Join Hickchaser on his wacky adventures through the universe battling aliens and finding lifelong friends.

It was four in the morning and Joe just couldn't sleep. Getting up and looking out his window at the beautiful cornfields. His stomach grumbled pleading for food, 

“Shut up!” he told his stomach.

 He had a drink and some peanuts at the bar just hours earlier, his stomach didn’t acknowledge that as food. 

The floorboards creaked as he stumbled into the kitchen. 

“Goddamnit!” He muttered under his breath as he stubbed his toe on the wall, which was a couple more inches to the right than he remembered. 

He still was not used to his new apartment, he chuckled in self-pity, this was the fourth new apartment in three months. 

He opened the cupboard out of habit even though he knew there was nothing in it. “Great,” he thought sarcastically, 

“Now I need to go to the grocery store,” He thought, adding that to his ever-growing list of things that needed to be done.

 Looking around he found some ritz crackers and a can of cola in his backpack, laid down, and contemplated life. 

He awoke with a start, his alarm blaring in his ear. Sitting up, he fumbled around on his nightstand for his glasses. Locating his spectacles, he stood up and, with some difficulty, stuffed them onto his round ugly face. Glancing around the dark room he searched for his lighter and something to smoke.

 Finding a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table he lit one and limped into the bathroom to assess the situation. He looked bad, somehow he got progressively uglier as time went on. It was only 8 o’clock and already he was ready to go to the bar and drink his troubles away. 

But alas that was an ill-fated dream, as work started at 8:30. 

“Ah whatever,” he thought to himself.

That was more than enough time to break out a can of bud light from his almost empty refrigerator. 

He took a quick shower while gulping down the last dregs of the can and got ready for work. Joe works at the local arcade, but not any of the fun jobs one might associate with an arcade. He swept up all the popcorn and mopped up the spilled cola, every single day. He was a janitor for the biggest and only arcade in Fort Riley, Kansas, the self-proclaimed corn capital of the world.

 With a screech, Joe whipped his old honda civic into gear and commuted the whole five minutes down John B. Kennedy Street, named after the politician, not the founder of the KKK. It was never confirmed who the street was named after, but that’s not important. 

Pulling up to the lot, he gracefully maneuvered his car into the employees only area, effectively blocking two spots. Stepping out of his car, he took a second to look around, right as a strong wind, whereas the likes of which can only be found in old westerns and old western towns, whipped across the parking lot, spraying him with dirt and old cigarette butts. 

The door to the arcade was locked forcing him to combat the gusts while trying to jam the key home, all the while slightly buzzed. After about a minute of struggling, he finally succeeded in unlocking the door and stumbled inside welcomed by the familiar stench of sweat and old coins. 

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Walking in the first thing he saw was the aftermath of the bachelor's party they hosted the night before, a thong was draped over the Pacman machine and there was a cooler full of beer and what looked like the remains of a BLT sandwich. 

He picked up the thong and painfully reminisced the night before, it was his brother's best friend's cousin's second marriage and his brother's best friend showed up in nothing but a thong. 

Understandably scarred for life, Joe had left to go to the local bar to find the bride-to-be kissing a twenty-year-old bartender. In a small town such as this one, it wasn't at all uncommon to be invited to a wedding or a funeral of someone you met once, at a gas station, in the middle of the night and just happened to share a cigarette or beer with. 

He was jarred back into the present by the only other person he worked with walking into the room, Melinda. Melinda was only seventeen but damn she was hot if she wasn't his niece he guaranteed he would have tapped that ages ago. 

She went straight to the office behind the ticket booth, so absorbed in her celebrity magazine she didn't realize she had left the door open. Picking up the cooler full of beer he began the arduous journey back outside to throw it away in the dumpster. 

Fighting against the wind he was about to dump the cooler full of beer into the garbage when he was struck by a literal stick whipping through the air. Falling onto his butt he looked up at the sky, blinking once realizing what he had almost done. 

Perfectly good beers were almost thrown out by him, a perfectly good alcoholic. He quickly looked around. Thankfully no one had witnessed his spectacular fall. Cradling a six-pack in his arms like a baby he scurried to his car.

 “This will be fine.'' he thought to himself. 

No one would show up to the arcade for at least three hours, a quick nap and a few beers wouldn't hurt anybody. Popping one open he laid back with the passenger's seat at a perfect 140-degree angle. 

Waking up six hours later to an overwhelming urge to pee, he sat up and cracked the door open, forcing himself to stand up and walk across the parking lot towards the arcade. Melinda walked out of the door and looked at Joe with a gaze that could only be interpreted as true love, or maybe the promise of extreme violence. It was hard to tell in his drunken state.

 “Hey s..sexy” he slurred in her direction. She immediately started running in the opposite direction, smelling the alcohol on him from fifty feet away

“Was it something I said?” Joe wondered, burping loudly and scratching his huge stomach.

He continued plodding on towards the bathroom when he was struck by a sudden thought. Nobody Joe was working for actually cared about him, the manager hated him for no reason, the kids would run away from him in terror and call him mean names, hell even Melinda wouldn't date him. 

“Wait.” he thought, stopping himself. 

He didn't want the kids or the managers to date him, but it was a different story with Melinda. She didn't even respond when he said “good morning” or “bye” or even “you look really hot this afternoon”, apart from some F-bombs thrown his way, but does that even really count? 

Stuck in a pit of self-loathing and doubt he went and did the only rational thing. He peed everywhere, behind the arcade games, in the popcorn pot, not even the cash register was spared. 

After all that he collapsed in the basket of giant fluffy animals issued to kids as prizes and vomited before promptly returning to sleep. 

He forgot about only one thing. The next morning, the owners of the arcade chain had scheduled their monthly check-in and evaluate the property. 

Let's just say it wasn't the prettiest sight when the inspectors stepped through the door, directly into fresh hot human feces. Long story short, Joe was dishonorably discharged and with a court date looming over his head and a migraine inside his head. 

He drove home and drank some more, thinking about where it all went wrong. Maybe it was the lizard arenas he would create as a kid, catching up to five lizards at once and leaving them in a big cardboard box until they would fight to the death or starve. 

Or maybe it was the neighborhood cat who he would throw a stick at when it didn't come towards him when he called it. 

Maybe it was his dad who left him and his mom for a twenty-year-old Russian model who lived in Los Angeles. all in all, he had a pretty shitty childhood and it made him a shitty adult. 

The next morning he noticed that across the street from his apartment the hipster bagel shop had a “NOW HIRING” poster in the window. Previously Joe had tried to avoid it as he wasn't a huge fan of gentrification, but due to recent events, the tables, as they say, have turned. 

Walking in, he went up to the counter and applied, his interview being scheduled for five o’clock. He decided to take a walk down the road, tentatively enjoying his last moments of temporary unemployment.