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    Sally
    Sally
    Sally
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Sally

    By Cameron Glenn

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A recently fired suicidal thirty five year old man in 2012 contemplates kidnapping his daughter Sally, a budding child star who does not know he exists. A stream of conscience meditation on life, death, and art are spewed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCameron Glenn
    Release dateJan 17, 2017
    ISBN9781370809264
    Sally
    Author

    Cameron Glenn

    Cameron Glenn grew up the third of seven children in Oregon. As a child he dedicated hours to the pursuits of basketball and cartooning, as well as waking up way too early for his paper route in order to earn money to buy toys, candy and comic books. He also loved to read and write, which he continues to do voraciously. He currently lives in Salt Lake City after having earned a BA in literature from Boise State.

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      Book preview

      Sally - Cameron Glenn

      Sally

      By Cameron Glenn

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2017 Cameron Glenn

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      SALLY

      Chapter One

      An Audrey Hepburn quote begins with something like I believe prettiest girls are the happiest girls.  I believe that too.  It’s such a nice, simple, clean mini-philosophy.  One that expresses both hope in society determining beauty by less superficial means and a literal statement of fact gleamed from observation: girls that are genuinely happy express their happiness through their smiles, energy, voice, activities, dress (happy people care about their appearance and hygiene because they care about themselves and the world and therefore they think their appearance matters to the world; a purpose to everything, even matching earrings to nail color sometimes) and countless other subtle yet collectively compelling and powerful ways (an eye brow arch, a guffaw, a sing-along to a song while on a drive, picking a stray weed flower from the lawn and throwing it to the wind, their number of friends, their meaning to others).  They possess a magnetic spark and glow seen and felt, not just girls but all happy people; we are charmed and attracted to them because we wish to be happy ourselves, to be surrounded by beauty, participate in whatever generates this energy, creates this happiness and beauty, this warm inner light manifesting in this unquantifiable way, for one can’t really scientifically measure levels of feelings and impressions yet we are so aware of them and their impact they can cause obsession, ambitions, and destruction. 

      The rest of the Audrey Hepburn quote finishes: I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.  Which, on the surface, strung together, the quote seems like three simple non sequiturs, which they are in part, but they could also express the belief that happy (pretty) girls are optimistic, that happiness doesn’t derive from simply being exempt from sadness, misfortune, and various possible calamites which unfortunately are unavoidable to most all who live at least over age 25 (Audrey herself experienced hardships as a hungry World War II refuge girl) but that they look forward with optimism despite whatever proof for pessimism may have previously tripped them.  We are attracted to this optimism, this want for happy good fortune and the beauty such sentiments feed (illusion or real, the feelings are real).  Julia Roberts made half a billion dollars in the prime of her movie career mostly based on that great open cackle of hers, first heard when Richard Gear snaps the necklace case down at her reaching fingers in Pretty Woman; a genuine laugh because that scene was impromptu; that movie’s message seemed to be that even a prostitute could be worthy of real love, not just money for gratifying sick wanting men’s lust, and therefore true happiness, and oh look how pretty she is now; and if even a prostitute like Julia Robert’s character deserves happiness, then don’t we all.

      [That movie is old does anyone remember it anymore anyways; not like I think of it much. I’m old now. I just thought of it as an example trying to prove my ‘people love happiness’ point. Which of course they do. I do. I’m revisiting this file some years after I initially wrote it in 2012. It’s the first month of 2017 now. I was suicidal then. I contemplated kidnapping my daughter. Being divorced, sad, thinking about happiness. Random weird thoughts.]

      I mean genuine happiness, not the forced fabricated kind seen in some inflicted with lunacy or the religiously zealot and some actors and politicians trying to wear the aurora of happiness as if it could be attained as easily as spraying perfume and a strong inner will, in their too self-conscious thinking that happiness means success in life (doesn’t the saying go ‘happiness is the best revenge?’…. happiness or success, I forget which it is, but they’re essentially interchangeable in this context, for what does ultimate success mean other than ultimate happiness?) and they don’t want to be thought of as failures.  Or they believe their happiness proves the rightness of their religion, or whatever way of life, thus validating the promises of happiness their religion or life philosophy offers, so they show they are happy and tell themselves so, even if they really are not; or they’re simply living in delusion to both the reality of the world and their smug satisfaction in this flawed world view.  There’s nothing more disconcerting then forced or ill-timed laughter; it’s why The Joker is such a classic and chilling villain and why Tom Cruise’s reveling in Scientology laughter frightens rather than being infectious the way genuine laughter is.  You can tell when it’s fake, when there’s an air of  trying andperformance in it; real happiness springs as effortlessly as the fresh push of wind caused by a strong ocean wave crashing up against a rock, or rising sun pouring through low hung meandering clouds.  You can see real happiness in the colligate celebration outpouring after a buzzer beater game winning shot in NCAA basketball tournaments, or in Olympians who just won gold medals, especially in perceived upsets, or less loudly yet still vibrant, in a mother’s smile after she has given birth and is holding her baby for the first time (never mind the postpartum depression which often follows) and in the children’s squeals as they jump on a trampoline while a sprinkler sprays water up underneath the bouncy tarp on a hot July afternoon like my neighbor children do. 

      Genuine happiness is more rare among burdened bagged adults I fear, becoming something endlessly pursued (as the Declaration of Independence declares is our right); either using too much alcohol to mute its absence or slick the slide towards it or  chasing after it through over indulgences of food, sex, money, drugs, asinine collections, celebrity gossip and other vices rather than something lastingly achieved: happiness is a moment where you want more happiness: Don Draper said something like that in the latest, 5th season of Mad Men during his pitch to the Jaguar company.  I don’t think this is just a human phenomenon either; puppies and kittens are boundlessly playful, energetically curious while their adult counterparts, especially in house cats, have a duller, seen and bored with it all, less enthusiastic of life demeanor; you see the same effect with  baby chimps and monkeys and cubs and lions in nature documentaries. 

      It’s strange, how observing this one happy pretty girl (she is both superficially attractive and seemingly happy) will delight me in fleeting bursts, cause me to smile and be glad for her, think wonderful of her and the world, in either that the world is made more wonderful because she is in it or that the world is wonderful how it is a place where it is possible for someone like her to be born from it, then leave me feeling a bit flat in a melancholy stupor, bored within my internal frustrations, similar, perhaps, to how a prison inmate might be left feeling both glad that his window overlooks a beach pier full of carnival rides and ice-cream shops, yet also more sad as the bright sights and sounds offer a more violent contrast to his own isolation than a view of a desolate desert would. 

      It is a similar feeling to being in love but not having that loved return, and actually, that is close to what this is, although the love for her, Sally, is familial and innocent.  She is my twelve year old daughter and doesn’t know I exist.  I am a thirty five year old man mostly drained of whatever youthful handsomeness and accompanying youthful optimism I once had and not really magnetic in personality or charm and have a weakness of self-loathing as this sentence demonstrates, which I will try and curb some further in this account and lay out the facts and let the reader decide the extent of my pitiful state and life or not.  But here’s another quick self loathing thought; if Sally had been raised by me, even partially, she wouldn’t be as genuinely happy as she appears to be.  The weight of my morose ways may weigh her down psychologically.  Either that, or

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