all old and lame-looking. I told David that if he ever wanted to come to my chatroom and talk to me for a bit, I'd give him ops. He can kick and ban anyone he wants. I think everything will change when that happens. It would start like this:

@david: Hey Shark, sorry it's been so long. I've just had some crazy family stuff going on, you know?
Burzumfan9999: It's okay David.
Burzumfan9999: I know how it is with families.