Tales of Amethyst Part 3: "Brick, if you need to curse my name, curse me good!"

A lot had happened with everyone's favorite female protagonist on this here blog. Sure, she's the only female protagonist we've had on this here blog...but at least we're trying, right? Ha ha...uh.

In addition to landing several high profile interview subjects for her insatiable boss, the incredibly self-involved Eugene Pterodactyl, one could say that this past summer had been the summer of love for the purple loving producer.  A certain someone had young Amy smitten and craving the end of the work day like a dog craved a steak. Was that an insensitive comparison? Lo siento.

Yes, Amethyst had spent the last few months in a state of tantric ecstasy, pulsing with joy as she floated through her most productive few months at the TV station yet. Lonely shut-ins had gathered 'round the old boobtube in force to watch the non-stop layouts and poorly downloaded second-hand material, which Eugene Pterodactyl's documentary series specialized in, as they never had before.

Amethyst's star had never risen higher. She had even begrudgingly earned the respect of her hard-to-please employer, the aforementioned Pterodactyl. Pterodactyl had a poor reputation when it came to his producers. He went through them like a pack of Kleenex on a sneezy day.

Understandably, in this perpetually orgasmic mood, Amethyst was sitting on top of the world when Brick stumbled into work. In a moment of uncommon charity, Amy actually wished Brick a good morning with a hint of sincerity she hadn't used with him since the beginning of her torrid affair with her as of yet unnamed BF.   

The color had long since drained from Brick's skin. He was like a healthy looking zombie minus the brain diet. The lowly video editor had his hair cut short and his prickly stubble shaved to try to regain some self-respect. No luck.

Brick sat down and stared at the blank timeline on his desktop screen. That's all his life had become. An empty timeline that refused to stop.

John Slate, Brick's immediate supervisor burst into the common office area with a swagger previously unheard of. He marched over to Brick's desk and slammed his fist down.

"Where the hell have you been?" demanded the impatient editor.

"I was..."

"I don't care where you were, you get to work on those goddamn promos right now. The biggest episode of Pterodactyl's show is coming up and if the promos aren't ready, no one will know what to watch."

"Take it easy on him, John," said the surprisingly compassionate Amethyst.

Slate walked up to her, grabbed her by the waist and pressed her up against his body in a passionate kiss right in front of Brick's eyes. Devastation could not begin to describe the suffering Brick's tattered psyche endured in that moment. Amethyst glanced over at him, pity in her eyes. The first domino had fallen. The rest were soon to follow.

  

Mortality and the common Brick or what not to think about on one's birthday... "Someone take these dreams away, That point me to another day, A duel of personalities, That stretch all true realities."

And so on a random summer's day, Brick reported sick from work and stayed home. Home was what he called a claustrophobic crawlspace that is disdainfully referred to as a 'Studio Apartment'. A lonely crimson guitar hung above the broken futon that Brick used to slip into temporary oblivion between dusk and dawn.

He hadn't slept that night. The air was oppressive with its mixture of humidity, heat and haughty disregard for one's ability to breathe. Stripped down to just a sweat-drenched pair of slacks, Brick stared at the bare wall across from his hopeless body. Exposed red bricks stretching from floor to ceiling played tricks on the vulnerable Brick's mind.

Beside him sat the omnipresent specter of G Mod. Brick no longer remembered who he was or what he had done to him in his former life as the troubled leader of the world's worst band, MFUJ. G Mod was just the darkest shade in a room desperate for illumination.

"What is a man?" asked the incorporeal one.

"I don't know anymore," relied the recumbent Brick.

"A man is a vessel for change. He is a sentient being capable of making decisions that affect not only himself but the lives of those around him."

"..."

"What is a brick?"

"Useless..."

"It is a tool used by men to build something. Or it can be a weapon. It all depends on the man's intentions."

"Huh..."

"What is mortality?"

"Mortality?"

"Did I stutter?"

"No..."

"Mortality is the measure of a man's limits. Health, endurance, luck... A man's time comes when he has depleted these three."

On the walls appeared the faint outlines of MFUJ band members Shadow, Tigerman and Slate.

"I know these faces.. from somewhere."

