And there he was, standing in front of the Man, facing his life, facing his fate. It wasn’t like they usually said it is: the light, the smoke, the tunnel, the virgins, the nice shiny day in the beautiful park with some relaxing music by the greatest composers playing in the background. Everything seemed too casual for the afterlife or whatever that place is called in between where you yet to be decided by God to put your sorry ass into for eternity. It did seem a very bizarre experience when Bob was standing there facing the Man.
“What’s your name?” the Man asked.
“Bob. My name is Bob Cooper, Sir.”
Bob answered with a questioning look on his face. Bob was 53 years old, alcoholic, and a selfish asshole. He had a family, a wife and two kids, daughters. Bob liked to watch sports on TV, drinking beer, vodka, whiskey, and pretty much anything that would give him a buzz. He worked for the union, a construction company, all his life, and he drank and smoked for about as long as he could remember himself. Bob grew up in a typical middle-class family in rural Pennsylvania, to the parents of a school teacher and an engineer. Bob left his home at 19 and started to live his own life because he wanted to make his own money and be his own boss in life. Bob was an asshole all his life. Even he was surprised how in the world he managed to get married and have children and remain in a marriage as long as he had. Bob never paid too much respect or spent too much time with his family. He was providing, and he was drinking all the fucking time. Nothing else mattered besides the booze, his friends, sports, and his union job.
Bob’s drinking affected his looks and health, but he didn’t care too much about it. He looked much older when he actually was. He had a heavily featured swollen face; his skin was wrinkled and old. He chain-smoked and drank something all the time. Even on his job, he was trying to slip some whiskey into his coffee. Drinking was affecting his mood and his behavior severely. He was rude and disrespectful to other people, and he was rude and disrespectful to his wife and kids.
Bob had two kids, two gorgeous girls who were always ashamed of their father. If Bob was sober more often, he would be ashamed of himself also. When drunk, Bob was becoming a religious fanatic and was praying aloud all the time. He would go around and preach to everyone. He would be talking about God and how he was a special person to be here on Earth, suffering for everybody’s sins. When he sobered up, he was not talking about God so much; however, he felt like he had to become a priest instead of becoming a nobody somewhere deep in his mind.
Short Stories
Hello and welcome to my blog. I am John Loraine and I am a poet and a writer. Check out my new book, a collection of short stories and poems “Nicetown”. Thank you for reading. Cheers!
The saddest day
I am still wondering six years later, how in the world this could ever happen? Why? I refused to believe it for so long. I could never imagine that the person with so much life and energy could be gone so quickly and so suddenly. It crushed me. I remember that morning as I woke up and I checked my phone, and multiple messages were saying, “have you heard?” I haven’t yet. I am 7 hours behind that part of the world; I was peacefully asleep as the planet changed its course. It was impossible. The impossible happened. Damn. Was it just the dream? Is it just a car accident? Maybe he’s still alive? Maybe he will recover? Why in the fuck did this ever happen? The saddest day in my life was emerging on the early morning of February second of 2015. It has been a grey, cold, nasty, and brutal morning. I still remember that day as it happened yesterday when my hero died.
There are people that once you’ve met them, your life changed its course immediately. There are people larger than life. He was a person like that. He meant life to so many, and he was more alive than anybody I knew. He showed how to live and how to live properly for so many. He helped people to live their lives and be happy and be thankful for the little things. He radiated life energy, positivity, optimism, a bundle of great emotions, and a willingness to live, to live forever. His music was with me throughout my entire life. I was growing up listening to his music and watching him on TV as a kid. Later, as I grew up, I had a chance to meet him personally, and I was just fascinated. His energy consumed me and made me feel different, gave me the boost that I needed to feel life, to feel alive, and have something to be proud of in every breath. I felt that life was great again and worth living, and there were so many beautiful things in life that somehow I haven’t noticed before. Nobody ever has me felt this before or after.
That morning I was about to start a new chapter of my life. My lifestyle was about to change due to restructuring at work. I had a chance to come to work earlier and leave earlier as well. So my new schedule was 8 am, instead of 9:30 am. That meant that I would wake up at 6 am. I woke before that alarm went off on February second. Checking my phone for the time, I’ve noticed all these messages I received overnight. There were some messages from people I haven’t heard in a while; they all said the same thing. My initial reaction was, ok, there was a car accident, he’s probably traumatized, but I couldn’t comprehend that he’s no longer alive. I refused to acknowledge that. I watched the videos sent to me and read the news articles. They didn’t say he’s dead just yet, but about the car accident. Looking at the white Toyota Sequoia wreck after the accident, it looked like it was impossible to survive. It was impossible to imagine it could ever happen. It was just too much to comprehend.
