strangedaze

HAVE I GOT YOUR ATTENTION YET? was written in wide-tipped felt marker lengthwise across a folded sheet of lined paper. The half-moon tears on its corner made it look like it was taken from a coiled notebook, which it was. While watching pornography, Lars tore that particular page out of a notebook he should have used for his remedial math class and signed it at the bottom: QUENTIN CASH. He liked the way the name sounded, its sense of rhythm. Not like Lars Smith, which sounded like his parents glued together the two ugliest sounding syllables they could find and taped the result to his face while he was still drooling in the crib. The piece of paper upon which Lars scrawled his gaudy pseudonym was placed in a manila tag folder, its insides lined with bubblewrap to ensure that once it was sealed and sent away, the videocassette that he intended to include would not be damaged by the rough hands of the Canadian postal service.

Of course, the package was discovered and thus never mailed.

Lars’s room was upside down; all of the appliances, cupboards, drawers, and all other items worth mentioning had been fashioned and arranged in such a way that they were never any higher than waist level. Even Lars’s collection of movie prints and posters were tacked to walls at crotch height, so that if one gazed at a decline, one’s eyes would be met with an explosion of color and cluttered feng shui. Conversely, if one were staring straight ahead, there would simply be BLANK. Unless you were in a wheel chair, like Lars. Then all bets were off. The bed looked like Lars, in the sense that it was also missing its legs and looked like its lower half had been eaten by the floor. Even though it would be more economical, his mother refused to have her son sleep on a mattress like a homeless person or, worse still, a drug addict, so she went to the most skilled artisan she could find and had a frame custom crafted, one that looked good and stylish on the ground.

Lars was a good student only when he thought that the lesson at hand would make him more appealing to Briana. For example, he memorized chunks of Shakespeare, ensuring that should the situation arise he would be able to recite whole soliloquies to Briana, impressing her with the seemingly limitless expanse of his learnedness. For example, he studied music and film closely, because it’s important, Lars thought, to keep his index finger on disciplines that were widely regarded as the pulse of culture. For example, he paid especially close attention in home economics class, so that when he cooked for her on their first date, she would eat her fist-sized portion in a state of bliss and pleasure him orally afterwards, the sweet sauce of his pad thai STILL ON HER LIPS and transferring to his penis. And so on.

Surprisingly enough, sexual education was his lowest mark. The watered down x’s and o’s version of human mating rituals and the reproductive organs with which they are enacted simply did not hold Lars’s interest. And how could they? Full of plot twists and familiar sexual-archetypes, the films his father produced were glitzier, faster paced and more explicit, and, of course, quite often starred Briana, so any subsequent non-pornographic visual display scarcely registered.

Lars had a glossy still-clip of Briana Banks in mid-orgasm sandwiched between his mattress and the bedframe. The picture itself was centered between the transparent lips of two plastic pages, the kind that could be opened and closed and used for storing vintage comics. Lars had a ritual whereby he would prop himself up against his bedpost with the picture flat on the floor in front of him, balancing on the blunt protrusions God had given him instead of legs. He would masturbate furiously, eyes fixated with Zen-like focus on the video he had placed into the DVD player earlier. Sometimes he would wrap one end of his navy blue bed sheet around his throat and the other around the lamp screwed into the wall over his bed. Sensing his built up orgasm, Lars would lower his body just enough to constrict the sheet around his larynx and partially asphyxiate him. The sleazy foreign porn magazines that his father kept around the house for research purposes told him that the French call the orgasm petite mort, or the little death. Briana Banks wrapped a scarf around her neck and pretended to hang herself in a scene involving a convicted felon on death row. Choking himself usually doubled the amount of semen he expelled onto her picture, creating a one and a half ounce pool instead of a single fingerlike strand. Lars liked the feeling of dying ‘only a little bit’. It didn’t make him feel alive, as near death experiences were purported to do, but it intensified his orgasm, so death wasn’t all that bad.

The man who had contributed one-half of the DNA to Lars seemed to have great difficulty seeing his son as anything more than a straw-haired eunuch. For that reason, he wasn’t too bothered when a girl from Lars’s class began spending nights in his son’s room. Nameless and unintroduced, she would materialize after dinner, letting herself in with a key Lars had given her, and maneuver straight to his room, never casting more than a vague nod at his parents.

