Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1 (ep 1)
We find our hero alone, in a coffee shop, with a laptop. He is looking for work on Portland's craiglist, hitting the pagedown button every few seconds, clicking on 'next 100 postings' every now and then. He stops when he finds a post titled "Creame Ale sales final super OPPorTUNiTEEEEE"
He clicks on it, curious. Initially, he chuckles to himself while reading the add, but his mood changes quickly as he reads on. He calls his girlfriend who is at work, and tells her to go to craigslist and read what she sees.
"'Creame, ale sales final, super opportunite. eeeee.' What is this?"
"Are tired you of nine and five hours outside house? Super opportunity to end strife and pain, meaning of life held within chambers deep under chief seattle, many riches, impossible reaching amazing! You will not believe that you are at the coffee shop on your girlfriend's laptop at 6:43 pm with a pen in your mouth but you will call now because the wall you are looking at is red! ... did you write this, this is hilarious and weird."
"I don't believe you. You're at the coffee shop right now? It must be someone you know."
"Well, the only alternative is that someone wrote that hoping that there would be SOMEONE who this applied to. There's a lot of coffee shops with red walls, and a lot of people who chew on pens while using their girlfriend's laptop at 6:43."
"Yeah, maybe, but there's not that many. I'm going to call the number and see what happens."
"All right, go ahead, but don't give anyone any private information of anything."
"Ok... yeah, I'll call them. If it's a scam, it's a damn good one."
He calls the number.
"Hello, you've reached the phone of Christian Mattson. Please leave your name and number, and I will get right back to you."
After the beep, Harold listens breathlessly for a second, and says "Uh, I'm responding to your craigslist ad? Um, please call me back..." the moisture gone from his mouth, he recited his phone number and asked for a call back.
The internal monologue begins as time stretches like a piece of hot cheeze off a fresh piece of greasy pizza. "I'm hungry," Harold thinks as he ponders the puzzle. "Christian Mattson. Why is that name so familiar? Who is this person? Is he on MySpace?"
A few minutes of searching finds that, Indeed, Christian Mattson is on Myspace. Even stranger, he learns that Christian is NOT a stranger, but in fact, him. Stranger still, Harold finds a post consisting of a story, in the form of loose dialogue, confusing narration with inconsistant tense, distracting spelling errors, and self reference... a story about Harold finding Christian Mattson's myspace page, and being forced to question HIS VERY EXISTANCE!
Stay tuned for the next episode of Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1
Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1 (ep 2)
Current mood: The plot thickens in your throat
Category: The plot thickens in your throat Religion and Philosophy
We find our hero just as he was last time, but whereas he was alone, he is now joined by a vicious spectre of fear which threatens to destroy him, as Harold Clinton has just learned that he has a double...
Harold wondered what could possibly be in store for him as he browsed Christian's profile, a browising that quickly went from casual to frenzied as an overwhelming premonition of danger mixed with a strange form of deja vu filled him with a rarely experianced flight or fight instinct. The adrenaline-fueled storm of free-word association that raged in his mind was, at first, the only line of thinking he could hold on to. Doppelgnger came up the most frequently.
Taking a breath, he tried to relax and draw on parallels from his life, or at least life he'd lived vicariously through the media, in order to put this strange situation in context. He thought of Invasion of the body snatchers, a story of a town being repopulated by alien doubles, Fight Club, as he considered the possibility of his insanity, and The Matrix as he began to question the reality of the world around him.
Taking a deep breath and a calm look at his mundane coffee shop surroundings, he gave himself a little dose of reality. Rubbing the back of his neck and his jawline, feeling the scruff of his beard with one hand and the plastic warmth of his girlfriend's laptop with his other, he decided that his world was indeed real, and the only insanity he had to worry about was letting his memory of fantastic movies give him crazy ideas. Christian would not be Harold's 'Tyler Durden', or the other way around, given the striking similarities between his double and himself. Christian the voice on the answering message and Christian the MySpace profile also were not likely some kind of glitch in a Matrix-like sub (or super)-reality, and neither sounded much like the workings of some alien civilization. Reason and real life experiance dictate, Harold thought, that there would be a reasonable and real life explanation for the whole thing.
