[methods]

I think there may be a few commas where they shouldn't be a probably some words I've missed out, enjoy!
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I light another cigarette barely seconds after I extinguish the last one. By now a normal person would seek help but I am not a normal person. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through this and I realise that deep down inside I enjoy it. What’s cooler then the guy sitting by himself with a cigarette hanging out from the side of his mouth? A guy doing that, but whom also has a black eye.

Where did the black eye come from? In all honesty I couldn’t tell you. The story starts like this though; I light a cigarette and sit down. There is a foreign beer in front of me; I think it’s a lager. I take a sip and place it back.

‘I saw the girl of my dreams today on the bus;’ I say, ‘she was wearing a red dress and had her hair done up high.’
‘Did she look like the girl on the train?’ he replies.

She didn’t look like the girl on the train. The girl on the train had knee high socks and glasses; she was also my dream girl. Every day I see my dream girl and every day my heart is broken.

‘No, she didn’t.’ I inform him, I doubt he wanted clarification anyway.
‘If she’s your dream girl why don’t you say something to her?’ he says.

I think about this a lot; I always tell myself that it would ruin the illusion by talking to her but really it’s because I fear rejection. How do you talk to a girl you’ve never met before? What do you say?

‘I think you look nice,’ and you stare her in the eyes and you give her a roguish smile and you light a cigarette, then you ask her if she wants a lift home and you ride your motorcycle off into the sunset. If life worked like that I would probably still be the same self-loathing piece of sh*t that I am but I would have a motorcycle.

I put the cigarette out and stand up, he is gone. He is probably playing World of Warcraft or some dumb sh*t, I open the fridge and grab a beer and drink it. I repeat this procedure until everything becomes a haze. I go to grab a cigarette from the packet but I am out. I am too drunk to drive but I will drive anyway because maybe if I’m lucky I’ll crash and I won’t have to go to work tomorrow, I won’t have to pay my bills tomorrow and I won’t have to talk to anyone ever again.

Driving drunk isn’t as extreme as people make it sound, I don’t get behind the wheel and suddenly feel the need for speed. I don’t try to impress girls by driving sporadically on the road. I try to drive like I would when I am sober but it’s harder to concentrate and sometimes my depth perception is thrown off by a few seconds.

I arrive at the store, I approach the counter and I ask for a twenty five of Dunhill Blues. I give the man a piece of paper which denotes some sort of economic value and he passes me tobacco leaves that have been processed and crammed into cylinders of paper. He also hands me back tiny pieces of metal with animals, numbers and a queens head imprinted on them.

On the drive home I smoke a cigarette. When I get upstairs I smoke a cigarette. Sometimes I fall asleep with a cigarette in hopes that maybe my bed will catch fire and I will go out in a flame of glory.

Unfortunately this does not happen and the next morning I wake up.

[Tyler]

Your stories are always short but they hold a great amount of quality in them, methods. Quality over quantity and all that, I suppose. This piece caught that indifference/depression phase people get rutted in quite well, I loved the beginning. The second to the last paragraph feels much more mechanical than the rest of the description, and it sort of felt less passionate (oddly enough) than the rest of the story.

I hope for some longer posts from you but I understand the difficulty in making longer stories that don't encompass specific characters and plots, and rather, ideas and experiences. Regardless, I enjoy reading your work and I'm happy you've got the courage to post it, methods.

[El Zilcho]

Interestingly and deceptively simple; it's almost a stream of consciousness, and it is a good piece in its delivery. I'm not sure if I can give any complex feedback, but sometimes it's the simplest that counts for the most. I enjoyed the piece.

[Ziggy455]

Sometimes my mind works like this. You feel the cynical side of everything, I can see from the way you wrote this that it's a concious vomit. It seems personal, but even though it's not expositional -which is a good thing- it seems to ring true to me in many ways. You write with bland honesty and I do believe to quote Tyler when I say it's quality of quantity that matters, and you've nailed that here.

We've all wished not to wake up at least once.

Not bad, Writer. Not bad at all.

[Eminence]

I'm going to throw out a bit of a backhanded compliment here and say that I really, really enjoyed the first half of this more than the second half. Two reasons: the first is its abstract, locationless nature. It progresses through a few temporal shifts, but never solidifies where we actually are; once you root it to a physical location in the second half (driving to the store) it loses a little of that detached, abstract charm. Secondly, and tied into this detached nature, the first section really tells us everything we need to know, and provides us with this cynical, nihilistic worldview through the actions unfolding before us. The second part slips into straight up telling us this point of view - it makes it all a little too blunt and over the top, and as a result kind of cancels out what was so great about it at the start.

I think you nailed this one, stylistically, at the outset, but it slipped a little into cliche by the end. There's no rigid delineation between the two halves, mind - it's just the general sense I got as it progressed.

[Mokrie Dela]

Pretty good work. Like Em said, I enjoyed the first part more, but - specifically about the bit about your dream girl, seeing her everyday and gettin g your heart broken, how to talk to her - I can identify with it on a personal level. Especially the bit I just mentioned - it touched a nerve, gently but enough to stimulate my emotions. Nicely done