Scene 4 -- Best Buy

The next morning I awoke and quickly got dressed for work. I was the lucky one in the apartment, I didn't have to be to work until 10, everyone else had to be there by 9 so I got another hour to sleep in. I woke up around 9:45, threw on the stupid blue polo and khaki pants and drove over there in a hurry. I was so damn sick of the retail environment I could hardly bring myself to be happy going in to work. I especially hated the morning meetings there, they were possibly the stupidest things you had to participate in.

"Alright everyone, time for the icebreaker!" The guy running the meeting said cheerily. I groaned silently. "I want everyone to pick out a DVD that best describes the person besides you." I hardly knew anyone around me, they all worked in different departments and I hardly ever had the chance to converse with them for even a moment. I gotta tell ya, this game was probably the most retarded of all the retarded games they made you play. I wandered around the DVD section for a minute when they called for everyone to come back. I grabbed the first thing I saw, An Inconvenient Truth. Oh great, I thought to myself as we got back in a circle.
Everyone took turns showing their DVD and saying why they got it, by the time they got to me I was just pissed at having to participate in the stupid icebreaker.

"And what did you pick for Mary, Chris?"

"I picked An Inconvenient Truth."

"And why's that?"

"Because the inconvenient truth is that this game is a waste of time. We don't know a damn thing about eachother and you want us to pretend we do. The truth is it just makes us look like idiots, but we all pretend not to notice." No one said anything for a while. I stood there with my arms folded, not saying a word. My operations manager walked up to me.

"Come on, we need to have a talk," he said. Oh great, I thought. I followed him silently into the office. "What the hell was that? You just blow up when all we're trying to do is run a fun, energetic morning meeting."

"Yea, and a retarded one at that. Can't we just go through the numbers, talk about business, and then get to work?"

"No! Best Buy is a family Chris, we're all one big family, we're all supposed to be friends. It looks to me like you're not living the values Chris. How can you expect to progress if you're not living the values?" My manager said. He always talked about living the values. He worshipped them like they were god, and we were their humble servants.

"You're kidding me right? No one here lives the values, everyone here pretends to love this job, they kiss butts, and in the end they're just a bunch of lying phonies." Well, at least that's what I thought about saying. In the end though I really needed this job, I did have to pay part of the rent after all. I just kept my mouth shut and once he was done lecturing me, once he had written me up for "not living the values" he let me go out and get to work.

I tell ya, it sure wasn't the most enjoyable place to work. Don't get me wrong, they tried to treat us well, or at least they made it look like that, but in the end it sucked. Bad. The worst thing about the job was having to sell their stupid magazines. No customers really wanted the magazines, we had to coerce them into signing up to them through mostly unethical means. If we didn't our hours would be cut, not to mention the constant moaning of our managers because we weren't hitting our numbers for publications.

"Also with your purchase today you do qualify to get eight risk free weeks of any of these..." I started during one transaction.

"Those are the worst things ever! I signed up for them once and I had to cancel all my credit cards because they wouldn't stop charging me!" I was dumbfounded. Sure I hated the magazines, but what idiot didn't know how to cancel a subscription? I didn't say much else, just tried to get her out of there as fast as I could.

"Chris, got any mags out yet?" I just shook my head. "Come on, you can do it, you can't leave until you get 5 more," my manager said, chuckling. Sure he was just joking about me not leaving but it wasn't funny in the least. I gave him a courtesy chuckle and let the conversation die. Finally after 5 hours of this I punched out and left in a hurry.

Scene 3 -- The Ethics of Suicide

“Are you kidding me?” I heard a heated question come from the front room. I thought something exciting might be happening so I got out of bed and walked out there and took a seat. Paul and John were sitting across from eachother, apparently in a heated debate.

“Seriously! Who are we to say whether or not someone has to live?” John said as I sat down. “It should be a decision strictly between God and the individual.”

“But suicide is against the commandments, you’re murdering yourself,” Paul said.

“Oh don’t be silly. Murder and suicide are on completely different levels.”

“Either way, suicide is wrong. God wants us to live.”

“Who are you to speak for God?” John asked. I nodded in agreement. Paul got up and walked around the room for a second, thinking of what to say.

“So you think that if someone is depressed and doesn’t want to live anymore we should let them kill themselves?” Paul asked in disbelief.

“Yes. Who are we to tell people they have to suffer for the rest of their lives?” Paul stuttered and stammered for a minute, not sure what to say.

“I agree. If someone’s life is a living hell, and there is no end in sight, they should be able to make that choice. Granted in some cases we should stop them, but for the most part I agree,” I said. Me and my brother tended to offend Paul a lot. We tried not to discuss religion much, because we didn’t agree on much of anything in that aspect.

