AM I THE ASSHOLE?

An Adventure through Space and Time

1–900–909-JEFF

While most people today view dreams as either completely random or the product of the subconscious being horny for their own mothers, Native Americans have a different viewpoint.

According to this TV show I saw, Native Americans view dreams as windows to other worlds. They think what you dream is a whole nother actual life you are living when you go to sleep, and these guys are spiritual as shit, so you know it must be true.

So it seems to me that these guys are describing what sounds a lot like the multi-verse theory that is so popular in Academia and Marvel movies these days, and if that’s true, not only does Kevin Feige owe them some serious dough, but we can extrapolate out from there that my childhood friend, Slappy, owes me a profound apology.

Let me explain: even though I am unaware of him doing anything wrong to me, per se, and even though I haven’t even thought of him in years, recently, I had a dream where Slappy and I were walking along a path we used to frequent in the woods of our hometown when for no reason, Slappy pushed me, and I fell in the bushes, scraping up my arm and getting mud all over my pants!

You may think this is no big deal, but it really hurt, and when I awoke, I was distraught.

“But it was just a dream, Eric! Calm down! You spit when you yell, and I’m getting soaked!” you might say if you were my wife.

I would tell her, like I would tell you, to go back and read what I just wrote: Science has proven that dreams are exactly like the multi-verse theory as it exists in popular culture.

That means in some universe, somewhere, Slappy actually did push me. I actually scraped up my arm and actually got mud on my brand-new pair of Grranimals.

More importantly to my argument, that alternate-universe Slappy is the exact same person as the Slappy who I know and used to consider a good friend. Those same instincts and desires are in him, even if he didn’t technically act on them given this precise set of circumstances.

So I was at a crossroads: I could either reconnect with my old pal, tell him what had happened, and accept his apology, or I could use my time machine to go back and exact some vengeance on him.

I feel the apology route was messy because what if he wasn’t up on the latest scientific theories like I was and didn’t feel he owed me an apology? Well, then that would just piss me off, and I would do the time machine thing anyway.

And before you freak out: yes, I have a time machine, but no, I will not go back in time and kill Hitler or stop 9/11. That’s not how time travel works. Get with it, people. This is real life, not Star Wars.

I traveled back in time to my childhood and snuck into Slappy’s house at the precise moment his family pulled out of the driveway on their way to their beach cottage in Rhode Island for the summer. I went up to his room and dialed the Sports Illustrated football phone he kept in there. This was a “landline telephone,” and the technology is lost to many of you now, but I used this to place a call to the one number I still know by heart: the DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince Rap Hotline.

In case you didn’t wait for the fine print at the end, that’s $2 for the first minute and 35 cents for each additional minute.

I will spare you the math, but that comes out to about 40 grand (plus 2 dollars) for the whole summer. And remember, that was $40,000 in the ’80s. You could buy like five million shares of Apple with that!

I jumped back to the present, barely able to contain my childlike glee, and tried to look Slappy up on Facebook, but to my consternation, he wasn’t there.

It took some digging, but I eventually found out what became of him. I located an old news article about his family and how they had faced financial ruin when they suddenly had to pay off a forty thousand dollar debt for some unknown reason (heh heh) they got evicted from their home and had to live in their son’s treehouse, where the whole family was mauled and eaten by bears.

It was exactly like that scene in Back to the Future where Marty looks up what happened to Doc in the alternate 1984 timeline but instead of wailing and moaning like a little bitch, I had a hearty chuckle and ordered a pizza.