Iron and Ink

Isolated iron is always cold.  Always.  Even on the hottest of summer days, heat radiating off the harsh metal, the sight of iron fills one's self with a cold darkness that captivates the imagination of some and fills another with desolate despair.

That was what filled his mind as he felt that painful heat through his work gloves, handling the huge iron beam thirty some odd stories above Earth's surface.

The pen always held such a warm and passionate feeling pinched between the fingers.  A universe of knowledge, passion, longing, lust, despair, and sadness she thought as she tried to push the keys on her laptop down in rhythmic fashion.

She couldn't find the words or passion or even a glimpse of that universe she longed for.

The philosopher in both of them begins to question why they are doing anything they do.  The reasonable voice knows they'll die if they don't - or at least be forced to find a new way to survive.

He takes the long drink of ice water, symbolic of the end of another torturous day of ten hours worth of heat - he had to sign on for that overtime pay.

The pay was great.  The pay is great.  The week is almost over and the pay is great - the chant repeated in his mind.

She held in her hand, between her fingertips, that old Montblanc pen she bought herself after her first big story broke.  She hadn't used it for years but believed it was the key to her next big ticket.  Of course, the doodles on her page didn't translate to her next big paycheck.

Before arriving home, he stops at a local liquor store to buy the beer that will get him drunk the fastest and for the least amount of money.  A necessity, he thinks, if he is to endure such coldness again tomorrow.

He rolls a joint before leaving the parking lot - this to prepare himself for all the commands of his wife once home.  He takes the first hit not long after he leaves the parking lot.  The first of many.

A page full of doodles lay upon the page as she brushes her teeth in an attempt to hide the smell of cigarettes.  Frantically, she sprays perfume and flushes the toilet to dispose of the butt.  A deep breathe fills the empty space and a tug to straighten her shirt sets her in motion to start dinner.

She peers down into the empty sink and realizes she forgot to lay out the meat for dinner.  Knowing it is too late to thaw now, she hits the number three on speed dial for takeout Chinese.  A distinctly American voice answers and she realizes her mistake - Chinese was four, three was the stress relief she was trying to give up.

He arrives home significantly more stoned that he wanted to be.  Trying desperately hard to hide it from his wife, he yells his hell while walking directly to the shower.

The shower loses him for far too long and his wife opens the door with hushed anxiety.  "Are you drunk or high?"

"Both," he answers while his wife shuts the door without a word more.

She springs to life when the door rings - perfect timing, she thinks as she ponders where she wants her story to go next.

He gets out of the shower and sees a notepad open upon the table, full of drawings and no words, next to a bag of Chinese food.  She is in the garage speed dialing number three.

-Dustin S. Stover

Kindle: Happiness in a Void of Darkness
Nook: Happiness in a Void of Darkness

The Explanation

I have always been terribly interested in why someone would cut themselves.  I suppose that deep down I understood it - a physical interpretation of the pain one feels inside, a frustration that needs an external release in some fashion and the pain doesn't run off into someone else's life.

I've just never been one to follow suit in that type of performance art.  My personal belief is that there must be some other type of expression that leads to far more productivity.  And, you know, not having to explain the scars to anyone else is always a bonus.

But, I suppose that in itself would be a test of sorts.  If a lover can see past the battle scars of externalizing an internal problem then doesn't that in some kind of way prove that love triumphs?

The hypocrisy, however, is hilarious.

Everyone has the problematic affairs that we are dealing with.  From the man who drinks incessantly to the woman who buys herself into ruin - or the woman who drinks incessantly and the man who buys himself into ruin.  It is all just a means to deal with the internal struggles of life's existential problems that no one wants to face up to.

And as I'm laying here, I grow increasingly tired, exhausted.  Like the life is just seeping from my veins.

I believed that if you had unlimited money then the world's problems didn't touch you, when I was young.  It was like the penguins having water just run right off their body.  A type of bullet proof vest that made it impossible for life's turmoil to trouble you, but that was just young naivety.

