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So I had this jar of answers perched upon a shelf in my room.
It had only sat there a day or so in it's glory. There was no dust upon it, and it's gleam was uncomparable. In it was the future, in it was life for all.
A new life, a better life... the answers to any question anyone had ever asked.
'Is there a god?' ...it had the answer.
'What is true happiness?' ...it had the answer.
'What is the meaning of life?' ...it had the answer.
It was going to aid everyone. It was going to bring about peace and happiness, joy and love. It would be the first real, true miracle of the 21st century... and it would also be the last, for it would be the only one we needed.
But the day I found it, so helpless and alone despite all it's power... well, that day I had to go to work, so I left it on the top shelf in my room, at eye level, in fact. A safe place, I figured. A fitting place, above it all, like such a majestic icon or relic deserved. That mason jar of answers was going to change the world, and I was going to help it happen. Apart from what joy the jar could bring on it's own, it would make me speed past the marker that said 'insane' with extreme happiness if *I* was the one who got to deliver the news, if *I* was the one who would use the jar to help everyone who ever sought an answer they didn't find.
So I went to work and milled about. I went to my job of packaging golf balls with relentless tedium. As usual, by the end of the day my hands were cramped up and my feet were aching, but that was okay... because I was going home to the rest of my life, and to the true golden age of the known universe.
My bus ride home was uneventful. I rung the bell and got off at my stop and the biting cold outside made off with some of my warm breath. I passed by two girls who took up the whole of the sidewalk, one with short hair who I found attractive, and one with a shaved head, eyes with a little extra and a centered lip ring who was simply gorgeous. I passed by them silently and regretted it.
It was getting dark early now, and the sun had been long gone as I walked home, while the clock persistantly ticked towards 6:00. I stepped into my front door and felt the warm air against my face, yet I was considerably less comfortable indoors as a result of who was home to greet me. It was my frustrated father and his dopey sidekick, his live-in, drug addict, alcoholic girlfriend.
He informed me he was about to have an adventurous night on the town. I couldn't have cared less... except that this was just another instance where he proved himself a liar. Earlier in the week he had taken to moaning to me in complaint, as usual. His cries of, 'She drinks too much! I'm not going out with her this weekend, I have work here to do...' hadn't fallen on deaf ears. However now, all he had to say was once again meaningless and pointless, as a liars words always are. So in his lust for alcohol, and the accompanying rage which always managed to ensue (he is an angry drunk, a pity since his natural state is one of intoxication), he shirked his duties. Quite the role model I have and have had. He passed not just the buck, but some change as well... over to me. Do the dishes, vaccuum the carpet and program the vcr were todays orders. Fine. It really wasn't that big of a challenge, and still would easily have time to go have a Friday night out if I so chose.
As it ended up, the day at work had tired me out more than I'd thought it had, and after performing my basic 'chores', I happened to slip away to sleep upon my bed in my clothes around 10:30, completely forgetting about my sparkling answer jar atop the shelf on the wall. How I managed that, I don't know, it was all that could be found on my mind for the entire day. My brain had been mossy with thoughts of the jar.
Later.
So, being the lucky lad I am, at precisely the worst time to be waken up after falling asleep (which is approximately a half hour into your snooze) I experienced the annual Return of the Drunks, which is something akin to the Running of the Bulls, but with more destruction. It was strange that they came home at 11. They were early for some reason that night... oh well. The walls are thinner than my dad's hair in this house, and drunks aren't known for being quiet... especially these two.
That night, like any every other night, there was a problem in Margaritaville. My father started it, which was no surprise. No matter what, he finds the resiliancy to be the most intense asshole possible. It's a routine. His problem that night, however, bothered me slightly as well. His problem, though it may have started with his own incompetence trying to work the new vcr... ended with me.
The drunks came home and wanted to watch a video, and my father found that in his altered state, his incompetence grew to towering levels, and a task normally as difficult as pushing a play button became as easy as deciphering WWII German codes with an etch-a-sketch and two fingers. His frustration grew and grew, and more and more expletives came from out his mouth. First, they were just about the vcr itself.
Then... then they evolved to be directed at me.
So I listened and I listened. I couldn't really do much else. And the expletives began to fly.