"I'm sure you do. The question I have to ask you, Brick: how long is the life-cycle of a brick under duress?"

"I don't know..."

"Okay, fair enough," declared the ego-stroking G Mod,"What is depression?"

"It is drowning without the water...without the hope of coming back for oxygen. It is the constant feeling that one's life is devoid of purpose or fulfillment. It is cancer of the soul, hell on earth."

"So what's holding you to this world Brick? What is preventing you from finding peace?"

"These dreams filled with the dead souls from my past and present. My spirit swerves out of their way, but  they prove overwhelming. They make me crave my own demise, a demise I will never achieve on my own..."

Whatever Happened to the Brick Man Part 4: A Farewell to Guitars or Dr. Strange Brick or How He Learned to stop worrying and embrace the boring dialogue and depressing ending... Wow. Referencing Hemingway and Kubrick...and Deschanel? I guess someone could have been Brick's girl.

As you remember (or don't, hehe), Brick's recollections of his past dealings with G Mod had been wiped completely clean  somehow. We're not sure exactly how. Some said that Brick finally managed to repress the negative memories from his past (those seem to pile up quickly, don't they?). Others said that the massive soul destroying tower had begun to melt his mind. And still some others claimed that his high dairy intake had finally come back to haunt him. Regardless, we felt that it was time to relate to a lost tale about Brick before he gets dragged down by the storm like an Orwellian dog in a Roger Waters-penned song. We better hurry since no David Gilmour guitar solos could possibly save a charade like Brick, ha ha.

It was back in the summer of '10. Brick was a young guitarist. Not a good guitarist. A guitarist nonetheless. He was down on his luck but the sun still shone in the sky every day. It still did in those days.

One day his friend Tigerman brought him along to help impress a woman he liked. It was at an audition for a play. the building was nothing special. No need for lengthy exposition. We'll let Brick tell the story, starting from the former MFUJSF HQ. How he remembers, we can't tell you (Plot hole!)

"You will help me with the lady, won't you, Brick?"

"All right. Let me clean up first."

"Yes, you should wash away that fake stubble of yours."

"All right!"

I washed my face and combed my hair.

"Ready?"

We left the HQ and headed for the audition. We went to the nearby town and the sun was hanging high and it was nice. The theater house was a villa built before the grunge era. Miss Ruby was in the Garden. Another actress was with her. We saw their tank-tops through the trees and walked towards them. Tigerman saluted them. I just stood there and acted confused.

"Hey there," Miss Ruby said. "You're not an actor, are you?"

 "Oh no. I'm in a band."

Tigerman was flirting with the other actress. She was laughing at him.

"What an odd thing― to be in a band."

"Well, it's not all I do. I wrote a book."

"It's very odd though. Why be in a band? They don't make money at all."

"I don't know," I said. "There isn't an easy answer for everything."

"Oh isn't there? I was always instructed to think that it was 'my way or the highway.'"

"That's disturbing."

"Do we have to go on and talk like this?"

"No," I said.    

"That's a relief, isn't it?"

She was beautiful. Her light-brown hair glistened in the midday sun. Her slender frame felt good pressed next to mine, the softness of her bosom brushed up against my shoulder by a happy accident.

"Miss Ruby..." I began to say as I held her hand in mine.

"Yes, Brick?"

"I love you."

She smiled.

"You're a nice boy, but don't play this awful game with me."

"What game?"

"Don't be lame."

"I'm not, on purpose."

Tigerman was making some weird hand gestures at the other actress. She couldn't understand him.  

Miss Ruby was perfection personified. She sat in my lap, her legs crossed. Her arm was cradling my shoulder.

"I don't know, Brick. I've always been afraid of stone towers."

"Well, I don't see any near here. So I think you'll be fine."

"I guess."

"I love you."

"I wish you didn't have to return to your band."

"My record producer will kill me if I stay out too long."

"I didn't get the part anyway. I want to be with you."

"I'll love you no matter what, Miss Ruby."

"I like it."

"Are you really afraid of stone towers?"

"Not when I'm with you."

"Why are you afraid of them?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me."

"Don't make me."

"Please?"

"Alright. I'm afraid of stone towers because I see you dying because of one."

"Oh."

"But I'm an actress and crazy, so it's all nonsense."

