My Friend Thule: 500 Words a Day – Day 9

My Friend Thule: 500 Words a Day – Day 9

Day 9

I have a new backpack. It’s a Thule. If you’re a close friend of mine you’ve heard about it, a lot.

“This bag is the President,” were my first words after picking it up.

“Check out my bag, it’s perfectly designed.”

I show people, like I work at a tradeshow, all the features that set it apart from other bags. The sleek, all black design, the multiple access points, and the robust compartmentalization are just a few things.

“You can open it from the top if you want, but if you just want your laptop you can unzip the back, or even still if you want some snacks or a journal from the main compartment you can open it up right here.”

I have a connection with this bag, I imagine like people do with Oprah’s TV show. And if you’re one of my close friends, you have heard all about it.

“Kirk, why don’t you tell us about your bag, again,” my friend said yesterday after I was showing some of the zipper access points to his girlfriend, who very politely gave me her full attention. But I’d like to think it’s because she could feel my passion and saw the merits of my talking points.

It’s also the first bag in a year that Phil hasn’t lived in. Phil is my miniature Ecuadorian figurine that my friend Ashley brought back for me from her trip to Central America. It is believed, by everyone but me, that Phil is actually very angry and very much bad, awful luck. He once threw a baby 5 feet across a room into a door. Another time he told my ex-girlfriend to go into my iPad and read emails between me and a Spanish beauty I had a long-distance but emotionally lucrative friendship/relationship/shewantedtohavemychildrenship with. And there was the one time I brought Phil to Hong Kong to be cleansed by a spiritual healer on a full moon because 5 flights in a row had been delayed or cancelled.

I want to get rid of him. Throw him in the ocean or toss him in a little girl’s backpack when she isn’t looking. But I’m scared. He’ll come back and burn my apartment down. Although I don’t see Phil as a negative figure in my life, I know that he could be if we weren’t such a good match personality wise. One wrong turn and he would go from protecting me to hurting me.

I’ve sought counsel on how to properly get rid of him and I’ll be holding a 4:30am pre-dawn meditation at the beach in OB next week. At which point I’ll send him off in a small sailboat.

“I don’t think I can just throw him in the ocean. He’ll drown. And he’ll be depressed,” I told her.

The good news is that there are so many different places in this new backpack that I can store and then later access Phil from on the way to his ceremony.

In other news, I’m going to write a script for a film about mainland Chinese people battling America’s Nascar viewership for the rights to what is left of Earth after we get done pillaging it for a few more generations.

Leave a Reply