Today, you're going to whisper the secret wisdoms of life to your unborn child!

Caption unnecessary.

It's Saturday and this afternoon you're going to walk into the living room where your wife is watching Hell's Kitchen and crying.  You'll get down on your knees and place your hands on her stomach, getting your mouth close enough so that your breath creates a small damp spot on her skin. Then you'll tell your baby the truth.

“Hi little baby,” say. “It’s dark out here. It’s confusing and you have to watch people you love destroy themselves. You have to watch people you don’t even know destroy each other.  You have to watch terrible television and you have to watch yourself forget who you were supposed to be.”

“Eric.” your wife will say.

“Shut up,” tell her. 

Then to your baby, “If you're lucky you'll get about 80 years, or unlucky depending on how you look at it. You’ll love some people and you’ll trick yourself into thinking you’re in love with some people when really you just want them to take on the responsibility of making your life matter to something besides your pets. There’s alcohol and drugs out here. Alcohol is great until it gets bad. Drugs are terrible until they get worse.”

“Jesus Eric,” your wife will say.

Ignore her. “Fucking weird how a lot of us get by. When you find out you like to be choked when you come or you need to be called Betty, it’s weird enough to take you out of the rest of it so it works. Taking yourself out of the rest of it without killing yourself, that’s the secret to life. You might pull it off through sheer, unparalleled accomplishment that lifts you up above the screeching desperate hordes, or you lurch down into a darkened basement and huff paint. Same deal. You claw yourself up and away from the mess the best you can.”

“We’re late,” your wife will say.

“You shouldn’t make it to your 30’s without feeling like you’ve destroyed at least one human being simply by entering their life. Never go to raves and never read Anne Rice and never start a gelato or hunting blog."

You look up.  Your wife has tuned you out and is back to the TV.

"When you realize how ruined your parents are, you’re invited to bestow upon them one brief pitying glance, then just make polite conversation with them until they die.  Somewhere in the middle you may attempt to express to them how sorry you are for being the source of their pain and high blood pressure and endless nights laying awake in bed staring at the ceiling, but you give up because there's no way"  

"After enough decades you'll reach back and count the knives in your back left there by friends or family you swore you'd be buried next to, and you'll shrug and resume paying overdraft fees ."  

"I do not apologize for bringing you into existence. No one apologized to me, so why should you be special.”

Your wife will start to move away. Tighten your grip on her stomach and finish up.

“It sounds bad but it’s all there is. Just come out here and cause as much damage as you can. Also, sit by lakes occasionally.”

Let go of your wife’s stomach and get dressed because you've got to go and buy her a fresh box of nicotine patches.

Today, your High School got together and named you Boyfriend of the Year!!!!

These geezers are obviously jump street.

But that wasn’t one of the categories in the yearbook questionnaire.

“Screw the yearbook questionnaire,” Jenny the yearbook editor says. It’s a surprise to see her so devil-may-care, because Jenny is all about the yearbook. 

“We'd be damned if we graduated without you being recognized. Your love for Marie is an inspiration. We’re all going to look for men in college who treat us the way you’ve treated Marie.”

Just spit it out.

“Marie and I broke up.”

They all gasp.  Somewhere on the other end of the room a pencil clatters to the floor.

“This morning,” tell them. “I decided that there’s absolutely no point in being her boyfriend if it’s not going to earn me any awards or accolades. 

You register an almost incoherent sound of disbelief originate from Jenny's throat.

 "...Wish I’d known you were planning this.”

You hang your head and let your hair fall mournfully over your eyes.  They all start talking at once, and after lots of shouting and bickering it’s agreed that you should call Marie and ask her if she’d like to give it another chance.

“Will you take back the award if I don’t?” you ask.

On the spot, an impromptu caucus is formed and the resolution is that no, you can keep the award regardless since it was based on your performance as boyfriend during the school year.

“Then I’m good,” you say. “Time to focus on numero uno, if you know what I’m saying.”

You point your thumb at yourself just to make it clear.  

“Fine,” Jenny says. “But just so you know, having given you this award, and then watching you behave this way, it’s really not going to help us in our future relationships.”

And it won’t. Everyone, every single person in that room, will get at least one divorce in their lifetimes. 

Except for you. You’ll be dead next year.  Xanax overdose.

Today, you're the world's most repulsive and racist crime fighter!

Bigot.  You should probably take this down from your cubicle

When you show up to work today, your boss will tell you that you have to train the new guy.

"He’s just like you," your boss says.

"Almost like your clone," your boss’s right-hand man adds.

"You guys should get along just fine. You’re practically the same person," your boss says.

So you go to your desk and you find the new guy sitting on the floor next to it. He’s eating pudding out of a plastic container and it’s all over his face. When he finishes the pudding container, he throws it at the back of someone’s head then laughs very loudly.

"You’re the new guy?" you ask. "I’m supposed to train you."

"Thank God you’re not black," the new guy says.

This is where you march right back to your boss’s office.

"What do you mean he’s just like me?"

