

### The Song Between

### Her Legs

### Lance Manion

Copyright © 2014 by Lance Manion  
Lance Manion Enterprises  
ISBN: 978-1500912987

Smashwords Edition  
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Edited by Andira Dodge wordrummager@gmail.com  
Cover art by Lance Manion ... obviously.

www.lancemanion.com

"Starting a book with a good quote is important."

-Lance Manion

ALSO BY LANCE MANION

Merciful Flush

Results May Vary

The Ball Washer

Homo sayswhaticus

The Trembling Fist

### Contents

Introduction

a stinging bug by any other name

lost in transmutation

the pep talk

killing a bird

the hanging bit

Mr. Peanut

germs

Whatcha doin'?

The Council of Jeffs

Bunny and Claude

The Verrazano

Commencement Address

hangers

repairman

first day

the deep dark web

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame must burn!

where there be blow jobs

the slightly amusing story of the no-show ghost

how a story fails

this constant certainty

hard-nosed seasonal fare

bloom

hiking the Appalachian Trail

four lads that shook the entomological world

how to make love stay

my first racist joke

Mr. Nosy

Bugs the bunny

the song between her legs

a few thoughts

why men can't stay faithful

Elvis Wings

bargains

the fart

Mr. Old Fashioned

Miss Ham and Eggar

Caesar can't sling the batter

House the house

Porn World: The Movie Pitch

the tough questions

so much for high society

imprevious

tragedy plus time

belated

disturbances

Quera

the father he needed

understanding racism

his airtight heart

the button revisited

cooler

brother

Mr. Swansong

National Have Sex With An Ugly Person Day: Year 2

and now for the news ...

Occam's knife

glasses

advice from a dodo

About The Author

### Introduction

The first thing you must be wondering is why the cover of this book is so crappy. Well, I'll tell you. I threw this together quickly to give the general idea of what I wanted as the cover but the more I thought about it the more I wanted the cover to look crappy. I wanted it to scream SELF PUBLISHED. I didn't want to pretend that this book is something that aspired to be read by the masses.

I know what you're probably asking yourself ... "Doesn't he know that most people judge a book by its cover?"

Believe me, I do. But most people won't enjoy this book. It's definitely a book geared more for the people that don't judge a book by its cover. Over the years I've had publishers and agents contact me with helpful advice and tips on how to improve my writing and be more accessible to the general public and they always seem at a complete loss when I tell them to piss off. They just can't process that someone doesn't want to be a best seller.

Just because there isn't a demand for obscure writers doesn't mean there isn't a need.

I know my limitations. I am incapable of writing some epic, transcendent story about fabulous people doing fabulous things, meticulously researched and rich in detail. I'm literally struggling to get through this introduction.

How long do these stupid things have to be anyway?

And yes, I know that you probably figured out that not judging a book by its cover is also a form of judging a book by its cover.

Life is funny. And dumb. And sad. And scary and absurd and rude and weird. That's pretty much all I'm trying to capture. The human experience is wildly erratic and I won't pretend otherwise.

Here's the thing ... if I could sing I'd have much rather been a songwriter. If I could draw I'd have much rather been a cartoonist. I can't do either so here you sit reading an introduction to a book that is one corndog away from being an odd little carnival tucked away where you least expect it.

I hope you enjoy some of the rides.

### a stinging bug by any other name

The other day it was partly cloudy, which doesn't make a great opening line but it does go a long way in explaining why when a bug landed on my nose it couldn't be said to have been "out of the blue." It was partly cloudy ... as I just mentioned. Rarely does a bug land on someone's nose "out of the partly cloudy."

I like to believe that I've evolved as a human being because I reacted very differently than I did the last time a bug landed on that particular spot. The last time I acted under the false premise that my nose was constructed with indestructible titanium and not the very structible bundle of nerve endings that it actually comprised.

I slugged myself right in the nose and left it all red and swollen and was forced to walk around the rest of the day sporting this testament to my poor decision-making.

The problem then, as it was the other partly cloudy day, is that while the bug did not wear the distinctive yellow and black colors of the notorious villains of the insect world, it sat on the end of my nose and, while my eyes are outstanding at gathering information from a variety of distances, the close proximity made the bug blurry.

Try as I might I could not make heads nor tails of what exactly was perched on the end of my snout.

This is where being a writer makes one susceptible to unfortunate flights of fancy. While most people would stop at a small number of insect suspects, the writer, given his or her training, can come up with a cornucopia of winged menaces that could have hypothetically plopped down and made themselves at home.

I guess this is a cautionary tale of sorts.

Everybody thinks they can write and most people aspire on some level to put the ol' pen to paper and take it for a spin on behalf of their fellow man. What they don't appreciate is the terrible toll it takes on your imagination. Scientifically speaking, I believe every time you think of a new odd idea you build a new neural pathway. You make a new connection which in turn allows you to make a similar odd connection more easily the next time the desire for weirdness takes hold. The odder you start to think the easier it is to continue to think of odder and odder things until such a time as you are sitting at a dinner party making small talk when all of a sudden you look up to find everyone else at the table staring at you with their mouths wide open in shock and bewilderment at what you thought was a pretty innocuous observation.

Some people don't think this part through, the dangers that lurk in thinking oddly. Once you slip to the odd side, it's a long road back. Book signings might be tedious but they are nothing compared to the horror show of lying awake at night staring at the ceiling with a writer's mind.

So instead of lashing out in fear I took a composed breath and tried to imagine all the whimsical circumstances that could have brought this noble creature to my nose. All of a sudden I was one with the universe. Connected with all living things. How two separate but equal beings such as me and this blurry little fellow could have found our paths entwined began to play out my head in great detail. Each scenario getting progressively more poignant.

I slowly pointed my head towards where the sun would have been, had it not been partly cloudy, as if showing the universe that I was a much better person than the last time I punched myself in the face. I was beaming and imagining my friend doing a little basking itself.

Perhaps I'd truly found some deeper appreciation of the beauty of life in all its many forms.

That's when the insect stung me and left my nose all red and swollen.

Well played, universe. Well played.

### lost in transmutation

If people hibernated then I'm sure there would be a medical term for what Greg had but as Greg was a frog and people don't hibernate I'll just have to describe it as best I can.

Disappointed in the name Greg for a frog? Expecting him to be called something whimsical like Gribbit?

Be reasonable. First of all, there are literally millions and millions of frogs and they can't have all names that are whimsical. Second, if you take a moment to examine the existence of a frog you'll find a decided lack of whimsy in their lives. Granted they start off as tadpoles and it's tough to top that if you're looking for whimsy, what with the tail and the swimming around and all, but eventually the tail departs, to be replaced by legs, as they move from an aquatic lifestyle to a more half and half land approach, and after that they are strictly business.

So, the condition Greg was afflicted with ...

Although perhaps the word afflicted is a bit harsh. While it did drive him a bit mad, it could be argued that the thoughts that run through the heads of both people and frogs are really the only proof that we exist at all and thus this so-called "affliction" added at least thirty five to forty percent to Greg's existence.

His condition was this: while all of his amphibious comrades slipped deep into the mud and went to sleep for the winter months, Greg slipped into the mud and was awake the entire time.

A bit of a mixed blessing.

It made him a very odd frog when he eventually popped out of the mud and rejoined his brethren but nobody could argue that he wasn't a pretty bright frog. He'd had plenty of time to think through some issues that in the course of a typical frog year most frogs didn't have time to mull over. Frogs seem to be on the menu for almost every animal out and about in the warmer months so much of their time is spent hopping for their lives and trying to squeeze in a few worms and flies when the opportunities present themselves. Buried safely in the mud allowed Greg some peace and quiet his slimy pals didn't have available to them.

I realize at this juncture that you might be guilty of anthropomorphizing Greg to such a degree that you have him inventing things and walking erect and such but let me slow your roll a bit and remind you that he was still a frog. A really smart frog is still not as smart as really dumb raccoon and I've yet to be walking through a wooded area and see a small raccoon factory belching out black smoke and producing tiny wheelbarrows or raccoon footwear.

You're still probably dizzy with the earlier whimsy of tadpole imagery and thinking this story is destined to end up a Disney flick.

Let's try to collect ourselves and get back to Greg shall we?

For although nothing about his condition indicated that he would end up the beloved star of an animated movie, Greg had seen some things that no other frog, that he was aware of, had seen.

Snow for starters.

Every few years the ground would warm up noticeably and he would slither up topside while the rest of his frog compatriots slept blissfully unaware that there was a break in the cold action. Greg would emerge and see the grey skies and naked trees of winter but the temperature made it safe to sluggishly move around.

And while sluggishly moving around, he would occasionally see lumps of this white stuff he'd never seen before. When he got closer he could feel the chill radiating off it. Being a very wise frog he knew not to get too close because there were still hawks flying around and they could, whether it would make sense to them at the time or not, see a green frog against a white background from miles away.

The first time he'd seen it he couldn't wait to report back to all the other frogs but the following spring, when he told them of his discovery, they laughed and croaked derisive things about him so he never said another word about it.

So seasons came and went and Greg spent his winter months deep in mud and thought while simultaneously trying not to go out of his mind.

Then one December the temperatures suddenly shot up and he emerged to find the air temperature similar to a typical spring day. His blood started to flow more quickly and he made short work of exploring the frog-less world around him.

Or so he thought anyway.

For there, sitting on a section of pond still covered in ice, was another frog.

A young lady frog.

And quite a looker. Legs that went on for days. He thought he remembered her name was Amy and she had just lost her tail the previous spring.

Almost on queue he saw a hawk high above them take notice of her and he leapt into action. Please note that the fact that Greg was a frog and he happened to be leaping into action was entirely accidental and one of the more pleasant side-effects of not knowing what the next word in the story might be until it's typed.

He let out a well-timed croak and Amy was able to slip safely into the chilly water and make her escape. Moments later she slowly crawled up to Greg to croak back her thanks. Greg could think of no better way to get introduced to a female and felt his confidence grow with each suave observation he made about their winter environment. She took it all in like an eager student. They spent two solid days above ground before the temperatures started to sink again and signaled it was time to once again slide deep into the earth and wait things out.

Two magical days.

Amy was just happy to know that she wasn't the only frog who couldn't get to sleep.

Greg found himself appreciating probability and circumstances more than he could ever remember.

It was the first time he could remember burrowing where he was already anticipating the trip back topside. His heart was fluttering away, remembering sliding up to Amy just before they went their separate ways. If ever a frog felt debonair it was then. Their enormous eyes almost touching. Whispering to her and hoping that she understood.

"I have to be leaving ... but I won't let that come between us, okay?"

### the pep talk

I was never a natural athlete. Whatever gifts of hand-to-eye coordination, strength or speed that were ladled out to my peers via DNA somehow gave me a miss. Nowhere was this more on display than when I participated in youth baseball.

I don't want to get all Wonder Years on you but somehow it seems unavoidable. That little wave of nostalgia that washes over me when I think about grabbing the ol' bat and ball and heading out to the ballpark has me longing for a simpler time when all I wanted was a root beer and a corn dog.

And a girl to touch my penis.

Sorry. No need for that. Penis-touching aside, there was nothing about my baseball experience that would help me convince any girl that my penis was something to aspire to touching. That last sentence proving once again that try as you might to put penis-touching aside, you simply cannot. Truth is, at the age I was during this story, penis-touching probably wasn't even on the menu but that's yet another example of how I have a nasty habit of working penis-touching into stories even when it's not relevant. With a hyphen no less. The hyphen is where I feel I really crossed the line.

Back to the story with the usual apologies.

I was the complete package ... I could neither pitch, hit nor catch. I couldn't even figure out the point of the brim on my hat. Sure it kept the sun out of your eyes when you were looking forwards but as soon as you lifted your head to try and see a fly ball the sun immediately overwhelmed your retina and had you covering up your head and backpedaling away from the site where the small leather meteor was plummeting to Earth with ill intent.

It wasn't as if my father hadn't done his best to prepare me for baseball. Just before my first practice, he dragged me to a local pizza place that had a few batting cages out back to work on my swing. He quickly bypassed the 30 mph and the 50 mph options and threw a few coins into the 70 mph machine. Having done that, he grabbed a bat and a helmet- safety first in the ol' Manion household- and strode confidently to the plate.

He looked me right in the eye. "You can't have fear in your heart when you approach the plate so let's get this over with right now." I heard the pitching machine growling away in the background as he leaned forward into danger zone and I knew at once he meant to get intentionally hit by the ball to drive home whatever lesson he was cooking up in his head. "There are worse things than pain. For instance ... a restless heart." Before I could ask him what he meant by that, the ball came hurtling forward and fractured his humerus. Despite the name of this bone, there is nothing funny about damaging it. I concluded this as I, and all the families gathered at the pizza place, listened to a smorgasbord of profanity that would have had a longshoreman covering his ears.

My dad was in a cast for the first six weeks of my season. A grim reminder of the suffering that can be inflicted by even the smallest of objects.

During the first practice it became clear that the coach would be assigning positions based on the size of the truck each child arrived in. Until that time I was completely unaware of the thriving lumberjack community our town must have been harboring. A few of them appeared to have paid extra just to have the vehicle unnecessarily belch black fumes into the air upon command. By the time our station wagon roared down the dirt road there was barely room enough for my mom to park between the collection of phallic-mobiles.

Being keenly aware of the subtleties of language, I quickly noticed that while my coached instructed the other players to "play" second base or "play" centerfield, I was always asked to "go out" to left field. I quickly vowed that I would "go out" there to the best of my ability so as not to disappoint him.

The wooden bat that I had purchased with my own money was sneered at by my peers so I scooped up one of the aluminum ones, or whatever space-age material it was made of, to take batting practice only to find that this space-age material was scientifically designed to transfer the energy from the pitch to your hands, should you be unlucky enough to make even the slightest contact with a pitched ball. The results would have your hands burning with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

For the record, listening to some of the parents doing their best Tom Hanks "There's no crying in baseball" impersonations every time I fouled one off did little by way of making me appreciate the movie A League of Their Own.

I remember the events leading up to my little pep talk like they happened yesterday. It was during a practice when I was having particular difficulties doing anything right. Any ball headed in my general direction did so with the complete certitude that it was in no danger of being caught. Each grounder and pop up had an almost palpable arrogance to them, as if they knew that they were going to reach their intended destination with no meddling from my glove.

It was after a tenth ball in a row had seemed to defy physics and make its way through my glove and into the vast expanses behind me when the coach seemed to feel the need to pull everybody together and address the team.

"I want everyone to take a look at Lance. Here is a kid that can't catch a ball to save his life. His fielding skill seems to defy all laws of probability; a bystander would assume that if enough balls came his way that at least one would make its way into his glove ... and yet none do. In fact, the only thing worse than his fielding is his hitting.

"Why do I point this out? Because he still makes every practice and he still shows up to every game. He doesn't let the fact that every one of his teammates and every one of their parents and every coach, including myself, secretly hopes he'll miss one deter him. Just one."

He paused and got a far-away look in his eyes before continuing.

