tgenoves43's blog

That Groaning Sound You Make When You Wake Up In The Morning

nightmare woke me up

can’t remember it at all

it’s unimportant

 

Books

“I love Stephan king”

No you don’t, he doesn’t write

Cocaine writes his books

 

Terror

The click and clatter

My bones rattle with terror

I wish I was safe 

His breath is like a windstorm

He whispers his name, “Ted Cruz”.

 

Recluse

Wish I was alone

People do not excite me

I am surrounded by them

I can’t relate to humans

One ticket to joker please

Reflecting on the past 10 years I’ve spent in choirs can lead to unearthing many stories. One of those many stories is the tale of my 7th grade Boychoir trip to the coast. This was a trip of legendary proportions with copious amounts of middle school hijinks.

Let’s flashback to the magical year of 2015. It was the summer after 7th grade; I was listening to Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz on my 2013 iPod Touch and in a van full of middle school boys headed to Portland. The trip to Portland proved to be fairly uneventful until we got back to the hotel room that night. 

One of my three roommates for the night decided to make some “tasteful” prank calls to various unsuspecting businesses. The first of many was your average prank call to a local appliance repair service that went something like this.

“Is your refrigerator running?” snickered the preteen.

 “No.” sighed the fed-up employee.

“Then you better go catch it!” said the tween.

Not long after the disgruntled employee hung up; my roommate called another business. This time the target of the prank call was the local Verizon store. My roommate continued to bombard the employee about how much he hated Verizon’s service and how T-Mobile is superior. 

    The next day we hopped on the van and drove to the coast, cannon beach to be specific. After hopping off the van we got to the massive vacation house that we were staying at. The house consisted of around 2 massive floors and a huge basement. I ended up sleeping on the floor in the basement next to the TV. My friends and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up the huge surround sound speakers in the basement to watch TV. The first show we decided to watch was Extreme Couponing on TLC; a show that boasts a 4.8/10 on IMDB. 

The premise of Extreme Couponing is about the lives of people who are addicted to using coupons when buying groceries. One guy on the show actually used so many coupons that he spent a negative amount of money and forced the grocery store to pay him the remainder.

We wasted the hours away watching that show until it was time for dinner. Around 5:30 PM we headed off to dinner at a local fish and chips place. One member of the choir went off to the bathroom and came back with the handle that he had stolen off of the bathroom stall door. The choir kid (let’s call him Stu) hid the handle in his pocket without showing it to anyone.

After lunch, we went to go see a community theatre production of Little Shop of Horrors. I have always been a big fan of musical theatre, and I enjoy that show quite a bit. The specific production that we watched had very robotic acting, offkey singing, and a lone piano to accompany the actors. All of these elements only added to the campy charm of the story.

After the show, we headed back to the house and settled in the basement to play some Super Smash Bros and talk about which Studio Ghibli is the best (Castle in the Sky is the right answer). After about 20 minutes of this, we started to wonder where Stu was. We knocked on the bathroom door and found Stu violently ill and vomiting. Out of fear that we might get sick as well, we made a charming name for the sickness Stu was facing. We all decided that Stu had been stricken with an acute case of The Soup. 

We came up with the name “Soup” because the symptoms included vomiting. It was believed to have originated from the bad clam chowder that Stu had for lunch, but the keenest of us decided that it was from the stolen bathroom stall handle. 

        Overnight most of the choir had been infected with the wretched stomach bug. I gathered up the few of us remaining who hadn’t been tainted with The Soup. The survivors had kept our distance from the infected, whom we put into specific quarantined rooms. As survivors of the plague, we found pride in our sense of cleanliness and our preventive hand washing. I was sent by the leader of our squadron had sent me on an apparent suicide mission to grab the Wii U from the quarantine room so we could play videogames. I agreed to go on the mission for the greater good of the survivor community. I put on my hoodie and headed into the infected zone. The shells of my former compatriots stumbled around the vomit caked room. I found the video game console in the corner and pounced past the infected but was unfortunately touched on the shoulder by Stu and I knew my healthy days were over. 

Around dinner, I was stricken with The Soup and spent around 15 minutes vomiting in the bathroom. At this time of the evening, the number of people without the infection had gone from 6 to 2 and we had all accepted our fate. We had accepted that we would all have to inhabit this house that reeked of vomit and Cheetos for only one more night. Soon this nightmare would be over.

The next day The Soup had dissipated and most of us had been cured. My friend Nathan who had previously found pride in himself being Soup-free had become stricken with the stomach plague. On the way back while we were bickering about Version vs T-Mobile; one kid was holding an empty Redvines bucket in case anyone threw up. Nathan was sitting next to the kid with the bucket and decided to play a prank on him. Nathan leaned over the bucket, pretended to vomit, and freaked out everyone in the van. The smirk on Nathan’s face is a look I may never forget and The Soup is a memory that will forever haunt me.

1002 Words

Frequency a short story written by Townes Genoves

 

He rewound his modified cassette with a pencil and loaded it into the tape deck. The machine spit out a pained hum and the playback started: “.dnuora evol ruoy worhT elpoep ,elpoep ,dworc eht ni em teeM .gnihgual elpoep yppah ynihS”.

