Tom Oatmeal

As the Termination Robot Man would say, (robot voice) "I've come back...baby."

[gomtotemeal]

Thanks for blazing your guacamole story. Going down your whole blog really made my night. You’re incredible!

That means the world! Thank you so much for the kind words!

[gomtotemeal]

You don’t have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off. And while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the baby’s soft cartilage head into something a little more modern. It might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but let’s see where the dog is going with this.

[gomtotemeal]

It wasn’t until we were driving home from dinner that my wife Diane told me that the chips and guacamole I had been eating hadn’t been meant for the entire table.

“Deb and Gary ordered it for themselves when you were in the restroom.”

“What!?  But I thought that everybody was…”

“Nope, just you.”

“Oh no!”

Diane slouched casually down in the passenger seat and kicked her feet up on the glove box.

“It was strange,” she said. "Your face was so red and contorted.  It was like you were eating just to see if you could eat everything.“

In a cold sweat I thought back to the dinner and realized that my wife’s description was spot on. Not only had I partaken in the chips and guacamole, I had been attacking them like a starved animal.  At one point I was even rhythmically alternating between hands the way a boxer might attack a heavy bag. Left chip, Right chip. Dip, dip.  Eat, eat.

"You couldn’t have told me?” I asked weakly.

“We were trying to tell you without making a big deal out of it,” said Diane. "I called your phone a couple times and I know Greg was trying to kick you.“

"That was Greg?  Christ, I thought that was you!”

And in fact, I HAD noticed the kicking. Thinking it had been a rare moment of erotic spontaneity from my wife, I had returned the ‘kick’ by removing a dress shoe and pinning my opponent’s leg with a single stocking foot before sliding my toes inquiringly up and along the length of the accompanying inner-thigh.

“How did Greg seem when we left?” I asked.

After Diane went to bed that evening, I sat awake sipping whiskey sours and replaying the evening’s events in my head. It wasn’t until after my third or so drink that I decided it was best to simply call up Deb and Gary to apologize and explain the miscommunication. But I was unprepared!

“Hello?” answered a groggy voice.

“Avocados,” I slurred.

“Who is this?”

I hung up.  

The next morning it dawned on me that probably every single phone had Caller ID. I wanted to ask Diane if Deb and Gary had Caller ID, but in a way that seemed casual so as not to reveal my actions from the night before.

Over coffee I said, “So last night Barb was telling me that Deb and Gary don’t have Caller ID. Haha! Man! Is that even true?”

“Why would Barb say that?”

“She just did, goddammit!”

[gomtotemeal]

At dinner, my wife Diane told me that Deb and Gary were going to stop by for drinks later and that it might be nice to put out one of the good candles.

“Oh?” I said. “Which ones are Deb and Gary?”

“They’re our next door neighbors.”

“Hmm..."

“I thought it might be nice to light one of the Yankee candles.”

“Isn’t that a little excessive?” I asked. “It’s not like we’re sleeping with them. At least. It’s not like I’m sleeping with them.”

I eyed my wife suspiciously, but she remained focused on her dinner.

“I just thought we’d light it for a little while."

“And then what is our excuse for blowing it out?” I asked. “When the time comes, what do we tell them? How do we extinguish the candle in a way that seems casual and good-natured?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I said I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think of that.”

“You never do, Diane. It’s a miracle we’re not sleeping in the streets.”

We ate in silence for the next five minutes as my mind worked towards a possible compromise. I wasn’t a monster.

“Describe their breathing habits,” I said. “Are they excitable? Do they breathe heavily?”

“Forget it,” said Diane. “I don’t even care at this point.”

“I just don’t want them breathing up our expensive candles!”

“I said forget it.”

A week later, there was a fire in the locker where I kept the candles. They melted together into one, gigantic candle. It was too horrible to look at and so I had the firefighters put the candle into a garbage bag so I didn’t have to see the damage.

We buried it in the backyard. Diane cried, but it was a dry cry. There were no tears and I asked her about it.

“I guess I’m all cried out."

“I had a medical procedure,” I said, as I shoveled the last of the dirt onto the candle. “Where if my heart stops beating, I explode. I’m a human bomb.”

It wasn’t true, but if my suspicions were correct and it was Diane who had destroyed the candles, then I knew that I was next. I needed to buy some time until I could investigate the depth of my wife’s lies, starting with these supposed “neighbors.”

That night, from their closet, I watched uncomfortably as Deb and Gary made love in their bed. I had broken in to look for other proof and I guess they kind of surprised me.

“Okay. Well I guess the part about neighbors was real,” I thought. “Well played, Diane.”