"But he never does. Ever. Every friggin' game I'm forced to find a spot for him on the field and every game we can look forward to him striking out three or four times. Sometimes during critical at-bats. But does he quit? Nope.

"Why do I point this out? I'm not sure. It's just watching him play the game of baseball makes me so angry at the universe that I simply couldn't stand by and not say something."

Practice then resumed.

The next game, fueled by this inspirational pep talk, I decided to take one for the team and get hit by a pitch. Years later I would understand more fully what my dad meant about a restless heart but, as I lay there in a pool of my own blood with two of my teeth knocked clean out of my head, I would briefly question his conclusion vis-à-vis getting hit with a pitch.

### killing a bird

While I would love to regale you with a charming coming-of-age story, I'm afraid the facts surrounding this particular one preclude that. Had I been ten or eleven when the events I'm about to chronicle occurred, there might have been a chance but, given I was nineteen at the time, chances are you're not going to find it endearing.

The lessons learned from the forthcoming narrative should have been learned long beforehand but taking into consideration they weren't might allow a little sympathy towards me to creep in.

When my college roommate suggested we buy a BB gun you would think that all my "nothing good can come of this" bells would be ringing up a storm but you have to understand that while my "gathering" skills were unmatched, I had yet to explore the "hunting" side of my psyche. While it was true that it wasn't the first time I had held a weapon, it was also true that the previous weapon had been nun chucks and after hours of practice the only thing that was in any possible danger of getting harmed were my elbows and the occasional lamp.

As is inevitable when dealing with all thing male, shooting at bottles and cans soon became tedious for reasons that might escape the typical female. I am careful to say "aiming" as opposed to "shooting" because "shooting" infers that the aforementioned were hit from time to time. Try as we might, as close as we crept, we were unable to hit a single bottle or can. We put them up as targets and then twenty minutes later we took them down unscathed.

We had bigger fish to fry.

It was time to hunt.

While we didn't apply war paint to our faces before departing we did pretend to. The village needed food and it was up to us to oblige.

My friend took a couple unsuccessful shots at a squirrel and cursed the breeze and the faulty manufacturing facility where his BB gun was made. Moments later a blue jay landed on a branch about thirty feet above my head. I aimed and pulled the trigger and was about to curse the breeze and the faulty manufacturing facility where my BB gun was made when I saw the blue jay fall from the tree like a plastic thing.

No final chirp, no twitching. It fell like the dead thing it was. The dead thing I'd made it.

To this day I remember watching it fall. Remember walking up to it as my roommate congratulated me. The sincere admiration in his voice. I remember, as if it just happened, looking down at the corpse.

When I hear about these new 3-D printers I know in my heart that when they have the ability to take images directly from my head that I will be able to recreate every feather on that blue jay.

I couldn't tell you the name of my high school prom date or my first drink or even where I lived at the time of this hunting expedition but I can picture that bird laying there with complete clarity.

So I talked early on about the lessons that come from such an experience. I can spin it however I want but the truth that was revealed was that I am a pussy. I am a gatherer.

I should be back at the village with the rest of the women grinding corn and whatever the hell else Indians eat.

I tried using my intellect to rationalize the killing. I told myself that I had no doubt saved the lives of hundreds of worms. Each of them free to go on and procreate and have little worms. When I thought about it, I was the Oskar Schindler of the Amynthas alexandri crowd. Somehow being the hero of all things slimy and spineless seemed appropriate.

This fucking bird now lives in my head. He visits me when I get too happy or too full of myself. A ghost that lives in my stomach and his fluttering is felt as an ache.

The funny thing is- if you find irony funny- is that, although I've never held a weapon since, I don't think I'd have much trouble shooting a person. Maybe irony isn't the word for it.

Maybe I didn't learn dick. About having a dick. Or being a dick.

### the hanging bit

Sometimes I get so frustrated with this little thing hanging between my legs. The grief and drama it causes.

Then I laugh at the absurdity of it all. Not just the fact that that it's hanging there in the first place but the whole body. The appendages jutting out all over the place, the anus sitting right next to the little hanging thing, the nose, hair, the whole package.

How absurd we are.

We think we are so special in the universe but I'm pretty sure there is a lot of other sentient life put together a lot better than we are.

And this damn hanging bit.

Half the people on the planet have a hole in them that seems to be a perfect fit for my little hanging bit but it's never that simple. Sure, they all feel the same but somehow I want to stick my hanging bit in a particular hole. Even "want" is a poor way to describe it at times.

Need.

And why? They all feel the same.

Don't give me the evolutionary imperative line. I know we are born with the drive of spreading our seed but that is simply the engine that moves the metaphorical vehicle. Procreation doesn't explain everything. Our minds, our ego, play a huge and senseless part. A cute woman could be wearing an "I'm infertile" t-shirt and there would still be lines around the block to have a shot at her rig.

So evolution gave us a motor but no steering wheel.

And why does it feel so good to play with if it is just a means to an end? If you stretched the nerve endings on the tip of my hanging bit endings-to-end I'm pretty sure they would travel the moon and back at least a half dozen times. Funny we would call them "endings" in the first place, they are usually just the beginning.

All of this sensory overload would seem to scream "Any hole will do!" but it doesn't work that way.

Don't get me started on the hole either. What a mess that thing is. How could evolution come up with something as beautiful and complicated as the human eye and then produce the hole? The hanging bit might not be a treat for the eyes but the hole looks like evolution was just exhausted from working on the eye and decided to turn in early. You can almost see it throwing up its just-recently-completed hands and saying "Good enough. We'll come back to that in a few hundred thousand years when we're done growing the head a bit more. The downstairs plumbing will have to suffice. They'll just have to live with the bouquet."

But my hanging bit desires it just the same.

I sometimes sit back and wonder what great advances humanity would have made if we didn't have such voracious sex drives. So many brilliant minds (I'm obviously not including mine amongst those) spending so much of their day worried about their hanging bits. I'll wager every known disease would be a thing of the past if men could spend just a few clear-headed days without the shadow of their penis hanging over them. We'd be flying around in environmentally-friendly solar cars, our life spans would be doubled and college and professional athletes wouldn't have to continually spend big bucks getting themselves found not guilty of rape charges.

What a wonderful world it would be.

But instead we all wallow in the bleak reality of the hanging bit. Chasing the momentary release of shooting a batch of DNA into the depths of some hole that is usually lying there seeking completely different objectives, collapsing back dazed like the guy who suddenly wakes up with a start and realizes he's been a werewolf all night. Except instead of mauling people to death he's been crashing around making poor decisions, promises and mistakes.

"What have I done? What have I done?! That wasn't me. That was my hanging bit!"

All these lamentations falling on deaf-and-expecting-to-be-taken-out-to-an-expensive-dinner ears as the poor creature tries to drift off to sleep figuring out why hole and whole and hold and holy all sound the same but are so damned different.

Sometimes I get so frustrated with this little thing hanging between my legs. I can't help feel that putting the anus right next to it was poetic justice.

### Mr. Peanut

(first appeared at potluckmag.com 6/3/14)

It took a minute to clear my head. The last thing I remembered was a long fall and then suddenly I was sitting in the dust in the middle of what appeared to be a movie set based loosely on the Old West. Damned if there weren't tumbleweeds rolling past and all.

I stood up and found I was parched. My lips felt like little pieces of cracked leather and my throat was raw. As much as I wanted to cough and get rid of the dust that had found its way to my mouth I didn't dare.

"Go on, check the well."

I heard a voice behind me. I turned to see a man leaning against what appeared to be an old saloon. His face had too many lines on it and although he was wearing chaps I could see that his legs seemed to bend in the wrong direction. Like the kind of insect that comes to mind when you talk about legs bending the wrong way.

Usually I would immediately come up with the kind of insect but I was just too damned thirsty.

From inside the saloon I could hear raised voices. Eager to take my mind of my need for refreshments I walked up to the little swinging doors you always see in westerns and took a look inside.

There were two men, both who seemed to have legs that bent the right way, sitting across a wooden table across from each other and seemingly in a heated argument.

"Obviously the peanut is the preferred nut of the poor!" one of them bellowed.

Not to be outdone the other bellowed his choice of the almond with equal fervor.

"How can you say that?" the first one thundered. "The almond is clearly the nut of the middle class."

"You're batshit crazy I tell you!" the second man countered, "The almond is the nut of the common folk."

The first man fell back in shock.

"The almond? The almond the nut of the common man? Are you mad?"

Neither had bothered to mention if the nuts in question were salted or unsalted but the question ran through my mind just the same and reminded me how much I needed a drink.

"Go on then, check the well," the cricket-man chimed in.

My attention was brought back to the two men at the table as the second man began to make his case.

"Was there or was there not an entire advertising campaign based solely around the image of a peanut dressed up in a top hat and cane? Is this the preferred wardrobe of the masses? Was there a fashion memo I missed?"

A satisfied grin began to crawl across his weathered mug.

"You're seriously going to base your argument on a giant peanut wearing a monocle?" The first man sat back with a look that was equal parts disbelief and disgust.

Feeling the argument turn in his favor the second man made his closing argument "Why would a peanut company lie?"

"Why do all commercials lie? Everybody knows that the cashew is the rich man's nut. Just because one doesn't waltz around in a TV ad with a monocle doesn't mean that it's not the favorite nut of the upper class. It goes cashew for the rich, almond for the middle class and, sitting on every counter in every shitty little bar across the impoverished landscape, is a bowel of the lowly peanut!"

Every time they mentioned a peanut I imagined them covered in salt. I imagined them sitting in my dry mouth. I could almost taste them.

"Go on son, check the well."

Did I mention the big cowboy hat that sat on top of the man who had been asking me to check the well the whole time?

It was large and until that moment he'd kept it leaning so far forward that I'd yet to even see his eyes. Just his mouth and the few teeth that called it home. I spun around and glared at him and he stared back and I finally saw them. With the hat now pushed back I could make out his two grey eyes. I lost all my enthusiasm for confrontation and my fists unclenched.

Suddenly I had to find that well.

I rushed out the front as the little doors swung wildly behind me, leaving behind the two men and their inane debate. At the end of the dirt road that ran through the center of this make-believe town I could make out a well. Heart pumping I ran to it, wild with thirst.

Sure enough there was a rope with a bucket at the end of it and I hurled it into the black depths only to hear it crash against the solidness below. My tongue was a withered thing in my mouth. My head swam.

He was right behind me. Dressed as Mr. Peanut but still sporting those aforementioned I-think-it's-a-praying-mantis-I-was-thinking-about legs.

"There's no water in hell."

### germs

(first appeared at themeofabsence.com 6/27/14)

Do you ever catch yourself doing something that seems innocent enough but then when you think about it you realize there might be a lot more to it?

Of course you do. Everyone does. Forget I phrased it like that.

The thing is, this thing I do is so weird and creepy I can't come to terms with it. I've been doing it ever since I was a kid and I never stopped to think about it and now it's all I can think about. Like how hair grows out of our face and head and we never stop to think just how creepy that it is. How we'd freak if anything else was growing out of our skin but because nobody else seems concerned we just accept it.

Sort of like that except worse. Worse because it could mean so many things ... this thing I do.

Examine any peanut and you'll see in addition to the two main pieces that make up this embryonic dicot, called the cotyledons, there is a little thing sticking out called the radicle. This is the root emerging from the peanut seed. Most of the time you pop the whole thing in your mouth without a second thought but occasionally you'll see it poking out of the peanut and you'll make a special effort to pop it off and eat it individually.

Or at least I do.

And then, when the can is almost empty I will tip it into my hand to see how many of these radicles have fallen off their original peanut and settled to the bottom. Sometimes there will be a couple, other times, particularly if the can has been given a good shake when nobody is looking, there will be a dozen or more.

And I will pop them all in my mouth. They are my favorite part of the peanut and I can't explain why. I crunch them between my front teeth and close my eyes and feel nothing short of euphoria.

Sometimes I will buy a few cans and spend a leisurely evening opening each and every peanut, removing the little embryonic shoot and then placing it in a pile with all their unsalted brethren. Typically I'm wearing women's clothing and listening to Dashboard Confessional.

It puts the radicle in the basket.

I can't put my finger on what makes this seem so wrong. Is it because the radicle is designed to thrust into the earth and start the root system of a plant and instead it ends up in my stomach? Is it because it is so small and typically ignored by the peanut-buying public? Is it because as I am gently pulling it off the main part of the peanut and making small piles of them on a piece of paper towel I am wearing women's clothing and listening to Dashboard Confessional?

I realize that last part might seem a bit gay but to be fair, their song on the Spiderman soundtrack was pretty good. Plus, listening to Dashboard Confessional is only about ten percent as gay as any man over the age of sixteen using an umbrella.

I mean seriously, how do they not see how gay they look standing there holding an umbrella? They might as well be holding an erect penis in their other hand. If a man is that worried about getting wet that he insists on carrying an umbrella the top should have to be purple and the shaft should be covered in veins.

At least using an umbrella in public gets it out there for the world to see. Shaking my nuts in secret just makes the whole thing that much worse. There are times I wish I would get caught in the act. I imagine trying to explain what I'm doing as my face grows red with shame. Pieces of my treachery still stuck in my teeth.

"The peanut isn't even a nut, it's a legume," I would rage, quivering.

"A legume you barbarians!"

I am Vindicated

I am selfish

I am wrong

I am right

I swear I'm right

I swear I knew it all along

"It's a bean ... a bean ... and I love the little nub sticking out of it."

Now where are my fishnet stockings?

### Whatcha doin'?

There's really no way to tell this story where I don't come off looking like an asshole and to some degree that makes telling it a lot easier. I could tell you that I'm not proud of my behavior but instead I'd like to focus on some possible explanations.

The behavior I'm alluding to?

Let me preface it by saying that I was having a perfectly normal day. There had been no stressful encounters leading up to the incident and I had entered the little gathering of friends only an hour beforehand completely at ease and looking forward to a pleasant evening.

I felt the need to relieve myself and entered the bathroom both sober and in high spirits.

I closed the door behind me and just as I was about to unzip and start the proceedings a little plastic snowman holding a plunger, hidden amidst bowls of potpourri and little soaps in the shape of clams and bottles of hand sanitizers, let loose with a loud "Whatcha doin'?"

It startled me.

I was not expecting it.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, instead of being startled and leaving it at that, I lifted my leg and after letting out a small roar, did a side kick into the would-be-humorous motion-activated snowman. There was nowhere for the snowman to go. With only tile-coated drywall behind it to absorb the impact it immediately exploded into what seemed to be dozens of fragments. It broke apart with such enthusiasm it led me to believe for a moment that Fabergé had, without fanfare, gotten into the business of would-be-humorous motion-activated novelty products.

Before I launch into a defense of this rather unprovoked outburst let me first admit that my Bruce Lee-esque side kick was not the end of said outburst. In fact, I'm sorry to report that it was only the beginning.

Upset that I was startled by such a poorly made holiday decoration I then let fly another kick, more of a stomp if truth be told, at the defenseless hand sanitizer. It put up about the same resistance as the snowman and threw its contents all over the sink and mirror and me.

