Today, you're going to live (however pathetically) in the moment!

You and Marcy's husband Roy are staying behind because you both have leg injuries, while Marcy and your husband Jake go hiking through the snow to try to find food and hopefully a ranger who can find a way to get you all down off this mountain. 

And the only cure for cabin fever is?

“They could be gone for days and they might not make it back,” Roy will say, limping around the cabin. “We should start having sex now.”

“How can you—”

“Oh spare me!” Roy shouts. “The longer you play this game of being the loyal, loving wife grateful to her husband for risking his life for you, the less sex we’re having.”

“But they’ve barely just left,” you say. “Look, I can still see them. They’re waving.”

You motion for Roy to come to the window and wave back to them. Roy slaps you.

“Dammit you need to think realistically,” he shouts. “If we wait to have sex until we’re sure they’re dead, we might be too weak to even feel sexual, not to mention we’ll be trying to come to grips with the reality that our spouses have died somewhere out there in the snow, possibly never to have their bodies found by anything but packs of hungry wolves. Think you’ll be up for boning with the image of your husband’s limp body being shredded to ribbons by bloodthirsty wolves on your mind?”

You concede that no, you would not. Neither would Roy, he says. He loves Marcy way too much to cheat on her while her body is being eaten by animals.

“And supposing we do wait,” Roy continues. “And when we manage to have sex we find out we are the perfect mates for each other, that the sex is the best we’ve ever had. But, oops, we waited too long and we’re too dehydrated and hungry to have sex a second time. Almost more tragic than if we’d never had sex at all! We’d die regretting that we waited, regretting that we stood on formality instead of grabbing as much erotic opportunity from what little time we had left.”

You’ve spent too much of your life regretting things. Roy is right. You love Jake, but waiting to be sure he’s dead before you have sex with Roy is just another instance of you living as if tomorrow is some kind of guarantee.

You take off your clothes and Roy enters you for approximately 30 seconds before Jake and Marcy burst into the cabin with a half-dozen park rangers. The rangers had been hiking up the mountain when they bumped into Jake and Marcy having frantic sex against a snow bank around 200 feet from the cabin’s front door.

Today, love in an elevator.

You know how every great once in a while, you'll be going about your own business when all of the sudden something or other happens and you stop and go 'wow, I'm going to remember this moment forever'?

Yeah, you think about those a lot.

Today your going to walk into your apartment building at the asscrack of dawn still wearing your clothes from last night.  You fell asleep on the couch at Bella's boyfriends house after fighting off the drunken advances of some guy named Lance.  You swear an oath to yourself to never date anyone named Lance.

Anyways, you've also sworn off drinking and you have a grocery bag full of pastries and greens, with which you are making a celebratory healthy breakfast to put your most likely futile plan of sobriety into full effect.  The heels you're still wearing from the previous night make you wobble a little as you breeze through the glass doors to the lobby just in time to see the elevator door start to slide shut.

There's someone in the elevator.  "Wait!"  You call out.

The someone sticks his arm in between the elevator doors and they bounce back open, chivalry ain't dead yet.

So you'll clomp your way in and dump your little big of silly crap on the floor.  It promptly spills out half the contents; a bag of pita bread and some hummus, a cantaloupe, and something you think is a quiche but weren't sure.

"Looks like your representing the cuisines of about 8 different cultures this morning," the man remarks.

You smile and make a show of rolling your eyes.  "Yeah well."

There is a pause as both of you wait for a follow up.  You sigh.

There's someone else in the elevator.  It's a small boy, about 3 years old.  Seems a bit hyperactive.  You watch as he dances his way over to the button panel and whangs the heel of his palm against it, lighting up every floor.  You look at his Dad to gauge his reaction but he is busy picking up dates and water cashews and packets of semi-exotic herbal tea that you will probably never drink.

You open your mouth but before anything comes out the hyperactive little boy crows joyously and hammers on the emergency stop button.  The elevator lurches to a sickening halt, sending pistachios and raspberries everywhere.

