[Fiction] Concerning Yourself with my Pointless Life

[Robbo!]

The key to any friendship, as psychology tells us is “proximity.” It has been proven that the closest friends are literally the ones who are closest to each other. When you spend a lot of time with someone, you like them more. And it’s much easier to spend time with people who are nearby, as you interact with them more often, either on purpose or by accident. I had an extremely close friend when I was four. But when his parents divorced and he moved to Florida, I never saw him again, and now I know just as little about him as I do about a stranger I may see in my Psychology class.

The girl three rows in front of me in the lecture hall is gorgeous. She is short, has medium-length blonde hair, and a nice rack. She’s a gamma phi beta. She’ll never go for me. She’s proud of her greek-ness, and won’t even consider someone outside of a fraternity. It’s a shame that the best-looking ones are the psycho ones.


Friday night. My roommate and “friend” is going out on the town with his girlfriend. He is going to get wasted and end up humping his bitch of a girlfriend on my futon. He invites me to get wasted with him and I politely decline. I never liked the term “wasted,” nor any other term associated with getting yourself fucked-up using liquor. Smashed, hammered, plastered… no matter how you say it, it sounds like a bad time.

Not to mention the raging headache in the morning and the puking and the feeling that your bowels and stomach are going to rupture. Real liquor doesn’t even taste that good. And that’s all I drink. To be honest, whiskey and coke (the first drink I ever consumed at the tender age of 17) tastes like nail polish. My roommate gets drunk on fruity, girly drinks like margaritas because he hates the taste but loves the buzz. What a gay little fucker.

I turn on the television and browse through the lifeless channels. Nothing good is ever on Friday nights. I shouldn’t have rejected my roommate’s invitation to go drinking. It might be fun to drink coke, pretending it’s spiked and watching my roommate and his girlfriend get so fucked-up they can’t remember the night.

I am scrolling through the channels with the remote, sitting on my futon in the apartment and I see a cum stain next to me. It’s still a little damp. My fucker roommate jacked-off on here today. I look beside the t.v. and see the film that inspired his actions. “Babe.” My roommate wants to fuck a pig. I look through the rest of our DVD library and see nothing but crappy movies I’ve already seen a hundred times already. Hollywood can’t make a real film with a real, genuine message to save it’s life.

If Hollywood did do that: write and create an honest, relative film, one that emphasizes the meaningless of life, it would be a commercial failure and inspire national suicide. But it’s true. In the grand scheme of things, all of us are nobodies. Not even our ideas outlive us. I’m sure there was some great war with some great leader in the 6th century that would change the course of history and shape the face of the future, but for the life of me, I can’t remember who he was. Even the commoners of the 6th century: peasants equal to today’s accountants and engineers and other scum, have been well-forgotten.

I turn the channel to see some cartoons. The bright colors and childish jokes entertain my interest for two minutes before turning off the t.v. and figuring out something else to do. I do some long-overdue homework for two hours on Friday night. I then look at how pointless it all is, as I don’t even know any of my grades, but I’m certain all of them are failing and most of them are irrecoverable. It doesn’t matter. I’m an English major, and I won’t be able to use that ever in real life, unless I become an English teacher. Writers are paid worse than shit.

I get on my laptop and get on Facebook and laugh at all my loser friends who are on Facebook on a Friday night. I know I’m a loser, too, but it doesn’t phase me. I know I don’t have any real friends. I only have a roommate because I needed a place to live and he needed another person to pay the rent. I think he feels sorry for me. I don’t give a damn. He’s a loser.

I know he’s not really a loser. He’s a business major. One day, he may be the CEO of a major corporation. It doesn’t matter, because only his children will remember him after he’s dead. And then he’s going to be completely forgotten in less than a century. That’s how it goes for everyone. It’s how it’s gonna be for me.

I reach into the mini-fridge and pull out a water bottle. I take a swig and immediately spit it out, tasting it to be vodka, and not water. My roommate started this habit when we were freshmen, hiding alcohol from our R.A.

I put the vodka back in the fridge before plugging my iPod into a nearby speaker and playing music. I don’t give a damn about what type or who the artist is. I just want music: nice, loud music. I carry the speaker and iPod into my bedroom and lay down before drifting off to sleep listening to the obscenely loud music.

I didn’t do anything important today. I didn’t buy anything, I didn’t go out and protest anything, I didn’t even get my mail. It doesn’t matter. The world is just going to keep on spinning, whether I fall asleep listening to my loud music or I actually legitimately do something.


I wake up to the sound of heavy machinery. It is way too early in the morning, probably around ten or so. I search for the sound of the noise and look out my window. A crane and wrecking ball are in the parking lot of Sunny Lakes Apartments, the apartment complex across the street from mine. Sunny Lakes: “Where every day is a sunny day,” despite the fact that it rains here more often than anywhere else in the state and the closest lake is an hour’s drive away.

Sunny Lakes Apartments has been standing abandoned for the past year. It was condemned: something about asbestos or the latest builder-grade material that’ll give me cancer now. The sign outside the apartment complex mentions “est. 1971.” The crane swung to and then fro into the building. As it started demolishing the apartments, I considered the nearly forty year-old history of the building being destroyed. Sunny Lakes was probably the dream of some realtor or developer who died a dozen or more years ago. I think of the contractor who was paid to build these apartments, the dozens of people who worked for the contractor, making a living laying bricks and tile. I think of the thousands of tenants who lived there at one point during its history, who wouldn’t even give a damn watching it torn down now. Well, they might, but it wouldn’t matter; they’re too busy doing something else somewhere else.

Just wait until they learn they have cancer from whatever was found in the building.


By noon, the Sunny Lakes Apartments is nothing but a pile of rubble. I look at my roommate’s bed and see him still asleep, soon to be hungover. I realize that I have just spent two hours watching the destruction of a building.