To Be A Kid Again, I have To Do 100 Good Deeds
At 10:20am on a Friday afternoon, a man sat down in front of a Macbook Pro to write about his reasons to be cheerful. The Macbook was one of those refurbished ones, bought by the man using money from his student loan that was supposed be for educational textbooks. He had poor posture, but no poorer than everyone else he knew, and too many tabs open on his internet browser. Switching between the Wikipedia page for 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd and a Guardian interview with Matt Haig, the man slowly began to sink into his chair. Was this all “part of the process”? Was this how he was going to write something that people would be able to pin their hopes on and talk about down the pub after two-and-a-half pints? No. It was becoming increasingly apparent to the man that he wasn’t built for this sort of writing. An earnest display of emotion that could speak to people’s innermost thoughts and let them know that they weren’t alone wasn’t really his vibe.
He closed the Guardian tab and ran the idea of making a coffee by his id. Maybe that would help, he thought. Caffeine made it easier for him to arrange his feelings on the page, it made his eyeballs feel less foggy, and plunging the cafetière always gave him a sick satisfaction like seamlessly peeling the label off a beer bottle or biting off a perfect half-moon of fingernail. The man got up, made a half-hearted attempt to straighten out the S-curve of his spine, and trundled towards the kitchen, where he kept his coffee and coffee accouterments.
Spooning out three hefty quenelles of coffee into the beaker, the man wondered why no one ever asked him where his coffee came from. Today he was drinking a wild single-origin coffee from Tanzania with delicious notes of almonds. He’d love to be able to tell someone about where that coffee came from – and how it was ethically sourced.
It wasn’t difficult for his train of thought to make a change from coffee to 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd. 100 Deeds was a programme, similar in tone to Even Stevens, that the man enjoyed a lot when he was a child and scrolling through the Wikipedia page (Plot, Characters, Episodes, Cancellation) was the most nostalgia he was willing to indulge in that morning. If he started re-watching actual clips of 100 Deeds, he knew that he’d end up stuck in a YouTube hole, the algorithm luring him for hours with endless clips from Kenan & Kel and The Amanda Show. He’d never get that essay done if that happened.
While he waited for his coffee to steep, the man focussed his energies on trying to remembering why it was that the show’s protagonist, Eddie McDowd, was forced to live out his life as a dog. That was the concept of the show. Eddie McDowd had been turned into a dog and had to complete 100 good deeds as a dog in order to be turned back into a human. The reason that Eddie McDowd was turned into a dog eluded the man but he did remember that the show had a strong anti-bullying stance so he figured it was probably something to do with that. The man did remember, though, that the only person who could understand Eddie as a dog was the last kid he bullied. That didn’t seem fair to the man. Why should the victim have to help his tormentor become a better person? What was the Nickelodeon channel trying to say about trauma?
They don’t make children’s television like that anymore, thought the man, as he swirled a spoon in the coffee’s dark midst and felt the granules tug and resist before eventually acquiesing and gliding in a small tornado inside of the cafetière. He liked the moment that those particles stopped resisting and all just decided to go with the flow, as if they’d hopped onto lilos in a lazy river and simply accepted their fate. It made him feel powerful: like he was an all-seeing, all-hearing, all-powerful God.
As the man waited for that twister to settle, he thought about how every time that Eddie McDowd performs a good deed, a character called “the Drifter” appears with a creatively presented number stating the remaining deeds he has left to complete.
99, 98, 97, 96, 95.
The countdown was a major part of the show’s appeal for the man. It reminded him that time was finite and that, while progress can seem slow when you’re making it, looking at the bigger picture can really help to give you perspective and keep you on track. Occasionally, when Eddie would misbehave, the Drifter would take away one of his deeds.
95, 96, 97, 98, 99.
It always upset the man as a child, whenever that happened. That wasn’t how life was supposed to work. That wasn’t what he was taught at school. Progress was supposed to be linear – you could only get better at something, not worse. The fact that it was Nickelodeon, not his mother, that first taught the man that life wasn’t fair seemed fitting. She was always an optimistic. He plunged.
The man considered comparing this act of plunging his second coffee of the day to an orgasm but felt that was probably a bit much. The first coffee, maybe. The second, definitely not. It was an experience that teetered towards being orgasmic but always failed to attain that pure level of ecstasy, plonking itself firmly in the camp of “very, very nice” instead. Cleaning his ears with cottonbuds, digging into the ear canal further than is generally recommended, was another experience the man would put in that “very, very nice but not orgasmic” category.
There was no milk or milk alternatives in the fridge so the man told himself that he preferred his coffee black anyway. This was a lie. It was a lie he’d been telling himself for years, trying to convince himself into thinking he was a character in a Raymond Chandler novel who could subsist on black coffee and cigarettes and not a babyish someone who still enjoyed the velvety kiss of whole milk on occasion and got a sore throat from Marlboro Golds.
The thing the man remembered most vividly about 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd was that the story had no ending. The series was cancelled before any sort of final resolution could be made which meant that, having failed to complete his hundred deeds, Eddie was left to live out the rest of his days as an Australian Shepherd/Siberian Husky mix. The man pulled up his phone and asked the internet how long Australian Shepherd/Siberian Husky mixes tend to live by typing “Australian Shepherd/Siberian Husky mix lifespan” into the first search engine he was offered. Around 10-12 years apparently. The first series of 100 Deeds came out in 1999. Eddie was most certainly dead by now.
Thinking of death made the man sad but his coffee was hot and woke his tongue up with a bitter hit of almond. That, combined with the synapse shock of caffeine, made the man’s brain happy, ironing out any wrinkles of anxiety and worry, until he remembered that time someone told him that cyanide smells and tastes a bit like bitter almonds. This meant that the man was thinking about death when he sat down at 10:32am in front of his Macbook Pro and, closing all his tabs, began to type...