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By Vicki Austin

Drink a cleansing glass of your brother’s homemade red wine. Drink a cleansing tumbler of your brother’s homemade red wine. Down the cleansing remainder of the gallon of your brother’s homemade red wine and chase it with three shots of Jack until you can’t tell the difference between the dog’s howling and the rhythmic pounding of alcohol-enriched blood racing through your hot temples.

Steal the pliable wax from your teenager’s brace kit to fashion two generous plugs. Place the bulbous creations flush to your delicate ear drums and press. Press harder. Run to the little-league first-aid kit for cotton to stem the thick, magenta blood flowing from your damaged organs. Celebrate the fact that for a few glorious moments you can hear nothing.

Turn on reruns of Full House. Enjoy Joey Gladstone chirping “Cut. It. Out.” on automatic repeat at volume eleven (It’s one louder) while alternately pirouetting around the family room and engaging in Slavic prisyádka (squat) dancing. Run into the leg of Nana’s old loveseat and forget about the barking as you are distracted by the certain fact that you have severed at least two of your already (it’s a long story involving story time at the local library) mangled toes.

Call your DoorDash hookup and order tacos, spaghetti and falafel. Eat until you are forced into carbohydrate malaise. Stealthily dump the leftovers over the fence for the noisy mongrel. Wait for your very own diabolically arranged Montezuma’s revenge.

Jump into a scalding hot shower belting Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Upon reaching the refrain, dedicated to how I’m killing you, gesture wildly in the vicinity of the aggravating mutt showing it you mean business. Feel powerful.    

Reenact the Lizzie Borden murders in your bathrobe using the meat tenderizer your Great Aunt Polly gave you as a wedding present and two shabbily clothed Cabbage Patch dolls from that retail rush in the '80s. As you become one with the bloodthirsty character, allow the wild, rushing anger flooding your ears to drown out the aggravating canine.

Get into bed with the smothering scratchy blanket from your college ex, three Line-Friends throw pillows and your dad’s left-behind CPAP machine covering your face. Cockily take deep, cleansing breaths. Begin to suffocate. Pass out from claustrophobia panic as the dog bays at the moon.

Bake bread for your mom. Bake bread for your boss. Bake bread for your best friend. Bake bread for your pharmacist. Bake bread and eat an entire loaf while watching reruns of The Office. Message Jenna Fischer (a bread ENTHUSIAST) to share your bread recipe. Message her again. Ignore the sting when she blocks you on Instagram.

Power up the chainsaw you impulsively bought your unhandy husband last year for Father’s Day. Destroy old curio cabinets. Destroy lots of old curio cabinets. Sweep up sawdust. Feel extreme buyer’s remorse as the dog wails.

Buy $50 noise-canceling earbuds. Return those and buy $99 noise-canceling earbuds. Return those and buy the stupid $250 noise-canceling earbuds your spouse told you that you needed to buy from the very beginning and yes, he knows everything forever and always and no, there’s nothing wrong and you’re definitely not mad.

Cry.  

— Vicki Austin

Vicki Austin, faculty and dorm parent at Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School, lives with her husband, two children and 80 or so other teenage boys in Kingston, Pennsylvania. Vicki has more than 25 years of experience in many facets of education and is currently shifting her writing focus from persuasive to creative. Vicki’s most recent work has been featured on the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop blog, included in the online journals Projected Letters and Wraparound South and printed in The Walls Between Us: Essays in Search of Truth, a Juncture publication. You can find Vicki on Twitter @VickiAustin02.