Pressured against his people to sign the bill, Scooby took off with his pen and sneakers and found his way over to the supermarket, where he would have to get some more sneakers.
"I'll take one, not two, pairs of shoes, please." Scooby nervously looked at this boy, with his shoes untied, wondering whether he was going to waste the only pair of the shoes that the dog wanted, himself, after the purchase was made and the boy managed to make his way out of the door. Who's going to offend who? Who's going to pay the toll to leave the island and never return? These were the fundamental questions concerning Scooby Doo.
What relief the dog must have felt when the boy actually did not have enough money to pay for the shoes. While a mildly offensive scene took place, and this warranted the guard coming and taking the boy away by the ankles, throwing a tantrum upside-down, this did not phase Scooby in the slightest, because the pair of shoes that he wanted was actually on the counter there, still waiting to be purchased by someone who actually had a responsible grasp of their funds.
"Excuse me, but I have actually been looking at those shoes for a while. I read in this article that they were one of the hottest selling items of the year, and well, I really should see if the hype's all it's cracked up to be." Scooby looked at the black box carrying the sneakers that would surely overshadow the ones that he currently had on.
"You know, my son has a pair of these sneakers and they're practically all he ever talks about now. Previously, any footwear that we managed to pop on to our son's feet would result in severe blistering and systemic edema. You should know that our son is morbidly obese."
"I think I have heard of your son. In this town, with all of its upscale advantages, word gets around pretty quickly if there's someone obese living amongst us."
"Right, and luckily he's been losing weight ever since these new shoes. They have given him the confidence to go to the gym and now I have a feeling that he is going to become the strongest member of the family. I should let you know that he lives with me and solely with me, seeing as how the father left the family about 20 years ago to devote his life to fishing."
"Yes, I heard about that in the newspaper. It appears that he got just what he wanted, because he died while he was out at sea."
"Exactly, it was the only death he could of had any form of acceptance towards. Anyways, this pair of shoes is going to cost you $39.80."
"Ah, excellent. This is going to be the first time in a few years where I have managed to pay exact change." Scooby handed the cashier exact change for the sneakers and the shoes were bagged and given to the pup. They exchanged repeated farewells and Scooby left through the automatic doors and back out into the street, waiting for new challenges to meet him as he returned back to his house.
"I find that the best three boys in the town were all pregnant, and sapped of their energy, I had to find even more recess time while also fishing around for the keys that my father had hidden in my pajamas. This called for no mental cooperation of mine, and I fetched over even more wasted time and effort to confirm that my father was, in fact, messing with me. This really took a toll on both my patience and my overall satisfaction for the day, so I shoved him off the roof of my house and he died."
"You didn't do that, you goofball."
Two kids were swinging next to each other on a swingset that was placed in the front lawn of a suburban home that was in the path of Scooby's return to his own house. The kids were talking about things that they had rehearsed the previous day and really I took most of my own understanding to mention that they would have probably continued swinging on those swings until midnight if Scooby had not intervened with his sacked shoes and his black pen glistening in the sun, providing him as a beacon of interest to whoever happened to see the animal pass by.
"Well, would you look at that? Hello puppy, my name is Richard, and I was just talking to my friend about the daily onslaught of knowledge I have learned while I was still young and in charge of how I got to spend my time. I live with a father that has all of the best intentions for me but only recently supported the idea that the best thing for me would be to leave me to my own devices. Look at these red shorts that I have purchased with my own money, that I have stolen from someone who wasn't paying attention to their surroundings, and also, look at this wristwatch, although this was actually a hand-me-down from my older brother. These two items have done nothing but solidify the fact that I am of the best wishes of my family and thus, achieving the most beneficial story-telling concretes, I was previously denominated for a second role in the star-action lawsuit, the refined trust of my people."
"You know, Richard, I was just wondering how long it was going to take me to get home, and I had a perfectly arranged set of variables that I could take into consideration while at the same time confirming my time of arrival. However, you were not one of these foreseeable variables, and now I am going to be late. You have surprised me more than anything else today, and I had just gotten back from a botched bill-signing, which I steadily declined, but I did manage to not let the person who had borrowed my pen take it away from me."