 “Shiny Happy People” by R.E.M. had been played non stop the summer of 1991, but 28 year old Daniel Sampton was convinced of ulterior motives behind the song’s meaning. He insisted that the repetition was the key to decoding the “secrets” behind the song. Daniel gathered that the message was to be used as a form of mind control from the band that was intended for world domination. 

For multiple weeks, Daniel became shut off; his eyes dilated and his breath smelled stale and rotten. He had avoided sleep for at least seven days due to the aggressive sound thumping on the windows of his 8th story NYC apartment. The gentle tapping of rain made the sound of bullets flooding his eardrums. His thoughts had become jumbled due to a lack of human contact. The shrieks of Michael Stipe had been his only companion and almost comforting… then the thumping stopped. A sharp jolt of feedback surging through Daniel’s stereo. 

“WHO’S THERE!” Daniel yelped into the blackness. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” 

“They don’t get you” whispered the voice through the stereo.

“Who?”

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

“What?” 

The voice dissipated. 

On the morning of September 8th 1991, after not sleeping for a week, Daniel finally woke up in a neatly pressed striped suit covered in blood with no recollection of the previous night. Daniel, not sure of his situation, ran to the phone to call the police, but his landline had been mangled and melted into a clump of burning plastic and wires. His entire apartment had its electronics destroyed and furniture stripped. The only things remaining in his apartment were a Rhapsody TV-670 portable tv, a Fisher Price children’s cassette player, and four cassettes, one of which was simply marked play. He put the cassette into the toy and a metallic voice shrieked at him,   “Good morning! You must now act quickly; there is a bottle of dish soap sitting your bathroom. Fill your bathtub with warm water and the whole bottle of dish soap. That will help you get Mr. Tartikoff’s blood out of your suit.”

After the message ended, the tape off the cassette became unwound and tangled to the point of becoming unusable. Not much later the tv flicked on to a distraught news reporter: “Today the television world gathers together to mourn the loss of beloved NBC President, Brandon Tartikoff. Witnesses say that the assailant was a well dressed man in his late twenties who was clearly schizophrenic.”

Not long after, the tv sputtered and buzzed off. Daniel hobbled over to his bathtub and filled it with water and dish soap and sat in it with his suit on for what felt like two hours until the blood stains were mostly gone. Still soaking wet he walked over to put in the second cassette, which was a copy of Out Of Time by R.E.M, which he assumed was simply for entertainment, along with an audio copy of Kenneth Branagh reading one of Henry V’s monologues. The fourth cassette was quite possibly the strangest one. It consisted of nothing but a low hum that made Daniel nauseous and twitchy. Not long after the tape finished, he bolted to the door as to escape his prison. As his feet screeched to a halt he noticed that the door and windows have been replaced with metal sheets with rivets bolting them on. The vents in the walls started to sputter out a white fog that ended the course of another day.

The next day Daniel woke up to a wall of speakers connected to a three slot tape deck playing all the remaining tapes at once. This sound would continue for nearly 18 hours of painful agony and sleep deprivation. The pain was so unbearable that Daniel started to mutter to himself to drown out the sound of the speakers . After multiple hours of the noise, the intercom buzzed on, “If you want this to stop just take this knife and put on a suit, the door will slide open and you will be put in a black Cadillac DeVille to be driven to the next location.”

Daniel followed the directions given to him by the voice. The door opened with a horrible screeching sound and the view of sunlight scorched his retinas like a blowtorch. His 8th story apartment had been transferred to a waterside, bottom level warehouse. A black 1991 Cadillac DeVille screeched next to the warehouse. 

“In, now!” croaked the driver with the raspy tone of a lifelong smoker. Daniel simply responded with incoherent mumbling, despite understanding the request, and hopped in the backseat. The radio buzzed on with the hum that Daniel heard in his apartment. 

“Wa…w-what’s..th-that…frequency?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know, kid? Boss’s orders.”

“Wa…w-what…is…y…y-your name?”

“My name is none of your business…”

“Kenneth Branagh! T..t-that must be the name!”

“What is your deal, kid?”

“Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

Before Daniel could say anything else, the car came to a stop in a dark alleyway where Daniel exited the car wearing a suit and carrying a knife. His utterance of  “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” continued down the alley. At the end of the alley was a bustling New York street where a news anchor on his way to work bumped into Daniel.

“Excuse me?”

“W…w-what…i…is…y-y-your name?”

“Dan, Dan Rather.”

“M…m-m-my…n-name…is…d-Daniel. Y…y-your’s is Kenneth.”

“My name is Dan.”

“WhatisthefrequencyKenneth!?WhatisthefrequecyKenneth!?WhatisthefrequencyKenneth?!”

“Kenneth” fell to the ground onto a bloody pool after being stabbed in the stomach by Daniel. Daniel became dizzy and disoriented as the light faded and a shadowy figure appeared from the alley. Michael Stipe’s unmistakable voice muttered “Good work.”

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