Continue readingRant about jobs
Jobs are different kinds. There are full-time jobs, part-time, contract, contract-to-hire, passion projects, soul-crushing jobs, there are self-owned businesses, gig jobs, freelancing, and whatever, you name it. As many as there are problems in our lives, as many there must be jobs because all jobs should help solve the problems we have. We all need jobs. We all should get jobs. We spend our lives working jobs, making careers, busting our balls trying to make it, or making ends meet. We are always told that “It’s good that you have a job”, “It is good to be busy”, “Busy is good, right?” I guess it depends on what you are busy with and how much of it you really care about. Most of the time, we all hate our jobs, but we have our obligations, debt, family, kids, bills, loans, and we work and work and work until we die.
I am one of those “lucky privileged bastards” who finished college, and now I have had quite a few years of professional work experience behind my belt. I am considered middle-class or somewhere near that based on my salary, and I am supposedly the one “who made it.” I came to this country, and I’ve got my education, and I’ve got multiple jobs over time, and now I am who I am, a professional. I followed the traditional path to “normal life” by getting a four-year degree and working my many career jobs so I could be promoted over time and move from one position to a better one. Back in the day, that sounded like a great plan. Back in my early college days, that seemed like it was the only way to “make it.” I didn’t want to work at factories and construction sites all my life like most people that I knew did. I wanted to be in the office, working clean and safe jobs and getting promotions as time goes by. I guess now I’ve got what I wanted. As this became my life now, I started wondering, what the fuck did I really achieve, and why am I so fucking miserable all the time?
There are a shit ton of people out there who, with or without the proper education, made a tremendous success in life, whether it is building a business or creating a new product or service or new app or whatever. Most of them never got a proper education; most of them were college or high-school drop-outs. Most of the people you know or see hitting the road to work every day on the highway, are with an excellent education are just fucking office people who none of us will ever know or hear from or notice them amongst the crowd. They are the masses, the masses who followed the plan. It is not always bad to have a secure job and steady income and keep on “growing” and living a “normal” life. The problem is the cost that you pay for it. It is not the price of your salary. It is never just those fifty or one hundred thousand dollars in school loans that you’ve borrowed because you were led to believe that you are investing in your life, your dream, or your future. Sometimes it is true, but it is so fucking false in most cases. Once I get a decent job, I think that it will take me about a year or two to pay my debt off, and then I will be free and happily living my life in peace and comfort.
Spring was still too far away
The weather forecast was terrible for the next couple of days in Philadelphia. Jake knew that if it were snowing heavily, he would be out of work again. He needed to work, and more so, he needed the money. He’s shit was out of luck. His savings disappeared as fast as the new bills came in the mail. He couldn’t get to the city to work. Jake lost his office job for the second time in the last six months, and his bank account was slimming down to the lowest balance in years. Driving for Uber was the only immediate option for him to make some money. His situation was dire. Somebody had to pay the lease on the car as well as a bunch of other bills. There were not too many options for him but to wait. The waiting was hard. Jake had a couple of bottles of red wine on the shelf. He liked to drink red wine, especially when the weather was bad and there was nothing else to do but to drink and hope that everything will be alright. There wasn’t much to do at home while the snowstorm was dumping on the city. His car was too small and useless for driving in this snow. Things were not looking up for anybody.
Jake’s wife had a full-time office job, which she didn’t like. Nobody likes their jobs, but financial stability and job security somehow make it all work. Jake remembered the days when he was supporting the family. He remembered the days when his paycheck was good enough for both of them even before she got her first job. He got used to the steady bi-weekly paychecks, good red wine every evening with dinner or on the weekend, paid healthcare, 401K with contributions, PTO’s, and the rest of the corporate benefits that are supposed to make people happy and satisfied with their jobs. That job security and stability are really making a man too dependent and much weaker. When you are always uncomfortable and struggling, you get to enjoy life’s little moments and appreciate your achievements, work, and career progress. When you are too comfortable in your job, just one thought about the possibility of you getting fired is terrifying. How would you live? What would you do? How will you pay your bills? What’s going to happen to you and your family? After Jake lost his second job that year, these questions were not terrifying anymore. He knew he could make it without a corporate gig. He knew that he needed to hustle all the time to make it. He would be driving for Uber to make enough to cover the bills and put food on the table for him and his wife. There is no more corporate nonsense, no more useless meetings, reports, no presentations, and no more pain in the aching young soul. But that fucking snowstorm for the next two days was screwing his plans. He needed to get a little over $500 to cover his bills in the next few days, and he couldn’t leave the house because of the snowstorm. Jake was becoming desperate. The weather had a different plan. The weather was always fucking things up for him.
Fuck you, 2020!!!
It’s December now, and it is unbelievable that we’re still here. It is unbelievable that we are all made it and that this fucking 2020 is about to end. Like anybody else, I had a rough fucking year, and as we all know, a lot of weird shit happened that nobody could expect and account for. Fuck 2020 and fuck the pandemic. This shit is about to be over. But is this true? Will the new 2021 be a better year? What will make it better? The new digit won’t do shit about making a year better. We should work harder on ourselves to make sure that we are faithful and better people moving forward.
