ALLSASANDDONE by Peter Breakfast


A grappling hook shoots, busts a window, wraps around a drain pipe on the ceiling and catches its own rope. Awesome. We're off to a good start here. She's after a diamond in the center of the room, but it's surrounded by lasers, naturally. So she notices the lasers, and just so we can see how acrobatic she is, they show the lasers in red, and now she's leaping around the room and the music comes on and it's very sexy ("her clothes have to be that tight if she's going to avoid those lasers") and cool. You'd want to be there, be her.
      And so she gets to the diamond that's encased in glass and the lasers and music have stopped so it's all suspense. She gets out the glass cutter and slowly scrapes it in a circle just big enough for her hand and the diamond--obviously an expert. Her hand starts melting if you look at it too closely--if you're sitting too close--and you start to see it as a combination of the red green and blue light. It all comes apart so maybe you can squint, but it's no use. It's fake now, 2D luminescence.
      "Don't sit so close to the TV, Simon! You'll ruin your eyes," your mom walking by wiping her hands on a dish rag. So yeah, you don't want to get yelled at again so you sit back again on the floor with your back leaning on the couch. With your blanket that means the world to you. In 4 years your mother decides to throw it away after realizing it'll never be the color it once was and then sees you sleeping with it and it's not covering your feet. And the only reason you know it was discarded was because you saw it through the clear trash bag as she was bringing it out to the curb. How could she DO this to you!? The audacity! But to her it was just another chore in the long list, the busy life of her.
      You lived where man and nature meet, deer tromp through yards and kids tromp through forest daily. Tires in the vernal pool a few hundred yards in, back and forth seeping into each other. The edge of the suburbs.

      You know those puzzles where you have to make an image by moving squares around and one of the squares is missing? Well a lot of people try to make the image by staring at those things figuring where to make the next move. And then they do it and if it's right they refuse to move it, only working with the pieces that don't yet make up the image. But if you want to solve those things you have to not give a fuck. You have to move whatever piece you're working with with reckless abandon to the spot it needs to be in regardless of what's around it. Then, after a while of what looks like randomness to your friends, you move a few pieces more, and there it is.

      It was the nice kind of hangover when you know it's going to be fine by the end of the day. The night before our hero got too drunk, tried to get laid, failed, and ran his bike into a tree. In the morning he woke up with the word "Gutai" written on his arm in someone else's handwriting. He remembered it was written by a guy he'd talked to relatively extensively, and that he was talking to someone else when it was written. And he asked what it meant, and thought it was fitting or cool or something, but he couldn't remember what it was.
      He had to go to work now, like a lot of other people. Waking up, brushing teeth if he feels like it, do I look okay to not shower? Smell? Alright, hold on where are my keys. Okay--Shit, the dog, alright. And in a few more minutes he's finally out the door to work, a twelve minute train ride downtown.
      OOooooh, downtown! Yes the place where all things are tall and confusing. Where taxis and bicycles battle endlessly for the right to the road and tourists look just perfect. The cops drive segways now, did you know that? It's one of those technological jumps that at first makes you laugh but then quickly becomes commonplace, nothing new. Big deal, man get on with it. And if you look up (why would you ever look up?) you see windows that all look the same, but only feet behind them lies the highest concentration of human activity you'll ever not encounter. More brain activity, moral and emotional conflicts, social responsibility being taken, and food eaten than in any square mile of country.
      He was on time, as usual. He walked in and waved to the boss, but a new kid was between them and waved back. Maybe he'd waved at both of them.
      He was sobering up all the time. That's good. During the day, too, he was invited out for the night by two co-workers: the first was a girl who had the pretense in her mind that she would set her up with her friend, but actually wanted to sleep with him herself maybe, if the situation arose, who knows, we'll see. The second was from the pothead dishwasher. (He liked the left-to-right one at a time organization of the whole thing, the simple productivity in it) He'd often invite our hero out. He'd go if there was nothing else going on usually. He said yes to both invitations.
      He was the head cook at a restaurant, which he liked and was good at. Keeping track of orders, keeping people happy. An order would come up in the sweaty kitchen and he'd instantly be on it, on everything. The time went by quickly and thoroughly when it was busy, his favorite time to work. "Schedule someone else for the slow times, I've got better things to do." He loved the pressure, even created most of it himself. Zucchini? yeah, salt, flip that in a minute, stir that but not too much, pour it, where's the big spatula? "Hey where's the spatula?" "Right here" "Put it back when you're done, David." The rice should be about done, flip that, slice the bread, dump some soy sauce in there. "Put these right on the plate, Amanda." Thanks. "Thanks" What next?
      In Zen archery when they start your training they blindfold you.