“Does Lars have a girlfriend?” his mother asked.

“She’s probably just tutoring him or something. Can he even, you know, get it up? I can’t remember what the doctor said.”

“Some father you are,” she grunted, a slender cigarette clenched between her teeth. “You know just well that he’s just like any other boy his age, except he wasn’t blessed with legs like the rest of us. And he makes up for it with other traits.”

Mr. Smith raised an eyebrow, its furrowed crimp imploring her to elaborate. After marinating in silence for a few awkward minutes it was clear that the statement was meant to be taken as rhetorical and they resumed watching television.

They were spending their evening as they usually did when Lars’s dad wasn’t doing a shoot, digesting a Maury episode about reformed blow addicts, when the girl arrived, poutier than usual and flanked by a stout woman in an auburn fur coat.

“He never did anything to me – he barely even looked at me,” the girl whimpered, her mother’s bright red fingernails digging into her arm. “I kept my clothes on, he unzipped his pants and we watched the same porno every night while I jerked him off. The money was always on the table, and I’d just take it and leave. After the first day, when we sorted it all out, we never spoke to each other once.”

“He didn’t even fuck her? Jesus, for a hundred bucks a pop, I would have at least gotten a bang for my buck,” Lars’s said as the closed the door behind them.

“Brian!” Lars’s mother protested. “Our son’s in trouble and he needs us. Go call Dr. Adams.”

“It’s nine thirty, Mary,” he protested.

“This cannot wait. Now be a man and call, for your son’s sake.”

Dr. Adams, Lars’s psychiatrist, was an openly homosexual Ivy-league graduate who insisted that Lars call him by his first name George.

“How are we doing today, Lars?” Dr. George would say.

“I’m fine George,” Lars would say.

“How’s the circulation, Lars?”

“Just fine, George. My physical therapist has me hanging off of my bed twice a day to make sure the blood doesn’t collect in my ass and stumps.”

“And is that working for you?”

“Yes.”

And so on. Sometimes Lars constructed elaborate sexual fantasies involving him and his mother and extrapolated upon them. He began by holding his breath until the pressure made the space behind his ocular socket swollen with tears, and Lars would offer the streaming forks running down his cheeks as proof that he was dredging up traumatic childhood memories. Dr. George considered himself a neo-Freudian and salivated at the thought of incestuous interaction.

“And what do you think that means, Lars? Why do you think you dream about, well, as you put it, ‘dipping your pickle in your mother’s honeypot?’ Hmmm?”

“I don’t know, George. But it’s hard to ignore her new breast implants. They’re a conversation piece, if you know what I mean.”

In their sessions together Dr. George insisted that Lars do the work for himself while he ‘guided’ the discussion, which was a boring one-sided dialectic and seemed too much like an abuse of child labor legislation. As a result, the hours were often passed in silence, Dr. George patiently tapping the eraser of his pencil on a leatherbound notepad he pressed against his thigh, while Lars yawned and fingered the buttons of the Gameboy he had stashed in the pocket sewn into the wheelchair by his hop. The game’s onomatopoeic blips served as a suitable stand-in for the ticks of George’s gold plated Rolex. Neither doctor nor patient had the motivation to force the other out of his vow of silence. The swirling toilet bowl sound of Lars’s last video-game life being flushed signaled the end of the session, with a hollow but not altogether hostile handshake bringing the meeting to an official end, rigid as ritual.

It was Dr. George’s professional opinion, after nearly a year and a half of status quo maintenance thinly disguised as therapy and prescription orders that usually found their way into the office wastebasket, that Lars should be allowed to meet Briana, preferably off-set.

“His fixation on Briana, unhealthy as it is, is not altogether uncommon in youths who have strained relationships with their parents.”

“What do you mean, strained relationships?” Lars’s mother asked, squeezing the arms of the leather chair her son frequently occupied. She snorted, trying to maintain composure “We all get along just fine. Isn’t that right, Brian?”

Lars’s father reached over and massaged her white knuckles. “Just fine, George. The kid just…has trouble relating to people. He’s so difficult whenever we go out in public for dinner. Barely says anything to either of us, and we’re his parents, for Christ’s sake. And can you blame him for wanting to, you know, make it with Briana? When I was his age I was out trying to screw the entire varsity cheerleading team, and Briana is ten times hotter than any of those bimbos. Classy, too.”