"Okay, good, I should mention my name as well though." The unnamed friend got off of the swing and shook Scooby's hand. His name was Tylenol (actually Tyler, but he and his friend Richard thought that the nickname set himself apart from the 23 other Tylers that happened to go to school with them) and he had most of his assets already in the bag, so to speak. He had some of the best teeth of any child that Scooby had ever seen, and was really counting on the sunlight that was shining over them right now to display this dental achievement as proudly as possible.
"That's a set of teeth alright, but I did manage to get the last pair of these sneakers from the grocery store, and they have been making me quite excited to try them on. I found that these were one of the most talked-about shoes in the current public consciousness, and this really got my hopes high. Do you have any friends that own this pair of shoes?"
"Yes, there is this obese kid... well, I should say previously obese kid, by the name of Hetmon-Lo who managed to get a pair of the shoes on him, and it completely transformed who he was. I could go as far as saying that the kid's likable now. He is one of the strongest kids in our class and even warrants a couple kids following him wherever he goes. I don't know what it is about those shoes, but they really seem to put you in a good place no matter where you are." Richard seemed to be paying undivided attention to Scooby's bag while saying all of this.
"So you got a pair yourself, Scooby?", Tylenol asked.
Scooby walked a couple laps from the sidewalk around the swingset and back on the sidewalk. He did this 5 times, but it is important to note that Scooby actually wasn't counting how many times he was circling around them.
"See, I'm already tired. I don't think I'm unhealthy or anything, but I can't really put much focus on doing any sort of deliberate task without feeling incredibly tired afterwards. I think this is what happened when I had so many people pressuring me to sign a bill. This was a bill that I didn't even know the insides and outsides about, but public opinion destined me to sign this piece of paper. Luckily, I got fed up with all the pressure and managed to leave the place with my pen and my old sneakers. For once in a sign of cowardice, I didn't manage to leave any of my belongings behind, so I felt pretty lucky considering, and decided to celebrate by buying these sneakers. Do you realize that this was the last pair left at the store, and I only got it because the kid ahead of me, who was about to purchase them, did not have enough money? He had to have a security guard throw him out of the store because he had a big tantrum."
"Yes, we saw the kid in question stomp back over this way not too long before we saw you. He was pulling his hair out and looked grumpier than most people in retirement homes. I think he was going to try to find some place to physically harm himself in order to quell the severe rage that was obviously pent up inside of him, but I didn't really pay attention to exactly which part of the neighborhood he was going to end up at." Tylenol seems slightly amused at the way he was describing the child.
Scooby brushed off some dust from his face, and looked at how far down the sun had dropped since he had stopped to talk to the school kids.
"It seems that I have let my interest in you two get the better of me, because the sun is telling me that I need to get home before it gets dark."
"Yes, we're sort of impressed we managed to keep you so long." Richard and Tylenol exchanged glances with each other and grinned, then they both looked at Scooby. Scooby grinned back and it was clear that they would be on good terms the next time they saw each other. They did not say good-bye to Scooby as he left, however.
The sweat was finally getting to Scooby Doo, and as he approached seven more layers of concrete to get himself situated on, he placed his paws over his face and wept at the amount of insects that were crawling on the wall that had halted him completely. It was a scene from some sort of severe religious retribution, as if all of the mistakes that Scooby had made in his short life had culminated together into one singular image, and this was an image that Scooby could agree summed up his misguided life completely. It was made on a registrar's account, that besides from this striking imagery, that there was nothing around of merit to catch Scooby's attention, which was perfect, as this would allow the striking, infested wall as being Scooby's only real means of stimulation for the next half hour.
"I was tired of being at the forefront by the first sixteen hours of the adventure. All these people were looking to me to provide great and substantial changes to the community that they had grown up in, and when I had to decline their offers, because I knew that just as I had to go through this period of time, this era... with all of the rewards and setbacks of my upbringing, I had to fight against it in my own special way to get to this point of power in the first place... and considering this, I could not just let these people have an easier way to live. A simple bill could not manage to change how they thought, and I knew this was the only way I could really insist that I was doing the right thing. What I didn't seem to keep in mind is that these people couldn't handle a "No." from someone who they had put so much of their effort into believing great things from, and things had gotten sour. They did not want me to say "No."... they wanted to convince me that I just wasn't thinking clearly and that this would be the most beneficial thing to the community. Once one voice dissented from my refusal, several others joined in, and really it became too much for me to tolerate. The cameras did not flash yet, but I wanted to get out of there before they did... and I left without a single trace of me ever being there."
