That Bullet on the Laundry List, I swears this is better than that other one Options

[Lindstrom]

That other story was probably too long and uninteresting for most but whatever, I'll only bother posting this one and maybe just at least one person will read the whole thing and get something out of it.

You go to a party, meet this cute girl, you strike up a conversation and find out she is the daughter of the deposed president of the Republic of Namibia and all she needs is someone to hold on to this briefcase containing $16 million, American currency, in small bills. The briefcase is right there, she's carrying it at the party, and she explains that she cannot hold the money for tax purposes. You who have a low but steady income, who are gainfully employed, and, let's face it, the most attractive male in the room, could carry the $16 million and never be caught.

The Princess of Namibia hands you the briefcase, almost forcefully, and you hesitate because the last time you held an enormous amount of money for a member of the West African nobility the CIA raided your studio apartment at 3:30 in the morning, trashed the place, took the money, and stole your girlfriend.

You are reminded that the letters from your girlfriend stopped arriving in the mail two months ago. She was reliable in her correspondence from the CIA terrorist cell in the South Bronx but she was either killed or found a new love. Either way it sucks.

After the Princess entreats you to hold on to the money you get enough sense to ask her what the money is for. The Princess explains that her mother, the Queen, is stranded in Namibia and the $16 million is for passage from the Namibian coastal region of Kunene to Port Miama in Florida on the luxury liner christened The Iron Sieve. You look at her quizzically because $16 million is a bit much for a trip across the Atlantic.

It turns out that the boat must stop at St. Helena first for supplies, then to Sao Luis, Brazil. From Brazil the boat will go to Martinique and finally to Miami. You know from your days as a travel agent that the trip costs roughly $12 million. What will be done to the other $4 million?

Three million of that is ransom money. The Queen of Namibia is being held in Walvis Bay by rebels whose political agenda consists of changing the spelling of Namibia because they do not like living in a country that has more vowels than consonants.

This is an international incident on so many levels and because you flirted with a pretty girl at a party in East Boston, you are now in the middle of it. And your gut reaction, the part that makes this worth writing about, was this: Yes, I want to help this girl. I want to be a transporter. I have never been to West Africa. Let's go.

So you agree to hold the $16 million for an undisclosed amount of time. The Princess says she'll come by your place and pick it up once she's talked to the Namibian rebels about releasing her mother the Queen. After handing you the suitcase she indicates that the remaining $1 million - left over from the $3 million ransom and the $12 million boat trip - will go to you as payment for undertaking such a risky and altogether sexy task.

That night you get home to your apartment. Your roommate is spending the weekend with his parents in Tuscaloosa so you don't have to sneak in and come up with an excuse for stumbling home with a $16 million briefcase. To your surprise there are two men in your apartment, both of whom you have seen before because they were here waiting for you the last time you held money for African royalty, and these men are carrying the same Louisville Slugger baseball bats they used to subdue you during that last incident. You hadn't cleaned your place since they trashed it the last time plus you don't have a girlfriend anymore so you're pretty ok with the situation. Until they knock you out again.

There is a major difference between what you wanted your last thought to be before you were knocked out by the CIA and your actual last thought before you were knocked out. What you wanted to think was: What we have done up to this point can never be duplicated but always surpassed.

What you actually thought was: Marlins.

This could be explained in many different ways. A marlin is a rather large game fish that can be found in the Atlantic Ocean. It has a spear for a snout and can be up to three meters long. It is a primary character in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea in which an unlucky Cuban fisherman harpoons one and ties it to the back of his boat. But then sharks come around and eat the marlin and leave only its bones. The old fisherman becomes angry that he lost such a majestic beast to the unforgiving sharks of the Gulf Stream.

Your last thought could also mean that you were thinking of baseball. The Florida Marlins were established as a Major League Baseball franchise in 1993. Of the two occasions the team made the playoffs, both led to them winning a world championship. Now they are not the greatest team in the world but they have been twice before and that is a marvelous accomplishment. You decide not to make such a big deal of it.

Dreams that occur in a state of unwilling unconsciousness - that is, when you are hit in the head with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency - are almost always about your past. This is probably because in these situations our brains are unsure of whether or not we'll wake up, whether or not we're dead, and they decide that the safest action is to have your life flashed before you. It is not your entire life flashed before you, however, because the brain doesn't want to make that decision of whether or not you're still alive.

