Buble Theatre

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I stumbled drunkenly along the former, not knowing whether my feet were actually in motion or if I was being teleported in micro-increments that gave the appearance of a steady gait. Either way, I pushed forward. Yes, it was a push, in the sense that all great explorers are pushing rather than pulling. Disheveled natives with razed crop-lands and sundered pacts involving crafting beads and the entireties of boroughs would disagree and say that indeed there was vigorous pulling involved in successful conquest, but for the purposes of imperialism, we will overlook the brutes.
So, the former road. I say that I stumbled drunkenly along it, but it’s obvious to the intoxicated mind that one is never really alone. That being said, I was leading the way for an equally hazy Jeff Bridges and the ghost of one Richard Nixon, although my sources, coincidentally his sources, say the apparition was just a figment of my imagination (or the milligrams of an unknown substance Bridges and I happened upon on the side of a lonely lamp-post).
It was at the moment of retrieval that I realized two facts; all lamp-posts happened upon from twilight through breakfast are lonely, it’s a quantum certainty, like moldy jam and rubber-ducks going underused. The second fact was that upon finding unknown substance without means of discovering its original purpose, one must consume or imbibe it in the name of science. We did.
Now, Bridges always has this cocky smile on his face, you know, the curled-grin that pushes up on his pseudo-train robber mustache and portrays a thousand different types of idiocy. Well, that grin disappeared on digestive impact and was supplanted by a thin line of mingled philosophic questioning and wondering whether the price is right is shown in any other countries than that of its origin (it is).
I couldn’t really pinpoint why I was so intently focused on the muscular morphing of said Jeff Bridges, but I was later thankful that my eyes were fixed on him rather than turned inwardly. Introspection can be a deadly thing. So can unknown substances, but this was science for God’s sakes (and God’s sakes can actually be quite deadly as well, but I figured the science cancelled any danger out).
Back to the future present tense, though. I could tell those years of study at generically atavistic and old fashioned university in a cozy valley had done me well, for I could feel the chemical reactions firing off as I slid through the former road. That was the true value of education, not progress, but being able to truly sense how and when and where and why drugs were making you want to climb inside a hermit crab’s shell and burst from within like a revolutionary crustacean refusing the limitless trappings of evolution.
Enough of crabs and careening and caring, it should be enough to say that I had no idea where I was or who I was, and like the infernal beast of anglo-saxon terror, I only had wistfully regretful men with grey-flaked beards to compare myself against. Bridges instead of Hrothgar, and Nixon in the place of Hrothulf. Ghost Nixon, for the flesh of the original is being consumed by secret space-tibetans, or something of the like, according to recent papers.
As I-we sloshed through the swampy earth of the former road, we conversed about nothing-really, but if one was to sit at the very periphery of our conversation and only hear the rapidity and sense of exigency, well then it would transcend into quite-something-if-I-may-say, and you very well may. So the nothing-really and something-sometimes floated around our heads in bubbles of static electricity and dynamic introspection, as to say, hey, I understand that I’m supposed to be carrying on a conversation with grim-Bridges and ghost-Nixon, but I’m actually concerned with my future and forgetting my past and walking in the present.
“What is the actual structure?” Asked dour Bridges with a sense of urgency.
The surrounding forest (one must remember that all roadways at night must be surrounded by woods of some sort to allow for tricky goat-men to jump out and ask you riddles and/or for a few dollars) loomed around us like it was waiting for us to separate from a group of girl-friends so that it could sweatily ask us to prom.
“Of what?” I provided as a sequel, and hopefully, a sieve for his initially foggy query.
“The fucking road, man, the road,” He added before throwing his head from side to side at the forest as if it were going to fulfill its purpose and belch out a beguiling satanist.
Well, I thought, the structure isn’t really existent, is it? I mean, the only reason we’re on this damned path is because some poet decided to describe the one less travelled by. At a certain point, doesn’t the one less travelled by become the more discussed and thus the less relevant of the two? We’re on the more travelled by, the former, and damned proud of it, albeit confused as to the physiognomy of the actual winding and shuttling of night-time philosophers and drug-consumers.
All of these questions were lost on lightbulb-on-top-of-head Bridges, who just had a particularly good idea.
“Well let’s, like, map it, man, you know for future generations and just people in general,” He ejected with the acute self-conscious sense that they were words best maintained in one’s throat and not allowed to stew in the stupidity-sensor that is reality.
