It's like I went to sleep and woke up thirteen years later, fat, balding and slightly retarded. What the hell happened to my life? All of a sudden I'm the proud father of two ungrateful, sexually active teenagers and the girl I knocked up in high school is now my bitter, sexually inactive wife? Are you kidding me? Bullshit. That's not how I'd planned my life. What happened to Art School or Med school or Law school? What happened to a career in art conservation and living in Antibes? How did I end up an accountant at some fourth-rate firm in downtown Los Angeles? What happened to me?
I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I feel nausea consuming me. All I see is some semblance of my father--an uglier and fatter shadow of the old man squinting back at me with disgust and pity. I remember very clearly being terrified of having him drop me off at school because his weave was never put on right and my friends were cruel. He'd say, "pick ya up at 2:00? Same corner?" and I'd say, "yeah, sure." He was completely unaware that in addition to his pathetic hairpiece, his accent and his beat-up car were the tools with which my peers tore me apart. "Nice turban your dad has. Is it made of lamb hair?" they'd say, bursting out in laughter as I walk past them. I often envisioned the guys raped in a remote African village while their girlfriends, the dimwit cheerleaders, undergo clitoradectomies by the local blind midwives. The thought of them suffer assuaged my resentment and made me tolerate my dad a little better.
Just like my dad, I provide plenty of material to anyone set on teasing my children whose perpetual sulking whenever around me proved they were both embarrassed and resentful of our kinship.
I take my shower and try to get into my cloths, which seem to be getting tighter every day. As I stagger around the bed trying to push my legs into the pair of Relaxed Chinos, my wife Cindy says, "you gotta lay off that yogurt ice cream or you won't fit into any of your cloths pretty soon." Sizing me up and down with her stabbing look of repulsion, she is put out by the mere sight of me. She is pretty slender herself and could fit into pretty much anything. Unlike her hippopotamus husband--yours truly--my wife, much to my chagrin, is a swan. I looked at her and said nothing. I could have said, "don't worry, honey. I'll stop by the Big Dogs store on the way back home and buy new cloths," but I decided against it. I might still be holding on to a distant dream of having the Fat Fairy pay me a visit late at night to suck all the fat off my body and leave me looking buff and muscular like that man I never was. It's either that or I gave up challenging my wife's arguments a long time ago.
I walk down to the kitchen to grab my coffee before heading out to work. My children, Casey and Stacy, are there having their breakfast. Both kids have their mother's good looks and I convinced myself that they have my intelligence. My children excelled in everything they attempted and since I'm the only one in the family with a college degree, I attributed their triumphs to my genetic generosity--an argument that's consistently shattered by their frequent, nonchalant statements like, "dad, an accounting degree from a community college is nothing to boast about," or before a game of Trivial Pursuit, "no, I don't want dad on my team."
I'm officially what kids call these days a "douchebag." Boring job, a wife that's probably cheating on me and kids that don't respect me. What happened to my life?
I grab my coffee and leave the house. I get in my '98 Jeep Cherokee and drive to work, thinking where and when did my life veer off course? Where was I in the past thirteen years? Drugged out? Passed out? Checked out?
My name is David Edreesi and I hate my life.
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