What you see in your dreams is the beach in the winter. It is after snowfall, when the fringes of the waves have frozen over and the entire shoreline becomes glacial. Chunks of frozen ocean break off and float back to sea and you think it's violent. You see most natural imagery as being violent - sunsets, sunrises, storms rolling in and out, and it was your girlfriend, your old one stolen by the government, who hated it when you said, "Gosh, look at that sunset. It's so violent." Your old girlfriend. You'd rather see her dead by the hands of a G-man than alive and happy with someone else.

When you wake up your place is still trashed and the money is gone. This is the second time this has happened, man! You have to be more careful! That party you went to, the one where you met the Namibian princess, you shouldn't have gone to that. In fact, you had the night shift at your job and decided to skip it because you had this wonderful feeling: Maybe this is the night I meet someone new, someone exhilarating, and things turn out for the better. But that didn't happen. You could blame this on the American government - they did knock you out twice and steal your girlfriend - but that is turning a blind eye to the concept of free will. And this is all your fault. You have to fix this.

While the government did take all the money, they left the briefcase. It takes you fifteen minutes to find it because they put it in the refrigerator. Inside the briefcase is a small piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it. The name is Queen Gladys of Namibia and the number is one of those complicated overseas numbers where you have to dial like a thousand different digits just to get an operator.

Because this is all your fault, you decide to call the number, hoping that it is indeed Queen Gladys or at least her captors in Walvis Bay. To be precise, the number leads to the office in the abandoned warehouse #13 of the Walvis Bay Port Authority. The man who answers speaks impeccable English and you tell him that you wish to speak to Queen Gladys, that you are a close personal friend of her daughter's and you have news from America.

"Just a moment, bro," says the man on the other line. You hear him scream, "Gladys! You have a phone call." A pause. "Phone call, Gladys! Says he's some American who knows your daughter."

The next voice you hear is that of Gladys, the Queen of Namibia. "Hello?"

"Your highness?" You tell her who you are and why you called, you explain that her daughter gave you $16 million at a kegger in East Boston but the CIA stole the money and left this phone number.

"That Gloria!" says the Queen. "She has royalty in her blood, yes, and she's a fine princess but her head's in the wrong place. She thinks terrorists and rebellions and West African upheavals like this mean the end of the world when in fact they're good for the system, kind of like a political enema. Don't worry about the money, my boy."

"Your highness, your daughter wants me to see to it that you are safe and on your way to America. Are you being held by Namibian terrorists?"

"Oh yes, yes I am," she says, sounding flighty.

"You seem ok with that, your highness," you say.

"They're extraordinarily well-behaved men," she says. "And all they want is to rearrange the spelling of our nation. They don't like vowels, you see. I, for one, would love a little change. And they've been keeping me in this warehouse for a week or so, during which we have played some of the most rousing games of euchre this old queen has ever been a part of!"

"Are they going to release you?" you ask.

"In due time, yes. I have won a bit of money from them with the card games. They're stubborn fellows and won't release me until they've won back a bit of their money. But I've managed to secure enough for passage on the Iron Sieve. I'll be in Miami no later than Thursday."

"So you're safe? Can I tell your daughter that?"

"Yes you can, my boy. Though there is one thing I am afraid of. I have never been to America. Should I pack light? What is it like there?"

Such a broad question! And you, you who are heroic, you who have spent his weekend trying to save a member of the West African nobility, gave the most half-assed answer anyone could give. What you did was you paused, mulled it over, and said, "It's nice." But that is an understatement, man! America is much more than nice. Here is what you should have said:

America! Her food is marvelous, her people even more so. She is hailed as a melting pot, a multinational beef and lentil stew. You, my queen, will be welcomed with opened arms in the Port of Miami. You will be showered with hellos and advertisements and the most beautiful men and women in the nation for it is the coast of America to which the hard-bodied and tremendously sexy flock. In America, no matter where you go, everything is there. Everything you need. Never has anything this small grown into a colossus of love, truth, freedom, sexuality, excitement, compassion, and the occasional carcinogen! America, my queen, is the shit.

