So it’s been a couple of days. I wish I could say I did anything more productive than watch a couple of movies, fail to finish the Sunday crossword, read some comics, and go to my writing group, but that would probably be lying. Why is it that when I take off on Friday, I feel like I’m getting an extra Sunday, and not an extra Saturday? Believe me, I think I’d prefer the latter.
I did buy a new television, which was something. I don’t have cable, but the TV has an internet connection (for Netflix, YouTube, etc.), which I can combine with my Roku and Blu-Ray player and more than enough entertainment. I picked it up at the local Best Buy, which made me glad I hadn’t gone there to buy a PlayStation 4. They were answering phones with “Thanks for calling Best Buy. We’re all sold out of the PS4,” and lots of people with me in the long pick-up line were worried their own purchases wouldn’t be there.
If and when there’s a Portal 3, I’ll consider buying a gaming system — maybe for a new Bioshock — but I haven’t actually had one in years, the original Nintendo. I think I sold it at a garage sale, which is a shame. I never did figure out how to get that robot to work.
Anyway, the movies were Kiss the Girls and Jack Reacher. The former wasn’t great, and then was unbelievably bad in its last twenty minutes, while the latter was entertaining but very forgettable, with more talk about how amazing Tom Cruise’s character was — “Who the hell is Jack Reacher? Well…let me tell you…” — than action.
And then there was my writing group. I wrote this, from a few randomly chosen writing prompts:
In the past, I’ve tried to kill this woman. It was nothing personal, mostly politics; I was just a hired gun, doing a job, and most of the times our paths crossed her name could have easily been any of a hundred others. That doesn’t make it any easier, realizing in the heat of battle that you’re only there because some bureaucrat flagged her name a little higher on that week’s kill list — some Congressman wanted to make a point, or more likely just stumbled on her name at random — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have made her feel any better about the whole damn thing. My intentions were still the same. But it wasn’t built on anything specific, no personal feelings. If anything, I kept accepting the contracts because I respected her too much, respected her skills, wanted yet another chance to match them against mine. I could have walked, or let some other agent tangle with her for a change. Sometimes I wonder why nobody ever forced me to do that. A hundred times we must have met, squared off either face to face or across the divide of rifle scopes, and there we were, both of us still alive. There’s no honor among thieves, they say, but maybe there’s too much among assassins. Maybe you shouldn’t send one killer to kill another. Sometimes I wonder. They had super-soldiers and black ops programs that might have settled the account more quickly and completely than my own self-taught skills, but I guess no one in charge ever learned the power of no. Let’s just keep sending her out, these senators must have said — just as they must have been saying about her on the other side — and eventually it’ll sort itself out. Law of averages. That’s if they even thought about it that far. After all, these were the same men who’d built the Abomination Project — actually called it that, like that wasn’t just asking for trouble — then tried burying it and the evidence when it all went predictably south. I’d tied up a few of those messy loose ends for them myself. The pay was always good, and their checks cleared — you couldn’t always say that in this line of work — but thinking far ahead wasn’t exactly my employer’s strong suit. After all, they hadn’t told that this time me she would be…
And that was my weekend. I also spent some time on Friday coordinating a meeting for tomorrow morning at the office — is it good or bad that I can do work from my phone…on my day off…while on line? — which I’m not exactly looking forward to. But we’ll see.