The rich find themselves equally as troubled as the poor, but that is also when it came to me that it isn't a class problem, it is a societal one.  A society that wrings the life out of every person placed as a cog in the working wheel can never have room for a society in which the human life has more value than the productivity of their job, and being rich still leaves no value in the individual's life - just a dollar sign sitting next to a name.

And that is why one must stand in protest.

As I'm doing now.

As my veins drip the remaining drops of my blood upon the floor, and with it my ability to be another cog in your systemic decay.

The systemic destruction of the human condition.

And this is my...
explanation...
for these...
scars...



A morbid short story by Dustin S. Stover

And You Said Life Would be Easy

There is a radical design stitched into the very presence of every human being. From birth we are molded into what others perceive and expect us to be, never fully grasping any individuality in those desires.

Then, as we age, we begin to understand the world quite beyond that in which we've been forcibly exposed to. Whether it be through television, music, the introduction of new people, books, or whatever other external sources that could influence our otherwise pristine conservation of familial and close proximity world's desires. The rebellion of such things is what begins that massive chasm of separation between the world of old and the world in which one creates for themselves.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that the chasm always maintains distance. Most people end up conforming in massive ways – their rebellion of underage drinking and casual drug usage is found out to be the same coping mechanisms of their parents, the same ones that refused to acknowledge their own usage of such things at the same age. The conformity of finding a job that satisfies just enough, typically through the paychecks that come in from said job, yet leave the rest of life unfulfilled. The conformity of giving up on the things enjoyable in youth – the discovery of things outside the pristine world in which one was raised in.

Raise a glass to yourselves if you can pretend the satisfaction of such things is enough for you. Down the contents of said glass in an effort to dull the pain of pretending, go to tuck your children into bed, and proceed to post more pictures of what you made for dinner on social media in an effort to bring an encouraging vindication to your very conformed notion of what reality should be, all the meanwhile keeping that pristine barrier around your own children.

There are those of us who are philosophers, artists, believers that the value in our lives are created solely by the things we leave behind – not the value of ourselves, but the value of the things we do to make tomorrow a better place. We live and die by the sadness we're forced to face, clinging to the threads of life's fragility only because we understand that someone has to suffer the consequences of societal norms as a means to bring greater understanding to it tomorrow. We do that through our words, our paintings, our drawings, our songs, and any other means we can birth our pain and suffering into the world as a form of educational entertainment.

If love is but a mechanism to ensure a mating process, then an artist's pain is only a mechanism to ensure purity for a better tomorrow. The next time you see that painting that disturbs you, or you read a passing paragraph in a book, or you hear a song that hits an emotion you don't want to experience take it as a sign to pay more attention. The reason you feel the way you do about it isn't because the painting is ugly, those are easily ignored, it is because you don't want to face the emotion the painting is making you feel.

-Dustin S. Stover

And don't forget, if you want to support my writing then buy my collection of short stories.

Kindle: Happiness in a Void of Darkness

Nook: Happiness in a Void of Darkness

Dangerous Daisies

I tripped over daisies
on my way to work this morning.
It was this profoundly new experience,
one in which totally shocked
and stunned.

Graveled hands,
broken glasses,
and my pride shattered
upon the ground
as the audience gawked.

I tripped over bricks
in the past.
And I've tripped over ropes
because I put them in
bad locations.

Ego plays a part in those falls,
but daisies shouldn't be dangerous.
They should be frail,
weak and kind.

But this daisy
damaged me more
than the brick and rope
could dream.

Just Another Day at the Office

Susan, like always, beat me to the office.  It never seems to bother her that she beats the boss every day.  She deserves a raise.

I settle down in my chair after grabbing my cup of coffee from the break room, of course started by Susan as soon as she got in, and just enjoy the aroma.  Then, it happens, the real start of my day.

