DAYLIGHT ROBBERY by GRIMLY WHETFOX

"I don´t want to dream if it won´t come true."
~ Conor Oberst.

"But you know, it’s hard to have a relationship in this business, man. It’s gonna take a very special woman … or a whole bunch of average ones."
~ Bill Hicks.

"Don't try to tell me how some power can corrupt a person."
~ Trent Reznor.

"...row after row of machines for making shit taste like bananas..."
~ Citrus Creed.

"All reactionaries are paper tigers."
~ Mao Zedong.

***

It's really easy to be in love with someone you don't know.

If they are also very far away, it is even easier.

You would think that you would snap out of it, forget about it somehow, eventually move on. And, in many ways, you do. But it's always there, because it is unfinished. It always comes back.

You can never get away from the one that got away.

We only want what we can't have.

It's because you don't actually know them. There is nothing to pin your faults on, nothing to take away the idea that they are special. You just think about their good side, what you want to see, what you fell in love with. Not who they really are. Not what they are really like.

Fall in love.

Yeh, it's a fall, that's for sure.

What's that old saying? 'She may look hot, but somebody, somewhere, is fucking sick of her.'

Hah.

I had done well. Well, not really well, but, y'know... okay. Not bad. Not too shabby at all. I was drinking but that's like deckchairs on the titanic, and by no means useless; bars are good places to fish. I was having no problems fucking my way through the foreign female population of this town anyway, breaking hearts with gay abandon as I used the false memory of 'her' as a shield to protect myself from ever being the one in the relationship to cry when the other one left.

Right from the start, with every single one. There is only one rule. Stay on top.

You see, I have discovered the secret of The Game:

"Be a prick."

Always leave a conversation first. Any conversation. It demonstrates a lack of neediness. It demonstrates power. It's a power trip. It feels fucking great. You can be a real cunt when you start to think like this. I would stop it, but it gets me laid. Women are strange. I've given up caring about the karma. Que sera sera, n'est pas? What will be will be.

I've done experiments in "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen." Not just with girls, this works with dogs and cats too, animals, children, groups of people, gnomes, your family... It works with everyone. Maybe not waitresses. Best to be polite to them. Anyone that serves you food, actually. But otherwise...

Love Bomb Then Leave.

It seems the less you seem interested or willing to compromise, the more they want your approval. Try telling a girl you like her loads but you just don’t really want a full on girlfriend, never mind a long distance girlfriend (foreign ones, I'm telling you guys, it makes the breakups much easier) and then WALK AWAY. They go fucking crazy. Try it. And then later, once you want rid of her, tell her that you know you drink too much but you don’t care and you're never gonna call her when she goes back to her home country and that they can hang around all they want and drop by any time, but you are only in it for the sex...

They seem to stop thinking rationally. They seem to start to try to buy your love. They seem to call far too often.

Oh, don't ever call them, by the way. That's just basic.

Prick, remember?

Get them addicted and then only offer affection when you see them really starting to crack.

Turn yourself into their perfect drug. Try it. Seriously. It works.

I gave my love to someone, once, long ago, one night on the huge football field in our hometown. Told her I loved her and I couldn't play games. She shit it. So now my heart is pretty much bulletproof. And now games are all I have.

Often, I am dark and brooding. Chicks totally dig that.

I knew, that one day, one month, one year, I would check in on 'her' and there would be the announcement of a wedding, or a baby. A movie. A job in space. And then my guts would hurt for weeks and I would become even more self destructive and even more mockingly alpha to women, or I should say girls... because I never pick a real challenge, never choose anyone who would ever do anything other than think the sun shone out my arse no matter how I behaved and that one day, some way, I would settle down and stop hurting myself and that she could change me, that she would be the one who was there to do that, to help me do that. To save me from myself.

Such good women, all of them. I don't waste my time with idiots. I waste my time with awesome.

She told me it would be easy. She was right about that one. It is.

I think they deserve much more than me. I think they deserve someone who cares for them the way that they seem to care for me. Unconditional doesn't exist, in my opinion, but they sure as hell are tolerant. I have no idea why they keep coming back.

The better they treat me, the easier they are to manipulate.

It's a shame when the truth is ugly.

Sometimes it makes me feel sad.

Ah but, fuckit, 'who needs love when there's Southern Comfort?' I mean, I show them some fun. They are all obsessed with the taste of flesh anyway. It's not like they're getting a bad deal. And I love dumplings, no doubt.

I only sauntered by her place once in a blue moon to glance at her front door, hoping I might catch a glimpse of her, to know she was happy, to know she was okay. I felt fucking stalkerish enough just doing that. She made it that way. Looking through the windows would have been like sucking razors. She didn't know I was in town. She didn't really know me at all, it seems. That's fair enough. I don't really know her either. She told me she loved me, long ago, but we needed space. Told me life was very long. She was right about that too, I guess.

