Sprite, one of the many charming new faces around the Abbey, asked me the other day why I did not tell any more “little monk” tales. You know, stories from before I became the over caffiniated pervert that I am today. Well, seeing as how we are on schedule (and budget) for the upcoming show I think that I have a wee bit of time to share a quickie.

The Exploding PBJ

Yes, yes I did in fact walk a MILE to the bus stop every day.

We lived in the country, a chunk of rocky soil and scrub trees where my parents decided to take a stab at “living simple”, we hiked rain or snow down a long and winding dirt road to catch the bus everyday. These were the late 70’s and things like school lunches were strange rumored fairytales, like the Easter Bunny and parental supervision. No, in those days everyone carried his or her lunches. In either their trusty metal lunch boxes or the venerable brown paper sack.

We, we were a brown paper sack family. We were also dirt fucking poor so my mom, bless her heart, did her best to keep her 3 school-aged kids fed. Peanut butter sandwiches were pretty much the bottom and middle of our “nutrient pyramid”. Perhaps it was guilt, or perhaps some kind of overcompensation on my mother’s part, but she always seemed to make the biggest damn sandwiches possible. Like more peanut butter than 2 slices of bread were meant to handle. No, we are not talking about a thick slab of it. Imagine a thick, globulous layer of the stuff. So thick in fact that the bread didn’t really stick together, it more like floated about on top of the viscous peanut surface like a pair of whole wheat tectonic plates. Just look at the sucker wrong and it would slide open and spew its chunky payload all over your favorite tough-skin corduroy jeans.

Now I guess this would not be too bad if it were not for the dreaded orange.

With out fail, mom would make the sandwiched first and then place the said peanut flavored time bomb on the bottom of the sack. Only to then put what had to be the largest orange possible, to this day we are still not sure if she was secretly buying them from some kind of experimental government farm or something, right on top of the sandwich.

And there it would sit; pressing it’s round orangey mass into the now expanding sandwich, forcing it into new and strange shapes. Shapes that were most defiantly “non-sandwich”. By the time we got down to the bus stop the bottom of our lunch sacks would inevitably be showing the tell tale markings of a leaky sandwich. No longer a sandwich, it often looked more like a great brown crater with the contents all smooshed out and straining against the plastic wrap that feebly held it in place.

Eventually we gave up on even trying to unwrap the sandwiches, opting rather to eat them “Spaceman style” by poking a hole in one end of the wrapper and squeezing the contents out like toothpaste.