A story which contains an unusual number of topical references. This is because 1997 just happens to suck RIGHT NOW! Also Kodak keeps screwing up my photos.

IT'S A WONDERFUL DEATH

(Or, Spot's Seventh First Christmas)

written on Christmas 1997

Copyright © 1997 James "Kibo" Parry

Poor Spot! His life was ruined because he didn't get the Christmas gifts he'd wanted! All he'd asked Santa for was the entire contents of Forrest Ackerman's mansion. And instead all he got was a lousy gift certificate for the approximate retail value, and Spot didn't want to have to do the work of buying his own gifts. Christmas sucked! Spot jumped off a bridge.

Halfway down, time stopped, suspending Spot in the clear cold Christmas air. A tiny fairy appeared in front of his nose. "Hiya, Spot!" shouted the late Chris Farley, who was really small and hovered in the air on little fly wings. "I'm your guardian angel!" He took a slip of paper out of his red beret. "It says here that you're trying to kill yourself by jumping off a bridge."

Spot looked down at the icy water far below. "Well, DUH."

Chris Farley shook his little finger at Spot's eyeball. "Now, Spot, it's not nice to mouth off to your guardian angel, especially a guardian angel who's here to warn you that if you commit suicide like this, you can't get into Heaven."

"Waah!" cried Spot. "I wanna go to Heaven! Now!"

"People--and their dogs--who kill themselves jumping off bridges don't get into Heaven. You have to kill yourself in a much more violent, painful, gory, weird way." Chris Farley disappeared with a tiny pop, and Spot was falling again! He landed in his doggie bed, bouncing twice. It was all a dream! Or... was it?

Spot had been given a new leash on life, and a warning, from his guardian angel! Now he had a mission, a purpose in life: to kill himself! Spot took off his Knight Rider pajamas and put on his Fruit Of The Loom underwear and his best jelly clogs for a trip to the mall. Whenever Spot felt too happy, he always went to the mall to depress himself. It was the perfect place to commit a tragic suicide!

He started at the food court. If anything at the mall could kill him, it was the food court! Unfortunately, all the cubicles with real food had closed and been replaced by imitations of Cinnabon, like Nutmegalon and Basil-Ba-Loo. The scariest thing Nutmegalon had was a bowl of rice pudding with an "@" on top made out of bright blue nutmeg, which didn't seem threatening enough. Basil-Ba-Loo had Thai food, which Spot liked, so he didn't want to eat there. He tried the next cubicle, The Clove Grove.

The Clove Grove sold him a moldy orange with hundreds of cloves stuck in it, tied to a wire coat hanger. Spot ate it, only to discover that explosive diarrhea was non-lethal. "Waah!" Spot cried, "That's false advertising!"

He tried Anise Orifice, where the most threatening thing they had was an old shoe made out of licorice. Spot ate it. A man who looked like Adolf Hitler but talked like Dudley Moore threw a tantrum. "You stupid dog! I'm Charlie Chaplin, and that shoe was reserved for me!" Charlie Chaplin's career was RUINED! Now he would only be able to get work playing the evil 'Poozoo' on a Sid & Marty Krofft show, where he would have to wear a green rubber bondage hood every week while being hit with cardboard cutouts of cream pies.

Spot tried to soothe Chaplin's nerves. "Sorry, Charlie, I was just trying to kill myself."

"Oh! I understand, old chap. I'm sorry I lost my temper. You had a genuine need to ruin my career in your quest to kill yourself. Have you tried Wasabi Hut?"

Spot thanked him and ran to the largest store in the food court, Wasabi Hut. Inside, several Japanese guys wearing gas masks were using corrosion-proof paddles to stir a huge vat of toxic green horseradish. The gas masks were starting to melt, but fortunately the Japanese guys were wearing other gas masks under them.

"Wow!" said Spot. "If I were to hurl myself into that vat of wasabi, it would dissolve my entire body in a really painful way, and I'd go to Heaven!" He took a step towards the vat, and a wall of wasabi vapor hit him. "Ow! Ow! My nose is burning! Waah!" He took a step backwards, leaving the invisible wasabi aroma zone. "I know! What I need to do is plug up my sinuses, so that I can't smell the wasabi!" He grabbed a handful of what he thought was green Play-Doh and packed it into his nose, but of course it was wasabi.

Spot's head exploded, mentally speaking. He ran around screaming for a few hours, and when he went sane again he was at the other end of the mall.

He tried sitting on Santa's lap, hoping the red dye in the suit would be carcinogenic, but it just gave him a nasty rash. Spot, too. He ate some of Santa's plastic snow but that didn't help either. It was a lot like eating at Clove Grove without the pleasant clove flavor.

At Spencer Gifts, he put on a pair of the edible underwear and threw himself into a pile of windup chattering teeth, but they were too smart to eat anything from Spencer Gifts. He drank several lava lamps and stared into an ultraviolet strobe light for several minutes, but he just felt silly. He tried on some rubber Spock ears and they didn't kill him either. Trekkies just pointed and laughed WITH him instead of AT him! This was a rotten day.

