Teashades

Yes, this had previously been my April contest submission. I had been planning to post this in the actual section for a good while but with complications and other external work I had never received the time to do so. Since this would appear to be the only relatively competent written work of mine in this section I decided to allow it some justice and lovingly request criticism (the criticism to general-praising-comment-without-criticism ratio preferably being around 99:1 as I definitely wish to improve any sort of my writing at all) and sorts of tips and whatnot.

Those using the original white and blue skin may notice the application of letters in dim grey near the beginning of sentences. This is purely for paragraph-dividing and I apologize beforehand. Simply allow your mind to will yourself in considering it transparent.

TEASHADES

xxxIt was not a normal day in the life of Terry, but what certainly was in such an age?
xxxTerry was a man of rather refined simplicity; a blunt, hard-working man that cared not of such bountiful aristocracy that pervaded the modern life of his time. Every day he found his rather dull self in the midst of fanciful gentlemen and polite ladies, hedonistic figures that passed by him without a care but their own narcissistic needs. They invited poor Terry to parties and dances and even a few funerals; they treated poor Terry like an old acquaintance, or, may one daresay, “friend”, perhaps. But Terry? Terry considered all of these complications sorts of abnormalities in his own right; he was aware that these men and women loved him only for his possessive wealth, not his actual personality. Never in poor Terry's life did he have a “normal” day.
xxxBut it was, indeed, up to Terry as to what he considered “normal”. Terry would search for days and nights looking for something beyond the generic kitsch of the city; the copy-pasted fanciful aristocratic lifestyle that manufactured itself in the great assembly lines of the country's own industry and its lack of noticing its own dwindling resources. Terry would spend days in boutiques and stores, nights in bars and dance clubs, still rambling on with beat poetry and the sultry sound of the sousaphone. Terry found all of this as a great useless illusion as to cover up such inconsistencies the country had with such common public topics. He would walk with his head down, dance with his back arched and stare with a nihilistic mask of a face as he watched the gallant, doll-like men and women pass him by in their surrealistic Edwardian-era wear. For nights and days, for months and years, this abnormality would appear as a dream to poor Terry; a nightmare, even – one that Terry held in such lifelike quality that he could not escape it out of his own will.
xxxAnd thus was it indeed not a normal day in the life of Terry, but whatever would such a man as Terry do in a circumstance?

