My name is Hal Townsend. I’m twenty four years old living in some nowhere town just outside of New York city. Not too outside to be a country bumpkin, not too deep in to be a city slicker. I merely exist in one of those millions upon billions upon trillions of places that you pass sa pamamagitan ng without much notice. Those small towns that you pay no mind to where people just go to stop existing. People that don’t really live, but don’t have a desire to kill themselves. They just go there to stop being. But if you’re born in one of these places, you either just accept your lot in life and just decide to remain in your little piece of nothing or try to fight your way out tooth and nail like a cornered animal. Unfortunately, as far as cornered mga hayop go, I was as ferocious as a three legged rabbit. I didn’t really excel at anything in my entire life. I didn’t see a reason to. My mom was a nurse who would have to clean up old people for a living. She’d go to their place, hear them discuss the good old days, hear how their bowels don’t work and then come home, make some crap tasting microwave hapunan and then would wake up the araw after. Pops, he was different. He had a sort of mental relapse when my sister died. He just spent his days in the house working on all these custom bikes for some reason. I don’t know what, I guess my sister was a bike enthusiast. I dunno. I was only like three months when she got killed in that bus accident that was sadly the only thing our town was known for. The Hamilton School Bus Disaster where the bus got stuck on a burol and due to some budget cuts led to the bus rolling down the burol in the snow and thus crashed into a ravine. Of the thirty two kids on that bus, twelve of them got injured and seven were killed. That included Melleni. I mean, yeah, it sucks, but what could I say about it as a three taon old baby? Damn, sorry for your loss, but I’m still a kid and I need some attention too? I wasn’t mad or anything, I get it. Work to feed the soul, no superman, that usual shit you hear about. But when you come tahanan from school every araw to a tahanan and your parents only mumble a few words to each other at the hapunan mesa before my mom goes to kama at 6 PM with the sun still up to do it all over again tomorrow and my dad is up all night trying to figure out the right tune a kampanilya should be making, and all I got to keep me company was a few of my burnout friends, a TV, and the local dead end small town committees like a playground, the small family store run sa pamamagitan ng the friendly Holocaust survivor, and whatever abandoned plots of land we can break shit in, is it any surprise that I turned out as cynical and monotone as I did?
I wasn’t a shit kid in school? I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t a model student. I didn’t do any sports or after school activities. I didn’t aim to do my best on any of the exams or projects. If I got an A+ on something I had a mild understanding of, then cool. If I got a C, whatever. I got a couple Ds. It was a sort of “I give enough of a shit to not do this again, but not enough to excel in anything” sort of attitude. I mean, in ten years, or fuck even five, who’s gonna remember Jessica the valedictorian who had that really moving speech? Or who’s gonna remember Rebecca who was selling weed in the bathroom and was fucking her boyfriend’s best friend while he was busy being a closeted homosexual? Who’s gonna remember Mikey who died from a drunk driving accident in his dad’s Ford truck? Sure, you may got one of those teachers that was like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society that really changed your life and made you want to do better, but for the rest of the population, all our teachers were just these deadpan glaze eyed Night of the Living Dead looking motherfuckers who really didn’t care one way or another what was going on. At the end of the day, you were just a job to them. Another kid in the long listahan of kids that came before and after you. You really think that any of that is gonna come back to them if you told them “Hey, Mr. Robertson, remember me, I was the kid who got a B- on that english exam and would always talk to my friend in the back of the class about how sick Evangelion was”. No, of course not. Cause to you, there was only one Mr. Robertson. But to him, you're just another Hal in the ever growing sea of Hals. I wasn’t the worst kid in class, but I made it a fucking artform to just glide through my school life and leave zero impression on everyone. Sure, had a few cool mga kaibigan on the way, which I guess for some high school grads like the cheerleader that got pregnant at eighteen and looks super busted nowadays or the kid who became a skinhead after a run in with some Nazi punks, I think I could have had a worse outcome.
You got Bishop. Shocking that I got to be mga kaibigan with a guy like that, but when you're as socially inept as me, I guess it isn’t too hard. The kid came from one of the richer sides of town, lives in a mansion with his own personal gardener if you can believe that. He doesn’t really like to talk about what his dad does for a job, just that he’s a negotiator. Sometimes we like to joke that he’s like a Goodfellas sinag Liotta type that just breaks the kneecaps of some guys for not paying and knows how to make someone squeal. Which is made even funnier considering Bishop's grandparents were Italian immigrants. But if you walked into his bedroom, it was like going into a portal to another dimension. You go through this place with a chandelier, like something out of Beauty and the Beast. And in this joint, you go to his little corner of the house and it’s a filled with all these death metal posters and crazy DVDs, some fucked up shit from Japan. I sometimes wonder if Bishop was just doing this to spite his parents or if the guy was really gonna grow up to be a serial killer. Since we’re still friends, I guess it was the latter. But ya know, could be a late bloomer.
