The Long and Winding Road to Adulthood Part 5: Steady Employment and the Long Way Back from Hell.

The screen went white again as the program froze for the umpteenth time that day. Brick sack back in his rigid swivel chair and let out a downbeat yawn. He had been working for weeks now and the damned computer kept freezing whenever he loaded his old sequence.

Despite the occasional headache accompanied with an existential crisis, the last few weeks were rather dull and consistent. Brick was working hard for once.  The hiring process was a bit of a blur to him. He vaguely recalled reading words of wisdom by someone he had once respected, but had trouble putting a name or face to the memory.

The row of cubicles where Brick was stationed was soon greeted by its other usual suspects. John D. Slate, the would-be king of promos led the pack. His hair was nestled back in a blonde tail that was about as pretentious as his high-pitched 60 mph rants. Behind him was Señor Tigre, an affable audio expert with a head as shiny as freshly polished boots. Bringing up the rear was Jacques Ombre, dark and mysterious, mostly because of an unhealthy addiction to dark clothing and spray can tanning.

Brick ignored his throbbing head and focused on getting all the promos done on time. The morning dragged and clicked away into afternoon, with pauses for rendering and freezing alike. The typical parade of characters passed through the room at regular intervals, like figurines on a cuckoo clock: the overworked, underpaid secretary who looked mortified 24/7; the jovial lawyer who was both a badass and a mensch; the voluptuous producer/host with eyes like stolen diamonds who could always spare a moment to break your heart and piece it back together for next time; and the creepy soon-to-be-ex-employee who lingered around with unknown agendas and nothing to lose...

The trivial matters of running a rock band had become nothing but a distant memory for the man who now had a steady paycheck and a comfortable shell of a life to call his own. Sure he barely spoke the same language as his new co-workers. Sure he was missing sleep like a blindfolded piñata swing.  And then there was that growing void inside him that grew with every monotonous keystroke and mouse click.

Perhaps his road to adulthood was sacrificing freedom for stability, passion for consistency, love for malaise. The fire that once roared within him, the passion to reach for the unobtainable had been doused and the ashes of his troubled youth were swept aside for the respectable mediocrity of the forty hour work week.

Hell was a distant memory, but Brick was still a long way from paradise. For now, there was only the job and the nagging suspicion that something around him was not as it seemed.

 

 

 

Whatever Happened to the Brick Man part 3: Where is my blog? Way out in the water, see it swimming...

With a snap came darkness. Total, unwavering oblivion. Was it really just a quick attack between the eyes or was it the force of a beastly storm rampaging the countryside? In that moment, it didn't really matter which was real and which was the illusion. It was cold, loud and nothing made very much sense anymore. Nothing mattered in the moments that followed but finding a way back to a lost reality.

As if the directionless void that darkness provided weren't bad enough, there was the cold and the slow river of phlegm that seized the body during the lack of heat. In this cold and miserable state, the dark and dimensionless space seemed like the confines of a ship sinking to the bottom of an ocean. The loud noises coming from outside the wall echoed within the confused and muffled sphere of consciousness.

And then came the sense of loss. Not for oneself but for others, but for the unseen masses that one will never know. And though one might be spared the force of the storm, others would not be as lucky. And it was this growing sense of guilt that began growing inside of Brick. And on top of that guilt of being better off than others when maybe you didn't deserve to be, was a sense of helpless self pity.

Perhaps that was G Mod's revenge. He had shattered Brick's isolated mind and exposed it, like a nerve, to the realities he had been avoiding. He had lost the ability to focus solely on his own mundane preoccupations when he knew that the  tide outside was moving without him.  So while his body was trapped waiting for the storm to pass, Brick's mind was scattered across the water and who knew what would await him when he came back to his senses...  

 

Whatever Happened to the Brick Man Part 2: The Inconvenience of Existence. Dude, we really have to come up with better titles. That was embarrassing... I can't explain, you would not understand. This is not how I am... It's ok. Shhhh... There is no pain, you are receding...

Before Brick had a moment to react to the crowd of angry protesters that had gathered outside his home away from home in the middle of nowhere, they began to tear everything to pieces. Down went his mobile recording studio, as well as his brooding room, er... living room. Brick by brick the protesters tore apart the edifice until nothing was left but a hollow imprint in the ground, an empty cavity serving as the only piece of proof that there once was a Brick that lived there.