Sighing carefully, he resolved to do a little more research into whatever was going on, only, he told himself, so he could find whoever was responsible and congradulate them on their elaborate and effective practical joke.
First) He attempted to find the original craigslist add, but it apparently had been deleted. This easily implicated his girlfriend, who, knowing which coffee shops he frequented and knowing he often chewed on pens, could easily have written the ad, and after learning that Harold had read it, decided the joke was done and the post could be removed.
Second) He scrolled through the list of friends that Christian's profile showed, a list which was very similar to Harold's, but with a few more people that he didn't know, looking for a discrepency which would clearly point out the creator of the fake myspace account.
Third) On a hunch, and getting bored of follwing up on an obvious prank, he idly attempted a google search on "underground chief seattle statue" which was mentioned in the craigslist add, and after a half minute of a moment of scrolling through the results, he found something intere-
Harold's train of thought was interrupted by the ringing of his cellphone. The number listed on the display was the number he had just called, the number belonging... attributed to Christian "Mattson," a fake sounding name if he had ever heard one. After a brief hesitation, he pressed the green button and asked the mic on his cell, "Who is this?"
"Uh, this is Christian Mattson, I'm calling in responce to your call about, uh," The voice on the other end was uncertain, but extremely familiar... hauntingly familiar, "um, about a craigslist add? I'm confused because I... didn't post anything on craigslist?"
Deciding to call the bluff, Harold forced an amiable and convincing laugh, "you got me, man, you got me -- scared the hell out of me. We should meet up for drinks sometimes soon -- where are you right now, man?"
The continued uncertainty he heard from the person on the other end sent chills down his spine, "Uh, I'm sorry, but who is this? I, um, saw a strange add on craigslist this was the number listed. And then I got your message. I'm really confused."
Harold hung up.
What will Harold do next? Does Harold even exist? Will Harold maintain his quickly eroding grip on his sanity? Will he learn more about the surreal origin of his doppleganger, or will he instead find that he has fallen headfirst into a rabbit hole of an enigma of a multi-layered onion of mystery and intrigue with more questions than answers and more questions revealed as answers are laboriously unveiled, tearing back the frightening layers at the risk of causing tears and rending a rift in the fabric of space-time continuity? Stay tuned for the next unbelievable episode of Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1
Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1 (ep 3)
Current mood: The end of the world is before(?)
Category: The end of the world is before(?) Dreams and the Supernatural
We find our hero in the immediate aftermath of a terrifying question that continues to stand poised to spectacularly smash his perception of reality, a question that hints at far-reaching implications with a scent of danger unlocked at every bite. And yet, there is something else that tugs at his attention, fighting for space in his thoughts, valiantly taking control of a moment of time from his perspective, a battle of essences of ideas that is finally won by a sort of natural disaster...
...The cellphone rings! Harold, shocked back into the world outside his head, glances quickly at the time, which is approaching 7pm, a fact which gives him an idea of who is calling even faster than looking at the caller ID, which confirms his suspicion.
His girlfriend's voice, "So, did you want me to pick you up from the coffee shop or what?"
"Yeah, and, uh..." he could feel his psyche squirming out from under the weight of the strange last few hours. After all, the man dieing of thirst must attend to his acquisition of water before he asks 'who is he anyway'. In this case, the pressing matter was not thirst, but more mundane tasks which only have the appearance of similar importance. "I activated Windows."
"How'd that go?" She asked, also mumbling something in responce to the radio that Harold filtered out.
"It was... It was pretty crazy." He hesitated, forcing himself to 'shift gears', "First I called and spent 5 minutes talking to a computer -- you know, one of those damn voice recognition things, and read off some numbers. Then I waited 5 more minutes and talked to some guy that got really confused every time I said something nice to him because hewas probably Indian and used to people being curt..." He sighed, understanding the plight of the callcenter workers, "anyway, everything worked out fine." Sensing her next question, possibly because of some hidden message in the way she inhaled almost imperceptively just before he cut her off "--and I found a couple good jobs. No interviews yet, but at least I'm getting the unemployment, which I figured out comes to 570 a month."
