Steve B. Howard's Blog, page 153

I’m a Weirdovert

Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

I’m pretty introverted. If I had my way I’d spend weeks at a time alone reading, thinking, and writing. I’d only surface for a day or two so I could debrief with close friends and then disappear once again into my solitude.

I love my wife and son of course, but I do need several hours of quiet time every week at a minimum. Quiet time though can include a packed and noisy Starbucks as long as my iPod is charged and my headphones are deeply inserted in my ears.

I suppose it’s hard for non-introverted and non-creative types to understand, but I live most of my life in my head. I’m aware of what’s going on around me of course, but usually, there is a second universe running behind the scenes that I’m probably as, if not more, interested in.

As much as I love my solitude though, I also enjoy the spotlight too. Besides writing I’m very passionate about doing stand up comedy. Standing on stage and trying to get 20–30 people to laugh probably sounds like the last place a socially awkward introvert would want to find themselves, but I absolutely love it. And my day job is teaching English, which means I might be talking to 1–20 people at any given time during my classes. Weird waters for a happy recluse like myself to be swimming in all the time.

Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash

Being a Weirdovert though isn’t so bad. When it’s one on one or in small groups of people for a short duration I’m fine. I can be charming and fascinating sometimes, so I’m told. And when I can focus it, the nervous energy can really fuel my performances on stage and in the classroom.

Photo by xandtor on Unsplash

Being “normal” might be nice, but I’m pretty happy as my old Weirdoverted self. And as one of my literary heroes Hunter S Thompson used to say, “When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.” Spending time alone writing and thinking is my way of attempting to go pro. Now all need to do is actually sell my books.

I’m a Weirdovert was originally published in Redoubtable on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yep, every fiction writer and poet I’ve talked to on Medium feel this way.

Yep, every fiction writer and poet I’ve talked to on Medium feel this way. We feel completely ignored.

Gangsta Daddy

“man in black cap and hoodie jacket” by Jenn Lopez on Unsplash

My eight-year-old son’s
Sport’s Day in Japan.
The papa next to me is missing
the first joint on his left pinky.

Could be a clumsy ex-machinist I suppose,
but I think the missing digit also explains his
long sleeve shirt in this September heat.

Gangsta Daddy was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

typhoon #27

Photo by Sean Foley on Unsplash

howling summer storm
clothes hangers off balcony
homeless person drowns

typhoon #27 was originally published in Haiku Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sounds like a very lonely life among people that only think of money.

Sounds like a very lonely life among people that only think of money. Poor people laugh a lot more than the rich do from what I’ve seen. Glad you stuck to your values and kept your friends.

Well, George Burns is dead and Morgan Freeman is already been used, lol. Maybe Oprah.

Well, George Burns is dead and Morgan Freeman is already been used, lol. Maybe Oprah.

Bad Beer O’Clock

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

A short trip really for one not long for this world or into deep philosophical ponderings. Just a left out of the parking lot of Mcleary’s Tavern and then a few weaves across the center line to the stop light before the on ramp to interstate. A short five mile hump at about ninety only hitting the gravel once before taking your exit with old Hank Sr. riding shotgun on the radio.

At the entrance to the battered trailer park you drop the rusty Dodge into first gear because of the speed bumps and then you make a smoky cruise down to lot #107. At the top of the rotted steps you promised to fix a dozen times you light up a Camel and bang through the front door. As expected, wife number three asks the same old question, “Drunk again Henry,” and you respond with a short hard shot to the mouth and then pick a tooth out of your knuckle before staggering down the hallway towards fourteen year old step daughter number two’s bedroom.

You feel the sexual meanness rise as you stare down at the quivering blankets and hear the soft “please no, please no, please no” praying from underneath. You remove your baseball cap and greasy t-shirt and you’re unbuckling your belt when wife number three with the shattered lips and missing teeth interrupts your favorite excursion with a shotgun blast from your favorite twelve gauge. A small whimper for mercy passes your lips and wife number three dials 9–11 while you hold a towel to your bloody mid-section and lost manhood. The short blond hair and blue eyes of step daughter number two appear from under the covers, but her tears seem to have dried up now and she’s laughing.