“I can’t believe you guys, that’s terrible.” Paul said. He got up and went into his room. That was pretty much the last we saw of him that night. We had all been friends for over eight years, it took quite a bit for us to ever stay mad at eachother.

“He’ll be over it soon enough,” I said, chuckling.

“Really I can see both sides here though. I mean, who says murder and suicide are so different?” Jake asked. Like most issues on the more extreme issues Jake seemed to be on the fence on this one.

“One has to deal strictly with our own life and the other one deals with other peoples rights, that’s the difference.”

“But all the people you would hurt by killing yourself, aren’t you taking away their rights to be happy?” Jake asked.

“Since when do other peoples emotions give them power over what we choose?” I asked. That was pretty much the end of the discussion. We tended to discuss politics and the like quite a bit, but the discussions rarely ended sour. We all just shared our opinions and it pretty much ended there most of the time. Sometimes Paul might get offended, but that never lasted too long. We all got over it within a few hours. I went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge for some food. We pretty much ate junk food all the time. Hot pockets filled our freezer, and ramen filled the pantry. Food of the Gods right there. I sat down with a can of pringles and munched away. I looked at the clock and noticed it was already ten o’ clock. As boring as Sundays were, they went by too damn fast every single week.

“I’ve got work in the morning, I’m off to bed.” I said.

“Me too,” John said.

“Ditto,” Jacob said. We all worked full time at our jobs. John was a personal banker, Paul taught swimming lessons, just like he had for the past three years, and no one knew what Jacob did. He never really talked about it. Who knows why? We didn’t push the matter too much. Myself, I worked at Best Buy. Pretty boring, I know, but hey, it worked.

Scene 2 -- Naps

It was about noon on a Sunday afternoon when I woke up. Sundays were a godsend. The only day I always had off of work. My day of rest. Paul was already out of bed of course, probably all ready to go to church already. I headed out into the kitchen and whipped me up a nice cold bowl of Lucky Charms and sat down to read the Sunday comics. Best part of the whole day, right there in that newspaper.

“I’m off to church, see you guys there,” Paul said. I looked at the clock.

“Paul, it’s only 12:15. You got 45 minutes.”

“Meeting with the bishop. Later,” he said as he strolled out the door. John and Jake looked like they had both just crawled out of bed as well as they got themselves some breakfast and sat down at the table with me. None of us really liked to talk that soon after waking up so I just hurried up and finished my breakfast and headed in to get ready for church. I pulled on my Sunday best, threw on a tie and went out the door. I felt like walking alone that day, not to be depressing or anything, but I was having a rough morning after the night before. It wasn’t much of a walk to the church, just a few blocks down the street. That was the nice thing about living in Utah. There were LDS church houses about everywhere you looked, it only took you about five seconds to drive to one no matter where you lived. I walked in a little late, like always, and found a seat next to Paul. The rest of the meeting really was pretty boring. Mostly the speakers in church never interest me, unless it’s someone I know. They tend to be pretty boring to tell you the truth. Sacrament meeting finished and I really didn’t feel like staying, I was still feeling pretty bad so I got up and headed back to the apartment.

You ever notice how hot chicks that run are? I mean you see a girl running and you can be pretty sure she’s going to be hot, or at the least average. I contemplated on that matter until I got back to the apartment.

“I need to date an athletic girl,” I told John when he got back from church. He came home about an hour after me.

“What?”

“I need to date an athletic chick. They’re almost always hot.” John thought about this for a minute.

“True, that’s because hot girls are the ones that take care of themselves. Runners obviously take care of themselves,” John said. I nodded in agreement and went to my room to take a nap. Sunday naps are the best, as long as they don’t last too long. You can ruin the entire day by taking too long of a nap. I set my alarm clock for an hour and went to sleep.

“Have a good nap?” Jake said as I walked back into our living room.

“Of course I did. Power naps are the best,” I replied.

“I don’t know if I agree with that. Power naps suck, takes you 30 minutes just to fall asleep.”

“That’s why you set your alarm for longer, to give you time to fall asleep.”

“Scheduled naps just don’t fly for me. They have to be free. That’s the beauty of the Sunday nap! Freedom!” Jake exclaimed.

“Pshh, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Actually I agree with Jake here Izzy. You can’t limit yourself to just an hour. What if it takes you an hour to fall asleep!” Paul interjected.

“An hour? If that’s the case I don’t think you’re ready to take a nap.”

“I donno, just seems like a bad idea to me,” Paul said. Jake nodded in agreement.

“Try it out, it’s the best. You don’t even know,” I replied. “At least I’m not all groggy and tired for the rest of the day.” Paul and Jake had nothing to say to that. It was late afternoon now and we were all just chillin’ in the living room. Really there wasn’t much to do. I’m not gonna lie, besides church, Sundays tend to bore me. It was better now that I had some people to hang out with, but boy time still seemed to go by so slow. I went and chilled in my room for a while, started reading a book. I’d already read it about a billion times so I got bored pretty quick. That’s the problem with buying books. You read them once, maybe twice and that’s it. What a waste.

