BABOONS LIVING ON GRANOLA

Monday morning.
There’s nowhere I need to be.
And nothing I have to do.
Once, this was the dream. But seeing as I never got round to putting something by for the proverbial rainy day, it’s the farthest thing from.
No matter how much I might have hated the day job, at least it gave me purpose. I’m not going to find much of that strolling along on this actual, non-proverbial rainy day in these depressing, gray woods, but maybe the fresh air will do me some good.
Yeah, right.
It’s not fresh air I need; it’s a job. And quick. The shitty severance I got isn’t going to last pissing time.
I’m laying the ground work for another sleepless night or ten, doing the mental arithmetic of just how much time pissing time amounts to, when I step ankle-deep into a mud-filled puddle.
Well, of course I do.
Cake, have some icing.
I squelch-limp over to a long-fallen tree and take a seat on one of its broken boughs. I don’t bother taking the shoe off. What’s the point? It’s forty degrees outside. Not like waving my sock around is going to help it dry any. I sit there long enough for it not to matter anymore. Long enough to drift off into my own little world of opaque pointlessness, a world so sealed off from this one I do not see or hear the little boy in the brightly colored raincoat until he’s standing right in front of me.

You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. That’s what my mom used to say. No idea where the hell it comes from, but I know what the hell it means, believe that. So when Flash Harry glides up alongside me in his two hundred thousand dollar ride, the right-hand side of his S-Class overstepping rudely into the bicycle lane, the gleaming black bodywork so close all I have to do is move my knee a bit to the left for it to touch me, I know what I gotta do: tumble to the ground screaming and crying like a soccer player in front of the opposing team’s goal. I tangle my legs up in the frame of the bike as I roll, for optics you understand, as I hear his brakes apply. The car stops on a dime, right the way you’d expect, and Mr. Mercedes climbs out, jogging up to me in his nice blue suit.

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My name is now Fintan, it would appear.
Unfortunate.
I’ve always hated that name. Puts me in mind of unwitting, socially awkward dorks who sit up the front of the class and bring the same sandwiches to school every day in aluminum foil. In other words: sad, boring bastards.
To you and me.
So, for a day or two, until I find someone better, a sad bastard is what I will have to be.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I’ll do all the other Fintans out there hiding in plain sight a favor and stick with it for longer than usual, just for the sake of injecting some personality and life into their insular little lives, maybe increase the stock price in their awful moniker.
Really. Come on. Christen your kid Fintan and you’re basically condemning them to a life of tedium. Not saying calling them Bruce would mold them into an automatic action hero, but it would be a step in the right direction.
If your name is Bruce, you have no choice but to lead an interesting life. The name demands it.
But anyway, look, suck it up, my friend. Fintan it is and Fintan you are.
I tuck the driver’s license back into the wallet, and then the wallet into what is now my new jacket. I tie his backpack around his ankles, fill it with rocks and push him off the ledge into the river below.

I’ve avoided him, since the first day I clocked him, the second time I climbed on to this piece of shit bus, on my third day in this piece of shit job.
And I’ve seen him on board every day since. In the same seat. With the same empty seat next to him.
Because everyone else on this thing avoids him too.
Like a Jehovah’s Witness.
Maybe that’s why he’s laughing, because Jesus, or whoever it is they bang on about, is by his side filling with him the good word, and it is as good as he had hoped. And instead of knocking on your door relentlessly, wanting to share it all and read to you from his good book, he’s decided to keep all that goodness to himself.
That would be one reason why he’s laughing.
But all the time? This guy, he’s laughing every day, every time I see him.
All the goddamn time.
Nobody, including me, looks or stares for fear of making eye contact.