xxxIt was certainly one day, however, before the War, as Terry remembered it, that his rather abnormal life – and his negative views on such a life – changed quite dramatically. It may be quite amusing how a single event in a man's life may completely deconstruct his mind and re-arrange itself to better fit the needs of his new thought process, rather like some sort of absurdist form-fitting wear that was prone to excessive tearing. Terry had just recently entered his current investigatory bar: a small, corner-side midnight pub that held all sorts of lovely folk. And as he sat on his usual side of the rather long counter, he counted their dwindling numbers – broken men, saddened fools, sleeping alcoholics that were soon to be forced out of the cramped building, and the general drunk buffoons that enjoyed their last collaborative drinking session before their eventual drafting into the army. Terry pitied all of these sad folk; he was certainly not surprised that such pleasure and hedonism could exist in even the most vile, rat-infested corners of the city fringes.
xxxIt was perhaps the exhilarating rush that was associated with a midnight alcohol stand or simply an uncontrollable parapraxis, but with the passing of time Terry began to duly notice and notice a very specific man standing out among the generic crowd of lifeless drinkers. The man, in all of his cigar-smoking, teashades-wearing splendour, sat quietly on the other end of the counter, respective and – in a surprise to Terry – quite happy with himself. This was a man, Terry would think, that held such joy with him despite clearly being a denizen of the bottom rungs of society.
xxxTerry decided to sit next to the interesting man in an attempt to hold some sort of conversation that would save him another dire night. The man's first reaction, however, completely surprised Terry:
xxx“Want a drink?” The man asked.
xxx“Wh-what? Oh, uh, no. I just had a bunch or somesuch.”
xxx“I don't know, sir,” Continued the man, shifting around his old cigar, now shockingly appearing to Terry as rather old and overused. “You just look like the type of guy who has a lot of problems here or there?”
xxxTerry felt a genuine offence towards this. What was this drunken man's place to completely conclude on Terry's psychological values? But in truth, poor Terry felt more threatened and defensive than angry; how did such a man understand?
xxx“What problems? You think I have problems?” Terry yelled at the man, rather vocally.
xxx“No, no,” Quickly coerced the man. “I was just assuming. You know, assumptions aren't always that accurate, are they? So,” - the man shifted around his cigar yet again and shifted his glasses - “What brings you here, anyway?”
xxx“Why would you care? I would not think it is any of your business.”
xxx“Just curious, y'know.”
xxx“My motives would disgust you anyway. I am going to go move back to where I was before; I thought holding a conversation with you would be interesting but all you seem to be interested in is asking a bunch of questions that are horribly idiotic.” And with such a blunt statement, Terry picked himself up and began to move back to his previous seat, but with a lurch of the old tails of his coat he was forcibly and quite literally turned around, peering directly into the blank – almost deathly – black teashades of the man.
xxx“No, stay. I love hearing problems.”
xxx“Let go of me you crazy alcoholic!” Terry yelled, yanking himself away. But yet, Terry could not help turning back to the face of the man, the man and his teashades that were essential voids of an absent nothingness. Yet, it was this absent nothingness that was staring directly into him; coercing and coaxing poor Terry into revealing all of his secrets to the man. He was, however, able to notice the cigar-choked smile of the man, which sent him reeling into an unforgiving chastisement.
xxx“It's folk like you that make me hate this god-damned aristocracy – what, smiling for no reason? Are you taking some sort of sick, sadistic pleasure out of my suffering? Do you think my suffering is funny?”
xxx“Ah,” The man calmly began, “So I see. You hate smiling, is that it?”
xxx“I hate all forms of such hedonistic pleasure. All they care about is themselves!” Terry spat out.
xxx“I don't know, smiling seems to be quite lovely, sir. Have you actually tried it?”
xxx“I would love to, but it is this society and its narcissistic love for such general and overused richness; its horrible aptitude, that allows me not to do so.”
xxx“So you're a hypocrite.” The man pointed out.
xxx“What?” Terry asked in a relevant fury. “How the hell am I a hypocrite?”
xxx“I never like to judge good, kind-hearted folk when they are their most tipsy, but this is a treasure trove of information.” The man shifted around his old cigar yet again, puffs of dusty grey smoke angelically floating past his shocking eyeglasses.
xxx“So you use me and you don't even answer my question? What kind of man are you?”
xxx“I don't know. Perhaps I would get a better answer if I asked you that question.”
xxxTerry turned slightly confused. “What?”
xxxThe man sent a stalwart push towards his teashades, bringing them further back before the bridge of his nose, before stating such solemn words: “You seem to be a man who is mixed up with everything. You look rather aristocratic yourself and yet you claim to hate what you were built upon. Now, that's quite understandable, but why do you keep blaming, or rather associating, happiness with hedonism?”
xxx“Because happiness and joy are products of pleasure! Pleasure is hedonism!”
xxxThe man let forth a sauntering chuckle, surprising Terry.
xxx“You're taking things to extremes. Look at those men over there,” - The man pointed to the previous drunk friends at the far end of the room - “You think they're hedonistic because they are having fun? You're a pretentious and nihilistic fool. Happiness is not always associated with hedonism, you know. Happiness can flourish in even the dark times – not out of pleasure itself but out of the goodness of mankind as a whole. Hedonism is not happiness, hedonism is a stark pleasure for the boring, wretched qualities of human life that are already present everywhere. Happiness is different.”
xxxTerry turned rather enraged. “What sort of horrid pride do you have insulting a drunk man in his later years?”
xxx“Oh, no, why would I?” The man replied. “I would never do such a thing. I'm simply trying to talk some sense into you; you people are the reason we're going to have that damned war soon.”
xxx“Nonsense! It is this idiotic happiness that runs itself throughout our country that causes this war! This ignorance!”
xxx“Oh yes, I must agree. I hate ignorance too, you know. Never a good thing. But think of those leaders; hypocrites like yourself, always considering their own opinions and themselves over the good of the public. They don't care about happiness or death, the death of the young men and women that are sent out on to the field. Happiness finds death on the battlefield, and this is precisely the plan of these people. They hate happiness. They love such petty conflicts – removal of happiness? A bright-eyed youth finds his way into the vanguard of an advancing army. And then what? Bang. Out goes his kindling life, his happiness. They profit from the unhappiness, all of them.” The man had thrust his pale fist up in a radical gesture. “I'm certainly with you against their disgusting hedonism, but that's just my opinion as an educated prole of a man. You'd really think they'd listen to me, a rambling idiot-savant who is a wise man among drunks? It's the hypocrites I hate, oh yes. And you're one of them, sir. Why hate happiness? Why hate what makes us human?”
xxxTerry's beleaguered and cloudy mind was absolutely silent and devoid of raucous thought. He sat in a rather deathly frozen pose, peering straight into the murky depths of his empty glass. He was horribly dizzy and tired, almost narcoleptic with the recent events that had made such a man think beyond his normal maxims.“You're crazy, you're just rambling on and distributing terrible thoughts to innocent drunk men who never wished for your preaching on a Friday night.” Were the only words poor, poor Terry and his swampy mind could whimper out before his subsequent retrieval of himself and departure from the dilapidated structure.

