RTOTD: 22116

by Revis Edgewater

There’s a moving company in my area named Two Men and a Truck. On the back of the truck, they’ve got their web address painted on the door: http://www.twomen.com

I think that’s probably their legitimate website address. On the other hand, I think that’s also a really easy way to trick someone into going to a gay porn site.

I’m curious as to which it is, but not curious enough to actually go to that website.

No Longer Home

by Revis Edgewater

John Livich had spent his entire life in the big city. His family never even took any vacations anywhere that they weren’t still surrounded by concrete. He couldn’t imagine a life where there wasn’t a restaurant within walking distance of his home. People were always constantly around. They were walking and talking. Sometimes yelling. And, no matter what time of day it was, there was noise.

That’s what woke him up. The silence. It was something he’d never heard before.

His eyes were assaulted by the sun as he opened them. John was sure that he had closed his blinds before getting into bed, but the bright light told him otherwise. One hand reached up to shield his eyes while the other moved to shove his blanket off him. There was no blanket to be found, however. In fact, he realized after the initial shock of being blinded wore off, he wasn’t in his bed. He’d never had a mattress that was as hard as what he was laying on.

John slowly opened one eye. The sight before him made his other eye shoot open in disbelief. He was laying on the ground in the middle of a forest. There were trees all around. The only break in them seemed to be the one that was letting the light in his eyes. Shuffling backward out of the light’s path, he took another look around.

He’d only ever seen places like this in movies or on TV. Leaves of green and red created a canopy above the spot he now sat. There was grass on the ground, but it was patchy at best. A few flowers and bushes were scattered around, but the area was mostly covered in more of the leaves. For a moment he wondered how there were still some in the trees with as many as there were on the ground.

John put his hand down to push himself up to his feet and immediately lifted it again. A loud cry of pain came out of his mouth and broke the silence that was surrounding him. Looking down, he saw a rock with a sharp edge sticking out of the ground where he planted his hand. Blood began forming from a small spot on his palm where the rock broke his skin. Up until that point, he would have sworn that he was dreaming, but the pain in his hand was very real.

Had he gone out drinking the night before? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d drank too much and woken up in a strange place. His friends were notorious for messing with him when he’d had one, or two, too many. Leaving him alone in the middle of a city park wouldn’t be the worst thing they’ve done to him.

No, he thought to himself. He had come straight home from work and spent the night binge watching a show he’d been meaning to catch up on for a while. Also, no city park has this many trees in it.

So, where was he?

John’s thoughts were interrupted by a sound, the first one he’d heard from his surroundings. He jumped to his feet and looked behind him toward the source. At first, he didn’t see anything. Then, he heard the sound again. He shifted his gaze to where the newest noise came from. For another moment, he still didn’t see anything, but he noticed a color among the trees and leaves on the ground that didn’t match anything around it. A small streak of gray was coming out from behind one of the trees. Seconds later, he saw what the gray was.

A large gray wolf stepped forward, crunching the leaves under its paw. John froze as the animal bared its teeth at him. The growl that came from the carnivore caused him to take an instinctive step back. “Oh shit,” John muttered under his breath. “I’m in trouble.”

To his surprise, the wolf’s growl changed right after. It morphed from a threatening animal snarl to mocking human laughter. “You have no idea,” came from out of the wolf’s mouth. “The good news for you, human, is that your trouble will be over soon.”

Musical Diversity

by Revis Edgewater

As I was going through the playlists I have on my computer and phone, I noticed something. Almost all of the music I listen to on a regular basis is firmly in the “rock” genre. There are very few songs that don’t fall into that category, but not many. That realization was odd to me because it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I was younger that I had an equal amount of music from multiple genres in my collection.

For example, the first two CDs I remember buying for myself were Garth Brooks’ In Pieces and Coolio’s It Takes a Thief (Hey! Fantastic Voyage is a good song! That turned out to be one of the two songs on that album that didn’t suck, but we can’t win them all).

Back then, when I was in high school, I listened to a little bit of everything. Rock? I listened to Metallica, Megadeth, Nirvana, and The Offspring. Country? I listened to Garth Brooks, John Michael Montgomery, and Alan Jackson. Rap? I listened to Snoop Dogg, Coolio, and Bone Thugs N Harmony. And many others besides these examples.

That made me wonder why I don’t listen to the other genres now.

As far as country music goes, I pretty much know the answer to that one. I will still listen to country music from the 90s now. It’s songs that are newer than that which are dicey. Especially the current country music. I live in a house with young girls who will play that stuff and I can’t handle it. Today’s country music is just pop music sung by people with southern accents. It’s horrible.

That left me to wonder about rap/hip hop/R&B.

There is a person where I work that plays newer songs in these areas and I’m forced to listen to them once or twice a week. I’m not a fan. Honestly, it all sounds the same to me. At one point she played three songs back to back to back where the artists rapped in the exact same rhythm. If they didn’t each have distinctly different voices, I would’ve sworn she had the song on repeat.

Since current music was out of the question, I went back to some of the stuff I used to listen to back in the day. As I mentioned, Coolio was a bust. Other than Fantastic Voyage and Gangsta’s Paradise, his music pretty much sucked. I’d heard a song or two of Snoop’s stuff from back then recently, so I listened to Bone instead. Overall, it was as good as I remembered it being, but that’s when I realized why I don’t listen to that genre very much anymore.

There’s a particular word that gets used a lot in rap that I don’t like. I know there’s millions of people who dislike it far more than I ever could, but I still don’t want to listen to it.

So, I guess that leaves me sticking around in the rock arena with occasional trips into 90s country.

A Wandering Song

by Revis Edgewater

A few years back I had a random song pop into my head just moments after I woke up one morning. At the time, I thought it was strange because it had been years since the last time I’d heard it. I’d actually forgotten about it until this happened. Then, as the day went on, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t push the song out of my head. So I relented and listened to it a few times on YouTube. It went away after I did that and I forgot about the song again.

For a while, at least.

The song has done the same thing to me every few months since then. It’ll pop into my head early in the morning and stay there until I listen to it a couple of times. If it happens on one of my off days, it’s not really that big of a deal. When I’m working, however, I don’t always have the time to pull it up on my phone and listen to it. Then I’m stuck with that song in my head all day.

Not that it’s an entirely bad thing when this happens. It’s not a bad song. It’s just not something that I’d normally listen to on a regular basis. I will say one thing about it: it’s the sweetest song I’ve ever heard about a man having an orgasm.