I ended last 2019 year with a post, and my year’s review and accomplishments in “Time is all we have.” I was proud of myself, and what I could accomplish in that year; in particular, it was one of the most successful years in my life so far. I accomplished many things that I wanted to achieve in my personal life, from improving my lifestyle to becoming a father. Also, I was focused more on my writing, created this blog, and I made and saved the most money I ever have in my life so far. It was true. I had high hopes going into 2020 with my goals were all set up, with lists and priorities listed, and my mind programmed on success. Success is the weird fucking word to use for sure. Things didn’t go well or as planned, let me tell ya.
From the beginning of this year, something felt strange. There was something weird in the air besides COVID that made me feel strange and notice that somehow things are not the same. It almost felt that I was pushing for something that didn’t mean shit and didn’t matter, and I wasn’t feeling it at all. It almost felt like I want to procrastinate more than accomplish anything or push myself harder. Two months into the new year, we’ve got the major fucking pandemic going on with, and the lockdowns began, and later the country drowned in hate and burned in the fire. I knew that some of the things that I set myself to do somehow, I cannot accomplish right off the bet. It just felt weird, or instead, I didn’t feel like doing much, to begin with. I was sick for almost four weeks at the beginning of the year. As I found later, it wasn’t coronavirus, but I was sick as a dog, and those cold / flu-like symptoms would never go away. I have been miserable but still went to work every day and was just dealing with it on the go.
In the second week of March, we’ve learned that there is a dangerous virus in the air, and the company will shut down its doors, and we will all be working from home. I overheard a conversation in the office that there was somebody sick in our building one floor up and that it took these assholes about a week to figure out what to do and whether they need to shut down and announce that there has been a case and that we all have to be careful. No shit. I might have used the same elevator with that sick person. Who knows? But as long I never got ill with coronavirus, I suppose I wasn’t exposed. Who knows how many others got sick then? Working from home felt strange in the beginning, but I knew this is temporary. I knew this was a two weeks matter, and we’ll be able to go back to the office and resume ‘normal’ working conditions. How wrong was I?
One thousand Sundays left
The traffic on I-95 was dead. My morning commute is usually rough. I was up early at 5 AM and rushed to work. I always wake up early because I have so much work to do every day that there are not enough hours in a day. I am forty years old, and I am the Director of Operations at one of the major finance companies. I’ve worked hard to get where I am, and I am working harder every day to make sure my job is done well and on time, and according to the plan. Even though I make a decent salary, I can hardly prioritize my personal life, like spending time with my family. I have been married for 15 years and have two kids, 4 and 8. I wish I could spend more time with them, but I am always busy at my job. I show up in the office before anybody else does and work long after everybody else leaves. When I come home, I work some more and then more on the weekends, holidays, and pretty much every fucking time. Often, I feel like if I stop, the job will never get done, the team will underperform, and the company will collapse, and there will be no tomorrow.
A few weeks ago, I was on the same I-95 staying in bumper-to-bumper traffic, getting more frustrated and annoyed with every minute. The radio played some random lame morning show. I decided to browse through the channels to see if there is anything better to listen to. There’s hardly anything good on the radio anymore. As I scanned through the channels, I stopped once I heard the soothing voice of an older man talking. He mentioned something about “the theory of a thousand balls,” which caught my attention, and I turned the volume up. I sat in my car listening to this older man talking while watching the dead highway. There was nowhere to go and nothing else to do.
“Ok,” said the old man on the radio. “I can bet that you are always very busy at work, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am, old man,” I replied to the radio.
“So, you are always busy, yesterday, today, and you will be busy tomorrow and so on and on … and supposedly you get paid a lot of money.” The older man grinned as he said that and continued his speech in a serious but kind voice. “They are buying your life with money. Just think about it. You are not spending your time with your family or your friends or significant others! I just refuse to believe that you all need to work that much to make a day-to-day living. You work to please yourself! But see, the thing is that you are just like a hamster in the wheel. The more money you make, the more money you will need, and the more money you will spend, and it is a never-ending cycle. Regardless of how much money you have, you will always want more, and you will work more for that purpose. Just stop there for a moment and think. Do you really need all these new things or more things that you already have? Do you need that new car or brand-new phone with all the bells and whistles or anything else that bad? And in order to have all those possessions, are you willing to miss the time of watching your kids grow up, the first dance performance by your daughter, the first baseball or soccer game by your son? Let me tell my story about how I’ve learned to figure out what is really important in life.”