Which pissed me the fuck off.

I grabbed the hapless bowl of potpourri and, with a thunderous yawp, hurled it across the tight confines of the bathroom and into the toilet. The sound of the ceramic-on-ceramic impact bordered on ear-shattering.

It's at this point I should mention that the foot that had only seconds before been involved in dispatching the hand sanitizer was just now coming back to earth and been given new instructions to pivot and become a weight-bearing entity.

It's at this next point I should remind you that hand sanitizer is very slippery. And that it was coating that same foot.

For reasons that are even less comprehensible than my original reaction to being startled, it had been my intention to punch the mirror. Why? I have no idea. I bore no ill will towards the hosts of this gathering and when I went in to pee I had no intentions of destroying their bathroom. Be that as it may, I was just about to punch their mirror when my foot, due to the aforementioned slipperiness, decided to abandon the plan to support my weight and instead headed for points south. This treachery resulted in my twisting and flopping and whirling in such a manner that my head hit the metal toilet roll holder in such a way that after my head finished its journey to the cold floor it left a good chunk of head still clinging to the metal toilet roll holder.

That started the red stuff flowing.

I realize that if I describe the sound that my lungs then produced as a thunderous yelp it might confuse you but that's exactly what left my lips. A sound equal parts yelp and thunder.

That's when I heard it. The voice on the other side of the door. Asking me a simple question ...

"Whatcha doin'?"

It was at that moment I decided to pull the toilet out of the floor.

To the partygoers gathered outside the other side of the door I'm sure what they heard next was more of a bellow than a shout, although to be fair I think folks from below the Mason-Dixon line might get away with describing it as a holler, but whatever it was it convinced them that immediate action was required and they began to try to break down the door.

When you pull a toilet up out of the floor water really does come fountaining up. It was the first time during the entire bathroom incident that I can remember feeling any satisfaction.

The truth is, or at least the truth as I explained it to my shocked and deeply dismayed hosts, that if you insist on inserting plastic snowmen in your bathrooms for the express purpose of terrorizing the occupants of said bathroom you have to expect some collateral damage.

It's at this juncture that you might be waiting to hear some possible explanations. I advertised these explanations early on so it's a reasonable request on your part.

It might be that in third grade Mike Sanchez pinned me down at recess and shoved a snowball in my pants.

It might be that when I owned my first apartment I got overcharged by an unscrupulous plumber.

It might have something to do with that reoccurring dream I have where an unscrupulous plumber shoves a snowball up my ass.

Who knows. It might be that I don't enjoy holiday parties as much as other people do.

The subconscious is a funny thing.

I have thirteen stitches in my scalp and an expensive trip to Home Depot that will testify to that.

### The Council of Jeffs

Any time you write fiction, the hardest part is introducing the premise. The harder it is to swallow, the more background you have to provide to make it plausible. If what you plan to write about isn't in any way plausible, you have to pull off the literary equivalent of ventriloquism; have the reader be watching your lips so intently that they don't really care about what words are coming out of your mouth.

While you mull that over let me explain that there are hierarchies of reality and just because yours might end on a deathbed surrounded by family members obeying the laws of physics doesn't mean that's true for everyone.

Not Jeff anyway.

While he liked the scenery he wasn't enjoying the play, so it was decided that he would change the script at intermission and pick only one hundred people with whom to move the story forward.

Except that such was his dislike for his fellow man, he decided to live in a world populated with only one hundred of himself.

Jeff and ninety-nine other Jeffs.

Why one hundred?

I could explain it but, as with most things physics, you wouldn't understand. This reality couldn't exist with only ninety nine Jeffs and one hundred and one Jeffs would face a similar hurdle.

With what I've told you about Jeff I'm guessing you can already see the problem with this scenario. It took only a few days for him to realize that the only people he disliked more than everyone else on the planet was the collection of Jeffs he'd surrounded himself with. Sitting in a confined space with a group of himselves was torture.

Luckily the Jeffs had a great big world to spread out across and they all agreed to do just that. With what I haven't told you about Jeff though it would be hard for you to see the problem with this scenario so I will come right out and explain it. The skill sets possessed by Jeff, multiplied a hundred times, or even a thousand times, were limited when it came to practical applications faced in a world devoid of all other people. He was unfamiliar with plumbing, electricity, farming, weaving, automobile repair, construction, and pretty much everything else that his fellow man had provided prior to his decision to abandon them to an alternate realm. His mechanical aptitude, on a scale between 1 and 10, sat uncomfortably at a zero.

Thus was born The Council of Jeffs.

Perhaps ventriloquism wasn't the best way to have framed what was discussed in the opening paragraph. I'm sure by now you've long forgotten it and perhaps even forgiven me for having phrased it as such but I think I'd rather come back and address it rather than have it sit in the back of your head only to lurch out months later unprovoked and cause a burst of anti-Manion sentiment.

I might have better explained myself if I had compared it to sleight-of-hand. Doing something interesting with one hand while the other is up to no good. Or perhaps distracting you with something shiny while elsewhere something dark and unexpected takes place.

As you can see, however I explain it, you now return to the story with a complete understanding, and, dare I say, an appreciation for, the reality that Jeff finds himself.

The Council met every month to discuss the challenges that the Jeffs faced out in their new existence. None of them knew- given that if any of them knew it they all would have known it- that gasoline doesn't power cars after enough time has gone by, so they discussed alternate forms of transportation. The lack of fresh meat presented a problem so they discussed if any of them would like to go into raising cattle, forgetting of course that either everyone would want to do it or nobody would want to do it. The only thing they all agreed on is the fact that they should have one leader and each felt very strongly that it should be them. They voted and every time it ended with one hundred candidates getting one vote each.

There was no way Jeff could convince another Jeff to throw his allegiance behind him for the betterment of Jeffs everywhere.

I could at this time ask you that you not substitute yourself for Jeff in this little scenario and play out what would happen if you woke up on a world populated with only ninety nine of yourselves to keep you company, but I know it would be useless. In fact, unless you're gay and preoccupied with wondering if you would find yourself attractive, you've probably already jumped ahead to the same ending that Jeff has in store.

In a way it's like those street hustlers that ask you to keep track of the little rubber ball they place under one of three plastic cups that they then move around in a series of seemingly easy-to-follow circles. You'll follow it and hand them over a dollar, certain that you've beaten the game, only to find that the cup you've selected is empty.

It's really just a matter of time until one Jeff decides that this world isn't big enough for so many Jeffs and, if you've started to notice the pattern, that means all of the Jeffs will come to this conclusion.

Actually it's more like when a magician flashes a pack of cards in front of you and asks you to select any card you want and he then guesses your card. You're unaware that after years of practice he flashes the deck in such a way that one card stands out amongst all the others and sits in your head even though you're completely unaware of it. You think at the time that you are making a choice of your own free will but in the end the power of suggestion is stronger than you think.

So a Jeff, which one isn't important, calls for a Council of Jeffs. Everyone agrees that all one hundred Jeffs need to be in attendance for this particular conclave and everyone comes into the meeting with an ingenious idea to slay all the other Jeffs.

If you give it some thought I think you'll find that this was your card.

### Bunny and Claude

Submitted for your approval: the tawdry tale of Bunny and Claude. A tale so unbelievable that it couldn't be true. And isn't ... i.e. any similarities between anybody you know, living or dead, is completely a coincidence. Although I think it's fair to say we all know somebody similar to both Bunny and Claude ... proving coincidence is a force not to be trifled with or understood.

Bunny was a country girl, Claude a city boy. They met on a midnight train and instantly realized that while anyone can live with quiet desperation, it's the slight discontent that will get you. So it did. It got them. Both at the same time.

He leaned forward for a kiss and she said "So I guess this makes us partners in crime."

From that moment a sincere word never passed between them. It was just somehow understood that every moment they were to spend together was a send-up of real life. Given their own moral ground rules, lying between the pit of man's fears and the sunlight of his knowledge as it were, calling their actions "crimes" was being both disingenuous and generous. With an equal mix of weaponry and tomfoolery, the only thing for certain was that no money was ever going to be successfully stolen.

Oh sure, there were many attempts at bank robberies, complete with large bags with overly-large dollar signs painted on them, but something always went hilariously wrong. After awhile they had only to enter a bank and everybody on cue would fall to the ground to enjoy the show. The hold-up notes were the stuff of legend. Desperate pleas for financial riches, written with the lust of an accountant, the sincerity of a pirate, and always signed "Romeo & Juiciest. " They never used dynamite. They called that the "Butch Cassidy Rule."

They had both enjoyed the performing arts in colleges but upon graduation had chosen other ways to make a living. Straight-faced. Straight-laced. They preferred their drinks and upper lips the same ... stiff.

Despite what you might think about her name, Bunny had never been a stripper. Although the same could not be said about her sisters Candy and Cherry.

From their first date they lied about everything. She changed her hairstyle and he bought a handgun. Claude's friends asked him why he suddenly began to talk like an old-time gangster and all they could get out him was "That's just the ways things are now, see? You get me?"

They traded in Bunny's 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible for a 1932 Ford V-8 B-400 convertible sedan and then robbed a convenience store to celebrate. The heist netted under twenty dollars but they did manage to make off with a thousand scratch-off lottery tickets, which they handed out to diners at a local fast-food establishment later that evening.

Then one day, as they were driving through a small, horribly rustic town near the Grand Canyon, he told her a true story. When he was younger he was forced to do an "Impossible Sit-up," which consisted of being blindfolded, held down on his back and told to do a sit-up. He struggled and struggled and at an agreed upon moment the boys holding down his shoulders let go and he went flying face-first into the bare ass of the boy crouched over his face. "Right into his ass, see? At a slumber party. You get me?"

As the story was winding up two birds began an aerial dance that started half mile up the road and ended with one of them bouncing off the windshield of the vehicle driven by our two distracted robbers. Whether they were caught up with fighting or flirting or doing an elaborate mating dance, the birds that is, it was impossible to tell. Claude applied the brake and hopped out, frantically trying to locate the bird to see if there was anything that could be done.

He heard a car door slam and watched the car pull away and drive off.

Claude was unable to find a body but nonetheless he walked to the nearest police station and turned himself in.

"I'm a murderer," was all he said. They took him at his word and applied the handcuffs.

Bunny just kept driving. She looked into the rear view and said "Oh Claude, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him."

### The Verrazano

I can't say exactly how long it will take you to read this first sentence but what I can know for certain is that however long it takes you will be that much closer to death.

That was exactly the kind of thought that was dogging Neil Nathan Pre (pronounced /prā/). His mortality shadowed him everywhere he went and was becoming a problem. Being a reasonably intelligent man, religion offered him no comfort. The specter of death became his constant companion and made him a tiresome person to hang out with.

To rectify the situation he determined that he needed some sort of epiphany in order to avoid squandering what little time was left to him. The kind of epiphany usually reached while watching a sunrise. To that end, he planned out a thirty-day trip wherein he would watch the sun rise from thirty different strategic locations that would appear, on the face of it at least, to be ideal places to have a brilliant insight into life.

His first stop was the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge, the double-decked suspension bridge that connects the boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn in New York City. Completed in 1964 it is named for the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. Three men died building it. You might be asking yourself how these details are important to the story and all I can answer is that they may or may not be. Better to include them than have you finishing the tale and feeling a vague emptiness that you can't quite put your finger on.

He got there well ahead of time and began the walk across so he'd be right smack in the middle of it when the sun finally got around to making its big appearance. No doubt some of the cars passing him thought that he was there to jump, what with passing of Bob Casale and Harold Ramis in the same week, a double-blow to humanity that would cause the most stoic soul to waver, which was pretty ironic given he was there to avoid thinking about that very fate. In fact, he leaned over and saw The Narrows glistening beneath him and wondered how anyone ever had the guts to hurl themselves off.

He watched an enormous freighter heading out to sea beneath him. So large that it seemed impossible it had been built with human hands. As the sun broke over the horizon the first rays of light made the ship seem sluggish, almost hesitant to begin its long journey to somewhere far away. Then, only seconds later, more yellow poured over it and it suddenly looked eager and full of optimism. No disrespect to purple intended.

Neil watched the sun rise. There would be no need for the other twenty nine destinations. There could be no lovelier place on earth to watch the sun come up. He soaked it all in and realized, or rationalized or whatever he was doing, that every planet in the universe was made up of all the same stuff and each was just trying to assemble the elements in interesting ways. Few of them could take in the scene that stretched before Neil and not be envious. He couldn't let his consciousness ruin what was going on. He was, and always would be, part of the Greatest Show Earth Is Capable Of.

An anthill needs ants to be an anthill, not any particular ant.

He forgot about the cars belching out exhaust behind him and the fact that Staten Island was really nothing more than a giant garbage heap with a few strip malls scattered around, and he just looked out at the sun crawling up over the horizon. His five senses tingled and traded bits of insight into what he was experiencing.

The ghost of Gerard McKee stood wordlessly next to him, drinking it in. Once the sun was fully up he nodded and went back to the important business of not existing. It wasn't so much jealousy that Neil felt, watching him go, as much as the hope that one day he might get such a nice spot.

He wondered where Bob and Harold were.

He began the long walk back to his car, aware that his constant, scythe-carrying companion was no longer with him.

You wanted a story to read, maybe not this particular story I confess, but I hope it was worth the time just the same. If you're waiting for me to wrap it up with some answers ... I've got none. How could I when I don't even know your questions?

Neil, on the other hand, would suggest that there is a Verrazano out there for you if you're so inclined.

### Commencement Address

(first appeared at Yareah.com on 2/2/2014)

Every year at this time, being the influential writer I am, the requests to speak at graduations start to pour in. It just doesn't seem like a commencement without a few wise words from Lance Manion. Because I'm stretched pretty thin during this time of year, I figured I'd publish my last address and perhaps others can try to recreate the energy and enthusiasm of a Manion speaking engagement.

"Dearly beloved, especially all of you sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs, with your square caps and colorful tassels, representing all the time and energy you traded so you could wear a colorful tassel, we are gathered here today to send off this new collection of fresh-faced graduates into the world.

It is my unique honor to say a few words to them before they depart.

In the coming months as you decide which career to choose, you're going to hear a lot about two things: money and happiness. Depending on your upbringing, one of these will take a starring role in your decision making.

Let me give you an example. Let's say that you decide that you need a lot of money to be happy but you'd also like to work with interesting people, so you find a market for something that nobody has ever thought of.

Dandruff.

You find that if you bottle it, people stand in line just to snatch the stuff up. I could give you a long list of possible uses for somebody else's dandruff but it's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make. You create a solid brand name and you simply can't keep it on the shelves. Everybody wants a bottle of your dandruff.

The problem is that you need to find a lot of people with dandruff and then convince them to let you harvest it off their heads. Not exactly the kind of people you want to be interacting with on a daily basis. I don't mean to cast aspersions on those of you with dandruff but even you have to admit that being paid to shake your head into a big vat every day wouldn't exactly keep you in the most cheerful mood.

