“As I thought about it all, I realized that all I’ve done is trite and pointless, all my masterpieces are frail, uninspired works, and my god is not only dead, but he never existed.”

This is my best piece ever, I thought to myself as I walked down the hallway. I had my line. Any true writer can tell you what the line is. All stories follow a general premise, a theme if you will, but at the same time, there’s always one line that stands out. There’s your hook right there, and if you say it right, and place it right, it makes all the difference.
I sat down at my desk and wrote it down. It could have changed anybody’s life, it was amazing. I was societies little wonder boy, ready to take it all over.

“This line and your poetry may be the death of you. Life is a train only on one track. You start somewhere, and go in a straight line. When the train runs out of gas, it’s all over. What you do from point A to point B may seem important, but it’s all futile in the end.”

All I needed now was some filler. I smoked a cigarette and pulled out a joint. "Maybe this will help it come to me" I thought as I sparked it in the middle of my work office in my apartment. The billowing smoke I let go felt like it covered the entire room. Isn’t it odd that you never really can comprehend how much air your lungs can hold in until you see all that air instead replaced with smoke? Anyways, I laid back in my chair and let the pot do its work....

Thinking about life, with an emphasis on my life... I wondered how futile all of it was. Because, really, everybody dies. The survival rate is always zero. We're all terminal. We are all societies experiment, and I am society’s lost final prophet. Everyday for work, I had to go get names. Always with the names. Sorry, allow me to back up for a moment here. I work for a newspaper. I started writing god knows when, but I stopped writing my poetry and prose so much after it was discovered that most major publishers don’t usually give money to some 22 year old writer who has more holes in his rehab punch-card than a piece of cheese. You know, the kind with all the holes. Anyways, it was always my job to dig up the life stories of all these saps that got knocked off everyday. Maybe you’re familiar with my type of work.
Local man, 34, jumps in front of train.
Car accident leaves 4 dead in Woodstock.
Suicide note from 17 year old reads, "I just want to be free".

“Death itself may be the only way you’ll ever live. Suicide is no more different than living life in a job you hate with a spouse you resent and only your failed dreams to get you through the day. Who’s really dead here, the boy or you? He’s the one with the head start.”

Depressing work, no? And it always seemed that I got the "jumpers" as us in the industry like to call them. You know what I’m talking about. The suicides, the "accidents", the tragedies, the stories that pull on your heart and make you step back and realize how fucked up some people are. So it somewhat spurned my interest back into my prose and poetry.

That, and a new girl were making my creative process walk from the dead. She was amazing, her eyes, damn her eyes. Sorry, where was I? The weed was making me drift from thought to thought without even any sort of reality check. Societies perfect docile little rebel. I got up and got a bag of chips and sat down on my couch and watched television sort of. I threw off my shirt (its a great shirt by the way.. I bought it at a thrift store about 2 years ago, it reads Quot3 Th3 Rav3n... Edgar Allan... if only I had the skill of that man I wouldn’t be sitting here unrecognized and alone, but here I am, drifting again...) and took a bit of a nap.

I woke up and she was cooking. So beautiful, she really was. She walked up to me and kissed me, slowly and full of love. She told me, "Tony, you’re dead. Don’t even try to write like that again. Nobody cares Tony, nobody cares. I love you, but nobody but you can ever take out from a short story as much as you try to put in." We ate on my frail kitchen table, bought from a guy at some sort of pathetic garage sale I passed by about 2 weeks before I moved in. It looked a lot better in horrible light.  She left shortly after, and I was back to my writing. I couldn’t do it. Nothing was feeling right. I decided to take a drive.

“This love will be the death of you. I promise. Love is only a sacrifice of oneself to the routine. Do you love her? Could you ever love her? Could you ever love anything or anybody while meanwhile putting all your money up your nose and writing stories no better than the forced creative writing of some high schooler?”

Fuck! How do I finish this! I was so angry and so determined to finish all of this nonsense so I could just be seen up there with the Kafkas, the Sartres, the respected writers of the world, past and present. As I sped around the suburban Oceanside bends in my old Ford, my cd stopped playing, so I reached into the backseat to grab my CD booklet. As I grabbed it, a piece of paper became caught in my hold as well. Being that I was a neat freak, it was odd that I would have left paper in there. I pulled it up and almost instantly knew it was from my baby. Reading it, it became painfully obvious that it was a suicide note. "Oh my god" I thought to myself, praying it wasn’t too late and I could save her. Her house was in the direction I was heading anyways, so I sped up. As I rounded the huge turn with the beautiful view of the ocean, I remembered my first time being here.


I was just starting writing for my newspaper, and some lonely artist had taken his car and plunged into the ocean right over here. He had it all. Talent (I had seen his work, beautiful, though I never told him), a lovely girlfriend, and a nice paying job. So, you can imagine my surprise when I attempt to slow down my car and it wouldn’t! Looking closer at the suicide note, I start thinking... my breaks? Are they working? It doesn’t seem like it.

Shit.

Is this her version of a joke? Some sort of sick liberation? Is she freeing me somehow through all of this? Am I free now? No. All I wanted was to change the world. All I wanted was for my words to reach someone and make them think in a new way. The way I’ve been thinking for my whole life. I want someone to live like I did. Insomnia. Infidelity. Abuse. Desperation.

(Crash)

(Splash)

"The body of Tony Martin was found today after is car crashed off of the edge of Oak Street. Officials found a suicide note in the car and have ruled it as such. His funeral will be on Thursday at First Methodist Church in Burbank. Giving his eulogy will be his fiancée, whom he proposed to just a few hours before. She is filing a lawsuit to gain his possessions, which were originally given to his family."

"Officials have found boxes and boxes of prose from the man now many are calling "The most prolific writer of our generation." All his short stories are going to be published into a single book, which is expected to sell better than any book of our time. All of the money will be going to his fiancée, who found all the stories in a box somewhere in his room, saying to the press that she "Never knew Tony was a writer."'



         A LINE WITH NO ARTISTS EXPLANATION IS BORN ABORTED TO THE WORLD.