God and the Devil

As a teenager, my mother asked that I work during summer breaks to earn what my grandfather used to call "pocket money". To my surprise, I had little trouble getting a job at the newly opened Loco's Pub, albeit as a dishwasher. That first summer, we got absolutely slammed on a daily basis. Besides getting pelted in the eyes and mouth with black bean remnants and other nasty bits from the ridiculously overly-powerful "hose" I used to clean awkwardly-shaped dishes, it was a pretty boring job. Very hot, and very soapy.

One day, I made a mistake. On a particularly busy Saturday afternoon, in an act of sophomoric lunacy, I decided it was time to try some magical mushrooms from an older co-coworker to make the afternoon a little more interesting. I got my wish. He told me, laughing apathetically, as we stood in the men's room, that it probably would be best to wait until I got home to take them, but with great gusto, I downed them right there to his guffaws, gagging severely. We walked back into the kitchen and back to work.

About 30 minutes or so later, I realized something was slightly off. The sink-water had become a particularly dazzling color of bluish-green, and I remember staring at it in awe for a few minutes until a co-worker came by and gave me a shake and said something I missed entirely. I nodded and mumbled incoherently, my glasses almost entirely opaque from steam, as my mind began to wander again..."What the Hell am I doing here?...It's really hot and hard to breathe...I think I'll go to my car and listen to some music." That last thought turned out to be not such a great idea.

I stumbled past my boss's office, catching his confused glance as I passed by, opened the back door, letting it slam behind me, and walked across the parking lot to my car. I got inside, turned on the radio, and leaned back, satisfied. I honestly can't say how long I sat there, but at some point several minutes later, an alarming thought came to mind like a lightning bolt: "Wait...I'm sitting in my car listening to music when I'm supposed to be in there, at work, for money." Leaving the car running, I opened the door, stood up and - in habit - locked it, and took a few steps before leaping into the air in horror. I had locked myself out of my running car, and was, literally, hallucinating in the hot, hot Macon summer sun - at work -during a particularly bad rush.

I stumbled back inside, half-crazed. As I passed the guy who had sold me the stuff, I spun him around, and with a manic passion, told him that he was, I suddenly realized, literally, the Devil, and that the guy on the line next to him was, in fact, God, himself. They burst into laughter. Pleased with my reasoning, I approached the row of surly line cooks, and pleaded my case. In the end, a seasoned veteran came out and was able to effortlessly break into my car using a crudely-fashioned pickle-bucket handle, relieving me of my intense anxiety, albeit temporarily. I wobbled back inside, and was instantly confronted with a decidedly more pressing conflict: I had a Jinga-esque pile of filthy dishes to deal with and was quite bewildered and sweaty.

Somehow I made it through the day, but the ride home presented entirely new challenges, as I was faced with a one-in-a-million scenario in that the local police had set up a roadblock on my street during that particular afternoon. Trembling, I pulled up to the road block, and fumbled through my wallet for my license, but to my unbelievable disdain, could not produce it: I had accidentally left it on the dresser that morning and for the second time that day was forced with the awkward task of relating a critical fail and asking for help, although this time to someone in a decidedly more authoritarian role. My mom rolled through the same stop a few hours later to find me sitting on the curb, peacefully, in outer space.

