After reading Donniey's amazing and imaganitive Blinds Leading the Blinds, I was inspired to write up some Venetian Blinds fanfic of my own. Now my story is nowhere near as funny as the aforementioned work, but I admittedly decided to take the rich Venetian Blinds universe and do a full reboot. I'm taking it in a much darker direction, and much more rooted in reality ( Tomb Raider style). Anyways, here it is and I hope you enjoy it (also, anyone picking up the reference at the end?):
The Venetian Blinds
“This is exactly why mom left you!” Jeff yelled at his dad, Vincent. “This is why you have a pathetic life! And this is why I’m leaving right now!”
Vincent had always been a family man, at least up until he delved into the abyss. He always put family before everything. He preferred a mundane night on the cough with his beautiful wife and kids to almost anything in the world. He loved helping his kids with their homework. Doing chores and little home improvement projects, together with his family, were the highlights of his week. But there was more to him. Vincent could have been anything he wanted to be. He was one of those guys who have a charisma about them; guys who shake your hands strongly and look straight in your eyes, who can convince anyone that an eggplant is a delicious hand-fruit. He would have made a great businessman. He could’ve gone places. But Vincent had always been a family man.
He had amazing ideas too. When opportunity came knocking on his door to head up a new team of the best designers and artists at the central Home Depot workshops to work on Super Secret Project VB, a classified project with the primary goal of making blinds mainstream, Vincent simply turned it down because he could not imagine moving away from his family. When his brilliant ideas about a brilliantly innovative set of blinds made some noise at a few business conventions and competitors came begging at his doorsteps with promises of money and beautiful woman, Vincent simply scuffed at them. He had all he wanted in life and no one could give him anything more. Nothing could possibly make Vincent a happier man.
Until the idea of perfecting the blinds allured him, like sirens do to the pirates at sea. He had all he wanted, but he thought he wanted more. The half an hour he spent thinking of new ideas for blinds every week slowly turned into hours, and then days. The warm and cozy couch in the living room wasn’t his favourite seat in the house anymore; it had given its place to the cold and hard wooden chair in his workshop in the basement. Talking about the events of the day wish his family had become meaningless to him. Why would he waste his time doing that when he could be chatting with the mastermind engineers of blinds? He had become obsessed. Schematic after schematic. Prototype after prototype. But he was never able to perfect it. Whenever he thought he had crafted the perfect set of blinds, he found something to improve upon.
His kindness and pleasant smile had vanished. Vincent would spend days in his workshop without even eating, and upon his wife entering the workshop to ask about his wellbeing, he would spontaneously burst in to flames and yell at her. That went on for about two years, until his wife had had enough. She left him, taking their younger daughter with her.
His son, Jeff, stayed with him. Jeff always had a glimmer of hope left that one day the father he once had would return and hug him with all his affection.
That day never came. Vincent had been pulled deeper and deeper into the chasm he had created for himself. There was no such thing as a perfect set of blinds, was there? Vincent was unidentifiable as a human being anymore. Wearing the same clothes for months at a time, with hair that reached his waist, he spent all his time in the basement, only coming into the house to test his prototypes on the window with the most beautiful view in the house: the living room window.
That day, Jeff had talked to Vincent for hours about his girlfriend and how he intended to propose to her and had simply asked Vincent for some fatherly advice. Vincent, instead, had completely ignored Jeff and had continued working on his latest prototype, which he simply called The Venetian Blinds. Fed up with his father’s apparent lack of any human emotions, Jeff finally packed up and left the house, leaving Vincent all alone.
Hours later, the sun had almost set when Vincent finished putting the final touches on The Venetian Blinds. He took them to the living room and installed them on the window with the view. He couldn’t help but notice how empty the house had become and started reminiscing about the good old days when his family was still with him...
He finished installing The Venetian Blinds and pulled up a chair. From the perfectly straight string to the side, which never moved or scrolled, to the blinds themselves moving at the perfect speed with no sound or friction or the need to pull the string, the blinds were perfect. He had done it. He had achieved the impossible. Against the laws of physics, Vincent had made the perfect set of blinds!
And there he sat, on his comfortable living room chair, gazing out at the beautiful view. A sad, false, shell of a man with the perfect set of blinds and all the time in the world.
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