Comacoated Dreamsicle

A resume goes out! A credit card maxed out! The hunt for a job baits our hero back to a city where stagnation is an aspiration and beer is the breakfast of champions. Acceptance of a position there could mark the beginning of the end for his hopes of fleeing the nest, but with momma bird serving up free room and board, the offer might be too good to bat down. Will the uncontestable coziness of Palm Coast transform him into an open-eyed modern day Rip Van Winkle? Will he spend the rest of his days fusing with the sofa/bed/recliner of that which he has no will to escape? Is it too late to turn back? Too soon to tell! Read on and digest the many layered flavors of the Comacoated Dreamsicle, where sampling the flavor of the day could land you a decade in voluntary confinement!

The most comfortable city on the planet is the same one I've been dodging for most of my adult life. Now I'm living in it. But if I had to ask myself "What's worse than moving back to Mom's after four years living on my own," I probably would have shrugged the question off altogether. No need to jinx it; I'll just move back and let the lazy ripples of this stagnant city lick at my body until it's been eroded to the soul.

The decision to move back was made on a heartbeat. It's one of those decisions that cost me many, many hours of silent, anti-sociable thought (which probably drove my roommate nuts, since there were whole days I'd go by without saying a word), but when the time came to swallow my pride, it wasn't preceded by any of this deep thought. I'd just been turned down for a job at a local middle school teaching pre-IB English, which was actually great news, because I did not want to deal with the crazy parents I'd inherit along with it. Soccer moms can be pretty irrational, but for that special brand of top shelf crazy, you can't get any more batshit nuts than a parent who's ready at all times to throw down bare-knuckle style over a one-point discrepancy on their child's vocab workbook. (In this too-specific-to-be-generic case, said parent was the father of a very gifted, very talented soccer player. Greatest kid I've ever had the pleasure of teaching, but I'd drop the dad down an elevator shaft without a thought.)

I didn't get the job. I got the job as a substitute for the county, but I didn't get any calls. Never. Not a one. In fact, they went out of their way to lose all of my documents to push me to my financial limits. Can't pay rent without a job. Can't buy food without a job. Can't buy comics without a job. And those of you know me understand that I have never missed a month of rent and never go a day without food, and yet I did. But the worst thing of all - the point at which I knew I was scraping rock bottom - was when I didn't even have the money to spend on a single comic. I was better off dead. I really was. No more four-color fixes until that fat tax check came rolling in. No comics. No fun. I finally buckled and subscribed to Warcraft just to keep myself busy, but it had about the same effect as telling someone to focus on a scraped knee to take their mind off a sprained ankle, which, incidentally, was exactly what happened to me shortly after I made the decision to move back.

Like I said, I didn't want to jinx it by answering silly rhetorical questions, but I think that somehow, the universe being the eternal pain in the ass that it is, just by acknowledging the existence of the jinx, I was welcoming it into my life, and to spray an extra coating of "what the hell" on an already frustrating situation, I'd injured myself barely an hour after I'd ditched my top-of-the-line health insurance policy in favor of a catastrophe policy that didn't cover hospital visits. And let it be stated for the record that even though I mentioned my ankle was sprained, I had no way of knowing for sure at the time, except that I did not hear or feel any cracks at the time of the incident (just a few small pops), and that there were no bones protruding from any part of my foot.

I'd just made the decision to move. I was getting more jobs in Palm Coast than I was getting in Orlando, which was a major factor in my decision, but it was far from the only factor. I was also getting tired of playing taxi for a roommate whose car had died six months prior, which meant I drove him everywhere. Which meant I spent more time with him than I'd spent with any other person in my life. This was not boding well for the pissed off little hermit in me, who just wanted to hole up in his room, doodling and typing for weeks at a time. I'm a man who needs his space, and space I was not getting, so when the roomie was in the shower and I had the place all to myself, I took out my phone and sent out a text to a mutual friend who had just been hired for a job in Orlando and had been making the long commute every morning and afternoon, from and to Palm Coast. After my roommate was dressed and ready to make his grand re-entry to the living room, I looked at him blankly, informed him that I was getting the hell out of there, and then we went off to play a game of racquetball with a friend who was visiting.

My future self wants to kick my ass for doing that last part.

