Thor's Bad Day

Although the specifics of the celestial's inner-workings and machinations are forever barred from true understandings of us mortals, the power of dreams can gift, or perhaps curse, a select few with a view or glimpse beyond the gulf and into the realms of... Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? One beer/tequila bender gives me a bad dream and I try to justify it by waxing philosophic...

Here's the deal. One lonely weekend of drinking and one nightcap of bad late-night TV led to me crashing on the couch, a bottle in one hand, a remote in the other. I awoke to find myself amidst glittering golden towers framing the light of a brilliant yellow sun that seemed to reflect and refract kaleidoscopic phantoms around a room so tall, that it made me dizzy to stare at the apex too steadily. My drunken reflexes forced me onto my ass and the bottle I held made a loud thunk that echoed like a cannon blast.

Under normal circumstances, I suppose it would have occurred to me that I was no longer at home, but my inebriated attentions were more closely focused on the odd clothing I now wore. Gone were the jeans and T-shirt I had come home from the bar with. What was in it's stead were rivets of metal that looked like scales over leather?

Damn if this get-up wasn't heavy...

Never one to panic, I looked around to take stock of where I could be. Although the vague shape of the bridge made of a rainbow in the distance, and the dancing lights from the golden reflections told me it was most likely a Sigfried and Roy Vegas stage show set. Weird, I was in Jersey when I passed out.

"There he is!" Bellowed some unseen giant behind me as they took long but swift Thundering steps into the room from some ingress I hadn't yet seen.

"There who--"

"Don't you dare speak to me!" The angry voice roared.

Okay, so now I'm wearing armor, standing in some strange vaulted loft getting yelled at by someone like they were my father. I hate my dreams.

"Now wait for just a --" I tried to begin.

"First," he began, still behind me. "You disobeyed the travel ban your father had put in place! Second, you insist on going to the earth realm and stirring up attention for yourself and cavorting with mortals even though our time is long since finished there."

"My father?" I couldn't get a damned word in edgewise with this guy and for the life of me, I had no idea what he was talking about. "What are you talking about?!"

"Do you know, in your one transgression to Midgard, you fled from us, hid from Heimdal, and left Mjolnir in a primitive amusement den beside a ruined machine with small plastic rodent heads in a dirty cramped human settlement called New Jersey. The All-Father found you asleep in the home of some lowly slob dressed as a peasant and drunk on spirits unbefitting of a son of Odin?"

At this point, anger and curiosity washed over me and I had to turn around and see who was talking to me.

"Those were expensive jeans... I'm not a peasant!" I fired back, never mind the home of a slob, he may have been right on that one...

"YOU ARE THE SON OF ODIN!"

I felt the laugh tumble out of me, like a rush of puke I was simply unprepared for. Now it made sense! Everything was crystal clear to me. This was the nervous breakdown from too many nights of booze and not enough sleep. One too many weeks worked in an office that drained the life out of you to the point where you couldn't even be bothered to check out the ass on the cute woman in the cube next to yours, even though she has to cross your field of view every single time she gets up. Ah, a nervous breakdown, okay.

So there I was getting a lecture from some golden armored jagoff who'd just as soon be an extra in some bad SyFy channel production telling me that I was Thor...

... And a bad one at that!

"Okay, I am Thor." I confessed, as much to amuse myself as to finally address this lunatic in some direct fashion. "How did I get here?"

He looked at me as if I had asked him How do I breathe? It seemed to set him back a step and he hesitated a minute before responding. "... Heimdal was able to find you with the help of your father and brought you back."

I made no reply, my head swam with the haze of drunkenness and it was hard to look at any one thing for too long. I didn't remember being a god... You'd think something like that would sort of stick out in your mind... At least a little bit.

"Your Father is on his way..."

All of a sudden, the sky darkened and there was thunder and roaring in the air. The wind grew icy and chilled my skin. I saw red eyes emerge from the new deep well of darkness and there was a great hammer in my hand. The last thing I remember was screaming, infused with power, and smashing the evil things within my reach. Then it hit me.

Reality came back with an electric jolt! I woke up covered in booze from a broken bottle I had swung, staring into the guts of my damned TV. I just bought the fucking thing...

Maybe Thor's bad day would've been better...