"Oh, shit!  Dodger!  No!"  The man says.  He grabs the boy lightly by the arm and gives him a swat on his rear.  If this punishment had any disciplinary effect, Dodger's face failed to register it.

You look him over.  He's wearing the tiniest plaid shirt you've ever seen and has the smallest checkered vans on his feet.  Dodger pops over in front of you, and you see that this child is never going to be a beauty.  His brown eyes are flecked with gold but they are too close together, a shock of orange hair rests on the top of his head like a brush fire, and jug ears poke out of the side of his head like the handles of pink fleshy teacups, but you look at him and you still love him.

For lack of better things to do as good 'ol Dad gets the elevator going again, you crouch down in front of the boy, cover your eyes with your hands and then you take them away and you say Boo.

The boy squeals high-pitched laughter and hops up and down with his hands flapping loosely at the wrist, making you wish that anything could make you that excited.   You're having fun so you do it again.  And again.

"Dodge, leave the nice lady alone," says Dad.

Neither of you stop.

It isn't until the doors have been standing open for a few seconds that you realize the elevator has arrived at your floor.  Dodger is shrieking with laughter as you collect yourself, a big cheesy grin smeared across your face.  You pick up your swearing off drinking breakfast bag and stand up, barely registering how the man is just standing there regarding you with a bemused expression.  There's a pregnant silence again.

Ok, you tell yourself, now I just feel stupid.  You say bye to Dodger as he dances around your feet and you get off the elevator, your face a little heated.

You've gone four steps out of the elevator and down the hall to your room when Dodger's Dad speaks up from behind you.

"You know, when he grows up he's going to fall in love with a girl who looks just like you, and he's not going to have any clue as to why."

You turn around.

The elevator door is closing fast as he leans out to say, "But I will."

Today, you're going to cruise for some trim!

Go figure.

For the past week you've toured all of the retail and food establishments in your neighborhood and you've decided the wine store has the highest fucktential, which is a word you made up that means potential for fuckatude, which is another made up word, though you didn't make that one up (your Dad used to use it before he had a heart attack in Sizzler). Anyway, the wine store seems to have a lot of fucklihood. Fucklihood is a way of describing a place that is fuckamentally sound, which is a way of describing a place that looks to be ideal for those interested in forgoing modern medicine and instead experimenting with natural fucklistic healing. Basically, the wine store looks like a pretty good place to go if you're looking for a little bit of true love and undying devotion. Just kidding, the wine store's a good place to try and get yourself effed.

Go down there today and hang around in the French wines section. When a nice piece of trim rolls up and pretends to be reading the wine bottles when what she really wants to do is read the "YKK" on your zipper, just pick up an expensive bottle and let her know what you wanna do with it.

Say, "I want to drink this entire bottle as fast as I can."

She'll ask, "Why?"

Manufacture some tears. Then say, "Not be me for a while I guess. Just (pause for a second) ....kind of wanna erase me."

She'll nod. "I know what you mean." She'll pick up her own bottle. "I like buying bottles of wine because I like the suspense of wondering whether I'm going to finish the entire bottle before smashing it into pieces and slicing open my wrists with one of the shards."

You'll both just stand there, your heads bowed as tears flow from all four of your eyes onto the floor.

The wine store owner will come over to the two of you and say, "I could tell from all the way over there that we seemed to have a fuckuation back here, which is a fun word for situation of fuck."

The wine store owner will lead you both to the stock room, wrapping his big beefy arms around your shoulders, then he'll make the two of you have sex for him at gunpoint. It will ultimately feel a little fuckapointing.

Today, you're going to kill your cheating whore of a wife!

Sancho makes house calls

Today you come home from work at five o'clock like you do every single day and you open the front door and the house is so quiet and so still like it always is. Your wife is in the basement again.

You know better than to go and knock on the basement door, but you do anyway and the only response you get is her shouting for you to stop intruding on her private time, and that if you want any type of goddamn dinner cooked, then you'd better be patient.

