A Golden Moment for Brian ---------------------------------- a Half-Life Lesson
By Ned Sane

Friday morning was easy.

Brian jumped out of bed without much of a second thought. It took little effort to shower, dress, grab a bite, and head off to school.

Brian's parents were leaving town that night for Vail. He was to have the house to himself for close to 24 hours.

School dragged on a bit, but soon it was over. After classes, Brian located his swarm of party buddies. They quickly made plans. Jack would buy the beer. Ricky would call the rest of the guys. Brian's job was to contact every party girl in the school directory.

This was going to be it.

The big one.

Brian made it home in time to receive final frantic instructions from his mother, Mona. She was a nervous wreck at leaving him alone, and it showed. He knew well enough the reasons why. However, Brian did his best to reassure his parents that all would be fine.

After they drove away, Brian retired for short rest before the action, as it was sure to pick up later. He relaxed in his father's favorite recliner, feet up high. Memories of past party glory stories filtered through his thoughts. The craziness, the good times, the dramatic moments of party lore.

A particular remembrance suddenly hit Brian as he laid back in the chair. There had been a tasty, yet bizarre party activity at his cousin's house the previous Christmas.

Brian's cousin had taken him to his room and shown him a very unique way to ingest beer. The cousin had explained that the taste of beer made him feel sick. So he had figured out an alternate way to taking in his suds. The cousin then produced a small humidifier from the closet. They put beer into the humidifier and plugged it in. And sure enough, when the evening ended, Brian remembered feeling as if he had imbibed his fair share of barley delight, even though he didn't feel full.

Brian sat in the recliner, thinking, deviating from the memory to the present day. He stared at the fireplace and wondered:

Wouldn't it be a great gag for the party tonight?

He would pull the two humidifiers out of Mona's closet and manufacture some beer vapor. His party guests would never know what hit them. It would surely be hilarious.

Jack arrived later with the keg. Brian helped him carry it inside. They set it down on the kitchen floor and immediately tapped it. Brian had already placed the humidifiers in the kitchen and began to fill one of them. Jack reached into the cupboard for a glass. He turned around to ask Brian if he wanted one, but stopped short.

"That's a pretty big beer mug, dude," Jack commented, eyebrows raised. Brian just grinned and told him to hold on and observe.

After filling it to the designated mark, Brian plugged it into a wall outlet. He told Jack to sit down.
By the time the rest of the guests arrived, Jack and Brian were cackling like chickens at a poppy seed fair.

The humidifier gag went well. Soon both of the machines were blasting beer mist at full power. The last thing Brian remembered was talking to Ricky about the number of alcohol molecules required to kill one brain cell.

The following morning, Brian woke to the dry sound of humming humidifiers, long ago emptied of their golden liquid charge. The house was also empty, except for a few of Brian's closer friends. Their unconscious bodies were strewn across couches, chairs and the living room floor. The sound of snoring accompanied the humidifiers drone in a fittingly sleepy time way.

Brian grabbed the utility closet doorknob to pull himself off the kitchen floor. Just as he steadied on his feet, Brian stared down at the doorknob. The shiny metal knob had been dulled by a sticky film of what Brian soon deduced was beer condensation.

Much to his eventual horror, the coating was also on the utility closet door, the walls, the cupboards, and the refrigerator. Everything in the kitchen and dining room, where the two humidifiers had run was coated with a stale, skunky, dead-beer slime.

Brian's eyes were gaping open. His lower jaw drooped downward; disbelieving the predicament he was now standing in. He went to the sink, reached down and fired one arm into the cabinet beneath for some cleaner.

Anything he could find.

After trying several different cleaning products, Brian settled for some grease remover in a spray bottle and proceeded to scrub the crap off of the refrigerator for nearly an hour.

It took him that long just to get the front of the refrigerator cleaned off. There was still some scum lining the creases and crevices where his mother usually inspected. But now was not the time for detailed sterilization. Rational thought was all but a distant memory for Brian.

He thought of his parents. His mother screaming through tears, while his father simultaneously hammered angry fists into Brian's midsection. They were due back home that evening. And mommy always liked to get home a bit early to assess the clues at the scene of the crime. Brian had become adept at hiding his trail, until now. He would need some help this time. It would prove to be a panic-paced cleanup effort.

He awakened all the friends into a collective grumpy state of cooperation. They helped him scrub because, well, they liked Brian. And they knew they might never see him again if they allowed him to be thrown onto the mercy of the court.

The kitchen smelled like one big beer-soaked tennis shoe. So they opened all the windows to let the sub-freezing air rush in and stifle all sense of smell. The discomfort amplified the distress level to a sort of panicked partiers cleanup phenomenon as they scrubbed for the remainder of the day.

Brian's parents arrived home late in the afternoon. They entered the house, via the front door, and walked directly into the kitchen. The cleanup effort and subsequent scattering of friends had finalized only twenty minutes earlier. Brian had shut the windows a full ten minutes after the last person left.
Brian's parents were both smiling. He watched them closely, with a forced smile of his own pasted uncomfortably on his face. Unlike his earlier visions of terror, their smiles never did drop into the fierce, accusing glares that he had expected.

Brian's mother, whose nose had the power to find the poop-pebble from a mouse at the bottom of a neighbor's woodpile, merely mentioned that it was a bit cold in the room.

But her smile never faded.

And neither did Brian's, during this, the most golden moment of his young adult life.

Moral: Hard work makes the world go around.