Fred Aiken Writing

Category: Short Story

October 3, 2021

Wrong Side of the Road

It felt like a dare no one asked of me.

I can’t say that the impulse to not wear a seatbelt came out of nowhere. As a child I would always try to get around wearing one because it chaffed my neck and left an uncomfortable nylon residue.

My parents bought the most economic option when they went car shopping: used cars. I don’t have anything against buying used cars. In fact, I’ve only ever owned used cars. But ultimately, the seatbelt you put on has all the sweat, bodily fluids, and various other debris of whatever other drivers came before you. No matter how much it is cleaned.

But that’s not the entire reason. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t wear a seatbelt in a new car either.

I especially would never buy a new car since all the new models tend to have a feature that doesn’t allow you to drive without you putting on the seatbelt. Either that or it will have the most annoying dashboard beeping sound until the seatbelt is finally clicked.

Nor can I really say that seatbelts are all that constrictive. I mean, they kinda are. But after a while I can get comfortable if I really concentrate by not focusing on the chaffing.

If I’m being honest, and I think you know that I’m not, it’s because I hate the rhyming campaign law enforcement started using: Click it or ticket.

It sounds like a Mother Goose rhyme, but with legal consequences. 

I have this overwhelming impulse to ignore it.

When I get pulled over, I just subtly pull my seatbelt over my chest. The police officer can never tell that I didn’t have it on to begin with. They’re lying if they say that they can. Their dashboard cameras are of questionable quality. If I were to be taken to court, though I never have been, at least not over the issue of my seatbelt, then I’d ask the judge to review the body camera of the officer that pulled me over, to which someone in the court would say there is no body cameras on our officers because of budget cuts or something along those lines, and I could scream out about the injustice of my persecution or subtly mention how civil servants aren’t paid nearly enough nor given the correct resources to effectively do their job, and low and behold the matter is settled. At least I think so. Like I said, I’ve never been to court over my lack of wearing a seatbelt.

On occasion, though, and it’s not very often that this occurs, but on occasion I start to slowly pick up speed. First five miles over the limit, then ten, twenty, and so on and so forth. When I hit a hill it’s even better. I don’t hit the break. I keep tapping the gas. Picking up speed. Pull down the windows. The wind lashes violently through my car, against my face, to the point where it’s a little difficult to keep my eyes open completely.

Then I start to nudge onto the other side of the road. At first, there’s no one there. There never is anyone on the road around here. But eventually another motorist climbs around the corner, probably going the speed limit, though probably a little over themselves. Maybe even contemplating the same game I am.

When the other driver sees me, they give a courteous honk to notify me that I’m on the wrong side of the road.

I ignore them.

They honk again. This time bearing down on the horn longer. Slightly more passive aggressive. Hell, I don’t know what I’m saying, they’re probably being as aggressive as possible. Cursing me out. Flipping me off. Calling me whatever names they can think of despite knowing I can’t hear them. I don’t know what they’re saying.

And I ignore them.

Then the other driver starts to swerve themselves. They think maybe they need to think about getting onto the other side of the road just to avoid me. But something subconsciously tells them not to. Perhaps it’s that little lawyer cricket chirping in everyone’s head at all hours, day and night; ‘That’s illegal, you can’t do that.’ So, they wait for me to get back into my rightful, lawful, responsible position.

I ignore them.

They come to the conclusion that I’m either drunk or high or both. Maybe I want to kill myself. Maybe I want to take them out with me. Maybe they have a mild or major racist/sexist/homophobic, ageist, classist thought, like I’m Asian, or maybe female Asian, or maybe a gay female Asian too poor to fix my car, and too old to fix my eyes. They hate themselves. But they hate me more.

They’re going to die with me, and the last thought they had was incredibly offensive. Does that make them horrible? Have they always been horrible? Can they change, and if so would it matter in the last brief moments of their life.

But then we miss each other. In the game of chicken, I always chicken out.

It feels almost generous to give the other driver and myself another chance at life.

