“Young man you are destroying this family!” my father yelled at me as he pushed me to the ground. I fell in the pool of warm milk that I had just spilled with a large thump. As I sat in the warm milk, broken from the yelling, I promised myself to never be a clumsy fool again. Knocking the bowl of cereal on the kitchen floor is my favorite mistake.

On that fateful day I had woken up feeling groggy and tired, already not off to a great start. I dragged my sluggish body out of bed and down to my kitchen where I grabbed a bowl, cereal box, and milk. The kitchen table was filled with junk, a random assortment of drawings and sculptures my mother called “Art”. My father had left his newspaper open to an idiotic article on motorcycles, which was most likely written by a bible thumping oaf. I opened up the jug of milk and poured it into the bowl and without thinking, poured my cereal on top of it. I stared in quiet disbelief at the abomination of a cereal I had created. Giving a great sigh I decided my hunger outweighed my hate of floating cereal, my life had become yet another joke in the joke book we call the world. Already the morning was going my way.
Just as I was about to eat my already ruined cereal I realized I had nothing to read! I shot up to my room trying to find a book that I had yet to read. All of the books I searched through were appallingly bad. Every single one was an atrocious act of boring. After 5 painful minutes of squirming and searching through piles of books, I finally found a suitable comic. Yet despite all my efforts of speed, when I returned to my cereal, it was soggy. Tendrils of despair reached around my throat, squeezing my emotions, forcing out a horrid scream of my eternal anguish. I dropped to my knees in utter defeat, I was a lugubrious soul in that moment. My anguish knew no bounds, and neither had it seemed my luck with mornings.
Despite the inclination to throw the disgusting cereal out, I forced myself to down the so called food. After I finished force feeding myself I got up to clean my bowl, and in that split second the conscious part of my mind blacked out and my Freudian subconscious awakened, causing my hand to move a few inches over, just enough to knock the bowl from its precarious position at the edge of my kitchen table. The bowl broke into tiny shards, each one digging into my heart as guilt drowned me. A fear of the consequences of my foolishness replaced the guilt. I desperately tried to clean the mess up and act is if it had never occurred. The milk had already soaked into the wood, and the cereal stuck to the floor like glue, I felt like an ignoramus while trying to clean it up. I wanted to sit down and have a good cry; all that ran through my head was the repeated phrase “This is not good”. To be completely clear, that was NOT good.

Within two minutes of the accident my mother came down, donned in a typical yellow dress, accompanied by my father in khaki shorts, arguing over some trivial matter. As soon as they saw me and my “creation” they started to yell. From how the bowl only a week old, and why was I using mothers favorite bowl, and how this was the fourth time in my ruddy life, finally I would take no more, I was enraged. My parents took no notice, they merely yelled more and forced me to clean the mess up, and I thought this was frightfully unfair, so I pouted, angry at the unfairness of the world. When my father returned ten minutes later to find me sitting with an angry look on my face and the mess still just lying there, he took me by the collar and screamed in my face like a blundering ape “Young man, you are destroying this family! Your poor mother is crying from the fact you destroyed her favorite bowl from the dollar store, and you refuse to apologize! Just keep on saying it was an accident and see where that gets you!” he yelled throwing me to the ground. I was broken; my own father had thrown me into spoiling milk. I thought about my actions as the milk festered around me, I realized then what I had done was wrong, that I was a clumsy fool, and that to survive in this dog eat dog world you must stay in the shadows until you see an open window to extract your revenge. I decided from that moment on to never be a fool again.
I had knocked my cereal bowl off the kitchen table, but that was ok, it taught me to be more devious and less noticeable. It was and still is my favorite mistake.