Thread: Hullaballoo [Warning: Strong Language]

Short intro to a potentially short-ish story:

… And all the hullabaloo in the world won’t save you now, boy
“The market is going down. It went down to a damn near cutthroat level last night, and I don’t really think it will stop any time soon, you know. Maybe it’ll plummet so far, far down that people will start flying out their windows and painting streets crimson red… just like they did back in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The horse’s head has been cut. You ain’t going nowhere now, son. You in the deep end. You looked the damn horse in the mouth and it swallowed you damn near whole, and you are in the belly of a chimera now, bub. You done for. Good luck came and went, and you missed it with a terrific splat against the virginal white wall. You adulterated bastard. You stain. You foreign substance… and such is the way of money, my friend. High risk stocks; angelic. Mutual funds; the fucking devil. The only way to survive is to get your feet in the slime, muck about, and damn near drown. And then grab that fucking branch and pull. Pull until your hands are raw. And then you will get somewhere”
…
My friend once said this. I don’t believe him. I think being safe has its pleasant advantages, its pleasantries, if I might say so. I was safe all my life and I am pretty sure I got what I wanted. I have my own apartment for Christ sakes, and I’m only twenty-two. And all I did was be steady. I didn’t rock the boat, or make any big leaps of faith or nothing like that at all. I just saved up. That’s it. And I did it without getting arrested, or mugged, or falling into mud, or all that crap my friend does on purpose because of that attitude he has. He thinks if you don’t fall into Satan’s Pit, God will push you over into it anyway, so might as well “enjoy the fall.” I mean I like the guy and all, don’t get it the wrong way or anything, but he won’t last long. He’ll burn out. I feel sort of sorry for him, you know. It’s like Evil Kneivel jumping Snake River over and over. The fall is hard, the landing is rough, and the reward is nowhere in sight. I don’t see what’s so wrong in the quiet American lifestyle. It’s quaint, and it’s damn comfortable, if I might say so. And there is always fun to be had. But the thing is you can never allow yourself to have too much fun. If you do, the table flips. You fall hard on your ass. It’s not pretty. You wouldn’t want that. You don’t want to make any mistakes.
…
I said that two years ago. I was such a piece of normalized manure, and I admit to it fully, heart and soul and all that, ok. I admit it. Forgive me, or don’t. Just leave me be in my terrifically bare and horrid - yet wonderful - existence.
I fucking sold my apartment. I hated those white walls. They always suffocated me, straight jacket like and all, you know. I thought the four-fold poster’s I got every month in the magazine would make things better, but they just got me so fucking depressed. I remember looking at them at night, when the moon made them visible and all, and thinking to myself how in God’s stinking name are these posters supposed to make me feel better. They did nothing. I felt like a fucking empty void, laying there, looking at those damn posters. I didn’t feel alive, I didn’t feel like I existed. Everything around me was a static image of what used to be me. I was gone, my friends. I was in purgatory. I don’t know when the decision got in my head, but I remember I was damn grateful for it. I decided to sell my prison off to some other poor loser. I was sort of afraid for him at the time, because I still had sympathy back then, you know. I didn’t want the sorry bugger to go through what I had gone through. But I was rushing for time. Rushing for sanity. I sold the place for cheap, left and called my friend. I hadn’t called him in over a year, but the bastard remembered me. I told him I didn’t feel good. I told him the posters didn’t help, and I asked him why the hell am I feeling this way. What’s the reason for this sudden nausea, this contempt for my apartment? He told me something like:
“I warned you. I warned you a hell of a lot of times. Fuck depression. It’s not that, you’re living wrong. You have to change, man. You stand still, you got no momentum. No momentum makes you ghost.”
“A ghost?” I asked.
“A fucking ghost. A static image. It’s like being frozen. You can’t go nowhere. Maybe, but you’ll never feel any progress. Same spot, always. You got no momentum, you burned your image to the screen. Humans are born to move, have momentum. But you burned out, sorry. At least you saved your fucking ashes… I’m going to have to resurrect your sorry ass.”
“And how are you going to do that?” I was getting interested.
“Just get over to my flat as soon as you can. I’ll tell you how to get there.”
His directions were terrible. There were way too many unnecessary turns. At one point I was apparently supposed to go in a circle. But he told me to follow them precisely. I knew this was his strange way of adjusting my view, metaphorically taking a new direction, and I was desperate at that point, so I did it. I went over to his place following his pointless directions. Only they weren’t pointless. At the midpoint of the circle I was supposed to make I hawked an old, tarnished and rotting building. It was a perverted place, with a few porno magazines and a collection of racing papers and ripped financials articles laying haphazardly around the building. Burned yellow black walls were visible through a gaping, destroyed entrance. I’m pretty sure they were virginal white - those yellow walls - at some point. They were not anymore. I don’t know if this place was supposed to make me feel better about my own situation or worse because the world was such a shithole.

your writer's voice comes out strong and interesting.

A very captivating intro paragraph unfolds the reader to the narrator's dystopia.

I would very much like to see where this goes as this is only the intro.