Business

"Life is lonely, we all know this," Johnathon says as he swaggers around the large conference room table, surprisingly not trying to sell something - he is quite the salesman.  "The job, fellas," of course, the women in the room are every bit as attentive as the fellas, "shouldn't make us feel even more lonely.  Our team work, that is what we have to pull us through!"

Of course, this line of bullshit is only built around the singular vision of making himself look good for all the higher ups.  Just last week, while trying to negotiate with him taking a few of my leads in an effort to start weaseling my way away from selling to allow more personal time with my clients, he declined.  See, as he put it, he didn't earn those clients so he didn't want them.

He just has his nose up the corporate's brown eye.

Of course, he is striking a prominent chord in me here.  This job makes me feel like I'm wasting away - it doesn't matter how good I am at it, or how good the pay is.  I'm just a cog in the endless wheel.  I leave and they replace me.

"Terry, over there, he is a prime example!  That man, fellas - I tell you, he is king of the hill!"  Johnathon's fingers pointing directly at me.  "This guy could sell goat skin to a goat farmer!"

I've never heard that expression before - fucking weird one.

"But, even Terry is lonely!  I bet he has too many clients to deal with.  Why, I bet he could even afford to pass a few of them off to someone else and with as well as he gets to know his clients, he could really help out on getting information about them out there to really lock in those sales!"

Bastard.

"And that would strengthen the whole team.  Imagine if we all had a secured client base like Terry!  We'd only have to replace people once they passed away!"

What a morbid mother fucker.

"Of course, that is a horrible business strategy.  Of course we'd just need to expand!"  His swagger is full of grandeur now, like a peacock in full display mode.  I've never seen a man showing off like this unless there was some pussy involved.

"Get to the point, Johnathon."

Finally.

"Alright, alright.  So I think we should implement a new training method that really focuses on the client, and I think I'd be perfect for the position."  His pace and expression frozen as dead as someone who was found frozen to death.

Well, that's ballsy.  Saying that in front of a whole group of sales people who all have roughly the same amount of experience.

"Johnathon, we will need to talk after this meeting."  Patrick, the boss, said in the most stern voice I've ever heard him use.  He, normally, is the most pleasant person to be around - someone more akin to making everyone in the room feeling happy to be alive than to making them feel as though they were on the verge of death - here we all are, though, frozen like that dead body.

"Terry, I want you to stay behind as well."

I have tried my damnedest to stay out of trouble.  I couldn't imagine what I've done wrong.  I just want to collect my fucking paycheck and go home.

Maybe this could be a good thing.  Maybe they will fire me and I will be able to collect unemployment while I really focus on my life - what I want out of my life.

I have always found it perplexing how people can stick to the same job for so long when there is so little psychological fulfillment in what they spend so much of their lives doing.  Waste away in the hopes for a pension, a healthy savings account, and a lack of life lived in their prime.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised - the majority of people still believe some imaginary person in the sky watches what everyone does and if they don't do what he wants them to then they will burn for the rest of eternity.  Living in that kind of fear would most certainly take away your desire to fight back against a system that destroys your whole will to live.

I suppose I should have been paying more attention because now everyone is walking out - all of which looking like they dodged some kind of bullet.

As the final person steps out, Patrick closes the door behind them.

"Alright, Johnathon.  You're fired.  We know that Terry offered up some of his clients last week and we had no idea why you turned them down, but now it is obvious - you wanted to turn it into your idea to look better."

"Wait... what?  What gives you..." Patrick's face was getting more red than I'd have ever imagined possible as Johnathon changes his tune.  "Fuck you, Terry.  Fuck you.  You're doing this to make me look bad!"

Aflood with confusion, "I... I'm completely lost here."

"No, Johnathon.  Terry comes in and puts his head down.  He just does his work, and he excels at it.  He has turned this company around from a run of the mill sales team to a team where the clients actually feel like we help them."

I was just doing my job.

"Then who the fuck ratted me out!" The conference speaker sets sail directly to the wall and shatters into twenty pieces.

"Someone who cares about how this job operates.  Now get out of the building."  Two armed security guards step inside the room as Johnathon walks out.

"Now.  Terry, what Johnathon was getting to is right.  We do need someone to really lead the charge on training our team on how to make our clients feel like family.  We want it to be you."

Fuck.


-Dustin S. Stover

Wise and Lucky, May We Be

Essentially,
we are all damaged.

We are all frail.

We are all divided.

We have all been stomped on
spit on
degraded over time
for the things we don't
control.

We run.
We hide.
We evade.
We escape.

But it is all a temporary
relief
for what inevitably comes
to confront us.

Still, we run
we hide
we evade
and we still escape
to be confronted again.

Perhaps,
if we are wiser
or luckier
we take on some of that pain head on
and we defeat it.