So you have this big dilemma. Keep raking in the cash selling dandruff, knowing that you'll no doubt get sick of dealing with all things itchy and flakey, or find something else to do.

What's the point of this little story?

Before I answer that, let me point a few things out.

If you want to be angry, really legitimately angry, there is no shortage of reasons to be angry.

The same can be said of sad. There are terrible things happening all over the place that can make you sad. You don't have to invent reasons. Turn on any television, open any newspaper or log onto the worldwide web and in minutes you can be swimming in very good, completely understandable reasons to be sad.

You want to be indignant? No worries there.

What about disgusted or offended? There is vast sea of things to make you want to hoist the trembling fist or hang your head in your hands.

Do you want every bit of hope pounded out of you? Because I'm here to tell you, all you have to do is look and you can find the apparatus to strip yourself of every ounce of your optimism.

Do you want to wallow in despair? I'm not talking about the kind of blue that you get when you run out of toilet paper mid-shit. I mean the kind of despair that you can only feel when you've taken it all in and found that nothing you ever do will be able to change things. The grim understanding that we are all here for a short period of time and we, as a species, have decided to use that time being horrible to each other and every other living, breathing animal on the planet. In a hundred years we'll all be dead.

Despair!

Or can you say "Fuck that!"?

Can you muster up the willpower to ignore all of the foul goings-on and still laugh?

To find it in yourself to say "Yes, I know there is suffering and misery going on and the whole game seems fixed and nobody would care if I fell the fuck over right here and now, but I'm still going to be happy."

Are any of you out there?

That can say "I don't give a flaming crap, this smile will stay plastered on my face and I dare any of you gutless turds to try and remove it. It's not coming down! It may falter but it will endure."

If you only believe one thing I'm saying today make it this: It's your only hope. It's the only hope of the planet. It's your only defense and its frail and it's a fraud and we both understand it's bullshit but never let it go. Not all of it. Not any of it.

Carry it in your heart and defend it with everything you are. Because they're coming for it. They hate it. They fear it.

Be fucking stupid and laugh whenever you can and cherish people. Sweep them up whenever you can and shine like a torch for them. Be happy. Be joyful. Be happy. Sing in the shower. Be happy. Act crazy. Be happy. Dance. Be happy. Chuckle. Be happy. Sing in the car. Be happy. Be silly. Be happy.

Be. Happy.

Be.

Happy.

It's a decision. It's a choice. Make it your fucking mantra.

And fuck those that aren't, because it's a war they know they're going to eventually win. Fuck 'em with all the power you can muster.

Find a way to be happy. Beyond that, nothing I can say can help you.

And what, I'm sure you're asking yourself, was the point of my first story?

The dandruff story?

Don't be afraid to change your opinion of people.

Forgive them for their awkwardness and dumb stories.

They will sometimes surprise you.

And become allies.

And that will help make you happy.

### hangers

Always on the lookout for the next threat to global stability, I started doing the math on hangers the other day. If the average working person wears five shirts a week that require dry cleaning, they are bringing in five additional hangers into their closets every week. Assuming that their non-dry cleaned clothing wears out and is replaced by new items at a constant rate and these hangers are not utilized that means that the average working person brings in 20 empty hangers a month into their closet, 240 per year. In the United States I would reckon that there are at least fifty million people that would fall into the definition of "average working person," which means that every year there are twelve billion empty hangers clogging up closets from coast to coast. Over the next twenty years that is two hundred and forty billion hangers in the United States alone. Don't even get me started on China.

I don't want to come off as an alarmist but by the year 2034 I expect the world to be waist-deep in unwanted hangers.

You'll note that I don't call them coat hangers. The little metal wires I'm referring to cannot support the weight of a real coat. In fact (a little known fact at that) the wire coat hanger was invented hundreds of years before they became commonplace in the dry cleaning industry. Unfortunately there was no use for them because giant Viking coats would instantly cause them to lose their shape and the garment to fall onto the ground, at which point the Viking would rage and twist the hanger into all sort of obscene shapes and then hurl it out into the wilderness.

Which brings me back to the crisis we're staring at presently.

If you take the time to figure out just how much metal would be involved in two hundred and forty billion hangers, which I obviously don't have thanks to America's stubborn refusal to embrace the metric systems which would have everything divisible by tens instead of trying to figure out ounces and pounds and tons, you'll probably see what my next threat to global stability is ... horrible sculptures.

The kind that sit out front of corporate parks and have you scratching your head until you find out what the sculpture costs and then you start scratching with such fervor that bloody clumps of hair end up in your hand. I keep calling them sculptures but the truth is they are just giant hunks of crap welded together by talentless frauds. "Modern Art" they call it. I'll stick with my initial summation.

These "artists" will try to ride in and save the day but the truth is the world would much rather be waist deep in hangers then have to stare at more horrible sculptures.

Which leaves us screwed unless of course genetic engineering makes some great leaps forward and we find out a way to bring back Vikings, heavy coats and all. I think we all know how the average Viking would react to Modern Art. Assuming they could wade through the waist-deep hangers (no doubt exclaiming "What sorcery is this?"), they would make short work of lopping off the heads of all these pretentious "modern" artists that are clogging up corporate park entrances from bow to stern of this great country, despite our lack of enthusiasm for the metric system, with enormous shiny twisted entwined phallic symbols most of which are saddled with annoyingly ostentatious names.

And the best part?

You didn't know there was a best part yet did you? I'm self-aware enough to know when a story is screaming out for a best part and if there was ever one that needed a little bump in the "best part" department it's this one. Oftentimes I will forgo a point in exchange for a best part. This story for example (which has you shaking your head and muttering "What sorcery is this?).

The best part is that with all these new Vikings running around the need for multiple hangers would go through the roof. It would take at least seven to nine wire hangers to support each of their heavy pelts. Within a single generation the hanger crisis would resolve itself.

Yeah Vikings! Yeah best parts!

### repairman

"Ok, let's get started," he thought to himself as he turned his car down the narrow lane and saw the house.

What was left of it.

And it wasn't actually his car. He had recently borrowed it.

Most people would consider what he was doing as simple escapism but it was all he could think to do. To try and make things right. To rebuild.

He had burnt down the house ten years ago. Their house. He regretted it and even after all the years had passed, he still woke up screaming her name. He saw the flames and felt the heat and smelled the smoke on his clothes even after he woke up.

He started with the front steps. He was no good with tools but he was going to try just the same. He tore out the charred old pieces and started hammering the new wood into place. Try as he might though, he couldn't get the steps level.

Things have to be level. "Things have to be on the level," he heard her say. "They have to be on the up and up," and he closed his eyes tight and fought the urge to hurl the hammer into the woods and run far from the house but he didn't.

"Good enough," he thought to himself. The steps would work. They would bring her from the front step into the house. That's all steps need to do. Step by step. A step at a time. Level or not.

Doors and windows seemed trickier. A good wind will make a bad window whistle and he still felt the draft under the door back when it was the front door of their home. He stuck a towel under the door and argued that any heat lost in the winter was balanced by the cool air contributed to the summer.

"It's all a balancing act, Dear," he would argue. He loved to call her Dear and she hated it and called him unbalanced.

The days passed and anyone looking for him would never have thought to take a drive out to his old abode. He felt more alive with every nail he pounded.

Maybe he could make it right. Maybe she would take him back.

He wished he could ask for outside help but they wouldn't understand. Apparently burning down your own home is a crime punishable by a life sentence. Nobody had ever looked at him the same way.

"You never have to be afraid of me." He jerked awake. Out of the dream of how things were. Laying in what was left of their front room he fell asleep looking up at the stars and dreamt of holding her and woke up angry and cold.

Why couldn't she even pretend in his dream? It was just a dream after all.

He went back to work, ferociously tearing away anything that reminded him of the blaze that consumed everything. There were days that it wasn't a wonder the whole thing didn't collapse down upon him.

There were moments he wished it would. Just like the old days.

Such a simple thing lighting a match. He wished that gasoline didn't burn so well and words didn't sting so much and memories didn't hold on so damned tight.

He grabbed the saw and went back to work humming the same part of an Eagles song over and over and over and over:

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains

And we never even know we have the key

He spent an hour trying to remember the title but it was only after he stopped trying it came to him. "Already Gone..." of course.

His back ached and he wondered what she would say when she saw the work he'd done. A helicopter passed over him and a bright light shone down on him. He had to admit to himself that the house still looked like crap. He wasn't one of those handy men. The guy in the helicopter probably had a good laugh.

He wondered if it would be good enough to get her back. Would she see it how he wanted it to be? Would she appreciate all the hard work and see the glimmer of the man she'd hoped he would become one day?

Could she forgive him?

Then he remembered that she had died in the fire.

Somewhere off in the distance he heard the wailing of an approaching siren.

### first day

He was accustomed to moving. He had moved nine times by the time he was fourteen. His dad had been in the military which meant a lot of moving but even after he left the Air Force he didn't seem to be interested in any new job that wasn't at least two time zones away.

Which meant the boy was familiar with the dread that was slowly taking hold of him. The first day at a new school. Lying in bed he could only imagine what fresh hell awaited him.

He was not a good-looking child. Non-athletic with a pasty complexion, he knew he was going to have to find the least popular group of kids and hope that there was an opening. He dressed as though he was about to enter the Alaskan wilderness. He was spindly in build and he hoped a few layers would add a little bulk to his frame.

T-shirt, dress shirt, t-shirt.

He stood at the bus stop, away from all the other kids. An awkward adolescent giraffe hoping the hyenas didn't spot him.

It was deep into the second semester of his freshman year. As he approached the enormous high school his head swam at the sheer size of it. His last school had been a rural setting where the kids that disliked him were mostly farmer's sons and daughters. Now here he was in the suburbs.

He made his way to the front office to pick up his schedule. One thought kept scrolling through his head; "How bad could it be?"

His first class was swimming.

That answered that.

He sat down in the office, his legs unable to bear the news let alone the weight of his body. He thought only major universities had swimming pools. "What kind of sick bastard puts a pool in a high school?" He put his head in his hands. Someone asked if he was ok and he gazed up at them with a look that caused them to draw in their breath sharply and haunted them for weeks.

He had enough time to find his locker and realize that he didn't know the combination before he made his way down into the pool locker room. He could smell the chlorine before he saw the little sign.

He didn't have a swimsuit. "Who brings a swimsuit to school?"

They provided him one. A shapeless black set of trunks that were so short that they would have cut into his balls if he'd have had any. He was a good two years away from puberty. The tile floor was freezing and he was surrounded by what appeared to be the cast of a surfing movie. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the snap of a wet towel.

"Where's the fat kid?" His eyes darted around madly, hoping to find one teenager that looked as horrific in his swimsuit as he did.

There weren't any.

He folded his arms across the space where his chest should have been and started to shuffle out the door to the waiting pool. When you were put together as he was it would surprise no one that he didn't know how to swim. Cleary he was a youth that did not spend any time around water.

He turned the corner and saw the females in his class. And then they saw him. And he saw them see him, all the while pretending not to. He heard snickering but wasn't sure if he was the cause.

The gym teacher marched in with practiced indifference and gave the order for his charges to enter the water. The boy rose to introduce himself but the man walked by him, his full attention being given to the whistle that he clutched in his beefy hands.

He shivered involuntarily. He had yet to say a word to anyone. He stood at the end of the pool and debated whether or not to hold his nose as he jumped in. If he did he would be putting the cherry on top of a very unflattering sundae. If he didn't he would drown. At that moment the drowning sounded very appealing but he doubted that with this many people around they'd let him get off so easily. Somebody would haul him out of the water and he would splutter and cough and seal his doom as surely as if he'd held his nose to begin with.

"Let's get this over with," he thought and he hopped into the pool.

He surfaced clutching his nose and completely unaware that his borrowed swimsuit was no longer intact. It was sitting about knee-level.

The worst part about it? Nobody noticed.

He pulled them up and clung to the edge of the pool as his compatriots swam laps, splashed and played games. They called out to each other and laughed and the instructor blew his whistle whenever the opportunity presented itself and the boy clutched the side and treaded water and was completely ignored. It was clear that everybody there not only found him loathsome but would detest him as long as he was to attend this school.

When he was finally able to haul himself out of the water nobody hated him more than he hated himself. He was skinny and wrinkled and openly shook with cold.

He kept his eyes down. He didn't want to see how the others were looking at him. Or through him.

He dressed and left the locker room, heading to his next class.

"How bad could it be?"

Tomorrow he would bring his own swimsuit.

### the deep dark web

He remembered sitting around campfires as a boy, back when he was a Boy Scout and getting badges for making knots and walking old people across intersections seemed about the most important things in the world. Listening to spooky stories and getting so freaked out, he'd lay awake for hours in his tent afterwards, listening for confirmation that one or more of the ghouls and goblins described in no particular detail were making their way over to his sleeping bag with ill intent.

Perhaps it was the very vagueness of the threat that allowed his mind to wander in such detail. The stories were always very formulaic and he could see the endings coming a mile away and initially there was no great cause for concern. He would chuckle to himself and load another marshmallow onto his stick and await the next attempt by the older counselors to traumatize their charges.

It was only later, when he was alone with his thoughts and the moon was doing its best to cast shadows where no shadows should be, that he would feel the icy finger of fear start to creep up his spine.

Sort of like what he was feeling as he looked outside his window.

There are parts of the United States where it is so crowded, it's hard to imagine a house could be so far away from anywhere else. Set in the woods, his home was only accessible on foot and even people who liked their space might find it a bit remote. It sat atop a large hill and on a clear day he could make out the middle of nowhere. He was careful, however, not to be completely isolated.

He had an internet connection.

That's all he needed. He walked to town for supplies every couple of weeks and pretty much kept to himself.

Except for the aforementioned connection.

Nothing crazy mind you, just a few social networking sites to keep in touch with friends and a link that allowed him to manage his finances. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Until last night anyway.

He stared at the snow. It surrounded his house and sat at least six inches deep. It covered everything in a blanket of white. Nothing disturbed the stillness of the scene and on any other morning he would have thought it was just the start of another beautiful day.

And it would have been except for the footprints in the snow. Footprints coming out of the woods and ending at his front door.

He'd had no visitors last night.

Last night. He jerked involuntarily as he remembered the previous evening.

It started off with him speaking online with an old college buddy and went south from there. His friend had sent him a link discussing the parallels between the internet and the human subconscious. It discussed in greater-length-than-necessary detail how the worldwide web might someday become self-aware. Most of it went over his head but he did find it interesting the many levels that the article prescribed to the internet.

It mentioned something called the "deep web." A place inhabited by only a small fraction of users, where the information posted and shared started at obscure and got weirder from there. This was where the radicals, the loons and the fruitcakes hung out. One link led to another and soon he was plumbing some pretty strange depths.

His friend had warned him about it. Told him that the government monitored these kinds of sites. His friend told him that while it might be fun to take a quick peek, it was dangerous to take a longer look. Like some sort of cyber-Medusa, there were things underneath this "deep web" that were best left alone.