I was a madman. I hadn't played in a month, but as my legs settled into the swing of it, I was running all over the court like a sugar rush semi-pro, trying to keep anyone else from touching the ball so I could reap the sweetness of victory. I was almost acrobatic, in a way, relative to my usual dexterity on the court. That's not to say that I was pulling back flips and wall kicks ("relative" being the operative word), but I was leaping farther than I'd ever leapt on the court, and did, on occasion, dance a contortionist ballet, dodging the hurtling rubber ball with the grace of a drunken master. And when that ball came hurtling back from the other side of the court, riding the left wall while I was flat against the opposite, rather than letting it ride on and score another point for my opponent, I pressed my foot off the wall and bounded across the court to the other side, where I concentrated my attention to my racket and the now-in-reach ball, and in doing so, abandoned my instinctual understanding of how to stick a landing. My right foot twisted inward, and all of my weight and momentum crashed down on my ankle, sandwiching it between flesh and concrete, tendons popping as I dropped like dead weight to the ground in mid-swing.

I did not hit the ball.

My roommate was pretty happy I took the dive, because it gave him a chance to hit the ball for the first time all round. (It's important to note that when playing a game of three's, the two receivers are simultaneously cooperating and competing against one another in an effort to usurp the server. Because I was feeling particularly energetic that afternoon, and the fact that my roommate was overwhelmed to the point of shit streaks at the speed and ferocity of an indoor game, I basically shut him out every chance I had, hence his excitement when I ate floor.) The game ended there, though. I wasn't getting up, and even if they did feel like playing around me, my body was too sprawled out on the court to maneuver around. After a disappointed sigh, the two dropped their rackets to their sides and shuffled over to check on me. It was a good game. I was winning, but it was really close. The thought of it ending barely twenty minutes into the first round must've felt like a huge kick in the nuts to them. If I were a more empathetic person, I would have felt the same way, but I was too preoccupied with an ankle the size of a softball to really give a shit.

I stretched out until my back was flat against the concrete. The air was far from warm, but I was sweating all the same, shaking as I tried to divert my attention away from my foot. I forced myself into a zen-like state: breathing long and deep, eyes closed, letting my mind flood with song lyrics, movie scenes, and comic book panels. Somewhere in the mix, I began comparing DeMatteis' run on Spider-Man to the very few chapters I had read from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. "Hunh... the Kraven and Chameleon relationship - for that matter, the entire Kravinoff family - has some pretty interesting parallels to the story. For that matter, Ira from Moonshadow is a dead ringer for Fyodor. And from wha little I've read online about The Idiot, a Moonshadow, the main character from Blood (I think his name might have been Blood), hell, even Peter Parker all exhibit qualities similar to Prince Mysh--"

"He scraped his knee."

"I scraped my knee?!" I scraped my knee. Nothing too big - must've hit the wall on my way down, but it was enough to sour my meditation. "Nah, man, my ankle. I think I fucked it up." At this point, it wasn't very swollen, still about the size of a strawberry. They helped me to my feet and asked me if I could stand on it. I could bear it for about a second before I sat back down on the court. In the time it took me to do this, I noticed the ankle grow from strawberry to clementine. It was time to go. With some help, I slung my arm across my roommate's shoulder and hopped to the car, rode back to the apartment, and spent the remainder of the day icing my foot, watching vampire movies, playing video games, and pulling myself across the carpet in a desk chair, the very same chair where I would sit and watch in amazement as that innocent little clementine blossomed into a fat ass grapefruit.

I couldn't walk. I couldn't put any weight on it. It hurt to wiggle my toes. I had no crutches, just a chair with wheels on it, and I knew that I would be spending the next week on the couch/bed/recliner. I had just started getting jobs and already I had to call out of them. No money. No insurance that would cover a hospital visit. It was my driving foot, too, and since my roommate didn't have a car, any hope of getting out of the apartment was a pipe dream at best. What I needed to do was get some rest.

I also had to pack all of my shit up and move it back to Palm Coast by the end of the week.

Next: It's the most comfortable place he never wanted to go back to, and under the worst circumstances. Will he survive in the land where dreams die? How long will it take him to get back to work? Will he ever get out of the house, or will he melt into the fabric of the furniture like a widower at the end of his days? Come back next time to bear witness to this immobile epic of a Man Inaction!