Life in a Thrashing Machine | Page 7

that the brief half-hour that he had spent at The Coffee
Bar, would see the quelling of the wind and cold, but it wasn't really
much different. Vlad usually walked down to the transit terminal on
Duke Street when he was ready to go home from the city's core, but the
weather convinced him to wait for the mainline bus that stopped just
outside the mall.

He soon got on the bus, dropped his sixty cents in the fare box and
stood by the rear exit door until someone got off at the next stop and he
fixed himself in their place.
The bus engine grunted as it started off and made its way slowly down
the street. There were many people on the bus today and he didn't know
from where they were all coming. Vlad looked at each and every one of
the people on board and he wondered about what their lives. He saw a
couple of pretty girls that were sitting at the front of the bus and he
wondered if their personalities were reflective of their appearance. Did
they like the same kinds of music that he liked or felt the same way
about life's peculiarities, as he did?
He didn't know what to think about anything, any more. He couldn't
relate very well to a girl, on a one-to-one basis, when it came to
wanting to get romantic. Usually, if Vlad liked a girl, he told her so, but
he has had trouble with certain girls, at times, when he did so.
He had found that most modern girls wanted a loose relationship that
didn't tie them down to any one particular guy. There were also some
girls that only wanted a sexual relationship and that would blow their
stacks if something more serious were even suggested.
Most of Vlad's musical compositions were based on that idea, of
modern love-relationships. His music was the expression of the man's
lonely soul crying out to be loved ... or, at the very least, to be noticed.
For sure, Vlad was in his loneliest state, right now. He knew that he
would be able to compose some crying heart-rippers when he finally
arrived home.


CHAPTER TWO
Getting-off the bus at his regular corner stop, Vlad slowly made his

way across the empty lot, and towards his house.
With each successive step, Vlad sank deeper into the moist, sparsely
grassed earth that still had not frozen-over from the cold. The squat
shape of his parent's raised bungalow came nearer. To Vlad, that house
was like a huge cage and the street, on which it stood, was like the
pathway of a zoo. He did not want to go home today, but without
money, he could not stay out longer or venture anywhere else to have
some fun.
His life has always seemed in this predicament. Throughout highschool
and University, good times and entertainment was always sacrificed in
the name of getting-by. He was never fortunate enough to land a
half-decent job that he liked and that paid well. He always got stuck
with doing menial-work, with a salary that never seemed appropriate,
and then when he finally was going to University, he got an
insignificant amount of money, as a Student Loan and Grant, from the
government. He never managed to get a scholarship, for his musical
education because his folks weren't wealthy enough. He had found that
scholarships were only given to students of wealthy families so that the
families wouldn't have to put themselves out, financially, to see their
children succeed. Children, with families that had money, would
seemingly be paid to do school work and therefore they never needed
to work after school, as some teenagers had to. Everything was
supplied for them - their cars, spending money and whatever else was a
necessity for them to live. The only thing that they had to keep from
going ultimately bored, since they had so much of everything else, was
the challenge of school work, and they even did that well.
Therefore, Vlad had noticed that the majority of scholarships given in
highschool, for University study, went to the children of the more
well-off PTA Members.
That was all behind him, now, however. He hated to remember such
things because it all made him feel like either up-chucking, or shitting.
Vlad had a strangely warped, pessimistically optimistic, view of life
and the only way that it could be changed for the better. He was
positive, and self-assured, that the circumstances within his

environment would only get worse. He believed that the only way for
mankind to be straightened-out, was to be destroyed by God and then
have him start life anew.
His music reflected that particular belief of his, as well.
There was a strong yet spiritually