"..That's when I found out she had been cheating on me.  It was with an old coworker.  Apparently they had been... screwing.. God, just thinking about it makes me want to vomit... they had been doing it since I worked with him.  That was twelve years ago.  Twelve years of the two of them fucking... The two of them doing it behind my back... like... how did I not know?  How?  Just... I don't know how I was so stupid...."

"Before I got busted with all that coke, I mean, I was on my way up to being a big time executive.  Who gives a fuck if I was snorting coke like it was candy.  I mean, who gives a fuck?  I was fucking productive, man.  I tell you, I could work circles around every other fucking clown in that office, but no... no, I get fired.  I get fired because they found some white powder in my office.  Fuck them, man.  Fuck them in their assholes."

"I don't really know how to say it... I mean, I know he and I had an agreement.  I know we were supposed to do it together, but... I just couldn't... and I just... watched.  I didn't know what else to do.  I just watched, and cried.  I don't know what is worse, that it was the first time I saw a boy touch himself and it brought me to tears or if it seemed to make him more excited... Am I always going to cry when I see a guy touch themselves?  Do you think I'm a lesbian?"

I go into the break room for a refill on my cup of coffee, but I notice the back door is propped open by a little block of wood.  I walk to the door, open it, and find Susan taking a puff of a cigarette.

"Mind if I take a drag of that, Susie?"

"I didn't know you smoked."

"Yeah... You're right.  I guess today wouldn't be a good day to start, either."  I used my foot to put the block of wood back against the door frame before gently resting the door against it.

"My wife tells me I just make bad choices.  I mean, no fucking way, right?  It isn't my fault if I blow ten grand at the poker table. I mean, fuck, I could be on a winning streak and then, bam, wrong bet.  Shit, that's all down to luck.  It isn't a bad choice, it just means my lucky day hasn't struck yet."

"He touched me in my private parts.  That's what mommy told me to tell the police officer.  That's what I told the police officer."

"I blame it all on my mom.  She is the one who didn't teach me how hard life would be.  She let me have my favorite blankie in bed with me until I was 12!  It is her fault!  It is all her fault!"

"...I don't really know how to come to terms with it.  Every time I close my eyes, I see his hands wrapped so tightly around my wrists that my hands are going numb.  I can see outside my body, and I see my mouth screaming, but no sound is coming out.  I see his grin as he... I just..."

"Look, doc.  Are you a Doctor?  Did you earn that PhD?  Look, I don't belong here.  I don't have a problem.  It is just the fucking courts.  They ordered this shit.  If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be sitting here right now."

"I just pray every day and hope things get better, but nothing is changing.  My prayers just aren't getting answered, but maybe that just means that God's plan for me is to suffer like this.  Maybe God just wants me to suffer for all the sins I've committed in the past.  Maybe that is why he isn't answering my prayers."

"I bet you just doodle all day long in that notebook of yours.  Seeing patients day in and day out, have that little notepad out pretending to be jotting down bullshit about your patients."

As they say this, I am just doodling.  It is the fifteenth time this patient has been in here and it is the fifteenth hour he has spent accusing me of doodling in my notebook.  It is now the eighth time I've actually doodled in my notebook.

"I... I know I am so quiet.... my wife tells me all the time that I need to talk to her, just talk... but... I don't even like to order food at the fast food drive through.  She says that our sex life is boring and she wants to spice things up by wearing sexy lingerie.  I don't know how to tell her that I want to be the one wearing it...."

"Well, that ends our session.  If you see Susan at the.."

"Yeah, yeah.  I fucking know.  Susan.  Front counter.  Next appointment."

I close my notebook.

"Have a good day."

I pour out the remaining bit of coffee into the break room's sink, watch the black liquid form a small puddle near the drain, refusing to join the rest, and then twist the knob to force the water to wash the puddle away.

Just another day at the office.





Written by Dustin S. Stover

Irrationally Fearful

This is quite personal for me and, as such, I'm going to get quite personal.

I will preface this for those who do not know - I am married to a Brazilian woman.  One who has not yet received her green card, but will legally hold it in the near future.

