The Joy of Children

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I would have to say that my greatest flaw is my profoundly compassionate and care-giving selfless nature -and it is exactly this quality that completely wrecked up my Saturday.

Long story short, due to a family emergency I hadda do some babysitting.

Now, for those of you that don't know anything about kids, suffice to say they are tiny little screechy people with about sixteen arms and boundless energy. I'm not sure why God afflicted them with so many numerous obvious physical abnormalities, but I'm about 95% sure that it is Divine Punishment for all that screeching.

So this kid -I think he has a name, Joe or something-gets dumped at my house at the ungodly hour of 10:30 in the morning. On a Saturday. I'm like "WTF?", right? I need a good eight hours of sleep a night, and six or seven during the day or I can't function whatsoever. So I figure I'll find him some toys to keep him busy for a while, and I'll get back to my blissfully solitary snoozing.

I have no toys. None. Zip.

Armed only with my radiant braniosity, I needed a plan.


***

Taking him out to the garage, I figure, is a stroke of genius. I mean kids like power tools, right? And not in the house, he can screech his little heart out till his face turns blue: I wouldn't hear a damn thing.

The only thing I didn't account for was his freakishly small size. His hands are too small to hold drills, he's too short to effectively push the lawn mower, and the puny little bastard couldn't even lift the fucking chainsaw.

His awkward size thwarted my fun plans again and again. While too small to enjoy edging the sidewalk with my weed-whacker, he was too large to clean out my crawlspaces. Too heavy to dust the tops of my bookshelves. Too 'scared of the dark' to catch those rats in my basement. Bitch, bitch, bitch. I swear to God I have no idea why people have children in the first place.

My dad had a dog once, but the dog kept pissing and shitting on the carpet no matter how savagely beaten he got. So my dad took him out into the field, let him out, and drove off so Skippy could be wild and free just as God intended for poodles. Simple, right? But kids are infinitely sneakier; they memorize stuff like addresses, names, phone numbers ... I'll betcha this kid would be right back here in two or three weeks.

By 11:15, he's hungry and I have decisions to make. If I feed him, won't that make getting rid of him even more difficult? What if he just starts showing up on my doorstep at 10:30 every morning? Do I even have food?

Noon rolls around and the shit has scarffed down all my Pop Tarts, Lucky Charms, Eskimo pies, expresso, Mountain Dew, and Twinkies. I'm cleaned out save for four Heinekens (he apparently prefers dometics).

He ran around the house one hundred and sixty-seven times. I'm painfully aware of this, because every time he finished a lap, he came running into my bedroom to loudly proclaim his count: "Thirty-five!" he would screech, and then slam the door as he set out for number thirty six.

Right around lap seventy-one, I was making Kool-Aid popsicles in an empty ice tray. Immediately before sticking the little toothpicks in them, however, I added an entire bottle of Nyquil. By 2 o'clock they were frozen, and by 2:30 he was snoring loudly with four toothpicks and a big sticky blue stain on his chest.

He was still sleeping when his mom picked him up, and she asked how he behaved. It was then that I informed her that her offspring was a complete banshee from Hell, and that she should be imprisoned for unleashing such horrors upon an unsuspecting and otherwise peaceful planet.

Once the filthy whore and her insufferable hellspawn pulled out of the driveway, I stopped throwing Heinekens at the car. It wasn't that I couldn't hit it anymore, I just didn't want the inevitable wayward one to hideously crash through her windshield and wake that little prick up again.

Shrugging, I go back into my house and head back to bed. My walls, now covered in tiny blue handprints and Twinkie residue, serve as a mute reminder of my horrible and hellish experience.

All and all, I think it went pretty well.