"You don’t see the similarity?"

Look back over at the new guy. He’s now in a desk chair and he’s got his pelvis arched up under the desk, clearly massaging his boner with the desk’s underside.

"Okay, maybe a slight resemblance," you state. "But I’m not racist."

"Yes you are," your boss says without looking up from the documents he’s reading.

You decide to go back to the new guy and learn more about yourself.

"It’s hard to believe licking my own sweat off my arms still tastes good after so many years," the new guy says. "You’d think my changing chemical makeup might have altered the taste after a while. Or it might have been affected by the alcohol and amphetamine I swear out of my pores on a constant basis. But nope. It’s still my favorite meal."

Here's where you send out an email to the entire office, apologizing for your behavior in general. You promise to try to be easier to tolerate.

"Can I access the kind of pornography where it looks like someone is being victimized on this computer? Or do I have to use my iPhone?" the new guy asks you.

"tiedupandscared.com isn’t blocked yet," you reply. "But we’d better start training soon."

"Let me just finish this threatening letter I’m writing to someone I want to rape," he says.

You wait patiently.

"Okay, finished. Just have to drip a little of my blood at the bottom here. Aaaaad, let’s get to work."

You're amazed by just how bad the new guy smells. You send out another email, telling everyone in the office that you now understand why your seated alone by the window and that you will try to rectify the situation.

It’s all getting too much to bear. You kind of want to train the new guy and then resign so you can start anew someplace where people aren’t already so familiar with your repulsive character. There’s just so much you have to change about yourself.

"Before we start training," you say to the new guy. "I want to thank you. You’ve taught me so much about myself already."

The new guy leans in. "I’m an undercover agent with the FBI. This office is a front for a human trafficking ring. You’re the only one here who isn’t in on it, so I made sure they’d pair me up with you by appearing to be compatible to your personality. Help me bust these scumbags."

You shake his hand. He wipes his hand with an anti-bacterial napkin after you let go. Then you begin your brief tenure as the world’s most repulsive crime-fighter, all the while thinking, "I may be awaiting trial for masturbating next to patients’ beds in a burn ward, but at least I’m not running a sex slave ring."

Today, your cup done runneth over!!

Because baby rhinos are cuter than baby humans.

Your new next-door neighbor lady has a baby.

“You fuck someone for that?” ask her.

She’ll look at the baby and say, “Yup.”

You can tell she’s remembering the night she made the baby and thinking about the damp, flawed but seemingly endless expanse of beautiful skin on the man she banged to get the baby so you give her a minute.

You pretend to look at your phone. You pretend to laugh at a text that isn’t there.  "Ha ha," you say..

“He still in the picture?” ask her.

Your neighbor lady will shake her head no. This is where you offer to be the father-figure to her child.

“Eighty bucks a week,” say. “I’ll teach it street smarts, how to use tools and how to shave, what dignity is and why it’s important, and shit you can do to keep from paying taxes.”

The neighbor lady will say, “Seventy.”

Shake on it, then as soon as she pays you that week’s fee, hold her baby and let it rest its sleepy head on your rock-hard pectoral muscles.

“Don’t you worry,” say to the neighbor-lady while holding the baby. “You made the right decision. Your baby’s gonna grow up to have a nice life, now.”

Your neighbor-lady will start to cry until you tell her to shut up.

Today, you're going to deliver a baby on the bus!

Could be worse.

Today, you'll be riding on a bus when it comes to a sudden stop because a woman riding in the back has unexpectedly gone into labor.  You're preoccupied at the moment, because you're looking out the window at that short skinny girl that you have a crush on who is at that moment walking past your window (she's someone else's girlfriend though, what a shame).

Your thoughts are interrupted by the pregnant woman's exclamation that someone needs to deliver her baby for her, and everyone on the car will look at you because you’ll be wearing surgical scrubs. You aren’t a doctor. You’re just the guitarist in a Bob Marley cover band called No Woman No Cry.

You’ll explain that the surgical scrubs actually cost you a lot of money and you might not be able to afford to replace them if you get placenta all over them, but everyone will promise to chip in to buy you new scrubs.

‘We’ll all just feel better if the guy doing the delivery is at least dressed like a doctor,’ one of the passengers will say.

The pregnant woman will howl at a contraction and you’ll realize that there’s no time to argue.

‘Let’s go crazy,’ you’ll say before you get down on the floor and reach in between the woman’s legs to pull her soaking wet panties down from underneath her skirt.

Tell the woman to breathe a bunch of times, then tell her to push. Her vagina will get wider and wider and it will even tear a little bit. When the baby’s head starts to poke out of the woman’s vagina, place your fingers around it and pull very gently. Even though you don’t know the woman, it’s okay if you accidentally touch her on the vagina a little. Everyone will know by how much you argued about having to help deliver the baby that you’re not some pervert who only gets turned on by vaginas that have babies coming out of them. She knew when she got pregnant that one day someone she doesn’t know might have watch her vagina get really big and might have to touch it even. She never thought a whole subway car full of people would get to see it, but she knew there was a very small possibility.