/whoops

Avalanche, or The Red-Faced Planet

In elementary school, I developed an appreciation for the skillful art of procrastination. Waiting until a calculated moment to begin a school assignment, I would normally spend long present moments in the rapture of impetuous youth (say, playing video games and reading comic books) while willingly conceding that short expanses of space and time in the future would be anxiously and feverishly consumed completing an impending assignment. I began this habit initially because of complacency towards my assignments but continued it indefinitely because I always excelled using the described method. In the third grade, the woman I called a teacher also happened to be called a mother by another student in my same grade but of a different class. He was regarded by his teacher as an intelligent creature, much as I was also considered myself at the time, and students sometimes talked between classes about which of us was more intelligent. Near the end of the year, after I had "gone steady" and "broken up" with a girl from my third grade class, my teacher assigned each individual student an aspect of the solar system from which each student was to present to the class an oral presentation. To me she assigned the planet Mars. As normal, I burned the last hours of the night before the assignment due date engaging in Mortal Kombat and relishing in the illustrated tales of Mutants who were hated and feared. I set my alarm that night with the intention of waking up at 3 AM and completing the Mars assignment before my class began at 8:30 AM, a feat which would have easily accomplished had I not unintentionally set my alarm for 3 PM the next day. I awoke the next morning to the sound of my parents preparing for work at 6 AM, which at once registered to me that I had failed to rise at the intended time and that I had an extremely limited amount of time from which to prepare the presentation. Jetting around the house as stealthily as possible to avoid alarming my parents, I managed to secure an empty shoe box which I imagined could suspend in its vacuous interior an orange I had taken from the fridge by a piece of yarn I took from the sewing materials of my mother. Having been unable to construct the model before I caught the bus to school, I attempted frantically to piece it together through the rhythmic shaking motion of the Big Cheese but realized in consternation that I had not obtained the means to secure the yarn to one inner side of the box nor the means to secure the yarn to the orange. When I arrived at school, the elaborate model and presentational designs of other students struck me repeatedly like a boxer who had quickly gained the advantage and, like one who sadistically continued pummeling an opponent even after the declared KO, I was unable to construct any model more impressive for the assignment before I heard my teacher call my name to begin my presentation. I stood up in the front of the class, the girl whom I had broken up with facing me in anticipation that I would confirm why she ever liked me, and held up the box I had brought with me. Inside the box, the orange rolled around lazily in response to the gravity of Earth, impotent as a symbol to convey relevant information about the planet Mars; information like how Mars was suspended in space around the Sun, how its size and relational distance to the Sun compared to other planets, or even simply (as the fruit reflected orange light instead of red light) the color many people would cite as a common titular reference to Mars as the "Red Planet". I stammered through the few uncertain facts I had attempted to memorize about Mars, the while trying at once to display and obscure the destructively insufficient model I had created. This markedly unprepared presentation having been completed, I shrank back into my desk. Increasingly millisecond by millisecond I felt an awkward silence condensing in the room around me, as if the room were a bowl containing a liquid gelatin mixture which was congealing in the cold response to my presentation. The girl I had broken up with was flushed in the face and avoided revealing her embarrassment for me by similarly avoiding eye contact with me. Nervous giggles bounced around the room like 25 cent rubber balls with impossible momentum. The teacher looked sternly at me, as if to confirm that every one of those ballistic giggles should strike my face as red as that of the girl avoiding my gaze and the surface of the fourth planet from the Sun. She then pronounced in earshot of every tympanic membrane of the local universe, "Phillip, I am disappointed in you."

"Christie"

When I was about nine years old, I was handed a note from a female classmate while walking back from lunch. As I looked down and saw it was, indeed addressed to myself, and more importantly, from "Christie," I immediately felt flushed, as Christie was one of the most attractive and popular girls in the class and would have never been someone I imagined "going with." As soon as I could reasonably justify a bathroom break, I fired my hand up and was mercifully excused. I hurried out the door, down the catwalk, into the boy's bathroom, bolted into the nearest stall, slamming and locking the door behind me. As I looked down, my hands shaking in still-confused excitement and anticipation, I tore the note open, and read the following, from "Christie": "I drawed this pictur cuz I love you," written in jarringly terrible handwriting. Instantly deflated, I tumbled back to Earth.

The attached illustration of what I could only imagine was meant to be a representation of myself - essentially the classic stick figure with exaggerated facial features and elongated digits, more typical of drawings of four or five-year olds, helped me connect the dots. The note was indeed from "Christie," but unfortunately not the cute, popular one. My "Christie" was an obese girl with severe learning disabilities and a ponderously strong Southern accent. I tried as hard as I possibly could to avoid her gaze when I returned to class, in shame for my hubris and true commiseration with the poor girl, though I occasionally looked up, masochistically I suppose, to catch her discomforting stare.