But she wasn't right about everything.

Once you have felt this way, you know how to make others feel this way. I've tried it. It's not hard at all. Love Bomb Then Leave. There is a girl in the pub round the corner from where I am staying. She is only 18. She cries when she sees me. The best way to learn anything: get your hands dirty. So try this one. They call it 'cat string theory'. It's VERY effective. Power is addictive though, people. Corrupts. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The other day I passed by 'her' place, and there was a note pinned to the front door: "Gone back to hometown."

And I stopped and wondered. I wondered to myself, does she think I still live there? Does she think I'm still hanging around the same old bars, and smoking with the same old friends? Does she mean to go back and look me up? It was.... unlikely. But not impossible. Anything is fucking possible. Perhaps... Perhaps I should investigate further?

I didn't like doing these sorta things, but when in Rome, y'know... slip into your toga and eat some grapes. Et tu, Brute?

The window at the back of the house was unlocked. It wasn't like real breaking and entering, then, was it? Probably, legally, yes. But fu... damn it. Let's just see if there are any clues and get the fuck out. Dammit. Can't stop swearing.

So I'm in the kitchen window like a thieving Gibraltar macaque, heart pumping, wondering where to start to look. Mirrors everywhere, and the place is spic and span, cleaned out. She's left, packed up, gone. Wood floors and white walls. Tidy. Really classy, actually. I vault over the leather couch in the middle of the central room, to check behind the last door, trying to be quick...

And there it was.

What was I looking for? A forgotten love note? Addressed to me but unsent 'cos she thought she would just come and say it to my face instead, like an adult?

Nope. Something way better than that.

In her room, where all the furniture was pushed to one side (although there were a hell of a lot of old clothes scattered about, shouldn't she have sold them?) was the largest pile of cut up newspapers I had ever seen. I knew what they were, I'd made similar things myself. You get a bunch of newspapers, stick the pages together so they have a bit of strength, then patch the blocks together to form the size of the message you want to give. Then you draw the logo or the words you want, and cut out the pieces that make up the design. Those pieces are what I was looking at, in her room, the discarded cut out letters. What you are left with is a massive, foldable, portable stencil. It’s pretty fragile, you have to be careful not to rip it, but it's actually limitless as to what you can do with it. I mean with planning you could build a stencil as big as a football field. Or build several and join them together. You'd need a hell of a lot of paint to tag it and dash off, but it could be done...

With planning.

Big stencils, the ones that take the real time, they are one-offs. If you put that much effort into making it, into the preparation, you want to get it right when you go bombing. The first time you use it the paint seeps into the newspaper and the whole thing turns to mush. Can't be used again. Gotta be done right, first time. What an impression it leaves. People will be cleaning that mess up for weeks.

Anyway I'm stood there, with this big pile of papers at my feet, the cut out jumbled letters clearly visible. And I'm thinking to myself, even just browsing the top few letters, that I can see the end of my name being spelled out.

So this is where it gets silly. Cos, y'know, you can make anagrams all day. If there is one thing I hate it’s fucking anagrams, they are the vagabond drunken tramps of literature. Fuck them. Fuck anagrams with a sharp pokey stick.

Swearing is useful, in the right context. I REALLY hate anagrams.

Anyway, I'm sitting there for ages, re-arranging the letters, obviously, slowly developing my loathing for riddles, and I'm shuffling them about and I'm thinking I know what she is going to say. I'm thinking it is a big message to me, in letters 10 foot high, huge... Fuck-off huge. I'll never know now, I guess. I can keep re-arranging the letters, they are just letters, nobody has a copyright on them, in fact many of them are rather hard to avoid... I guess I'm gonna keep seeing them, here and there.

For the rest of my life.

The thing is, when I first sat down read them in reverse order, the order she would have cut them out in, I think, before I started moving them all around and wondering what order they were meant to be in, before I jumbled them all up...

I think they spelled out 'I love you' and then my name.

I've got them in my notepad still. I can even just think of them, the letters, in my head, and jumble them all up, anytime I want to, to try and guess what she was going to say. To try to guess in what order she cut out the letters. A guessing game with no answers to never know what she might have meant. It can go on all day, believe me.

Love you, baby, but I hate your hurtin' kind.

Who the hell wants a hobby that makes you cry, anyway? Fuckin' stupid hobby, and no mistake. Hard to avoid letters though. Capitals, lowercase... they are everywhere. Maybe they'll stop reminding me one day. Like all those tunes on the radio.

Hah.

So I wrote it down in my notepad, the message, and I jumped back out the kitchen window - the neighbour who saw me just smiled and waved, surprisingly. Maybe she sees that sorta thing all the time, who knows?

And now I'm back on the street and thinking what the hell I should do.

Because I'm stuck in this place...

And our hometown is very, very, very far away.

Is there a bar near here?

***

The State: Monkey Torture


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