I am a happy man
I am a happy man. I know I am. Even when things don’t seem to work out to my best, I think I am a happy man. Things were rough lately, but the man isn’t always in control of everything. Things do go out of order occasionally. I stand and smile, looking at the ceiling with my tired eyes. I think this isn’t so bad. Things will get better soon. I know they will.
They say this virus is so bad; they say it is so dangerous and difficult to survive. It is out there and everywhere, and is contagious, and it kills. I am not the healthiest person, and I a vulnerable person; I am afraid of this stuff. I am never leaving my apartment. I am not going out anymore. I find my peace just sitting at home and get buried in my books. Oh, I have so many books! I love my books so much! I love my jazz collection, and I love my classical music collection, and I love to be alone. I love to be with myself and nobody else.
One time, as I opened my doors to take my trash out, and my neighbour walked out at the same time, so I ran back inside. I don’t want to talk to my neighbours. I never have before, and now, it is just too dangerous. I shall be safe and stay inside. I wore a long coat, scrubs over my shoes, a face mask, and the shield over my eyeglasses and the two sets of gloves. My eyeglasses got foggy in a minute, and I could barely see anything, but I have to protect myself. It is too dangerous out there. The virus kills.
I don’t have any friends, and I am not looking to meet any. Not in these crazy times. They say it is so dangerous to be amongst the people. People should stay apart and away from one another. I like that. I never wanted to be amongst other people; I never mixed with them. I have always been an outsider and a loner, and I liked it like that. I don’t need anybody else in my life. I need myself and my books and my jazz music collection. I remember how I always been frustrated with meetings and conversing with other people at the office. Oh, my God. I always wanted to escape and to avoid any contact with anybody. They always talk to me about their lives, their dogs and cats, and kids, and all their problems. How great it is that we all have to work from home and don’t talk or be around one another. I have nothing to talk about with anybody. I don’t want to. My life is quiet. I am different. I am a happy man when I’m alone.
Why I started my blog a year ago
This week marks the first anniversary of my blog. A year ago, I decided to create this blog to help improve my writing and do more of it and share it with the world. Before, my writing was very random and sporadic, and all over the place. I had various pieces saved on my cloud drive and flash drive, and nobody ever saw or read any of it. Not even me. This blog gave my writing a new life and another chance, and most importantly, it gave me an excellent opportunity to write more and write regularly.
I decided to create this blog because I wanted to get my writing out there in the world. Before, in my early days, I was trying to submit as much as possible to various journals and literary publications, and magazines with very little or no success. It could be because it wasn’t any good, or because there were too many submissions to choose from, or because of the content itself, or because what I write is not necessary the pretty and safe writing I’ve seen in so many places. After a few years, I had a few successful submissions, and then I asked myself, why in the fuck am I wasting so much time and effort and money trying to get accepted by some assholes who will decide my future as a writer. I wanted to determine my future as a writer. I didn’t have to wait for someone else’s acceptance.
Looking back at it now, all I needed then was to get at least something accepted and published by another publication, so I could proudly call myself a writer, a poet, or whatever. That moment came, and it was a very proud moment in my life. I was finally happy for a short period of time. After so many efforts, somebody read my work, liked it, and offered to publish one of my poems. Great, mission accomplished. However, that feeling of great success was relatively short-lived, and soon I felt empty again. I mean, it wasn’t enough. I thought that I need to do more, that I need to write more, and for fuck’s sake, I need to stop worrying about being accepted and published. All I needed was to focus on my writing, and work it out, develop my style, work on my poems, craft my lines, develop my sentences, dialogues, prose, all of it. Finally, I was able to write whatever hell I wanted, and it all is published now, here on this blog.
Hello, World!
Hello, world! What the fuck is wrong with you? I mean, it seems like just yesterday everything was okay and then, all of a sudden, everything and everybody went fucking crazy. People lived their lives, going to work, raising and feeding their families, enjoying its moments, and taking it all for granted. And now, it seems like we all are fucking hating each other, want to crush each other, want to ruin whatever we have built this far. This is not how a community survives. This is not how the country survives. This situation is more like the end of us all; the end of all the human things that we’ve accomplished over the centuries and decades. Every fucking thing is going to hell now.
It is hard to imagine that we can now build cars that drive themselves, we can shoot the fucking rockets into space, we can engineer pretty much everything, but that God damned virus is something we don’t know how to deal with. And after six months into this pandemic, we are not able to figure it out at all. It seems like bullshit; for some, it has taken people’s lives; for some, it is a political thing, and it also is a fucking propaganda. But at the end of it all, it is just us, the regular people, who’ll get fucked the most. We need to think about us first. But we don’t. We are just trying to find who’s a fault it has been and who we should be angry with. And that, my dear friends, is bullshit.