No, no, no, I thought, no way to map and no impetus. Future generations could go through the journey and people in general could remain hopelessly generic and find another way of shooting through the countryside with a head full of whatever the fuck was left propped up near the habitually lonely lamppost by some prick of a deus-ex machina.
Again, my thoughts were carted into the air directly behind clueless Bridge’s skull, as neither of us had mastered telekinesis yet. His look of confusion only made me more angry than I had been when I first read Frost’s words.
“I said, or I thought quite loudly, that your idea was bad, and we aren’t going to map anything until we’re out of here and ghastly-Nixon stops whimpering,” I testily slapped at both of my idiotic companions with the force of a sheep’s will as it’s approached by the farmer with the lube and the ridiculously goofy look on his face.
Well, berated Bridges and nearly zombie-Nixon both looked chidden by God, or Todd, or whatever the hell I was named, and they shuffled by with the gusto of children slapped for wailing the under-garment details of their parents. As for the contents of their tear-ducts, bereaved Bridges and no-pulse-Nixon went by dry, as Bridges had his removed after a bout of crying he underwent at the clutches of a lost puppy, and Nixon was in that realm between death and life that was only separated by the contingency of being able to produce tears. While a few quarter-hearted dribbles plummeted down no-longer-ashamed-about-Watergate Nixon’s protruding nose and added more moisture to the soft, pastry-esque feel of the former road, back-in-business Bridges got a look on his no longer grinning face that told me he had yet another idea. The problem with Jeff was that he kept forgetting his bad ideas, which was great for his confidence, but horrible for anyone within an audible radius that was subject to his discourse on aqueduct structures to preserve the water from kiddy pools for later use as ammonia-based detergents and industrial cleaners. It was a good idea on paper, but once one figured out the total cost and bureaucratic issues of finding the occasional turd-floater, it had to be scrapped and boasting Bridges sank to the carpet for a few minutes before getting that stupid look on his face again.
And all the while, almost-whole-again Nixon kept whimpering.


Of course, it was one of the many occupational hazards accompanying a literary career that you would have critics. It still is, even beyond the grave. Unfortunately, Frost had found it wholly over-taxing to descend the pit of dirt he’d been lowered into and reconvene in the subterranean recreation center located deep below Vermont. So, without revealing too much of his humanity to those who occasionally flocked to his grave and recited bits of poetry (he dreaded this, as he was trying to shake off his rural image and reinvent himself as a rough-and-tumble beatnik without a cause), Frost would lie in his space and consider what means it took to rise from the dead. Never, as a rule of thumb however, did Frost roll over. It was the first thing they told you as you were lowered (in this case, pushed) into your intermediary resting area, in fact, if they had written it down, it would have been in chunky, bold, and nearly obnoxious lettering for maximum visibility.
And, in keeping with the strictness of this rule, Frost was having a fit after rolling for what seemed like a string of comically-enjoined minutes, thinking someone was watching and thinking, ay lads come check this out, I can make a poet squirm. Let’s just say he was nearly right and move on. Usually maggots were the sole inhabitants of Frost’s brain, but fragmented neurons were lighting fuses and signaling alert triggers to stabilize Frost’s body and maintain the regularity of a typical corpse death-style. Considering the decades of disrepair and decay, (a word corpses tended to avoid, along with every other word that required the use of functioned vocal cords) Frost’s stabilization was a tad late, but it came, and with it a multitude of questions that only a snide author huddling in the corner of a room hurling anathema at formerly relevant celebrities could answer.
It would have taken a cataclysmically critical event to flip Frost. Corpses rarely rolled over in their graves, despite popular belief, and the last time one did was when a gaggle of self-markedly clever teens put copies of the diary of Anne Frank in the religious fiction section. That little jig cost a book salesman his job and the funds for his ridiculous collection of thick-rimmed glasses. The only issue was the corpses of Anne Frank and her father were confused as to whom should roll and decided to split rolling-time to avoid the repercussions of not moving at the right time. Although they were told to never roll, which was an unwritten rule, it was a law scribbled hastily in invisible ink on stained bar napkins that if one is to ignore movement when a culturally ignorant and horribly insulting remark is made, the corpse shall be forced to go to Heaven, where it’s lutes abound and lyres afire. A good time, no doubt, if you were some magnate from the fourteenth century who got a rise from the ecclesiastical conjunction of unnecessarily elegant instruments and powdered women who refused to show a single inch of skin besides that of their ever-so-alluring faces and almost-too-tantalizing knuckles. For the other corpses, however, it was either admittance into Hell or staying in a damp pit that was appealing. Not necessarily that Heaven existed, but that in the off-chance that it did (which, in this case, it didn’t), they were sure that they’d rather take a poke in the ass every few millennia and behold the wonder that is a molten wasteland of lost truths and denied hope than be forced to listen to lutes all day. In this way, corpses were like your average 8 year old or politician.