It looked as though the insects on the wall sped up in their travel, and Scooby was becoming less and less disturbed by the wall. He managed to walk around it and found that the sidewalk continued the way it was supposed to, and he managed to set all of his steps in the right direction, finally making his way over to a drainage area that sloped 10 feet from the sides of a bridge. The crossing of the bridge was as wet and as cold as any single person could expect, and by the time that the streetlights had turned off, and then from there, turned on again, it looked like Scooby managed to cross the entire thing without any issue. However, looking back:
"It was one of those moments where I felt completely unsafe. The crossing of the bridge was startling to every fiber of Scooby Doo from the first to the last step, and all of that clamminess must have caused some sort of infectious agent to slalom up and down my spinal cord. The wetness was not one that you would typically find on this planet. This was a wetness that was reserved to caves which had no opening to the outside. It was an encapsulated kind of water that was rich in minerals that spring water would have no idea how to tolerate, and it oozed on your skin like some sort of clinical lubricant, set off to make you feel like you were an amphibious experiment who would never get a copy of the results themselves. There were all sorts of flower petals that kept coming into my mind, fluttering away again using the same trajectory... purple petals, white spiky petals, the green petals... I have not given the edge of accountability to myself to discover what the names of these flowers were, but in my travel across they were all I could really think about. It was sort of like if you have a jack-o'-lantern following you around but it wasn't carved out of a pumpkin but it was some sort of black glossy gourd, one that was painted on before by another human, and you could only make out the details of its face when the light, from my pen, shined on it just right. Luckily, this didn't happen, as I had these thoughts of flowers in my head, and I was able to escape the wetness and cold without even realizing that I was doing it."
The sun was still out, but crossing the bridge made it seem like there was never any sunlight out to begin with. That is because very large trees covered this area and did not permit much sunlight into the area.
Scooby was remembering this part of the neighborhood, because this is where his house would be waiting for him. You had some red mailboxes that were all open and ready to receive mail from a car. You had all of the lawns cut to size and ready to hold some houseplants in them, and you also had garages that were mostly closed so as to not make the garage too hot when the father got into them from the door inside the house and to check on if there were any problems that needed to be dealt with. Luckily, these were well-maintained garages and frequently there would not be any problems. The streetlights cast some green light over the street and it looked like the grass on the lawn matched the color of the street if you gave it quick enough glances. The tribal belongings of all the houses were all stashed inside waiting for you to become friends with the owners and know them well enough to get invited over to the houses before you could really see just all of what they had collected over the years.
"If I could bench press as much as the other kids at my school, I would have them know that they would all be in for a world of pain! Cast aside all of these childish troubles and ensue on a rampage that would make them all gawk at me through broken jaws!"
This was not the child who had been kicked out of the store some time ago, but actually a little girl who seemed to also be down on her luck, playing in the lawn of a house that looked completely dark on the inside. She had both a dolly and a beach ball, but whereas the dolly was laying on the lawn and not in the girl's possession, the beach ball was in the hands of the girl complaining. She did happen to look at Scooby walking past her, and she smiled and forgot that she was even upset in the first place.
"Scooby, wait for me! You must tell me how things have been going for you today!"
"Elisa, I could not forget to tell you. It is pleasant to see you, I came back from some pretty hefty arrangements."
"Oh Scooby, please don't tell me that you had a bad day as well."
"I wouldn't consider it a bad day. You could say that even good days have their share of undesirable qualities. Even so, I did manage to get something nice for myself and really, that's all I needed to have happen in order for me to feel good about today." Scooby lifted up the bag he was carrying in his mouth higher so that Elisa could see the logo of the sneakers that he had bought.
"It's those sneakers you wanted!" She grinned at the black box. "I was under the impression that these would not be at the grocery store you go to!"
"Well, they were the last pair that the store had for sale, and I managed to get them through the rotten lack of another child, who I still don't know the name of, even though I met up with a couple of kids that also saw this kid. While not worried about him in the slightest, I still wouldn't wish for him to hurt himself, as it appeared that he was about to do, according to the two boys that I met earlier."