If we're lucky.
or wise.

Otherwise, we run.
We hide.
And you know the drill well,
as you take your next drink of alcohol
or down your next pill
or consume your drug of preference
in whatever way suits you.

Essentially,
we'd not need those things
if we were just wiser,
or luckier.

But until then,
have another run,
but try not to hide.



-Dustin S. Stover

Mirroring Images

Measurements. 

Taken in all shapes and forms.

How big are your feet?
Your tits?
Your dick?

How long are your legs,
and waist.

Obeying the desires of others
when they don't even know their own.

And conforming to their notions
which are fed by their own insecurities.

You're too big,
or too thin

You're too short,
or too tall.

But have they looked in the mirror today?

And if they have,
did the recognize what they saw?



-Dustin S. Stover

Left Hooks

The fist comes from the right this time, and I absorb it.  Our eyes are locked in a dead stare, neither of us even daring to blink because we know, on an unconscious level, that it could be the point in which the other one strikes and we're caught off guard.

I jab a couple small jabs from the left, just attempting to break his concentration more than anything else, but it isn't working.  A tight right hook comes at me, but it whiffs into thin air.  Now is my chance and I lay it all out.

A solid right lands directly on his face, two left jabs while I regain the momentum with another solid right. 

He falls back and I pounce towards him.  My right lands on his glove, but he is dazed.  He has regained his footing, but he took a couple solid hits that is sure to wear him down.

Our eyes have again locked in a dead man's stare.

A ding and it is the end of the round.

I drink my water and the sound of voices in the distance keep me company as I stare across the ring at the enemy.

Any other day, I could sit and have beers with this mother fucker, share stories of wasting money and women, but today we are at war.  I've got to get this out of my head.  Makes me weak.  This mother fucker needs to die.

I left that round with a big lead.  I can take him out in the next one.  The pain of those solid right handers have to be hitting him hard now that his adrenaline is coming down.

We get back up and the ding starts the next round.

He is playing it safer now.  His guard is up further, his face has been hurt, but that just means I've gotten him weaker.  Just have to wait for my moment to land another good solid hit.  He'll be done for sure.

I jab a couple quickies, again, trying to break his concentration, but his hands are planted.  His guard is secure. 

His jabs are weaker now, but my eyes aren't leaving his.  Fuck that.

I can see it in his eyes, they dart a quick little dart to my left hand before coming back to mine.  He's lost it.  His edge is gone.  Just have to wait for the perfect time.

A right then a left, my jabs are getting more intense as I try to break his guard.  I notice his right is flinching just a bit.  That's his weakness growing.  Just a little bit longer and he is done.

His eyes dart over to my left again and I force a right directly towards his face.

It catches glove and then I notice it - a left hook coming straight for my face.  All I can think - I blinked.


-Dustin S. Stover

All Encompassing Madness

"How does that make you feel?"

Well, how the fuck is it supposed to make me feel, doc.  I come to you for answers, not to question my motives.  Psychologists are such bullshit.  Give me the hard sciences, not someone to talk to me until I feel like crying enough to flood the Earth in some biblical, forty-days and forty-nights nonsensical way.

Fuck you, doc.  The shit happened and now it doesn't matter how I feel about it.  It doesn't fucking matter how I feel about it because I have to wake up tomorrow morning and go into work like every other damn day of my life.  I have to put food on the table at the end of the day.  I have to pay the light bill.  I have to do the same shit as everyone else.  How do I feel?  I feel like I need a mother fucking break from life.

"Norm, are you going to answer?"

"I'm figuring it out."

You condescending piece of shit.  You sit there in that chair and you ask me these simplistic answers, attempting to get me to dig deep for some answers through equally simplistic responses.  I know what you're doing, but again, it doesn't matter.

I  had damned dreams.  I had goals for my fucking life before shit hit the fan.  I wanted to make something out of my life and now I just wake up and feel like grabbing the fucking bottle.  

"It is odd, Dr. Shrellin.  I just don't know how life got to this point."

"Norm, I've told you before.  Just call me Alice.  I'm your friend, but let's talk about what choices you made to get here."

You're not a fucking friend.  A friend is someone you meet at a bar, someone you have common interests in, Alice.  I have been forced to come see you as my therapist.  Someone who I pretend isn't just as fucked up as I am.  But I know, Alice.  I know you hit that bottle like there's no tomorrow once you're done with your work day.  You've probably got escorts on speed dial, or hiding some inner lesbian cuckhold fantasy.  You probably have to smoke a thousand dollars worth of weed a week just so you don't get so pissed off you slam someone's head against a wall.

How I got here, though?  How I got here was fucking simple - I made choices.  I made the choice to drop what I wanted out of life because I played the safe bets and found excitement in the wrong places.  Well, all bets fail sooner or later.  That's how I got here.  Living with the failure of those bets, how the fuck do I deal with that, Alice?

