Diablevert

That Tell-Tale Gleam, but Whose Eye?

Today while cleaning out my desk I found a note: “Strunk --- tool. Rogan --- watch.” I’m not sure what this refers to. It certainly reads like the maddened gibbering of a bitter paranoid --- or perhaps it is the frantic scribbling made during a moment of clarity, a brief dissolution of the clouded delirium that I conceive of as “reality”:

You are on a couch in your apartment with your roommates. This movie is terrible, you realize, inane and plotless. Why was I laughing? Briefly, the haze has dimmed, and as you glance out of the corner of your eye you witness their false and patronizing smiles evaporating, to be replaced, on Strunk’s face, with a scowl of contempt, and on Rogan’s with a thin-lipped, shifty-eyed smirk combining equal parts loathing and cunning. You see it all now: One of your closest friends is an asshole, and the other is quietly plotting against you. Surreptitiously as you are can, you ease a pen from your pocket and a on a twisted scrap of ATM receipt note your discovery, praying that someday, you will find it again and remember…quickly, now, the beer Rogan is about to hand you is probably drugged…

Though to be fair, I gave Strunk a tool box and Rogan a watch for Christmas last year.