As the protesters began to disperse, the ever annoying mastermind G Mod emerged from behind the hemp covered masses. With rage in his heart and vengeance clenched in his tired fists, Brick charged at the record producer with all his might, but he failed to make even a dent. The megalomaniacal G Mod grabbed the frustrated guitarist's fist and used it to send Brick flying face first into the mud beneath his feet.

From beneath the Brick shaped indent in the brown dirt, Brick muttered, "Of course. Nothing's gone right for me thus far, why should I win now?"    

 G Mod, amused by Brick's insistence on self pity merely, laughed as he watched him rise to his feet and shake the grass from his face. "We've wasted enough time with this malarkey already, boy."

"Oh god, now he decides to be topical? Why don't you just leave me alone, old man."

"I can't do that anymore, Brick. You've been alone too long. Your mind is beginning to rot."

"Haha funny. Is this going to be another speech about how I'm sooo ignorant and how you know everything about the entirety of existence?"

"Sarcasm is an ugly shade of human communication; I was never a big fan."

"I'm sure. You never were a fan of anything I ever did."

"Brick, you've been trapped in your own cathedral of ideas for too long..."

"Wait a minute...Slate mentioned that in the very first webisode (Editor's note: *we had to fire our editor due to a Ponzi Scheme they had tried to start but failed miserably*), before everything became goofy and self-caricature."

"For all his bluster and faux rockstar posturing, Slate had a few moments of clarity, and that was one of them."

"What the hell do you mean by a cathedral of ideas?"

"You hide behind your so-called music, your novel... anything but face the rest of the world. You even went into seclusion for christsakes.  You've walled yourself off and no it's time for you to face what you've become. It's about time for you to put aside all of these unnecessary distractions and characters that you've held onto for so long..."

"What did you do?"

"What I had to..."

 "WHAT. DID. YOU. DO?!"

"I merely removed some unnecessary parts of the equation in order to balance things out again."

"Where's Tigerman?" Brick demanded as he tried to grab G Mod's collar but missed."

 "I showed him the error of his ways."

"You bastard!"

"He was a crutch! He made you weak with his own weakness."

"And Shadow?"

"You mean the ape responsible for me being able to keep tabs on you this whole time? He's gone along with the cowardly tiger and the Slate Man to meet Oz the Gweat and Tewwible."

"..."

"You're missing the point."

"Am I? Then what is it?"

"They were the unnecessary parts of you that you didn't need any more. It's time to leave your shelter, grow up and join the rest of the human race. This charade has lasted long enough. Let go of your childish dreams. We're going home "

With a swift flick between the eyes, G Mod disabled Brick and set into motion his end game. Brick fell slowly to the ground. As his body began to lose all feeling, he finally began to feel at peace, even as he knew that something terrible awaited him at the other end of this fall. There was no going back this time.

Whatever Happened to the Brick Man? Part 1: Me and the Devil Blues

As every structure begins with a single brick, so does our story. Well, technically first you have to make sure the ground is stable, build a foundation, and then... Yeah, yeah. Whatever! Mr. Architect over here. Mr. Architect? What is this some bad 90's stand-up comedy bit? What do you know about 90's stand-up comedy...you didn't even exist yet! Touché, sir.   Where was I? I believe you were starting the blog post with a bad metaphor. Oh yes, right.

We began this tale with Brick and we shall end it with Brick. It is, after all, his story, even if it doesn't always seem like that's the case. In case you didn't know, Brick was an aspiring musician with stars in his eyes and that one guitar. Foreigner jokes aside, it was that guitar that stood by him since the beginning... of the story.

Brick was a simple child, too simple. Level 1-1 simple. He was a decent student (when he wasn't challenging his teachers to music showdowns... long story). He spent half of his youth in a daydream and the other half wishing he was in a daydream. He was never a good looking fellow. He was so ugly, but that's okay, cause so are you. He always had problems with authority (which explains why he got kicked out of boot camp.)

It was Brick's avid desire to be creative that served him well throughout his life but it was also his greatest weakness. Oh jeez, we're talking about weaknesses. In fact his overactive imagination had been the source of 99% of Brick's problems. (See what we did there?)  If there were anything that could have saved Brick, it would been the ability to wake up and face what's in front of him, but that was never something he could do.