Long gone the days when we could just go out and about. Long gone days when we were just doing our shit, going about our business, not thinking, not worrying about anything pretty much. Today, all we think is the virus, who’s to blame, who to vote for, who’s worth anything, who should we fuck over, who should we cancel, and so on. We cannot talk to each other, we cannot see each other, we cannot get together anymore, we cannot be in the same fucking room anymore, we cannot go to churches, we can’t go to work, we cannot go out without a mask, we cannot ignore our governor’s warnings and curfews and shit. What in the fuck is going on? When did this all start? Why are we such a lousy, fucking scumbags, so easy to manipulate, so easy to scare away and so dumb at the same time?
New Life
Jack woke up early that morning. He couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t able to fall back to sleep for a while now, but he tried to stay in bed as long as possible. It seemed like the sleep was a long time gone, and all he did in the last two hours was just twisting and turning. He had a bad dream, something weird from the past was going through his mind and his dreams, and he couldn’t lose it. The minute he’d fall asleep, that same weird, strange dream came back to haunt him. It almost felt like watching the same annoying video on Youtube on repeat. At some point, he just gave up. Fuck that, he thought, I guess that is enough of the battle. It is time to wake the fuck up and smell the roses. It is another day, and it is a new day to start things fresh. Maybe it is time to start life fresh?
He went to the bathroom, took a piss, and turned the cold water on to wash his tired face. The cold water felt great. It felt refreshing, even though he still felt the same old tired. He watched his reflection in the mirror and noticed that he is not the same person he thought he was. He noticed that he’s changed. His face changed, his attitude changed, and there was some grey hair sticking out of his temples, letting him know that he’s no longer that young and careless lad, and reminding him that life went on taking its toll on him. Damn, I am getting old, thought Jack, with a bit of sadness.
Coffee was on his list next. Jack liked a good, freshly brewed black coffee, made in the Moka pot, the way Italians made coffee for decades. The good old coffee tradition that stock with people for years, even today, in these weird fucking days, people are still brewing the same coffee the same way. It felt more authentic to Jack and more pleasurable to brew his coffee himself. Hell, it was so much better then that drip filtered bullshit or anything you can get at those fucking gas stations. The classic music radio played on his smart speaker, and it just felt normal. The only normal thing about his life was coffee and classical music.
Continue readingLike the Catcher in the rye
We were poor and young and happy. There was very little to worry about because life was so simple then. We were trying to enjoy our lives as much as possible. We were new to adulthood and responsible life then. We were yet to find out all its tricks and challenges. I remember all those turning points that affected me as a person. There wasn’t much of anything to take from 2017 except for this vacation. This was the best thing that happened to me in a long time right before all the shit hit the fan. These were truly the best and worry-less days of our lives, and they still bring pleasure when I think about them now.
It was a hot July of 2017. The vacation season was here. My wife and I, married for about a year then, decided that we need to take a break from everything and go on vacation. I worked for a finance company in Southern Jersey, and she was working for an accounting firm in suburban Pennsylvania. The company I worked for was going through some transformations and leadership changes as my job were becoming less and less relevant and soon to end for me. My wife’s job was an hourly contract position with no benefits, a few hours a day commuting, and the same boring accounts payables every fucking day.
I was on the market, secretly looking for something new. I’ve lost any interest in working in the office at all. But, I had to do it, I had to pay the bills and credit cards and the school loans and anything else that I owed to anybody. This is the game which we all have to play. As long as you play it right, you should be okay. I didn’t have any particular interest career-wise as I started thinking about becoming a writer. I was already playing it wrong. But becoming a writer doesn’t mean that I would pay my bills right away with my writing. Maybe I could? If I could only dedicate myself to the craft more. I surely could. We were both fed up with our jobs, and the daily routine, and taking a vacation was a no-brainer.
We booked a hotel in Center City Sarasota, Florida, for five days over the July 4th holiday. Things were about to change for both of us right after this trip. But before that, we lived pretty happy and boring lives and didn’t have many expectations. The trip to Florida in a car was roughly about eighteen hours, with just some brief food and restroom stops. Since we both lived paycheck-to-paycheck, driving was the best option for us. The hotel was booked for July 4th. We’ve decided to leave Philadelphia on the evening of July 3rd to get there in the afternoon on the 4th. We were going to celebrate Independence Day in the beautiful Sarasota, getting baked under the bright Florida sun. Our hotel was located right there in Center City, close to all restaurants and the best beaches with the whitest sand and the most gorgeous sunsets ever.
“Okay, my bag is ready. Taking that to the car. Are you ready with your stuff, babe?” I asked, feeling the internal rush inside me as we were packing our bags and stocking them into a car.
The old man who played chess
I met my neighbor Gene when my family moved to our new house in North East Philadelphia. Gene was in his mid-eighties then, a short, older guy wearing his old-school clothes and eyeglasses. He loved to play chess, and he would always ask me to play with him every time he saw me around.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gene. I am just a little busy today, maybe we’ll play next time?”
