Have a Brain Slug

Spring is just around the corner and you know what that means: more brain slugs!  Wherever the weather is nice, neighbors are getting along with neighbors, and folks have loaded refrigerators, brains slugs are bound to show up.  This is probably because they cause all of those things.

My love affair with brain slugs started a couple weeks ago.  I share an apartment building with some pretty odd neighbors, and I awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of a terrible fight.  My first instinct was to mind my own business, but something inside me compelled me to jump out of my warm and cozy bed to see if I could help.

My neighbor Arthur was shrieking for my help right there in the middle of the hallway.  He had pinned another neighbor, Albert, to the floor, who was grunting and writhing as if possessed by the devil himself.  “Get ‘em off!”, he shouted.  “Get off of me!”

His body was covered in mysterious green blobs which were attached to him.  His clothes were filthy and torn.  His eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was draped over his bones as if he were starving.  In hindsight, I realize that this was because he was ripping and tearing off his little green helpers.

I helped Arthur restrain him, as a wildman like that could pose a real threat to others in the apartment complex.  Sure enough, I found out later that he had made a nuisance of himself to several of the neighbors.  More importantly, though, he had bruised up, chopped up, and even killed many of the helpers, many of which were slithering toward me and Arthur to get away from him.

I finally punched Albert hard enough to knock him out cold, and gathered up all the adorable little guys, so they could have some place to stay until I could find them a home.  Arthur and I lifted Albert’s limp body up and drug him back into his apartment.

Well, I had no idea how terrible Albert had been.  As it turns out, he had suffered from a severe case of cephalopodaphobia, a terrible mental illness which causes you to brutally attack brain slugs.  A search of his apartment confirmed that he had even flushed some down the toilet and shoved some in the garbage disposal.  It was The Splatter.

How sick!  I know you agree with me that cephalopodaphobia is the worst moral disease that can happen.  It was very obvious from simply looking at Albert that he was seriously disturbed, and seriously in need of some brain slug therapy.  I sat down the next morning with my wife, my son, and my daughter, and warned them about this terrible affliction.

The next few weeks were really enlightening for me.  Now we all have brain slugs and they make everything better.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s been challenging dealing with all the rapid changes in our house, but my new perspective has allowed me to see just how immoral my old way of life was.

I had always fancied myself as running a pretty happy and functional home.  What I had actually been doing was being a big bully, just like Albert.  I had been telling my wife how to dress, telling my daughter to come home before it gets dark, and punishing my son for talking back to me.  I had even been cruel to the family dog, Barky, not allowing him to eat people food or get up on the furniture.

My wife started wearing my work uniform and told me that I was only to wear my pink pajamas in the house.  My daughter announced that she would come home when she feels like it.  My son started huffing paint fumes and watching porn videos right in the middle of the living room.  Barky snarled and snapped at me from on my daughter’s bed, and I left him be.

That’s a lot for a man to take in all at once, and at first I was really upset about the whole thing.  My son, Boomer, however, explained to me that they had all suffered under my tyranny for so long that a certain period of affirmative empowerment is fair and appropriate.  The whole thing was harsh, but fair, and I was as disgusted by how mean I had been as they were.

But I was really too busy to get too upset.  As my brain slugs multiplied, some of them slithered down from my forehead and attached themselves to my arms, my chest, and even my privates.  One even slithered into my wallet.

What were they doing down there, you might ask?  Enhancing me!  I felt stronger, more righteous, and more virile than ever before.  In fact, I opened my wallet shortly after the little guy crawled in there and money just started pouring out!  How cool is that!?

I had money spilling out of my wallet like a fountain and my son refused to help in the workshop.  I had more important missions than working, anyway, so I closed the workshop down and sold all of my equipment.  After all, if I needed any more money, I could just dig deeper into my money fountain.  I regularly handed over fistfuls of it to my family, the dog, and random people in the neighborhood.  I really owe them all big time for having been so mean in the past.

But we didn’t only liberate ourselves from my strictness, we all realized that we needed to liberate ourselves from a lot of our old ideas.  I flipped through all my books, throwing out all of the ones from the mean old days.  The most disgusting one, perhaps, was a true story about this guy who reminded me of Albert.  He spent much of his life arguing against the brain slugs and demanding that people detach them from their foreheads.  The whole story was very cephalopodaphobic, but the brain slugs nailed him to a pole and laughed at him while he died, so at least it had a happy ending.

Things certainly have changed a lot.  My daughter and Barky are getting along together in a way which truly defies expectations and confirms that they’ve both been liberated.  My son has really expanded his horizons by sniffing new household chemicals and introducing me to some videos of people doing things that I would have never imagined.  My wife calls every now and then.  We never see her anymore, except in some of my son’s videos.

As you can tell, there certainly has been a lot of progress, and it’s all entirely thanks to these awesome brain slugs!  People from throughout the apartment complex are jealous of me because I have the most, and are always coming around and loaning me money.  It’s certainly a safe bet, given how much money spills out of my wallet every day!

While things have been getting better and better in our apartment, me and my son have been shocked to learn that things have not been going so well in some of the neighbors’ apartments.  It ended up spilling over into our apartment when Ali, who is CRAZY, threw a beer bottle through our living room window.

My son and I put our pajama bottoms back on and stormed out of the house.

“This could have hit one of our brain slugs!”, I shouted with rage.

We looked all over the place for Ali, but we couldn’t find him.  That’s when we learned from our brain slug friends that his brother Mo in the next apartment was stockpiling beer bottles, and intended to throw them all at brain slugs.  Infuriated, and filled with righteous rage, we kicked in his door, shared the gift of brain slug with all of his family, and they (having been liberated), turned against him, strangling him to death.

We never did find the beer bottles, but that’s beside the point.  NOBODY hurts our brain slugs!  These poor little defenseless guys are our dearest friends, and you’re either with us or against us.

One of Mo’s neighbors also suffers from cephalopodaphobia, and we’re pretty sure he’s gathering up baseball bats to kill off all of the brain slugs.  It’s probably smart to just break into his apartment.  In fact, he reminds us of Albert, and we won’t let The Splatter happen again!

Breaking into apartments is a moral and righteous act when you’re doing it to liberate people with the gift of brain slugs.  Unfortunately, though, I’ve been feeling a under the weather lately and some of the neighbors who have been loaning me money have started to whisper that I might be unwell and unable to pay them back.

My brain slugs assure me that this is only a temporary glitch.  All I need to do is sell some more of my stuff and borrow from some different people to pay back the previous people until the brain slugs can create more money.

Barky, who sleeps in the master bedroom with his entire pack now, has decided that the smartest thing to do is sell as much stuff as possible, borrow as much as we can get our hands on, and use that money to buy his pack more people food and buy some baseball bats to attack that neighbor.  He’s such an articulate and nice dog, and he’s definitely running the household better than I was.  Both the kids fully agree.

In fact, we all agree on just about everything.  I even agree that I’m a mean and worthless jerk.  Even though I’ve tried really hard to be better, I still find myself trying to eat people food and wishing I could sleep inside the house at night.

It’s very cold out here tonight and my bowl hasn’t been refilled in a couple days.  The draft goes right through the holes in my pajamas, but at least I have my brain slugs to keep me warm.  Thank God I have my brain slugs.

Here, have a brain slug…