It was this condition that made Brick very susceptible to G Mod's offer of fame and fortune, despite the fact that G Mod's legendary music studio was just someone's basement in California. If he wasn't so trapped in a waking mix of dream and reality, Brick never would have signed his life away to pursue something as fleeting as fame, as petty as money.

As Brick stood on the porch of the MFUJ retreat, staring into the restless grimaces of the Occupy protesters that had come for him, he was finally facing the aftermath of following the relentlessly evil G Mod down a road of insatiable greed.

Brick had sold his soul and his friends, his delusions, had paid the ultimate price. And soon, soon it would be his turn to face the harsh light of day. For now it was just him, the devil and an angry mob out for his hide.

The Secret of the Tigerman: Well, People are Crazy and Times are Strange... I used to care, but things have changed

"Is this not what you expected to see?" asked the sinister G Mod as Tigerman, the former MFUJ bassist, looked in to the mirror to discover that he was not in fact a six foot tiger creature but just a man in a cheap tiger costume.

"What the...?" pondered the perplexed former feline.

"You didn't really think that a six foot tall anthropomorphic tiger creature could come into existence just like that, did you?"

"I..."

"ugh..." sighed the exhausted record producer as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. "It's not that complicated. You had a very strong connection to brick... it's no surprise that underneath the mask, you look just like him."

"but..."

"You are him... a part of him at least. You are his optimism, his innocence, his hope. Is it any wonder that you manifested as his favorite animal, something majestic yet ferocious that could hold back the negativity..."  

"Brick split..."

"Into several pieces. I've already taken care of his baser instincts when I banished that loudmouthed attention hog, Slate, to a distant flashback."

"And now you're going to get rid of me?" asked the ex-tiger as he looked at the harsh manipulator extraordinaire.

In a rare twist, G Mod responded by simply stating, "No," before sprinting behind the silent Shadow, the drummer (who we haven't forgotten about.)

"You see, you and Tattoo boy aren't the only fragments of Brick. There's also monkey man here. You see, he's Brick's conscience, the part of him that can tell the difference between right and wrong. When Brick came to me, he was far from whole. He had no moral compass. It had been reborn as this ball of fur. And how this creature has ended up betraying him over and over again without his knowledge... is oh so sweet."

G Mod removed Shadow's hood and gorilla face to reveal yet another brick Doppelganger. G Mod then grabbed the drummer's throat and clenched it. "I've put a lot of work in over the years to get to this point. The fun and games stage is officially over." With a quick action, G Mod crushed Shadow's windpipe before hurling the drummer out the window and towards the mysterious tower outside.

"Shadow..." mumbled the bassist formerly known as Tigerman as he watched his old friend dissolve into the giant metaphor.

"That felt refreshing...." G Mod remarked as if a part of his own soul were cleansed.

"The Id is gone. So is the Super Ego. And now, it's your time to go, Ego."

"I thought that you said that I was innocence..."

"What I meant was that you are a faulty ego. You weren't able to keep Slate and Shadow in balance with one another. They both turned their backs on Brick."

"But you made them do all those things," retorted the frustrated.

G Mod smirked. "The decisions were theirs to make. Slate was allowed to thrust the band in his direction and shadow confined you within my grasp, as you would put it. You failed at your job to keep them tied to... I gave you a job here in order to snap you out of the realm of imagination and back to..."

G Mod pointed at the tower.

"The tower?" asked Tigerman.

"Reality..." said G Mod as he leaped in for the finish. Tigerman was broken and tossed onto the tower with an indifferent expression on his once vividly animated face.

"That just leaves one thing to take care of," G Mod said as he wiped his hands and headed for the exit from the office building (which was slowly fading out of existence).

 

 

 

 

Sometimes the worst betrayal is the one you never saw coming. I put my trust...in the fact that this blog would not be so melodramatic. I'll try to not fade away.

And as former MFUJ front man, Slate Man, wandered around the sloppy coke-fueled masses amongst the CBGB's crowd (Don't fact check us, it's a little late in the game  for that, don't you think?), he noticed something strange happening. the louder and faster that Super Mario and the Koopa Troopas played, the more he felt his very being affected. He looked around the crowd once more and, to his horror, discovered that almost all of the members shared at least one part of his appearance. A tattoo here, a spiky hairdo there. In fact, one terrible certainty was becoming clear. Slate was a composite of everyone at this club on this forsaken night in the past.