Or at least an elevator full of people.

Anyway, the baby will eventually come out, followed by all this other terrifying stuff and it will look like a massacre happened. You’ll all take a vote on what to do with the umbilical cord and you’ll decide not to do anything about it because the only knives that are on the train will belong to some teenage gang members and they won’t be able to remember if they washed the blades after their last rumble.

Once the baby is wrapped up in newspapers, you’ll remind everyone that they’d better chip in to buy you some new scrubs.

‘These were twenty one dollars before tax,’ you’ll say. At first everyone will balk, hoping the guy with the briefcase will just give you the full twenty-something. But he’ll complain about an ex-wife and a daughter in college, so the others will all chip in and give you around eighteen dollars, which isn’t bad.

The mother will ask you your name so that she can name her son after you. Tell her your name is Kyle, even though it’s not. You don’t want some kid who was born on a subway to be your namesake, do you?

Alternatively, you could tell her your name is Adolf which would be funny if she goes for it.

Today, there will be a gripping moment at the Diner.

Parking lot handjob optional.

You're learning to spend some time alone. It's going well enough. You're finding that your thoughts can be good company, especially since you're always thinking about what it would be like to have two girlfriends, and the ability to teleport.

Tonight you went to the diner. For a coffee and a view of the street. You've been there for around forty minutes with a vision of falling off of the Empire State Building, but teleporting to the Denny's across the street right before the moment of impact, as your two smokin' hot girlfriends hop up and down and cheer you on.

Yes, it's a pretty regular 'ol Saturday night for you.

In your mind your drinking some powerade and giving an interview to a reporter when you shake the fantasy away to notice the mailman with a mailbag slung over his shoulder stopping in front of the diner to check the address. The mailman looks at the postcard in his hand

You look at your watch and see it's 8:53 PM. 

"That guy woke up late today," you think. The mailman enters the diner and speaks with the cashier.

You drift back to the Starbucks where you and your two girlsfriends, Julie and Lorraine are trying to coordinate your plans for the evening. Julie wants to see the new Twilight at 8, and Lorraine just wants to make sure the movie lets out early enough for you to meet her and her visiting parents for a drink at the hotel where her parents are staying. 

Then you notice the waiter is standing by your table and not refilling your coffee. You look up to see the waiter with a postcard in his hand.

"Are you Jimmy...uh..." the waiter checks the postcard. "Jimmy...Abbot?"

You are. "How'd you know?"

The waiter drops the postcard on the table. You pick it up and read.

Jimmy Abbot
c/o Zingo's Diner
Third Booth By The Window
333 Buck Owens Blvd
Bakersfield, CA

Boy, get down! Head to the tabletop! Now!

You throw your nose to the table and wait for the gunshot. You turn your eyes up just in time to see a straw wrapper shoot past and float down onto the empty seat of adjacent booth. If you had not gotten that postcard, the straw wrapper would've slammed directly into the back of your head.

You sit back up and look behind you to find a little boy with a crewcut, the naked straw to his lips aimed straight at you. The boy's mother takes the straw from his mouth and motions for him to finish his hamburger. You go back to the postcard and read the rest.

Hope this helped kid.

Sincerely,

Tom Cruise

You check the postmark. It says "Hollywood."

Today, you're gonna get thrown out of Weinerschnitzel!

The black guy dies first.

Today, you'll find yourself completely unable to wait for lunchtime because lunchtime is when you get to talk to Sarah, the 17-year old girl who works behind the counter at Weinerschnitzel. 

Sarah looks exactly like Annie, a girl you were on a date with from high school who died on Prom Night. 

A bit of history.  Years ago on Prom Night, you were driving the car and you bet everyone in the car that you could make it across the train tracks before the train passed. 

No one in the car took the bet and they begged you to just take them to the Prom so that everyone could live out the night they had dreamed about throughout their teens, but you thought that by them being scared it would just make Prom Night all the more memorable when you sailed past the train tracks with only half a moment to spare as the train horn screamed in the night, already retreating behind you, with your laughter drifting out the car windows. 

Oh, you were all so young.

It didn't work out that way though, because everyone in the car died except for you.

Which is why you like ordering lunch from Sarah every day because it lets you pretend that the world stopped just minutes before you were all hit by that train, and it lets you pretend that Annie isn't dead, but that she's still 17 and she got a job at Weinerschnitzel.

Unfortunately you find yourself unwelcome in Weinerschnitzel and unable to enjoy a nice simple chili dog because eventually the manager stepped in front of Sarah and told you that you aren't allowed to eat lunch there anymore since every time you ordered something you followed it up by screaming "I'M SO SO SORRY!" and then lunging across the counter to try and hug Sarah and it scared his customers.

So tomorrow you'll head over to Fresh & Easy, where one of the cashier guys looks like Jared, one of your friends who was in the backseat.

Except more of a mexican version of Jared.

You can't wait for lunch tomorrow!