Filed under: Fiction
Jake Tomlin hated it when people defied stereotypes. He hated it because it made it that much more difficult for him to pre-judge them. As he sipped his third cup of coffee and surveyed the rest of the people in the twenty-four hour café, he managed to pre-judge all of the other customers in a manner of sixteen seconds. Jake, it should be said, based his entire existence on the validity of his pre-judgments, most of which were based upon sixteen seconds of observation, and most of them were false. Had he based the validity of his pre-judgments on seventeen seconds of observation this would likely be a different story. Jake had once managed to pre-judge every person who had ever lived in a manner of three seconds. However, this was an unusual feat for Jake. It had followed an all-nighter for his philosophy class in which he was instructed to write an essay on “bullshit”. He had come to the conclusion that night in a manner of three seconds that all people who had ever lived, including the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Phonetians, the Hittites, the Romans, the Huns, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh, the San, the Jews, the Gentiles, and especially Bill O’Reilly were or are proliferators of bullshit. The reason for this judgment: Jake could think of several. They were all clearly incorporated into his well organized essay of three body paragraphs, held in place between a rather clever intro paragraph and a rather condemning and incendiary conclusion. After Jake paid his bill, he surveyed the room one final time. His eyes fell upon a booth that contained six drunken girls who were clearly trying to wind down from a night of bar-hopping.
The booth the girls were sitting in was a rather normal booth, one you might expect to find in a twenty four hour café. However, what the girls did not know about the booth was that it had been a womanizer named Darryl Jones in its previous life. Darryl had spent the majority of his adult years trying to feel up women in bars, without much success. Now, as a direct result of karma, he had been reincarnated as a booth in a twenty four hour café, a café that was frequented by drunken women who freely sat on top of him every night. However, without any hands or the sense of touch the booth, who had once been Darryl Jones, was unable to enjoy this sensation. The irony of the situation was probably lost the booth though. It had given up on trying to think years before, although it was not aware of this. Thinking, it must be noted, is a rather difficult skill for a booth to acquire. Most of them give up very early on in the process although a few have gone on to get PhD’s. Had this booth, who had once been Darryl Jones in a previous life, attained the ability to think it would probably have been very worried about the rather suspicious stain it had recently acquired.
As Michelle Adams stared at the rather suspicious stain on the booth she was sitting in with her five sorority sisters, she couldn’t help but think about her boyfriend Guy Stripling. She and Guy had been dating for the last seven months and were madly in love with each other. In fact, they were so in love with each other that they couldn’t stand being around each other, a trait they share with most happily married couples. Michelle and Guy had recently spent their spring breaks together in Cancun, but that wasn’t what Michelle was thinking about. For some reason she kept getting the mental image of Guy laying in bed and her standing over him holding a knife. She was rather disturbed by the image, and she had a hard time thinking of anything else. She had also had a hard time earlier in the evening when she tried to explain to her sorority sisters why Guy had not joined them in their evening of bar-hopping. However, her thoughts were temporarily interrupted when her waitress, who was apparently trying to defy physics, failed in her endeavor.
As Audrey Blackman watched the plates that she had been balancing four seconds before tumble to the floor and shatter into two-thousand-three-hundred-and-thirty-nine pieces she couldn’t help but feel satisfied with her life. She was living her dream. Single mother at age twenty-seven, three children under the age of five, an ex-husband who refused to pay child support, a fifty hour work week, and fifteen pounds gained over the past two months. Hers was the life. As she picked up the pieces of her culinary fresco, she caught sight of Daniel Renfrow who was sitting at a table close to the wall typing madly on his laptop. She had forgotten to take his order.
As Daniel Renfrow sat at his table and moved his fingers rhythmically over the keys he couldn’t help but think about all of the homework he had to do before finals started. He had also recently come to the realization that he was out of ideas, and if he wrote anything else it probably would not be very good. He stopped typing, saved his writing as a word document, and shut off his computer. He would likely upload it later onto Facebook as a note, marvel at his cleverness, work on some French homework, and then fall asleep in a sea of narcissistic thoughts.
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