I wrote this as a sample for an AI program to use to make a video.
I thought it was pretty good, so I am preserving it here.
File it under the further adventures of my gay hardboiled detective.
It was a hot thick drizzle that slid down the window pane in obscenely bloated drops and clung to the underside of anything horizontal as if daring gravity to try to make it drip onto the greasy pavement below.
It was the kind of hot, wet weather that makes you feel like you’re too large an animal in too small a cage and even the slightest of annoyances make you want to yowl like a baying hound at anyone or anything daring to come near.
The city was on edge. So was I. It often works out that way, somehow.
And that’s when he came in. Impossibly and immaculately beautiful, like something painted on a church ceiling by an exceptionally homosexual Renaissance artist. There was a otherworldly freshness and untouchability about him like he wasn’t really here with us in this filthy old world but just appearing to us in a vision to warn us about the latest candidate for American ‘s Top Messiah. He was blonde, and beautiful, and softly feminine like a lamb or a fawn.
In other words, he was exactly my type. And that made me suspicious.
I thought I’d complain about it in the day’s video because you lovely readers are probably sick of me writing the same old stuff every time this happens.
You know, this sucks, unfair, easy to fix, crazy to expect us to live for five weeks on what normally only has to last four, and so on.
It’s all in the vid.
Hopefully I will get some $$$ for my birthday. That would help a lot.
Of course, being the prudent type, I’m not gonna spend like I usually do assuming that I will get enough money to pay for that final week.
That would just be silly.
But I did spend like usual in this last week because it didn’t occur to me to check whether it was a five week month until yesterday.
They sneak up on me. It’s like they come along just at the moment when I have finally let down my guard after the last one.
What I really should do is go through the whole list of deposit days for the year to identify these five week fuckers so I can plan ahead or at least so they don’t come as a shock each god damned time.
I crunched the numbers and I am not in too bad a shape. I got $150/week or so to live on, which covers my stable expenses.
1 trip to Denny’s, $30. Two McDonald’s runs, $40. Groceries, $70. 30 + 40 + 70 = 140, leaving me with a whopping $10 in leeway.
Time to paint the town red! Woo hoo! Bonanza!
I have a small problem : I have two days to cover and only one entrée. I did my grocery budgeting last week assuming I would be ordering in tonight and as I probably shouldn’t order in at all this month that leaves me in a bit of a pickle.
So I might end up ordering in tonight anyway, but with a real eye for value. Maybe look for a good high yield two for one deal so I can cover a meal for Friday night as well and thus avoid one McD’s run.
My clever foxy brain is working on it. I can play with the numbers and make it all work out. Trust me.
Otherwise, things are going fine. I continue to try to get the gas giant that is my cold and bloated soul to ignite into the big shiny star it’s supposed to be.
I feel like I’ve hard partial ignition. Didn’t last long as the flame didn’t really “catch” but I am sure that I am on the right track and it’s only a matter of time.
Heck, maybe I’ll get the Onion job and my life will be transformed. I’ll be able to rent a house and decorate it and pay someone to keep it clean and maybe invite the occasional gentleman caller over to dally with me in the drawing room.
And then fuck me up the ass.
I was reading the job listing and it mentioned “being familiar with the Onion editorial process”, so I decided to look up just what the heck that meant.
Basically, quantity. All the writers are expected to produce a lot of everything – story pitches, headlines, full stories, video ideas, and so on.
And I was like, HELL yeah. Demand much of me and WATCH ME GO. I will blow your god damned socks off.
I sure as fuck wouldn’t want a job where I am only expected to do a little. I’ve not been developing my writing muscles through blogging for all these years to just submit one little story a week or something.
Pretty sure they wouldn’t be paying me $100K CDN/year for that either.
So the mystery of how they can be so sharp and funny all the time is solved : they have an enormous amount amount of all kinds of inputs and from there they choose the best stuff and presumably combine, refine, polish, and so on in order to create the incredibly high standard of satire for which they are known.
And I could one day be a part of that.
They’d be fools not to hire me!
More after the break.
I ordered in
I probably shouldn’t have, but I did.
Got myself some lamb shawarma from Uncle Sal’s Shawarma and so far it tastes great. Has that “grilled” taste I love so much.
For some reason, I like slightly singed food.
And it is, of course, lamb. If lamb is an option, I get lamb, 99 time out of 100. There is just something about sheep meat that makes my soul happy.
Eh, it fell apart. Probably my fault. Uncle Sal is blameless.
But if I get this again, I am going to make sure I have a clean, empty bowl handy in case this happens again,
Right now my shawarma wrap is in a bowl all right, but it lies atop a layer of trail mix left over from my lunch. And I am eating it with a spoon.
Such are the small indignities of life.
Otherwise today has been typical. Video games, meals, video, blogging.
Another day ticks by while I sleepwalk through life.
Actually, that’s not fair.
Sleepwalkers actually get somewhere.
But I am, in my own intermittent way, striving to change that. When I find myself in a moment when I can push against the walls of my enclosure, I do.
And for the rest of the time, I lie there, plotting my escape, and saving up the energy for my next big push.
Big changes are coming. Transformational ones. Ones that will finally unmoor this barnacle existence of mine and let me find a real place in the world.
Maybe it will be the Onion. Maybe not. Maybe I need to get back to the world of freelance writing. Get myself a cheap smartphone so I can sign up for UpWork or the like again and get myself out there.
I would be so much more sane if I could earn money.
