HOME | DD

Description
Saturdays always spell trouble for me. A calendar day, no different than the rest, seems to have a grip on my conscience, tricking me, guiding me like a lamb to the slaughter house. I can't avoid it; I've tried. My boredom on Saturday is always so complete, so final, that my mind can’t take it, and it reacts in the only way it can: mischief. No matter what I do, whether I visit my grandmother downtown, or spend the day wiping forced tears off of my face at the Catholic Church on twenty-seventh, I get in trouble, one way or another. Perhaps I'll see a twenty leaning out of my grandmother's purse, Andrew Jackson begging me to take him downtown for drinks at the Black Thorn. Maybe I'll be compelled, inspired by an unnamed yet decidedly adolescent impulse, to balance the baby Jesus from the Ave Maria on top of Big Jesus' head, creating a holy time paradox and human architecture at the same time. On more than one occasion, I have literally taken candy from a baby. Try explaining satire to an angry police officer.

    Regardless of intention, mood, or even circumstance, by the end of every Saturday, I've been reprimanded by one authority figure or another. The strangest thing is that the harder I try to behave, the more quickly I find myself ringing trouble's doorbell and stumbling away in vain.

    One Saturday, I had just come off of an epic night of sour-mash-and-shallow-chick debauchery. I was feeling wholly despicable, and I slouched around the house all Saturday morning in my underwear, eating Lucky Charms out of the box and watching QVC. After all the diamond studded pendants sold out around noon, I turned the TV off and wandered back to my room. I flopped onto the bed. My stomach made a loud growling noise that sounded not unlike the death knell of an overweight housecat, which, incidentally, I had heard at my grandmother's house many Saturdays ago. I had wanted to see if Mittens would jump off of the second floor railing if taunted with salmon-flavored meat snacks. The hypothesis tested correct, I concluded, as Mittens screeched her last breaths away, and I ran and hid behind the garden shed, afraid that my own end would be soon to follow.

    I rolled over in bed, clutching my stomach. I was a horrible person, I realized. I had lived my whole life, taking and hurting, causing sadness and torment all around me. I was self-absorbed and legendarily apathetic.

   Suddenly, images of crying children flashed in front of my eyes. "What the hell?" I screamed out loud, seemingly into the face of a very somber blonde girl, big, polka dot tears sliding down her cheeks. She stood sobbing, inconsolable, and in her arms lay a badly burnt Barbie Beach house, smoke still billowing out of the two-car garage. Instantly, I remembered the occasion, and I couldn't help laughing out loud at the delightfully cruel arson of my friend's sister's most prized possession. As if on cue, my stomach lurched and bellowed, and I rolled over onto my back, blinded by the images in my eyes.

   I began to see broken toys of all varieties; crushed cars, singed stuffed animals, pulverized plastic in all sorts of configurations. Next came the cars: a neighbor's Miata with a full-length, key made pinstripe; a minivan at the mall with no handles; a pick-up truck on Seventh Street, twenty blocks downhill from where it was parked on Twenty-seventh.

    Image after image came flooding into my conscience. I could no longer see the room around me. Memories collided with each other right in front of my eyes. I began to take a tour of everything wrong I had ever done.

    Eight years old at school. I'm sitting at a lunch table with Nelson, the token retarded kid of our class. His fingers are submerged in his Salisbury gravy. His pudding is more for decoration than ingestion, globs of it dripping off of his oversized Alf shirt.

    His wild, slobbering mastication stops when I say it. "That's not true," he exclaims.

    "It is true." I see myself say the line, as if I'm watching a movie. "The presents are put under your tree by your mom and dad. There is no such thing as Santa Claus. Your dad eats the cookies you leave out."

    The table adjacent exploded into laughter, and I watched as my younger self joined them. Nelson jerked his attention back to his lunch, this time with tears dripping into his partially-frozen mashed potatoes.

    Reality slid back into focus with a quick snap. I rolled over and vomited large heaves of hearts, stars, and horseshoes over the edge of my bed. When the last pink balloon dropped out of my mouth, I stumbled to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, fully expecting to see more clovers and blue moons. I saw, instead, my reflection in the toilet water. The waters swirled before me, toilet unflushed. My reflection began to change, inexplicably, into someone else's. A tide of marshmallows rose high in my throat. I saw my grandmother in the toilet. "My grandmother is in my toilet," I repeated out loud in disbelief. She opened her mouth to speak, and I nearly yarked again.

