Click here to read Part 1!

Enjoy Part 2!

11:52:

I owned a bar. That feels like forever ago, but I did. Yeah…yeah, I remember it now. How could I forget? “The Pond.” Ha-ha. The irony is not lost on me. That place was my life. The battlefield can really take a toll on a guy. I had bartenders, of course, but every Thursday night I made sure I was scheduled to work. Thursday was our “College Special.” Students received half-off drinks. I loved the huge crowd of aspiring actors, writers, CEOs, and whoever else poured through the doors like a river pouring into a pond, ready to mix and mingle, dance and laugh, drink and spend. They were some of the craziest nights I ever experienced, and I loved every second of it - everyone buzzing and just searching for someone to talk to, to impress, to persuade, or, sometimes, to intimidate. Frat boys came in, already drunk off their asses, and made complete fools of themselves, yet several women would still cling all over them. The stressed-out nerd, looking to forget all his stresses, ready to cut loose. A shy, quiet, new kid tried his hardest to break out of his shell, and sat in the corner; Jan’s favorites. That’s how I knew Jan. She was one of my bartenders. Sweet gal. Taking their orders, mixing their drinks, providing the breeding ground for relationships to form, to break, to mend; I was at the center of it all. With the drinks I mixed as their strings, and their naïve trust in me, I controlled their animalistic urges like they were my puppets. We were a pond, in a way - our own ecosystem, sharing and intertwining our habits and identities, becoming one living, breathing site. Don’t I have such a way with words? There I go again, off the deep end. Reel it back in, Johnny. Ha-ha.

Wow. That’s why God put me here - terrible puns. Hmm. Why am I here? I wasn’t a particularly bad guy. No goody-goody, that’s for sure, yet not bad. I don’t deserve to be trapped in this Toy Story hell for eternity. It’s just got to be some mix up. Like Sadam Hussein ended up in Heaven in my place and here I am, serving his term as a stuffed frog with his stitching just waiting for one more tug in the right direction to give way. ENJOY A MARTINI ON ME, HUSSEIN!

Focus, Johnny. Clearly, you’re here to learn a lesson, so let’s figure it out and move on. Phew… I’ll start by reevaluating my life. I guess you could say I was a control freak. My sister always said I was, anyways. But everything I did was perfect. Worth it. Could it be that simple? I need to experience complete loss of control to understand that control itself is pointless? Lesson learned, God! Beam me up! …guess that’s a negative.

Read Part 3 next week. Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts in the comments.