by Jon Plester

Typical! This is so typical! This sort of crap always happens to me. Is it because I’m a pushover, or is it because I’m such a people-pleaser that I have these very palpable perceptual blinders on? I put in all the effort, all the time organizing and planning and comparing schedules, and then this bullshit happens. I want to know why don’t other members of the most heavily armed criminal syndicates respect me? Is it because of my delicate constitution?

I went to great lengths to plan this very elaborate Mexican standoff and then neither of those jagoffs show up. It’s so infuriating!

You know it takes a lot for someone to put themselves out there like this, to be vulnerable like this with other people. Remember inviting your whole class to your birthday party when you were 13 years old, and nobody showed up? Well, that situation is completely synonymous to this situation, except your classmates are some of the meanest, cruelest assassins in the criminal world instead of being the meanest, cruelest emotional assassins in Thomas R. Grover Middle School. And instead of being worried about them tearing through your psyche with insults like “delicate boy” and “moist hands”, they’ll stab you with a big knife and murder you. I’m not sure which is worse.

Not to mention all the effort put into the planning the damn thing. Weeks it was! Weeks it took! The lengths I went to make sure that everything about this Mexican standoff, down to the very last detail, would impress world-renowned assassin Giovanni Lorenzo and the evil Dr. Takinowa. Do you know how hard it is to rent out the top level of a parking garage in a bustling city? Extraordinarily. It’s extraordinarily hard. People want to park there, and we’re making it so they can’t do that thing. And then they get mad and honk with their car horns. Their car horns are loud and it frightens me a great deal.

I’m so ticked off. I went to a lot of effort to make sure that we had everything we needed there. Just in case someone didn’t have two guns — because people need two guns to participate in a Mexican standoff — I stashed some spares around the parking garage ahead of time. Those were my own personal illegally bought guns that I spent illegal drug money to buy, my own personal illegal drug money. That is what I used to buy what I did for the thing. And I’m upset about it.

You know, Dr. Takinowa always does this sort of thing. I really should’ve known better. Like the time he said he was going to return my cousin unharmed, then sent me his severed head in a box. How inconsiderate can one guy be. But I keep making the same mistakes because I’m an idiot, a big dumb idiot. He’s equally as evil when it comes to honoring commitments as he is when it comes to viciously murdering family members — just a real savage.

I bought new clothes. I don’t know why, I just thought it would make me feel more confident in myself. I got this new, and very expensive, badass leather jacket that the saleswoman said made me look like “a real rough and tough son of a gun”, and boy was I beaming when she said that. I trusted Donna’s judge of character, as she had a very maternal disposition and I respond extraordinarily well to that sort of behavior. I thought Dr. Takinowa would really take to it, as well as Giovanni Lorenzeo, and that they would respect me for putting effort into my appearance for the dramatic standoff. I ended up getting so mad that they didn’t show up that I threw my jacket against the wall. Except I forgot I was on top of a parking garage and the jacket went flying off the roof and into the street below, falling into the back seat of a drop top convertible and driving off into the distance. I spent the rest of my personal illegal drug money on that jacket.

So here I stand, alone and cold on top of a parking garage, with more than enough guns but no adversaries to be seen. I’m very lonely. I just want respect, and that seems to be the one thing that illegal drug money can’t buy. I miss my jacket. I only hope that due to serendipity, Dr. Takinowa or Giovanni Lorenzo happen to see that convertible man and his new leather jacket, and they think to themselves “Boy, I’d really love to have a gun pointed at that guy’s face while some other guy points a gun at my face.” That would be a dream.

Jon Plester is a writer, improviser, filmmaker, and all-around bad boy from Philadelphia.