    "Timothy," her image echoed, "Timothy."

    I was in absolute, arrested bewilderment. An image of my grandmother, portrayed in the swirling of the waters of my toilet, was calling my name. A high-pitched squeal penetrated my skull and dug its audio claws into my brain tissue. A deep pressure pounded my temples, blinding me once again, this time in pain.

    "I'm sorry!" I screeched out. "I'm sorry for everything I ever did!" I was screaming into the toilet at this point, my voice echoing off of the porcelain. "I'm sorry, Grandma!"

    My eyes snapped open. My grandmother's effigy no longer floated amidst stray pots of gold and rainbows. The feeling in my head was gone. More noticeable, still, was a deeper feeling. A lifting feeling, almost like a wedgie without the unfortunate end result. I felt new, refreshed, and pure. I was no longer a hoodlum. I would no longer be a slave to comic mischief and mindless self indulgence. I was a new man; changed, forever.



    Two hours later, I was at the check-out counter of the convenience store down the block. The cashier was a greasy, high school kid who connected a little too closely with The Fast and the Furious and now spent the entirety of his minimum wages on tacky spoilers for his Honda Civic.

    "Welcome to Gas and Go, how can I help you?" His voice was flat like a politician's, and all pinched and nasally.

    "Pack o' filters," I replied. I grabbed a green lighter from the stand on the counter, "And this green lighter right here." I handed him a Jackson. He popped the drawer.

    "Oh, W-T-F." he emoted, "No tens. Sigh." He shuffled around the counter and towards the back of the store.

    I leaned forward. The drawer of the cash register lay open, mocking my new found freedom. I jumped back, hands straight at my side. No, I thought. No.

    Against my better judgment, I leaned in again to take another look. Coins glistened like polished diamonds.  Stacks of bills glowed under the fluorescent lights, calling me with the intensity of neon advertising.

    "No!" I said aloud, startling myself, and, incidentally, the Asian woman in aisle two.

    Still, the putrid taste of temptation tricked its way back onto my tongue, and my mouth watered with old, familiar, Saturday desires. And, without conscious thought, it happened. One moment I was standing behind the counter, waiting for the wannabe dragster to return with my change, and the next I was bolting out the door, cradling roughly six-hundred-and-fifty dollars cash in my arms. I stuffed the bills into my pants as I stumbled across the parking lot, and then I disappeared into the blinding afternoon.



    By the time I arrived back home, my head was pounding harder then ever before. Once again, I was overcome with the images of my transgression. I saw the young, greasy cashier bear the cold, blunt force of an unfair termination, head hung low in disbelief. I witnessed his trudge home that day, dejected and hot. The abysmal walk of shame in the smoldering July sun. I watched him sigh under the weight of injustice as he slid the muffler catalog into his desk drawer, now unable to purchase his new double exhaust system. I felt, in a moment of breakneck intensity, the shame and pain and disappointment. So much sorrow, and my impulses had been the source. My actions, executed with hardly a thought, were sure to bring months of bad fortune to an innocent person. Every hardship lying in the grass ahead, every stress headache, every sleepless, hungry night, all are products of my impulses. My bored, toxic impulses.

    I was wracked with emotion. I had destroyed a chapter of this poor kid’s life for no reason other than sheer entertainment.

    I returned to the bathroom, once again vomiting in my grandmother's face. "Timothy," she called, sweetly and simply, "Timothy." I stared into the image. "Timothy."

    As if taken over by some unnamed force, some sudden impulse, I began to quickly and frantically retrieve the bills from my pants. I stood in the bathroom, arms shoved down into my drawers, knocking against the wall, and yelled to my grandmother, "Don't worry!" I cried, as I grabbed a wad of fivers from between my legs, "It's all going to be better now!"

    In one ceremonious, pivotal motion, I flung the whole lot of bills into the watery abyss and flushed the toilet. My grandmother remained, smiling back at me, until kit and cash caboodle was fully swept septic.



    Saturdays are still trouble, every now and then. It's an uphill struggle. I joined a bridge club that, although incredibly boring and occupied solely by geriatric cases, keeps me busy and out of trouble for a few hours. Ok, well, I did commit a harmless prank last week involving Fixodent and the Queen of Diamonds, but, like I said, it's an uphill struggle.