The science behind all of these transfers and unwritten rules was that the Dukes of the afterlife constantly thumbed the edge of motivation but could never find it in themselves to commit to anything more than scratching some nether-region or casting a soul into eternal torment (a day’s work, for your average Duke). By being so assiduous in their pact to do the minimum amount of work without the man downstairs noticing, the Dukes made death a rather annoying process, more so than it was when the only means of achieving it were carrying oneself off a cliff or bludgeoning one’s head with the nearest blunt object, which, in early times, was often someone else’s head.
Keeping in mind that our Frost was still wondering who was tarnishing his name (unabashed Bridges, steadily-transforming Nixon, and I), the general cog-work and machinations of the after-life were kept steady even if balance meant no weight at all, which it did. The Devil, the black-man, Sir Shadow, Baphoment, Mephisto, Beezlbub, or if you wanted to get it proper, Stephen Edelman, sat stewing per usual. He was typically stewing for two reasons, boredom and a lack of floral diversity in Hell. It was either bleeding roses or torturously sharp tulips, and sometimes Stephen tired of this. Boredom took root in another form, which was that God had been dead for about a century and a half due to the proclamations of a severely mustachioed philosopher. This mustachioed man went by the name Nettles or something of the sort, and was dreadfully sorry for killing God, but knew that it was to be because he wrote so in an earlier book. Nettles carried a curse with him from that point-on that ensured a ridiculous amount of seizures and the number-one spot down below, which just happened to be subterranean Vermont rather than Hell (the two had very similar zip codes). What God hadn’t taken into account besides the ancient aliens that helped him get this pit of a planet up and running in the first place was that with his own death came a collapse of heaven and a redirecting of all influence into Hell. This meant that while the actual structure of the underworld remained gothically clad with brimstone and furnaces of flint, it was actually a rather pleasant place, and was considered to be one of the safest place to raise one’s kids, providing they were spawns of some babbling nether-creature, which one couldn’t immediately mark off nowadays what with online dating and portals to black realms.
So, without a big-bushy beard to direct all his anathema and bile at, the Devil, our Mr. Edelman, grew listless and to this day finds it rather painful to just sit about. God had made him to rebel, and now all he had to rebel against were the particularly terrible designs his interior fabricator had been bringing about recently and the number of Starbucks that were appearing around every pit-corner in Hell (which, at the time of this writing, is the company’s foremost market and future headquarters). Occasionally he peeps up to check up on the Dukes, who have a misconception that he actually cares what they’re doing with humans, and other times he’ll just dawdle about until he can find something to combust. Edelman wasn’t necessarily displeased that all souls were now funneled into his principality of darkness, he just felt under-appreciated. He’d never realize it, but chocolate would have instantly cleared up those feelings in an endorphin blast of hedonism. All it would have taken was a trip down to the local Starbucks.
Frost didn’t know that either, but he did know the dirt above him was loosening its putrid grip and he could better feel the crisp Vermont air. The breeze and the recent surge of flipping sparked something inside what remained of his heart, and he let out a groan that would have been poetic had it not been muffled by shifting excrement.


At the time we were obviously unsure of the point behind our plodding or the placement of said ploddage, but we felt required to do it. I figured that eventually restless Bridges and newly-formed-muscle-structure Nixon would complain, but it stayed in the realm of twitching facial hair and too-discontent-to-be-inaudible whimpering. It could easily have been the chemical reactions that forced our legs to quirk and jump and push us forward on the road-more-travelled-by-and-subsequently- neglected. It could just have easily been some ancient force taking time out of its busy schedule of making appearances in front of blind-men, who no one will believe. Said force could have been animating our legs in such a fashion that our brains were stimulated by the flowing blood and found it necessary to disparage a formerly defenseless poet. It could have been that, but that’s too convenient and probably what should have happened. Life’s too random and chaotic to follow the ley-lines of mysticism that dictate that some once slumbering entity is behind all of the events worth noting. Not to say any of this is writ-worthy, but that even if it was, it wouldn’t be made so by anything with enough mental acuity to string together plot and character development into a decent yarn. Nothing that should happen ever does if you think about it too much, a law giving sponges true supremacy in the matters of status-quo.