Spot went to Radio Shack, looking for dangerous electrical gadgets to hurt himself with. The worst he could find was an electronic die, which displayed a number from 1 to 6 when he pushed the button. It was powered by one AA battery from Radio Shack, in other words, half a normal AA battery. Spot tried to put his tongue on all 10,000 kinds of Radio Shack batteries simultaneously, and barely felt a tingle. Besides, they were out of 9,500 of them.

At Victoria's Secret, Spot dressed up in a frilly lace teddy, but this just made him feel like killing himself more. He pranced out of the store sullenly.

Sears wasn't much help either. Spot saw the softer side of Sears, and everything was so soft it couldn't possibly hurt him. Including the hardware. He picked up a Craftsman hammer shaped like Bob Vila and hit himself over the head with it. It shattered and shredded duck down came out.

He rode the escalator in Sears, being careful to try to get his tongue stuck between the steps so he could be crushed in the basement, where that weird green light came from. Unfortunately, the extra lubrication from Spot's slobber just made the machinery run more smoothly, and Spot was whisked to the other floor without incident. For the first time in years, the two handrails moved at approximately the same speed! Spot cried.

Now Spot came to Crax Camera. "Hey! I know! I could go in there and run myself through their PhotoCD machine!" Unfortunately, this involved sending him to the Kodak lab, which took two weeks, which meant three weeks, and then the Kodak lab misread the instructions which said "PLEASE RUN THIS DOG THROUGH THE PHOTOCD MACHINE" and ran some hamsters through a dishwasher instead.

Spot had wasted all his money on not being put on PhotoCD! A robotic eye descended from the Christmas decorations hanging in the mall, and detected that he was broke. Security guards threw him out of the mall. Now he'd have to look for free ways to kill himself. Being broke sucked! It made Spot want to kill himself.

He stuck his head in a gas oven, but it just made him all giggly. When he came down he discovered he'd gone to the dentist and had several cavities filled painlessly.

Spot jumped into the piranha tank at the zoo, but they wouldn't eat him because he still smelled like wasabi. Same went for the shark tank and the tank of liquid killer bees, which looked like yellow and black striped soda pop. He stood in front of Bessie the elephant and tried to get her to step on him, but Spot was such a tiny puppy that Bessie though he was a mouse and ran away to hide under a rock. And the woodpeckers wouldn't peck Spot to death because his head looked too hard.

In the town square, there was a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a giant razor blade, and Spot tried sliding down it but it was dull, like most modern art.

He rented a motorcycle and tried to recreate Evel Knievel's famous jump over the fountains at Caesar's Palace which led to Evel breaking over 200 of the over 200 bones in his body, but Spot, being a dog, didn't have that many bones, so he wasn't critically injured. They just took him to the hospital and gave him a few thousand stitches, and while he was there, he ate all the medical waste. It made him somewhat sick, and to treat him they generated even more medical waste, which he also ate, but by this time he'd developed an immunity to rusty used syringes.

He had the doctors replace all his bones with blasting caps and tried the motorcycle jump again, but they were all duds, just like Kevin Costner's recent movies. That was an idea! He tried standing between Kevin Costner and a bad idea, but just wound up getting screen credit for inspiring "The Postman Goes To Waterworld". Even watching it didn't kill him, just the movie industry. And speaking of postmen...

Spot dressed up like a big bullseye and danced around the Post Office shouting "ALL POSTAL WORKERS ARE WIMPS!", but it turns out they were all too psychotic to hit the broad side of a barn. He dressed up like the broad side of a barn, too, but that didn't help. (Shame he didn't try dressing up as the narrow side of a barn.)

Next Spot tried to paint his whole body gold, because he'd heard that you could die if you painted your whole body gold including the little area at the base of your spine. Unfortunately, he couldn't paint that area, as his tail was covering it! He felt cheated that they didn't tell him so in that completely realistic movie in which the fat guy decapitated people with a flying hat.

And the atomic wedgie from an actual nuclear reactor didn't hurt at all, because Spot was still wearing his Fruit Of The Loom underwear with the Super-Stretch Comfort Waistband. He also tried setting off a nuclear warhead in a roomful of mousetraps for double the chain reaction, but the two just cancelled each other out leaving Spot sitting in a very clean, empty room.

He licked Bob Hope's face, but the old guy just got dog germs.

Spot watched that Japanese cartoon that gave little kids seizures, but it merely made him turn Japanese.

He tried standing in front of a speeding car, but the stupid limousine swerved and plowed into the wall of the tunnel. Six guys following the limo on motorcycles stopped to take photos of the Death Car and the Death Dog, then went to sell Beanie Babies based on them. Spot cried! Why couldn't it have been him in that luxury sedan instead of Princess Diana? Spot hoped he didn't kill any more celebrities before he killed himself.

"Hiya, Spot," said the tiny Chris Farley angel again. Spot squished him with a flyswatter and continued looking for ways to kill himself. Spot never succeeded, even when Di's tombstone fell on him, and lived to be a trillion years old, and by that time, Heaven had gone broke from all the partying. When Spot arrived, he discovered that Heaven was a cardboard box with a piece of string lying on the bottom. He picked up the piece of string and amused himself quietly with it for all eternity. Also, Chris Farley was in the box with him.

THE END