"You're not crazy."

"You're right, I'm not...  I guess that's kind of foreboding."

Tigerman was ultimately rejected by his potential first ex-wife. Miss Ruby kissed me with all the passion and desperation of a star-crossed lover.

I didn't want to leave her but Tigerman reminded me of the wrath that G Mod might inflict if we missed the recording session.

"Oh Brick?" asked Tigerman as we headed back to MFUJSF HQ.

"Yeah, Tigerman?"

"You do know that Miss Ruby has a boyfriend, right?"

Lately, Brick appears missing. It seems like Amethyst has him falling off of cliffs. When reached for comment, all he could mutter was "Shock me awake, tear me apart..." I guess it's only falling in love because he hit the ground.

...And so time passed and minutes begat hours, hours begat days, days begat weeks. Time flowed seamlessly into a crimson spiral emptying down the drain of existence...

...And the award for most unnecessarily morbid opening sentence goes to...

...as Brick's world became more and more sullied by the complexities of the reality collapsing around him. 

To say that his life became complicated by the presence of Amethyst would be an understatement of Gulliverian proportions...

Are you sure you're using that adjective correctly? I thought Gulliver was the guy who smashed watermelons...

That's Gallagher.

The guy who plays Piper Perabo's boss on Covert Affairs?

No, that's Peter Gallagher.

You mean the lead guitarist of Oasis?

Ugh... that's Noel Gallagher.

Oh, the author of London Calling!

No, that's Noël Coward... or the Clash (minus the !)

Huh...

As we were saying, Brick's world was totally thrown out of orbit by the enigmatic Amethyst. Her entrancing glances at him in the hallway were as brief as the flap of a hummingbird's wing but they devastated him like a supernova. It was inexplicable. She was but one of several attractive women working at the office. She was just one woman amidst millions of women that he' see within the city limits. Just one woman amongst 3-4 billion on Earth.

And yet she dominated his limited attention span. There had been others of course. A singer songwriter, an actress and a humanitarian among them. But here was this producer who had flat out ejected him and yet there still seemed to be a bond, as malleable as a cloud, as stable as chaos itself. It was disarming, this influence Amethyst had on our unlucky protagonist. Despite his insistence on renouncing her, Brick was unable to rid her from his mind. I mean, how could you remove a thought once it has taken root in one's mind, huh, Christopher Nolan? hmmm?

There was no resentment for this one sided love affair either. The mere sight of her lifted his spirits into the magenta tinted sky only to drop him to earth like a human meteorite. She was the Louise de La Vallière to his Vicomte de Bragelonne, the key to his destruction disguised in a humbly beautiful vessel.

There was a caveat, an exception, a dread that lurked beneath the surface. Pterodactyl had warned Brick about Amethyst and that warning proved to be coming true. Much like the aforementioned Vallière, Amethyst's attention was dominated by another man's love.

What has become of this once mighty blog? We're talking about love instead of a faux rock band... the horror, the horror.

And it was this cold hard fact that disintegrated Brick's very being, leaving a hollow cavity in Brick's chest.

You mean like that Green Day video?

Except there was no stray heart here. Brick began to fade in and out between the world of Amethyst's misleading charms and a deeper, darker world that was familiar and estranged simultaneously. Although on the outside Brick seemed his usual goofy self, if one were to take a closer look, he appeared missing.

That moment you run into the person responsible for hiring you and you don't recognize them. Them: "The coldest blood runs through my veins... You know my name!"

As Brick raised his drool-covered face from the soft memory foam mouse pad on his work desk, he realized it was morning already. Hours had gone by since his humiliating encounter with Amethyst and his subsequent... oh guitar picks! Brick couldn't seem to remember what happened after that. As a matter of fact, neither can we. Huh?

Seriously though...it feels like a major character, an antagonist that has bothered Brick for years, has suddenly been stripped from our memories. Yes, we are totally freaking out over this total mind****.  Back to the story. Brick, having completely lost 13 hours of his life with no recollection why, did what anyone normal clueless video editor would do... he went to the restroom.

