Another Blank Page

        He sat in front of his computer, his face illuminated by the white neon glow of the monitor.

         “Failure,” it said to him.

         He shook his head and took a drink from the bottle of beer next to his monitor. It was warm by now, but he couldn’t bring himself to drink bottled beer fast – it gave him painful burps. He grabbed a tortilla chip from the bowl on the other side of his desk, dipped it into a jar of store-bought queso dip, and crunched it down. He followed it with another swallow of warm beer, dusted his fingertips off on his shirt, and put his hands to the keyboard.

         “Still a failure,” it said to him.

         His fingers began to clack rapidly across the plastic keys. Letters formed words on his screen, and short, awkward sentences began to appear. Those sentences banded together to create painfully ugly paragraphs, each one a stillborn monstrosity in the place of elegant writing.

         “My God,” the computer said to him, “how can you be so bad? I mean, did you see that? You used past and present tense in the same paragraph. Is that because you’re retarded?”

         He stood up from his computer and wandered into the kitchen. The refrigerator light illuminated two half-empty bottles of diet soda, a container of pesto sauce, some sliced American cheese, and half a gallon of milk. Options being what they were, he grabbed the milk. A few chugs later he put it back with the cap half-screwed and wiped the thin trail of milk from his lips. He walked back towards the computer but stopped at the bathroom to urinate first. When he was done he sat back down on the uncomfortable office chair that sat in front of his desk. He put his fingertips to the A-S-D-F and the J-K-L-;.

“Resistance, as they say, is futile,” the computer told him. “You are a failing failure who fails at everything he attempts. Why bother? Give it up. Save yourself. Go to bed.”

More clickity-clacking created letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. The punctuation wasn’t bad. At least he had that going for him. He stared evenly at the monitor as his thoughts hit the screen in fits and spurts, his fingertips rapidly punching the keys at a respectable sixty words-per-minute. His right pinky, lightning-quick, would tap the backspace key twitchingly every few sentences or so, destroying words and half-formed thoughts before they had a chance to take a breath of free air. The television was on, but he liked the distraction. It helped him to ignore the computer.

“Come fail away, come fail away, come fail away with me!” it sang.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

He tried to be clever. He tried to be meaningful. He tried to be honest and thoughtful and evocative. He fought to ignore the urge to just sit down and write a fantasy story – a simple tale of dragons, and elves, and magic, with nothing new to say and nothing of relevance to reveal. He’d been fighting that urge since he wrote his last fantasy story in high school. He didn’t even read fantasy anymore, but the idea of writing anything of substance was almost too intimidating to address.

“Maybe I should write a comic book script,” he said to himself.

“Maybe you’re retarded,” the computer retorted.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he replied.

Ideas began to flow a little more easily. It wasn’t quite a story he was creating – it had no discernable beginning, middle, or end. It had no plot to speak of. But it was an idea, and it was honest, and open, and he didn’t hate it as much as his computer did.

“Had I hands,” it said to him, “and fingers to flex on those hands, and a gun within reach of my hands, I would put a merciful bullet in my tower. I would end this atrocity that you are inflicting upon me.”

He put a few finishing touches on a last paragraph, took another drink of his warm beer, and looked at his monitor.

“You know what?” he said. “You aren’t very nice.”