by Mark Morelli

It’s Saturday. You have a list of chores to accomplish: Deposit a check, drop off library books, pick up dry cleaning, return a video, fill a prescription and shop for groceries.

(Be sure you have the grocery list your wife wrote out for you. If s he is a wife who categorize d together the items on the list as they’d be found in the s tore, t hen you’re on to something more important than kisses.)

If you’ve got a kid in the car, especially a kid in a car seat, then there will be one chore on th at list, last if you’re l ucky, when the child’s irritability makes you snap.

You will holler and jab your finger at the child. You might even screech. Far from eliciting disapproving glares, your explosive temper will evoke raised brows of empathy from other parents. Unless you are at Wal-mart, where it will go completely unnoticed.

If you never expected yourself to publicly behave in such a shrill manner, know, too, that the kid would rather be home molding clay, swinging on swings or bonking the remote over her sister’s head. Anywhere but looking at your silly, furrowed brow in the rear-view mirror.

You try to squeeze too much into a day, into the idea of a day. Christ could feed a multitude with a few loaves and fishes, but who are we to think we can add some sort of cosmic Hamburger Helper to the idea of time and quality and stretch it out. Who are we to have produced The Odd Couple II; Godfather III; and Rocky IV. History will look back on us not as the pi oneers of technology b ut the fools who thought they could outwit time.

You and me a nd Neil Simon and Francis Ford Coppola and Sylvester Stallone and everybody else bite into the Nagasaki Slice -- the one you shove into your mouth just because you think you might like t he taste of it even though you’ve already eaten five and you’re stuff ed to the gills.

The name comes from the arguable notion that dropping an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, in addition to Hiroshima, was unnecessary. This Atomic Age phrase becomes especially poignant, however, in the Digital Age.

During the 2000 election fiasco and a year later, the terrorist attacks, cable news networks provided continual coverage of event, but they still didn’t use the time to branch out and cover all the news. They remain one-story newsrooms, which means they basi cally repeat on e story for 8-to-12 weeks. Even though it’s on 24/7, after twenty minutes we are sated. After that, each report from Kabul is another Nagasaki Slice.

The Nag asaki Slice idea came to me after scarfing down pizza like a bloated Roman senator, leavi ng my wife with just one slice and me with a new pet phrase. But I could have just as easily coined it the night when the second shot of Wild Turkey, and not the seventh, went down like honey. Not to mention the seven months of Nagasaki Slice dating I to ok from a totally incompatible chick named Brittany when the second date told us both that this was one batch of dough that wasn’t going to rise.

Too often I’ve been the guy screeching at the kid who is screeching at me because she is fed up with b eing pulled out of and strapped back into the car seat six times in one sunny afternoon. My blood’s boiling by the time the library books are returned. Something’s wrong when a trip to the public library gets hot-blooded. Waiting for my prescription to b e filled, I wonder why am I not in a hammock in the backyard of the house that requires an abnormally big hunk of my income to maintain.

The grocery store aisles are jammed like the interstates at Christmas and just one backtrack across the Super K for some goddam peanut butter and I feel like I’ve missed my exit -- and a whole lot more.

Our mundane Saturdays are becoming more and more like Christmas shopping, which Anna Quindlen recently described as “a joyless hateful pursuit.” In the rear view mirror I see the sniffly face of a bleary four-year-old with a sweaty back.

I am lucky to have come of age just as the blueprints for the first area shopping mall w ere drying on developer Edward J. DeBartolo’s desk. Instead of Nagasaki Slice s in my bygone Saturdays, we sipped Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine amid green apples and mowed lawns, hiking the railroad tracks on the outskirts of town to break in our new sneakers. No kidding. This wasn't literature. This was life.

Our Saturday errands, if we went along at all since our mothers shopped during the week, were spent rolling around the back of the station wagons reading Archie comics. Our version of the Nagasaki Slice was pushing our luck in making our mothers call us three times before we came in for the night.

Our Hectic Present isn’t even Life in the Fast Line. It’s Life in the Turning Lane. What a waste of a hammering pulse, trying to make a white-knuckled left before the yellow light turns red.