Nay, we plodded for reasons we would never understand, presupposing that we could understand, which, when looking into the eyes of regretfully-hollow Bridges and closer-than-ever-to-humanity Nixon, is a factor you must forgo. I, of course, could very bloody well understand, but with a brain addled by the not-too-ancient forces of supply and demand narcotics, I didn’t particularly want to. I’d rather have kept walking with my unexplained cohorts to our shared fate, and so I did.
The swampy excess that was the former road gobbled beneath us as if it were one of those interesting fellows you become friends with at work and only later realize has a domineering fetish for feet. This epiphany will of course result in you replacing all of your open-toed gear with heavily furred boats and the occasional worn-down sneaker. Your friend will forget you existed and continue his eternal search for the perfect pair of feet, not knowing that they died with Audrey Hepburn, a locally known craftswoman in Newfoundland who bore no relation to the famous actress and never stepped on any surface not crafted by her own hands. The swamp moved in such a manner, and to look down upon its jubilance and quasi-laser show of Hepburn’s weaving was too much to bear, so I snapped my hand out and lifted dangerously-amazed Bridge’s head and instructed him to look forward. Not-too-dead Nixon saw and forced his head up in a childlike sense of mimicry. Oh, childhood.
“I was a child once,” is a sentence you will rarely hear, unless you directly accuse the opposite. It’s just plain unnecessary, and linguistically we tend to circumvent such obvious statements for over-complicated ways of covering up what is actually pertinent knowledge. Instead of “I was a child once,” we’ll say, “Man, what a life,” or “Do you remember that one time I filled your bathtub with fish-hooks and watched you flail about like a sack of forgotten meat,” while perched over your late-friend’s grave. Well, we were all children once, except in the case of amicable Bridges, who nodded in agreement as I thought this, honing his telepathy on the road. I came upon him in a weird way, the kind of way that ensures friendship for life, however short said life is.
To be frank, I waited around in an empty theatre and sort of just picked him up. It was one of his movies, the name of which escapes me because I replaced that information with the necessary instructions allowing me to abuse a number of substances. Everyone had left, and as they shuttled back home and discussed the merits of the movie less and less while getting increasingly curious about that constant itching they’ve felt since last month, the spirit of the film found itself spinning back across by-ways to the theatre. Spirits have to sleep too, and film-spirits even more-so, being constant performers.
Well, after figuring this out via trial and error, it was just a matter of sitting idly in the theatre until the credits finished rolling and the film-Bridges flew back to coalesce towards the projector. I grabbed them, considering swallowing them, but decided against it and waved them around like I thought film-Bridges would appreciate. Out popped clean-shaven Bridges and from that instance until now we’ve worked on dirtying him up, from allowing his facial hair to tangle upon his face and throwing him into dumps, which is how we found now-almost-completely-human-except-for-a-few-remembrances-of-death-and-the-resignation Nixon. He was completely-ghostly Nixon then, and baleful Bridges felt his loyalty tested, but we’ve made it to the former road, and our feet felt like that’s all that really mattered. Dirtying had been successful, as could be noted by anyone that saw telepathically pleased Bridges sidle through the sludge and sniff at a particularly gruesome stain covering the entirety of this left sleeve.
As for soon-to-be-real-nixon Nixon, we weren’t really sure what his purpose was, other than to whimper and provide something for us to complain about. He had a puzzle-piece identity until a few miles ago, which is to say he had the individualism of the space where the last puzzle-piece should go. Enough contour to give it an ever-shifting name, but not enough substance to constitute being a human. There was only one instance where ferocious Bridges bit out at then-redolent-of-deli-meats Nixon, and I grabbed the back of his purposefully greasy hair and blew in his face, a tactic I gathered from a silly book about training dogs, which personally seemed like something you did when everything else in the world had resolved itself, which hadn’t happen and didn’t seem to be possible.
Recollecting all of this told me the cloud of lonely-lamppost lager was clearing, which was good in the sense that I could start to take in my surroundings more accurately. It was negative in that I couldn’t shake the feeling that always useful Bridges was probing my mind and mucking about where he didn’t belong. A good knock to his skull sufficed to end the mental invasion, and the only thing that can follow a good knock is a healthy walk, so we kept on, unawares that only a short distance away birds were clearing from the forest in the cinematically symbolic way of bellowing that something was hunting us. It really was the road more travelled by.