[gomtotemeal]

Let’s say I operate a frozen pea factory and we run out of peas. I’d tell the workers, “Just fill the bags up with anything you can find for now and I’ll deal with it later.”

"Anything?"

"Yep. Anything that adds weight.”

But of course I totally forget so when I get a phone call about it later I haven’t prepared well enough to defend myself.

"Calm down," I say. "Start with telling me what was in the bags."

"What the fuck does it matter what was in the bags!?" shouts the distributor. "They sure as shit weren’t filled with peas!"

"John. Listen to me.”

"No, YOU listen to ME dammit!"

As he continues on about lawsuits and damage estimates, I take a moment to daydream about a shipment of peas that arrives just minutes before John confronts me in person to close down my factory.

"You’re lucky," he tells me.

"And you’re not," I say, pulling out a tiny pistol that uses frozen peas or soybeans as ammo.

I fire several times, peppering John’s face and midsection, but even in my dream the pea gun is a useless novelty item incapable of inflicting any real damage. Stunned, he charges at me and we wrestle on the floor of my office until I snap out of my daydream.

Of course, in reality when John finally does show up at my office, I don’t actually try to kill him with a pea gun. Instead, I hide by the door and smash a vase over his head.

[gomtotemeal]

And so a month after they built the fifth Wal-Mart in our county, a little coffee shop opened just a few yards away.  

My coworker Rick said it looked like a giant amoeba just waiting to absorb any surrounding properties.

“The coffee shop?” I asked.

“No, Wal-Mart is the amoeba.”

“Oh.”

When I got back to my desk, I typed ‘amoeba’ into Google and realized that I had incorrectly pictured a centipede.

“To hell with Rick,” I thought. “I don’t need any more friends, anyway. I’m on friend overload.”

At dinner that night, the Wal-Mart came up again when my wife Diane mentioned how ugly it was to see another gigantic shopping center taking up space in our town.

“It looks like a giant amoeba just waiting to absorb that little coffee shop,” I said. “And then the coffee shop is like a centipede.”

“I don’t think amoebas eat centipedes. And besides, that’s the point.”

Diane went on to explain that the coffee shop, though legitimate and functioning by all measures, was really an art piece constructed by a group of private donors in response to the new Wal-Mart.

“The idea is that we’re intentionally not supposed to go to the coffee shop. That way, Wal-Mart customers will be forced to observe the gradual decay of a local business every time they enter the store.”

“Well, I’ve been going there all week,” I said. “I think the coffee is top-notch stuff. Plus, it’s on my way to work.”

“The coffee is supposed to be mediocre,” said Diane. “Keeping within the budget of most struggling businesses. It’s supposed to be virtually undrinkable.”

“Hmm…well I really like it.”

“Well, you can’t keep going or else you’ll ruin the project.”

“This is America,” I said. “And if I want a cup of mediocre, overpriced coffee, by god I will have it!”

Over the next several months, I kept drinking the coffee. Some days I even went twice. The quality of the coffee, I was told, gradually worsened as a result of my unwavering interest, but I never noticed and so I had no choice but to doubt the rumors.

My doubt remained intact even after overhearing a private conversation between the coffee shop’s manager and the cashier. I was standing by a tree and watching a teenager back his car into another car and I guess they didn’t see me.

“I know,” said the cashier. “I’ve tried that, but it’s like he doesn’t have taste buds.”

“Well, he’s single-handedly fucking up this entire thing.”

“So what then, poison? Would he even drink poison?”

“Now, that’s an interesting idea.”

“Stupid teenage drivers,” I thought.

In the end, they poisoned the coffee. I made it a month after that, but my failing eyesight and ravaged kidneys eventually left me bed-ridden.

“Well, they just opened another location,” said Diane. “Business is booming. I hope you’re happy.”

And I wasn’t happy, but I was somehow content and I thought about everything then: Wal-Mart, art projects, even little amoebas crawling through the forest, one-hundred legs working beautifully in tandem.

“Nobody ever wins in these kinds of things,” said Diane.

“But if you had to pick a winner, you’d probably pick me because the coffee shop was on my way to work.”

Diane sighed and left the room. I dozed off and in my dream, they did pick a winner. They picked me and I was led over to a small stage to choose my prize: A brand new recliner or two new kidneys!

“The recliner,” I inquired. “How far back are we talking?”

[gomtotemeal]

"In-dia-na! J-J-Jones! In-dia-na! J-J-Jones Jones Jones!" -Harrison Ford (on the lyrics to the Indiana Jones song)

[gomtotemeal]

At this point in the story, Dog Dad is living in a one-bedroom apartment with fifteen dogs. It has been four months since his release from prison and he is struggling to find even a part time job that grants him the flexibility to work around the mandatory care that is required to keep the dogs healthy.

