Winter Non-Entry 2015 An Attempt at Comedy About An Old Man

This epigraph, seemingly pointless like most other epigraphs, is really a portrayal of the inner anguish of a certain Otto, well advanced in his years, well reminded of how old and decrepit he is and then brushes it all aside since everyone of his age has to go through it as well. The problem with that though is not all is well.

After all, he had lived a life filled with challenges seemingly insurmountable, like attending school and struggling to attain good grades so that he could struggle to work a job for several decades so that he can struggle to purchase insurance against an accident that would never happen. Other challenges he had struggled to overcome included struggling to hoodwink a woman into a matrimonial union with him then struggle to take care of her and their offspring in what was surely the worst of struggles, or so he thought.

It would appear that the greatest challenge of all for Otto was to attend (to) funerals of first his immediate relatives and friends who are older than him followed by the funerals of his immediate relatives and friends who are not so much older than him.

When his parents kicked the bucket in his forties and fifties, he had had to worry about where the funeral ought to be held, how much it would cost, whether the people attending (in contrast to attending to) the funeral would be willing to give enough money to offset the costs of holding it and squabbling over his siblings over inheritance issues (though in both cases, it was about deciding who should inherit the debts left behind)

When his friends and older siblings were kicked out of the realm of the living, he needn't worry about funeral arrangements. All he needed to do was to attend their funerals, ascertain whether they are truly dead and then ponder on his mortality. The first two were easy to do, but the third placed upon him tremendous emotional strain, not because he is necessarily heartbroken to see the people he knew for so long go away, but heartbroken that these are signs that he himself is about to go away.

So, the fear of death, in addition to his bodily problems that frankly afflicts almost everyone who have lived over half a century are really the reasons why all wasn't well. It could be because of his obsessive nature or his tendency to worry about the most trivial matters but try as he might to brush them off he would still fret about them. It didn't help that he felt like going to the toilet every one hour or so or that any attempt to run would come with searing pain in every single joint in his body.

If one were in his or her teenage years and is experiencing the bitter taste of what it is like to go through the daily problems that most adults have to face, he or she might pen a whiny poem about Otto's predicament in something perhaps around these lines:



Indeed, it is perfectly normal for most of Otto's close relations to be six feet under or cooped up in an urn at such an advanced age. It is tragic but not entirely expected for his best friend to go gaga considering that his brain cells are old and worn out. Much has already been said about Otto's ever declining physical ability and it is natural for his surviving (and younger) family members like his children, nephews and nieces to treat him like a child in need of around the clock care!

So in the face of all of this what should he do? Otto being Otto decided that the only panacea to all of these problems was to worry and work to solve those problems. A less flattering word to describe his efforts can be found repeated in a bizarre fashion in the first few paragraphs of this writeup -- struggle.

It is not entirely unfounded. Most of his peers who have pushed up daisies beforehand have decided not to worry. After all, the most sensible thing to do after having worked and laboured for several decades was to rest. And rest in peace they did! Since this wasn't what Otto wanted, he did the exact opposite and behaved and worked just like he did in his younger years albeit with the aching bones, barely controllable bladder and bowel movements and the ever dwindling number of people he could call his peers.

Otto's situation is like a caricature of some killjoy Buddhist doctrine which describes life being a cesspool of bitterness. However, he certainly didn't prescribe to Buddhist methods to extricate himself from that situation and attain nirvana for he is so wedded to this primordial instinct of self-preservation. If life have to come with arthritis and finding out that you have a longer lifespan than your friends, so be it. At least Otto is still drawing breath!

For those setting your eyes on this and are feeling that this writeup is a bit anticlimactic due to a lack of resolution, rest assured this is what will happen to Otto one fine night:

He would go to bed with a list of worries and concerns in his head, some real while others made up and expect himself to wake up in the morning tomorrow attending to those problems. What he would not expect that much however is that his body could no longer cope with the physical stresses that come along with age and then it would be

it might be a funny twist if Otto became unstuck in time, so he actually died and born at the same time.

like when Otto got abducted by aliens and be perceived as started going insane, while in his actual point of view he was traveling back in time to his point of youth where he tried shagging a different woman.

Feels like a story which could come out worse than Uki Uki Suru and Doki Doki Suru combined!

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4981.Slaughterhouse_Five

it's so weird i got to love it, and i wasn't even a fan of books.

I was expecting the spoiler to reveal this was about car. You know, since there's one in the picture and the guy's name is Otto.



I don't mind the prose too much in this except at parts like the above sentence, but I know that's your thing and you did it on purpose.

I don't have that much to say about the story itself. You give us this guy's life story and then he dies an anti-climatic death (as most of us will). And that's it.



