Thursday, March 24, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The Watch
The Watch by Shervell Jones
HI, my name is Walt Peters, and a long time ago, I was just like everyone else. Well, not like exactly like everyone else, but I was someone. At least, that was until I found that damn watch, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning:
It all started one day while I was at work......um, well at home. You see, for me, work is at home since I run my father's old watch repair shop. I sleep in the room above the shop a.k.a. the attic. Yeah, I know...I know...Not the most glamourous living quarters, but it's a living. My life has never been a glamourous to begin with. I'm 45 years old, single, and living around the constant presence of time slowly slipping away. I'm surprised that I haven't gone crazy from the ticking alone. I guess I'm use to it. You see, my father was an avid collector of anything time related.
Clocks...calenders...watches...old timpieces. When I think of all the days I spent with him searching for antique timepieces. All the time I spent helping him fix them instead of making friends, but like everything else in my life, It's in the past. The story of my life. I have all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it.
Business is good, despite the changing technological times. No matter what era, there will always be one pretenious person who will buy a grandfather clock just to brag to his friends about its origins. I know what you're thinking. I'm fooling these guys into buying a worthless clock. Believe me when I tell you fooling themselves more than I'm fooling them. If I found out that one of these clocks was really owned by henry the eight, do they really think that I would really sell it to them for three hundred bucks.
Give me a break... And I know when they get home, they're just bragging about how they swindled a simple watch reapairman into selling them a priceless grandfather clock. The most entertaining customers are the ones who come in to get their watches repaired. Some of them generally nice people and some of them are just plain jerks. They come in with some expensive watch which they overpaid for and tell me to be careful with it, despite the fact that they're bringing it to me means that they weren't careful with it.
The one customer that I even remotely like is this old man who came to the store everyday even when my father owned it. He was a kind old man. He wears the same overcoat everyday and has a small scar on the side of his cheek. His face looked as though he always had something to tell, but couldn't. When I asked him who he was, He would always smile and say he was just a good friend of the family. He wouldn't buy anything. He would just aimlessly wander around the store. He'd pick up a watch or two, but never buy anything. He also knew a thing or two about watches since there were times where he would lend me a hand when I was swamped.
Sometimes I could swear that I could see a tear slid down his cheek, as if the act of repairing one was lethargic. I would never comment on this. I figured since he was a friend of my father, it was probably feelings for a lost friend. Whenever he would get like this, I would simply go in the kitchen, make us a quick lunch, and eat with him while he told me stories about my father. The stories were a little strange, though. From the way he told them, It didn't sound like it was from the point of a friend. More like from the point of a father and son. I always shrugged this off as just my own messed-up way thinking.
Though I spend most of my life fixing and restoring timepieces, don't mstake as a love of mine. If anything, I do it out of respect. When my father died, he left me his shop and everything in it, including a wooden box with a note attached to. It simply said : I'm sorry. At the time, I thought it was apology for taking away my childhood., but as I later found out it was so much more than that. I tried to open it, but the top wouldn't budge. There wasn't a lock or anything. There wasn't even a clip. It was just a wooden box. I threw the box off to the side as another display of my father obsession with time keeping from having something I want.
For four years, The box just sat there collecting dust. I'm actually forgot all about it. I don't know what it was about that day that made me even think about it. A letter came in the mail stating that my father hadn't paid his taxes since forever. At first I couldn't believe it. My father had this shop since before I was born. How could a man go that long without paying a dime in taxes ? To make it worse, they were sending someone out in two days to collect or they were going to take the shop. Now, as I told you earlier, I could care less about this shop, but where would I go ? This place was my home. I didn't have any friends to stay with and all the money in the shop went towards my already meager living expenses. I couldn't afford to pay what had to be at least a couple hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if I could why would I keep something that put me in this situation in the first place ?
That night I did something I'd never done before, I drank. I drank long. I drank hard. I drank whatever I could find in my father old liquor cabinet. Bottle after bottle, I consumed as much as my body could handle and then drank some more. Since I had never drank any kind of liquor before and didn't have any friends to ever go out with, I didn't know when to say when. At first, it tasted terrible like burning ashes, but then, almost unexpectantly, it turned oddly smooth. I found it had a numbing effect. Even though the pain from my problems still exist inside of me, I couldn't feel them. I couldn't feel the weight of my father's world I had been forced to bear. for hours, I just sat at my workbench in my office and kept taking shot after shot of the only thing that was making me feel better.
