Last Day

In the dull days I spend making pizzas, staring at chalkboards, and spitting off highway overpasses, my mind tends to wander. You see, my mind is like an old man at the mall, just walking from store to store aimlessly, without a reason to even be there. The things my minds thinks of can be pretty sick sometimes, but then other times I can get pretty dang philosophical. I'll question stuff that has never been questioned before. Who invented America? Do dogs bark differently in China than in Vietnam? These questions puzzle me and eventually I get frustrated, so I'll instead think of other things.

The other day I sat on a bus to Detroit and watched the beautiful sunrise from my seat near the back. The view was amazing to behold. The outlines of the far off buildings, the smoke rising from the processing plants, "Wow," I thought, "This must be what it's like to drive to Heaven." Then completely out of nowhere I think to myself, "What if this were the beginning of my last day on Earth?"

What would I do? Where would I go? Would I loot the Best Buy or the Circuit City?

Any question that makes you think of even more difficult questions such as those are worth exploring. And so I shall. I'll imagine myself waking up to find out it's the last day before everything is destroyed. If my imagery is too detailed and you begin to picture the end of the world yourself, please stop reading. No, I'm just kidding, grow a pair and finish the story.

(Wake up)

Assuming I knew the day before that the world was going to end, I would set my alarm for about 11 in the morning. No need to wake up early, it's not like the work is going to have me come in today, but I don't want to sleep into the afternoon and miss the chaos. I'd turn on the television and check the news to see various newsmen stressing about the panic in the streets all across the globe. They're telling me to stay inside, but come on, it's the end of the world, I gotta check this out.

I'd grab a Nature Valley bar and head outside to explore the destruction so far. Holy shit! The sky's on fire! Hot damn, I didn't expect that. The sky-blue sky is now a red-orange red, and instead of clouds, there appears to be gigantic pieces of sulfur. I guess the end of the world doesn't abide by the rules of physics like the us tax-paying Americans have to. Those sulfuric rocks should be falling! Anyway, I gotta get in my car and head to the city, because if there's some crazy madness going on, that's where it'd be.

After a 45-minute drive through relatively smooth traffic, I reach the heart of the city and just as I thought, it's like someone opened up the doors of the mental institution. People are flipping over cars and throwing Molotiv cocktails. Two kids are burping without saying "excuse me," they're out of control! People are throwing things out of high-rises and there's a jumper or two off every building. Some people just can't handle anything remotely Rapture-esque I suppose. Boy, I haven't seen the city this nuts since the Pistons won a championship.

If you're thinking I drove down here just to see children playing hot potato with makeshift explosives or car-flipping, you are wrong. I got an ex-girlfriend down here, and what better way to make up with her than "to save her when the whole world is going to Hell." It worked in Cloverfield, why not now?

I find her apartment to be in pretty good shape, no large mobs have come through her part of town yet. I hear a bullet whizz by me as I go to ring her buzzer.

"Sorry, mister," A young girl no older than 7 says to me.

"It's ok, sweetie. Just make sure to put that on semi-auto next time."

Haha...kids. I ring the buzzer and I hear her voice call my name, and when I reply, "Yeah, baby, it's me," she sounds all too delighted. I kick open the door, for effect, and race up the stairs to the 14th floor. Now you say to yourself, why not just take the elevator? Dedication, my friends. When my ex-girlfriend (Ann, by the way) sees me there, a sweaty mess, telling her the elevator was out of order, she'll be even happier to see the lengths I went to get to her. Reaching her floor and soon her door, I knock my special knock to let her know it's me. And to let you know, it's knock, slap, knock, punch. She opens it immediately.

"You raced up the stairs for me?"

Her smile tells me she's impressed. Haha...women. I grab her hand and pull her along, all the way back down. 14 flights are so much easier on the way down, I gotta tell you. I kick open the front door, once again for effect, and we jump in my car.

"Where's the nearest Best Buy?" I ask.

She tells me it's not too far from here.

"Good, 'cause we got some looting to do."

I push the gas down hard, just like I've always dreamt of doing. My girlfriend likes the rush, I can tell, even though she's telling me to slow down and that I hit a businessman or something. No time for jaywalkers, I need to grab that iPod I've always had my eye on.

"But it's the end of the world, what do you need an iPod for?"