xxxAnd as the war continued in its few years Terry's mind would always recall the night of himself meeting the man and his unorthodox, contradictory ideas. He would retain this thought through such tough endeavours that associated itself with the war; the eventual economic downfall of his previously immense wealth; his terrifying and excruciatingly painful life in the bunkers below the city as it was devastatingly annihilated in a series of firebombing runs; the death of whatever such family he had; his eventual emigration into the quiet boondocks, the edges of the state. And in the waning days of the war he would sit in the lone farmhouse of his rather rustic relative – usually always out of the area on errands and such – pondering to himself such ideas.
xxxHe had noticed that aristocracy in the nation had come to a crashing end. The hedonism of such figures had, as Terry would always assume, been the complete downfall of such contemptuous men and women. He had heard news stories and reports over such dismissal and destruction of wealth, property, and the economy, and Terry, after many a few years, finally held an itching to once again see the public nation in its current state.
xxxWhat Terry found in the big city, however, astounded him. Not only the current state of the city – a ruin of coagulated cement, distorted towers of rubble and steel, and the dark street corners with their littered trash – but the people of the city. The people were horribly impoverished and depressed; circles of dust in the melancholic crevices of their faces, bone-like, hunger-derived phalanges that extended far beyond reach for any sort of nourishment applicable to them, and their silent, stalking postures. Terry would gasp wretched gasps as he even began to spot a few of the previous aristocrats that he had observed in such lavish parties scuttling around, rat-like, in a desperate attempt to find something, get somewhere, do something at all. This was a world where such people had lost everything and were finally united under banners not of aristocracy or proletarianism but of a stagnant, raw nature that would associate itself with the perils of war. What he found, however, was that none of these men or women were happy.
xxxTerry began to reach the edges of the city as he arrived at an old cemetery. He trekked among the great amounts of marks that were casualties of both war and society – new and simple crosses of rotten wood that were decent enough markings for poor victims of a horrible war; simple tombstones that marked previous deaths before this wretched conflict, and lavish graves of great sizes that were, rather ironically, some of the most destroyed. He walked onwards with sodden weights on his feet, dragging them as he dared to fight such subconscious curiosity. But it could not be staunched any longer as poor Terry finally stopped at the sad and wailing grave of a man he once remembered.
xxx“Death by his own ideals, what a metaphor for man.” Terry concluded quite bitterly, as he picked up the broken teashades from upon the simple plank that stood as a simplistic memento for the memories of such dead men.