Now, before Donald Trump was elected, she could buy a plane ticket and get special permission to fly back to Brazil to visit family and then come back here.  This, the United States of America, is where she will be living her life for the foreseeable future, as she has absolutely no plans of moving to any other country - I, on the other hand, will be working diligently to convince her to move with me to some other undetermined European country.  That is irrelevant.

My wife has not seen her daughter in over a year, a sacrifice my wife made to come here because she could make more money cleaning houses than she could working in her home country, money she could then take back with her to create a better life for her and her daughter.  We met and fell in love, got married, and now we're working towards getting her daughter here.  That, however, requires time.

A couple months ago my wife booked a plane, immigration lawyer stating that there should be very minimal problems - a few questions when she arrived back here in the States and she'd be on her way as they would have no reason to deport her.

Now, all that changed.  With Donald Trump's recent ban on immigrants from the seven Muslim majority countries, and even though my wife is not affiliated at all with those countries, our immigration lawyer has advised her to cancel her flight entirely.  This is not done for fear that she'd be confused to be a Muslim, or from the Middle East.  No, this is because now there is a stigma drawn on every single immigrant in this country.

So now you may be saying, "but Dustin, your wife worked here illegally.  She didn't pay taxes!  Shame on her!"  Maybe you're saying to yourself, "this country has too many people in it already!  She doesn't belong here, she should go back to her own country!"

Yeah, I'm not going to change your mind on that.  If those are the way you feel then next time someone offers you 20 bucks to drive them some place turn the money down, or 50 dollars to turn a wrench, 100 dollars for a sucky-sucky job - turn them all down.  Guess what, you've worked illegally, too.  We all have.

As for her being from another country, if you go back two, three, four generations then your family was from somewhere else, too.  Maybe it was a bit longer than that, but go back far enough and not even Native Americans are native to this country.  Get the fuck over it.

The point is that when you place a ban on people coming into this country, you're not preventing the bad people from coming into this country.  Sure, an ISIS operator could be sneaking in with those Syrian refugees, but statistically it isn't happening.  Those rapists you're so worried about from Mexico?  Yeah, statistically, more rapes happen by legal citizens in such a large amount that it isn't even worth bringing up foreigners as a whole as rapists by comparison.

The same logic that the gun-toting conservatives use with the whole banning guns won't get guns off the street is the exact same logic that can be applied to banning immigrants.  So long as it is easier for immigrants to make more money here than in other countries then they will be finding a means to cross that border.  So long as we continue to bomb countries in the Middle East, we will have terrorists - unless, of course, we kill every other country.

All these bans do is encourage more problems, not less.  Now those refugees who desperately need help are going to see that we're closing our doors to them, the most powerful country in the world, and they are going to grow bitter from that.  A country in which has more guns than any other country.  A country which has 11.1 MILLION people who have a concealed carry permit alone.  A country who has a police force so well equipped that it would rival the military of the countries on the ban list.  This is, by definition, irrational fear.

And because of this fear, this irrational fear, my wife now has to go even longer without seeing her daughter.  We were officially told my the immigration lawyer that it would be a bad idea for my wife to go back to Brazil to visit her family (note: the lawyer did not tell her not to go, but rather just that it will be very ill advised to go).  That is simply not a risk my wife or I am willing to take.  This is just my wife, though.  The immigrants all throughout this country are in the same position, whether they are refugees or otherwise.

Now I will ask you, if you're so willing to force someone to go a year without seeing their children, when will you go a year without seeing yours?

-Dustin Stover

Politics and the Curse of Conformity

I've been trying to get my mind on writing.  Well, that is to say, writing about something other than the political atmosphere.  Even the short stories I attempt to write in my spare time end up being about a compulsive liar who bullies his way into getting everything that he wants.

That is to say, all of my writing has been ruined with this smear of crud so thick that it is impossible to see through, and so hardened from the sheer amount compressed on the window that it can't be chipped away at, either.

