I felt something in my stomach that could only mean one thing; mistake. I forgot to check the dimensions. Even an idiot knows what twelve plus twelve is, and the idiot that was making his way towards me was no exception. The only thing he was an exception to was healthy living. I could hear his oxygen mask from two hundred feet away. Not really, but I imagined that I could. Almost like a dinosaur stomping as it makes it’s way through whatever universe our creator let them explore before he decided for no reason, to destroy them. Well, almost all of them. The Loch Ness monster managed to escape the powerful wrath. I couldn’t help but wonder if our creator had stock in Scotland. It’s the only explanation. Well, that or Nessie doesn’t exist. Bullshit. If the creator exists, the mythical creature definitely exists.

There he is. I thought so long about how I’d avoid him that I forgot to avoid him. Standing right in front of me. He’s a sad little man, with a very large amount of girth. If you were to pull a deep fryer away from the wall at a family owned Mexican restaurant that doesn’t believe in food safety and a cleaning regiment, you’d find some large chunks of grease. Imagine one of those chunks morphed into a little person and that person is standing before you. Of course they still have many of their grease chunk features. Most notably they just look disgusting.

The man who was once a grease chunk, is Dave. He’s worked here for thirty-six years and he’ll often remind you of that. As if doing something you hate for that long gives you more power over the person who does not. Did I mention the fingernails? I did not. They’re fairly long. Longer than most transexuals who don’t care about their appearance. Under his fingernails is a collection of dark debris that most likely started to collect when he was eleven years old. I imagine him at that time of his life sitting in a fifty-five gallon oil drum, that still contains oil, while his father smokes his last Camel and debates on whether or not to pull eleven year old Dave out of the drum before he gets more smokes.

He’s already telling me about my mistake and I’m not even listening to him. I start to listen about halfway into his speech and I realize that it’s actually his mistake, yet he thinks it was mine. I’ll go along with it. This is all he has. I have a little more. I have hygiene and I have clothes that appear to be clean, even though I wore them the day before. It appears he soaks his clothes daily in the same oil drum he once sat in many years ago.

I tell him I’ll fix it this afternoon, after making roughly two seconds of actual eye contact with him. Just enough time to know that he still needs an oxygen mask to breathe and can’t make the thirty second walk into my area of the office without almost dying. It’s not his genes and it’s not his thyroid gland. He’s just a greedy son of a bitch, who didn’t know when to stop, despite countless doctor’s most likely telling him he’s going to die. Perhaps he’s more into philosophy than I thought and that he thought the doctor meant one day he’ll die, just like we’ll all die. Wow, he walked away and I didn’t even know it. I was just drifting off.

First part in a series. I have no idea how many parts there will be, but I do know the next two will be done soon.