He opened his front door and looked down at the tracks. A single set leading to his door. He felt a panic rising in his chest and he slammed the door and reached for the closet doorknob. With a quick twist it was open and he felt the comfort of the rifle in his hands. Loaded and ready for use.

He went from room to room. His visitor had not turned around and gone the other way. He must be inside. The next twenty minutes were spent throwing open every door, each time expecting to see some villain crouched and ready to do him harm. Finally he had explored every inch and was confident he was alone in his house. He sat down and closed his eyes. With the gun lying across his lap he tried to unremember what he'd found under the "deep web."

The images began to assault him. He winced as each refused to be unseen.

For a moment he saw himself in front of a campfire, surrounded by eager young faces looking up at him as he told them a scary story.

"You see kids, underneath the "deep web" is a place called the "dark web." You don't ever want to go there. Ever."

"Why not?" one of the boys would ask.

And he would scream.

It was real, this place where the sickos communicate with each other. It exists. The depraved and the perverts. The worst of humanity using technology to interact and spread their filth.

"Who the fuck came to my house?" he said aloud.

He pulled on his boots. He reasoned that if the tracks ended at his house they had to have come from somewhere.

He was going to find out where.

Obviously it was completely unconnected to this "dark web." He had only stayed for a little while and nobody knew where he lived. Nobody could have found him and, even if they had, what would they possibly want with him?

The wind was cold and after walking long enough his eyes hurt as the sun reflected up off the whiteness of the snow. He kept them open anyway because whenever they shut there was some picture or snippet of conversation that forced its way to his brain.

The footsteps led away from town and deeper into the woods. He had never been this far away from his house but he had to know who had come to his door. He had to make sure it was just some crazy coincidence and completely unconnected to the "dark web."

He repeated the word crazy in his head and laughed.

"The deep dark web. What a crock of shit."

So he walked on.

It was getting dark. If he was camping he'd be making a fire and heating up some hot dogs right about now. His fellow Scouts would be tittering to themselves excitedly as they waited for the sun to fully set and the nighttime to kick in with all gusto. The darkness bringing with it the requisite creepiness to begin an evening of storytelling.

The stage was being set.

But he wasn't a Scout anymore; they don't hand out badges for what he witnessed last night. He remembered sitting there, after clicking on one website after another after another, wondering to himself that if the road to hell was paved with good intentions ... where the hell was he headed?

"It's been there all along."

The footprints stopped.

He looked down and tried to pick up the trail but it had ended. No more tracks. He looked around wildly. There was no wind. No sound other than the minute crunching noise his boots made rubbing against the snow as his head pivoted desperately around.

He closed his eyes as tears began to trickle out and freeze on his cheek. He had a moment of clarity ... the last thing he could afford.

He was standing in the last set of footprints. He realized that he'd been walking backwards from his door the entire time.

And now it was dark.

It was time to get back. Before he froze. He could just follow the tracks. He might even make it.

Though it was getting really, really dark.

### The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame must burn!

I've never been a big fan of civil disobedience. It just seems such an impotent act. A bunch of slackers wearing nose rings throwing bricks through front windows is not my idea of revolution.

The biggest problem these days is with revolution itself. It's been co-opted. Bought, labeled and used to sell fabric softener and pick-up trucks.

Which is why I'm calling for one enormous act of rebellion to remind everybody why we need rebellion in the first place.

This is a call to burn down the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. It is everything wrong with our culture boiled down to one location. Ground Zero of hypocrisy. The spot where the very spirit of rebellion has been stolen by corporate America.

I want it burnt to the ground. Not metaphorically, I mean literally destroyed and left a smoldering pile of rubble.

How can we ever hope to address the problems in our government, both locally and in Washington D.C., when the very music that was supposed to be a revolt against the norm is now simply revolting? Rock and roll was supposed to be something that made the older generation nervous, not a way to peddle soft drinks. How did the corporate types ever get the first bands to agree to such an offensive premise?

I still can't believe that so many bands get excited to be inducted into the musical equivalent of the Anarchy Club. Congratulations, to show your rugged individuality we're going to put you alongside other such bad-asses rebels as Hall & Oates and ABBA.

I'm asking for a wild-eyed crowd of rabble-rousers to assemble and set fire to this abomination and when the inevitable suits start pouring out of the building to try and defend their beloved Madonna and Randy Newman busts like so many cockroaches I want them drawn and quartered as an example to anyone else that would ever dare to try and buy the musical soul of our nation in the future. I want their empty heads on spikes for our children's children to remember.

Maybe politicians would even take note.

How did we ever buy into this place in the first place? Every year they have their "celebration" and it feels like every other insurance convention or law firm retreat going on across the country. It sickens me that rock stars, of all people, would allow themselves to be paraded around like so many sheep in the hopes of finding some validation that they should be the last ones seeking in the first place. That's why they don't ask real bands like Devo or The Replacements to join. I would hope they would both tell them to take a big flying leap.

Why does it matter?

Because America used to be rock and roll. We had swagger and energy and balls. Now America is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. If I have to explain the difference or give you a million examples to prove my point then you are too far gone to ever be of any help in getting us back to where we once were.

I'm talking to the rest of you. The ones that shook your hips and threw your head back and smirked when you heard the occasional bad word. The ones that felt the vibe and it energized you to fight to bring down the rest of the squares.

This is not the way the world was supposed to be.

The radio is not how it was supposed to sound.

How long has it been since music made you want to change the world and not buy a new phone plan?

It begins and ends in Cleveland, Ohio. This blemish on our collective souls has to burn before we can ever hope to turn things around.

We could even set up a stage next to it and have bands provide a soundtrack: Burning Down the House \- Talking Heads, Firestarter \- The Prodigy, Open Up \- Leftfield, Beds Are Burning \- Midnight Oil, Dig For Fire \- Pixies, Cover It With Gas And Set It On Fire \- Ween... you get the idea.

Just as long as Great White closes the show.

Now that would be rock and roll.

### where there be blow jobs

If there is one thing that the internet has stolen from this generation of kids it's a sense of innocence about sex. Looking back now there was so much about sex that I didn't understand and there's a large part of me that wishes to go back to that time. Not knowing now all the things I didn't know then would be nothing short of magical.

His name was Mark and he was one of the cool boys. He wrestled and as a sophomore that allowed entry into that small but very visible club. When we saw him walking down the hill that separated Coolville from Nerdland we didn't know what to make of it. I think we expected to get beat up. We couldn't think of a reason why we'd earned a beating but it was the only plausible explanation.

It was the three of us playing football behind Ryan's house. Me, Ryan and Dave. Dave was a Hispanic kid of questionable ethnicity. His parents had adopted him when they thought they couldn't have kids and then a year after his appearance his mom got pregnant so from that time forward Dave was an orphan again. To make matters worse, his little "brother" was a little snitch who everyone hated.

Ryan was a fat kid. The funny thing was is that a year later he turned into a buff football player and then, a few years after that, he turned fat again. Sort of like that movie Awakenings except that instead of suffering from some rare Parkinson's-type disease he suffered from fatness. At least he got a few good years; the dorkalitis geekspazica that kept me socially catatonic never relented.

He made his way down the hill and asked if he could play with us. To us it was as if Lemmy had asked if he could sit in with a garage band.

We played two on two and kept changing the teams so that Mark didn't get tired of trampling the same person into the grass. I remember to this day the feeling of exultation of having him trip over me and almost fall over before recovering and completing his four hundredth touchdown run.

"Nice try," was all he'd said but it was if confetti was raining down on me.

Later, when the three of us were sufficiently battered and no longer able to walk under our own power, we sat together and he told us that he'd just gotten a blow job.

On cue our faces scrunched up and squinted and made it clear to Mark that we had no idea what he was talking about.

He explained what a blow job entailed. My two friends gasped and nodded and I tried my best to unsquint my face.

To give you an understanding of what kind of cool-kid-worshipping was going on that day, it was only upon deciding to write this story that it hit me why Mark had come down to play football with us in the first place; to tell us about getting a blow job! For years it never occurred to me that he must have been bursting at the seams to tell everybody he could about it. Even the dipshits. At the time, I assumed that cool kids wrestled and went to parties and got blow jobs like it was no big deal. This whole time I was completely oblivious to the fact that Mark was just like I was ... just not as a big a wheeze.

My face slowly lost the look of an inquisitive child and took on the demeanor of a seasoned gigolo. I didn't want Mark, for even a second, to suspect that I wasn't a veteran of the whole putting-your-penis-in-the-mouth-of-a-girl thing. Truth was, of course, that I was the last boy in our grade to hit puberty so not only was I unfamiliar with the act but I was completely unclear as to why anyone would want to engage in it the first place and what would transpire after the requisite number of "blows" transpired.

Why a girl would subject herself to this remains a mystery to me.

Eventually conversation dried up and Mark walked back up the hill to where the rest of his kind lived and he never again came down to play with us. I saw him in school but it never crossed my mind to nod or acknowledge him in any way. I never felt insulted that it was if the whole thing had never happened; it was just the way things were.

What it did open my eyes to was the fact that once I got my equipment there were blow jobs to be had. I would watch Mark's girlfriend and imagine that, sick of having a large, hairy, functioning penis in her mouth, it was mine she wanted. Though without the ability to climax and wrap up the proceedings, the daydream would often fizzle out and end awkwardly.

I bet kids these days don't have to go through that.

Poor bastards.

### the slightly amusing story of the no-show ghost

"I'm a winner. I have a seat at the table."

It began as simple as that for John. No mysterious noises or floating objects. Just a quick whisper in his ear as he sat reading a book in his living room. Of course, the mysterious noises soon followed as well as things being moved around haphazardly.

For me to spend another word describing events that indicate a ghost had taken up residence in John's house seems the epitome of wasted space. Movies and television programs dealing with hauntings seem be all the craze right now, so I won't squander any more of your time setting up the story with unnecessarily long descriptions of the creepy proceedings. I will squander it telling you how I won't waste it.

The creepiness went on and on and began to irritate John to no small degree. He's a laid back guy but whatever spirit moved in had very little respect for the rules of the living. And that little expression it kept repeating, "I'm a winner. I have a seat at the table," would be enough to drive anyone crazy. Fearing that he'd never be able to get a good night's sleep again, John reached out to a group that does paranormal investigations. He asked for their help and in return they asked that he agree to let them use his story, and whatever footage they captured on the various cameras and microphones on their hit television show.

The days leading up to their visit his spirit was quite active, whispering his catch phrase and knocking things over. John was actually a little excited to have these events filmed and broadcast across the country. He could be the one that proved the existence of ghosts.

When the big day arrived though, his ghost was nowhere to be seen. Or heard. Or captured in any way, including the EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) recorders and thermal cameras. The investigators did their best not to make him come off like a loon but after they picked up and left he sat in his quiet living room and felt like an ass.

Had it all been in his head after all?

"I'm a winner. I have a seat at the table."

Nope.

His friend was back and John didn't feel any of the usual fear that came along with hearing its voice. He was pissed.

"So now you talk?" John yelled to nobody. "Now you want to say that stupid saying? Where were you a few hours ago?"

His eye twitched and a little spit shot out as he raged on and on.

Then he paused to see what if any reaction he would get.

"I'm sorry. I had to step out."

That answer did not satisfy John. He went off.

Weeks later, when the episode aired, there was further humiliation for him. After they were done showing the world that his house was the last place to look for a ghost, the next segment had undeniable proof of supernatural activity. It seemed that there was a man complaining of some presence following him wherever he went so the show's producers decided to take him up north and have him walk through a snowy field. Sure enough a second set of tracks followed him as he made his way across. This brought to John's mind a certain story of two sets of footprints walking in the sand until there was some sort of trouble at which point one of the set of footprints disappeared.

He explained the analogy to his houseguest.

"Not likely. Not unless Jesus has cloven feet."

"Yeah." John laughed. "Good one."

"Listen ... sorry again about ducking out when you needed me to be here. Had I known, I would have hung around. You know, had ghost stuff to do."

"At least you stopped with that "Seat at the table" crap." John thought it over a second. "By the way, what does that even mean?"

"Nothing. I just thought it sounded cool."

John laughed and picked up the remote. "Fair enough."

### how a story fails

(first appeared at www.newpoplit.com 8/16/2014)

I thought you might find it interesting to take a little peek behind the curtain and see how things work in the mind of a professional writer. Just remember not to attempt any of the following techniques on your own. I am a veteran of the writing process and even then, I sometimes require the assistance of a spotter.

After reading any of my books the first thing most people ask me is "Is there anything that you don't print?"

A writer with thinner skin might take offense at such a pointed question but as I mentioned before, I am a veteran of this game. Haters are gonna hate.

But to answer the query anyway, yes. There are certain stories that just aren't going to make it to the finished line.

To give you an example- and the peek that I promised earlier- I was working on a story about a moth earlier today. The general idea was originally going to be that this moth had been given the task of flying into a person's mouth. After a quick bit of research into moths, I felt comfortable coming up with a pretext of why it had been given this mission in the first place and the next step was to do a bit of research on kamikazes. Once I had a decent handle on the culture behind these suicidal aviators, it seemed like a pretty simple task to knit the two together in a jocular fashion and end up with a pretty cozy thousand words sure to delight and entertain.

In fact, initially I felt it might be the story that suddenly caught fire on the internet and made me an overnight writing sensation. I was giving the moth some real depth while still being able to throw in some poignant commentary about the courage and stupidity required to sacrifice one's own life for the greater good. All of it presented with the snarky wit that I would be known for if I was known. Before it was even done I saw myself receiving any number of literary accolades. Of course, I usually feel this way about each of the 400+ stories I've had published so I never really give these feelings much credence. The important thing to note is that as I started to jot it down there didn't seem to be any dark clouds on that particular horizon.

Then another cook entered the kitchen.

I started to think about the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star by shooting a torpedo from his X-wing fighter into the tiny exhaust system. In my head I simultaneously imaged a Japanese Luke flying into the mouth of an unwary picnic attendee and a hachimaki -wearing moth bullseying womprats on Tatooine.

Cracks began to appear in the fragile framework holding the premise together.

With only three hundred words to go did I have time to include other Star Wars characters in my story? Would readers understand how these three moving parts could come together?

While the two chefs wrestled with the recipe, another entered the kitchen through the back door.

Literally. You'll understand in a minute.

I suddenly imagined the picnic taking place at a nudist camp. Instead of the moth being tasked to fly into an open mouth, its merry band of moth friends, including a butterfly it wanted to bang that would end up being its sister, talked it into trying to enter from the other end and abruptly the Death Star became a man's hairy anus.

I closed my eyes as the story began to crumble under its own weight. Even the anus started to disintegrate in my head like an old mine collapsing in a B movie. Let me tell you, it was not pretty.

I even thought about telling the story backwards.

Please don't try to bring all these elements together and finish the story in your own head. I tried and it can't be done, you'll just hurt yourself. I appreciate that a moth named Skywalker following the Bushido code and flying out of the ass of a human seems like comedy gold but you'll just have to trust me on this. No can do.

There's no shame in tapping out. Sometimes a professional writer just has to understand his limitations and walk away with his dignity intact. Even kamikazes came back from missions once in awhile.

