One. Two. Three. Six of clovers. One. Two. Three. Ten of hearts. She’s already flipped through the deck twice, hoping the cards would reshuffle themselves magically. This is the third straight game she’s lost; resigned, she lets the cards slide off her hand.

She leans back in the creaky straw chair, blowing the hair off her face, crossing and uncrossing her legs in discomfort. He was never on time, but worse, he wasn’t reliably late either. Five, ten minutes. An hour or three. Once, two days—that time she’d gotten angry, which resulted in a new pair of sunglasses and her choice of concessions at the movie theater. Otherwise she always let it go. He was late; it was a fact of life.

The itchy straw and the creaks and groans of the battered chair get on her nerves eventually. She carefully puts the cards away and eyes the front gate. She can’t help but expect his silver pickup truck to squeal to a stop any minute now. She hates herself for it. Toward the rest of the world she is hard, unforgiving, even cynical, but he always managed to smile, hug, and charm his way past that. She lets him get away with murder and he knows it as well as she does.

She fumbles through her purse for her cell phone—no calls. Maybe she should call him. No, he either wouldn’t pick up or give her some flimsy excuse. Hearing the squeal of tires she leans forward on the front gate, looking toward the end of the block, anxiously. Nope. Only a couple of kids in an old Chevy, driving too fast.

She distracts herself for a few moments, letting her sandals slide off her feet and picking them up again. She’s thirsty but she doesn’t want to go back in the house, only to have her mom look at her with eyes full of itoldyouso.

Ants diligently march down the crevices of the paved walkway toward the front gate. She stares at them, following their path with her eyes. She envies their single mindedness. Ants are never late; they’re never early either. They are either somewhere or they’re not. They don’t clock in or work overtime or have arguments with their mates about working late.

She glances at her cell phone again. It’s only been ten minutes. She might give up soon—go back to her room and waste some time on the computer. She considers calling him again. Not worth it.

She heads back toward the porch, taking a seat again. She spills the cards on the dinner tray, shuffles them again, and arranges them in the familiar pattern. One. Two. Three. Ace of Spades. That’s a good start.

***

This is a short story I wrote a few years ago. I recently filmed a short film very loosely based on it. You can watch it below:

So, I'm trying to write a novel in 30 days. 50,000 words. 1,667 words a day. It's a little insane. Or it will make me insane. Either way, I guess it'll be fun? The little icon below tracks my status (currently behind about 2000 words). Wish me luck.

So, MySpace is running a contest for bands to get some exposure. Grand Prize: Record deal? Yes, please. Help us (Palisades Drive) win, hit GRAB THIS and embed/link this on your Facebook,MySpace,Virb,Bebo,Tumblr,Twitter,Posterous,Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Delicious accounts, etc. You do have an account on all of those, right? I thought so.

As I sit here in my unimportant chair, looking at my dreary life with uneducated eyes, I feel it. The world is rising up and getting ready to swallow us. Men have flooded us with acronyms and obfuscated paradigms; creations of exponential complexity, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. And we are meek and we will watch, afraid but pacified, self assured. We will drown together and even then, we will not raise our voices, weary of the truth spilling forth seductively. In a perfect world, the world we like to imagine—a world with Jack Buer and Gregory House and Rorschach. A world where the right thing is done as a matter of course. In that reality, the word is not an article in a wiki. The word is absolute violence. The word rips flesh from bone. The word terrifies. The word rapes and pillages and burns. The word is absolute evil for relative good. Revolution. It will never happen but sometimes, honestly, don't you think it should?

It's always ham versus turkey on Thanksgiving. I'm sorry my weird looking chicken friend but honeyed is what I'm thankful for.

Being uniquely qualified I present the following easy-to-follow rules that will guarantee your continued dissatisfaction and lack of success. 1. Never finish what you begin (or even better, don't start anything at all). 2. Continually sacrifice your health and happiness for a paycheck. Someday when you're sixty-five and can't get a hard-on you'll have lots of money to spend on bingo and a premium grave site. 3. Spend at least an hour a day visualizing the huge success you'll be when you finally pursue your dreams. Bonus points if you can actually hear the applause in your head. 4. Recursively trade in your goals and ambitions for slightly less satisfactory ones. Attempt to eliminate them altogether. 5. Allow routine and tedium to rule your life. Wake up, Eat, Work, Eat, Sleep, Wake up, Eat, Work... Begin by adopting these rules one at a time. By design, each sucessive rule will naturally follow. Good luck!

Do we really need a security guard down every aisle at a concert? Is the geriatric crowd at a Bob Dylan concert that great of a concern? Is it some type of cruel joke that THE protest singer of our time plays venues with more rules and precautions than a shooting range? How much money are people making from selling that blurry photo of Bob from 400 feet away? And yes, I'm talking to you, the bald hard-on with a headset and a two-sizes-too-small yellow security shirt: if the 65 year old guy who knows every Dylan lyric, because he was there when they meant something, wants to partake in some recreational cannabonoids, shut the fuck up and hope when you're that age somebody pays you the same deference.

Woe the turkey. Yesterday, he walked with little worry Gobble gobble Today he's covered in gravy yum.

Hi again, I've cleaned up all the posts for 30 Days Vol. I, adding links backwards and forwards so that it is easy to navigate. I've also created a cleaner archive page. The pages are also now cached to improve loading time. 30 Days Vol. I Archive Unrelated: Help these guys get to 100k comments.

Nicholas Barrios finished typing and sighed. Even writing stories he already knew was hard—to create them from thin air, on a schedule, was some sort of stupid. Thirty days ago he had started writing with the idea that it would be no more than a small part of the day. Something to keep his mind occupied and perhaps a small grab at the hidden ambition he had of being a writer. He had been wrong. He had spent the last thirty days constantly going over plots and motivations. Driving became a time to pump up the volume and live out stories, trying to make them go further with each repetition, hoping that at the end of the day he had come up with enough. He had learned to keep them running in the back of his mind. And now that the thirty days were up and all he had left was to write a goodbye, he felt relieved. There were more stories to write, of course, but they could wait for a while. He has a feeling, however, that as soon as that anxiety and excitement and motivation is gone, he will miss it. It wasn’t that hard, he thinks, I can do it again—thus proving he’s a goddamn fool. If you were here from the beginning, thanks for reading. I’m honored. If you weren’t, the words will be there for when you have the inclination. See you soon.