The Body Shop

It’s hard to imagine that I could be up writing at 1:40 am on a Tuesday night as a teacher. I used to be up this late on a regular basis in college, and when I worked graveyard, I did this without batting an eyelash. Now, as I remind myself over and over again that I have work in the morning where I have to guide students through the finer nuances of JavaScripts loops and arrays, I can only chuckle at the writing prompt I chose.

While this is certainly nothing that could spark any great philosophical debate, it does bring to mind a rather amusing idea of what the world could look like in the future. I would love to live in a world with a body shop like this. For those of you who know me, I would swap my terribly weak and ever in pain eyes for cybernetics at the drop of a hat.


 

The Body Shop

My great, great, great, great grandfather opened his auto shop in the early 1950s. It wasn’t some grand shop, just a small single car lift with two bays. It survived two wars, four economic crises, and two pandemics. Once, in 2101, my Pops almost closed the doors permanently, but luckily, with a bit of convincing, I talked him into handing me the keys.

One thing most people don’t know is that an auto shop is only a single step away from being a body shop, and only three steps from being a body shop. I remember it like it was yesterday, opening the garage bay and cleaning out the old engines and parts, selling them for capital to invest in the cybernetics market. Oscar’s Body Shop took on a whole new meaning. No sense changing the name when the work is mostly the same.

On a typical day, I get the normal mundane stuff like recalibrations, hydraulics checks, sensor replacements, and of course the firmware updates. Sometimes though, you get a few special clients in, namely, the metalheads who want some fresh chrome to keep their buddies from ragging on them. It’s not unusual to do a limb replacement or an ocular implant, but those are always a bit special. See, I’m no surgeon, but I do know my way around a cutting torch and a pair of nuero-phasing control rods. Hell, give me an hour and I can probably get an industry certificate in neural computer data integration.

Honestly, I’m not the cleanest, I’m not the nicest, and I’m certainly not the cheapest. What I am is honest. We are a family-owned, family-run, body shop that only works with and uses the highest quality products on the market. No repros, no after-market skims, and certainly no blackmarket pirated tech. The finest in quality since 1953. So, remember, like our commercial says, “when you’re looking for an experienced body shop with decades of experience and a reputation to match there’s only one place to go for all your cybernetic augmentation needs. Oscar’s Body Shop on the corner of Norris and Grove.”

On Old Journals and New Beginnings (a.k.a. Illustrations of Frustrations)

 It's always interesting cleaning up your room and finding old toys and old bits and baubles from your childhood. You always think, "Wow! I haven't seen this in forever!"

Naturally, the inevitable happens shortly after that. You start to lose yourself in those memories, you start to think about where you were, who you were when you first experienced that object. It's funny how desire to make something can slowly be twisted and warped as you grow away from that person you used to be. Looking at this blog, I can only help but laugh as I remember how proud I was that I was able to produce writing for it, and then I started to slow down on writing, slow down posting. One week went by, then another, then a month, and before I knew it. It had been EIGHT years since I last posted on this blog.

I want to rectify that.

So, if I can, I'd like to turn this into a project that I'll finally keep up with. I want to post at least one thing a month to this blog. One short story, one poem, just one thing that keeps it from being another forgotten thing in a closet.

And so, without further ado, here is that one thing.

Illustrations of Frustrations

 To say that I was frustrated would have truly been a lie. I was not merely frustrated, I was immensely frustrated. I was that feeling of anger and annoyance swirling within the confines of your mind as you struggled seemingly uselessly against some invisible wall all to accomplish a task that leads only to more tasks with more walls. I was that sense of hopelessness that still held onto that prideful vanity of "it's gotta work this time" and yet even deep down, regardless of whatever minute detail I change, I'll still fail.

 I was not frustrated. I was irrationally frustrated. Not to say that my frustration was irrational, but rather that my frustration made me irrational. I punched my thigh as hard as I could to physically manifest my frustrations. I cursed my inability, I flagulated my emotional flesh to drive home my frustrations, and still it did nothing to help me or my frustrations. The pain still hurt, the emotional damage never healed, and still I blame myself for my frustrations.

I was not frustrated. I was inconsolably distraught. Like some kitten on a row boat in a storm, there was no place for me to hide. Instead, I simply forced myself to claw at my frustrations weakly and without any real ability to damage them. My body tossed about, leaving me with no foothold to steady myself, to give me leverage to right myself and to give me a fighting chance. I was at the tumultuous seas whims.

 I was not frustrated. Because frustrated would imply that I could accomplish the task but was simply without the skill or the equipment or luck to do so, of which I had none of those to rely on. I struggled uselessly like a fish in a net, I was already caught by my own intense desire to be successful that I resigned myself to do or die. DO or DIE as if it were a choice that I could so easily make as I hammered and bashed and pounded and pulled and pushed and heaved and cried and wept and pleaded and begged. Still, I cannot say I was frustrated, because it was so much more than that.

I was not frustrated.