Me Against the Planet: Punching, Murder, Recycling, and {Vengeance} (in that order)

Now I know what you’re thinking. Battered, bruised, body aching. One arm raised up in the mightiest suplex you’ve ever seen, about to slam my mighty limb into the biggest, baddest, meanest dude of them all. That’s right. The planet Earth itself. How did I possibly get into this situation, you ask. Starting in the middle—that’s called in media res, or so I’ve heard. But I’m not in the business of storytelling. I’m in the business of righteous violence.

Look, when my daughter was kidnapped by Ukrainian gangsters, I single-handedly beat each and every one of their faces in. When my son was kidnapped by British eco-terrorists, I alone broke each and every one of their bones. And when my wife was kidnapped by a Portuguese-Norwegian-Nigerian-Hawaiian-Chinese crime conglomerate (a crime-glomerate, as we call them), I calmly communicated my feelings using the diplomatic language of brutal fistfighting. I pulverized every unfortunate soul that had ever even considered joining up, to the point where a doctor giving a post-mortem on their bodies noted that they were not such much bodies filled with internal organs as they were “blood-filled black-and-blue water balloons.” That’s who I am.

So when the planet Earth comes after my family, here I am trying to make it right.

I don’t care that the planet Earth is our “home.” It attempted to bury my family in a landslide, and destroyed our entire home. Everything we held dear, gone, in an instant. Yes, if you ask my family (as I cannot, because they have not been returning my calls), it seems as if the bombs I kept in the weapons shack up the hill (for our own safety and use against those who would do use harm) exploded. But did they really? I know I put them away correctly. I wouldn’t have, say, accidentally armed one, despite what my wife, son, and daughter may yell at me to admit. There was no evidence of tampering at the scene, according to local law enforcement and some of my old buddies from “the Agency.” But that doesn’t matter. No, that landslide is all the proof I need.

The Earth itself is plotting to destroy me, and I’ve only got one option left: To go after it, first.

Now, my family might say, “Jack, it’s a planet, it can’t be plotting against you.” They might say, “See a psychologist. We’ve all been through a lot, and I think your understandable paranoia might be getting the better of you.” And they do say this. Often. But I’m not here to “think this through.”

The only kind of thinking I do is with my fists. It’s a style of thinking I call “punching.”  I know it might seem strange. But if I’ve learned anything on this journey across the Earth, one furious punch to the ground at a time, it’s that the Earth is deceptive, and cannot be trusted. I do not fault my family. They will understand, as they always do, when the Earth itself has fallen to my mighty fists.

That said, you can only punch the ground so many times before you doctor says, “Jack, your hands have so many fractures you look like your insides are made of stained glass windows.” Specifically, it was the blood-balloon doctor from before. I like that guy. I do not like the Earth. And if I can’t punch the Earth, I will step on it, slightly more forcibly than before. I will drive the biggest SUV I can purchase with the lowest gas mileage, which I will pay for out of what is no longer a shared account. I will pay for it by working on an excavation crew, digging up the Earth is a hollow shell, which I will fill, with all the non-biodegradable material that I could but do not recycle. I will only take a single day off every 4 years, specifically to vote for whichever presidential candidate is most likely to pollute and has the least restraint when it comes to our nuclear arsenal. And I will not sleep, and instead spend every night screaming up at the night sky, crying out for an asteroid to do a cool team up with me and obliterate this cruel planet upon which I stand!!!

Asteroids are loose cannons, but they get results.

My wife, she says, “Jack, just admit it. You messed up. That’s all I want.” But I can’t do that, knowing there’s a real enemy out there. I know I’ll see them all again. I ask friends, “Where do you think they’re living now?” And they just say, “For all you know, man, might as well be the moon.” Well, guess what?

I’m coming for you next, moon.