My other best friend was Rich, which was some sad irony since the guy was worse off than I was. I mean, I wasn’t poor, but I sure as hell wasn’t what you’d call easy living. But Rich practically lived in the house from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not exactly helped sa pamamagitan ng when I would see his parents and their seven other kids running around trying to shoot the stray Pusa with a BB gun. And of course, as if the crazy death family cult wasn’t already perfectly set, of course the family were extreme catholics. Rich was cool, though. I think I knew he was when I was just pagbaba some magazine about how some celebrity, I forgot which one, was a closted gay, and he just said, “Eh, let him pag-ibig whoever he wants.” So at least he wasn’t completely brainwashed. No issue with Catholics, just their church and its systems, that’s all. Rich didn’t really like it when we went to his house, especially when just finding a place to hang was difficult, so it was a lot easier to just not bother.
The other friend was Lola. Ya know, like the Kinks song. Which is really funny. Not a lot of people read the lyrics, but you’d know that it was a song about a transvestite. People just hear a good beat and don’t read the important stuff and what value the song has beyond that. Anyway, I say funny cause… Well, Lola wasn’t always called Lola, but I’m told that it’s impolite to refer to their birth name. Anyway, Lola was the ideal dude. Always worked on cars, had an understanding of tools at the age of twelve, would even go deer hunting and made his- Sorry, her own jerky. So imagine the shock when I met up with her on graduation and she was just… a woman now. I mean, cool for her I guess, but just surprising to see. The crazy thing is that none of those things changed. She still worked on cars, even helped out her dad with repairs from time to time. She still knew how to work tools, and she still went hunting out in the country. Just ya know, as a woman. I’m glad that Lola was pretty understanding of the whole situation, cause man, that took a while for all of us to get used to.
That was us, the fearsome foursome. Well madami like the Questionable Quartet. We were all a varying degree of burnouts and losers in our own way, or at least that was the plan in high school. Bishop had long since gone off to study in Yale to work in computers, and Rich had pretty much gone to work at a factory just outside of Buffalo to help pay for the family since he still wanted to ipakita some support. Even Lola got her own place though she never left the town, so it was pretty much just us two going through the things while I lived in my parents house. What did I do? Well, I pretty much dedicated my work life to just working as a simple Shell gas station. And let me just say, I don’t ever see myself as doing greater things. I won’t deny that I was a person who never dared take risks in my life. Why take risks when the fear of failure is so great. Sure, you gain nothing just sa pamamagitan ng doing the same stuff over and over, but at least you never have to worry about getting hurt. But this gas station shit, this wasn’t it. I don’t know how anyone could do any of this for a living. If there was ever a moment where I wanted to go back and change something, it was going to that goddamn job interview for this place. You wouldn’t think it was so bad. “Cheer up, Hal. There are people out there who have it way worse than you. There are war torn countries where kids see their families get killed and get drafted into armies as child soldiers and have to eat the hearts of their enemies. You just sit around in a gas station all day”. I get that. But I’m not in those war torn countries. I’m in America. So why the fuck am I forced to stand at a counter all day, having to explain to a woman that her card is backwards while another woman is telling me that her son who is screaming about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles just spilled slushy all over herself and now she wants a free drink, all this while some guy is stuck in the toilet in the bathroom and my co worker is too busy smoking weed in his car to come in and help me and every segundo I don’t make any progress in this transaction, the line gets one new person that I’m gonna have to explain the same card bullshit to again? I’m starting to think I have social issues.