“Yes, I’ve, um, seen some of her films,” Dr. George hesitantly admitted, uncrossing then recrossing his legs. “The point is that he has to see that she’s more than just an image on the screen – a real person, if you get me.”

Lars’s father leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, I think I get you.”

*

His father held the back bar of his wheel chair firmly, pressing his foot down on the break. “You’re old enough to see the real thing now, son,” he said. They were standing in a sound room overlooking the live set of a porn video. Lars’s dad told his son that Briana was in her dressing room, cleaning up after a shoot. “We’re meeting her and her husband in about twenty minutes.”

The garish décor and decadent costumes told Lars that the video being shot was going to be an eighties knock-off. He yawned as spandex was peeled off below and frizzy hair was tossed back and to the side, bored until movement off-camera caught his eye. A man in an imitation silk robe, decorated with kitschy burgundy swirls, lounged on a mauve loveseat in the corner, his feet propped on a table garnished with offerings of sliced cheese impaled by toothpicks and other assorted hors d’oeuvres. A young girl, probably nineteen or twenty with a button that read INTERN pinned above her left breast, was stroking the guy’s penis rhythmically, while he yawned and waited for the next scene.

“They’re called fluffers,” Lars’s dad said, tapping on the one-way glass with a fingernail. “To make sure the actor’s penis stays erect until he’s up to bat.”

Beads of sweat jockeyed around tiny blonde hairs and slid down her forearm as she pumped it with determined vigor. Lars focused on this scene for the entire time he was there, entranced by the loose, nonchalant expression of the actor and the single-minded devotion that the girl heaved onto his penis. An orgy went unnoticed slightly to his left, limbs quivering to the theme song of Flash Dance.

*

__________________
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

strangedaze

***Part 2***

Around a long rectangular table in the studio café sat Briana Banks, long blonde locks pulled back in a tight ponytail, and a handsome, wiry man with trace amounts of facial stubble whom Lars’s father identified as Ted, her husband and fellow enterprising ‘erotic actor’. Between them, at the head of the table, was a baby carriage with dimensions roughly proportionate to that of a small refrigerator, it’s innards made not of bottled condiments or leftover take-out, but rather what appeared to be a mute four-month old child, swathed past the point of recognition in cheerfully color-coordinated baby garments. All parties were casually dressed, though stylishly so. Lars instinctively scanned the room for cameras as he let his father guide his wheelchair to the table. He sat next to ‘Ted’, while his father kissed Briana on the cheek and took the seat next to her.

SCRIPTED. Stage directions. Bodies strategically placed to enhance the mise en scene. The handsome costar, the semi-real baby that hadn’t move since he entered the room. Lars felt his genitals shrivel, as if the hands of winter itself had unzipped his pants and clutched his nuts like a baseball.

“That’s a very nice baby you’ve got,” Lars said smugly, wishing he had been given legs so that he could cross them pretentiously. Briana beamed as any REAL mother would, not surprisingly, given her acting background, but ‘Ted’ remained aloof, his annoyingly symmetrical face brimming with a totality of non-emotion. Lars found his performance forced and unconvincing.

“Her name’s Abby,” Briana said, poking the mass and rubbing the a bump that Lars took to be the baby’s nose. “She’s all tuckered out from our trip to LA.”

“We had to shoot a beach scene with a Cabana boy,” Lars’s grinning dad interjected, knitting his fingers behind his head. “Nothing in Canada would do for that. Only disgusting manure clogged beaches and hillbilly parks, if you know what I mean.”

Everyone laughed, even though it wasn’t funny, and so Lars did too, aware that somewhere invisible to him a dangling black box had probably prompted LAUGHTER with buzzing thumb-sized balls. Or maybe they all knew their lines, and a host of anticipatory responses to counteract any possible unscripted lines he might say. Lars began wondering if research had been done, perhaps by his mother, for the purpose of accumulating a catalogue of his favorite phrases and common speech patterns he used. Playing off this catalogue, another compendium, equally thick and listing appropriate responses, had likely been written and studied by everyone at the table. Even the baby knew its role, waiting silently until some verbal or physical cue zapped it to life, ideally during an awkward moment when all else had failed and to keep the film rolling they needed a wailing sparkplug to jumpstart the action. The only possible solution, Lars realized, was to respond in such a way as to nullify their own research by acting completely out of character.

