MEDIA CREDIT: Tau Zero via Compfight

 VENGEANCE!

Time Travel Style:

Let me be the first to admit that a great many things in my life that motivate me to take action. Some of these motivations are noble, the love of a friend, humanitarian ideals, etc. Some of these motivations are less than noble, for example, my need pathological need to consume one entire animal a week, and of course, pure, unadulterated revenge.

Now, you might be wondering to yourselves, “What does this fat-kid have to cackle madly and scream ‘I’ll show them all!’ about,” not counting the fact that you referred to me mentally as a fat-kid.  To answer that question, I think I’ll have to slide back through time in my time traveling jet stream. You can come with me if you like, but be sure you’ve consumed at least 50 times your daily requirements of Riboflavin.

Time travel can be a bitch on the body’s riboflavin supplies.

We’ll begin our time-tour with the earliest point I can remember being bothered by the people around me and move forward to the present day. I’d show you the future, too, but that sort of time travel leads to a bitch of a temporal paradox, and it’s a pain in the ass to fix.

Sorry.

First Stop – 5th Grade

Now, I’m certain that I was bullied before 5th grade, but honestly, it hadn’t ever bothered me. I think the early warning signs of puberty were starting to kick in at this point, and my lifelong battle with chaotic emotional outbursts and depression were setting in. I don’t remember what exactly spawned the particular emotional outburst the day that one of my fellow classmates, we’ll call him Jeremy Dickhead for this story, became the most clever boy in grade 5 and uttered the name that would carry me on into High School, “Fat Blubberton.”

To this day, I dread interacting with people who knew me back then because I know it’s there, inside their minds. That’s the name they associate with me, even if they don’t mean to.

So, our first stop on the time-travelling vengeance spree is the Cambridge Elementary School Playground in 1994.

You can watch as a tubby kid sits alone on the chopped rubber tires beneath the electro-static generating death slide and cries quietly to himself. Then, watch as I arm him with a plasma rifle. The ensuing revisions in history will quiet obviously result in a better, more perfect world.

Second Stop – Mrs. Thomas’s Debate Class

I was 14 when I started Belton High School in August of 1997. This was a mere 3 months after my older sister, talented super-genius, had graduated.  I love my sister. She’s a brilliant, caring woman, and all of my memories of her are quite positive. Apparently, though, that wasn’t necessarily true of the kids she was leaving behind at good ol’ BHS. For some reason a handful of people who were now the Upperclassmen running the Theater and NFL cliques had decided that they didn’t much care for my sister, and from that it was decided that I was going to be their scapegoat for it.

This particular stop will take us to Mrs. Thomas’s classroom in September of my Freshman year for what was the first of many evenings spent unsupervised inside the school. I mean, sure, technically there was adult supervision somewhere around, but that was really just a formality. I want to point out that unlike in the previous vengeance stop, I won’t be giving my younger self a plasma rifle, because, let’s face it:

A) I already have one thanks to the time travel magic to 3 years earlier, and B) it wouldn’t be an right response this time around.

The hardcore hazing I got that year was brutal. I remember very vividly how it tore me up and down the emotional scale, but I also remember that when it was all said and done, I was accepted as part of that group and went on to be a pretty respected member. I needed the verbal thrashing those kids gave me to be able to develop the bit of with that would find me accepted into the friends I’d make much later in life.

So, naturally, I would like to go back to that day and arm 14 year-old Matt with the only weapon he would ever need again: spontaneous catty insult generation. A skill that I would not naturally develop until well after it would have served me in High School. That little change probably would have made the difference between being “Dug, the fat neurotic kid that didn’t even get to use his own name,” and being simply, “Matt.”

Of course, in retrospect, without being Dug, I could never have become Düg, the least talented member of the international sensationalist act “Kat Phüd,” but that’s a story for another day.

Final Stop – December 2003 – Springfield, MO

I’m not sure if I’ve really explained how much I loathe Ford F150s and the people who drive them. Now, I should preface that the following theory doesn’t apply to people who actually work their trucks, you know, farmers and contractors and the like. It only applies to people who traded into a F150 as a more masculine version of the Soccer Mom SUV.

That said, here is my theory:

Matt’s Theory of F150 Douchery: Drivers of the Ford F150 are all giant douches who lack basic human decency and should be treated as though they have leprosy.

This theory began to develop for me in late December 2003. It was the week between Christmas and New Years, and I was driving my third-hand Chevy Cavalier, which is a tiny, tiny car (predecessor to the Cobalt, which itself got transmorphed into a Chevy Cruze). To give you an idea, my passenger was a tall, thin man, and his knees basically rested in his chest while riding in my car. We were sitting at a yield sign, waiting for some pretty heavy traffic to clear out when I got waved in by a nice citizen.

That’s when a douche-hat in an F150 decided to pay attention to the traffic in front of him, switch lanes at the last-minute to avoid hitting the guy waving me in, and smashed into my cavalier so hard that his tires rode up my fender and onto the hood of my car before rolling back down.

(Side Note: I decided to never buy another  Chevy vehicle again when my airbags went off a week later.)

After exchanging insurance information, the guy convinced me not to wait for the cops to arrive. I agreed because I was running late for work, and am to this day still pretty convinced that every time I see a cop they will beat me to death and throw me in prison for crimes against society or something.

I actually have no idea why that is. I’ve never been treated with anything but respect by a cop, even when I while arresting me.

A few days later, I got a shock of my life when I found out that the guy who drove away from crushing my tiny car with his massive dick replacement  truck had told my insurance company that I’d totalled it.

So, that’s why the last stop on today’s time-traveling vengeance tour is to put this giant concrete barrier full of spikes next to this intersection in Springfield.

Serves the douche right.

 

Man, I already feel better. Maybe I should time travel avenge myself more….

 

The Moral of Today’s Story: Friends don’t let friends drive F150s… or tickle a chubby freshman until he pees himself while hyperventilating.