"Well I just can't wait," said the Queen. She tells you that you should get in contact with her daughter the princess and tell her everything that has happened. She gives you the princess's super secret cell phone number.

"So you're ok, your highness?" you ask for reassurance. "Can I tell your daughter that everything is fine?"

"Yes you may, my boy. And I hope to speak to you again sometime. You seem like such a nice American boy. But now I must finish the card games and start packing. Godspeed."

You manage to say, "You too, your highness," before she hangs up the phone.

The next phone call you make is to the Princess, the girl who started this adventure at the party in East Boston. She is so elated to hear from you that she demands you meet her at the bridge over the Swan Pond in the Boston Public Garden.

You go to the bridge and she is already there and she is glowing, her exotic brown hair tapered and layered and flipped up in the way many American haircuts seem to defy gravity. She asks what you plan to do with your one million dollars and you tell her you lost the money and before her heart sinks into her stomach you explain to her the whole thing about her mother and the card games and the Namibian terrorists who just want to get rid of the country's vowels. Everything is ok, everything is worked out and you assure her that her mother will be in Miami no later than Thursday. So happy is she to hear the news that she forgets about the $16 million dollar loss and lunges at you and kisses you and it is a fantastic kiss and now it seems you are in love. But there is a problem, a nagging question that rises from the neurons that fire off the stimuli for infatuation, sensuality, and human attraction. Here it is:

The question is not how do we love or who do we love or what is our capacity for love but where do we love? and that is what's hurting us. That is what's hurting you.

That was the worst place for a first kiss, man. Everyone in Boston had their first kiss as a couple on that stupid footbridge overlooking the Swan Pond in the Public Garden. It's embarrassingly unoriginal.

So you freak out and you pull off from the kiss and tell the Princess of Namibia that you are going to take her somewhere original, a place where your first kiss as a couple will be memorable and fantastic and worthy of a million stories to a million grandkids. You're not going to the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center or any of the lush parks that make up the Emerald Necklace, not even the Harvard Arboretum where the changing leaves are fantastic romance sparkers. You're not going to the top of the Prudential or down by the harbors or in a small restaurant in the North End where the wait staff will remember your names and the fact that you're the cutest couple in the world. No, you are going to the Theater of Electricity in the Museum of Science. You see, the Theater of Electricity holds one of the world's largest Van de Graaf generators. A Van de Graaf generator is simply a machine that uses belts to conduct static electricity on hollow steel spheres, accumulating enough voltage to create lightning bolts. It is in this room where you will kiss Gloria, the Princess of Namibia, and, utilizing your knowledge of the ancient poetic symbols involving romance, see if the sparks fly. Your chemistry will combine with the megavoltage of the Van de Graaf generator and if you two are meant to be together, it will sting with the force of a hundred million bumblebees. Remember, bumblebees can sting more than once.

Aren't you excited for the future? You are going to have full, lazy days with your lover in your bed, kissing each other in the most obscure nooks and trying to find more creative ways to smile. Direct sunlight will hit the bedroom of your apartment and warm your sheets and comforters, the sun never relenting or hiding behind a tall building. Everything will be as it should be.

It won't matter that the CIA kidnapped your previous girlfriend or that they stole money from you twice. It won't matter that you lost your job because you went to a party in East Boston instead of working the night shift. What will matter is that you found love and you will have a dozen kids and you will die as a self-actualized individual. What will matter is that you arrived and you left and in between you were brilliant.

[Hasfusel]

I loved that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalasmile.gif) Very entertaining. Five stars are deserved here, my friend.

[Arilla]

I did not get a chance to read your first piece, but this. Well, wow. I like your writing style, second person isn't used all that often and its nice to see it used. That last paragraph is really quite great. "...you were brilliant." :]

[Lindstrom]

Oh wow, people read this stuff? And liked it? Awesome. Glad you guys enjoyed it.

The other one (the thread is "I Could Have Loved You As Far As The Horizon: And Other Mistakes") is longer and focuses on nuns so it was probably a major snoozefest for everyone who looked at it.

[Gabstah]

Woah. This was really quite good. I'm impressed :/ bizarre. Good job.