“Ok, sounds good. We’ll play next time.” Gene would say with his signature older men’s smile on his face. He was already excited to play a game whenever that would be. He was old and lonely, even back when his wife was still around. I never told him I have no clue how to play chess, but I always thought, what the hell, eventually, I will play with him. The old man might teach me a thing or two. He had 80 plus years of experience after all, and I was just an asshole, his next-door neighbor, who was trying to figure out what to do with my own life.
I worked full-time then for the finance company in Southern Jersey at the time. I hated fucking it. I hated that company, financing, leasing, bullshitting, people who worked there and bullshitted their customers and bullshitted each other. I hated all people who stuck in the daily morning traffic over the Palmyra bridge driving to Jersey; I hated my colleagues, my asshole boss, and myself for working there and contributing to the great evil. It was around that time, back in 2016, when I discovered and was reading a lot of Charles Bukowski, and my world has changed along with me and everything I was about in this life. I loved his honesty, sense of humor, the ugly truth of the brutal reality, and the never-ending drunken shenanigans he lived through, and wrote about in his poetry and fiction works. But there was something else to it. There was the real-life feeling of hardship and misery, an enormous passion for writing, the close feeling of life and death with all this living on the edge full of despair and failure. Bukowski’s work inspired me to become a writer, and I remember that powerful feeling from the deep-down: “Fuck that finance company, I want to be a writer!”
Key West, Hemingway, and Sunsets
We finally arrived in Key West Florida around eight o’clock on a hot Tuesday evening in mid-June. The trip from Philadelphia was annoying and too damn long, but sure worth it. It took us a car ride, two shuttles, two airplanes, a rental, and a total of eighteen hours to get there. I am an inspired young writer trying to make it in a corporate world and my six-month happily pregnant wife, we’ve left for a little get-away right before the pregnancy, and traveling becomes too much of a burden for both of us.
We’ve decided on Florida because it was a relatively affordable trip with an excellent travel package for a week and, of course, because of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway resided in Key West from 1931 to 1939. His house is a historic landmark and a museum, and it’s the primary destination for so many people coming down here, to the edge of the world, the far end of the Florida Keys. We stayed at Havana Cabana, a cool Cuban style hotel-resort located just about ten miles away from Hemingway’s house. We stayed there for the next five days, and this would be our last trip with only two of us before the baby arrives.
Continue readingMy trip back home. Dedicated to Anthony Bourdain
This has been the first, and the last time I saw Anthony Bourdain alive…
JFK airport in New York was as busy as usual, even at 10 pm on Thursday night. This night on May 17th of 2018, we were going home. I got married two years ago, and my wife and I decided to go back home to Ukraine to visit the family and old friends as well as have some fun out there and travel around Europe. I hadn’t been home for ten years at that time, so I was super excited and, at the same time, a bit nervous about going back. A lot has changed since I was gone. Two nationwide revolutions happened in the country, three presidents changed seats, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in the East of Ukraine, just to mention a few. I was planning this trip for a while but never had a chance to do it. Finally, we were on our way.
We’ve turned in our luggage and, with two small carry-on bags, were roaming the airport searching for a place to kill the next three hours before our flight and, of course, the place where we could get a drink. We passed a few different cafes, which either didn’t look attractive enough or served something we wanted to eat.
“This one looks good and has a bar too.” Said I to my wife as we were walking by another café.
“Yeah, do you want to go there?”
“Sure, let’s see what they have on the menu.”
The place was crowded as most of the places in New York. This one was packed, and there was a short line of people waiting to get in. The waiters were running around serving food and drinks, wiping down the tables after people who left and setting them up for new customers. We grabbed menus at the front desk and looked inside. There were some soups and salads, and burgers with fries and sandwiches, and various drinks available.
“I’ll have a burger and a beer for myself. What would you like, honey?” I asked my wife.
“I’ll have a salad and a mojito,” said my wife.
“Sounds good. Let’s get in line. It seems to be moving fast.”
“Ok.” Said my wife, as we left menus at the front desk and got in the line. We had a little less than three hours before our flight home. We were hungry and happy.
…2018 was a bad year. This trip out to Ukraine was really the only highlight and the most exciting moment, the rest of 2018 was just struggling and trying to make ends meet. I have lost two full-time jobs back in 2017, which lead me to 2018 fully unemployed and emotionally broken and financially desperate. That was a moment of truth in my life. I was young and angry at the world and social establishments, and all that horseshit that dominated my life and made me a slave to the system. I thought that corporate life was not for me anymore. I was an outcast. I couldn’t get myself together and focus and work well with other people. Fuck people. Why did everybody annoy me so much? Why did I always feel like I had to adjust to meet some criteria or someone else’s expectations? Why I never had an opportunity to focus on things that mattered to me the most? I needed to make up my mind and try to do something that would bring me joy and help me become happy and fulfilled instead of miserable, frustrated, and always stressed the fuck out of my mind. So, that was it for me, and my relationship with a corporate world ‘slash’ career-building pursuit.