Scene 1 - "Shafted" and a disclaimer...

Disclaimer -- This novel you are going to be reading is a work in progress. If it sucks, that is because I am writing under a strict deadline and time to edit is minimal. If it offends, then chill out. It's just a story. Any likeness or portrayal of real life events is probably because some of this stuff actually happened. Enjoy the suckitudiness. Any attempt to critique my novel this month will be promptly ignored. Please do tell me after November is over however.

“Shafted!” I said as I walked into my apartment and sat down on a recliner.

“Again?”

“Again. I got nothin’”

“That’s too bad Izzy, shafted again,” Jacob said. He’s one of my room mates. I live in an apartment with three other guys. Jacob’s a guy who has just about as much luck with girls as I do.

“Well I’m out,” John said as he passed through the room and out the front door.

“Where’s he off to?”

“Probably out to get some more NCMO,” Jake answered.

“More than we’re getting,” I replied. “Man, eighteen and I’m still getting shafted with girls. I’m still VL for heavens sakes!”

“Yea, we’ve got to end that quick,” Jake said. “So what happened?”

“So here’s the situation. Date’s been going great, the conversation is flowing nicely, I’m making her laugh, it seems like all is going great, I thought there’s no way this can bomb,” I paused for a moment while my other roommate Paul entered the room. He took a seat next to Jacob and stared at me intently.

“Let’s hear. I heard the beginning,” he said.

“Okay, anyways, so we get finished with dinner and we go bowling. I even managed to break the barrier, ya know, making some body contact before the movie.”

“That’s a good move,” Jacob said.

“Damn straight it’s a good move. Anyways, so it comes time for the movie, we both sit down fairly close to eachother. The entire time she sits with her arms folded. I make it obvious I want to hold hands, but I get nothing. Nothing! Totally shafted!”

“No signs at all, huh?” Jake asked.

“Nothing. Nothing at all!”

“Ya know, I have a hot friend I could set you up with. Her name is Jessica, you’d like her,” Paul said. He was always one to set me up on blind dates, but they never seemed to turn out too well. What I thought of as hot, and what he thought of as hot didn’t necessarily always agree.

“Oh yea? Sounds good, I’m all for it,” I replied. As much as I hated blind dates at this point I was up for trying anything.

“Cool, I’ll talk to her about it and find out when she can go,” Paul said. That was about how my life was going at that point. I’d go on two dates with a girl, get shafted, and move on to the next. I definitely wasn’t one to dwell too much on girls that didn’t like me. The last thing I wanted was another friend. I’d already tried out the whole friend thing once, and I’ll tell you what, once you get too friendly with a girl one of two things happen. Either you get the “you’re too much like a brother to me” or you’ll get the “lets just be friends” talk after the first date. Rarely do things pan out any differently.

“Well yo, I think I’m heading to bed, it’s been a rough night,” I said. Jake and Paul were pretty enthralled by whatever was on TV by then so I don’t think they even heard me. Or at least, if they did, they didn’t bother to muster up the strength to reply. I got up out of the recliner and headed into my room I shared with Paul. Boy was it a mess. I never was one to keep things clean. Pauls side of the room was, as always, perfect. My side on the other hand was a maze of dirty clothes, blankets, and other assorted objects. I crawled over it all and into my bed for some well deserved rest.

The Final Idea...

So I know what I'm going to write about this year. It's going to be a fiction novel based on things that me and my friends always talk about. It's basically a book about nothing. Think "The Catcher in the Rye" type nothingness. Here's some scene titles that are going to be in the novel.

"Shafted"
"Man Laws"
"The NCMO"
"The DUFF"
"NCC/NCHH"
"Rating Systems"
"Halting Conversations"
"The Energy"
"The End of the Night"
"Assume Failure with Confidence for Success"
"The Revised Ladder Theory"

And the final scene in the book... Well, I won't spoil it. But it's going to be good. No worries. First scene is going to be "Shafted" and that is going to be posted Nov 1st. Most of these titles won't make any sense, but it will all be explained, haha.

Welcome everybody!

So I have no idea what I'm going to write about yet this year. I'll just start off introducing myself. I'm Christopher Leitch, this is my 3rd year doing NaNoWriMo. I started participating in '03 at the young age of 14. I'd consider myself a veteran even though I've only ever reached 50K once. Here's hoping I make it twice this year.

I'll probably be writing some sort of fantasy novel, but who knows what's going to happen come Nov. 1st right? I'm stoked to start writing midnight that night.

Good luck to everybody else who reads this!