### this constant certainty

I was never a strong swimmer. From as early as I can remember I was afraid of the water.

And yet ...

My pop is a good man. When I was little I didn't see him much, he was always off traveling somewhere distant. Distant and exotic with hard to pronounce names. He left my mom before I had even emerged and it was obvious to everyone I had been an accident.

Still, whenever I did see him he seemed to shine.

Maybe the near misses were my way to get his attention. Never really far enough from shore to be in any real danger but the sight of him plowing through the waves to my rescue was always something beyond a relief. I know most kids that grew up with a father who wasn't there end up bitter and angry but I could never hold a grudge. He was who he was.

Some people weren't cut out for one woman. One family. Quiet desperation.

Not my pop.

He belted out his discontent for all to hear. In time with the bongos he happily carried around with him, seemingly at all times. They were never far from his reach.

Like I was.

Deeper and deeper I went. My toes crawling along the bottom, trying to discern how fast the ground was falling away beneath me. My arms, useless for anything but splashing and waving and drawing attention to myself, made swimming motions so the casual observer would feel that I belonged in my aquatic surroundings. Underneath the waves my legs probed and hopped like a sluggish astronaut on the foreign terrain.

What is there to say about my mother... She was there every day so became invisible. It was my pop who sat in the sky like a distant star calling to the sailor in me.

In the end I went too far out to make it back on my own. Over my head. I felt nothing beneath me and the panic started to rise. I thought about calling out to my pop. He would come- like I said, he was a good man. Maybe the fairest soul I'd ever met.

But this time was different. I was in real trouble and you know how a drowning man reacts. Wild and desperate, grabbing a hold of anyone nearby and dragging them down with them. I couldn't do that to pops.

My mom had the police kick in the motel door the next morning and they found me.

### hard-nosed seasonal fare

This time of year, everybody is searching for a good holiday story. Magazines are packed with heartwarming reminiscences and the shelves of your local bookstore are choked with anthologies promising to spread good cheer.

What you won't find much of is hard-nosed seasonal fare.

I'd like to change that if you have a few minutes to spare. I know that might be asking a lot this time of year, what with all the hustling and bustling going on, but I feel that it's important to keep perspective on things. One minute you're decking the halls and the next you're living in a cardboard box if you don't keep your head on a swivel.

The tale I'd like to regale you with is about a little girl named Brenda.

Why Brenda?

Well, Brenda is an ugly name and I thought I'd throw a bone to girls with that moniker as a way to make up for the fact that they've had to drag it around all their lives. I'm just thoughtful like that. They might even feel indebted to me. Years from now people might say "You know, those Brendas sure are devoted to Manion."

So this little girl Brenda wanted to know why Santa seemed to favor rich kids over poorer ones. After doing a little research on the topic, she found that wealthy children got a lot more toys than boys and girls from impoverished areas.

To say that she was fuming over this would not be putting too fine a point on it.

Her parents tried unsuccessfully to explain it to her. Her teachers tried unsuccessfully to explain it to her. Her friends were so annoyed by her ceaseless questioning that they stopped talking to her altogether.

It took two burly mall security officers to drag her off the Santa sitting outside the food court. Decorum prevents me from relating much of the subject matter she discussed with the as-jolly-as-can-be-expected-for-$12-an-hour old elf. The one word that will stick with most of the emotionally-scarred children who witnessed the confrontation is "despicable."

Brenda decided the only way she was going to get answers was to meet the "big man" himself. To that end, she ran away from home and tried to make it all the way up to the North Pole.

Let me just interrupt here and warn you that if you're holding a mug of warm cocoa, listening to Bing Crosby singing a classic tune, and filled to bursting with the spirit of the season, then you might want to stop reading here. I certainly don't want to be the turd in your holiday punchbowl ... because beginning next paragraph I have dropped trou. I'm perched over the aforementioned bowl and open for business.

Fueled by the apparent injustice of it all and driven by the ruthless determination that most kids possess, Brenda made it all the way into the Alaskan wilderness before she froze to death. Her last hours were spent trying to find warmth in an unforgiving clime. Delirious, her hands, feet, ears and nose black with frostbite, she dropped the charts and graphs she had dragged along showing the discrepancies in ol' St. Nick's gift distribution and fell face down in a snowdrift.

I wish I could say that's how authorities found her but anyone familiar with that area of the country knows that there are too many large predators for a meal like Brenda to go to waste. An hour after she finally expired, a pack of wolves found her frozen corpse and tore her limb from limb. Aside from a few scraps of bloody clothing there was nothing left for her grieving parents to identify.

It's at this point that I'm having some second thought about naming the little girl Brenda. What seemed like a nice idea at the time now has me wondering if the Brendas reading this will appreciate their namesake being devoured by wolves. It might undo any good will I might have created and actually make these women annoyed with me.

You know how people say a crowd can "get ugly?" Well, in the case of a crowd of Brendas they start off ugly and I'm not anxious to find out where they go from there.

Certainly not a group I want showing up to a book signing in the future.

Like most holiday stories, there are a lot of morals you can glean from Brenda. The most obvious is that frostbite is not given enough respect in most of the TV specials. Elf or not, Hermey would have been dead in a matter of hours after leaving the cozy confines of Santa's workshop. If we as a society are going to go on perpetuating careless winter behavior then the large predators of the North have no fear of starving to death, I'll tell you that much.

Perhaps a holiday special about Santa slipping down chimneys and redistributing gifts more fairly to the children of the world might be a good place to start.

Brenda would have liked that.

### bloom

Let's assume for a minute you live in a temperate clime. Somewhere where the temperate never gets too hot or too cold. A place where flowers take root and never look back.

Given finite space in your garden, would you prefer a bland flower that blooms all year or a flower that has a prettier appearance but only blooms half the year? After that, the flower drops off and you just have a boring green stalk.

I'm guessing your answer to that question is very telling. Psychologists would jot down your decision in a small notebook and feel they had a good handle on you. Do you prefer dull but steady or are you willing to sacrifice a little for the sake of beauty. Withholding the pleasure of seeing a flower for half the year in order to get a better product for the last six months.

I'll wager there are some of you who would be willing to cut back the flowering time to only three months if there was an equivalent bump in the beauty of the bloom. In grade school this would be the point where I asked you to drag out some graph paper and start to create a chart showing either a steep incline or decline, depending on what parameters you put on the top and side of the graph, in how much additional beauty you'd need to see to allow the bloom to be around less.

Is there a flower so nice that you'd accept that it only bloomed one month a year?

What is if I told you about a flower so amazing that when it blooms people would come from miles around just to see it? TV crews would arrive days beforehand so they could set up and get the perfect shot. For one week a year your neighbors would be jealous and complain about the congestion and you would bask in the reflected glory of your flower.

The fifty one weeks of a barren stalk.

Could you live with that?

Now what if I told you that there was a flower that only bloomed one day a year but when it did it exploded into such a dizzying array of colors and textures that grown men would weep upon seeing it. Great swarms of hummingbirds would fill the skies around it and large ferocious animals would gather but they would be docile and allow you to rub their bellies. Then, just as it is about to fold up its petals for the year, it releases a sweet burst of nectar that provides everyone within one hundred yards the longest and most satisfying orgasm of their lives.

Of course, many of you are signing up for that plant without thinking through the dozens of other unintended consequences.

Congratulations.

### hiking the Appalachian Trail

(first appeared at valterramagazines.com on 2/1/2014)

I'm not sure what I thought hiking entailed. It seems easy enough when you think about it, one foot in front of the other as gorgeous scenery unfolds in front of you. When it was suggested to me that I join a few of my friends for a few days of hiking along the Appalachian Trail I thought nothing of giving the idea a rousing thumbs up. While not in tremendous shape, it never occurred to me that it would require anything more than a small dose of physical fitness. If things got a bit dicey I could always grab a walking stick. To make sure I left nothing to chance I even dragged out a pair of hiking boots I'd purchased a few years back when I was threatened with a similar activity. I found them on a discount rack at a discount store for $12. I'd never worn them but they certainly looked like the type of footwear I'd seen on rugged mountain men in antiperspirant commercials.

Were you aware that to even get on the Appalachian Trail requires a hike of several miles? Most of it uphill in the kind of rocky territory that is usually home to those goats that you see standing sideways on mountains whose tops are typically covered in fog banks?

I was not aware of that.

I had gone no further than a hundred yards when I began to realize that my $12 hiking boots were not going to be up to the challenge. With apologies to Nancy Sinatra, these boots were not made for walking.

And when I say "trail" I mean it in only the loosest meaning of the word. Whereas I was expecting cheerful signs every few feet what I saw before me was a few trees with a small splash of fading orange or completely faded orange markings on them separated by at least ten thousand other trees. It was like playing Where's Waldo if Waldo had gone into a Witness Protection program and had been told to lose the red and white striped shirt, ditch the glasses and dye his hair blonde.

Another thing I noticed as we began our climb was my friend's legs. They looked like pencils with oranges protruding where their calf muscles should have been. I looked down at my legs and saw two pencils with absolutely nothing where my calf muscles should be. I won't even bother describing their thighs ... except to say that they wouldn't have looked entirely out of place on the average Greek statue. You know the kind I'm talking about, the type where some hero or other is hoisting some heavy object over their head or wrestling a lion or whatnot.

We weren't twenty minutes in and the good-natured ribbing- at my expense of course- began. The sun had barely crept over the horizon on day one of a three day hike and already I could taste blood in my mouth.

Blood and despair.

I began a steady stream of lamentations under my breath as I realized that it would be at least another mile of uphill climbing before we actually reached the "beginning" of our hike. Quietly I cursed the birds and wished terrible things upon my friends. If only one of them would trip and tumble down the hill and break their spine I could save face and end this debacle.

But it was not to be. Cruel fate kept my friends safe and upbeat and I continued to hurl obscenities at any creature that had the misfortune of appearing in front of me. Walking sticks, despite what you might have seen in the movies, are of no help at all.

It was noon when we took our first break.

My friends threw off their packs and attended to their feet like an experienced Indy pit crew. They each stripped off the two pairs of socks they were wearing and nonchalantly applied baby powder to each foot as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

I took off my boots and my single pair of 100% Rayon socks to find that the soles of each foot were covered from heel to toe with a giant blister. It appeared that my feet were enormous and had the consistency of bubble wrap.

Miles away birds flew in great flocks, startled by the noise I made when I popped the first blister. Popping the second foot had my friends looking away and having silent conversations with their respective deities. Had there been a bear within a hundred miles the smell of blood and pus would have had him running towards us with all gusto.

I wrapped my feet with my own blister-skin and trudged onward.

It was only eight hours later that we arrived at our camp for the evening. The hours literally flew by, in a way that I imagine only the hikers involved in the Bataan Death March could relate to. The only break I got from the searing pain of each foot hitting the ground was the occasional leg cramp.

I had eaten my three-days' worth of provisions before noon so I was at the mercy of friends and their ridiculous freeze-dried dinners. The fact that they were all openly wishing I would hurry up and die of pus-loss and despair made my leverage in negotiating what I could borrow from their ample packs limited at best. What I ended up with was a pouch of "Southwest Chili." On the cover of the packet was a smiling chili pepper. Given my feeble intestinal fortitude I would typically avoid such spicy fare but such was the depths of my hunger that I happily snatched it up and threw it on the campfire. Moments later, the hot water barely soaked into the pepper-ridden powder, I wolfed it all down.

As the sun set all the creatures of the forest were treated to the noises coming from my stomach. I could clearly make out the sounds of gringos galloping down my small intestine, all the while whooping and firing their pistols into the air. My face was a red mask of sweat as I inquired where the bathrooms were. It was then I was introduced to the concept of a composting toilet. Compost, from the Greek "can be smelled for miles." I was pointed down a narrow trail and told that at the end of this was what I sought.

As I walked further from camp I began to get a whiff that I was headed in the right direction. There were no animals here. No insects chirped. The only noise I could hear was the buzzing of flies.

When I finally arrived I seriously considered taking off one of what remained of my $6 hiking boot ($12/2) and beating myself to death with it as opposed to sitting on the filth-encrusted hole that sat before me. That's when the "Southwest Chili" made the decision for me.

I shat with a force that had me looking between my legs to see if any of my spine had been cast out with the "Southwest Chili."

Even the flies left.

I realized I had no toilet paper.

I began to weep.

Eventually I made my way back to camp and found a spot to lay out my sleeping bag. Above my head there were at least a dozen spiders the size of my fist, sitting in their web and watching me with undisguised avarice.

I didn't care.

In the distance I heard my friends talking and laughing with a few other hikers who had made their way to the structure. They were giving each other trail names. I sat in the dark and decided I'd like to be called Strider. I was about to make my way over to the fire when I heard them give me the moniker Shit For Brains.

I stayed where I was.

A few hours later I heard them make their way inside the wooden structure and soon after I could hear them all snoring. My feet hurt too much to sleep so I decided to rid myself of what little moisture I still had in me by weeping again. Occasionally I would slip into a fevered hallucination where the smiling chili pepper would laugh and poke me with a fiery pitchfork.

The next morning my friends set off without me.

**The journal ends here. The identity and fate of the author remains a mystery and part of Appalachian Trail folklore.**

### four lads that shook the entomological world

It was March 1957 when the story began. John, who'd always had a strong interest in anthropodology, had struck up a conversation with Paul in the zoology section of the Natural History Museum in London... and the rest was history.

Four lads who shook the entomological world.

It wasn't long afterwards that their two classmates at the University of Liverpool, George and Paul, joined their team and thus began one of the most prolific partnerships in the annals of research history.

After a semester as adjunct professors at the prestigious Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, the foursome issued what would become the first of hundreds of wildly-popular papers: "Effect of temperature on the phenotypic variation of colonizing stink bugs."

The paper met with a very emphatic reception and colleges around England threw open their libraries to the charismatic lads. Their follow-up paper, "The influence of altitude and landscape structures on colonies of the corn herbivore, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera,"left no doubt the boys were headed for greatness.

Lecture halls were forced to turn people away as people clamored to hear them present their supporting data. It seemed everyone wanted a piece of them and after the Bulletin of Entomological Research signed them to an exclusive contract it wasn't long until television came calling. Nature programs were just starting to take off and the four lads from Liverpool made the jump to broadcasting seem effortless.

Now obviously I could go on from here and draw humorous parallels between The Beatles and the four fictitious lads that I have gone to no particular lengths to describe, but I think you get the point. Hopefully your head was swimming with black and white footage of the Beatles being hustled from their car to a hotel or airplane or wherever it was you imagined they were headed off to but instead you put four nerdy professors in their place and that image made you smile.

Perhaps you went even further and really gave your imagination a workout. It is my hope that this effort was richly rewarded.

Of course, by not shepherding you through the entire life spans of these made-up gentlemen I risk you focusing on some of the more tawdry elements that crept into the Beatle story in their later years, but I trust you'll keep the innocent, idyllic elements of the tale intact and will stay pretty much in the matching-slacks portion of the band's career out of respect for the field of entomology.

