Cement is such a grim choice in flooring. I have trouble picturing a person curled up on a cement floor with a favorite book in front of a fireplace. Maybe a furnace, or a water heater, but they don’t give off any light. You only choose cement for the rooms people never really go into. You put on your slippers and bring a flashlight when you venture into the cement-floored rooms of your home.
“Hey, you ready man?”
Ugh. Pffffaaaawww. No. Go away.
I bet every last room in this place has a cement floor. Maybe there’s a staff lounge or something with a carpet, but even then it’ll be one of those blue-gray carpets, short and stiff, made with plastic from recycled pill bottles. 60% post-consumer materials; may contain despair.
Oh man, great song idea.
“Bro, come on.”
That’s Don. He’s a son of a bitch. I should answer him, but I’m not ready just yet and he’s unlikely to accept that. It’s best that we ignore him for now, I think.
You may not be able to tell, but I don’t really want to be here right now. I’d hate to be that guy, but this place is kind of lame, and the stupid ass floor in here is totally harshing my vibe or whatever. I’m not cool enough for that last sentence, so please just disregard it and we’ll get back to work on finding me a way out of here.
“Eddie! Come on man.”
Don thinks he’s so cool. He wears a girl’s jacket. It’s leather with a built-in belt, silver trim, and oversize metal buttons. It looks pretty badass on his girlfriends, but Don just kind of looks like a space lesbian.
As for me, I’m wearing a hoodie with a picture of a diamond on it, as a statement on materialism which I’ve not really thought through just yet. Nobody gets it, including me, but that’s fine. This woman who works here asked if it was my birthstone. I said yes.
“Your people await, brosef.”
“Like five of them,” I say with a weird snorting noise because I am so totally that guy right now. He fucking baited me. Wah.
“Don’t be such a bitch, Danny Bonadouchebag,” says the fratboy demon possessing David Bowie’s vagina’s coat. “More like twelve hundred, and half of them want to fuck you for reasons nobody understands, so let’s swing our dicks around a bit and buy ourselves new systems.”
I hope he means skeletal systems. I feel like a big, floppy poo. A literal poo. Imagine a poo trying to stand up – it’s completely ridiculous. Now I’ve got you imagining an anthropomorphic poo. I should have said that I feel like a ragdoll, but for some reason ragdolls are all girls to me. Poo is gender-neutral.
I have to go now. Will you come with me?
In a way, cement floors are actually kinder on tired feet. I don’t know why that would be, and I’m not a doctor, so this is only a theory for the time being, but I like the way it sounds. The world sometimes has a way of working the way I assume that it might.
“Dude.” Don stops and asks me, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Uh?”
“Your guitar?”
“Oh. I thought it would be out there.”
“Not on this tour, Michael Jacksoff.”
There used to be a guy who would carry my guitar around for me. We never really spoke. I had another guy for speaking; an agent guy. If ever my guitar guy did something wrong I’d just tell my agent guy to explain it to him, and for the most part I managed to avoid direct contact. I still have my agent, but I guess he fired the guitar guy. I’ll have to call my accountant guy later to ask why I can’t afford as many minions anymore, then fire him and laugh ironically.
Ah, there she is. My adequately large and somewhat pretty red guitar. She doesn’t have a name, but I consider guitars to be girls, like ragdolls, and cats. Though a guitar is also a phallic symbol, so perhaps my guitar is having a gender crisis. Maybe I should introduce him to my hermaphrodite poo.
Some asshole from a band I’d never heard of once explained to me that my strings didn’t have enough action. Don’t worry, I thought he had made that term up, too, but as it turns out, action has something to do with the distance between the neck of the guitar and the strings and how hard you have to press them. I told my agent to tell my guitar guy to lower the action even more, out of spite. Now my guitar sounds terrible and my hands are slightly softer. Win/win.
Oh no. I can hear them. At the end of this long, cement hallway there are two large, metal doors, and beyond those there is a harem of sorts. A cacophonous, writhing mass of teenage girls and their ugly little boyfriends. All of them waiting for me, so that they might get my attention by singing the wrong lyrics out of key, clapping off the beat, or yelling in my face during quiet moments of scripted emotional vulnerability.
“Here we go!”
Here we go.