"Assuming a 3 check month."
He cringed, "Yeah," and changed the subject according to comfort level and pertinence, "but anyway, Pretty Monster is playing tonight at the ash street. I really want to go, but we have the video we have to return tomorrow and still haven't watched, and Catalyst JUST sent me a message on MySpace asking how come we never see him anymore."
"Oh yeah?" slight laughter in her voice, "what did you tell him?"
"I cited creative differences."
"What does that mean?" she asked, amused and disinterested, "that's probably a good call anyway. But, oh, how did your mystery call go?"
"It was..." Black thoughts flitted through his mind, strobing the surface of his conciousness like MGM stock film of bats swarming out of a cave at dusk... How did it go? It was so strange, it was difficult even to remember, like a dream with so few intersections with describable reality that it can barely be thought of while sane.... but Harold was proud of his sanity, tested as it had been throughout his moderately short and moderately interesting life, and he resolved that he would not lose it today, especially not because of Craigslist or MySpace. A character in Larry Niven's "Ringworld", which Harold was reading earlier that day, had a quote which was simple enough and which he liked enough to remember: I'll have to get over this eventually. It might as wel be now.
"It was crazy. I don't know. Maybe nothing is real, maybe everything else is real, maybe whatever. The only explanation that makes sence is that the internet is made up of billions of people communicating a lot and sometimes randomly, and eventually one person is going to randomly, drunkenly, or confusedly post something somewhere that... is weird."
"Yeah, probably. That's pretty crazy, though I still bet it's someone you know, like Andie. Anyway, you should pack up because I'll be there in a few minutes and I probably won't be able to find any parking."
Harold acquiesced. Though he still had goals involving his time using the coffee shop's wireless, he did not consider her advice to be an order because, after consideration, it was the most productive course of action; for the first time, he was aware that he was doing something because he was told to, but not because their will was stronger but because there was a unique situation involving two unique identities with two unique sets of goals and problems, and all these goals and problems were solved, in the scale of immidiate-time, by his packing up, which made it completely voluntary and logical.
Even though, from another perspective, it could be considered an order which could be used as evidence for an observer to show that he was not in control of himself, doing as was advised made sence from his perspective purely because his interests were similar to the interests of the other. If, he thought, someone orders you to breath and you have decided never to do something someone els tells you to do, it would be rediculous to not breath. It would be rediculous because, regardless of whether you are ordered to, it is in your best interest to breath.
Where does one draw the line? No where. There is never a time when someone telling you to do something should influence whether or not you should do something, unless it provides you with new information, like in a poker game for example.
Where does one draw the line?, Harold thought as he turned off the laptop, wrapped up the power cord, and shouldared the laptop bag.... No where, is the answer. Nothing anyone says should be considered at all unless it provides information that is valualble.
That being said, his world calmed. Beyond what people say, there's what people do, and beyond that, there's what happens, and there is no line to be drawn. The particularly dizzying effects of the practical joke had practically derailed him on several particular points, and good for them, he mused. But it provided no information that was usefull to him and so there was no value in the crazy things he had read.
Satisfied that a minor battle had been won, he stepped toward the fresh spring air, sighting his girlfriend's car rolling through the cherry-blossom-petal-bespeckaled intersection that was beautifully framed by the corner cafe's red doors, and heard a comforting skrit of his shoe gently nudging a piece of plastic debri that typically adorned a city sidewalk. Harold put the tiniest of his attention toward the lower side of his peripheral vision to include a piece of errant garbage in the joyous portrait of celebration, with people sitting outside of the bar opposite the cafe he was exiting laughing and people walking by enjoying the splendor of among the first of many sunny days, and more attention to the plastic by his foot was demanded.
