"Wuz that man?"
"Fresh pussy". Raucous laughter ensued. Tommy Carbonell laughed in the midst of a bong hit, spewing smoke and falling into a coughing fit.
"But I'm not talking about that old washed up, potato-salad shit..." He continued.
"I'm talkin about that fresh-to-death, professionally manicured, well-maintained shit with the slight aroma of a dead fish."
Laughter ensued. Such was the content of discussions held in the unfurnished basement of the Halibut household. Eric Halibut and his cronies would fire up the bong and talk pseudo-ethical bullshit. For all the brain cells he had lost, Eric still retained a mild level of competence. Though he remebered virtually none of what he was taught in high-school, he still possessed an adept, yet distorted, understanding of Jeremy Bentham. As a self-professed Benthamite, Eric claimed to have developed a more modern hedonistic calculus. Marijuana was regarded as the benchmark for all other pleasures, exceeded only by "fresh pussy".
In an upstairs room, Stephanie Halibut slept tranquilly, oblivious to the lewd forum being held in the basement. Donna Halibut, her mother, lay morosely on her California-king size bed. Oprah was blaring on the television. She perused her email on an Apple laptop, sorting through the array of congralutatory letters she had received. Her first experience with child labor had been strenuous enough, not to mention that it had bequeathed her a stoner son with no admirable qualities, unless you counted high intake of illegal substances as a laudable trait.
As if one failure wasn't enough, she was deceived, quite unscrupuously, by her husband into having another child. He had switched her birth control pills with Claritin and ejaculated a population of little Halibuts into her body...and so came Stephanie. Nine months of extra baggage, morning sickness and dry heaving. Her stomach had expanded to the size of a watermelon and her thighs inherited a flabby layer of cottage cheese cellulite. Maybe it was karma. Could her husband have known about the epheremal affair with Ed Sandler? Unlikely. It had lasted a week and she had done a sufficient job at hiding the hickeys that he had plastered on her neck.
In the nursery, Stephanie's cries became increasingly audible. The baby monitor droned out Oprah's cackle and Donna groaned discontently. She had petitioned to her husband, begging for a wet nurse to tend to Stephanie. He had ignored her pleas, adopting the traditional 60's era stance about social norms.
"I'm the bread winner honey. You are supposed to stay home, tend to the kids, and have dinner ready when I get home".
Maybe he was half-joking, but Donna Halibut found no humor in his quip. She would have hired a divorce lawyer in a heartbeat but prenup left her in a catch-22. A divorce settlement would yield little money. She was past her prime too and the aftermath of pregnancy had not looked kindly on her. Suitors would be sparse.
As Stephanie's cries droned on, Donna Halibut lay there morosely, in a half-way vegetative state, weighing her options. If we are to define pleasure as what equates the most overall good, then the scales were tilting heavily against a continued existence...
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