### how to make love stay

As I made my way down the hallway carrying my laptop and bed sheets I couldn't help but the envy the kids that had come to college with a high school friend. It would have been nice to know somebody right from the get go. I had put my name in to get a roommate but as fate would have it I got a single. Nice to have some private time but I was a little nervous the initial lack of opportunities for making new friends.

I ducked and dodged my way down the hall, sometimes bouncing off a wall to keep all of the items in my laundry basket from falling out of my aching hands.

The first time I walked right by my room because the door was open and a girl was standing in the middle of it so I assumed that it couldn't be the right one. It was only when the numbers on the doors indicated I had missed it did I turn around and walk back to find that it was the correct room after all.

Empty this time. No girl. I couldn't help but feel it was foreshadowing for what was to come with the ladies. Nerd in high school. Nerd in college. I was on the express train to celibacy.

I began to unload and set things up but the slight scent of perfume in the air was a bit distracting.

My concerns about making friends was unwarranted and within a few days I'd found a small group to go eat and hang out with whenever I needed a break from my studies. I even mentioned the girl that was in my room that first day but nobody could place her. For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about her.

Petite and redheaded with pale skin. Ever since reading Still Life With Woodpecker, I'd wanted to date a girl with red hair. I'd only glimpsed her but every time I thought about her I'd remember some new detail. The human memory is a funny thing. Little freckles. Flip flops.

Late at night I'd lay in my bed and I could swear I smelled her perfume.

A week or so later I was walking into the dorm with a friend and I noticed her again. She was standing on the far end of the hallway and staring right at me. I couldn't even pretend to act casual. My face must have lit up because even though she was far away I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck. My legs were jelly and I stopped quickly to collect myself.

I looked up again and she was gone.

I realize that these two brief encounters don't seem like much but you have to understand I didn't see much female action. I had no game whatsoever. These encounters had pretty much been the high point of my sexual interactions to that point in time.

There was no denying she was looking right at me. She didn't turn and look away or act like we weren't staring at each other. She might as well have invited me out to a movie right then and there.

Things were moving pretty fast. It wasn't even another few weeks before I saw her again. This time she must have been working up her courage to say hello because I looked up from my desk to see her standing in my doorway.

Keeping my door open was just one of the many elaborate schemes I had for seducing the other sex into my lair. There were also posters hung of cool bands as well as multiple chairs in case any female was just too exhausted to make it back to their own room and needed a place to collect themselves. Obviously I wouldn't have used the term "other sex" to describe girls if there was any danger of me having to use the word "sex" again when describing my room or my first few weeks of college. There wasn't any danger of it. At all. I just wanted to somehow get the word in because it was pretty much all I could think about since I arrived on campus.

I made my move. I cleared my throat and looked down as I pushed back my chair and stood up. When my eyes finally returned to the doorway it was empty.

She was gone. All that remained was the smell of her that hung in the air for what seemed like hours.

I'd blown it again.

For the next few days I was asking everybody I knew about her. I described her in as much detail as I could. My college wasn't that big and I felt like the Prince with the glass slipper looking everywhere for a mystery girl. Nobody knew a girl fitting the description.

Meanwhile everywhere I looked I saw swarms of beautiful women in short skirts and tight blouses. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a cute girl. Which, ironically enough, was probably a better strategy in introducing myself to one than I had been employing. Apparently college girls didn't like flustered, mumbling, awkward, shy-but-wild-eyed-with-passion come-ons.

I was ready to burst. I swore the next time the red-headed girl showed up I'd be ready.

It wasn't until the semester was almost over that she made an appearance.

It was late but I was lying in bed thinking of all the wonderful and terrible sexual things I wanted to do to a female in that bed. I was going down the list of things I'd heard about or read about or watched online. Having not done any of them they all held the same vague but urgent appeal.

That's when I smelled her perfume. Stronger than ever before. It was as if I had willed her to be there. That's when I noticed a small shadow interrupt the light coming in from under my door. And then again.

Feet. Somebody was standing outside my door.

Without thinking I jumped out of bed and threw it open. I wasn't going to let another chance slip through my hands.

It was her. Red hair and freckles and flip flops. She stood there and my heart began to pound.

She put a single finger on my chest and slowly pushed me back into the room and didn't stop until I fell back into a seated position on the bed. The door slowly closed behind us and the room was plunged back into shadows.

It was going to happen. Just like I'd imagined a million times.

I felt her lean in close to my neck. I felt her breath on me and I began to wonder how any man holds out until the actual act of intercourse. I was dizzy.

Her finger slowly ran up my chest until it was under my chin. She lifted my head up until I was looking directly at her. She spoke.

"This used to be my room. I went here three years ago. I invited a boy into my room one night."

Her voice was so soft, it seemed to almost be a whisper. Almost a counterpoint to the erection thundering between my legs.

She continued.

"I thought he was nice but he wouldn't stop when I asked him to. He said he couldn't. I tried to make him but I couldn't. He killed me right here on this very spot."

### my first racist joke

I heard my first racist joke when I was about eleven. I went to an all-white school and lived in an all-white world. At the time I didn't think anything of it. I didn't think I was a racist. I didn't think about race at all.

"There's a guy and he's standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon."

I saw plenty of non-whites on television and they all seemed the same as my friends. I would later be part of a track meet where we went into the city and ran against an all-black team. Afterwards, on the bus ride back to my school, I would think to myself that blacks seemed the same as my friends except they run much faster.

"A Mexican family walks up to look at the Grand Canyon. They look over the edge and marvel at how far down it is."

Maybe it was the innocence of youth but when I heard this joke I laughed and laughed. What did I know? I knew nothing of what went on before me in the world.

"The guy standing there asks the family if they want to see something cool. Of course they all say yes. He climbs over the railing and then hurls himself over the edge."

Looking back now I wonder if the joke would have worked without the racist bit. Probably not.

"The Mexican family is in awe as the man seems to just float there, smiling away. The man explains that there are thermals that blow up from the canyon depths that keep him from falling."

I do remember wondering, on that same bus ride home from the city track meet, if Asians or American Indians ran slower or faster than I did.

"The man asks the Mexican dad if he wants to try it. He says yes and climbs over the railing and jumps. He plummets to his death."

I wonder now if racism isn't just another way to laugh at people. Something to make jokes funnier. To make barbs crueler. I'm sure there are people that have good reasons to dislike other people but I can't help but think that if the other person is a different color that it might make it easier.

"A man standing next to the grieving family turns to his friends and says "Man, Superman sure hates those spics."

Obviously you could switch out the races of the superhero and the victim but that's not the point. The point is that someone told that joke, using Superman no less, to an eleven year old. Even if I could at the time rationalize Superman's behavior, perhaps he was upset about the amount of illegal immigration; it seemed a very inefficient way to get rid of Mexicans. And also a bit ironic given that despite his patriotic appearance (red cape, white skin and blue tights) he was not only not from this country but he wasn't even from this planet and I'm fairly certain he failed to fill out any paperwork before crash landing here. But the joke itself is funny, you can't deny that. I laughed because it seemed dangerous and edgy to talk about another race.

Maybe.

I'm still not 100% sure. What I do know is that was no way to hear the word "spic" for the first time. Having never heard the word before I could only assume it had negative connotations because of the way it was said. I heard it from the same kid that always had a cripple joke or a Helen Keller joke handy. He was very popular. I don't so much blame him as wonder whatever happened to him.

I'm guessing that kids these days don't get to eleven before they hear the word "spic." I doubt they'll even remember it the way I do. Like a scar inside my head.

A few years later, after I was getting accustomed to hearing racist words, I had the thought that perhaps racism is just a way for sensitive people to deal with reality. I thought maybe that if people didn't dislike people of color for some reason they'd go crazy with all the hunger, poverty and war going on in other countries. I wondered if it was just a defense mechanism to stay sane in a cruel world. Distancing themselves from the horrors going on around them.

Then I learned maybe that wasn't the case.

Learned is a bad word for processing such stuff.

Whatever the reasons, I never looked at Superman the same way.

### Mr. Nosy

I never read newspapers. If I want to hear what's going on in the world, which I never do, I'll watch TV or turn on my computer. That being said, I was reading a newspaper when the trouble began.

I say "trouble" in order to make this seem a bit more exciting than it really is. Or was. Whatever it was, or is, it's over now.

I was at a Jiffy Lube getting my oil changed and there was nothing else to read in the little lobby they directed me to, not even an old National Geographic, so I was forced to flip through the newspaper otherwise I ran the danger of having to make eye contact with the other poor bastards sitting on the dirty folding chairs waiting for our cars to get done.

I could make it seem a crazy coincidence that I ended up reading the obituaries but the truth is I perused every inch of the paper so it was inevitable I'd end up there. This is where things got sort of weird.

One of the stiffs was a guy I thought I knew. Or at least remembered from somewhere. I'd like to claim that I have a great memory but I don't. The only reason I thought I remembered the guy was that his nose was enormous. The kind of a nose you can't forget. Not only large but it had a ding in the top of it. Not so much a piece missing, just that it appeared to the casual observer that he must have been dropped as a baby.

Onto an axe. From a great height.

A dent. Sort of.

Not the kind of a nose you're likely to forget, I'll leave it at that otherwise I will spend the entire story trying to describe this whale of a snout.

But where did I know him from?

It wasn't until I was home and in front of a large picture of myself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower that I realized where I'd seen him. He was the guy in my framed Eiffel Tower picture whose nose was blocking most of it.

Then it hit me...

I don't usually take pictures of myself but when I do I rarely put them in a photo album but in this case I was forced to go grab an old photo album I had tucked away on a shelf under my vinyl record collection. Having thrown out my old record player years ago and with no way to play the albums this was a section of my entertainment center that did not get a lot of play. When I pulled out the photo album my nose itched from all the dust that was kicked up.

I began to rifle through the album and it wasn't long until I found what I was looking for. A picture I had taken in London over twenty years ago. A picture of Big Ben. Well, a picture of some of Big Ben. The rest was lost behind the gigantic beak of a stranger.

The same stranger who had blocked out a sizeable amount of the Eiffel Tower and the same stranger from the obituary picture.

What the hell was Sir Nosealot doing in these pictures? Decades apart in different countries?

My hands trembling slightly I did what any veteran of scary movies would do: I began to look through all of my pictures.

Now you, no doubt a veteran of watching those same scary movies, are probably anticipating that I found this guy lurking in the background of dozens of shots. And you'd be right.

Although lurking might not be the right word. He was blocking out some of the largest natural and manmade structures in the world. The Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China. He was there with his giant nose ruining them all. And there I was smiling away, completely oblivious to his presence. In the picture of the space shuttle launch he ruined he's holding a vuvuzela of all things.

Who was he?

It's at this point that I was forced to admit to myself I'd been waiting all my life for this type of thing to happen to me. Something to make my life seem somehow special. Maybe even important. The laws of probability seemed to indicate that I was part of something bigger than myself.

What was the cosmic significance of this guy with the colossal nose?

That Saturday morning I got dressed up in somber attire and drove down to the funeral home to pay my respects and to see if I could find out some answers. When I got there and found that they were unable to close his casket because of the size of his schnoz I laughed so hard that it didn't seem to matter anymore. It ruined everything. The metaphorical nose photobombing my big mystery.

I had to admit, thinking back on it, that bringing a vuvuzela to a shuttle launch was pretty cool idea.

### Bugs the bunny

I guess we all carry around a little baggage that makes us more sensitive to issues than we'd otherwise be. In my case it was a story I read about a puppy mill. It had made me furious.

For those of you lucky enough not to know what a puppy mill is let me pull the shades from your eyes. A puppy mill is a place that breeds dogs with no thought given to their bloodlines. They take the same few dogs and have them crank out puppies, even if they are related. In the end this causes all sorts of inbreeding and a whole slew of related health issues. If you buy a dog at a mall it's almost guaranteed that your puppy will have a host of genetic problems that will ensure a shorter-than-expected life filled with medical troubles.

Why is this topic such a sore subject for me?

Because when I was younger I bought a rabbit from a pet store at the mall and it was obvious from the beginning that this rabbit's family tree was short a few branches. Or any branches.

For starters, he was blind in one eye and only had partial vision in the other. His ears were different lengths and for some reason his large legs were up front.

Take a minute to imagine him if you will.

I'll wait.

This leg arrangement made walking a bit of a task and painful to watch. Half the time he would flip backwards in the air. Heaven help us if he had been the Easter Bunny. Those eggs would never have gotten delivered.

"Here comes Peter Cottontail ... hopping down the bunny trail ... eventually."

One day. Two. Three days after Easter and still no sign of the first egg.

Speaking of Easter eggs, he had testicles the size of tennis balls. When he leaned back it looked like he was sitting in a beanbag chair.

That wasn't even the worst of it.

Somehow his DNA blueprints must have been upside down because his mouth and his ass were switched. Anyone witnessing him eat would be traumatized for days.

"Look at that rabbit. It looks like he's slowly sitting on that carrot. Wait a minute ... is that? ... look at the carrot ... oh my god. No. No!"

My rabbit was a mess.

Was his ass and mouth thing the worst part?

Hardly.

The worst part was what happened when I tried to pet him. I wanted him, and the universe, to know that a few dozen maladies generously dished out by the callous hand of fate would not impact the love I felt for my pet. Every time I attempted to show said love by petting him large chunks of fur would come off in my hand. He'd look up at me forlornly with his one good, albeit usually dripping, eye.

That was the worst part. Perhaps all that fur was why the hand of fate got so callous in the first place. Chicken and egg stuff I guess.

Poor Bugs.

That was his name.

Bugs.

Not after the famous bunny but because his skin was always crawling with parasites. No amount of tick sprays or flea baths would stem the tide of critters that called his pelt home.

Luckily for everybody involved he was eaten at a young age by a two-headed wolf that escaped from the wolf mill up the road.

That's all folks.

### the song between her legs

She sings from somewhere you can't see

She sits in the top of the greenest tree

She sends out an aroma of undefined love

It drips on down in a mist from above

-DEVO "Girl U Want"

In Greek mythology, Sirens were beautiful women who lured sailors to their doom with their enchanting song. Beautiful, they would plop down on their rocky coastlines and sing away and even the strongest of men would be led to make poor decisions and end up in a watery grave.

Sound familiar?

The Greeks called them Sirens, these days we just call them vaginas. You can dress it up however you like, but the same forces are in play.

While I may not always admire the English language, you do have to give it some respect for grabbing the word siren and making it mean alarm, warning, danger and/or distress. You can't say the language didn't try and warn men. I'm surprised that the police and firemen across the country don't have their sirens blasting out of giant replicas of vaginas. Men would certainly take more notice and somehow I think the ranks of neighborhood watch and volunteer firemen would swell.

Even though the way Sirens were represented in folklore changed as time went by, the fascinating mix of temptation and charm persists to this day. Beguiling vaginas whose song makes us forget our native lands.