So you probably ask yourself, whoever you are. Why do you keep doing it then, Hal? If you hate your job so much, why don’t you just fucking quit? The customers hate you, your boss hates you, and the coworkers there don’t really give to shits if you leave cause as far as their concerned your just the guy who hides in the back checking his phone for thirty minutos pretending to clean out the hurno for the nasty asno food, but god forbid they have a five minuto smoke break. If you hate your job in retail so much, why don’t you just quit and find somewhere else? It’s like I sinabi before, I don’t like risk taking. I don’t see why I need to look for another job when this one is paying well and it’s only eight hours a day, five days a week of a whole larger day. It’s just part of a bigger picture. Make money to do something else with your life. I dunno what that something else is. I dunno, I’ll figure it out. I’m 24. Sure, I sinabi that at 20, and at 17 and at 12, but nothing is ever set in stone. Life is just one long ever present escalator. It’s always going up and we don’t know where the hell it’s gonna take us, but all we can do is just take the escalator up and wait to see where we end up. But you see, that’s the funny thing about life. Sometimes life is a spoiled shit kid that just likes to fuck with you from time to time. And sometimes it just likes to make that escalator of yours break down and come to a stop. What is an escalator that can’t move? Just stairs. So instead, your forced to make those steps your self instead of letting the escalator take you to where you gotta go. Of course not everything can be taken for you. I hate having things like this happen, having my perfectly average life fucked with. Sure, doesn’t happen all the time. But it does. I just thought I could ride the escalator all the way through life, no problems, no hassles. But eventually, when you least expect it, that escalator’s gotta become stairs at some point.
On one faithful autumn day, we all got the call. Rich killed himself.
I wasn’t a shit kid in school? I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t a model student. I didn’t do any sports or after school activities. I didn’t aim to do my best on any of the exams or projects. If I got an A+ on something I had a mild understanding of, then cool. If I got a C, whatever. I got a couple Ds. It was a sort of “I give enough of a shit to not do this again, but not enough to excel in anything” sort of attitude. I mean, in ten years, or fuck even five, who’s gonna remember Jessica the valedictorian who had that really moving speech? Or who’s gonna remember Rebecca who was selling weed in the bathroom and was fucking her boyfriend’s best friend while he was busy being a closeted homosexual? Who’s gonna remember Mikey who died from a drunk driving accident in his dad’s Ford truck? Sure, you may got one of those teachers that was like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society that really changed your life and made you want to do better, but for the rest of the population, all our teachers were just these deadpan glaze eyed Night of the Living Dead looking motherfuckers who really didn’t care one way or another what was going on. At the end of the day, you were just a job to them. Another kid in the long listahan of kids that came before and after you. You really think that any of that is gonna come back to them if you told them “Hey, Mr. Robertson, remember me, I was the kid who got a B- on that english exam and would always talk to my friend in the back of the class about how sick Evangelion was”. No, of course not. Cause to you, there was only one Mr. Robertson. But to him, you're just another Hal in the ever growing sea of Hals. I wasn’t the worst kid in class, but I made it a fucking artform to just glide through my school life and leave zero impression on everyone. Sure, had a few cool mga kaibigan on the way, which I guess for some high school grads like the cheerleader that got pregnant at eighteen and looks super busted nowadays or the kid who became a skinhead after a run in with some Nazi punks, I think I could have had a worse outcome.
You got Bishop. Shocking that I got to be mga kaibigan with a guy like that, but when you're as socially inept as me, I guess it isn’t too hard. The kid came from one of the richer sides of town, lives in a mansion with his own personal gardener if you can believe that. He doesn’t really like to talk about what his dad does for a job, just that he’s a negotiator. Sometimes we like to joke that he’s like a Goodfellas sinag Liotta type that just breaks the kneecaps of some guys for not paying and knows how to make someone squeal. Which is made even funnier considering Bishop's grandparents were Italian immigrants. But if you walked into his bedroom, it was like going into a portal to another dimension. You go through this place with a chandelier, like something out of Beauty and the Beast. And in this joint, you go to his little corner of the house and it’s a filled with all these death metal posters and crazy DVDs, some fucked up shit from Japan. I sometimes wonder if Bishop was just doing this to spite his parents or if the guy was really gonna grow up to be a serial killer. Since we’re still friends, I guess it was the latter. But ya know, could be a late bloomer.
My other best friend was Rich, which was some sad irony since the guy was worse off than I was. I mean, I wasn’t poor, but I sure as hell wasn’t what you’d call easy living. But Rich practically lived in the house from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not exactly helped sa pamamagitan ng when I would see his parents and their seven other kids running around trying to shoot the stray Pusa with a BB gun. And of course, as if the crazy death family cult wasn’t already perfectly set, of course the family were extreme catholics. Rich was cool, though. I think I knew he was when I was just pagbaba some magazine about how some celebrity, I forgot which one, was a closted gay, and he just said, “Eh, let him pag-ibig whoever he wants.” So at least he wasn’t completely brainwashed. No issue with Catholics, just their church and its systems, that’s all. Rich didn’t really like it when we went to his house, especially when just finding a place to hang was difficult, so it was a lot easier to just not bother.