xxxTerry, once again, began his abnormal days. He would wander around the city, spirit-like, in search of a normal day; those days of the past that had reflected such hedonism. But it was not hedonism that the poor man was searching for, no, he still detested such an idea. He was searching for traces of what the man had once mentioned to him as “happiness”, and attempted to observe if such a quality could truly bloom even in the remnants of a war that had torn the nation apart.
xxxTerry would search for days and nights looking for something beyond the generic kitsch of the city; the copy-pasted fanciful depressive lifestyle that manufactured itself in the great assembly lines of the country's own implosion and its lack of noticing its own dwindling resources. Terry would spend days in boutiques and stores, nights in bars and dance clubs, still rambling on with beat poetry and the sultry sound of the sousaphone. And it was as here that such a man as Terry noticed the revival of the city; among such beat poetry and jazz sounds, among its dance clubs, stores, and bars, sat a simple happiness that was rekindling itself among the townsfolk. A sort of more human-like, almost general anthropomorphic figure and ideal developed itself through the town and people; philanthropy was awarded and excessive pleasure was chastised. People began looking towards the future and what it held for the survivors of such horrible calamities – Terry indeed included. Liberalism and anti-war began to resurge for the first time in a century, Terry had observed. And as Terry walked among the now-refurbished streets, sparkling with traces of dust as old, individual memoirs and the lovely chatter of children, he indeed discovered that the man from so many years before was correct with his ideals – or at least Terry believed so. As he watched the youthful laughter of children playing on the streets, he was indeed not surprised in the least to sense any sort of fearful sentiments among them. The past was behind them, and yet it still lingered among the air. Terry himself could never forget such a past – not simply for the war, but for the time that his mind absolutely changed.
xxxIn the years that had gone by between the war and its post-conclusion, Terry never had a day which he considered “normal” by his own stringent definition. But perhaps this was a good thing.

 

I've only just now managed to finish this and just now noticed that this piece was worlds above all of your past submissions to the forum. I am, to a certain extent, in awe. Such an improvement is spectacular to see really. I don't have much to criticize because of the quality and I don't feel like attacking even the things I can because I liked Teashades so well. Damn. You can color me every shade of impressed you like.

Seeing as you did ask for criticism of some sort I'll make note that I liked this piece mainly because of your diction and sentence structure. The choice of words for once did not sound pedantic, stilted or snobbish in the slightest because it fit the tone and topic so well. This language will not always work for every piece so do not write the same way for everything unless you intend on always writing about the same kind of thing. Your sentence structure is great. I have trouble doing more than stringing together a few clauses but you make it look like you've been reading and writing literature for years. It's hard to explain, but you did well. However, it's another thing that will not translate well into many other subject matters, time periods, tones or styles. So you've got this kind of writing down pat. I suggest that you branch out and try to write more somethign with a more mundane and prosaic style.

 

This is an interesting story. However, as Jiku Neon said, don't overdo the advanced language. Yes, it shows your intelligence, but it may confuse the reader and they would have to keep a dictionary beside them whenever they read these stories. I'm pretty sure that your teachers are impressed whenever there are Creative Writing assignments, due to the fact you used words like "coerced" , and such.
Keep up the good work.

EDIT: I'm into film-making. This could easily be turned into a narrated/animated movie...or something of such relativity.
Once again, keep up the great work.

 

I first apologize for the extremely late replies. Thank you both for taking the time to read this odd piece and replying with lovely advice.

Thank you kindly, madam. It is certainly understandable for the word choice to not fit in certain scenarios regarding its specifics, and I am rather joyful that I actually hold some sort of partial excellence over a specific style of writing. I shall indeed take your advice to mind and attempt to write such other stories with a less extensive use of complicated and pretentious verbose.

Thank you, sir. In such a case, I would presume a more minimalist approach to prose may work on a superior level? Though it may again depend on the context. I will however, as I repeat my previous sentiments, not attempt to overdo such language to an extreme extent.

I am familiar with your dabbling in film-making, and it would be delightful to view such a thing, sir.