Although, this feels out of place. I don't see the point of it.

high_time suggested something similar to you but I forgot about it! Still, nothing beats an anti-climax in my book. I hope you felt that way when you opened that spoiler.



If my friends and parents were dead and I were to be suffering from chronic physical pain, I would find it dreadful! However, you do realise this is what a person who has lived too long has to face! Now imagine if I transplanted a teenager's brain into the body of a geriatric...

Do you understand what I am trying to do here?

I was definitely expecting something leonard267-ish when I opened it.



I understand what you did there. I don't get why you did it.

That wasn't really what you asked was it? You said that it felt out of place. I replied by explaining that paragraph. I implied that our hero is very miserable which is very consistent with what this piece is harping about.

As to what I was thinking when I wrote it, I would say that most of what I write were comes with a silly poem. I also find it interesting that double standards are applied to old people and the not so old pertaining to losing almost everyone close to you, being in poor shape and all that.

Why all of your stories have to focus on a lonely and descriptively pessimistic man?

Really? Could you name examples? The narrator IS rather pessimistic but not the characters in the stories I write.

The last one was indeed a better attempt at comedy about an old man called Leonard harassing his former schoolmates on a trip to the mountains. The one before that was about a young adult being a rather unreasonable father following the example of his mother.

Admittedly, I didn't put much thought into writing this as much as I would like. You can see this from the lack of plot here and I blame my inability to manage both work and writing on a commercial site that sells pornographic material.

This is a pretty satisfactory summary of the majority of lives lived today in a modern world. Although you claim it is anticlimactic, it actually did a decent job at creating the climax through the hypothetical narration of what was likely to occur.

I rather enjoyed the poetry both in the beginning and in the middle. You're becoming quite the poet, leonard267!

Alas, for some critique, I think you forgot a word here:

Corrected it.

You are too kind Xenon. I can only hope that you gained some kind of entertainment from it. Like I mentioned elsewhere, this entry is cobbled together for the sake of this event. I wish there could be a proper plot about an old man going on an adventure but I think that might have to be left for another day.

Well that picture was really misleading. Like d, I was expecting the reveal to be Otto's identity as a car, but alas, I was wrong. Your works are the only ones I've read in this forum (so far) that can put poetry and prose together to a satisfying degree.

Gotta love those anti-climaxes haha!

I think that is because no one in the forum bothered to put together a poem or song in their stories. It was cobbled together without much thought. I must really apologise for that. The least I can hope for is for you to be entertained.

Congratulations on getting runner-up! I will try to explain to why I decided that your entry was one of the winning entries later on.

Yeah, like you say. They all sound pessimistic because the narration was way too pessimistic about everything. Although I agree that they were quite lively in their own part. Like this guy who decides to continue to work even when the Worker's Union would not allow it and then file his children as ungrateful pricks and put them into a unwanted lawsuit. But such is life, and maybe such is Otto's ultimate plan up to his demise.

I would not say that I was really entertained though. I can sense the lack of effort in this piece as opposed to to your previous work. All I think was that it must suck to be old and that thought is certainly not exciting.

And I'm also eagerly anticipating your reply to my entry and we can have a positively civilized argument about it.

I did give a reply of sorts to your entry at the "Winners Thread". It really reminded me of what I write in more ways than one, the lack of effort put in for starters! Hopefully I can give a fuller reply over the weekend.

Back to what I wrote here, I can only say that I find pleasure and humour in describing misery which is why I like Masayoshi's entry. You will know how it will be like when you are working 12 hour days!

I'll start off by saying that I snooped around some of your older posts, so I sort of got what I expected.

This type of entry is actually very similar to Masayoshi's, in that they both recount the events in a mans life. It got a bit hard to follow for me, partly because I'm more used to reading short-story/novel type pieces. I'm also a bit confused at that picture of the car at the very top.

In terms of humor... I could tell you were trying, but everyone's sense of humor is different, and the more isolated your target is, the harder it is to make them laugh. I didn't really laugh at this, but then again I rarely ever laugh when I'm alone. I liked your poems, though - the second one was kinda funny (even though I didn't laugh).

You actually took my advice and went through my previous posts?! You deserve to win just for taking the effort to do so!

Also, did you realise that the car on top is used at funerals? It is a hearse actually. And yes, I actually like Masayoshi's entry if only it could be funnier!

I never really understood why some people wanted to grow up to be this old. It seems like it'd be such a bad time between losing important people and not being able to use your body in the same way you used to. I'm sure I'd find it dreadful. All in all, fun read. Nice picture by the way; that car really threw some people for a loop.