truefiction.org

ONE

Wake up. Take a shower. Perhaps make eggs or a bowl of cereal, but more likely grab a bagel and coffee from the store you pass on your way to the bus stop. Wave your credentials briefly at the security guy on your way up to your office. Sit down at your desk. Write interoffice memo. Go downstairs for a smoke. Buy fast food for lunch. Return to your desk. Fiddle with your hands, forward joke emails to your friends and write one more memo. Go home fulfilled.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

TWO

Wake up. Skip the shower, you’re in a hurry. Breakfast is a Nutri-grain bar found stuffed in your jacket pocket. Go to the coffee shop. Indulge in lattes for a few hours, jotting down ideas for your brilliant screenplay. Walk next door to your job. Smile at people as they walk in. Ask if they need help finding something. Demonstrate your knowledge of the products at hand. You are on commission. Stand around aimlessly for a few minutes during the slow hours, then take a short break. Ask your boss for a raise. Clock out, then return to coffee shop. Think about applying for a job there. You enjoy the coffee shop. They aren’t hiring. Catch the bus home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

THREE

Wake up. Smoke your last cigarette. It’s 3 p.m. Walk down to the store beneath your apartment. Buy a pack of cigarettes and a case of cheap beer. Sit down on your couch. Call your friends and ask them to come over. Call your parents and ask them to send money. Watch TV. Buzz your friends up. Roll a joint. Pass it around as you and your friends argue over whether to watch Fraiser or Seinfeld. Order a pizza. Call more people and ask if they know anything that’s going on. Decide on a plan. Put on your jacket. Hit up some bars on your way to the club. Buy some tickets to the show. Go inside. Bounce around in an uncoordinated fashion for an hour and a half. Convince someone to give you a ride home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FOUR

Wake up. Step outside the trailer cab and stretch. Sit down in the driver’s seat. Put the truck in gear. Pull onto the highway. Search the local radio stations to see if anything good is on the air. Turn on your CD player. Hum along. Try to stay in the rightmost lane unless there’s a slow car in front. Honk your airhorn for students on a school trip. Change the CD. Pull into a service station. Fill the gas tank with diesel. Buy a sandwich and a bag of potato chips. Get back on the highway. Drive for a few more hours, being vigilant in not letting your attention wander. Answer some queries sent over the CB. Stop at a weigh station and scan a day-old newspaper while you wait. Keep driving. Ignore the New Yorker honking angrily as he passes. Pull into a rest stop. Step outside and stretch. Go back into the cab and set up your bed. Watch TV for half an hour before sleep.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FIVE

Wake up. Lean over and gently wake up your significant other. Balance yourself against the slow rocking of the boat. Wake up your two friends. Cook a small breakfast in the galley–sausage, eggs, coffee. Take the boat of auto-pilot. Turn off the motor. Raise the jib only, because the wind is rather strong. Trade off on steering the boat. Smile, laugh amongst the four of you. Mix up some Bloody Marys. Raise the main sail. Stay on the rudder while others make lunch. Tack. Duck underneath the boom. Talk about the progress you’ve already made in crossing the ocean. Discuss plans for after your arrival in Europe. Make martinis. Put on some trendy music. Go inside for a coat. Check the weather around you through a laptop and your satellite phone. Step back out to the deck. Say you’re going to start cooking dinner. Make something fancy, because, well, why not? Admire the sunset. Note that pink sky at night is a sailor’s delight. Crack a bad joke about pink-eye being good for no one. Bring down the sails. Turn on the motor and put the ship back on auto-pilot. Go down into the cabin and sit around, just talking, for another few hours. Fall asleep with your arm wrapped tightly around your spouse.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

SIX

Wake up. Turn on your computer. While it is booting up, go downstairs for a can of Jolt. Come back up to your room. Sit down in front of the monitor. Begin typing. Break into another computer on the network. From that computer, break into another one. Continue until the lag as you type things is somewhere around a minute. Hack into the secret Microsoft database you heard about from one of your Counter-Strike buddies. Download plans for time machine. Get mother to drive you to Radioshack. Buy the following in large quantities: capacitors, resistors, inductors, circuit boards, hex-inverted Schmidt triggers. Go home. Have another Jolt. Warm up your soldering iron and begin laying out the pieces. Start attaching them to the circuit board. Work quickly, but adeptly, on a software interface. Jump a few small things–a pencil, a toaster, your cat–five minutes into the future to make sure everything is working properly. Go downstairs to dinner because your mother is yelling again. Come back upstairs. Clear out the middle of your room. Attach a note to the door that says, “Not missing. Will return on Sunday. Please keep floor clear.” Start charging the capacitors. Drink one last Jolt. Set the software interface to jump you to the start of next week. Have it wait thirty seconds before activating the machine. Stand in the middle of your room and wait for the blinding flash.

Rinse.

Finally, after nearly a year of talking about it, not creating, the first issue of Brilliant, Young & Angsty is nearing completion. With an all-star staff of writers, editors and artists, the magazine won’t just change your worldview–it will change you.

The fact that you have not yet heard of BY&A is ludicrous. We’ve been talking about it for over a year. We even showed you that quick Word97-based version we were going to print illegally in computer labs across the nation. But times change, and the purpose and style of BY&A has changed.

No longer is it just Nick Gorski writing about random things he couldn’t get published in McSweeney’s. Now it is many people writing about random things they couldn’t get published in McSweeney’s. Do you see the difference?

Actually, it’s not even much of a literary journal at all. Who needs another one in C-Ville, when we already have:

Seven journals published by students, quarterly

One published by MFA students

One published by the English department

Three published by people in their heads

One column about Dave Matthews, even though he doesn’t live here no more.

Two alt. weeklies, neither as good as the old, pre-Hawes departure C-Ville.

6000 Frat boys

400 “indie” kids (that magical 10%!)

Six members of the Seven society

Twenty-six buses

Your mother

Your wife

Your sister

Your chihuaua

Your favorite cup of coffee

Your favorite cup of tea.

Charlottesville’s already got a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t have a Journal of Pop Culture. This will soon be remedied.

Television! Music! Film! Society!

It’s all going to be covered, and you will be pleased. Oh, man, will you be pleased. We wish we could be you when you open up the magazine for the first time, amazed by what you see. We wish we could be you, sitting underneath the harsh lighting of the Chemistry Auditorium, having picked this magazine up because it all shiny and new and has an interesting photo on the cover. We wish we could be you, flipping through the pages and marveling at the small text that is coherent and funny and relevant, all at the same time (maybe not relevant). We wish we could be you, wishing you were us.

The future as we know it is about to change.

It will be awesome.

It will kick ass.

It will be Brilliant, Young, and Angsty.

(Issue 9 of BY&A comes out 14 October 2002, available at many fine locations in Charlottesville.)