Suddenly, there was a sharp pain in my stomach. It was piercing, like someone had stabbed in the gut with a jagged knife. The room began spinning around me. Everything seemed simultaneously too close and too far. I fell to the floor in agony. As the pain ran throughout my enitre body, so did my problems. I did my best to curl up and cry. The tears poured out as if they had been welling up for years. Everything came out. My money problems, my life, my hatred for my father's obsession. The flood gates had opened and worst of all, I knew they would accomplish nothing. As I came to that realization, another feeling began to rise up in my body. This feeling more familiar since it was only when I was deathly ill that I felt this particular feeling.
I leaned over towards the garbage bin next to me and emptied my stomach of everything ailing me, inlcuding the turkey sandwich I had for lunch that afternoon. Soon, even the pain in my stomach was gone. As I wiped my mouth clean, I looked up from the ground to see the box my father had given me. The light from my desk-lamp caused it to shine almost beatific down on me. The more I stared at it, the more I became enraged at it. It stood for everything that was my father. A constant reminder of his obsession. A constant reminder of how it became my own obsession.
A constant reminder of the love I wanted from him. The love he gave to his obsession.
In a fit of drunken, anguished rage, I rose to my feet. I grabbed the little black wooden box and threw as hard as I could at the wall across the room. It hit the wall with a loud thud and hit the floor even louder. What happened next was...no.....had to be divine intervention. The box opened and piece of paper and a small pocketwatch fell from it. Surprised in my drunken state, I couldn't believe it. The contents that had alluded me for so long. My father's last gift to me had been his own obsession. I fell to the floor again, this time from sheer numb shock. I slowly crawled towards the father's last will. I cautiously picked up the paper and the watch, as if it was more precious than gold.
The watch actually was gold. It was a gold plated antique pocket watch with an usual design on it. It was clouds with faint visages of clocks gears behind it. I suddenly remembered the letter and quickly opened it, hoping for something to end my pain.
The note said :
Dear Jason,
I am truly sorry for what I have put you through. All your life I have ignored you to further my own ambition and selfish desires and you deserve to know why. .....
I realized that the same watch he was working on all those years was the same watch I was holding in my hand. My anger returned at that moment. This watch....this watch was the reason that never got to truly live. To truly become my own person. I wanted to destory it. I wanted to get a hammer and smash it to pieces. I wanted to shatter it to a million pieces like it had done to my life. He'd ruined both of our lives for some fairy tale about a magic watch and now was insane enough and but once again, something inside of me stopped me from doing it. The same feeling stopped me from selling the shop when I first inherited the place. I didn't know what it was, but it was enough for me stop in my tracks.
I kept thinking to myself why would he leave me the most important part of his obsession. At first I thought that this was it. This was the piece that separated me and my father from each other. The final piece of our puzzle. The only thing that meant I wasn't him and now it was right in my hand. My final descent into madness like my father. That was going to be my life now: some crazy old man living in a tiny room, fixing the same watch over and over....over and over.
I could almost feel myself changing into him. Physically. Emotionally. Out the corner of my eye, I noticed the letter still in my hand. I looked at it carefully as the end of my transformation. I read the last words of my father's letter.
..., but this is someting you deserve to hear in person. There is a little button on the side of the watch. I have preset it for you. All you have to do is press it and it will explain everything.....
I turned the watch to its side and saw the button my father had mentioned. I didn't believe it at first. This one button would completely answer all my questions? and what did he mean by "in person" ? Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the numbness I was feeling inside, maybe it was the fact that I had nothing to lose. I pushed that button and didn't care either way what happened, But I wasn't ready for what happened next........
To be continued...........
HI, my name is Walt Peters, and a long time ago, I was just like everyone else. Well, not like exactly like everyone else, but I was someone. At least, that was until I found that damn watch, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning:
It all started one day while I was at work......um, well at home. You see, for me, work is at home since I run my father's old watch repair shop. I sleep in the room above the shop a.k.a. the attic. Yeah, I know...I know...Not the most glamourous living quarters, but it's a living. My life has never been a glamourous to begin with. I'm 45 years old, single, and living around the constant presence of time slowly slipping away. I'm surprised that I haven't gone crazy from the ticking alone. I guess I'm use to it. You see, my father was an avid collector of anything time related.
Clocks...calenders...watches...old timpieces. When I think of all the days I spent with him searching for antique timepieces. All the time I spent helping him fix them instead of making friends, but like everything else in my life, It's in the past. The story of my life. I have all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it.
Business is good, despite the changing technological times. No matter what era, there will always be one pretenious person who will buy a grandfather clock just to brag to his friends about its origins. I know what you're thinking. I'm fooling these guys into buying a worthless clock. Believe me when I tell you fooling themselves more than I'm fooling them. If I found out that one of these clocks was really owned by henry the eight, do they really think that I would really sell it to them for three hundred bucks.