From out of nowhere it began to be about me. It may have started with the idea that perhaps I was a curse. Perhaps that I broke everything I touched, which was completely not the case. No no, standing in front of him was the real problem. The drunken bitch who had broken the oven, the furnace and the washing machine in a short 3 months. Responsibility is an endangered animal, remember. So then he was yelling and screaming at no one in particular, all about me... not knowing I was in the other room the entire time.
He screamed about how useless I was.
He screamed about how worthless I was.
He screamed about what a terrible person I've always been.
And he had no right.
Drunk or not, meaning it or not, total imbecile he was... or not... he had no right to say anything about me, because he had ceased to know the slightest thing about me many years ago. However that's neither here nor there. What's important is what he did about it.
He was never a person of reason. In my bed, under the covers, listening to my own father call me worthless... I relived all the other weekends where the same thing had happened. I relived every night he'd come home stinking drunk and had brought me to tears again and again from childhood. My first memory, in fact, is of hiding in my closet from his gushing rage. I shook my head and pulled the covers up high, hiding away again from something I had no power over.
Then from the other room I heard a crashing. A terrible loud crashing noise that sounded to me like very, very bad news. Jumbo bad news. Monolithic bad news. In fact, it sounded to me something like a vcr being thrown the length of a room and for the most part being dashed to pieces across a floor and wall. Something a lot like that.
I had a thought then. That thought read as follows:
Oh... shit.
Because I knew it wouldn't stop there. I heard thick, angry footsteps coming my way... around corners... down a hall, and then they stopped. My double doors exploded open and banged loudly against the walls. They recoiled slightly to their original position, but only for a short while as my father heaved the remains of the new vcr across the length of my own room, to crash against my own wall while screaming something incoherent in it's unimportantness. The cursed vcr must have held together fairly well during it's first assault, but the second time it exploded in a way that was disturbing in it's magnificence. I heard what must have been hundreds of tiny pieces falling to the floor in scattered anagrams of transistors, metal, and plastic. With a final curse, my father left my doorway... all without ever seeing me huddled under my need-to-be-washed blankets.
He was gone. He'd shattered his brand new vcr above my head, and now with business finished, he did something that was so rational it made everything else that happened that night seem so much more insane. He took the video which he'd wanted to watch so badly, and he went downstairs, to watch it on the old vcr. The one we'd had for years that was worn in and he knew how to operater. The one that I hadn't had to program and in effect, frustrate him enough to the point of destruction over petty things.
He took his half-conscious partner in booze, and went downstairs to watch his precious movie, which by now simply had to be worth all the trouble he had created around it.
I did not need an engraved invitation to leave. I fumbled in the dark for a sweater, boots and my coat. I gathered them up in my arms and headed off as cautiously as I could for the back door at high speeds. I got two steps out my bedroom door.
That was when something peculiar, but not surprising happened. Of all the nights to be sentient, or even conscious... my father's alcoholic girlfriend chose tonight to have perfect hearing.
"Jaaaaack," she squawked. It was at that point I finally realized what animal she reminded me of. More of a cross of animals... a parrot and a chicken. "Diyooo hear tha? I thin' I herd some-un usstairs..."
"What?!" And I heard him jump up from his seat and sprint into action.
Oh. Fuck.
A dive back into my sheets later, he was standing in the stairway, with no declination of anger noticable. I, however, was also not noticable, and after shouting 'Johnny! Johnny?! JOHNNY, YOU FUCK!?' too much, he resigned and went back downstairs. I hate being called Johnny.
And I waited. I waited until I thought I heard the opening music of the movie, rather than just the gloriously action-packed trailers I'd heard before. I waited and went, and this time was sucessful.
I put them all on outside in the cold and snow and left for my mothers... a 25 minute walk. The cold was intense and wicked. Surely the furnace would be on all night at the home I'd just fled. Fabulous.
I spent the night there, on my mother's couch, and left for work again at 7 in the morning, after not enough sleep. I worked and I worked at pay that was not worth my while. And then I came home to a home that was not a home. It was a messy, messy afternoon. My father sat wordlessly in his favourite dining room staring chair, and I wondered exactly what he might say to me in explanation of the bits and pieces which were no doubt scattered around my room. While it was true his ignorance was unparalelled, he could still not ignore cold physical evidence scattered around my room and embedded in floors and walls.
