Being and Nothingness With A Side of Fries.

Hello, again. It's been a week and as I promised, this post will not be as heavy handed as the last. I want to talk to you--internet--about a short story I have been working on. It is about a man named Olly. This man is boring. He is a mime who works a corner in Tulsa, OK--the same corner he has been working on for over ten years, the same corner his father worked. He gets slushie's thrown in his face, little kids kick him, and he lives in an apartment next to a Lithuanian couple who always seem to be having sex.

But this is not a comedie, nor is it a tragedy, hell, it's not even entertaining. It's boring. But that's the point. It's about Olly's existence with all its sheer, overwhelming tropes of disappointments and disillusions. He sees life as nothing more than just a compilation of bad jokes with bad punchlines. Olly is in a state of transition and his depression lingers everywhere he goes.

So, why would you want to read this story?

Good question. I don't blame you if you think it would be a depressing read. It is set up that way, but there is a method to my madness. If you saw Olly on the street, or standing in line at the grocery store, or walking his dog, would you stop to say hello? Why is it that we only care about the celebrities, the athletes, the rockstars, the politicians, and their opinions or what is happening in their lives? Why do we not ask the bank-teller or the cashier their story, or even less than that, how they are?

Olly cannot complete anything. Nothing ever fully happens to Olly. He is to a large extent a metaphor and (for the story in general) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear him describe a new technique in which he mimes that he stuck against a wall, gathering an audience, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, he never fully figures it out. Olly is a representation of all of us that are boring. We have a story to tell too.

P.S. If you want a copy of the story, just email me or message me on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/hayskm -- I will also try to put an excerpt up here on the next blog.