The Lonely Adventures of Medium Guy a documentary by william black   This is a tale of one man. This is not a love tale. This is not a comedy. This is simply the story of one man's struggle to retain his sanity long enough to get him to tomorrow. Why is medium guy so lonely? Well, his name should describe it all. He is lonely, firstly, because he has no one else to entertain, but himself, and furthermore his tact is too slow, too clumsy to impress anyone. His methods are mediocre. He is a well read, well educated man from a middle class society. His life is written before it happens. There are no surprises in his stability. And much to the contrary of several of society's opinions, stability is uninteresting, unsung, and unappreciated. In order for people to have people, they must be anything but ordinary. Medium Guy has no skill for social flair, and no one has ever stopped long enough to notice that he even exists, yet his appearance is one that has been seen or felt by almost everyone. What makes his everyday habits so extrordinary as to be labeled "adventurous"? In the same things that everyone else in the world sees, and takes for granted, he sees as a landscape of hidden terrors, lurking predators, and mischievous traps. This story, if it can be called one, hopes to point out the problems, the mental and physical struggles throughout everyday life. Only from the eyes of an eagle can we understand how it works, so the mind of a "Medium guy" will do as well.   •   Medium guy descends several flights of a staircase, chasing what he knows is around the next corner, but had never quite gotten a proper glance. The staircase, although stonecut and ornate, transform unoticably into steel bars as he continues his chase through another part of the building. Steel pipes line the corridor that he suddenly finds himself standing in. Blood stains his forehead, which runs to the side of his face. He haults his pursuit. Medium guy stops. He listens. He hears his own heavy breathing. Louder. Louder. It deafens him to where he can no longer sense his surroundings. He spins violently to escape the sound. His spin is interrupted. He is caught by the arms of a beautiful woman. She stares deeply at him with her large, green, reading eyes. This is what he had been chasing but had yet to see. She is dressed fashionably, and her color was uncertainly made-up. He cared little for her appearance however, as his gaze was locked into her eyes. Those eyes... They told of a thousand years without loneliness. They told of ever understanding of him. They even told him of his domination of them. This is the woman that truly was the other half of Medium guy. She felt him, understood him like no other, and apparently needed no words to say this. As Medium guy pondered all of this, he hardly noticed her gentle embrace which now grew stronger. They held each other tightly, as tears rolled down Medium guy's eyes. Suddenly, red lights flashed. A screaming alarm was sounded. Medium guy's eyesight faded to seeing all grey. Medium guy rubbed his eyes to clear the grey, when he found (to his surprise) that his hands were real. He stretched them away from his blurry eyes to double check. For some reason they seemed different than they had a moment ago. Medium guy rolled over in his bed to silence his nagging alarm clock. He turned back to his hands to continue his previous thought which had vanished just as his sleep and his recollection of any of what had happened before he had woken up, a few seconds ago. Medium guy scratches his receeding hairline, wondering to himself how long his hair will last, and rattles his head into submission. He squints and concentrates hard on remembering the dream he had had last night. He was sure that it was a good one and worth remembering, if he could. Medium guy retreats his thoughts which seem to be losing the battle. He takes a deep breath and sighs. Another morning has come. Another challanger of time prepares to bout with Medium Guy, hoping to overcome him. As Medium Guy stretches and fills his sleepy lungs with refreshing new oxygen, he mentally prepares himself for the challenges that the day will bring to him and try to psyche himself up about it. After he lays for awhile swelling, mustering energy, he leaps from his bed to a standing position. He immediately takes a few important steps away from his bed to prevent it's siren-like alure singing of sleep and pleasant dreams. Medium Guy takes another well-needed stretching yawn, which exposes his somewhat hairy stomach and navel between the borders of his plain white T-shirt and his flannel boxers. This second yawn, supplemented by the leap from his wood-framed bed, makes his head spin, and almost causes him to stumble on his shoe which is sitting in the middle of his bedroom floor. Medium Guy walks from his bedroom, which streaks hints of early light through the windows, and into his bathroom. Small farms of dust and bacteria grow in the corners of his bathroom floor and counter. His bathroom is somewhat clear of unecessary clothes and bathroom products, but is laced with grime for which he has no real incentive of cleaning. He stares for several minutes at his reflection in the water-spotted mirror. He scratches his stomach for a minute. He imagines to himself that the person in the mirror is someone else, and starts to evaluate his twin. "If only he'd lose a couple pounds there, and worked out a bit", he thinks to himself, "he wouldn't be such a bad looking fellow." A shave here, a few more biceps there, he evaluates piece by piece what it would take to turn this large piece of glass his friend again. He doesnt immediately notice, but his legs and feet soon become tired from standing in place for too long, and ever-so-slightly begin to sway his upper body invoulentarily back and forth. His mind trails from his thoughts of personal vanity and join his legs in a swaying ocean of absent-mindedness. Medium Guy doesn't lose his sanity, but he does enter a mental state of numbness. As if hypnotized at his own image, he simply stares into space for a while. After several minutes of wasting this uneeded time, he recalls his attention to taking a shower. He quickly undresses and turns on the water for his shower. After he undresses, he again takes a short moment to observe himself in the mirror. "It's amazing how much visible fat regular clothing conceals" he muses. He again shrugs away the fact that he hasn't the will power or strive to do anything about it. He washes himself thoroughly and quickly, never having acquired comfortability in being naked for too long. He then exits the shower stall and towels himself dry even more quickly, scared that perhaps the temporarily fogged man in the mirror could soon see him, or perhaps that he feared facing the man in the mirror when the fog cleared. As he prepares to dress himself, he faces a serious dilemna that every day threatens the very personality of his existence. He doesn't know what to wear. His daily office job is a fairly relaxed one. He works in a medium sized town, where little ever happens. For this reason, he is not restricted to a shirt and tie or uniform. He stops to think about his position. He has some fairly fashionable clothes that he could wear to maintain a fairly buisiness-like appearance, but he doubts that he would ever have the need to impress anyone on the job, business-wise or personally. If he did dress up, he feels that he should make the effort of being a real businessman and work to match the image. He looks back to his fairly worn Levi's and T-shirt. This outfit, though upsetting to his boss and co-workers who try to keep a nice image at the company, fit comfortably and allow him to stay within his little shelter of non-conformity, one of his only remaining irregularities. It would be plausable to say that conformity is the biggest trait of anyone of mediocre status. This perhaps is true and false. Everyone thinks that they are wierd or outrageous in one way or another. In actuality, everyone seems to have his place on one end of a broad spectrum. Everyone has their own particular talents or tasks that make them different from everyone else. Anyone who has friends or peers has these peers in said or unsaid competition of what they already have, be it a personality or a skill, that is what makes them peers. This competition that they have with each other also allows them to relate to each other. In order to compete, they must have skills not common to the general populous of humanity. Using this logic, then, perhaps makes it impossible to attain a mediocre status in society. But any such individualism about Medium Guy that exists does so on a much lower level than anyone else. He is seemingly unable to compete with anyone else. Given this inability to effectively compete, Medium Guy grasps his underachievements and lives underneath them, using them like an umbrella. He refuses to venture beyond its cover for fear of further failure, and therefore refuses to change. So perhaps mediocrity is one of the most original and challenging status' to maintain. Having considered all of this He picks up his faded blue jeans and T-shirt and throws them on.