You say I ruined your life, whatever.

Who gets machine-gunned to death these days, anyway? I mean, seriously. The chances have got to be astronomical. You practically have to be begging to be machine-gunned to death. My cousin was on the waiting list to get machine-gunned to death for three years when he was hit by a train. I’m serious! The way I see it, you should be writing me a thank-you note. I’d call you an inconsiderate prick if I wasn’t certain you’d take it the wrong way.

Ruined your life, ha. That’s rich. I’ll have to remember that to tell my ex-wife, she’ll get a real kick out of that one. She loves jokes like that, about me ruining her life or sucking out her will to live, all those old chestnuts. She has this great new one about me chewing up the best years of her life and spitting them out like tobacco juice, it goes over really well at parties.

Because really, how do you ruin somebody’s life? Seriously. I can’t even fathom it. A priceless Faberge egg, now that’s something you can ruin. You can’t play catch with one of those things without ruining it completely, trust me on that one. Friendships? Yeah, I suppose you can ruin a friendship. Especially if it’s with a stuffy Faberge egg collector who doesn’t keep his house locked securely at night. Those are both ruinable, I’ll admit. But an entire life? Keep dreaming.

So what, so you have to get all your sustenance by licking pulp off the filter screen from a juicer now. Who doesn’t? I’m serious, my grandpa lived off juicer pulp for years, and I didn’t hear him complaining. Sure, after the kangaroo ripped out his voice box he had to talk by tapping out Morse code on a pair of spoons, but if he’d really wanted to complain I’m sure he’d have found the time. If he’d wanted to, grandpa could have sat around all day, bitching about how I took him to Australia and told him all the kangaroos were so tame you could get them to eat chewed-up peaches right out of your mouth. But did he? No way! Not after I took away his spoons. Who can sleep with that rat-a-tat-tat going on all night? Jesus. He acted like any of us actually bothered to learn Morse code.

You kind of remind me of my grandpa, actually. That fuckin’ guy would believe anything. Well, I’m not sure he’d believe a tall tale like “Go on, stick your hand in there. It’s not like they’d keep a loaded machine gun laying around!” but he wasn’t an idiot. He was just old and feeble of mind. He didn’t run around, sticking his fingers inside the gears of a loaded machine gun on a fool’s dare, just because the fool had talked him into sneaking onto a military base in the middle of the night. But then again, grandpa always did hold his liquor better than some people who I won’t mention by name.

(You.)

So come on, let’s drop this tired old argument. Any reasonable person knows you can’t really ruin a life unless it’s two thirds of the way there already. Yeah, then maybe you can give it a nudge down the crapper, but hey, that’s life. The important thing to acknowledge is that we’re both a little to blame. Sure, I may have pulled the trigger, but whose idea was it to ignore me when I was yelling “Dodge! Dodge!” like a good friend? Sure wasn’t mine. Granted, you might not have thought it was funny when I was shooting the machine gun down at your feet and yelling “Dance, motherfucker!” but I sure did, so that’s really your word against mine when you think about it. And hell, if your fingers hadn’t been caught in the gears I don’t think most of those bullets would have even hit you, if you insist on calling a spade a spade.

I swear, when those doctors brought you back to life sometimes I think you left your sense of humor on the other side. Let me know if they ever sift it out of that sack of unidentified gristle that was left over after the operation. Otherwise, I don’t even know why we’re talking.