Frost was inflamed. Or at least he felt like it would be appropriate to feel a blaze of passion at the moment of his come-uppance. With a great shake of dirt that reminded everyone not looking of a furiously cute dog. Frost’s eyes betrayed the need for revenge, but the combination of his decomposition and shuffling was too adorable to be taken seriously. He felt like this was a good thing, and it was proven true as he blundered up to a bunch of prospective poets at the graveyard’s entrance, heard their laughter, registered that he honestly hadn’t a need to kill them, and in the name of unnecessary chaos, threw them aside while shrieking the words to “Fire and Ice,” which to the Vermontians sounded like a chorus of confused deaf people asking for directions to the nearest hardware store.
They flew apart, and having met their grimy idol, vowed to never wash their clothes again which was a pact none of them kept for more than a week as their mothers actually did the laundry. He, the renegade back from the grave, put thoughts toward changing his garb up to match the dull ferocity twanging within where his organs should have been.
“I should get some vomit colored skinny jeans, throw some obnoxiously bright shoes on my feet (without socks, of course) and a shirt that says I’m a lumberjack but I’ve retired to better understand shoddy fashion,” was the first thought that cogently passed through Frost’s half-brain, and it wasn’t the last, as visions of a trio danced across the chunky bits of eyeball he still clutched onto and further stoked his fury.
Frost hadn’t even thanked Edelman, who took it as a personal affront and raised his molten eyebrow in a facial expression that said he was too furious to care, which immediately led to the dissolution of his bitter look and a loss of what had made him angry in the first place. Edelman was on a roller-coaster ride of emotions.
Shuffling, frothing, revenge-driven Frost, however, paid even less mind to Edelman than before and the particles of non-thought burst from his head and splashed onto the brilliantly verdant Vermont grass, turning it sickly yellow and decidedly more edgy. Former Frost had a mind for quiet nights drawing up adages to nature and pastoral bliss, but Fetid Frost found it difficult to think at all, and when he managed to, memories of rolling over in his grave and taking a great offense bubbled to the surface of his consciousness and caused him to walk more briskly than any respectable zombie should.
The night plugged on endlessly, and for the purposes of a grim setting, remained that way as Frost churned toward the only place he could remember. It was a fork in the road that once inspired brilliantly unnecessary musings that would form the pride piece of every 6th grader’s literary knowledge. Former Frost has once proclaimed the amazement in having taken the road less travelled by, but Fetid Frost seemed to understand that the root of all his underground unease was treading the road more travelled by and thus less revered and in all actuality less travelled by. This confused him, so he stopped thinking for a while and let his soggily tumescent feet carry the flame of his quest to maim whoever started this nonsense.
Somewhere in the following darkness, a confused voice called out for someone named Nixon to stop whimpering.


“Stop, just stop, man,” Unduly irritable Bridges shot at now-human Nixon, who took on a life of his own through the sheer force of whimpering.
I had to agree with uncharacteristically accurate Bridges that the whimpering weighed heavily on my nerves, and having a full telepathic link ensured he got my message, whether I intended him to or not.
With a mind now regrettably clear and an eyeful of seemingly endless swampland covered by forest, I began to worry. Had I really gathered up the spirits of a film, summoned a clone of a famous actor into being, and then found a decomposed former president in the pursuit of mucking up aforementioned clone? If I had, what would my father think? Who was my father? I hoped, for the sake of convenient plot device and rising climax that it was patriarchal Bridges, but I knew deep-down it was some scruffy old git I hadn’t thought about in years. That meant Nixon couldn’t have been my mother, but the thoughts of her once constant supply of sugary sweets and the warmly inviting scent of her arms are too painful to digest and should be locked into the nothingness that is escapism.
We could hear footfalls, or footscrapes it seemed like, becoming more audible with each tensely pregnant second. A heavy sense of fate descended upon us, took a good look around, and decided it wouldn’t be too bad to roost in our minds. Nixon, now human, shifted uneasily as the slick hand of destiny struggled to tickle his back, and called out his first words.
“Goddamnit, if I can’t get Kissinger down here to fix this fucking humidity I swear to Edelman I will kick Agnew in the nuts next time I see him. And who the fuck are you?” He gibbered with the tenacity of someone who talked via the swaying of jowls and the occasional addition of breath.
Previously-bitter Bridges got the look in his eye that suggested he was proud of Nixon’s first words, and as his dusty eyebrows arched to prepare for the mistiness of his eyeballs, I looked away, not knowing what the fuck was going on and fully preparing to descend into madness. It was enough not to vomit, but walking was unthinkable. I came to an abrupt halt, and emotional Bridges continued walking until he noticed my disappearance and hurried back to check up on what I assume he had come to think was one of his own brood.