Now as fascinating as a trip to the water closet can be, this little episode is all about what happened after Brick exited the can. Down the hall, around the corner of the block of cubicles occupied by one of the non-video-editing  departments, Brick saw his boss talking to a familiar looking businessman. As he got closer, the sunglass aficionado with the slicked hairdo became clearer. Brick politely greeted his boss, hoping to not attract attention to his wrinkled clothing. The boss man immediately surrendered attention to the mysterious figure who was now approaching our protagonist.

"Remember me?" asked the man with the crooked Cheshire cat grin.

"Um," said Brick, suddenly reduced to the vulnerable state of childhood, "I don't remember your name but your face is very familiar to me.

Brick's boss chuckled as the young video editor made a total fool of himself. The smiling man simply replied:

"My name is G Mod And I'm the one who got you this job in the first place."

"Yes," Brick said, his face mortified beyond believability, "G Mod. That is a very familiar name... I apologize. I'm very grateful for this opportunity..."

"I'm sure you are. Run along now, Brick."

The humiliated former leader of the band MFUJ walked into the next room while the bigwigs talked.

"He seems to not remember you, G Mod," said the giant boss man.

"Hmmm... it seems like everything is as it should be."

Unaware of the sinister conversation going on the other side, Brick returned to his desk to find an irate Eugene Pterodactyl standing there, fuming like a mofo.

"Where have you been?"

"Mr. Pterodactyl? I...uh..."

"Uh is not an answer."

"I was in the restroom."

"I see," said the flaming red haired host who was once voted most despicable host of the year by every 

publication known to man, "So you were in the restroom for the last 72 hours?"

"Well, no, that would be insane."

"Oh, so then you just purposefully didn't make the precious promo for my show?"

"Well, I was working..."

"What the hell do they pay you for, you insignificant insect's dropping?" asked the irate host in a baritone squeal.

"My great taste in music?"

"You ridiculous waste of air. If it weren't for the fact that no one wants to work in the promo department besides you and your loser ilk, I'd smash your skull against the pavement, you stone ugly bastard!"

"Sir, I'm not sure..."

"Yes, exactly. You're not sure of anything. What the hell kind of life are you leading? Are you just drifting by, a barnacle attached to me?"

Brick, already tired of this conversation, mumbles, "I don't know, you tell me."

"Of all the insolent... you maggot!"

Pterodactyl grasped Brick with his meaty hooks and slammed him against the wall.

"Get your act together or you'll be nothing but a stain on my fist."

"Yes, sir."

Pterodactyl, not satisfied, leans in with a snarl, "And stay away from Amethyst, you junkless amateur. She's MINE!"

"Amethyst?" brick asked with naive ignorance.

"Yes, you moron," continued the mad TV personality, "When will you realize how little value you have in this world. Do you think you even matter? Don't confuse my speaking with you right now to my acknowledgement of you meaning anything to me or this station. You are the most useless piece of garbage I've ever laid eyes on. Do you think Amethyst likes you? She's nice to everyone in that coquettish way of hers. You don't know anything about where she comes from or who she really is. She wouldn't care about you even if you paid her a million dollars to. Stop wasting your time thinking about her."

Pterodactyl released Brick and stormed off, as characters tend to do when they're done for the day.

Brick, stunned from the day's events, wondered how he could ever get any work done.

Brick: "If you try the best you can, if you try the best you can...Dinosaurs roaming the Earth." How is that for optimism? Or is that Jurassic Park IV? I'm confused.

"Brick?" Amethyst asked with the faintest tone of concern imaginable.

"Hmm..." mumbled the clearly overwhelmed video editor.

"Are you ok?"

"Uh, sure, everything with me is... normal."

"Normal, huh?" she asked with her lips freshly adorned with light red lipstick, her eyes shadowy with 

mascara. "Added drool to our definition of normal, have we? Nice..."

Brick, to his perpetual humiliation, discovered the dry streak of saliva originating from the side of his chapped lips.

"Huh..." he refocuses his attention on Amethyst who achieved of new attractiveness by adding a little bit of make-up...

Editors Note: We'd like to assure our female readers, if there are any, that you are beautiful just as you are and don't have to purchase expensive and environmentally unfriendly cosmetics to try to attract attention....And there goes our chance of getting a sponsor...

"Where are you going, all gussied up and whatnot."