On the way to the emergency room you stare in wonder at the large gauze bandage that’s quickly turning red where your Levis and love stick used to be. In the ER consciousness slips and slithers away from you and your breathing goes all raggedy, but you try to laugh as you hear the beer commercial on the television in waiting room say, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Bad Beer O’Clock was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hapsley The Bird Hunter

“white and pink flamingos on body of water during daytime” by YiTing Shen on Unsplash

The music throbbed, then pounded, then backfired into some sort of Indian Techno Disco hybrid. It was deceptively black inside the club. The walls, the ceiling, the bar, and most of the patrons were painted, or tanned in darkness. The deception was created by the lighting. Spinning light rainbows, white lightning flashes, and sparkling blue strobes puked out of the ceiling mounted special effects system and blended sickenly with the music. The net effect was a severe warping of ones senses and discretion.

This club in Nagoya, Japan was my semi-willing refuge for the evening. C. Hapsely Albright, my co-worker and co-pilot had cajoled me into coming here tonight. Hapsely had decided that tonight was the night for some heavy de-nerding. I’d been in Japan for three months and had managed to dig myself ever deeper into my sad little world of watching Anime, reading Manga, and playing Play Station II games.

“The birds are lively and cute,” Hapsely had said after work, “Maybe you’ll flip one if you’re lucky.”

Hapsely and I both taught English at Language Live Learning Center, or “Ol’ Triple L,” as Hapsely called it. If this were the 1920’s I’d probably describe Hapsely as, charismatically roguish, but being 2006 likeably shady and perpetually horny are probably more accurate descriptions Hapsely was the head teacher at Ol’ Triple L.

He’d been there for seven years and was originally from London or there abouts. He was forty-one, sported thinning brown hair with bleached streaks that he carefully tapered into a short ponytail. He was short and portly, but he attired himself in the most fashionable clothes his body shape would allow him to get away with. Foregoing glasses and his naturally brown eyes, he always wore deep blue colored contact lenses. From what I’d seen and heard at Ol’ Triple L Hapsely had apparently flipped most of the Japanese female staff as well as many of the students. His tastes seemed to range between twenty and forty-five years old, though I got the impression that a few under agers had found their way to his apartment behind the school as well.

So, in this dark and doomed place I found myself with the exuberant, but heavily tainted Hapsely. We waded through the crowd of people to the bar and ordered ourselves a couple of beers. I wanted a Corona, but Hapsely insisted we order the more in vogue Black River Ale, a costly import that tasted to me like a combination of silt and diesel fuel. After getting our beers Hapsely said,

“Let’s take a tour and you can bag your bird.”

We made our way around the outer edge of the dance floor pursing as we went. An odd pair of night club sharks we must have been, one long and gangly and the other short and blockish. Each time I’d zero in on what I thought was a promising species of fowl; Hapsely would wave me off, saying, “Not that one mate, not that one. Horrid, trust me.” On about our third circuit the beer, lights, or a combination began to work over my bladder and I made a trip to the toilet. Hapsely stepped out of the loop as well and stood near a dark little half table along the wall.

The men’s toilet was where the nightclub’s glamour, glitz, and mystique ended and the disgustingly real smells of piss, shit, and vomit began. I stood in line waiting for one of the urinals to open dancing from foot to foot. Five minutes later I grabbed a spot between a puking Brazilian and a Yakuza type giving me hard stares. Behind us the line had crowded almost up to our asses so had the pleasure of listening to their conversations while we pissed. My bladder dumped about a gallon of cloudy beer pee that quickly befriended the foul scents that already resided in the men’s toilet.

With a now empty bladder I returned to the fray hoping maybe urinating had made somehow more attractive to the opposite sex. Hapsely was nowhere to be found. He’d apparently struck out on his own. I thought about searching for him, but I felt like that might have been the tentative beginnings of a nasty temporary co-dependant relationship scenario. Taking the cowardly wall-flower way out, I occupied the tiny half table that Hapsely had been at. I fumbled with my hands not knowing if it was cooler to put them in my pockets and slouched James Dean style, or let them hang at my sides sort of militant and ready for action. I experimented with resting my elbow on the table and leaning back so that I could face the dance floor. My attempt at casualness though was thwarted by the height of the table. It was mounted on the wall too high and I imagined I looked like Mick Jaeger with his arms suddenly frozen in the upper arc of his famous rooster strut. Realizing how stupid I must look I returned to the arms at my sides board straight position.