He looked directly at it. A wristband. With a name, some numbers, and a small picture. It looked like it had been stretched off with some difficulty.
Still looking, aware that his girlfriend was honking her horn to get Harold's attention, he wondered at the plastic bracelet and the name, Greg Tilisio... no, not exactly familiar, but a strange coincidence to find something as strange as this on a day of such strange coincidence.. He picked it up, and saw even great coincidence swirling into view as galactic planes and chronometic verticies tumbled chaotically to intricately place everything into a perspective which only a god could understand but which a mere mortal can definately feel being inflicted upon him; He picked it up and saw, next to one of the strings of numbers, the words 'King County' and recognized this as the county that Seattle is in.
The name of the city in the Cragslist post that started the whole thing. Seattle.
What could happen next? The answer is ANYTHING as we join Harold in his search for deeper meaning in a hugely unlikely serious of unlikely coincidences which brings us all dangerously close to melting our wings in our flight for truth! All the while chilling our bones to absolute zero as we question OUR VERY REALITY! Keep your cursors at the ready for the next titilating episode of Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1
Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1 (ep 4)
Category: Life
Days have passed, and we find our hero in a period of what some might call denial and others might call sanity - for what is it to call the impossible, "impossible." Still, in the back of his mind are the questions that confuse and concern him, coercing him into continuing his barely begun quest... a quest which could destroy him just as surely as it could inform him.
"Days have passed," Harold wrote in his Livejournal, "and I find myself in what some people might call a period of denial." He sighed and thought for a moment, then continued. "But I think most people would call it a period of sanity, since what else can you call it when you think something that is impossible is really impossible?"
Harold heard a noise outside his apartment. It was a common occurrence because of the proximity of his apartment to the rest of the world, with other apartments, cars, restaurants, and people going to and from all these things. There were also children, which came from the people (the ones that go from apartments to restaurants) so that they could grow up and do the same thing. The noises usually consisted of a distant scream from an excited 5 year old or the heavy foot steps of a neighbor walking past the door.
"Still," he kept writing, "in the back of my mind, I wonder... I wonder what the hell is going on, and if it's even for me to find out. It sort of makes me feel like I'm on the verge of... I don't know. Something. It doesn't help that I had this dream last night. What did I dream, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.
"So, it starts and I'm in some kind of school, with yellow walls and low counters along both sides of this long hall with a set of big glass double doors at the end. It's night time, and I'm really concerned for a bunch of children that I guess I'm responsible for. There are loud noises outside, and there's another adult that is on her way to another room. I ask her, 'are they going to help us?' and I think I was referring to the government. The children are lying on the floor, I guess preparing for a hurricane. The woman tells me that they can't help, and I'm angry at first, but then I am afraid, and right then, the glass on the double doors break and there's a strong wind pushing us, and the children are crying. I notice there's a microwave to my right, just a little above me on one of those low counters, and I unplug it and take it off the counter.
"Suddenly, I'm outside and I am aware that I'm in some kind of aftermath, and I'm in a courtyard. It's sunny and there's lush vegetation around and also bits and pieces of wood everywhere, and I'm furious at this man standing on the roof of the school, laughing. I am aware that he is Greg Tilisio, and he's wearing the bracelet that I found the other day, but I can't do anything about him because the children are all screaming. Apparently I've had to deal with this before, because I know exactly what to do; I run and grab two trash bags, I line all the children up, and I systematically pull large-grapefruit sized eggs out of the children's belly buttons, rip open the fleshy, blood red shells, and put the shells in one bag and the contents of the eggs in another. I am afraid to look at the black things that I dump out of these horrible eggs, and I am completely horrified, but there's a grim necessity that I kill these creatures before they have a chance to hatch. I am also aware that we don't know when we will get a new shipment of rations, and while I put the things in the plastic bags, I think that we may need to eat them.
"Somehow, it's Greg Tilisio's fault. Or at least he is connected to it. After thinking that, I wake up."