Perhaps the reason the other driver didn’t swerve much earlier was because they themselves wanted to die. They harbored some deep seeded personal issue or trauma, and my little act of chaos was helping.

Yet the more we drove from each other, the more we each realized that I never had the intention of actually helping them kill themselves. I never had the intention of killing myself.

Not seriously, anyway.

Not serious enough, as it goes.

Though perhaps one day I will be driving without my seat belt on, minding my own business on the right side of the road, and then another sans-seat-belt driver will drift ever slightly to my side. The closer they get the more apparent it becomes that we’re going to collide. I have horrible reflexes, so I just know we’re going to make contact.

For the first time I’ll meet someone else that doesn’t like to wear seatbelts, and we’ll bond, so to speak.

September 30, 2021

Smoking Kills

“You need to stop smoking.”

That’s the reason I found myself doing the dumbest things I think I could ever do: taking up vaping.

I thought the doctor would give me some useful advice on how to quit, something that would finally stick.

But before the cancer diagnosis, I had assumed that I would smoke like my granddad, to the day I died and with very little consequences. That’s not to say that there was never anything wrong with Grandpop Joe. He certainly had his problems.

He was incredibly racist. A bit sexist. And he had an overabundance of tumors metastasizing all throughout his body. I think the nurses liked to call him the Polka Dot Man because of how his x-rays looked.

Either way, I never saw myself as a vaper. It sort of fell into place.

You see, I was incredibly down about the whole cancer diagnosis and facing my mortality. I wouldn’t say that I’d thought myself immortal. But I guess at forty-seven I hadn’t quite accepted death as all that imminent. Sure, accidents happened all the time, and some were even fatal. But I hoped against all hope that my accidents would continue to be benign, or at least not life-threatening.

But sitting in the parking lot, looking down at the half-consumed pack of cigarettes of a brand that I’d rather not mention just so I won’t get the cravings yet again, I broke down. I hope that no one saw me banging my limbs and head against the steering wheel, window, and seat of my car, but I doubt I was that lucky.

I wanted to rage quit.

I screamed as loud as possible.

I lit another cigarette. But I didn’t smoke it.

When I got home, I googled ways to try and stop smoking.

Most of the suggestions were things I had already done over the past twenty some odd years. The patch. Nicorette. Hypnotherapy. Actually, I hadn’t tried that last one, but out of principle I refused to ever see a therapist. I just don’t think I could ever support someone whose job title included ‘rapist’ in it. No, on a serious note, I just never thought therapy was for me, especially a type of therapy that entailed someone putting me to sleep and whispering manipulative suggestions into my subconscious brain. Even if it did work, it just seems too creepy.

But there were a lot of suggestions on the internet of fellow and former smokers saying vaping e-cigarettes helped.

Most suggested that it was the closest approximation to smoking that I would be able to wean myself off the nicotine steadily and at my own pace.

None of the internet articles or comments mentioned the culture behind vaping.

Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, vaping somehow had an entire cult of personality. A certain aurora that I would have to adopt.

No one explained that to me when I went into my first vape shop. It was called Tony’s Vape and Smoke Shop. I assumed Tony was the owner, but later learned there was no Tony. In fact, the owner always wanted a son named Anthony, but never met anyone special and so instead he opened up various businesses and named them after kids he wished he had.

The vape seller had way too many tattoos. I’m not sure what number of tattoos is officially too many, but looking at this guy behind the counter of the vape shop, twirling his moustache and occasionally blowing vape clouds around himself, I knew that it was too many tattoos. He looked like a caricature of a hipster. Flannel shirt, neon orange suspenders, wool fedora, and waxed facial hair.

I should have taken it as a warning sign.

Never buy anything from a hipster. Never buy into a fad.

Just smoke your cigarettes. Have the doctors tell you you’re going to die. And then when it’s your time, just die from one of many carcinogens that took root in your bones.

But I got married. I met someone that wanted to start a family. I met someone that wanted me to be a better person.

