Pac-It-All-In-Man

In “Anecdotal Tales”, stories will be told. Some will be fun, some will not. Some will be great, some will be less so. Some stories are true, some are merely possible. This is one of them.

Pac-It-All-In-Man

“One should eat to live, and not live to eat.” –Moliere

“You just don’t understand, Mario.  They push and they push my buttons, and they just won’t leave me alone!”

The man wearing suspenders nodded his head behind the bar, his bushy moustache bobbing along in agreement.  He knew by now that the round fellow didn’t actually want a response, he merely wanted to vent.

“I mean look at me.  I used to have a healthy yellow exterior, y’know?  I was in prime twenty, thirty years ago.  But I just can’t catch a break!  And then, when the missus wants to go out?  We do the same thing we’ve spent all day doing!  It’s a never ending cycle of abuse!”

Mario closed his mind off to the pudgy character’s complaining and thought of his own special someone.  Maybe the princess of his life would join him and they could run around town tonight.  That was, of course, unless his brother had already made plans.  Bros before damsels, as they say.

Mario realized that the round guy had been talking all this time.  To the bartender’s ears, it had just droned on into some sort of “wonka wonka wonka”-esque white noise.  He looked the blob in the one eye that he could see and tried to match it with a sympathetic ear.

“You know what I do all day?  Eat.  That’s it!  I see something, I eat it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s yellow, or sparkly, or even glowing.  I eat it everything.  Every time that I try to pass up the tiniest pellet or morsel, the boss sends me back for more.  You think your grandmother got upset if you didn’t clean off your plate?  She was nothing compared to these guys!

“Then there’s the missus!  She’s as bad as I am.  You know how you’re supposed to diet together but never work together?  Keep the relationship healthy?  Well we have things the exact opposite of that.  She works for the same guys that I do and they couldn’t give a darn about her girlish figure.  They treat her exactly the same as me.  They don’t care how nice she looks in that bow.  They don’t appreciate how long it takes her to put on her lipstick or eyelashes.  They just send us into these cramped rooms and make us eat and eat and eat.  When does it end, Mario?  When?”

Mario only shrugged his shoulders and handed a fireball cocktail to his former coworker.

“You used to have to jump through the same hoops, I remember.  They had you in that tiny room with that ape of a boss.  All day long he’d throw assignments at you and all day long you had to jump over the obstacles and bureaucracy to get any face time with him.  Now look at you!  You can do whatever you want!  You get to run around outside, you drive race cars, I hear you even get to fly to far off worlds.  Who knew?”

The bartender watched his friend down the drink and felt bad for him.  It was true, he did look rather sickly.  Wrinkles were starting to form under the visible eye; he could only assume the same was true for the other.  His color was almost that of a moldy oyster, and if his form had once been circular, then the many feeding sessions had most definitely left him oval-shaped.

“I gotta find a way outta this maze, Mario.  They can’t keep sending me into room after room.  Day after day it starts out the same.  Even if I make great headway, they send me back to square one.  And now they can get ahold of me by phone!  I’m on call now?  That wasn’t the deal when we started out Mario!  I tell ya, those bosses are two-bit crumbs.  And me?  I’m just an eight-bit character living in a sixty-four-bit world.  I’m classic, I’m original; I’m not super!”

Mario watched the despondent man put his head on the bar and sob.  He didn’t have the heart to tell the character that the world had moved on past sixty-four bits decades ago.  Mario let his friend be.  Ol’ P-M had enough ghosts that haunted him already.

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