Give me a break... And I know when they get home, they're just bragging about how they swindled a simple watch reapairman into selling them a priceless grandfather clock. The most entertaining customers are the ones who come in to get their watches repaired. Some of them generally nice people and some of them are just plain jerks. They come in with some expensive watch which they overpaid for and tell me to be careful with it, despite the fact that they're bringing it to me means that they weren't careful with it.
The one customer that I even remotely like is this old man who came to the store everyday even when my father owned it. He was a kind old man. He wears the same overcoat everyday and has a small scar on the side of his cheek. His face looked as though he always had something to tell, but couldn't. When I asked him who he was, He would always smile and say he was just a good friend of the family. He wouldn't buy anything. He would just aimlessly wander around the store. He'd pick up a watch or two, but never buy anything. He also knew a thing or two about watches since there were times where he would lend me a hand when I was swamped.
Sometimes I could swear that I could see a tear slid down his cheek, as if the act of repairing one was lethargic. I would never comment on this. I figured since he was a friend of my father, it was probably feelings for a lost friend. Whenever he would get like this, I would simply go in the kitchen, make us a quick lunch, and eat with him while he told me stories about my father. The stories were a little strange, though. From the way he told them, It didn't sound like it was from the point of a friend. More like from the point of a father and son. I always shrugged this off as just my own messed-up way thinking.
Though I spend most of my life fixing and restoring timepieces, don't mstake as a love of mine. If anything, I do it out of respect. When my father died, he left me his shop and everything in it, including a wooden box with a note attached to. It simply said : I'm sorry. At the time, I thought it was apology for taking away my childhood., but as I later found out it was so much more than that. I tried to open it, but the top wouldn't budge. There wasn't a lock or anything. There wasn't even a clip. It was just a wooden box. I threw the box off to the side as another display of my father obsession with time keeping from having something I want.
For four years, The box just sat there collecting dust. I'm actually forgot all about it. I don't know what it was about that day that made me even think about it. A letter came in the mail stating that my father hadn't paid his taxes since forever. At first I couldn't believe it. My father had this shop since before I was born. How could a man go that long without paying a dime in taxes ? To make it worse, they were sending someone out in two days to collect or they were going to take the shop. Now, as I told you earlier, I could care less about this shop, but where would I go ? This place was my home. I didn't have any friends to stay with and all the money in the shop went towards my already meager living expenses. I couldn't afford to pay what had to be at least a couple hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if I could why would I keep something that put me in this situation in the first place ?
That night I did something I'd never done before, I drank. I drank long. I drank hard. I drank whatever I could find in my father old liquor cabinet. Bottle after bottle, I consumed as much as my body could handle and then drank some more. Since I had never drank any kind of liquor before and didn't have any friends to ever go out with, I didn't know when to say when. At first, it tasted terrible like burning ashes, but then, almost unexpectantly, it turned oddly smooth. I found it had a numbing effect. Even though the pain from my problems still exist inside of me, I couldn't feel them. I couldn't feel the weight of my father's world I had been forced to bear. for hours, I just sat at my workbench in my office and kept taking shot after shot of the only thing that was making me feel better.
Suddenly, there was a sharp pain in my stomach. It was piercing, like someone had stabbed in the gut with a jagged knife. The room began spinning around me. Everything seemed simultaneously too close and too far. I fell to the floor in agony. As the pain ran throughout my enitre body, so did my problems. I did my best to curl up and cry. The tears poured out as if they had been welling up for years. Everything came out. My money problems, my life, my hatred for my father's obsession. The flood gates had opened and worst of all, I knew they would accomplish nothing. As I came to that realization, another feeling began to rise up in my body. This feeling more familiar since it was only when I was deathly ill that I felt this particular feeling.
I leaned over towards the garbage bin next to me and emptied my stomach of everything ailing me, inlcuding the turkey sandwich I had for lunch that afternoon. Soon, even the pain in my stomach was gone. As I wiped my mouth clean, I looked up from the ground to see the box my father had given me. The light from my desk-lamp caused it to shine almost beatific down on me. The more I stared at it, the more I became enraged at it. It stood for everything that was my father. A constant reminder of his obsession. A constant reminder of how it became my own obsession.
A constant reminder of the love I wanted from him. The love he gave to his obsession.
In a fit of drunken, anguished rage, I rose to my feet. I grabbed the little black wooden box and threw as hard as I could at the wall across the room. It hit the wall with a loud thud and hit the floor even louder. What happened next was...no.....had to be divine intervention. The box opened and piece of paper and a small pocketwatch fell from it. Surprised in my drunken state, I couldn't believe it. The contents that had alluded me for so long. My father's last gift to me had been his own obsession. I fell to the floor again, this time from sheer numb shock. I slowly crawled towards the father's last will. I cautiously picked up the paper and the watch, as if it was more precious than gold.