Geez, Ann can be a brain idiot sometimes. I really should have looted first. I find the store's parking lot and find a place to park, covering three spaces and tell her to stay in the car. I don't plan on this taking long and I don't need her looking at everything in the store, saying, "Do we already have this movie? I should get this camera so we can take cute pics together." I shudder at the thought. I kick open the doors to the store to see the place is a wreck, but with a lot of tech stuff still left. iPod...iPod...where are you...there you are! I run for it but see a middle-aged man grab it and smile. I latch onto his shoulder and spin him around.

"Give me the iPod."

"There's still 3 left," he babbles.

"I want that Cerulean Blue version you got."

"I'm getting this for me kid, buddy!" He points to a young boy about two feet away.

I look at the kid and I see myself in him for a moment. I wonder if my dad would have ever gone looting for an iPod on his last day on Earth, just for me. You know, he would have. But that would have been teaching me that stealing is ok when it really isn't. I kick the guy in the shins and take the iPod from him. I then look the young boy right in the eye and tell him, "This is what happens when you steal," and then run out of the store.

Back in the car, I can see Ann fiddling with the radio. Damnit, I hate when she screws around with my shit. I hop in and drive out of there.

"Where are we going?"

Seriously, why does Ann always bug me about the smallest things? My brain races like a rat through a maze. My parents house? No, they'd make me do laundry if I was there. Church? Crowded, probably. Maybe my other ex-girlfriend's apartment. Oh, right, Ann's with me. She probably wouldn't dig that. There is that cottage though, about 50 miles out of the city, that my family use to go to on weekends in the summer. Bingo. If I remember correctly, I left my Sega Saturn there too.

Now, as I exit the city's limits and reach the boring freeways, I don't have much to talk about. Also, I don't want to bore you with me and Ann's intimate conversation. So I'll backtrack a tad and let you know the other shit that was going down on this last day. It's pretty freaky.

From those giant pieces of sulfur in the sky came skeletons, armed with swords and shields (a little primitive if you ask me) and they began attacking the earth's population. Now these aren't the funny talking skeletons from cartoons, these dudes meant business, I mean they actually slaughtered everyone. They didn't kill any Jewish people though, turns out their religion was the right one and they're being spared. They're very modest about it.

"No, no, please, no need to congratulate," My Jewish neighbor told me, "I'm just some schmuck who went to temple every now and then. My friend, Morty Hornstein, now that's a Jew. You should go congratulate him before he goes to get his morning bagel and coffee."

Haha...Jews. Anyway, aside from that weird skeleton army, there was disease spreading around like wildfire. Smallpox, plague, redheadedness, it was everywhere and attacking people tenfold. By dusk there were people all over the place, lying face down and not moving a bit. It was a really sad sight to see. Just imagine all the wallets I could've taken if Ann would've had just let me stop the car for one minute. No, no, no, we had to keep driving because of the demon dogs chasing us. Big deal, so they had horns and were as fast as a Ferrari, what are they gonna do? Dogs just love to chase cars, you've never actually seen a dog catch one. They wouldn't know what to do with it.

So thankfully, because of my full gas tank we were able to evade the skeleton army (who didn't bother to bring tanks) and the demon dogs invading our planet. Oh, and because I got my shots last week, none of those sicknesses affected me. Okay, one interesting thing did happen on the way to the cottage, the radio station we had on played the same song twice. Pretty weird, right?

So we reached the cottage in the remoteness of the woods just before the sun went away on our last day on Earth. Ann and I got out of the car and strolled over to the hill next to the outhouse to watch the sunset. It was positively gorgeous. I got a bonus point for comparing it's beauty to Ann's face. We smiled at each other and I offered half my Nature Valley bar to her. We munched away and watched the bloodiest sunset ever seen on Earth turn into a night so dark that just the thought of how dark it was would make you cry and renounce God.

We wouldn't know about that darkness stuff, by that time we were already inside playing on my Sega Saturn. Then we hit the hay, kissed each other goodnight and actually slept quite well for the end of the world.

(fall asleep)

You know, after putting myself in that situation I don't think my last day on earth would really be that bad. I think people make too big a deal of it. It's really a day of opportunities more than anything. I rescued my ex-girlfriend, looted a sweetass iPod, and drove 150 mph for the first time. I never regretted anything I did and I lived life to the fullest. Huh, you know, I think the best motto to live life by really is, "live everyday like it's your last." Just pretend everyday has riots, skeleton armies, and sulfur rock clouds, and I think you may just appreciate life a little more. Alright, I gotta head out, I got an overpass to spit off of.