“I heard that they’re going to clone an armadillo next week,” Lars said, interrupting the inane industry-speak that had been playing out around the table without him. “And its name is Nixon. Nixon’s a fun name for an armadillo, I think, even if the thing is really a bitch. Are female armadillos called bitches, dad? Like female dogs? It would make a helluva lot of sense if they did, don’t you think so Ted? I mean, armadillo’s are kind of like little dogs, in their own way. Little fucking rodents things, under all that hard shelled exterior.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Ted muttered, looking at Lars’s father. Then silence. Then, on cue, the baby let out a shrill, alarm-clock cry, its arms flailing wildly. The lunch was cut short when Lars’s dad had to take a business call and had to send Lars home in a Para-Van.

*

Taking care to avoid detection, Lars tucked the collapsible tripod and camcorder into a gym bag and slid them under a blanket on his lap, casually wheeling himself through the house.

Laid out before him on a metal baking tray like a do-it-yourself lobotomy kit were sharp utensils ranging from a pair of gardening shears to an Exacto knife. Catching the refracted light from the miniature disco ball rotating lazily on his desk, the assorted blades shone rainbow fingers on his face. TODAY IS GOING TO BE A GOOD DAY, the bright flecks said, because rainbows always lead to that pot of gold, if you just follow the light. And right now that light made a crooked line down Lars’s body, down his crotch, bending slightly between his non-legs before slicing across the floor.

Lars could see himself on TV. A tangled vinyl python of red, yellow and white cords nested behind the set and snaked across the floor to the camcorder. The connection was fabulous. Held on the wall by four cuts of scotch tape, a large sheet of paper, Lars’s script, hung with all the stage directions and dialogue drawn on it in fat block letters.

Dabbing the bright red ‘record’ button, he read:

“MY NAME IS QUENTIN CASH AND I MAY NOT HAVE ANY LEGS, BUT I AM A FUCK MACHINE THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN ON THIS PLANET. MY PENIS CAN STAY ERECT FOR SEVERAL HOURS.”

As he said this he slid his jeans off, the legs stuffed with rolled up tube socks to give the impression that they held something more human than cotton and elastic. Lars was naked from the waist down, his penis erect and surrounded by a patch of razor-burn dotted white skin. Using the television set for guidance, he aimed the remote control at the camera and clicked the zoom function, until the entire frame was swallowed by his waist and heaving stomach.

Unwavering, the camera watched as he pinched his foreskin between two Godzilla-like fingers, stretching the skin like a wad of veiny sculpting putty. And it watched as Lars snipped, the scissor blades cutting through a cluster of nerves. And then Lars passed out from the excruciating pain coursing through his body, the camera still rolling and focused on his right hip – the only part of his body still on-screen.

*

The hospital was whitewashed and fuzzy when Lars opened his eyes and soaked up the mise en scene. Hanging over him were the disembodied heads of his mother and father, their faces transformed into oval-shaped ghosts by the bright light behind them.

“Quiet, quiet,” were the first words that Lars heard. Though he couldn’t place the lips forming them, the words’ whiny intonation told him that the voice belonged to his mother, who seemed to possess a defective voicebox incapable of speaking at any reasonable indoor decibel level. “How are you feeling, son?”

As the scene came into focus, Lars came to terms with his surroundings. His father was standing to his right, crossing his arms over a cream-colored polo shirt. Gripping the metal guardrail of his stretcher, his mother was impeccably made up, a glittering gold necklace cutting a V across her color bones. Behind them the angel-white outline of a twenty-something nurse stood against the square of green drapes enclosing them, hands crossed compliantly behind her back. Lars wondered whether his father had been drawn to her authenticity and propositioned her for a ‘lead role’ in one of his hot new films while Lars was comatose.

“Jesus H. Christ, Lars, what the hell’s the matter with you?” his dad said, running his hand through his hair. “You want to be a Jew or something? Is that what this is about? Is Jesus not good enough for you all of a sudden?”

“Brian!” his mother said, glaring reproachfully at him. Lars hadn’t heard the name ‘Jesus’ spoken around the house in years, except when his dad was looking over the script of one of his films and testing expletives out loud. “Lars, honey, if you want to convert, just tell us. We’ll find you a nice rabbi and throw a party. No need to go chopping yourself up.”