“What’s up, squirt?” He asked with the casual indifference of a father who picks his son up from soccer and asks about the surely-riveting game while examining the contours of every female ass in the emptying parking lot.
I looked up at him, and I would be a fool to say I knew what was up, but for a split-second I knew what was to be and I laughed. The laugh persisted, but the enlightenment did not, and as furiously-alive Nixon backtracked to see what was holding up the procession I was giggling furiously, not able to explain why I had stopped or what set my glee off. I only knew that he was near, and the momentum of years of consummation and hopes of escaping was finally shuttling into a point of absolution; the kind of finality that makes sense of zombie-Nixons and father Bridges, that takes back criticisms of Frost and understands the cultural significance of his verse, that refuses the pill and doesn’t look back. He still came.


Without the cool-bird-effect on his side anymore, Frost relied on a low-frequency moan and a steady trot to keep his lack-of-blood pumping for the carnage that lay ahead. He was ready in the same sense that all spartans are ready, a readiness you are bred to have and are made to unlock when the time is right. Frost was ready, and although he was unsure of what readiness meant or where he was, his feet did, and everyone’s feet agreed that’s all that really mattered.
It was only a few more minutes until his galloping brought him to find the mist curling around the shapes of three increasingly clear figures; what appeared to be a man confused between wanting to laugh and vomiting all over a heavily bearded second party that actually seemed to enjoy the dirtiness of it all, and what looked like a sour-faced politician decrying that he was above all of this nastiness and on the verge of sprinting straight into the woods.
Frost, however, didn’t give him enough time to consider bolting straightaway for Washington, and with the vivacity of a poet degrading for decades and not wholly sure of why he was about to attack three insane men, cried out. This cry sounded like a tree-branch snapping under the weight of a misplaced elephant, but did the job of turning the necks of the three, who were now only a few meters in front of Frost’s clutches.
Their eyes brought him rage, and rage brought him renewed clarity. All trappings of previous death dissolved like bitterness in the face of truth, and with the vigor of 30-year old Frost, once-Fetid Frost launched forward with the intent to restore his family name, not knowing that it was all going to be recorded anyway. Ignorance is bliss, however, and with the ignorance of someone sustaining themselves on poetry about mother nature, the most overrated force on Earth, Frost blissfully thrust out his claws and rammed into the vomiting fellow, who took it quite well, in that he fell to the floor and remained laughing.
Frost hadn’t really expected this, but he hadn’t expected anything that happened in the past few hours, and he really hadn’t expected the blood-clot in the first place, so his bewilderment was short-lived.
Bear-like Bridges, seeing the danger facing what he thought was his cubs, did what any bear wouldn’t actually do in this situation, turned in the direction of the conveniently placed woodland and dived headfirst to safety, a final, “It was nice knowing you, man,” whizzing by as he leaped.
Nixon hadn’t really been sure of what to make of the entire situation, but this last, abrupt withdrawal sucked all of the previously earned humanity out of him, and he shrunk back into decomposed-Nixon, who was unawares that he’d been lifted out of the trash-can he made his nest. This went unnoticed by Frost, who, with renewed vigor and thus, rejuvenated humanity, was looking at the vomiting man with misty eyes, lines of verse forming on the tip of his tongue like the purest of fruits.
All he could get out were the first few lines of Dancing Queen before the man got to his feet and tackled Frost. It was like something out of a western, minus the bar, the alcohol, the ass-less chaps, and sprinkled with the beautifully rendered embellishments of vomit-soaked clothing and occasional laughter.
Frost, spread-eagle and on his back, looked up in amazement into the face of a man who, with memories of a long-lost home and drug abuse shed, truly did not have the means to give more than enough fuck to ascend into enlightenment.
“You...you tackled me,” said Frost, uncharacteristically rudimentary.
“Well yeah, you looked like you were fighting between eating one of my limbs and roaring a sonnet. Seeing as though I didn’t really want either to happen, I tackled you. And honestly, I’ve wanted to say this to you for a while, but I hate your way with words. It’s like you don’t care about who gets to read what you write and you just fill the page with drivel that we could all out-do with a few walks along a forest-path and a medium-sized contentment with Nature. I needed to tell you that. I don’t know why, but I said it, and it’s true,” said the once-vomiting man, and after twitching with more words that were appealing but unnecessarily hurtful, he turned away from Frost’s newly crippled sense of self and followed the hurtling Bridges, his only remaining family.
Frost went on to become a successful barista at Starbucks, and Edelman would have felt it was a revenge well-deserved, but he was too busy yelling at his interior designer.