Spoiler Alert!

Spoiler Alert: For those who prefer not to know the outcomes of their bad decisions, don’t read beyond this line.

Scenario 1. You let your young son eat whatever he wants because you want him to learn at an early age how to make his own decisions (and deep down you are simply too overworked or lazy to make him eat healthily). He “decides” that he only wants to eat French fries, fried chicken and frozen ice cream cakes, so that is his diet for the next fifteen years. One day, you walk through the living room to find a 400 pound comatose stranger reposed upon your broken couch. You cry when you realize it is your son and that his poor decision-making has led to his downfall and severe diabetes. You vow to help him turn his life around by belatedly teaching him how to make sound nutritional choices, but you are sad that he has to spend a month in the hospital. You dive into a bag of chips to drown your sorrow.

Scenario 2. You tell your young daughter that she can have anything in the world she wants and that it is all there for the taking. You pat her affectionately on the knee, glad you had this nice father/daughter chat. The next week, you are unhappy when her Principal suspends her for stealing an iPod from another girl’s locker. You explain that you meant that if she works hard she can have whatever she wants. Another knee pat and you are off to your office to watch some more online porn. She returns to school and considers each of her classmates and realizes that most of their parents live off the system, as does her own father. She decides that you are full of shit, so she steals again and again until she is finally caught and sent to a juvenile detention facility. She is okay with that, though, because now she is far away from your hypocritical lectures. Soon she is pregnant with the first of five children she’ll have by five different men, and she learns to milk the system for every dime she can get without ever having to work a day in her life. She smiles, showing her four remaining good teeth, because she has proven her father wrong.

Scenario 3. You set a pound of frozen hamburger out on the counter to defrost. You know you are supposed to let it thaw out in the refrigerator, but you need it for supper tonight, so you think just this once it will be all right. You leave to do a bit of shopping and while you are out, the temperature slowly climbs into the high 90s. You forget that your air-conditioner isn’t working properly. While opening your car door, you break a nail and decide to visit the manicurist for a quick fix. There you run into an old friend and decide to go for a drink. The drink becomes six, and you have to have a local good-ole-boy drive you home. He decides to try his luck with you in your driveway, but you fight him off, breaking that nail you just had fixed. You stumble inside and realize that your house is a sauna. You see the hamburger packet lying in a congealed pool of its own blood. You poke it and are pleased to find that it is completely thawed. You begin to make meatloaf. You serve it to your family, but since you are feeling ill after those six margaritas you knocked back with your long-lost friend, you decide not to eat. In the morning, you awake to the sound of four people vomiting. Good thing you are now sober and can call the paramedics.

Scenario 4. You give in to your seven-year-old son’s whining in the electronics department at Wal-Mart and buy him the latest handheld gaming system. This is followed in quick succession with the purchasing of hundreds of games to keep his now ADHD-addled mentality occupied on those long 20 minute drives across town to his therapist. Later, you buy him the complete home gaming system and soon forget he even exists as he now spends hours and even days at a time behind his closed door “competing” against other “pro-gamers” across the world. One day, your husband asks, “Where’s Billy?” to which you reply, “Who?” Don’t worry. The stench of his decomposing body will lead you to him.  At least he beat BlAsTeRbOy2227 before he kicked the bucket. You can be proud.

Scenario 5. You tell your precious toddler that she is a princess and deserves to look pretty every single day. You buy her fancy clothes and dress her up like a doll. Everybody “oohs” and “aahs” over how cute she is. You let that go to your head and buy her even fancier clothes. You put makeup on her when she’s four, and you pierce her ears and buy her diamond necklaces and earrings. You get her weekly pedicures and spray-on tans. As the years go by, her body changes and so does her taste in clothing. She’s used to being the center of attention, and since she’s no longer little and precious, she starts using that credit card you gave her for emergencies to buy a whole different style of wardrobe. Forget cute and frilly; she’s now into skimpy and slutty. She pierces other parts of her body – some that you can’t see. She dyes her hair and bakes her skin to a crisp. Since she’ll always be your precious little girl, you don’t see her the way others see her. You also think that she has more of a fashion sense than you do, so you start trying to dress like her. You lose your job, and since you are now penniless and can no longer pay for her trashy wardrobe and she is embarrassed by your attempts to emulate her dress, she moves out of your house and in with her sugar-daddy.

Scenario 6. You’re born. You learn all sorts of neat things. You get a college degree and a great job. You make a lot of money and buy yourself all sorts of fancy things. You get a bigger house to hold all your neat things and a three car garage for all that stuff you need to maintain your lavish yard. You die. They hold an auction. Other people have your stuff now.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cut. Fade to black.