Entry One Hundred Six: Adam Mahoney, You Just Won!

[This entry is the current story I am working on. This is thirty-six of who knows how many will be posted. Enjoy it while it lasts...]

Chapter Fifteen
Adam embraced his new diversion with the same enthusiasm he had for his workouts. He developed a routine of getting up early, making sure the house was in order and then sitting at the kitchen table to work on a kit until it was time to go to the gym. His first attempts at putting together the cars and planes were shaky, revealing the unsteady hands of too much coffee and too many cigarettes, but with practice, he gradually became more skilled and the results improved with each finished car or plane. He loved the detail work best of all and found that, when he was concentrating properly, time would get eaten up and he wouldn’t notice how long he had sat in the kitchen working. He had to start setting an alarm to let him know when he should stop and do something else.

He continued his trips to the high school gym and after his workouts he found himself more and more drawn to the cafeteria and its crude map of the United States. He made sure and visit it every day before heading home. It was his personal pilgrimage to an unusual meditation spot. Besides the cafeteria being a great place to smoke a post-workout cigarette, something about the enormity and scope of the map painted on the wall calmed him down. He had no idea why and didn’t try to figure it out; self-analysis seemed such a waste of time. Very few things affected him deeply so he had learned to accept it and enjoy it while it lasted. The trip through the halls to the bowels of the school became part of his schedule and, to that point, the routine was working for him although he suspected it would run its course eventually, just like everything else. All the activities in his life seemed to be working off a cosmic timer, offering relief but only for limited amounts of time. He made efforts to ignore that or at least send it to the edges of his mind, preferring to live in the moment. Any part of the future was too much to grip and any hint of it crawling into his mind caused the chasm in his belly to awaken and remind him of the reality of his situation. He realized it was a form of denial, all of the stuffing and ignoring, but his main motivation was survival and he had made it this far utilizing the Adam Mahoney methodology, which he considered an achievement considering the odds.

It wasn’t long before Adam became proficient creating the models. He built enough of them that he soon discovered a rhythm in the creative process that, when immersed in it, allowed him to finish two or three models per day. His kitchen became a model factory with one part of the table set aside for a completed car, plane or tank to firm up and the breakfast counter reserved for a painted model to dry. All within view of Adam’s current work in progress, scattered in pieces around the rest of the table. His proficiency fed his obsession and he returned to the hobby store weekly, filling the back of his car with saran-wrapped boxes of plastic narcotics. This soon caused an unforeseen problem. The completed arsenal of miniature cars, tanks and planes were beginning to overrun his house. Most of the flat surfaces were covered with his creations and he had resorted to setting some on the floor, out of traffic lanes but still not safe. It was important to him that his work not be cast off and relegated to marginal status, collecting dust and in the way. After all, the models, no matter how small and plastic, were the only things new being created anywhere on the earth. They deserved to be displayed with respect and honor.

All words and images ©2007/J. Colle