New Plans for Our New Lives
Matt Rittenhouse

We are drawing up plans. They are purely logistical. There is no emotion present in our schematics. Jimmy thought that maybe we could put something in about his wife, and how he had to sleep on Tim's couch last night, but we thought (knowing his wife) that their episode would be a short one, and in the long run, inconsequential.
The plans are for our new lives. Each person is drawing up their own. I handed out, earlier, those flat carpentry pencils. The thing is, is that we're hoping to fit all the plans together.
Barry, according to schedule, made his with a cyclical sense of brutality. He used the terms, "cyclical," and "brutality." He thought that if he used such words, we would think he had read a bunch of books on theory, which of course, he had, but we couldn't give two shits. I told him that. I used the term, "two shits."
Harriet drew a plan up with references to domesticity, and some fellow named Barbary, as if that was a real name of some real person she had written newly into her plan.
What Jimmy came up with wasn't much in the way of logical progressions of one step to another step, like I thought it best to do (earlier I had told everyone that I thought this) but a sort of mish-mash of events which really just ended him up with a grey-black scribble plan. I think he was hoping he would have time for several plans, but part of it was that he didn't have an eraser on his pencil.
If, say, you were watching our lives, or the plans of our lives in one of the movie houses in town, through one of the movie cameras everyone sees everything through these days, there would be a shot of us, then a constant dollying of the camera away from us. We'd be getting smaller and smaller, and even though you might read into it all of the flotsam that you'd like, about us losing ourselves in the world, and us getting smaller and more insignificant in a rapidly extrapolating way, this is not the case; any more than the smaller we become in the frame, the larger the smiles become on our faces.
Sometimes, after several "pints," we get obnoxious. We put things which are not hats, on our heads as hats. We don't talk about these things afterwards. That would be showy, and uncomfortable for some.
At other times, after several "pints," we remember things which we haven't remembered in a long time. We flood the sawdust floors with our tears.
I threw my glass at Harriet one time. She was saying something ridiculous, and I wanted everyone to stop paying attention, stop hanging on every sappy word she spoke. She wears too much red lipstick and it hurts me in the stomach. "Fuck you, Harriet," I say sometimes after several "pints."