Dale Petroff Thinks Too Much

                Dale Petroff walks into a public restroom fuming. The kids and wife are driving him crazy; he’s considering driving head-on to incoming traffic, but he’s too responsible, which means he’s too much of a pussy. He walks into the service mart, buys a newspaper, a pack of cigarettes, which he won’t tell his wife about, two 24-ounch beers, which he won’t tell his wife about, and a “Barely Legal”. Sometime throughout the next three days he’ll manage to get away and possibly have the greatest jerk-off session in all of his 34 years. The only question is how and where he’ll manage to get away from the assholes he calls his family, and during said getaway, blow a considerable and well-deserved load.  He feels like he hasn’t jerked off since high school, when he somehow always avoided getting caught by his mother. The truth is, he masturbates on a daily basis. He loves it oh so much, considering is wife’s snatch is as dry as the great Salt Lake.
         He hates her. She’s sweet and harmless and deserves none of this. But he hates her and someday he hopes to muster up enough courage to not only leave her, but break her heart, all in one flawless, rhapsodically efficient motion. He can’t wait to leave his kids, too. They are ungrateful, vicious little tyrants. He wished he were a gypsy so he could sell them off, all for just some jewelry or a juicy cheeseburger.
         He’s managed to score a few Xanax from one of his employees, only to dull the non-painful pain, even only for a couple hours. One ear and out the other is the way he prefers the content to be while dealing with the kin. He feels that this way, it won’t give away the fact that he’s at the very least, kind of fucked up. For the past eight years, he has managed to get away with it.
         The exorbitant amount of indifference, shame and self-medication has no definitive root. It happen one day shortly after saying, “I do,” and hasn’t let up since. And it does annoy him, if not pain him. He still makes a living, puts food on the table (by a wife who will not EVER learn how to make even the most simple dishes with out a semi-supportive, nearly always mocking shrug of approval) and pay his bills. His idiot wife and unattractive children don’t think twice and continue to thrive on mediocrity. Which is okay. He’ll kill them someday, do his time, and rest ever so peacefully in either Hell or the closest thing to Hell. Just make it happen, already, he thinks day after day, every day. He can wait. He’ll always wait.
         He makes thirty-five thousand dollars a year, which is a pitiful amount. His wife, a real estate agent, pulls in about forty-two grand a year, and together, they do okay. He manages a truck-stop restaurant. His employees are so haggard, so hopeless, so unattractive, he’s amazed by how he shows up to put up with their garbage, every single day. With a smile. A fake, drugged-fueled smile, but let’s not get picky, that is perversely heroic. You should see this leper colony he calls work.
         How does he do it? He’s a smaller, Midwestern version of…some kind of savior. He doesn’t even know how great he is to his employees. Half, he’s positively sure of, would fuck him in a second, because he’s so patient and tolerant. It’s funny how those two adjectives can be confused with indifference and mock-sincerity. Lila and Bernice are always gazing into his blue/gray eyes, he catches them all the time. The pregnant 22-year old who already has two kids, he’s always catching her sneaking a peak at his cock, which is unintentionally rock hard every shift he works. He definitely wants to fuck, just for the sake of it and to give the youngster a thrill. But he’ll never do it, because she’s so fucking ugly and so fucking dirty, even he, he who has done nothing but weird, dirty things his entire life, would actually feel ashamed of getting his dick wet in that cesspool of bile.
         In other words, FUCK THAT. Fuck having to settle for things, just because you’re not happy at that exact moment. If only it was as easy as listening to Astral Weeks, eating a nutritious, yet savory meal, laughing when things are funny, crying when things are sad, hugging and kissing and loving the people and things you love, hating hopefully not too many people and things that are worth hating, popping in Astral Weeks again, and then doing it all over again. But it’s not that easy. It’s only easy if you don’t try, and what fun is that, eh?
         Fast forward five years. Dale no longer works at that truck stop in Beaverdam, nor does he continue to hate his wife or kids.  Instead  he works from home: organizing and coordinating visits between adopted children, who are now adults, with their birth parents. It has become no secret that doing this, for a salary twice as less as the restaurant he left, Dale Petroff, felt a rebirth of sorts. The considerable weight he gained bore no conscience to him; if anything, it made him more confident, like some jolly old feller you could look up to, someone who’d gladly give you a hand, all for nothing except a smile and a thank you.
         His wife became more beautiful with age. Her slender, feminine figure still reminded him of when they first met. She too, became more tolerant, more in love with her husband.                    
         One day Dale woke up to sirens indicating a tornado warning. After gathering all the children (now 9, 11 and 14), their cat Axl and dog, Fremont, and his wife, and huddling with them in their sizeable basement, the warning quickly subsided, until only seconds later, it sounded again. Dale, the dad, the father, the work-from-homer, the heavy- set jovial master of most ceremonies, spoke:
         “Hang on a second, I’m gonna take a look outside. Everyone, DO NOT MOVE AN INCH,” he said, and walked upstairs and out the front door.
         Dale stepped out to eerie calmness. With clouds parting at a frantic pace, he walked north up Sandusky, on an empty street with vacant stores, restaurants and parks and directly into a Greyhound bus station.
         “One way to Deluth, please.”


                                       THE END!