NICK BRUECHLE BOOKS
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    • This pale, decrepit vestige.
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    • Entanglement

Paranoia

​At night the perspiration on your back dries like salt, and your arms and legs feel sticky and filmy. It’s cooler, but the foliage itself seems determined to keep sweating, and in the undergrowth the bugs scrabble and click, and crawl and tickle. The ground you lie on is uneven and cold, strewn with rocks and nuts, and sticks poke into your sides and back and legs, and shit falls out of the trees into your hair. It’s not a place for sleep.

So you spend your time grinding out mean thoughts and chewing on the conspiracies against you, plotting gruesome revenge against those who beset you, and dreaming of your own days of ascendancy. When that gets too wearisome, you amuse yourself by planning inventive ways of relieving dumb white bastards of the bundles of baht they carry, and you marvel at your own creativity and insight, because you really are a genius but people just don’t seem to get it.

As the night drags on, it all starts to again appear hopeless and dangerous, because people are treacherous and brutal as well as stupid and ugly. You wonder why this is all happening to you, and then you remember. The conspiracy is so wide, so consuming and so evil that it’s happening to almost everyone outside a tiny cabal of bloated fiends. The fact that you’re doing it tougher than most is because you’re at the sharp end: you’ve woken up to it. You know who the puppet masters are. You know their game, and in time you’ll learn how to bring them down.

The trouble is, they know you know. They have all the time and literally all the resources in the world at their disposal, and they’re just waiting for you to make your move. Or, hell, even just to show yourself. Then those smug, controlling, corrupt bastards will simply dispense with you, without a second thought. They’ll wipe out your existence and blot out your memory – your own family won’t even remember you. You’ll be a speck of fly shit, and they’ll carry on their filthy way, laughing.

So you sleep in the jungle in that tiny cove at the southern end of Patong Bay. You pinch a little food here, a few bucks there, and you survive. Because you know that every day you’re alive, you’re a thorn in their flabby sides. Just by continuing to breathe, you’re sticking it to them, and that’s motivation enough to keep living.

The sun rises behind the high rise hotels that line the beach. Soon, the willing victims of the conspiracy will again infest the grubby off-white sand, wasting their lives and fucking the planet. At least they make rich, easy targets.
​
You drag yourself out of your makeshift bed of palm leaves and bugs, and you shit in the sea. It’s going to be another long day of life.
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  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Books
    • The World Without Mirrors
    • The Psyman
    • The Cat Man
    • The Reprint
    • The Surfer Alone
    • The Burnt Islands
  • Stories
    • The Secrets of Immortality
    • Sweet Dreams
    • Paranoia
    • The Foamer
    • Ice Cream
    • Anatomy 101
    • When the horizon goes black
    • Rage
    • Core
    • Death of a Writer
    • Invisibility
    • The Ride
    • The Barrel
    • Franklin
    • Paralysis
    • The Candidate
    • Priorities
    • An Awkward Conversation
    • This pale, decrepit vestige.
    • Road Tripping
    • Entanglement