LET'S GET SMALL

I live in a tiny hamlet, so when I started going to a shrink I had to listen to my Dr. complain about her clients: mean wife beaters with orders of protection in place, doormat drunks, poor souls trapped in a double wide, with a bunch of grubby rugrats in shitty diapers, who couldn't stop crying. At first I was lumped in with the rest- a recently divorced, clean shaven, hypomanic, bi-polar, manic depressive, with suicidal tendencies. After a couple of years of therapy I let my hair and beard grow back, started drinking and smoking again, and got in this thing with Friendly. I felt 100% better. I began to get my old sense of the absurd back. She said i was a breath of fresh air. "Tell me again how she wanted to get her pussy tattooed." the Doc. pleaded. Who was shrinking who here?
My 49th birthday in late August came and went without much notice. Then, the next day I got a phone call. "Hey you." It was Friendly. She no sooner got on the phone than i heard Jeeves in the background. "Sorry." she said, "Can I call you back?" Somethings hadn't changed. We finally had the chance to talk calmly. It was as close to closure as we were going to get. I told her I had started karate and had stopped seeing a shrink. "She should've been paying me." I said. She told me she got a tattoo (on her lower back) of a big C- "for Christmo." she said. We hung up with mutual "I love yous."
For a little while I felt better. It had been a tough summer. After Friendly left, Monkey Balls also decided it was time to split. I think I was bummming him out. I was totally alone and wallowing in it. I went back and forth on Prozac and practiced my karate moves. The big oak that shaded my house was loaded with acorns and the squirrels had taken up residence. Each morning, at the crack dawn, the acorns rained down onto my roof like machine gun fire. My nerves were becoming more and more frazzled. Then one morning I'd had enough. I loaded up the 20 ga. The bloodbath began.