Slate struggled to figure out what was going on as the band began playing a new tune, A Means to an End.

Slate tried to figure out what was going on but the more he attempted to think, the more he realized that he was incapable of going anywhere past surface levels emotions. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he had delved into his own mind for anything, as if he had never had a mind of his own.

The frustration built up inside him as the crowd became more and more frantic in its movements until everything stopped and Slate was staring at a young G Mod eye to eye.

"Having difficulty thinking your way out of this, moron?"asked the pretentious future producer.

"What the hell is going on? I was always loyal to you... why?"

"You've served your purpose."

"But... how is all of this happening? I have no control and... how are you manipulating..."

"You were never meant to have an power of your own. You were always meant to be an extension of my will."

"Your will?"

"You have no thoughts of your own that I have not planted in you."

"What?"

"I knew you wouldn't understand. You're not a person. You're a pastiche, a collage, a joke. You're made up of such disparate impulses and influences that you could never exist as an actual person. Not a sane one. You're pure Id. There is no depth to you. And now, there's no need for you."

"But why here?"

"This is a memory. One that you'll never know."

Slate looked at his normally tattooed arms and noticed his features slowly being absorbed by the cliché punks from hence his existence was spawned. And as G mod smiled, the unenviable Slate Man was wiped clean from existence and faded away to the cavernous void in the mind where bad ideas disappear to.

And so continues the empty filler of the Once Mighty May Day saga. G Mod lectures Tigerman on not believing what he sees is real. Everything might just be a dream within a mind****. Isn't it always? And you? You came from out of nowhere.

G Mod paused, took out a stick of chewing gum from the desk he was sitting in at Tiger International's HQ in *insert city name here*. He was staring down the six foot tall tiger standing across from him. For years, that tiger was someone reluctantly had to accept as a member of the band because, let's face it, in most cases the bassist was expendable. If there was anything G Mod enjoyed more than robbing lead guitarist, Brick, of his future, it was tormenting the bipedal Siberian tiger.

 "So you really thought that life had finally started going your way?" G Mod asked with maximum acerbicity.

"I was starting to..."

"It was a convenient lie to embrace, wasn't it?"

"That people would accept me?"

"And with such open arms. Did it never occur to you that it might all be too good to be true?"

And yes, it did seem too good to be true. That an unaccomplished musician would be given a job interview out of the blue, that always seemed odd to Tigerman, even if he just wanted to blissfully go along for the ride without looking beneath the surface.

"I was hoping..."

"Hoping," the corrupt producer repeated with a churlish grin, "if hopes affected the worl, well, uh, it would be a lot different than the sinkhole it is now."

"You mean...."

"Yes, all the lovely women who seem to flirt with you one minute and then find you odd the next minute, the mentor of yours who is simultaneously proud of and frustrated with you and all that work that you allegedly d everyday... all of t was just a sham."

"But why go through all the trouble? This all seems so elaborate."

"Does it now? I certainly was simple during the planning stages. you know I had a PowerPoint presentation all set up but ol' banana brain over there couldn't plug the l' PC o the projector properly and we've already fired the last competent employee this company had in order to boost my yearly bonus."

"But how? How do you have this much influence in this company?"

"I own it. Won it in a high stakes game of Chutes and Ladders. I bet MFUJ. Good thing the schmuck doesn't listen to rock music or he would have realized the band was broke and awful."

"I still can't believe the last few months were all fake..."

"100% fictional like pro wrestling, justice and the female o..."

"Wrestling is fake?"

"Don't tell me you actually thought that a bunch of misfits got together and decided to settle their petty disagreements like some elaborate Greco-roman soap-opera for dudes?"

"Well, I never watched it, I just thought..."

"Well, you haven't been thinking well this whole time, have you? You actually believed that you were actually a tiger."

"What?!"  Tigerman exclaimed with primal betrayal in his voice.

"Things are about to get really complicated, really fast, tigerboy. You better watch as I show you the truth."

And with one gesture G Mod stripped Tigerman of his feline visage and the truth dawned on Tigerman from out of nowhere...