The other friend was Lola. Ya know, like the Kinks song. Which is really funny. Not a lot of people read the lyrics, but you’d know that it was a song about a transvestite. People just hear a good beat and don’t read the important stuff and what value the song has beyond that. Anyway, I say funny cause… Well, Lola wasn’t always called Lola, but I’m told that it’s impolite to refer to their birth name. Anyway, Lola was the ideal dude. Always worked on cars, had an understanding of tools at the age of twelve, would even go deer hunting and made his- Sorry, her own jerky. So imagine the shock when I met up with her on graduation and she was just… a woman now. I mean, cool for her I guess, but just surprising to see. The crazy thing is that none of those things changed. She still worked on cars, even helped out her dad with repairs from time to time. She still knew how to work tools, and she still went hunting out in the country. Just ya know, as a woman. I’m glad that Lola was pretty understanding of the whole situation, cause man, that took a while for all of us to get used to.
That was us, the fearsome foursome. Well madami like the Questionable Quartet. We were all a varying degree of burnouts and losers in our own way, or at least that was the plan in high school. Bishop had long since gone off to study in Yale to work in computers, and Rich had pretty much gone to work at a factory just outside of Buffalo to help pay for the family since he still wanted to ipakita some support. Even Lola got her own place though she never left the town, so it was pretty much just us two going through the things while I lived in my parents house. What did I do? Well, I pretty much dedicated my work life to just working as a simple Shell gas station. And let me just say, I don’t ever see myself as doing greater things. I won’t deny that I was a person who never dared take risks in my life. Why take risks when the fear of failure is so great. Sure, you gain nothing just sa pamamagitan ng doing the same stuff over and over, but at least you never have to worry about getting hurt. But this gas station shit, this wasn’t it. I don’t know how anyone could do any of this for a living. If there was ever a moment where I wanted to go back and change something, it was going to that goddamn job interview for this place. You wouldn’t think it was so bad. “Cheer up, Hal. There are people out there who have it way worse than you. There are war torn countries where kids see their families get killed and get drafted into armies as child soldiers and have to eat the hearts of their enemies. You just sit around in a gas station all day”. I get that. But I’m not in those war torn countries. I’m in America. So why the fuck am I forced to stand at a counter all day, having to explain to a woman that her card is backwards while another woman is telling me that her son who is screaming about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles just spilled slushy all over herself and now she wants a free drink, all this while some guy is stuck in the toilet in the bathroom and my co worker is too busy smoking weed in his car to come in and help me and every segundo I don’t make any progress in this transaction, the line gets one new person that I’m gonna have to explain the same card bullshit to again? I’m starting to think I have social issues.
So you probably ask yourself, whoever you are. Why do you keep doing it then, Hal? If you hate your job so much, why don’t you just fucking quit? The customers hate you, your boss hates you, and the coworkers there don’t really give to shits if you leave cause as far as their concerned your just the guy who hides in the back checking his phone for thirty minutos pretending to clean out the hurno for the nasty asno food, but god forbid they have a five minuto smoke break. If you hate your job in retail so much, why don’t you just quit and find somewhere else? It’s like I sinabi before, I don’t like risk taking. I don’t see why I need to look for another job when this one is paying well and it’s only eight hours a day, five days a week of a whole larger day. It’s just part of a bigger picture. Make money to do something else with your life. I dunno what that something else is. I dunno, I’ll figure it out. I’m 24. Sure, I sinabi that at 20, and at 17 and at 12, but nothing is ever set in stone. Life is just one long ever present escalator. It’s always going up and we don’t know where the hell it’s gonna take us, but all we can do is just take the escalator up and wait to see where we end up. But you see, that’s the funny thing about life. Sometimes life is a spoiled shit kid that just likes to fuck with you from time to time. And sometimes it just likes to make that escalator of yours break down and come to a stop. What is an escalator that can’t move? Just stairs. So instead, your forced to make those steps your self instead of letting the escalator take you to where you gotta go. Of course not everything can be taken for you. I hate having things like this happen, having my perfectly average life fucked with. Sure, doesn’t happen all the time. But it does. I just thought I could ride the escalator all the way through life, no problems, no hassles. But eventually, when you least expect it, that escalator’s gotta become stairs at some point.
On one faithful autumn day, we all got the call. Rich killed himself.