As for the dogs themselves, they too have struggled to find work and sometimes when they are asleep, Dog Dad sifts through the bills and wonders if perhaps the warden had been letting him on when he mentioned that in the time that had passed during Dog Dad’s incarceration, dogs as a species had achieved momentous gains in intelligence.

Furthermore, it isn’t lost on Dog Dad that it’s possible he maybe misheard the warden entirely, and then, through time, allowed the interaction to become grossly exaggerated. Maybe the warden had not said “momentous gains in intelligence” at all. Maybe just something about how dogs only seemed smarter, which even then, would be one guy’s opinion versus verifiable truth.

“I’ll call the warden,” says Dog Dad to himself.

Thankfully, the warden answers on the first ring and Dog Dad expresses his concern.

“Yeah, look,” says the warden, “I’m glad you called because as soon as I said all that stuff about dogs, I immediately regretted it.”

“Huh,” Dog Dad frowns. “Because you know I did end up becoming a legal guardian to a ton of dogs in exchange for discounted rent.”

“Ah well, shit,” says the warden. “Shit. Shit. Shit. I feel like I always do this. I want to make people happy, you know? I want to be the one to share good news and so I guess I just embellish certain details here and there and oh, well, goddamn it. I’m really sorry.”

“So just confirming: dogs aren’t smarter then?”

“As a species? No, probably not. Although what the hell do I know?

Just last night there was a dog on TV that was pushing a stroller.”

“Like a real stroller? With a baby inside? Like the dog was babysitting?”

Silence for a moment, then the warden speaks again. “When you put it that way, it was probably just an empty novelty stroller. God damn I really am sorry.”

Just then, Dog Dad is interrupted by a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, but it’s only one of the dogs.

“Oh, it’s just you, Mr. Slick,” says Dog Dad. “You scared me. What are you doing up so late?”

But Mr. Slick ignores Dog Dad and begins licking at a section of wood paneling where Dog Dad used to stick banana stickers.

Dog Dad hangs up the phone and goes into the room where the dogs are sleeping. Ever so gently, he spreads a blanket out over the dogs. Some of them are okay with it, but others wake up and try to bite at the corners and edges of the blanket.

“I guess they are pretty smart,” thinks Dog Dad. “Maybe that old warden was right after all.”

[gomtotemeal]

They built the world’s largest salad. The whole thing was set up in a park about an hour away from our home so my wife Diane convinced me that it might be fun to go see it.

“Deb and Gary are going this afternoon and so I thought we’d ride over there with them.”

“Will there be any left?”

“Oh, it’s not to eat,” said Diane. “It’s like an art piece. The Guinness World Records people will be there.”

On the way over, I started to talk about a Cobb salad I had at this place near my office that was pretty big.

“I usually eat only about half of it.”

“Well, I’m sure this one is much bigger than that,” said Gary.

“Jesus Christ, Gary. I wasn’t implying that I thought the Cobb salad I had was bigger than this salad. It’s just that all of this giant salad business has me thinking about large salads I’ve had before. God!”

“It was a joke,” said Gary. “Calm down.”

But I could tell from the muscles in his face that Gary was lying. Deb quickly chimed in with a request to hear about more of the big salads I’d had, but I was over it. The mood had been ruined.

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just get this thing over with.”

The salad was huge. According to a series of laminated signs, we learned that all of the produce had come by way of donations from local farmers and then a college in New York had commissioned a handful of artists to construct a gigantic ceramic bowl to put everything in.

We took pictures and afterwards I bought a t-shirt at the gift shop. It was powder blue with a graphic of the gigantic salad pasted right on the front. On the back was the date and city.

In the car, Gary said that the salad on my t-shirt just looked like a regular-sized salad.

“Bullshit,” I said. “It’s huge.”

“Well maybe it’s huge because you know that it’s huge,” said Diane. “But to someone who doesn’t know what it is, I can see how it looks like a regular salad.”

I looked at it again and realized that they were right. How could I have allowed myself to be seduced by the context of such a limited reality? The only place a gigantic salad can truly exist is sitting there right in front of you! Even photos were a stretch. I stifled my anger and humiliation with short breaths and concentrated on the scenery so as not to rip the t-shirt in half in a blind rage.

Gary had made me look like a fool twice in a span of mere hours and I desperately needed to restore balance. That night, I sat in my study and replayed the day’s events in my mind. Surely, Gary had to have slipped up somewhere and said or done something dumb.