It’s probably the main reason why people start and stop smoking: relationships. They’re a tricky sort. Navigating around another person’s feelings and wants. I barely knew what I wanted half the time.

But Elizabeth, that’s her name, said I needed to take the doctor seriously. I was getting to that age. She wanted kids, but she didn’t want the kids to ever be exposed to cigarettes. Her father was a smoker, and she had bad memories associated with him. Though I think it was mostly his alcohol abuse that made her father especially intolerable. 

Needless to say, she was the only reason I would endure having an overly-tattooed hipster help me pick out flavored vape juice for me to suck from some mechanical penis to get some sort of nicotine satiation. 

I hated the doctor at the moment.

I hated the hipster vape salesperson.

I hated my wife.

I hated my theoretical child that I hadn’t yet conceived.

I hated myself mostly.

A small part of me wanted to walk out on principle when he mentioned a watermelon bubblegum flavor vape juice. I could muster not smoking.

I heard the first week was the hardest, but then it got easy. I could handle a week. 

That was a lie. I had already tried multiple times, multiple weeks, all of which failed with me breaking down and smoking mere hours before the final 168 hours were up.

I picked out the least conspicuous vape pen with the most innocuous flavored vape juice, vanilla, and jolted to my car in hopes that I could forget about the entire experience.

When I went to inhale on the vape pen, I accidentally noticed myself in the rearview mirror of my ten-year-old beige Honda Civic.

You’re doing great, you piece of shit. I regret nothing.

September 16, 2021

Inherited Misery

It’s one of the most misleading lines I think I’ve ever heard: You can be whatever you put your mind to

I barely wanted to be human, much less something extraordinarily human.

At thirteen and some change, I woke up with this sudden sensation that I would continue the legacy my parents established in the psychiatric community and beyond as the most depressed person in the world. 

It wasn’t a particularly distinguished title, and I don’t think anyone wore the medal with pride.

Can you imagine? Going around all day with a chunk of fake gold or copper, or some other sort of metal, reminding you and others that you were officially named the most depressed person living for that year? Perhaps even the most depressed person of all time?

I sometimes wonder whether if and when we discover there’s other life out there, drifting on their own little rock, whether they’ll have their own set of mental health issues.

What a joke it might be? At least it might put things into perspective. Or perhaps make it all that much more depressing.

No matter what galaxy, solar system, universe, or reality, I might always have been destined to be constantly, utterly depressed.

The worst part is that I don’t even have the stomach to kill myself. In some small way, I think that might end my suffering, and I don’t feel as if I deserve the reprieve.

I know, how depressing.

I’ve been seeing a therapist since I was fifteen.

They all give up on me. Eventually, at least.

I’ve gone through a handful of mood stabilizing pharmaceuticals. The list is quite tedious, and hard to remember. Let’s just say, if you are what you eat, then I’m a twenty-syllable word cooked up in a lab by some Korean phD trying to impress their spouse with how smart and clever they are to trick stranger’s brains into thinking everything’s going to be fine.

I can’t blame them, though. If I was that smart, I’d probably try the same thing. 

Instead, I have to suffice with a defunct brain and thoughts that keep draining me.

I went to the Guinness World Record people and asked them if there was some sort of reward for being the most depressed person in the world.

They laughed. They asked how’d there would even be a way to measure such a feat.

I had to agree. I never really thought of it like that. I guess I’d always taken what my doctors and therapists had said to be true.

Somehow knowing that I can’t even be recognized for my accomplishment makes it all the worse. Somehow making me even more depressed.

I guess there is always a lower level.

I have a feeling that I reached a point where I am more depressed than my parents. They at least had each other. In some small way, it seems like that would be comforting to have someone else to share their misery with.

No one wants to spend time with me.

The handful of times I’ve found someone to go out on a date with, it never carried over into a second date.

None of my dates ever explained why.

Though I suspect it has something to do with my lack of a personality. 

Just abhorrent.

Horrible.

Personality trait.

Depressed and still somehow carrying on.