"You would think that Richard and Tylenol are troublemakers, but y-"
"Oh, you know them too."
Scooby did happen to interrupt Elisa while she was talking, and the silence of both of them does offer the reader of the story to be taken back by how orchestrated and pretty the sound of the birds around them managed to be. They weren't really sounds of birds that you would be accustomed to hearing in a neighborhood, and I would go as far as to say that there was almost a sort of tropical flair to the overall instrumentation here. Please, if you haven't already, take a moment to let this all sink in and provide you with a good amount of headspace before returning to the story.
"I thought that Richard and Tylenol were troublemakers initially, but I got to know them after school and they both seem to rather just be a very observant pair of children. They seem to know what's happening in their community, whether it's their business to or not, and as such, they can provide you with good clarification to how things are working out and whether there are things that you should be weary about."
"I did get that vibe from them. They both seemed to be pretty knowledgeable, and I will probably have to keep this in mind in case I see them outside again... I had a couple of scary moments traveling back down here. There was this wall I had never seen before, which sported an infestation of some kinds of beetles... I really don't know my insects well but these were pretty sickening. Next, I had to cross the bridge I normally did and it felt like I was somewhere completely different - the experience was confusing and I can still remember the wetness that was on my body, and it was like something that in infant experiences for the first time when they exit the womb. Completely remarkably a part of the real world, but you just have not happened to take part in witnessing the sensation until that point."
"Well, I think you have had a somewhat stressful day Scooby, and perhaps you just forgot entirely about what that bridge is like."
"I won't dismiss that idea entirely, but overall I'm just looking forward to trying these sneakers on."
"Well, I'm sure you will like how they fit on you. They're supposed to turn you into a better person, and that's saying a lot given that those are pretty inexpensive."
"Yes, I will have to report back on you and tell you if they have changed my laugh."
They both exchanged laughter at this, as if Scooby was being sarcastic when he said that, but I think the overall reason behind why they laughed is something that can only culminate by being acquaintances of a particular person for a while. "You're always a witness to the betterment of my day, Scooby. I wish that I was as old as you so I could share the amount of wisdom you provide." "You don't give yourself enough credit, Elisa." Scooby walked on down the neighborhood, taking several sharp turns where he needs to take sure turns and this resulted in the ever-ending amusement of him trying to find his way back home. Scooby knows by now that his tendency to wander isn't completely misguided, because his subconscious is still heavily at work providing his body with the details needed to maneuver him back to familiar parts of town, and indeed, that is what he did in this instance, and he was glad that he could toss so much care aside while his body ensured him that he was not going to end up anywhere distasteful.
The newspapers were starting to appear in the mailboxes, and Scooby knew that the more vibrant shades of his community were revealing themselves to him. This, in a sense, was the part of the neighborhood that Scooby Doo felt committed to. You started seeing neighbors outside, waving at Scooby, and also talking to each other about various things. There was less of the sense that you were walking across a giant blemish and more of a sense that this was somewhere you could walk through without any worries in the world. The plants that were part of the customization of the people's fancy all had an appropriate amount of care done to them, as they were all faultless and provided a nice touch of floral color to the world that Scooby walked through.
The sprinkler systems all turned on in patterns that, while giving away the price range of the sprinkle systems, also seemed to provide a function of just brining a mild sense of awe when you passed by them. Sure, these sprinkler systems played a part in keeping the lawn healthy, but there was a stronger purpose to the excess that was put into setting this particular model up, and that was to invite you into the possibility that yes, we're not quite in a time where the space age is making us the crowning achievement of our piece of turf in the galaxy, but ever yet still, you can be provided with a reason to be content, surprised, and enriched by what's around you, and given the patterns of water distribution that these sprinklers sprayed, and given the complexity of the shapes and activities that the water droplets provided, with even the blades of grass offering to partake in the fiesta, flinging healthy droplets of water to other blades of grass and creating a grand network of moisture, this came back to you in a way that allowed you to appreciate your neighbors a little more than you would have otherwise.