Continue readingMy Iggy Pop Experience
That morning I was driving to work happy. There indeed was a smile on my face, and some weird naïve internal happiness was coming from the deep down of my poor little soul. I felt like life was good, even when it really wasn’t, and I was just fucking happy like a child is happy. This wasn’t an average morning, and my mood on an ordinary morning while driving to work is rather pissed. Iggy Pop played in my car, “I am a passenger, and I ride, and I ride…” blasted from my speakers as I’ve was driving into the morning madness of work and school traffic and all those poor schmucks who were out there just like me, early in the morning trying to make it happen for them. I didn’t care for them, I barely cared for myself. But I was trying to make it.
I was a poor fucking immigrant who somehow ended up working for a company that I despised for everything they did, everything they stood for, and I hated all those fuckers I had to face every day in the office. The reason I was happy that morning was that Iggy Pop was in town, and I was going to see his concert later that day in downtown Philly. The one and only, the mean and cool, the Godfather of Punk, Iggy fucking Pop, was on tour with his new band, new music “Post Pop Depression,” and I would never miss the chance to see that show. It was a great fucking day for me at once, and I still recall that great feeling four years later.
I’ve listened to Iggy Pop’s music all day long, at the gym in the morning, and at work in the office while working. Even listening to his music made me feel different, made me feel like I don’t give a fuck, made me feel like all the lost souls feel than they find themselves desperate and misunderstood. It was a Friday, the fucking long-time coming Friday of April 15, 2016. I usually didn’t have too much work to do on Fridays, but that one was pretty fucking occupied. I didn’t mind. I had plans for the night, I had a concert to go to and needed the time to pass by as fast as possible.
Continue readingPandemic reflection
It is another month, another day or rather another evening as I am writing this and life goes on. I haven’t noticed how one month became another, and here we go, welcome all to March. It’s been a busy couple of months of this new year so far. Everything was happening too fast too much, and there was no way of stopping it until recently. Maybe that is why the time just flew by over my head without notice. Is it because I am getting old faster? Or is the world coming to an end? The older I become, the more I think about life, mortality, diseases, and what the future is holding for us. Nowadays, that the novel virus is in the air pretty much everywhere, everyone is wondering what the fuck is that going to be like?
Just about two weeks ago it all was just another media story, another hype, just so foreign and so far, and away. Two weeks later, it became a disaster, and we don’t know how we are going to deal with it. I mean, we do know, but do we do enough to prevent the spread of this virus? Not really. There are still so many people ignoring all the warnings, and then we see a whopping seven hundred plus percent increase in coronavirus cases in the United States alone in just one week! That just tells me how many fucking ignorant idiots there are in this country and how fast they confirm their ignorance and carelessness. But also, it tells me more and more that things like this ‘new flu’ virus should not be ignored. Regardless of the media is overblowing it, if Trump says this or that, if nobody you actually know has it, or if you are on your Spring break, the danger is real. For all those who just don’t give a fuck, it might, and it will catch up with you and anybody else who is not behaving responsibly and who are not following the basic rules such as social distancing and washing the hands regularly. It is all up to us, you and me, not Trump, not Pence, not China, not your local douchebags representatives, who only get involved with you when they need your vote. It is up to us because it is about our lives, our families, our children, and our future.
Continue readingUber Story: Saint Patrick’s Day
I woke up with a little bit of a headache on St. Patrick’s Day morning. I’ve had some wine last night. I was tired of driving 16 hours for Uber and when I came home, I decided to take it easy. My life was not easy then and everything seemed to be working against me. I’ve lost two nice corporate jobs last year and now I’ve been full-time employed, or self-employed, or whatever the fuck you call this, driving for Uber. I’ve become just “a driver who drove random people around the town for a living.” I was also an inspired writer who never fucking had any time to sit down and write anything because all I could think about was how in the fuck am I going to pay my bills this month. Seven years of college and ten years of professional business career experience went to shit and all of a sudden, I was not needed anywhere and starving for money. My shit was out of luck and so was my life.
March 17th, 2017 was a nice, warm, and sunny day. Perfect weather to get shit-faced for a holiday like that. I woke up feeling sick and tired but I had no time or opportunity to recover from the constant sleep deprivation, habitual frustration, anxiety, light obesity, anger management issues, light form of alcoholism, and impulsive smoking. A complete package. Little that I knew what this day will bring to me later on.
