Madness, Starving, Hysterical
Showering while you still remember your bizarre dreams leads to some interesting consequences. I'm not sure this story's appropriate to post here, however, because one thing I've been learning about the furry community is they have a lot of disposable income. I won't hesitate to theorize why. But being on the upper bracket of the socioeconomic political ladder comes with myopic vision for the working classes below you, and I don't think the protag of this story will be getting the sympathy they're due as a proletariat (those exist without requiring the context of the U.S.S.R., by the way).
When I write a story, I often concern myself with some basic metatextual rules going in, and that includes that this is not an "unreliable narrator" story. It's a trap people love to copypaste onto everything these days, typically in the vein of "The main character in this movie or video game was really dead all along and the events that transpire are just his or her mind trying to cope with dying!" Nah, no thanks. This is just a good old "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" sort of suburban existential struggle story. What was that author's name? Texas Jones? Tostada Harambe? Tennessee Williams? Yeah, it's gotta be number two.
I used Italics, which I know is going to upset some people. As of late, people have been getting very tetchy with how you write. More restrictions, more bringing back the word "cliché" from the 90s, that sort of thing. Well here's a reference I'm sure they'll remember: "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!"
You're welcome. :D
So someone bangs the front door in and starts having a shriek fit with her husband. This is unbecoming behavior, and reflects poorly on the entire household since you can probably the next block up the street. So I say, "Shut up." Not knowing I raised my voice enough to be heard through the door and over the running water, I get responded to with a hearty and hysterical, "Drop dead!" Charming. But I'm not in the mood to pander today, so I reiterate with an appropriately due, "Shut the fuck up," because apparently there's a PA system hidden in the bathroom here that I'm not aware of. Stomp, stomp, stomp, door slam. I finish my shower, walk downstairs, smile, and my mom asks me who I was "yelling" at. Well, whoever's down here having a shouting match, I reply. I may be hard of hearing, but I'm not deaf. "Nobody was down here yelling," she says, which is, okay, you want to make my week about gaslighting me? I manage to stifle my stress (regular hygiene care helps) with a laugh and tell her, "Don't lie to me."
Except that my sister's life's not that hard. After all, working those long hours and avoiding three kids comes with certain consolations, chiefly in the vein of making sweeping, unilateral decisions which affect the household. She decides what we eat for dinner each night. She decides what groceries she feels like bringing home, which includes a lot of expensive wines and alcohols nowadays. Is she...is she becoming a "wine mom" now? Seriously? She decides who we get to fall in love with and have over the house. She chooses to work for a company that fired me, meaning she endorses their decision, meaning she endorses my current unfortunate state of unemployment. There are a lot of jobs I could easily ace, but ever since 2016, the world was bitten by some kind of space alien crazy virus (this is hyperbole) that makes humans oblivious to the intrinsic social nature of their animal and forget their social responsibilities toward one another (no customer with no pay). She grabbed the first blimp that walked by and pushed out three crotch droppings, the third of which was an admitted accident that she chose not to abort (it's your body; you have the right to come to an educated decision). She makes all the decisions for her daughter to become a micro-copy of her rose-tinted self, which is probably why her life seems to be on track right now; she doesn't really guide her sons that closely, and our own parents were pretty hands-off when it came to crucial life decisions (which is why I work the dead-end job market).
Then her husband lost my favorite job for me. It was a wonderful job, with wonderful people, then came the COVID furlough, and I never got a call back when it ended. I'd been calling them, but they said they sent me a letter and left messages on our home phone number. My mother avowed herself from her mouth to my ears that she "and [my brother-in-law] check the phone messages every night." I dunno, seems like it'd be important if the place you'd been helping me commute to for almost four years had asked for me back. So, the way I see it, and admittedly I'm the only one I can rely on here, they're responsible for my loss of income. Unless you want to blame every business within a 10-mile radius for the "we're not hiring" mantra. I don't have piercings, I don't have tats, I don't wear clothing with slogans or stains on them, and I brush my teeth. All that rejection starts to wear on a person.
I've lost track of all the lies over the years, and I'm tired of keeping track. They tell me I can't use the car as much as I have been, as I'm out there, straining to find jobs, each rejection burrowing its way deeper between my vertebrae. Maybe I really will drop dead. It'd certainly be a permanent solution to what on the surface seem like temporary problems except they keep rising up in some form or another like a hydra that just won't stay dead despite the blood loss every time one of its heads gets severed.
I'm not smart, and I don't like feeling like I'm smarter than anybody, that I have to educate them on basic principles of fact and ethics, because it makes me feel like I'm going crazy. It's not sane to pick yourself up over and over, to tell yourself incessantly to stick it out on this path you're on, that you're right and everyone else is wrong, because that's just not how the world works. That's not reality. Should I sacrifice my principles to endear myself to some potential Craigslist killer when I'd really rather not become a fuckcorpse? Should I run away and live in the woods eating bark until I contract some sort of exceedingly painful parasite? Maybe join that cabal of hobos behind Center Street? Runaway across the country to live with some drug addict who only sees me for excrement and not for myself as a person, who's struggled to develop inhibitions that make me who I am today? None of that really sounds appealing nor realistic to me.
So I'm stuck here, cataloguing every transgression against me, feeling like an entitled simpleton in so doing, feeling like there's a painfully obvious solution, even for someone as inherently flawed as myself. I'm gonna come home one day and find my computers smashed next, I can just feel it, and I'll be left with no outlet anymore, no way to reach out to anyone. If you don't hear from me anymore, that's where I'll be.