Short Story: Sayonara Zetsubou

Okay, a short story for you today, dredged up out of the archives. It’s also my chance to play with the swanky Flippingbook plugin, which allows me to do things with layouts that just can’t be done (easily) in HTML. You’ll see what I mean.
Incidentally, Yukio Shige, who appears (or, rather, doesn’t appear, Waiting for Godot style) in this story is a real person- the New York Times has an article on him here.

Click here (opens in new window).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Okay, a short story for you all today- this is part of the Big Important Novel that I noticed can work as a stand-alone piece, and it’ll teach you how to play the guitar part for a really great song.

“My God, that gives me such a boner.”
She meant my guitar, the EDS-1275. We were in my room, possibly cell, above the coffee house. We had, until this point, always stayed at Adele’s- my motivation being shame at my whole situation vis living. A young woman who often made it clear, even when it wasn’t appropriate, that her parents were millionaires and her childhood home was ‘a honest to God fuckin’ mansion’, deserved to be somewhere finer. Not, I should point out, in strictly bourgeois surroundings but in and amongst genuine aesthetic beauty, suitable to her idiom (for example, the Vatnajökull glacier).
“You wanted to see it… so… there.”
“How old is it?”
“Forty-one years. Some parts, like the tone control knobs, have been replaced but the body’s still solid mahogany.”
“Forty-one years… This is American history. It is a manifestation of our collective will.”
“It’s really just an instrument- I know to a lot of people it’s important, or ‘iconic’ or whatever, but it’s a tool to accomplish a certain task.”
“Then you should play it.”
“It’s late and if I play it through the amp I’ll wake Mr. Rosenberg-”
“It’s a tool to accomplish a certain task, und that task is making girls go all wet und quivery over othervise boring guys like you.”
“It’s not meant to be played acoustic-”
Adele held me around the waist and whispered “One song and you can fuck me wherever you want.”
“Is that anatomy or geography?”
She held up four fingers in front of my face.
“Okay, you want to play hardball, fine: there are four parts of me which can make you have an orgasm. For every second that goes by where you aren’t playing a song your access to one of them gets revoked. One, tw-”
I played. It was an intro in the chord C. I knew that she knew the song. It was important to us both.
“Two, one, two, three, four.”
I’m going to skip ahead to the next day with the two of us and my guitar and her drums in her apartment, mic-stands carrying Shure SM-58s in front of us and a formation of amplifiers behind.
Adele’s drums came in on the ‘four’ and I played the intro over after tap-dancing over the switches on a DS-1 and Bigmuff, then in G.
Adele, standing upright at her drumkit, leans into her mic. I’ve written out the chords above the lyrics and the strumming pattern should be pretty easy to pick up if you listen to the original.
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Okay, I’ve decided to give this whole ‘internet web-logging’ thing another go. Below this post there’s everything I wrote in an old Blogger account that went dark sometime in 2007. This post is something a little more substantial, a piece of fiction written in late 2008 that the Times Literary Supplement was nice enough to be nice about (‘innovative’ they called it. Its views are not my views.

Locke

Enough is Enough

My personal life is my personal life, and this site does not exist to discuss it.

I have an unmoderated comments section because free speech remains a right in this country (and will do so right up until Barry Hussein Obama decides that it might hurt somebody’s feelings), not to gather up a lot of limp-wristed missives about ‘making it through’ and ‘the grieving process’. No PalinforPrez58, I don’t need ‘some time alone to work things out’: while I’m sure that in California* your organic native-American granola collective will give you a good decade of paid ‘personal time’ for chanting, colonic irrigation and all other aspects of ‘personal growth’, here in America we work for a living.

Stick to the issues in the comments section or have them deleted. I’m drawing a line in the sand here.

* As always, criticism of the rogue state of California doesn’t imply criticism of governor Schwarzenegger- it takes a lot to corral forty million fags, gang-bangers and illegals into something resembling civilization.

Posted by Locke September 18 2008

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