      Some public school teachers are really great. They are the minority, to be sure, but every once in a while a kid just gets lucky and is exposed to positive reinforcement and new ideas beaming from a good person. Our teacher here saw a whole lot of potential in some of the kids he taught--smart ones who just happened to not fit in at school. And it was this teacher's dream--his whole motivation through the stressful bullshit of college--to see kids learning and liking it. And to get those kids so in tune with their intellect that even after they graduate they still go on learning. To pry apart the association of learning with difficulty and boredom. And he wanted to see others "get it" and never stop their awareness from growing. And they'd be nice people with good intentions, and they'd act on those intentions: liking good things and hating the bad things (which, for whatever reason, he was not seeing).
      And he knew how all this had to happen. One person at a time. Growing!
      "I can only show you the door," he said.
      "Or the brick wall"

      "Sucks, man."
      "Huh?"
      "Being poor. It sucks."
      "Yeah."
      "I thought I'd be okay when I moved into my place cuz it's only $50 more than what I was paying, but shit. I keep thinkin about getting another job or like... I was trying to be a waiter, make some more money, but..."
      For a pothead he was pretty hung up.

      A lot of his friends were there on the beach that day, as the sun was starting to set. They were drinking out of paper bags and talking about something that wasn't really that important, but it didn't matter. And that's what mattered: that it didn't matter at all what they were talking about. He was ridiculously fortunate to be there in the sun with people he'd formed long-lasting, helpful relationships with. People whose main concern was fun with a side of introspection. He was in love with what was happening, and so he zoned out a little--no! zoned in, basking in his memories, good, bad and everything in between. Happy.

      At her father's funeral, Heather, among others, couldn't stop crying. Whether she liked it or not, Heather's mind reveled in wholesome memories being smashed to bits. She cried because she wanted to be at the old farm doing nothing and mom went out for groceries or something. And the subtle happiness and openness that was always just hanging out, floating still.
      She wanted to talk to her dad before he died, not after. She thought how important he once was and that that had to die too. And she thought of her own death and the death of her bike and her clothes. And the death of all the metal and plastic all in the ground getting eaten by flower roots. But most of all she cried because this dumb funeral could never do her dad justice. The priest who never met him, the patheticism of crying ladies, how none of the men were crying because their awful culture made them that way. Everyone wearing black... were they trying to depress her? Who was "they"? She wanted beer. And all around and above her the squirrels and birds played, indifferent.

      In Africa, two elephants were reunited after having been performers in the circus together when young, and then separated to be traded and sold among zoos. When they saw each other for the first time in 34 years they were both caged. Reaching out with their trunks, the elephants bent the bars that were designed specifically to stand straight should the elephants try to escape.

      You're driving a car, a 98 Ford Taurus, say, on an open road through the desert and not a goddamn cloud in the sky. You don't know where you are and are confused about what you're doing but decide to just go with it because what else can you do? You have Alzheimer's and it's gone quite far through your brain over the past four years. It started in the hippocampus where your brain makes memories. You'd forget things just said to you, stuck in the moment and the past. Next to go was your speech, then logic altogether, good god how could it get any worse? But then your emotions went out the window so you're this irrational old fart making everyone's lives miserable and you don't even know it. Your brain stops making sense of things seen, heard, and smelled. Eventually your oldest and fondest memories go. Bye! See you later! Nothing left at all! What are you?
      Nevertheless, you have a sense of freedom somehow, if only from the movies with straight wide open roads in the middle of nowhere, but maybe it's connected to the time you divorced your wife and moved from Texas to California. What is this? Nevermind.
      So the earth is turning with you, in the direction you're driving, at 1000 miles an hour--everything attached here is cruising along with you: rocks, tar, rabbits, and tumbleweeds. But not only that--It's not just what you can see. The crust goes on and on behind the horizon, backwards, climbing, over itself, motorized, driven by sweat and dry ponds, rain and meat, and when you finally think it's all done you see you're back where you started. It's a wonder you can't feel the speed of it with you, it just looks like it's standing still, but I guess it doesn't matter because you're forgetting everything the moment it happens anyway.
      All is behind you now, even the sun--especially the sun--and you're speeding up this process, the gentle crash of it that sets the very landscape. What are you doing again? No matter. Moving forward I guess... Constant confusion. You are leaving the world exactly as it is and no one--not even you--knows where the hell everyone else is let alone what the fuck is going on.