Harold stopped typing and read over what he had written. He remembered the bracelet in his dream being very similar to the one he had found, but the one he had found was white and the one in his dream was yellow, almost like it had been highlighted. Of course, it didn't matter. The dream was another example of his insanity, he was sure, and it was better for him to just ignore the whole thing. He posted the entry, turned off the computer, and looked at the bracelet itself that he had set next to the computer.
After the strange post that referenced Seattle, finding this strange plastic bracelet outside his coffee shop just made everything more strange. It was thin, about an inch wide, and was warped in a way that suggested that it had to be stretched with great difficulty to take it off. Next to the name, it had a small black and white picture of a man with a big toothless grin, a shaved head, sunken cheeks, and the neckline of a hospital gown. The only guess was that he had escaped from some kind of mental hospital, and the strings of numbers confirmed a suspicion of some sort of institutional origin. And of course, the city name "Seattle" in small print after one of the groups of numbers.
In the wake of another rejection from a possible employer, Harold started to think that maybe Greg Tilisio warranted some investigation. Finding this bracelet constituted the second reference to Seattle on the same strange day he found a cryptic disappearing cragslist post alluding to something under 'Chief Seattle.'
Harold was certain that he was not crazy, that he really had found a craigslist post that almost seemed prophetic, that he had indeed found his doppelganger on MySpace, and that this bracelet added to the coincidence of that day in such a way that it might be crazier to sleep away the disconcerting memory than it would be to go to Seattle. He couldn't deny it, after having lived near Seattle so long, seeing the statue of Chief Seattle so many times, and being aware of Seattle's underground tunnels, that he suspected he would find something interesting under Seattle's statue of Chief Seattle at the edge of the business district. Surely it might be interesting and more effective to call Christian back and confront him directly, but something dark clouded his mind when he even thought about it. Clearly, he wasn't ready, and preferred the idea of arming himself with more information before such a strange meeting.
While he sat there, thinking about the logistics of a road trip to Seattle and how he would organize such a pilgrimage, he heard footsteps stop outside his door.
He looked and could see the faintest outline of a shadow interrupting a line of light that was the daylight peeking through underneath American Property Management's bad weather stripping of his door. It wasn't often that he had a visitor that didn't call first, and it was uncharacteristic for his apartment manager to stand outside his door without knocking. He wondered if he should open the door or wait for them to knock, or, if he should lock the door as quietly as he could.
He did owe some unsavory people large amounts of money, but he had left their circle of influence a long time ago and didn't think anyone was looking for him, but he suddenly felt a sick feeling in his gut that whoever was at the door could very well be someone he didn't want to see.
The seconds oozed by like cold syrup off an elevated fork, and Harold's hunger for escape was as impossible as the slowness of the terrifying moment, which stretched through the point where he slowly started to stand, considering his dire options of running to his second story bedroom window, creeping to the door to lock it with animal silence, or arming himself, when suddenly the handle turned.
Who is at the door? WHO IS AT THE DOOR?! OH MY GOD, who the HELL can it be at the door, and why-- MY GOD, WHY? This, and other questions may be finally answered soon, where our Hero will make serious progress and learn of other illuminating questions of dubious answerability in the next terrifying episode of Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1
Harold Clinton; Prisoner of Existential Adventure!!!!!!1 (ep 5) ...or is it?
We find our hero as we left him, choking on the stink of a fear so intriguing and awesome, it very nearly surpasses the amount of fear that is possible to have, as he watches the handle of his inopportunely unlocked door. It is highly unlikely to have a visitor at this time; in fact, he has never had a visitor at this time, which makes a visitor so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. Often we learn that the impossible is really the improbable in disguise, and as the door pushed open slowly, Harold took the only reasonable option he had available to him and grabbed the first thing he could see to wield as a weapon against his intruder. Suddenly...
...a cellphone rings! The presence behind the door fumbles for its pocket, and Harold takes the opportunity to take the offensive and lunge forward, keyboard in hand, tearing the door wide open to expose the attacker while they are most vulnerable. There, against the backdrop of the rest of the apartment complex, the surprised invader was revealed to Harold, and the frightened Harold holding a keyboard menacingly was revealed to the Jehovah's Witness.
