guide to bad television: a novel (chapter 1, pt 1)

this is probably 0.5% of my novel. congratulations, after reading this, you will have read 0.5% of a novel! i will probably change it a lot, you just read draft #1, i will probably do like 84 drafts or something.

On Friday night, Shaun sits on the plastic seat of his motor scooter and drives to the gas station. Shaun feels severe anxiety, thinking “gas station, sandy station, sandy gas, gas sandy”. A repetitive thought process. A repetitive thought process.

Half way to the gas station, only three blocks away, Shaun turns the lights off of his motor scooter and drifts through darkness. The street lights glow orange, not very bright. Cloak of invisibility. He pulls on the throttle. ‘Throttle’ sounds sarcastically hard-core, Shaun thinks. Sarcastically hard-core throttle-cloak of invisibility. Shaun is driving at sixty-five kilometres an hour in a densely built-up urban residential area. Pulling on his throttle. Illegally speeding throttle-cloak of invisibility.

Shaun turns a corner and almost runs into a car which is turning the other way. Nobody has their lights on, neither vehicle does. Shaun remembers driver training, his instructor always saying, “Turn the fucking lights on,” and Shaun being scared of his instructor and the way they abused their power to make him feel nervous and insignificant and stupid.

“What just happened?” someone says.

The woman who was in the car turning the corner steps out of the car and places her hands on her hips. She looks like Oprah Winfrey. Or nothing like Oprah Winfrey. The woman turns out to be Shaun’s old driving instructor. She always used to say to Shaun, “Turn the fucking lights on.” Now it is the other way around, sort of. Now Shaun could say to her, “Turn your fucking lights on, what sort of driving instructor are you, I could call the cops and get your instructor license taken away,” but that would be an abuse of power. It would be him using his momentary power over her just to make her feel bad. If Shaun were to call the police and tell them about his old driving instructor driving without her lights on, she would lose her qualifications, lose her job, become homeless, lose custody of her three small children, and perhaps develop a crack addiction and become a cheap prostitute. That is stupid and sexist, Shaun thinks, prostitution is. Shaun thinks, why I am even thinking about prostitution right now?

Shaun's old driving instructor looks scared. She knows that Shaun is thinking, “I could destroy you right now.” She is scared because she has more things than Shaun and more power, which means more things to have taken away and more power to have taken away. Shaun thinks about this. It would only be a momentary satisfaction for Shaun, destroying his old driving instructor. She made him feel bad during lessons. Fuck her. She made him feel stupid. Asked him, as some sort of joke, whether he had an intellectual disability, told him that he would never get his license, screamed at him at intersections. He was glad never to see her again.

But revenge is boring. It would feel satisfying for about five seconds, but then Shaun would feel bored and hypocritical. Using power to destroy other people is ‘bad’. Shaun doesn’t want to be ‘bad’. Shaun thinks about using power to destroy other people. No, he thinks.

“Cloak of invisibility,” says Shaun.

“Cocoon floating in complete and utter darkness,” says the driving instructor, feeling lucid. “Tonight I wanted to be feel alone and non-existent. You can only do that in complete and utter darkness. Wait. What am I talking about? Why I am explaining myself to you? You used to be my student. The one with the intellectual disability. That means that you were once my insubordinate. You are worse than me. Go away before I call the police.”

Shaun thinks, “Abuse of power,” and drives to the gas station.