Dammit! Who Do I Have To Kill To Have My Weekends Left Free?

Not to toot my own horn, which I could do if I wanted to because I'm me, but right now, I am working very, very hard. I am doing ten hours a day at Ye Olde Spice Plante (the added e's make it olde fashioned) in order to guarantee a few extra days off at the end of the year. A 25 kilo bag doesn't weigh too much at the start of the day, but when ya hit hour nine, those motherfuckers weigh as much as the goddamned pyramids. Except pyramids are nominally easier to carry because they don't bend in the fucking middle when you pick 'em up. Needless to say, I am tired and I am sore, and I spend an hour on the bus on the way home listening to hormone-riddled teenagers shout at each other across a space of said bus; all I want is to be left the fuck alone.

I want to be left alone at the best of times. Christmas day? Ho-ho. Merry Xmas, these are my gifts, these are yours, I love you all very much, see you in time for dinner, don't call me, I won't call you. When I am cranky, I'm like a turbocharged asshole machine, and since I'm louder than anyone else in my family by at least a factor of five, when I shout, fucking Spain hears.

Now my mother, Momzilla, is on this ... renovation ... jag. Has been for months, but until recently, I was spared the fallout from too much Trading Spaces because there were other areas in the house that needed work. And since she's a dying breed (a housewife, of all the antiquated and outmoded concepts in this new age), there's a shitload of time during each day in which to design multifarious ways to fuck me over.

Awhile back, Momzilla saw this show in which one of the people was one of those guys who likes to see what he owns. His house wasn't messy, per se, but it was well-lived in. The designer on the show started riposting with some kind of factual proof that people like this have a mild form of brain damage, and it's imperative that they don't dismiss this fact when designing their stuff. Lo and behold, Momzilla realises EvilMister is just such a guy hisself.

Shit, man, I could of told her that twenty fucking years ago. I used to go apeshit, I mean, stark fucking nuts when she'd clean my room while I was at school. It'd take me fifteen minutes to find a pen, because I had memorized the exact spot of the pen, and indeed, every other thing in my room.

It started with shelving in the closet. Which I like. But the process, which invloves a father who can literally spend sixteen hours choosing the proper nails, was a long and painful one, complete with architectural designs that would have flabbergasted Frank Lloyd Wright and horrified my ninth grade english teacher (closet is almost always spelled clost, and it ain't shorthand she's dropping down.) Any and all renovations in my room, small enough to frighten lifers on death row with it's size, involves the removal of all my worldly possessions to 'make room for your father and his tools'. This is a big lie. It's so she can create a list of things I own that she wants me to throw away. I forgot to mention that ever since this episode of 'Demolishing your Home and Making it Over the Way We Want' that explained this guy's ... condition, Momzilla continues to bring up the fact that I, too, 'suffer' from this 'problem'. I've had to point out to her that I am maybe a little too attached to my stuff, but I by no means suffer from narcolepsy or schizophrenia.

That was three weeks ago.

Last week it was bookshelves, to house the massive collection of crap I read. Again, I love the shelves on my walls, because now I can see all the titles, and the shelves themselves are only big enough to have rows one level deep. Anyone out there who is a booklover knows how fucking frustrating it is to have to dig behind two and sometimes three layers to find the one book you want. It can take hours, by which time you've forgotten your own name and the printed word has most likely been replaced by holograms and mental telepathy. Again, I had to remove most of my possessions out of the room. Including my computer. I hate moving my computer. Not because of anything I might be doing on it, but because of cords.

Cords and I don't get along. I can hold three speaker wires in one hand, look away, count to twenty, and find that they've tied themselves into a Gordian Knot by the time I've finished. This is complicated by my supergeek PC surround system, which has more wires coming out of it than anything else I own, and by the fact that my DVD surround wires come right by the PC. It took me half an hour to get everything unsnarled, and then Momzilla reorganized them for me, because my own loops were too loose for her liking. This time, the old man really did take all day. If it weren't for ChubbyMonk coming to rescue me, I'd have staple gunned both M0mzilla and my dad to the walls.

Then there's the coatrack she wanted built. Like the shelves in the closet and the ones on the walls, this came with an attached diagram. The only thing missing were instructions on how to assemble it in all languages known to man. My dad, being eminently logical and far more patient than I am, looked at the design, noted it's salient points, and built it his own damned way. When Momzilla saw the rack, the first thing she said was 'It's not up and down.' ( I should note that my new coatrack is nailed to the wall and has four giant pegs for jackets) She demanded to know why it wasn't how she'd designed it. My poor old dad explained in the weary tones of a foreman (which he has been for twenty-six years) to the architect (who can only think on paper and not in three dimensions) that an up-and-down style coatrack is asking for problems : jackets on top bolt hanging over all other coats, the necessity of digging through said jackets to find the one you want, the massive lump all the jackets would cause, etc. His own design, diagonal, is much more streamlined. I concurred and my mother left the room, still unwilling to admit it made sense.

All I want is to be left alone. I don't want to know about any more design changes to the very structure of space and time in my room, I don't care that my family doctor is now offering Botox shots, I could give a rat's ass that my father doesn't do anything around the house. On the weekends, all I want to do is sit in front of my computer or my television, eating all the shit I don't eat during the week, watching the cheezy shows I download or watching a movie on TV that I own the DVD for (but am way too fucking lazy to pull out of the box). I want to go to Starbucks, drink my Americano and stare at girls half my age. I don't want to be reminded that I need to have my laundry out, I don't need to be reminded rent is due, I have no desire to 'swing by' the grocery store to pick up the eighty-three things that were forgotten because Momzilla hates crowds. I wanna watch adult oriented clips without being ... disturbed. I don't want my massive dog, Bootsy Collins, to be let in to climb all over me because 'she misses me' and Momzilla thinks it's cute.

I wanna be left the fuck alone to do the things I wanna do, and if anyone hassles me next weekend (Sunday is a wash already) I am for sure going to kill someone.

My best friend and moral compass (he lets me know when I'm being too nice) has pointed out that the above will only get worse when I get married. He has pointed out that marriage brings another entire family into the equation, at which point I will find myself spending my weekends visiting relatives, babysitting nieces and nephews, entertaining out-of-town visitors, schlepping my ass to the ends of the earth for this or that, and generally signing away all rights to personal freedom.

There is no light, there is no consolation except for one:

At least in prison, you can stab a screw and get sent into solitary, where they leave you alone.