The watch actually was gold. It was a gold plated antique pocket watch with an usual design on it. It was clouds with faint visages of clocks gears behind it. I suddenly remembered the letter and quickly opened it, hoping for something to end my pain.
The note said :
Dear Jason,
I am truly sorry for what I have put you through. All your life I have ignored you to further my own ambition and selfish desires and you deserve to know why. .....
I realized that the same watch he was working on all those years was the same watch I was holding in my hand. My anger returned at that moment. This watch....this watch was the reason that never got to truly live. To truly become my own person. I wanted to destory it. I wanted to get a hammer and smash it to pieces. I wanted to shatter it to a million pieces like it had done to my life. He'd ruined both of our lives for some fairy tale about a magic watch and now was insane enough and but once again, something inside of me stopped me from doing it. The same feeling stopped me from selling the shop when I first inherited the place. I didn't know what it was, but it was enough for me stop in my tracks.
I kept thinking to myself why would he leave me the most important part of his obsession. At first I thought that this was it. This was the piece that separated me and my father from each other. The final piece of our puzzle. The only thing that meant I wasn't him and now it was right in my hand. My final descent into madness like my father. That was going to be my life now: some crazy old man living in a tiny room, fixing the same watch over and over....over and over.
I could almost feel myself changing into him. Physically. Emotionally. Out the corner of my eye, I noticed the letter still in my hand. I looked at it carefully as the end of my transformation. I read the last words of my father's letter.
..., but this is someting you deserve to hear in person. There is a little button on the side of the watch. I have preset it for you. All you have to do is press it and it will explain everything.....
I turned the watch to its side and saw the button my father had mentioned. I didn't believe it at first. This one button would completely answer all my questions? and what did he mean by "in person" ? Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the numbness I was feeling inside, maybe it was the fact that I had nothing to lose. I pushed that button and didn't care either way what happened, But I wasn't ready for what happened next........
To be continued...........
Friday, March 18, 2011
Friday + Friday = Hit Song
So I'm on youtube one day and I come across this song from some girl named rebecca black called friday. I see it has over 16 million hits and so I watch it. Now to me, it was actually good for a new artist, but as I go to comment on it, I see all these comments bashing this thirteen year old girl. What The Hell ?!! Now while I'll admit she has a Ke$ha meets Fran Drescher like voice, the song itself wasn't so bad. Then there are these comments like I hope you die and why wont you slit your throat? I mean she is only thirteen, what happened to self control? I have to believe some of these people are grown and should have some form of filter in the head that says this is wrong.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
I Got A Versatile Blogger Award!!
Thank You Crystal Pye for my Versatile Blogger Award. It's so cool to know someone is reading.
Now there are some rules when it comes to this award & here they are:
1. Thank the person who awarded you and link back to them in your post.
2. Tell 7 Random facts about yourself. (that's below)
3. Pass the award on to 15 new found bloggers.
4. Contact each blogger you want to pass the award on to and let them know you've done so, and let the giver of your award know you accept it.
1) I love anime and manga
2) I like snowy nights
3) I believe one day someone will find bigfoot. (I know, I know..)
4) I wont get lasik surgery because I like to take my glasses off dramatically
5) My favorite comic book characters are The Flash and Spiderman
5) I am going to be one of the greatest screenwriters there is
6) I dont count batman as a superhero
7) I love to gaze at the stars
Now here is where I'm going to have to break the rules, I'm pretty new at the blogging so I don't have 15 bloggers to give the award to, but I'll give it to as many as I have.
Now there are some rules when it comes to this award & here they are:
1. Thank the person who awarded you and link back to them in your post.
2. Tell 7 Random facts about yourself. (that's below)
3. Pass the award on to 15 new found bloggers.
4. Contact each blogger you want to pass the award on to and let them know you've done so, and let the giver of your award know you accept it.
1) I love anime and manga
2) I like snowy nights
3) I believe one day someone will find bigfoot. (I know, I know..)
4) I wont get lasik surgery because I like to take my glasses off dramatically
5) My favorite comic book characters are The Flash and Spiderman
5) I am going to be one of the greatest screenwriters there is
6) I dont count batman as a superhero
7) I love to gaze at the stars
Now here is where I'm going to have to break the rules, I'm pretty new at the blogging so I don't have 15 bloggers to give the award to, but I'll give it to as many as I have.
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