Life in a Thrashing Machine | Page 7

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 humble quality in the sounds that his mind produced. He had always hoped and believed that in some way God was instilling him with a special kind of skill and talent, but he wondered if he were just suffering through delusions. He was confused about his hopes of being divinely blessed with talent, and the strange problems that he was having in progressing with his life. If, indeed, God has given him the talent, then why didn't he give him a ready outlet to share it with the world?
Vlad took his house key from his right pocket of his pants, unlocked the door then entered. It wasn't that much warmer inside the house than it was outside, in