“You’re lucky they could fix your piece after the hack job you pulled,” his dad spat. pacing along the curtains. “And you still won’t be able to use the damned thing for over a month.”

The ride home was awkward and silent, the leather interior of the family van seeming like a black hole of vacuum-sealed antimatter from which no sound escaped. Lars liked it that way, because it saved him the effort of attempting to explain why he mangled his genitals in front of a piece of video-recording equipment and subsequently passed out. His parents decided, rightly so, that the incident had not been motivated by an irrepressible desire on Lars’s to undergo religious conversion and find Yahweh. Unfortunately, they now saw it as some sort of cry for help.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with kids nowawadays,” his father said, his booming voice breaking the silence. “Back when I was young, we didn’t need to cut ourselves to be cool or to feel like men. We just did drugs and tried to nail cheerleaders, like any sane person would.”

Before Lars’s mother had a chance to breathe, his dad preemptively waved her off with his free hand. “A little pot never hurt anyone, I don’t care what the experts say. We used to get high all the time and now look at us. Christ, I wipe my ass with twenty dollar bills.”

His father’s eulogy for days passed made Lars grimace, as did the thought of him soiling money in the john. Lars’s mood plummeted even further when his father pulled it into the driveway and parked next to a familiar ink black beamer with its top down. The license plate read, ostentatiously, ‘GD DCTR’.

Dr. George was already inside, making himself comfortable in the living room as he dissected Lars’s letter to Briana over a glass of brandy. He nodded gravely at Lars, who felt like a slab of meat being wheeled into the butcher’s on a gurney as his father pushed him up the ramp built over the trio of stairs leading to the kitchen.

“Go to your room and get yourself a change of clothes,” Lars’s father commanded as Dr. George rose like a magnet to his side. “You’re a mess.”

After squirming out of his clothes, careful to avoid any incidental contact with the head of his penis, Lars struggled to stretch some underwear over his bandaged crotch. Two failed attempts later, he acquiesced and swung a warm blanket around his waist like an apron, feeling only slightly emasculated. On the bright side, the blanket’s perpetual semen-crust had thankfully been washed and the soothing aroma of lavender replaced the smell of dank, sweaty cotton.

As he spun into the living room, the air felt tense, possessing the consistency of a vat of wet concrete slowly congealing and incasing everything in its bowels. Lars rolled his wheelchair and eased himself onto a reclining Lay-Z-Boy, taking care to keep the blanket draped over his naked lap. His father came over and confiscated his chair, then worked the edges of the blanket under the cushions, pulling the soft fabric taut and binding him to the plush leather chair like a straightjacket. His gauze wrapped penis was so sensitive that even a hint of friction sent shockwaves of pain through his body. His wheel chair was folded and leaning against the credenza, an arm’s length from Lars’s father, who poured himself a glass of scotch and sipped it scotch neat. Responding to signals sent from a remote control that Lars’s mom aimed skyward, the lights dimmed with an ominous slowness.

Scattered around the living room, Dr. George, Lars’s mother and father rigidly occupied pieces of designer furniture, faces tethered to the images that unfolded like a televised rolodex on the screen. Lars felt both ashamed and bitter about his parent-imposed house arrest, but also accomplished, beaming as a rookie actor/director would watching clips from a movie, his movie, which had been nominated for an Academy Award. He felt the urge to turn down the volume and give a play-by-play: “And here’s when the blades of the scissors got stuck. Oh, oooh, look, here dad comes in and finds me unconscious on the carpet. Here he’s fixing his hair and smiling for the camera…”

Etc. Etc.

Once the VHS tape stopped rolling, the entire room remained transfixed on the bright but somehow soul-sapping blue screen, unwilling to traverse the sanctuary that the awkward silence provided. Dr. George looked at the sheet of paper Lars had stuffed into the manila folder – his letter to Briana – and turned it over in his hands, as if he believed that by virtue of some kind of weird osmosis the letter’s true meaning would seep into the pores of his fingertips and he could straighten all of this nonsense out. Realizing the futility of harboring such hopes, he passed the torch to Mr. Smith, steel-marble eyes prompting a verbal response.

“Uh, yeah, okay. Son, I want you to know that you’ve got our attention,” he stammered, finicking with the paper.