“Diane,” I said. “Wake up.”

“God, what time is it?”

“Remember when we first saw the salad? Remember what Gary said?”

“I don’t know.”

“He said that the salad was so big that he’d need a pitchfork to eat it! Remember?”

She thought about it. “I guess. I really don’t remember.”

“He did say it! Ha! What an idiot!”

I clapped my hands together.

“Because, Diane. The ingredients were standard-sized ingredients. It was only the salad itself that was huge.”

“So.”

“So why the pitchfork?! Does Gary suddenly have a gigantic head with such a gigantic mouth that a regular fork won’t do? God, he’s so stupid! Isn’t he stupid, Diane?”

“I don’t know what your problem is with Gary.”

“I don’t have a problem with Gary! I just have a problem with an idiot who thinks that large portions automatically correlate with large utensils. I mean, Christ Diane! What an idiot!”

I could see that my wife wanted me to leave, but I wasn’t done yet.

“Why, that would be like thinking that…” I paused, a grin plastered to my face, and tried to think of a similar example containing both a large food item and another large utensil. But it wouldn’t come to me.

“It would be like what?” asked Diane.

“Nothing! I’ll think of it later.”

In the early hours of the morning, Gary was awakened by an anonymous phone call from the payphone outside of a nearby liquor store.

“Hello?”

“If someone gave you a gigantic sundae, you’d probably try to eat it with a snow shovel!”

 Click.

[gomtotemeal]

By his 139th birthday, the scientist existed as a severed head in a jar of fluid.  Crisscrossing wires jutted out of the sides of the jar and connected to large computers that did things that only the scientist himself could explain.

“I think I’ll get him a hat,” I told my wife, Diane.  “Everyone is going to get him movies and books, but I think a hat is something he might like.”

“Good idea,” said Diane.

The party was a small gathering of the scientist’s closest friends.  Most of them were intellectuals and ex-professors that had known the scientist for years.  I only knew him because Diane had worked as one of his lab technicians while she was completing her masters.

The conversations were intimidating and it didn’t take me long to saunter off.

“I’m just a regular guy!” I sang to myself.  “I’m just a robot guy who was sent from the future to eat these little appetizers!”

I ate most of the appetizers.   For the pigs in a blanket, I pretended that I was a giant and I had found a little hot dog cart in the street.  The imaginary hotdog vendor had information that I needed and the longer he stalled, the more hotdogs I ate.

“WHERE IS THE DISC?” I asked the nonexistent vendor in my best robot voice.  “WHERE IS THE DISC?”  I asked again before gobbling up another appetizer.

“Hey!  We’re doing presents!” a voice called from the other room.

As it turned out, the scientist liked the books and movies so much that I began to have doubts about my gift.  Maybe it was a dumb idea.  But it was too late.  His assistant opened the box and held the hat delicately, turning it in his hands as if he didn’t understand.

The other guests offered some polite Ooohs and aaaahs, with one woman adding, “What a cute idea!”

“I just hope that you went by the measurements of the jar and not my actual head,” said the scientist.

Everyone laughed along with him, but my heart sank. How could I have missed that consideration?

“Put the hat on me,” the scientist ordered his assistant.

The young man got to work trying to stretch the hat over the top of the jar, but my miscalculation was now obvious.

“It won’t fit,” said the assistant.  “It’s too small.”

The scientist was clearly embarrassed and his frustration turned quickly to anger.

“Keep trying,” he barked.  “Stretch it, you weakling.”

The guests shot nervous glances to one another as the assistant continued to struggle.

“Harder!” the scientist screamed.

“Hey, look,” I said.  “I can exchange it for…”

“Nonsense!”

With a final grunt, the assistant managed to get the hat onto the top of the jar.  He took a step back and smiled.

“It looks great..” he started to say, but the jar exploded.  Everyone screamed and some of the men raced into the kitchen to find another receptacle for the scientist’s screaming head.

“Oh God! Oh God, I am so sorry!”

The scientist glared at me for a second before his eyes rolled back in his skull.  He was dead.

On the way home, Diane said, “You’re honestly asking me why we didn’t have cake?  What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I didn’t mean it like, let’s serve cake!”  I shouted.  “Like let’s all sit down and talk and eat cake.  You added that part!”

“Then what did you say?”

“I said they could have put the cake out and let us kind of pick at it,” I explained.  “Just like to snack on, you know?  While we waited for the ambulance or whatever. Do they send a whole ambulance for a head?”

I looked at Diane, but she was looking out the window.

“It just seems excessive.  A whole, big ambulance for one, tiny head.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Oh so you’re not talking to me now.”