Congratulations on Abandoning Your Duties!

A man’s got to defend his family’s honor.  Your pappy taught ya that nigh ons a forty years ago and it stuck like most of what he taught ya on account a him teachin’ it with his belt and the back of his hand.  He also taught you a mean recipe for blueberry pancakes.

Today you’re going to put the first one of those lessons to work when Hoss, your cousin, comes in to tell you that your daughter Cheryl, who been takin’ classes over at the uni-varsity, has been spotted down at the Fashion Bug in the company of that there college boy what been tryin’ to make book learnin’ seem stylish in your home town.

You’ll thank him for his notice with a quick five across the eyes and then grab your gun and head off to the mall, leaving Home Depot abandoned.

While you proceed to hunt a resourceful young man and your attractive, entirely alienated daughter through the mall Home Depot will become a wasteland of sorts.  Without your steady hand at its helm, theft will become commonplace.  Feral children, unattended, will construct crude shelters out of the supplies offered them by the store.  Men and women will meet, fall in love, copulate in these shelters as the children watch, and birth and raise whole families.  Several people will take shits in display toilets.

Your underlings will have no idea what to do.  They will become a sort of shadow government, intervening in only the darkest of times to insure that Home Depot does not decay into chaos completely.  They will become, to the denizens of Home Depot who now toil in its foul heart, a sort of pantheon of dark figures who haunt the shadows, ever watching, waiting to intercede.

Meanwhile you’ll corner your daughter and her boyfriend in an in-mall Wal-Mart.  The young man will get two rifles from the gun section and your daughter will get some bullets from the bullets section (separated post Columbine) and the two of them will have sex in a dressing room in the children’s section and then bait you into a mass open area near a fountain in the mall where your daughter will shoot you in the heart.

As you die slowly you will be granted a vision of what has become of Home Depot in your absence.  This moment of clarity will bestow upon you the knowledge that you truly are a failure in life, and that a man should not abandon his post, even to avenge his daughter’s honor when she consensually has sex with a big city dandy who came out to Kansas to make sure people got book learnin’.

Congratulations on Abandoning Your Duties!