“Oh, you do son, you do,” his mother cried, rising to her feet in an explosion not unlike the blurred spatter of napalm firing out of a bursting grenade. As she skipped across the room her silicon appendages bounced without heed for the bra that feebly tried to contain them.

Riding the wake her emotional tidalwave left behind, Dr. George hopped to his feet and followed her, until they both zeroed in on Lars, the focal point upon which their simpering trajectories met. Not to be outdone, Lars’s father put down his scotch on a coaster and wandered over, looping his long arms and potbelly around the group.

Though on the surface the scene had all the makings of a Hallmark holocaust, each of their arms felt cold and fraught with goose bumps. Lars felt the urge to tell them that the letter wasn’t meant for them, that the video wasn’t staged for their benefit, and that his foreskin wasn’t martyred to bring the family and Dr. George together, but his words would only have been muffled or ignored under their tight-knit turban of entangled limbs.

“I love you,” he sighed to no one in particular, not because some internal emotion-pumping gizmo prompted it but just because the words seemed appropriate to the situation: an easy way to fade-out of an awkward scene. The constricting limbs squeezed tighter in response and he just sat buried in the middle of it, wondering what his penis will look like once the flesh heals and the bandages come off.

__________________
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Chris Miller

I read this last night. It really engrossed me. I actually snapped at my wife when she interrupted my reading to tell me the cat was trying to swallow this big hairball.

Your writing is toned down (for length?) here and allowed me to concentrate on the story (as opposed to the prose). There is a lot to digest. My favorite part was the kid stuffing socks into the legs of his pants (as opposed to his crotch?). Or maybe it was the fluffer giving the bored guy a handjob.

The auto-circumcision was intense. Having him faint so quickly seemed like a bit of a cop out, but, no, no need to suffer more I suppose. And the banal close-up visual at the end of that para was great.

I was hoping that, after sleeping on it, it would occur to me why he had done this. But beyond his wanting to make a shock-flick and maybe look more like the male porn stars dick-wise, or possibly to immasculate himself, I can't say I get it. So why did he circumcize himself?

Even though their flaws outweigh their strengths/virtues, these are some of your more likable and identifiable characters, which also helped keep me locked into the story.

__________________
the fairwriting blogs

Barcelona Review story: http://www.barcelonareview.com/64/e_cm.html

ms. vodka

i'm not going to let loose the string of exclamatory curse words that i would like...

i have nothing to critique, drew.

i would if i could because i know how much you really want me to slap you around...

it's brilliant on so many levels, and completely engrossing... and gross... and truthful and sickening and wonderful.

when you become famous and published, i want a copy of everything... signed of course with something cutely personal...

much love,
jen

gohn67

Hey Strangedaze,
I liked the first half and then I got confused in the second half.

-You have a really good character. You developed him well.

-I wasn't sure what happened in the second half. The cirumcision, I didn't understand his motivation behind it. I found the letter to Brianna Interesting, because the reader never gets to know what was said in the letter. Somehow the parents misinterpret it to be addressed to them, and it's somehow connected to the circumcision, I think. I think what prompts him to do the circumcision is the scene before, when they have that staged lunch, but maybe it was too subtle for me to understand.

-The character details and also the side details that you chose to use were great. Like the INTERN, that was hilarious. His obsession with Briana Banks was also real funny, along with the shakespeare siloquy stuff. Overall it had a lot of great humor.

Great opening sentence. Really drew me into the story.

-I'm confused in this section. In the first paragraph, you say two woman arrive? I wasn't sure who the woman were. Were they on Maury? Or did they just come through the door of their house? Is that the girl that went into Lars' room? So Lars' problem is that he is a sex addict?

Is the part in bold supposed to be Lars' speaking or his father. It would make more sense to me if it was his father. Then that would kind of make sense that he is only interested in Brianna or something.

This sentence is very awkward to read. I think throughout the piece there a few sentences that were a bit tough to read. Maybe trying to put too much detail into them, trying to connect sentences with too many prepositions, though I'm not completely sure that is the reason. It could just be me.

Hilarious.

This paragraph was tough to read.

It's a nice simile, but I think I bit too long to make it easy to read. The simile is trying to be too descriptive, trying to say too much. Though I think you definitely needed all those details to make it effective.

Overall it was still an entertaining read because of the humor and situations that you put this kid through.

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The Frowning Dog Blog