This Is a Book - Demetri Martin [8]
I quickly became purple with punches to the face and, on and off, even more purple with DJ lights that were still rotating. Things got worse when Violet’s boyfriend pushed me into a candle. I turned orange with fire and then gray with smoke. Thankfully, I quickly became pink with fruit punch after Carl threw some on me to put out the fire.
Violet’s boyfriend dragged her away. I looked for her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.
A few minutes later Carl and I left the party.
I was blue with sadness and also with windbreaker, which was now slightly melted from the fire. I just wanted to get drunk and forget about Violet.
Carl decided to go home, so I called my friend Joey to see if he wanted to hang out. Joey is white, really white, with being albino. We’ve known each other since we were black with graduation gowns.
I told Joey to meet me at a bar in the neighborhood. He did. Shortly after we arrived at the bar I met a girl inside who was Amber with stripper name. Her eyes were aqua with colored contact lenses and her skin was orange with spray tan. When she spoke, I noticed her teeth were bright white with teeth whitener (even whiter than Joey is with albinism). She didn’t look great, but I was drunk and I didn’t care.
We started to make out. We made out for a while, a long while. Then Amber suddenly got up and said she had to go. She left and that sucked because it left me blue with balls. A few minutes later I left, albeit very slowly.
When I got home, I was green with nausea. At least that’s what my roommate, who is peach with skin, said. I passed out in the kitchen and became beige with instant oatmeal that was in the bowl where my face landed. I got up from the table and somehow I made it to my bed.
When I woke up the next morning I was brown with stubble and rainbow with bruises and hangover. I looked at myself in the mirror and became chartreuse with self-pity. Then I noticed the time. I had overslept and was about to be late for work, which would be sure to make me pink with pink slip.
I finished getting ready and rushed out the door, becoming teal with hurry. I got to work just in time, stopping only once, at a traffic light that was red with signal. That was a good thing because I was green with being new at the job.
Anyway, these days I am mostly green and blue with striped pajamas and frequently orange with fingertips as I eat Doritos while sitting on my couch. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, because I got laid off. I’m doing okay though because I know that life isn’t always black and white with certainty. Sometimes you end up in an area that is gray with being in a transitional phase or something. I’ll be fine.
Still, from time to time, I can’t help but feel a little blue with sadness when I think about Violet Gold.
Socrates’s Publicist
Socrates had been working on and off as a philosopher for years without much success. He could barely pay his rent and was often not even sure if his place existed, both philosophically and because of its lousy square footage. He had found some moderate success as a freelance thinker, getting hired from time to time to ponder for an aristocrat or to ruminate for an idiot, but such opportunities were sporadic and never paid very well. His career was in trouble.
The truth was that, aside from thinking, Socrates possessed no marketable skills. And while he was pretty good at making small talk, that would not become a paid profession for another two thousand years, and even then only on late-night television.
As far as work experience was concerned, Socrates had very little. He had worked in a Greek restaurant as a young man but was fired after customers complained about the “annoying waiter” who had pestered customers with “difficult questions” about their orders.
Sometime later Socrates’s cousin managed to get him a job as a tour guide, but the struggling philosopher’s whole “I know nothing” schtick did not fly with the tour company, and Socrates was fired