"To a bar for a little get-together..." she replied, her mind obviously already there.

"Right..." Brick replied, his heart sinking a bit further into the abyss.

Amethyst exited with a standard "Have a good weekend" as Brick tried to piece together how things went so wrong for him.

Outside the tower shined brightly as souls circled around it like hazy fireflies in the summer sky. Brick began feeling blinded from within, a searing, savage pain that pulsed and ended as quickly as it began.

"Mind troubles?" asked the vile G mod as he spun around in a swivel chair across from Brick's desk.

"I don't have time for you..." Brick began saying as he attempted to rise out of his chair, before stumbling back into his chair.

"Awww...what's the matter, Brick? Health got you down? Or is it the latest in your series of women who don't give a damn if you live or die? What happened to not caring? To your Private hell?"  

Gripping his head, "I don't know, G mod. I guess I just care too damn much to let go completely, huh?"

"You're headed for a fall, my friend, " said the devil to the Brick. "Your eyes are distracted by a pretty gem and you don't even see that the floor is falling out from beneath  you."

"You're a....you're a..."

"C'mon, Brick. Use your words. You wrote a whole book, after all. By the way, when are you planning on publishing it? I'm sure the world is dying to read your insights on Vampire Werewolves from Mars."

"Ugh..." Brick exclaimed as he clutched his head for dear life.

"How does it feel to work so hard to achieve so little? Like that song you tried recording recently. Take Me Alive, was it?"

"Provocative title," G Mod continued, "too bad it's a mess. Got anything to say for yourself?"

"If you try the best you can... if you try the best you can.... The best you can is good enough."

"Yeah, and dinosaurs are roaming the Earth."

With that, Brick's head slowly lowered to his desk and he slipped away from consciousness.

"You're never going to get promoted if you sleep on the job. You know the big fish eat the little ones... oh well, I'll go get a burger or something. I'm out of here."

C'mon, baby. Don't Fear the G Mod. All our time is done, here but now it's gone...

It was a late night at the office, which, at the promo department where Brick worked, meant 6:30. Yes, it was one of those all-nighters that we all hear about, but pray that we never have to experience firsthand. The industrial strength fluorescent lights burned brightly above Brick's screen-exhausted eyes. How many times can you render a 45 second promo? If the editing software keeps freezing,  then we'll have to say a bunch.

Now it goes without saying that a long day of editing takes its toll on the mind of a man. When you live 45 seconds at a time, you tend you lose a grasp on the big picture. Especially if you're trapped in a private hell of you own creation like resident complainer, Brick. Last time we saw our disgraced guitarist, he was speaking to G Mod in Alice in Chains lyrics. Now, well, at least he was getting some work done. (Yes, it is exactly this in depth detail that has made this workplace plotline so popular, we think).

"****! I got the wrong text graphic..." Brick slurred after hours perfecting the perfect promo (the holy grail for Masters of Ephemera). "All that work for nothing." In this the distance he heard the faint sound of a hotel bell followed by a sneeze that rumbled like so much uncaged thunder. Although he felt the uncouth stare of the wily G mod upon him, he could tell that he was not to be found.

The emotionally drained promo maestro leaned back in his chair and out of the corner of his eye spotted the lovely jewel of an assistant producer, Amethyst, sitting at an empty cubicle, earbuds in her ears, an expression o her face that came close to the appearance of a woman pleasuring herself to maximum levels of ecstasy. Brick surely thought that he might be hallucinating after ten hours of editing a promo about  the history of intercourse movie that was premiering the following weekend. Why they would broadcast such an unapologetically explicit feature during the Saturday morning cartoon timeslot was a mystery best left unsolved.

Brick removed the ragged foam headphones from his neck and walked up to the clearly satisfied and independent Amethyst. Just as he reached the cubicle where she was sitting, he saw her body spasm slightly before releasing back to her normal state. She opened her eyes with a grin of sly bliss. Her eyes shined brightly before fading to normal.

"You okay, Amy?" Brick asked in a half perturbed monotone.

"Brick, you're still here..." she droned on distractedly, "huh."

"You seem, content."      

 "Yeah..." she said, quietly yearning for the release offered by a timely cigarette. "I just listened to my favorite
song. I must have listened to it two hundred times this week... but it gets me off everytime. is that weird?"