So, I suppose, I'm just going to write about it.

I'm not upset at Donald Trump being elected.  I had assumed he had a relatively fair shot at it, even if I tried to avoid the thought.  I've not been a Democrat nor Republican ever in my life, but it is easy to see how voting in a Republican takes steps back away from the things that enhance human life - that is to say, science, distribution of wealth, and civil liberties.

I often times neglect just how religious over half of this country is.  I suppose that being an atheist and having to separate myself from the masses in regards to religion has that effect on me.  I understand how harshly I get judged for just that singular belief when everyone around me believes so readily in something that has absolutely no evidence.

And I suppose that is the thing about it all.  The people who voted in this bully as President of the United States of America are very readily available to believe things with no grounds of fact or evidence.  A person who says he a wholesome Christian man can get away with also saying that he grabs women by the pussy, could shoot a man in the street and get away with it, and also convince the masses that conflicts of interest won't be an issue because his sons will be running his businesses.

It is also easy to forget that the President of the United States of America is, in fact, just another fallible human being who is subject to the same mistakes and complications of everyone else's life - all while making choices that impact the entire future of a country.

The problem, of course, with Trump is not that he is human, but he has surrounded himself with people who are paid to agree with his ego.  No matter how wrong he is on a subject, someone is standing there to tell him that he is right.

I fully understand people's concerns about the future for the average American.  I fully understand that the amount of support that Donald Trump was awarded was because of his rhetoric about the average American making a living doing manufacturing jobs and the jobs that evaporated up as the country scrambles to make jobs for those people in other fields, and generally failing.

Those same people have told me that they are going to be watching Trump closely to make sure he does what he says he is going to do, but when the only evidence of his doing what he is saying he is doing is his word on the topic, well, again, it boils down to that word I've yet to mention in this post - faith.  Faith, by definition, is the believing of something without evidence.

Now we've got an entire presidential campaign that was run on faith.  The difference between this and every other presidential candidate of the past decades is that we don't know the history of the candidate in politics.  We knew how Hillary Clinton was going to run the country because she has history in politics.  Even Obama, with a relatively short stint in professional politics, displayed signs of how he would be President.  Now we have someone who has run businesses with the entire basis of his actions being guided by self interest - how to make more money for his businesses.  Faith is, of course, required to believe he will act in the interest of the masses as opposed to himself as he sits behind that big desk in the oval office.

Every President of my lifetime has done some horrible things - from Clinton's agreement to let jobs go over seas (or his getting a blow job by an intern but I fail to see how doing that with a consenting woman is any worse than forcibly grabbing a pussy), Bush's campaign to collect every piece of data on the Americans he guided, and Obama's drone strikes in the Middle East.

I find myself struggling to support any President as a whole, but all have done really great things as well for huge groups of people - Clinton's economy was the strongest I've seen it in my life time for the average person.  Bush helped with the AIDS relief in Africa.  Obama by legalizing gay marriage, finally giving those people a right that they have deserved their entire lives, but never been granted previously.

It is easy to say, "I'm a Democrat" or "I'm a Republican," but that is just the first step in being blind to the bad side of the party you follow and ignore the good of the opposing side.

When Obama was nominated as Democrat for the election in 2008 I said some things that I still stick to - the best hope was for him to do exactly as he said he was going to do in four years, then they needed to elect a neutral party for the following four years.  That didn't happen and now we are faced to deal with the consequences of that not happening.  Again, no one wins.

There is also a piece of evidence in all this that is staring everyone in the face, but overlooked quite readily.  When was the last time the Democratic or Republican party has served longer than eight years?  That in itself should be telling you that this system of election isn't working for the people.  If the Republicans were better than the Democrats, they'd win far more frequently.  If the Democrats were better than the Republicans then they'd win far more frequently.  Neither party is doing a good job, they are just doing a good thing here and there to keep their supporters firmly in place.

-Dustin S. Stover