"4, you say? Oh uhhhhh CASH MONEY" I yelled back. I threw the other brewskie I was holding casually behind me and made a mad dash for the 5 money balls and I scooped up 4 of them. I starting clumsily sprinting towards the Bank, but Robert wasn't happy with my manipulation with the system. As others scrambled to get the brewskies Robert descended from his tower and started running to intercept me. He rammed into me at full speed like some kind of bull, and we both fell to the ground. As I collapsed I only lost one of the money balls, but Nick or someone ran up and hit me with one of the brewskies so I had to let go of another one. Robert kept knocking me around with his shoulders, but I managed to stumble to my feet and sprint away. As I sprinted away I got hit with another brewskie so I only had one money ball left, and there were several people running towards me, in between me and my objective. I danced around a few of them before someone checked me to the ground and I lost my last chance to score.
I laid on the pavement of Butler Elementary School and coughed. This had completely knocked the wind out of me, but it was pretty fun. My leg was all scraped up from Robert's takedown, but this is exactly what Brian and I had had in mind when we invented the game, hours earlier. Brian laughed as he walked over to help me up.
Ca$h mUnnE was a modest success, at the very least.
- -
The only difference between my driving in Grand Theft Auto IV, a game where you play as a criminal in New York who kills people for money and generally does immoral, terrible things, and L.A. Noire, a game where you play as a detective in 1947 Los Angeles who (supposedly) protects the public and solves crimes and mysteries, is that the game doesn't punish me when I land on somebody with my car in L.A. Noire, ending their sad, virtual existence in a bloody, cathartic crash.
My partner in the passenger seat yells "Slow down, Cole!" in response to how I just destroyed that fool. "Slow down, Cole," not "Cole, we're LAPD officers on our way to solve a single murder and here you are littering the streets with the bodies of those unlucky enough to be crossing the street as you careen unpredictably at clearly illegal speeds." All in all, he's reacting pretty calmly to my killing spree.
There are a bunch of optional missions in this game where you answer calls for backup and things like that, situations where a guy's sortof lost in and is shooting up a street or something like that. It's possible to apprehend some of these people with shooting them to death, but uhhh that's not my style. The coroner is going to earn his wage while I'm in town.
I feel like my detective avatar has to know the hell he's going to end up in once he dies. I'm sure he can smell the rotting flesh of his eternal suffering, I'm sure he's already sweating just thinking about how hot the flames will be.
But he's definitely not waiting for red lights to turn green, collateral damage be damned.
- -
I walked up to bed, tired from my 10 hour drive back to Illinois, but excited to be home and excited to sleep in my own bed again. I peered into my room and remembered how shitty and messy my own room is and how overrated my own bed is and then remembered how awesome Betsy's room is, so I decided to sleep in there instead.
As I twisted the doorknob to Betsy's room it fell out of it's socket and into my hand. "Oh yeah," I thought. "This door has been fucked up for years, and nobody's fixed it. Cool. Great." I inserted the doorknob back into the door and opened it. There wasn't even a doorknob on the other side, so I left the door ajar and went to sleep.
ONLY TO WAKE UP TO A SEA OF KITTENS what a bittersweet sensation. Annoyed and groggy I threw them out of the room and slammed the door. "That'll show 'em," I thought as I returned to bed.
Okay awesome time to start the day what a beautiful day it will be I can't wait to see everybody I wonder if there's any food in the pantrWHERE IS THE DOORKNOB OH RIGHT
I was the only one home, so I spent 5 minutes trying to MacGayver the door with a coat hanger. It turns out you have to be really awesome in order to actually pull that one off, so I called Nick, who lives across the street. I hadn't seen him since getting back the day before, and 10 minutes later we had our glorious reunion as he freed me from my prison.
As luck would have it, I'm actually locked in Betsy's room once more as I type these words. I didn't think about what I was doing and shut the door behind me. My father has a text message waiting for him downstairs, asking him to let me out whenever he wakes up. Let's hope that he looks at his phone before he goes to referee those soccer games. If not, I hope you see this post, Nick. You should come over and check on me.
- -
Summer begins. I am unemployed, aimless, getting lots of sleep, seeing lots of people, and having lots of fun. Expect updates as details emerge.
Hey Conor btw have you gotten out of your sister's room?
ReplyDeleteWhat, you want to sleep in my room AND have a door with two doorknobs? That's just greedy, Conor.
ReplyDelete