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"You suck!" shouted Providence resident Tommy Jones as he threw an empty milk carton at his recently-earned first grade diploma. After a year of grueling spelling tests and times tables, Tommy's dreams of being an astronaut were crushed last Monday when his mother, Carla Jones, placed a dream catcher over his bed.
"Hit me with another Rhody Fresh, Carla," said Tommy, leaning on both elbows at his kitchen counter. "If you'd have asked me a week ago if I wanted to walk on the moon, I'd have said yes. But now I know I can't even open up a decent lemonade stand with a first grade education."
Tommy, a student of Flynn Elementary, once dreamed of working on the International Space Station. He now insists that working at a gas station is a similar, but more attainable, career choice.
"Sure, I used to want to be an astronaut, a police chief, a Power Ranger, a dinosaur," stated Tommy, now banging on the counter for his third round of milk. "But what are the odds? You can only become a dinosaur if you're a Power Ranger, and the odds of that are even less than being an astronaut. I was so young and naive."
So naive was Tommy that when he used to look at the sky, he would see clouds shaped like spaceships and bears. Now he sees clouds for what they truly are - water vapor.
"I used to want to travel the world and see Paris, London, New York. I used to want to be rich and famous and meet A-list celebrities like Barney and Big Bird," he said, catching the milk carton his mother slid across the counter. "I even used to want to get married. I would have loved to settle down with a nice girl, in a nice house with a white picket fence once I got over my cooties," Tommy said, sighing. "But my parents have a basement, and I asked Santa for an Xbox, so why bother with any of that?"
"Oh God." He added, before taking a large, loud gulp of milk and giving himself a milk mustache, "Santa's not real, is he?"
Mrs. Jones, in a desperate attempt to distract him, proposed he should instead try broccoli because without it boys don't grow big and strong.
Tommy insisted he never dreamed of being more than 4'6", nor had he ever dreamed of colon health.
"I used to want to be president. I used to want to cure cancer. I used to want to retire someday, but I'll be dead by the time I'll be able to collect Social Security. And I'll never fill my piggy bank that much. I just don't see what's so wrong with accepting it," he concluded.
However, when asked if he had ever considered taking the dream catcher down, he refused to consider the idea.
"I can never go back to my old carefree attitude about the world," he confessed. "I'd never dream of it."