The words cut you like the blade of a razor, and you can feel faint sting of a tear from the corner of your left eye. She's been cheating on you in that dingy cellar, all this time. It was right there in front of your face. You put your briefcase down in the foyer of the home that you bought when you were married ten years ago, when you promised to love and cherish each other forever and forever and forever, and your left hand creeps up to the pocket of your sports jacket to the revolver you "borrowed" from your brother's gun case a couple of days ago, all the while wondering what in the hell you were really going to do with it.

It's solved. You step in front of the mirror, assume a wide legged stance, and you brandish the gun at your reflection. You tell your reflection that your sick of the lies, your sick of the deceit, and that you've known all this time that the reason she comes out of the basement every day smelling of too much perfume with a huge grin on her face is NOT because she's doing her 'arts and crafts'.

You tell your reflection the reason she comes out of the basement looking and smiling like a teenage girl is because that hotrod of a poolboy is down in that basement with her every single day, and you've known all this time about the infidelity.  Your going to finally do something about it.

You lower the gun and point it at yourself in the mirror and you go click.

Click.
Click click click click.

You smile at yourself, then you feel sick.
You load the pistol.

Before you can chicken out, you stomp across the hall and down the stairs to the basement door. You raise one penny loafer-clad foot and and kick hard, and you go through that basement door like an X-ray through wood.

Inside, you stop, lower jaw falling against your chest. This is definetely not what you expected. Your mouth tries to move, to form speech, and finally you find the words as you stare back into your wife's shocked face, her eyes wide open with alarm.

"You're shrinking heads in the basement of OUR home?!" You roar.

Your wife flinches as if stricken. "Jim, I..." she stammers.

"You know how I feel about voodoo!"

"It's NOT voodoo!"

"I can't believe this is how your spending your time, hunched over these herbs and spices, instead of banging the poolboy, like I thought you were!"

You see her eyes flash with a righteous indignation and she puffs out her chest. "Well, maybe if you paid more attention to me instead of working day and night, then I wouldn't need to have a shrunken head museum under the house," she replies matter-of-factly.

Your distracted for a moment by a huge bubble that percolates out of a giant cauldron on the workbench. "This is hardly sanitary."

"Don't you lecture me, this is my calling, and anyways you weren't supposed to come in."

You sag visibly, like an animal taking a bullet.  You are about to argue, but suddenly it dawns on you that you don't have the heart. You miss her desperately. You take a step closer to her. "Honey, what happened to us?"

She looks down, pushing around a pebble on the ground with one of her toes. "I don't know. Ever since Tommy died in that silo explosion, we just...drifted apart."

"That wasn't my fault!  Our lives were changed that day, all because of one condemned silo.  Why do you think I've been working day and night since?  I won't rest until I rid the world of all silos!  ALL OF THEM!"  You slam your fist down on the workbench. A couple of shrunken heads hop off the bench and onto the floor.

"Dammit Jim, be careful!"

"Sorry, I just miss him so damn much sometimes."

"Honey...listen, I was going to save this for our anniversary...but I think now is the time."

Your wife bends under the workbench and carefully slides out a small box. She holds it in both hands with a measured caution, as though it held diamonds, or cocaine. She offers it to you, her eyes glistening wet with trace beginnings of tears.

You take the box from her and put your hand on the lid. You look up at her and she nods. You lift the lid and gasp.

Inside is the shrunken head of your Mother. Her hair is the consistency of boiled wire, and the skin is mottled and fossilized by chemicals you'll never in your life be able to name. Delicate black stitching adhere the lips shut, and the eyes.  Looking at the dried relic, you're struck by the realization that it will stay this way forever.

"It's....it's....beautiful," you hear yourself say.

"You know how her grave was dug up a week after her funeral and the cops thought it was the damn Sicilians, avenging the honor of their family by robbing your sainted Mother's grave? Well, I have something else to confess. I robbed the grave of your Mother to shrink her head, put it in a box, and rekindle the passionate flames of our love."

"I always thought it was weird that Sicilians would want to desecrate her grave. My Mother was Puerto Rican," you reply.

"I know, honey," your wife whispers. "I know."

You put down the box and make love among the heads.

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."