"No..." Brick said as he glanced at Amethyst's mp3 player, only to see it set to infinite repeat on ELO's Mr. Blue Sky, "...or maybe.... Seriously? ELO?"

"It's the bass line... It makes me... shiver."

"Okay..."

"What are you still doing here?" She asked now that she completely un-aroused.

"Editing the sexy promo."

"Ah... the Saturday morning special."

"Yeah... What were they thinking?"

"I think it was a scheduling mishap."

"Well, I sure as hell am not going to re-do the promo now. It'll go on the air, errors and all."

"That's wreckless."

"Don't you mean reckless?"

"Yeah, women love having their spelling corrected by ugly dudes."

"Hmmm..."Brick mumbled, stifling back the self-loathing that swelled inside him.

There was a moment of awkward silence that was interrupted by Amethyst's next train of thought.

"Everyone else left already."

"Yeah. So is there any reason you decided to stay so late, other than listening to ELO?"

"Well, " she started, her brow beginning to wrinkle with worry,"I was worried about running into Eugene."

"The Pterodactyl swooping in for the kill?"

"Sort of. I've never seen him as angry as he has been lately. The completion of that new broadcasting tower has him on edge."

"That big tower of stone reaching high into the sky is a broadcasting tower?"

"That's what I've heard."

"Who builds communications equipment out of stone?"

"I don't know. I heard something abut it coming from an old Mayan or Babylonian design."

"Oh yeah, the masters of modern communications equipment," Brick remarked with painfully obvious.

As is usually the case when two characters are alone in a building afterhours, the lights began to flicker in an unsettling way. Hey, can't mess with a classic. Am I right? M'i'right?

"Aw jeez..." mumbled Brick, "What fresh hell is this?"

"Huh," Amethyst commented. "It reminds me of a rave i went to a few years ago."

"Wow, I really don't know anything about you."

"Nope, you really don't, do ya?" She said as she got up to investigate the cause of the weirdness.

Brick, his interest in Amethyst shaken by his complete ignorance of her back-story. Wait do we even know her full back-story? Aw, never mind. Almost as soon as the flickering began, it had already subsided. Yeah, you know where this is going.

'What's going on?" Brick asked as he approached the door leading to "the other side".

He turned to look, but Amethyst as gone. All that was left was the door with bright light pouring in underneath. Without a moment's hesitating he turned the doorknob and the light consumed him. When his iris' adjusted to the sudden influx of illumination.

The "other side", as it was always referred to, was nothing more than a storage room. Within the large storage containers were pieces from his past his ld bandana, his first guitar, the Tigerman costume, and the camera equipment that filmed the material for the promos he became so adequate at making over the last few months.

As confusion drained his face of that ridiculous pink color, Brick heard a scream. It came from the next room. He dashed round the corner only to find himself surrounded by glass replicas of the entire company.

"What the ****?" he pondered as he examined the lifelike replica of John Slate. The facsimile was so precise, it was hard to tell that it was a fake. "No way..."

The glass Slate's vacant stare turned into a sharp glare as his translucent hand grasped Brick around the throat.

"Traitor!"

"Ugh..." Brick struggled.

"It's all your fault. Everyone is gone...because of you!"

"I... ugh..."

"It was supposed to be ME! I was the favorite! Fortune was supposed to favor me!"

"Slate..is that... you?"

"Hello, brother," said the sculpture, it's glass arms burning with dragon tattoos from the late MFUJ vocalist's memory.

Brick's struggle to get free finally succeeded. he grabbed a nearby wrench and shattered he sentient glass being. All of the other figures shattered from the impact until brick was alone standing over the shattered features.

"How could you do this? "Amethyst murmured as she approached Brick from behind. "We were so close... Brick?"

The walls of reality began to collapse and where once there was the claustrophobic glass fragment event, there was the familiar confines of the cubicle where promos were made daily. Amethyst was standing over Brick with a great deal of concern. Despite the earlier presumption that G Mod had disappeared, Brick felt his icy claws scratch his back.

"I offer you a taste of things to come," whispered the malevolent G Mod, sending a cold numbness down Brick's spine. "Fear me!"