The Jehovah's Witness, wearing a white button-up shirt and black slacks, was weilding a bible (a holy bible, Harold assumed) and his cellphone, which he turned off politely.
"Are you a Jehovah's Witness?" Harold asked with suspicion and a little embarrassment.
"Um. Yes, I am." He said a bit defensively, "Are you familiar with... Why are you holding that keyboard?"
"Well, you were interrupting some very important work. Anyway, how can you believe anything when there's no way to know you really exist?"
The Witness was prepared to respond to this sort of argument, "Well, if you look here, this passage-"
Harold interrupted, "But how do you know that is real? If you want to know you are real, can you look to something that is just as real as you without suspecting that it could be just as UNreal, also?"
"Yes, see, the Bible helps with these questions. See, this passage here proves-"
Harold interrupted again, not because he was prone to rudeness, but because of a fervor that had been building inside him, suppressed for a time for the, and said, "But how can it prove anything if it's real? See? Nothing is real! I mean, if I'm not real, and it really seems possible that I'm not, and I'm talking to you, then maybe you're not real either, and if you're not real, then the bible you're holding couldn't be real either, and..."
"Your not qualified to make that statement. The only one who is qualified to decide who is real or not is God."
Sure, there had to be someone who could explain things, that could put things into perspective, and the clues of coincidence and fate were pulling him to Seattle. It was the only thing he could be sure of. "Is he in Seattle?"
"Uh... who?"
"The person qualified to make that statement. God. He's in Seattle, isn't he?"
"God? No, he's... um, he's..."
"Ok, I'm going to Seattle." Harold closed the door.
He looked around with a crazy look in his eyes, unsure of what he was doing, but more unsure of what he needed to do. Resolved to find answers in Seattle, he started working on packing a bag.
There were a lot of reasons why he didn't want to go to Seattle, mostly the same reasons why he had originally left Seattle after living there for a year and surviving a couple close calls. It was precisely his aversion to Seattle, and his unsettling feeling that the wet town would be his demise, that cemented his idea that the answers would be there, underground. Lurking.
Waiting
What will happen on the way to Seattle? How will he get to Seattle, anyway? How will he afford the trip, and where exactly will he go while in Seattle, and for that matter, who exactly will he see (and avoid?)? Find out in the upcoming episode, where Harold will encounter a new schism of thought from deftly fighting off a monstrous attack on his psyche by a fellow traveler, and find what could be a dangerous clue in his search for answers.
Harold Clinton, prisoner of existential adventure
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes
"Hey man, long time no see," a friendly face behind a counter greets our hero as he walks into a coffee shop.
"Hi, yeah, it's been awhile," they both chuckle and Harold smiles in an attempt to lessen the awkwardness, "Uh, actually, I hate to say it but I don't remember where we've met."
At this point, there would be an attempt to describe a party; whose was it, who was playing or DJing, who was there, where was it, what the house looked like, a common exchange for a couple of 20 somethings in a metropolitan setting. Harold suspected it was some time ago since he couldn't remember the last time he was at a party, which would have given him pause if the barrister hadn't given him something bigger to chew on when he said, "Oh come on man, that's crazy, you're an old school regular, you used to come here every day, when you lived across the street!"
The temperature in Harold's stomach jumped a million degrees, his skin flushed, and his vision narrowed to display a small patch of wall - a patch of wall that was frighteningly familiar, provoking a response that forced Harold to avert his eyes, but everywhere they settled was something more familiar and at once more frightening.... eyes darting in moments that felt like forever, Harold didn't realize that he had been screaming, drenched with swet, sitting up in bed, he reached for his alarm.
"More nightmares," he told himself, reassuring. But why the same coffee shop? Why did it all seem so real? In the dream he had the sense of being in Portland, but Harold remembered only being to Portland a couple times. He'd lived in Seattle all his life.
