— Fiction —

The Weatherman's Weekend Forecast

Thanks, Bob. There’s a lot going on in my life this weekend, so let’s get started.

Ex-girlfriend Donna is moving the rest of her stuff out as planned in an icy cold front Friday during rush hour, which is going to push all these moisturizers, tampons, and bras into a single cardboard box, a lonely reminder of how little we ultimately shared. There’s a 75% chance of one last huge fight with mutual recriminations about emotional warmth, waning libidos, and whose friends are more solipsistic, opening the floodgates and causing ocular precipitation from her and chilling numbness in me.

Things will settle down for Chinese takeout for one and sitcom reruns from eight to nine Friday night, but a storm will start brewing when I discover half a handle of Captain Morgan’s in the liquor cabinet during an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and start mixing hurricanes. After a few thunderous shots, lightning will strike as I call up my old frat buddy, Tom, to hit the singles bars in the northwest area of the city, with coverage expecting to gradually move south as the night wears on. However, around eleven we may run into a couple of mildly hot girls at the Keg ’n’ Tap who are awed by my D-list celebrity and want to party, in which case we could pass over these nightspots and head straight to one of their houses. Riding the high tide of the night, Tom will fully moon pedestrians.

Overnight will be a mixture of dry, unsatisfying sex, performance anxiety, and a broken condom.

Saturday morning, Rebound Jennifer will sunnily serve pancakes and coffee to me, Tom, and Tom’s Hook-Up, whose name I never catch. There will be brief flurries of awkward chitchat interrupting widespread silence and befogged headaches. Our collective barometric reading of where we are in life will be steadily dropping.

Tom and I will blow out of there with a weak excuse we furtively circulated to each other while the girls weren’t paying attention. As I drive him home, our different social environments and tax brackets since college—he’s a low-level marketing rep—will create a barrier to any intimacy between us as we confine our overcast conversation to baseball.

Saturday afternoon I will experience a stretch of major depression with scattered thoughts of calling Ex-Girlfriend Donna as I try to piece together what went wrong. By evening I will be in the trough located between 30º north and 30º south latitudes in the vicinity of the equator known as the doldrums.

Saturday night will have a surprise in store for me as my parents fly into town on a jet stream and treat me to dinner at the Japanese restaurant where I took Ex-Girlfriend Donna on our first date. There will be friction as I lie throughout the first half of the dinner about Ex-Girlfriend Donna’s absence due to a work obligation. My fourth Kahlúa-and-Baileys mudslide and my mother’s pounding hail of hints about a wedding on the horizon will stir up heavy turbulence as I yell at her for raising me to be a narcissist incapable of making a commitment to a woman. My Gaydar system will detect that the male waiter is attracted to me, temporarily raising my self-esteem and leading to brief visibility into my repressed homosexual urges. The mahimahi drizzled with wasabi vinaigrette atop a bed of Japanese black soybeans seasoned with garlic will be fair.

Overnight Saturday will be a blend of high-pressure gastrointestinal gusts from the soybeans and cold-sweat nightmares.

By Sunday morning I’ll reach the state when the lapse rate of a column of air is greater than the dry adiabatic lapse rate, otherwise known as absolute instability. Pursuing denial as my personal rain cloud thickens, I’ll volunteer to come in and do the Sunday report. The rest of Sunday will be partly cloudy with highs in the mid-50s, a low of 41, and winds out of the East at ten miles per hour.

Shortly after sundown, Rebound Jennifer will call to tell me she’s missed her period, leading to a major change in pressure. I will spend the rest of Sunday night reckoning with the potential shitstorm I may have created and drowning my sorrows in three Dairy Queen Blizzards. My happiness will reach a new record low, eclipsing May 17, 1998, when I thought I was going to get fired for a sexual harassment case at the station that was later dropped. We’ll track this one all next week with hourly updates on Rebound Jennifer.

I’ll be calling in sick Monday to get a round of emergency S.T.D. tests and consult with my lawyer, so enjoy your weekend, and don’t make the same mistake I will and forget that the 99% chance birth-control pills will be effective against pregnancy also means that there’s a one percent chance they will be completely ineffective. Back to you, Bob!