So I walked in the door to my room, now in daylight hours, and took a look around at the damage. There near the corner was the bulk of the vcr, mangled and now long dead. It's guts were spread out over my decaying brown rug in a fashion that made me think 'vitrual roadkill'. Needless to say, it was a mess.
Wordlessly I stooped over to begin what looked surely to be an overly slow clean up, considering the nights sleep I had, my morning at work and the mood I was in from this senselessness. And considering a lot of the meat and potatoes of the ruined recorder were jammed into the heating grate, it looked like I had some prying with a screwdriver or chisel ahead of me. It was a particularly cold night last night, cold enough that the heat had probably been on all night. Transistors here, motherboard fragments there and... glass. Thick glass. Glass? Why? Why was there glass? Vcr's didn't have any glass in them did-- no.
no.
I stared at the floor for a moment, speechless, thoughtless, not even breathing. Not daring to think again what I had just thought. It was an impossibility. It could not be thought of, there was no way I would dare let the idea of such a thing enter my mind.
But what else could it be?
I closed my eyes and swallowed. Twice. I took a deep, deep breath, and I stood up, slowly.
...No. There was just no way...
I tilted my head to level, facing the wall.
...it couldn't be, please don't let it be...
And I opened my eyes...
...for the sake of all that's good and right, please no...
and everything, literally and figuratively, was shattered.
Oh... shit.
All of a sudden my head felt very hot and light and I nearly toppled over. A wave of naseau crashed over me and I doubled over ready to wretch.
The jar of answers was gone.
No, not gone... because really it was still there... but in dozens of sparkling pieces. My father had shattered the jar of answers with his already-destroyed vcr toss.
But... the answers... what about the...?
I searched on the shelf but there was only glass. The answers... they all must have had rolled off. The answers were round, so they had no corners to snag on anything or keep them confined in one place. Alright, so they rolled off... that's okay, that's okay... they're on the floor, I thought in desperation.
I fell to my hands and knees and scrambled around, feeling for them and looking for them frantically, eyes darting back and forth to really see anything at all but a motion blur. They had to be there. Gravity, right? It all had to do with gravity, I thought, with a mad cackle. They HAD to be there, it was just a matter of where they could roll to.
But I couldn't find them. Any of them. And whether it be fate, or the laziness of a now-dead housing contractor, I noticed something I hadn't before in 20 years of living in this house.
I noticed an awkward slope on my floor... which twisted and turned the carpeted floor ever so slightly... and ended at my heating grate.
I saw the entire horrific scene of last night replay in my mind in a kind of super-slo-mo that most vcrs weren't even capable of. Vcrs... slo-mo... ah shit.
I saw the crippled vcr smash through the answer jar... not just into it, but right through it... and that picture alone forced me to my knees, and sent shards of glass and metal sinking into my skin through my jeans. But as trickles of blood dribbled out my skin, and darkened my jeans, my vision continued. I saw all the precious answers drain out of their formation in the jar and fall through the air onto my vaccuumed floor. I saw them twinkling in the night, rolling towards their doom. I saw them roll and I heard each indivudual answer clink against the warm metal of the heating grate. They just had to be round. Because that was their nature, they *had* to be round, like little white marbles.
They had all fallen out onto the heating grate, and I could guess what had happened from there. Last night was a cold night. The heat must have just poured out of the vent. Whatever hadn't burned up had melted, and oozed down the vents towards the furnace... to be incinerated and lost forever.
I was there on my knees for some time, blood dribbling from my knees, tears dribbling much in the same manner from my eyes.
It was true. The world was ruined by something as insignificant as the anger of one alcoholic.
And there... there was not a single one left. Not a cure for cancer, not a recipe for the end of war. Not even one on how to make a great chicken salad. He had destroyed everything. Among the shards of glass that were left, I saw all the last glimmers of hope die away. He had singlehandedly doomed the future to more and more waves of ever increasing ignorance... he'd murdered hope and ended lives, he'd bludgeoned anything that mattered to death... and he had done it because he didn't know how to work the new vcr...
...and he'd never even know.
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