The cold water was running down from my faucet into my hands as I was trying to wash away my tired, puffed-up, swollen face. It felt great, very refreshing. I don’t think it was helping my bad life situation and overall sadness but it was something. I brushed my teeth, took a shower, and made my breakfast. The usual routine. Nothing special. I thought about a bottle of cold beer in the fridge but then I thought about the smell of it in the car and the passengers possibly complaining and Uber locking down my account. Fuck that, I thought. That wasn’t an option. But it was a Saturday, a St. Patrick’s Day for fuck’s sake, who would ever complain about the alcohol smell? I couldn’t take any risks. I needed the money. The bills were handing over my head like a ton of bricks waiting until I wasn’t ready and then fall down on my head squashing me and my misery creating just a puddle of shit on the pavement. All I needed was to survive another fucking working day.
Memory Hotel
The dark countryside road went up and down and into the nowhere and into the unknown darkness of the Pocono’s mountains. Google Maps was taking us somewhere we’ve never been before. Driving was getting exhausting as it was getting late into the evening and pitch dark all around us.
“Honey, why don’t we pull out at the nearest hotel and spend the night there? We’ll hit the road tomorrow morning again. I am so tired of driving in this darkness. I can barely see where I am going.”
“Ok, sounds good, babe. I am exhausted too and I need a hot shower” my wife said. I flicked a left turn signal shifted to the far-right lane and took the exit out of the highway.
The curvy exit road took us through the toll booth and out into the town’s street with a gas station right there on the right. There were a few chain fast-food and pizza places down the street meant to be for the tourists, of course, to stop by for a quick bite of something painfully familiar while being away from the city. A few minutes driving down on that street we saw this classy, red-brick, four-story hotel with some lights on the outside of the building and a dead empty and quiet Broadway street.
I and my wife love to go out into the countryside over a holiday break or just because we feel like going somewhere away from the city and just explore new places, enjoy the view and enjoy getting lost in some weird unknown mountainside traps. We were married for about just three years back then and life was just much simpler and free.
Continue readingAbout writing
I started working on a novel back in late 2016. The novel is about an ordinary guy Johnny who is working as a salesman at a furniture store. He’s young and broke and trying to become somebody in this life. He meets a girl who comes to the store and they go out on a date and he falls in love with her. The problem is that they both are coming from different worlds and they are very different and incompatible people. The middle of the story is being written and the ending is in progress. There has to be a sad ending, I think. Maybe even a tragic one who knows?
There are a few other projects that I have in the works. Yeh, a few other novel ideas and a TV show are on my long-term writing list. I know that I will eventually get there but all I need is the time and a proper state of my mind. The timing thing is always the problem. There could be a lot of time but no passion for any writing or my mind would be in some weird place. Sometimes life gets in a way and there is no chance to write anything, sometimes I’d try to squeeze a thirty-minute to an hour to sit down and write something. That’s pretty much all you need as a writer. Just sit the fuck down and write.
I love to write early in the morning. I do find early morning hours the best to write because there is nothing else to do and likely nobody will bother you. A lot of times, I open my laptop and start writing just about anything. It could be the most random writing ever. I rarely know what will come up once the words start filling the page. Then one page fills up there might be two pages and three and so on. Writing is not about the pages. It is about mastership of releasing your thoughts and emotions on the page making the reader live your writing, feel your writing and want to read more. Writing is like a therapy for a writer. When you are all alone, processing your thoughts, building your ideas as they come to you one after another and transforming them into sentences, the magic happens. Eventually, you’ll get something out of your system and you’ll feel great about yourself afterward, even if your writing wasn’t that good. There is also a sense of accomplishment that will give you a lot of energy and will for sure lift your writing sprits up.
Continue readingMama was right
The story I am about to tell happened to me fifteen years ago. It might not seem like a very good or an interesting story but it makes me feel shameful of my own ego even today. This story is one of the many examples from my personal life that taught me an important life lesson. I guess they call it a turning point. It might as well be one of the turning points that changed my perception and appreciation for my mother, my family, and life in general.
This story takes place around December, my first semester at junior college. It was just another Friday night and the four of us were hanging out. We roamed around the City, did some shopping then we had dinner someplace and a few drinks. It was a great time. I still feel good thinking about those days. And to be clear, I haven’t had any social life before then, so to me, those days were pretty good in terms of getting some life and getting to know people around me. I, my friend Gene, his girlfriend, and my new girlfriend were best friends in college. We did everything together. We all came to America in about the same time, we all were about the same age. We started college same time, took the same classes, and went out for lunches, coffee breaks, smoke breaks, and double dates.
I was in my first year of college trying to become a decent student and eventually a decent citizen and proud office worker. It all starts in college somehow. Back then I knew a few wise things which I always kept on my: 1) I am nobody here, 2) I don’t know anybody who can help me, and 3) I need to make shit happen for me somehow. These three things basically defined my understanding of life and were driving me through the college years and eventually into the workforce. These were the thoughts of a young immigrant teenager who was brought to this country to have a better shot at life with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to support me and my brother.
Continue reading