Description
Saturdays always spell trouble for me. A calendar day, no different than the rest, seems to have a grip on my conscience, tricking me, guiding me like a lamb to the slaughter house. I can't avoid it; I've tried. My boredom on Saturday is always so complete, so final, that my mind can’t take it, and it reacts in the only way it can: mischief. No matter what I do, whether I visit my grandmother downtown, or spend the day wiping forced tears off of my face at the Catholic Church on twenty-seventh, I get in trouble, one way or another. Perhaps I'll see a twenty leaning out of my grandmother's purse, Andrew Jackson begging me to take him downtown for drinks at the Black Thorn. Maybe I'll be compelled, inspired by an unnamed yet decidedly adolescent impulse, to balance the baby Jesus from the Ave Maria on top of Big Jesus' head, creating a holy time paradox and human architecture at the same time. On more than one occasion, I have literally taken candy from a baby. Try explaining satire to an angry police officer.

    Regardless of intention, mood, or even circumstance, by the end of every Saturday, I've been reprimanded by one authority figure or another. The strangest thing is that the harder I try to behave, the more quickly I find myself ringing trouble's doorbell and stumbling away in vain.

    One Saturday, I had just come off of an epic night of sour-mash-and-shallow-chick debauchery. I was feeling wholly despicable, and I slouched around the house all Saturday morning in my underwear, eating Lucky Charms out of the box and watching QVC. After all the diamond studded pendants sold out around noon, I turned the TV off and wandered back to my room. I flopped onto the bed. My stomach made a loud growling noise that sounded not unlike the death knell of an overweight housecat, which, incidentally, I had heard at my grandmother's house many Saturdays ago. I had wanted to see if Mittens would jump off of the second floor railing if taunted with salmon-flavored meat snacks. The hypothesis tested correct, I concluded, as Mittens screeched her last breaths away, and I ran and hid behind the garden shed, afraid that my own end would be soon to follow.

    I rolled over in bed, clutching my stomach. I was a horrible person, I realized. I had lived my whole life, taking and hurting, causing sadness and torment all around me. I was self-absorbed and legendarily apathetic.

   Suddenly, images of crying children flashed in front of my eyes. "What the hell?" I screamed out loud, seemingly into the face of a very somber blonde girl, big, polka dot tears sliding down her cheeks. She stood sobbing, inconsolable, and in her arms lay a badly burnt Barbie Beach house, smoke still billowing out of the two-car garage. Instantly, I remembered the occasion, and I couldn't help laughing out loud at the delightfully cruel arson of my friend's sister's most prized possession. As if on cue, my stomach lurched and bellowed, and I rolled over onto my back, blinded by the images in my eyes.

   I began to see broken toys of all varieties; crushed cars, singed stuffed animals, pulverized plastic in all sorts of configurations. Next came the cars: a neighbor's Miata with a full-length, key made pinstripe; a minivan at the mall with no handles; a pick-up truck on Seventh Street, twenty blocks downhill from where it was parked on Twenty-seventh.

    Image after image came flooding into my conscience. I could no longer see the room around me. Memories collided with each other right in front of my eyes. I began to take a tour of everything wrong I had ever done.

    Eight years old at school. I'm sitting at a lunch table with Nelson, the token retarded kid of our class. His fingers are submerged in his Salisbury gravy. His pudding is more for decoration than ingestion, globs of it dripping off of his oversized Alf shirt.

    His wild, slobbering mastication stops when I say it. "That's not true," he exclaims.

    "It is true." I see myself say the line, as if I'm watching a movie. "The presents are put under your tree by your mom and dad. There is no such thing as Santa Claus. Your dad eats the cookies you leave out."

    The table adjacent exploded into laughter, and I watched as my younger self joined them. Nelson jerked his attention back to his lunch, this time with tears dripping into his partially-frozen mashed potatoes.

    Reality slid back into focus with a quick snap. I rolled over and vomited large heaves of hearts, stars, and horseshoes over the edge of my bed. When the last pink balloon dropped out of my mouth, I stumbled to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, fully expecting to see more clovers and blue moons. I saw, instead, my reflection in the toilet water. The waters swirled before me, toilet unflushed. My reflection began to change, inexplicably, into someone else's. A tide of marshmallows rose high in my throat. I saw my grandmother in the toilet. "My grandmother is in my toilet," I repeated out loud in disbelief. She opened her mouth to speak, and I nearly yarked again.