A man was sharing a pretzel bowl with himself, and know that he had taken a good deal of preparation in eating this pretzel bowl as he did the night before, with the cheddar chicken and green peas accentuating the meal, and he did happen to gaze upon Scooby Doo walking on his share of the sidewalk.
"Why, hello Scooby! I've got some of my neighbor's apples, if you wouldn't mind taking some off my hands!"
"You've really got me thinking that I can just take things from you, Mr. Peters? Do you think I don't know what sort of business you're trying to arrange with me. A guaranteed steal, you'll argue. Worth more than every penny in your wallet, you insist. These jokes get older with every utterance, old man, and I'll have you know that the more I decline your offers, the better I'll feel about myself."
"Oh come now, Scooby. These are yellow-colored apples. Even though they're yellow, they haven't done bad - quite the opposite, actually."
"It takes quite a bit of patience to put up with your day-to-day nosing around, doesn't it? I might make you something myself, some sort of insidious offer of friendship... and I'll put the blame on someone that I know. Yes, I could afford to give you these windshield wipers, of which all they do is creating deep carving into your windshield and let the water in during that one fateful storm you happen to have to drive across town with... and you don't want to stop driving, even though you have found yourself infuriated at me. As soon as the hail starts coming down, you have figured out that I was just a means to put your life at risk... and if you survived this drive, you would make sure that you never had to deal with my contribution to your living again."
"Yes, Scooby. I'll admit, that these apples wouldn't be the best thing to give to you. It's just that I really have nobody else who's interested to take them off my hands... you at least provide the banter to tell me why my actions are wrong, and that's a better sign of hospitality than anything else that I'm used to, even from my own family."
"You show a humble side of yourself for once, Mr. Peters. I can't say that I'm not slightly impressed."
"I figure that since you have those sneakers purchased that I should start giving the benefits of your purchase to you before you even try the sons of bitches on."
"How thoughtful. Yes, I'm pretty eager to get these on my feet."
"As you should be, Scooby." The craigs of the town all settled down, and featuring nothing more than the passing of another fine day, the birds reached over through arcs of movement and landing in nesting sites to proliferate with their various kinds. You could hear lovemaking as something that, while not an invitation for you, is rather the invitation of the prospect that maybe you should provide a little love yourself. These were the hampered notions of evil that set themselves in flight every single night, keeping Scooby on the ever-paining reminder that were was no other dog like him in the entirety of his planet, and that any sense of establishing an intimate, physical connection with any other personality would be a disaster and would throw Scooby's already-nurturing self into the wind, resulting in a perverted outlook of life and that his menacing would commence, destroying the flights of stairs around him and marking his mark as a pest and a cancerous addition to the lives of his friends, and marking his mark as a disease of systemic consequences to any future sexual option.
When you mentioned that the concrete of the sidewalks was all nice in this town, it was actually where the road started, to becoming on that, was brick-paved where you started to actually get close to where the location of Scooby's house was. While the weeds were less attended to in this part of town, the quality of households had bumped up significantly, featuring parts of the place that had 3 to 4 doors for their respective garages, and that there was less of a need to have any sort of vehicle out in the street at this time. A mailbox could house nothing more than a slow in a totem of brick, to show that there would be no way that you could steal anything that didn't belong to you without the assurance that you'd have a key to unlock the totem.
"It was wishful thinking to start myself as being perhaps the only pup named Scooby Doo in town, and this was the start of my fundamental voyage to trying to enhance my being with shoes. You know, as these days go on, I had always imagined that when I do advance myself, I would be better at the position to advance the community around me. This is why I must feel as confident in myself as possible, so I can come back to the position of power with a more solidified grasp of my responsibilities to the people around me and a more solidified grasp of how I can segue all the problems of my community out through a proper stream and introduce the new goals and aspirations that will take our outlook on the world and feature it to be something stronger. This would make it something rare; an idea that you could look at with scrutiny, and it would bring over a wave of consoling excitement, however mild, and tell you to that, "Yes, if I became a part of this... I would not feel like a blind follower, but rather I would become a part of something that would necessitate me bring my ideas into it and would ultimately enrich me for joining. This is what was waiting for me in all of my patience." This, and this only, is the reaction I want to create in every well-meaning man, woman, and child on this great Earth."