As I stood at attention near the wall and in the dark I noticed every few minutes a bright light would cut into the blackness of the club. In that brief spotlight people would suddenly appear for a moment before disappearing as they made their way into the club. I realized that I must be standing against the wall that was next to the front entrance. The club owners had had the good sense to put the club’s entrance near the toilets so that club goers would immediately see, smell, and hear exactly what they were getting themselves into. I watched new faces appear, mostly lithe Japanese women and men with a few burlier foreigners mixed in. Then a pair of dazzling Japanese women materialized and nearly stopped my heart. One had hair that was long, straight, black and silky. The other one’s hair was shorter and dyed an attractive bronze color. Both of them had bodies that jolted my libido like an 8.8 earthquake. They were the most gorgeous creatures I’d ever had the pleasure of nearly popping a woody over. They hesitated in the light a moment and I prayed they’d head for the women’s toilet and make whatever adjustments they felt were necessary before hitting the dance floor. My heart tittered as they made a sexy synchronized turn on the long thin heels of their most certainly uncomfortable pumps and swayed towards the bathrooms.

“This is it,” I told myself. “Leave the trees and show the birds your mating dance.” As they made their way to the bathroom I stepped from the darkness directly in their path and stopped them dead. My brain fumbled for Japanese phrases switching frantically between konnichi wa and konban wa. I cursed myself thinking, “You studied this language for four years in college and have spent billions of hours watching Anime and now you can’t even retrieve the simplest greeting from your brain.” Finally my brain cleared enough for me to recite a passable, “konban wa.” Their hands fluttered to cover their cute little smiles and laughs. Then the long haired one turned to her friend and squeaked out a loud, “Kawaii,” meaning, “He’s cute,” in the kitten or puppy dog sense of the word.

It thundered. The Gods and Goddess alighted upon me. I, I was cute! My mind raced at the possibilities. I’d always seem myself as a sort of skinny version of Lurch from the Addams Family, awkward and geeky for sure, but never cute. But maybe I had misjudged my morbid look-a-like. Suddenly I thought if Lurch had bought a nice flashy suit, changed his hairstyle, and maybe hit the tanning beds he might have passed for cute and yes even sexy. If this were true for Lurch then why not me?

“Feeling confidence surge from my head down to my groin I was about to launch into a hardy, “Genki desu ka,” How are you? When I heard a familiar bellow. “Got ya pint mate.” The birds and I both turned at Hapsely’s shout. The birds scowled at him as he came into view and then turned back to me with the scowls locked in place. Hapsely had two beers in one hand and a beautiful doll of a woman hanging off his other pudgy arm. In that second the birds made small polite bows, wrote me off, and walked into the women’s toilet in a beautiful huff.

My ego deflated, departed like the head of an impolite Edo Era peasant. It was then that I realized what a watered down drink I truly was, a Tequila Sunrise without a Sol. I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. Seeing my face Hapsely softly chuckled. “It’s not your fault mate,” he said clapping me on the back. “I flipped them both less than a month apart and their still a bit cheesed off about it.”

The over sexed rouge had raked me over the coals. I accepted my beer pitifully from him and began guzzling it intending to pass out before we left the club and force him to carry me home.

Hapsley The Bird Hunter was originally published in The Creative Cafe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Knuckle Soul’s Ascendance

“A shirtless man with tattoos on his body and rings on his fingers having a punk haircut in London” by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

“Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.”

— Charles Bukowski

Even the spines forged in super nova
eat shit when the bad chemical brain
dumps drag them by the balls down to
the busted glass world where their
potential quivers and shakes in fear.
And they search for the junky’s
loop hole OD cop out.

Fatal rope burns and blisters upon blisters
don’t even guarantee a glimpse at the peak
of your failures. Those lights in the sky
will burn you down no matter how
beautiful they twinkle in her evening eyes.

But put one shattered foot in front of your
soul and take that fatal hero’s journey even
if it means five inches from the summit you feel
gravity’s final twisted kiss rip your will power
back down to that dark base camp of insecurity.

The Knuckle Soul’s Ascendance was originally published in Other Doors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bye Bye Burt (haiku)

“red sports boupe parked between two trees” by Reza Rostampisheh on Unsplash

charisma and cars
smile of the decade gone now
burn outs and bong hits