    "Timothy," her image echoed, "Timothy."

    I was in absolute, arrested bewilderment. An image of my grandmother, portrayed in the swirling of the waters of my toilet, was calling my name. A high-pitched squeal penetrated my skull and dug its audio claws into my brain tissue. A deep pressure pounded my temples, blinding me once again, this time in pain.

    "I'm sorry!" I screeched out. "I'm sorry for everything I ever did!" I was screaming into the toilet at this point, my voice echoing off of the porcelain. "I'm sorry, Grandma!"

    My eyes snapped open. My grandmother's effigy no longer floated amidst stray pots of gold and rainbows. The feeling in my head was gone. More noticeable, still, was a deeper feeling. A lifting feeling, almost like a wedgie without the unfortunate end result. I felt new, refreshed, and pure. I was no longer a hoodlum. I would no longer be a slave to comic mischief and mindless self indulgence. I was a new man; changed, forever.



    Two hours later, I was at the check-out counter of the convenience store down the block. The cashier was a greasy, high school kid who connected a little too closely with The Fast and the Furious and now spent the entirety of his minimum wages on tacky spoilers for his Honda Civic.

    "Welcome to Gas and Go, how can I help you?" His voice was flat like a politician's, and all pinched and nasally.

    "Pack o' filters," I replied. I grabbed a green lighter from the stand on the counter, "And this green lighter right here." I handed him a Jackson. He popped the drawer.

    "Oh, W-T-F." he emoted, "No tens. Sigh." He shuffled around the counter and towards the back of the store.

    I leaned forward. The drawer of the cash register lay open, mocking my new found freedom. I jumped back, hands straight at my side. No, I thought. No.

    Against my better judgment, I leaned in again to take another look. Coins glistened like polished diamonds.  Stacks of bills glowed under the fluorescent lights, calling me with the intensity of neon advertising.

    "No!" I said aloud, startling myself, and, incidentally, the Asian woman in aisle two.

    Still, the putrid taste of temptation tricked its way back onto my tongue, and my mouth watered with old, familiar, Saturday desires. And, without conscious thought, it happened. One moment I was standing behind the counter, waiting for the wannabe dragster to return with my change, and the next I was bolting out the door, cradling roughly six-hundred-and-fifty dollars cash in my arms. I stuffed the bills into my pants as I stumbled across the parking lot, and then I disappeared into the blinding afternoon.



    By the time I arrived back home, my head was pounding harder then ever before. Once again, I was overcome with the images of my transgression. I saw the young, greasy cashier bear the cold, blunt force of an unfair termination, head hung low in disbelief. I witnessed his trudge home that day, dejected and hot. The abysmal walk of shame in the smoldering July sun. I watched him sigh under the weight of injustice as he slid the muffler catalog into his desk drawer, now unable to purchase his new double exhaust system. I felt, in a moment of breakneck intensity, the shame and pain and disappointment. So much sorrow, and my impulses had been the source. My actions, executed with hardly a thought, were sure to bring months of bad fortune to an innocent person. Every hardship lying in the grass ahead, every stress headache, every sleepless, hungry night, all are products of my impulses. My bored, toxic impulses.

    I was wracked with emotion. I had destroyed a chapter of this poor kid’s life for no reason other than sheer entertainment.

    I returned to the bathroom, once again vomiting in my grandmother's face. "Timothy," she called, sweetly and simply, "Timothy." I stared into the image. "Timothy."

    As if taken over by some unnamed force, some sudden impulse, I began to quickly and frantically retrieve the bills from my pants. I stood in the bathroom, arms shoved down into my drawers, knocking against the wall, and yelled to my grandmother, "Don't worry!" I cried, as I grabbed a wad of fivers from between my legs, "It's all going to be better now!"

    In one ceremonious, pivotal motion, I flung the whole lot of bills into the watery abyss and flushed the toilet. My grandmother remained, smiling back at me, until kit and cash caboodle was fully swept septic.



    Saturdays are still trouble, every now and then. It's an uphill struggle. I joined a bridge club that, although incredibly boring and occupied solely by geriatric cases, keeps me busy and out of trouble for a few hours. Ok, well, I did commit a harmless prank last week involving Fixodent and the Queen of Diamonds, but, like I said, it's an uphill struggle.