"I'm not sure, doctor.  I mean, I kind of just floated along the river of life and now I'm waking up to where I've floated to."

Where I've floated to?  What the fuck am I even saying now?  I sound like some children's after school special.  What I've done is taken unfulfilling jobs because it is a paycheck, dated shitbags because they offered excitement in my life, and been completely unable to find a balance between those things and my goals.  That's what the fuck I've done, Alice.  And now I'm stuck being hyper-aware of my situation in life.

"So what do you plan on doing now?"

So yeah, after my wife left me for the younger, more exciting artist, that mother fucker, I went off on my boss.  Sure, maybe I even threw the phone book at the wall, conveniently placed behind his head.  Yeah, I probably caused a scene when I got up out of my chair and yelled the word fuck at the top of my lungs, which led me to the office and phone book in the first place.  Can you blame me?  I mean, really?

"I don't know, doctor."

"Well, how does all this make you feel, Norm?"

Again with this fucking question, Alice?  Can't you reword it with your fancy ass degree?  Can't you make it seem more interesting?  Can't you do something other than just fucking ask a question?

"Mad.  I feel mad."

-Dustin S. Stover

If you find my writing interesting and desire more of it then please support me by purchasing my collection of short stories on Kindle or Nook.

Surviving the Storm

One would imagine that after months, years, or even decades that we'd have gotten used to this. The bullets screaming far beyond our post and into the never ending abyss beyond us. I suppose that to an extent we have done just that.

Families no longer duck for cover. Families no longer cower in fear of when they will lose their mother or brother. Instead, they simply go about their business as usual, and yet, the bullets still whizz past into the abyss.

In a society that picks around the bloodied apples to find an untainted one, a society that admires when a building only has one hundred bullet holes in the outer walls, a society that finds it more abnormal to hear that you've went a week without losing someone you know then it would be little more than obvious to state that hardships are simply a way of life.

And yet here I am, again, carrying away another dead body from outside my front door. Carrying it around to the back, where places have been strategically designed to extract the lifeless corpses by specially appointed military personnel. You know the ones – the ones freshly recruited and sent into the city, having never seen the atrocities that have become such normal life.

I can remember a time before, though. A time in which the city hadn't been ravaged by greed, by the strongest enforcing their survival on those of us who would rather think about a way to make tomorrow a better place. Speaking such things out loud, today, would lead to a public hanging.

Still, I enjoy talking to the freshies. I enjoy hearing about their tales of life beyond the death. And this is why I carry the dead now, at dusk, with the little remaining sunlight bursting through the remnants of buildings and illuminating the dulled browns of the sand and the buildings that look as though they are apart of the ground.

“Good evening,” a freshy says with nothing but trembling nervousness in his voice.

“Another one to add to the pile here,” I push the wheelbarrow with a full grown woman, beyond skinny and frail from the lack of motivation to make it outside for food.

Of course, the government does everything it can to ship as much food to us as possible. It is there for the taking, but in order to obtain it one must dodge the metallic shards flying through the air so fast they cannot be seen. Some try it, usually the young and fast teenagers. Sometimes the elderly who have lived beyond their years and have decided their sacrifice would be worth it if only to save their children.

“So... Where... where did you get this un?” A strange accent, one I had never heard before.

“Out front of my shop. They post up down the road and wait for people to try to get into my shop for food and shoot them dead as they are walking in. I took the door off to let them get in faster, but then they stopped coming in all together – said it didn't make them feel safe to have it open like that – so I put it back up for them.”

“Strange...”

“Where you from, kid?”

“What is left of the USA.” The USA, much like here, was torn apart when both sides of the political spectrum let things get so bad they declared war on one another. Eventually there wasn't much left other than burnt down cities with two capitals on each side of the country. They simply declared it a draw, threw down their guns, and resorted to cyber warfare to sway support. They are still equal, but most of their citizens don't even have a computer any longer so it ultimately ends up being the rich arguing back and forth while every one else signs up for wars they don't understand. Just to keep food on their plate.

“Is it rough over there, too?”

“I thought it was. Until... well... I got here...”

“Yeah, things here are pretty bad. Get up closer to this wall. You're out there making yourself the perfect target.”

“Thanks....” His tone still shaky, like a glass of water in the middle of an earthquake.

“You get used to it. Say, you and your compadres want something to drink? Eat, perhaps? When was the last time you had a decent meal?” I was unlocking the back door and opening it up, holding it open so as to entice them on in. “Don't worry, I've got a deal worked out with both sides. They let me by for the most part. Can't say the same about my customers, but you'll all be safe.”

