The thing about Earl...

I feel like Earl has a backstory. Maybe he's a mid-level executive, working his way to the top, and somebody just told him that he had to have some presentation ready for the Board of Directors in... I dunno, let's say Mumbai, India, by Thursday. He's trying to figure out whether to use FedEx or UPS to deliver the stuff.

He may have received moderately bad news. Something worse than "they screwed up your sandwich at lunch" but not so bad as "your wife was just caught screwing the pool boy." Maybe something along the lines of "Your son Albert was caught with an issue of Playboy in his locker."

And he's sort of chuckling to himself, like "well, I wasn't really sure Albert liked girls, so I guess that's good... but man, this is kind of embarrassing for me." It's not that Earl dislikes homosexual people-- in fact he's totally ok with it -- he just wasn't prepared for it as a father and is relieved to not have that on his plate while in the middle of the Mumbai deal. Obviously, he'd love his son just the same, but being a good parent is a struggle.

Clearly, though, he's upset that his son doesn't know that school is not the place for Playboy. Most dads probably wouldn't be actually that genuinely upset about their kid having a magazine that objectifies women. Earl, he never really bought that anyway. But he's kind of disappointed in himself for not teaching his son that school is not the place for softcore porn magazines.

But even with all that going on, Earl's pulling down somewhere in the mid-nineties and he's got a pretty good life. He spent the previous weekend fixing up his buddy's old car, maybe. His wife, Jessica, is working on her PhD in literature after taking some time off from her career to raise the Albert. She was a freelance reporter for a while and recently had an in-depth piece published in Vanity Fair and they were planning on using the extra money to have some solar panels put up on their roof, but the HOA said they weren't allowed to have black solar panels and the tan-colored ones barely work.

Instead they'll probably put the money into their IRA to get a leg-up on retirement. Earl hopes to retire by the time he's fifty-eight, not too early because he can't stand the idea of just puttering around the house for thirty years. Jessica never saw herself retiring, really, ever and will probably start writing a book when the time comes.

Anyway, that's the story of Earl, Albert and Jessica.

dts