“Fuck yeah!” Another freshy jumps out of the truck, a sharp, tall girl who looked to be all of 19 years old at most. “I ain't eaten nothing good in a week.”

I prepared the two of them their meals, even threw in a couple glasses of the best wine I could muster up – admittedly, it wasn't anything of quality, but no one ever complains about wine after they've endured a week or two here.

The meal with an equally unimpressive bowl of pasta with some very bland type of white sauce. I did manage to get a shipment of Parmesan Cheese in. It adds just enough taste for it to be considered the best bowl of pasta in the city. That's what the sign on the wall says, anyway - “BEST PASTA IN THE CITY!”

“This tastes like shit compared to back home.” The female freshy piped up after devouring half her plate of food.

“Well, you're not quite home now, are you?”

“No. That's not what I meant.” She interjected quickly. “I mean, I just miss home. Fuck, man. I'm sorry.”

“It tastes better than I thought it would...” the young freshy, still timid and fearful, said.

“Look. I don't get my choice of ingredients. I do the best with what I've got. Here.” I hand them each a plate of a jello-like dessert.

“No thanks!” they both said quickly.

The sound of their truck, still parked out back, fires to life and takes off with tires squealing.

“Hey!” the female freshy says while attempting to lift from her chair. “Is that... is... that... our... truck...?” Her body falls limp, first hitting the table and then plummeting to the ground.

The male freshy's face had already landed square on top of the table.

I picked up the phone and dialed a series of numbers until the ring started. “Hello. Got a couple more.” I hung up the phone.

-Dustin S. Stover

Emotional Choices

Let me start a discussion about the justice system.

I've known, and seen, for quite some time that the justice system favors people with money - especially if the one with money is white, but there are some severe flaws in the judicial system for a number of reasons.

The first reason I will touch on is the most obvious, yet perhaps the most overlooked problem.  Humans.  We rely on humans, who are presented with facts, to act according to what they discover from a court's proceedings to rule for or against someone.

This is simple.  Human emotions, however, are extremely far from simple.  They are easily played and preyed upon - hence how Donald J. Trump became president of the United States of America. (Get as pissed as you want by this comment, but if you weren't personally biased towards him/the Republican party then you'd be shitting all over yourself like a newborn baby trying to figure out how people could have elected him, just like the rest of the world is doing).

I will use an example - I was called in for a jury summons.  The case I was summoned for was a shooting.  A young black man was accused (don't ask for his name as I won't ever remember).  Another person who was summoned, just as I was, began talking to me on a break between the attorneys interrogating those of us who were summoned and the conversation went pretty much like this - the person discussing it will me proclaiming this young black man as being guilty, absolutely without a doubt, he was guilty.  This was perplexing to me especially because there was no evidence presented.  Just a name of the accused and the crime he was being accused of.  Just that simple.

Even more than that, however, was the overly cock-sure attitude this person had.  Not only was he guilty, but the person in the room sitting at one of the tables - mind you, this is where the attorneys and the accused were sitting - was the one who got shot!  Now me being me, and always more interested in discovering what makes a person think the way they do, I continued to listen to this theory of his.

And boy, it was a baseless theory.  His entire theory was based around the young black man being on the road it took place on, and why else would he be there?  And that poor guy in the wheelchair!

Turns out that the poor guy in the wheelchair was defending the young black man as his attorney.

I have no idea how that trial played out.  I wasn't selected to follow through with it all, but the process of selecting the jurors and the interactions I had with the people there was enough to give me great insight as to how they choose people - which ones will be sympathetic to the attorneys cause.

And it goes even further than this.  I couldn't even imagine to deduce the amount of juries who have been persuaded to place someone in prison for a crime they didn't commit just so the attorney prosecuting can line their pockets, but I have no doubt that if there were a way to truly deduce the amount that it would be staggering.

That is just how it goes with human beings.  It is all just a show.  If you learn how to tap into another person's emotions you can convince them of anything - every war has been backed by emotions just the same as every homeless shelter has been built by them.  Every religion thrives because of emotions just as every decision we make is based on them.

Think about what you're going to eat for dinner tonight or tomorrow.  You run through a list of things to eat and you find yourself saying how you don't feel like making that or that food sounds good.  The very basis of what you eat is how you feel about the food - whether it is the process of making it discouraging you or the restaurant you choose being a favorite spot.

Even the political arguments we get into - if we truly looked at statistics then Democrats and Republicans would die off in favor of no parties at all, just people who truly wanted to make the country we live in better.  Instead we have Republicans relying on religion to gain support and Democrats relying on fear of the future.  Emotions and the emotions attached to what the party is saying.

Perhaps the only way to overcome the emotions when sentencing someone to 30 years in prison is to start by acknowledging how our personal biases affect us in every choice we make every day of our lives.

-Dustin S. Stover