Although I didn't feel like a sailor at the time, I remember there were a couple of ball fields where we would play baseball when I was a kid. Because we were kids we would hit ten times more foul balls than we ever put into the field of play and, because we were kids, we were poor and needed to find every one of them. A task made that much more difficult by the heavy woods that lurked right behind the fields. We would try and follow the flight of the ball and go hurling ourselves into the shrubbery in pursuit but more often than not we were unable to retrieve it.

The funny thing was, the next day I would take a bucket and just poke around behind the fields and find upwards of a dozen balls. Some of them sitting right out in the open.

I guess when you're not after a particular one it's easier to find them.

That's the thing about women. Emotions make them like foul balls, difficult and arbitrary.

Depending on how hot she wants her porridge on a given day, she might choose "Aye Papi" Bear, "Hot Mama" Bear or "Ooo Baby" Bear and there's squat we can do about it.

And yet we go plunging into the woods or sailing into the rocks just the same, hypnotized, never sure if we'll find the ball or a ball and even more unsure if, in the long run, it makes a bit of difference.

Myself, I've found that the act of sex doesn't help clarify things. I never found a correlation between the physical attractiveness of the woman and my performance, both in and out of the bedroom. I've spent my life assuming that the hotter the girl is the less adequate my sexual prowess would be when the time came to step up to the plate but the evidence does not bear this out. In fact, at times it's almost an inverse relationship. I have been a stallion with beauties and disappointing with very ordinary girls.

Ordinary physically anyway.

And now what fresh horrors await us as this newest Siren, the internet, takes a hold? Our subconscious laid bare to anyone who happens to glance at our browsing history.

I recently had my penis fall asleep for the first time in my life. I must have been sitting very oddly because all of sudden the music stopped. My mind was flooded with fractals, geometric patterns and topographical dimensions and then I adjusted my leg and the blood flow started back and all of that melted away.

The singing resumed and I suddenly remembered this old movie theater I used to go to. It was small and old fashioned but it held a certain place in my heart so I would go there when all of my other friends would go to the big multiplex down the road. Eventually it closed down and fell into disrepair. I would sneak inside every once in awhile and sit in the darkness and the quiet and miss the old days.

Then, when it got to be too much of an eyesore, they tore it down completely and left nothing but a flat piece of pavement. Maybe they meant to rebuild something on the site but never got around to it.

So I would occasionally sit where the theater used to be and pretend it was still there. In my mind's eye I could see the screen and walls and even smell the popcorn. I was there, occupying the same space as always, but it wasn't.

That's the thing about foul balls. If just a few things were different they could have been Homers.

### a few thoughts

Can you imagine the violence that would ensue if truth serum was somehow introduced into the water supply over a holiday weekend?

So what did we learn from the latest David Blaine special? That the easiest way to make celebrities look like dolts is to film them watching magic.

I remember when LEGO was just a bucket with a bunch of little building blocks in it. Now kids are given detailed instructions on exactly what to build with no pieces left over. What a great metaphor for childhood these days.

People ask me "Lance, do you ever run out of ideas for stories?" and I answer "Nope, just good ones."

As my dog lay sleeping with her head in my lap she slowly transformed from a trusted and loyal friend to a dumb, oblivious animal as I gave myself permission to fart.

Ever have those turds that are too big? You sit there sweating and pushing like you're giving birth. I call them "prison turds" because they remind me how THANKFUL I am I'm not in prison.

I always meant to ask my last girlfriend what it was she thought about during sex that stopped her from coming too quickly. Whatever it was, it worked great.

There are people who are born to leave you. There are people wired to stay. To blame either for being how they are is to be mad at the sky for being blue. (Feel free to explore this observation further by noting that what we call the sky is just a vague region of the atmosphere and the color is only because air molecules scatter blue light from the sun more than they do red. You could easily replace sky with space and black for blue. Would that change how you feel about the first two lines?)

You know what would make a great holiday special? Having little people dressed as elves drag everyone involved in the decision to make a sequel to "A Christmas Story" in front of a Santa who will then chainsaw their heads off.

Hope springs eternal. It's annoying like that. Cynicism, on the other hand, just sits there.

When you understand just how many things go on in order to pee it makes you want to at least say "Release the urine!" every time you're standing in front of the toilet.

While on hold yesterday the message I was hearing made two things clear: 1. I may be being recorded. 2. I was free to press 0 at any time. Speaking in a strong firm voice I let the message know that I was free to press ANY number at any time. I wanted to let it know exactly who it was dealing with. I hope that it was recorded.

If you talk to any old person, all of their conversations can be distilled down to one simple thought: getting older blows.

If a woman didn't have nipples I bet we'd be ok with them walking around topless.

"Cough... cough," he coughed.

Sometimes I think that I'm nothing more than a machine to turn onion rings into odd-smelling farts.

Listening to a Barry White tune today I was able to improvise an entire song's worth of lyrics. Granted at least 50% of the time I was singing "Put your hands on my penis." (Note: This is not as funny if one is not listening to a Barry White song)

Listening to the stranger next to me. Her breathing is a lullaby. A lullaby that doesn't rhyme and causes me to lose my boner.

Had to delete a story today. Entitled "Hope is a Cruel Mistress," it was tale of a married man who was dating a girl on the side named Hope who was cruel. It was so choked with metaphors that the Word program kept freezing.

It appears impossible to leave Jiffy Lube without spending over $100 on a $40 oil change. I had no idea my car had so many fluids and belts that needed replacing. Finally I was forced to pull the greasy man over the counter and explain that I didn't care if they found human remains in my air filter I wasn't interested in replacing it.

Justt wantedd too seee howw cooll myy writingg wouldd bee withh aa littlee reverbb.

While I appreciate the fact that the folks at Hallmark Cards went to the trouble of exhuming the two ladies working at the checkout, and will no doubt return them to their graves after the holiday rush is over, there to wait until next season's shopping frenzy again summons them from the cold confines of their caskets, I do wish they could move the storeroom, where they apparently keep the boxes in which every little ceramic figurine comes in, a little closer to the front counter. And by closer, I mean not at the other end of the store. And while they're at it perhaps even shrink the size of the storage area down from the four football fields it appears to occupy so when the old corpses drag themselves back there for each and every customer that has had the misfortune of walking through the Hallmark doors and decided to purchase something they could be gone for less than an hour.

Last night, looking out my window and seeing a neighbor's light on through a small wooded area in the development next to mine, and then looking up and seeing the light from a star hundreds of billions of miles away, and noticing that they look almost identical, I could not help but feel that my neighbor's light just wasn't trying. There was also a metaphor about celebrity in our culture in there somewhere but I just couldn't be bothered to sort it out. That's how disappointed I was in my neighbor's light.

I don't enjoy watching people dance well. I don't dislike people who dance well; I just find their dancing tedious to watch. I like to watch bad dancers. I could watch a bad dancer all night.

A mayfly lives for only one day. When it rains that entire day you know that they must look skyward and think to themselves "Well that sucks." When one of them gets eaten after only a few hours the rest must be thinking to themselves "What a shame. He was so young." They don't have mouths, so that why they have to think everything to themselves.

The news never reports the things I want to know, i.e. was the jumper wearing Life Is Good apparel?

I always give mock advice as a way to make fun of people who feel so self-important that they give advice but today I'd like to give some actual advice: give mock advice as a way to make fun of people who feel so self-important that they give advice.

Living without regret is a ridiculous expectation. If you come to the end of your life with no regrets all that shows is an astounding lack of imagination.

I read that only 30% of woman can achieve an orgasm through intercourse. Here's hoping that the other 70% will make it their New Year's resolution to get their vaginas fixed.

"Caveat Emptor" - Let the buyer beware. "Just Pay Separate Process And Handling" - The buyer is an idiot who is about to get screwed.

Always remember... a hot knife through butter is fast, but a knife through hot butter is faster.

It seems that the word sweater has a negative connotation built into it. Instead of a cozy item to wear on a cold day it seems to indicate it somehow creates sweat. "He won't talk eh? Put on the sweater."

I love pulling a grey hair. It's like fighting against the ravages of time without actually having to do any exercise. An epic tug.

Typically a fart comes out front to back. This one was more left to right. I was farting and then one-tenth of a second later I was done. Felt great.

Yesterday I got my daily e-mail from a service that sends out requests for guests for various entertainment outlets and among these pleas was "Looking for couples who got engaged in a Costco."

Ironically, I too am looking for these same couples ... so I can talk to them about sterilization.

I have a pet rash. I keep him on my arm.

Last night at the mall I saw an awkward teenager who reminded me of myself at that age. Nerdy, unfashionably dressed, bad haircut. The whole package. I wanted to go up to him and throw my arm around him and say "I know right now life seems tough and unfair and everything seems an uphill battle but believe me... it gets much worse."

I'm realizing that a lot of celebrities don't have the complexion for 60" HD televisions. Hunks of make-up clinging to nooks and crannies as if it had been applied to an English muffin. A bit distracting.

I had a dream last night about camping. When I woke there was a faint smoky smell in the room and crumbs in my bed from the s'mores I had eaten. When I went downstairs I found the kitchen had been ransacked by raccoons. You could argue the sound of this ruckus was the reason I chose to dream about camping or you could believe, as I do, that I dreamt raccoons into existence. And they had antennae and human smiles.

Stalkers, a word of advice: make sure not to lose sight of what put you in that shrub by the window in the first place. Enjoy yourself or march right out and find something else to do with your life.

I can trace some of my problems back to my childhood and the toilet-flushing policy in my house: If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown also let it mellow. Our house smelled bad.

Read the word revolver. You picture a gun. I did anyway. Now remember that it is named so because it has a revolving cylinder containing multiple chambers and a barrel for firing. The cylinder revolves. This allows the user to fire multiple rounds without reloading and was a giant leap forward over the single barrel weapons that preceded it. Now read the word again. Revolver. Doesn't it seem different? With the emphasis on "revolve" I get a weird tingle in my brain now. Probably just me.

Replaced all the wooden doors in the house with three inch thick granite ones. I prefer a more dramatic sound when they close behind me. It's working.

I saw a car stuck in the snow so I quickly pulled in front of it and secured a rope to the front bumper. With one quick push on my accelerator the bumper gave way and I drove off dragging it behind me. I thought to myself "That makes six."

Traumatic experience #37: When I was a kid I showered at a relative's house and they handed me a towel and said it was "thick and thirsty." Ever since I've been terrified by the idea of a thirsty towel. Why couldn't they have just said plush?

The difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed of your behavior is a thin line usually directly connected to alcohol intake. Following that train of thought I have a feeling when I remember last night's events, or have them recounted for me, I will be revolted.

I don't mean to brag but I'll bet that when you hear that someone evacuated their bowels, I imagine it a lot more orderly than you do.

Women seem to violate the laws of gravity, i.e. they are easier to pick up than drop.

Love has gone when you stop kissing, not when you stop fucking.

Spent the night drinking and unsuccessfully trying to come up with a difference between my previous books and the journals kept by Kevin Spacey's character in "Seven."

When I'm watching porn there is nothing I hate more than when they show the man and woman initially talking and then cut to them banging away. It's like when I buy a new car. If I'm in the showroom and I find one I like I don't want to blink and find myself driving off the lot.

Watching UFC makes me wish cloning technology was much further along. While Barao vs. Faber is an ok fight, Faber vs. Faber would be awesome.

I can never quite relate to people that don't pick their nose when nobody is looking.

Some days time passes leisurely and others it seems to be marching relentlessly forward, determined to return us to a state of unconscious elements. Don't let circumstances fool you, it's always the latter.

The only female super hero I thought was ever named appropriately is Wonder Woman. The word "Wonder" can be used as a noun (miraculous deed or event; remarkable phenomenon; something strange and surprising; a cause of astonishment or admiration) or a verb (to speculate curiously or be curious about; to  doubt) ... much like every woman I've ever known. Her weapon? A lasso that compels all beings who come into contact with it to tell the absolute truth. Thank goodness she's the only gal with one of those.

Whenever you buy anything you are deciding amongst different options provided by different competitors. You are creating a single winner and multiple losers. Given that, I only have one question: "How could you?"

I laid there pretending I was asleep. She laid there pretending to sleep. Introductions can be so awkward.

The professor handed each student a mirror and said "Today we're going to be studying entropy."

I've never written to be popular or been popular.

Whenever I'm having a conversation with someone and they blink I immediately think to myself "They just spread a mixture of oils and mucous secretions across the surface of their eyes to keep them from drying out." Makes it hard to follow what they're saying but it's their fault if they're going to be standing there blinking the whole time.

Tom Hanks was ok as Captain Phillips but I'd rather have seen Emo Philips play the part. Or have Tom Hanks play Captain Emo Philips.

I'd like to open a restaurant in Hollywood called Gruel. All the hipsters would assume the name is ironic but I would serve nothing but cornmeal boiled in water. It would no doubt be a wild success. "Would you like that runny or extra runny Mr. De Niro?"

The problem some kids have with standing up to a bully is the part where they pin them to ground and repeatedly punch them in the face in front of all their friends.

While taking candy from a baby might appear easy, there are emotional tolls to consider.

I refuse to feel bad that my frozen dinner had chocolate pudding. If everyone was so damn worried about getting chicken fingers, leaving me with fish sticks, they sure as hell can choke down their corn without complaint.

I just had the feeling that it was going to be one of those moments where somebody would snarl at me "You're better than that" and I would whimper "No. I'm really not" before slinking out.

I don't completely trust any language where the word "manhandle" doesn't have something to do with masturbation.

St. Patty's Day research completed: How many green beers does it take to begin hearing voices in the bagpipes? Nine.

I refuse to stay at a La Quinta until they change their name to The Fifth. This is 'Merica, damn it.

Perhaps what nobody likes to admit to themselves is that they can leave any time they want. If they're here, wherever here might be, they are here because they choose to be.

It's gotten to the point where we can only hear truth from comedians. Politicians and businessmen are incapable of it. Comedians don't even have to be funny anymore, we'll pay them to stand on a stage and yell common sense at us. How fucked are we?

When someone asks you to pick a number between 1 and 10, don't pick 1. Or 10. Do I even have to explain it? Nobody wants you picking 1 or 10. You're going to end up making people ask you to pick a number between 2 and 9. Is that what you want?

The thing about polarizing writers is that we're always looking to increase the size of our pole.

I think the plan to just ignore the rampant violence and crime in the inner cities in the hopes that it will somehow just go away is going to work out splendidly for everybody.

Whenever someone says "I like to consider myself an intelligent person," what they really mean is that they like to consider themselves a more intelligent person than they are. Having said that, I just watched the India vs. Sri Lanka cricket match for two HOURS and, while I like to consider myself an intelligent person, I could not figure out how the game of cricket is played.

Every time I watch Alien I spend the whole movie marveling at how small Sigourney Weaver's mouth is. Not that she would necessarily be willing but I don't think I could get it all in.

Mark my words, one day that Cocoa Puffs bird is going to kill somebody.

I remember this girl. I thought she was the one... until the fateful day I snooped in her medicine cabinet and found a packet of Preparation H Medicated Wipes. When I think how close I came to asking her to be Mrs. Manion... really dodged a bullet there.

How can you trust a language where the word "umlaut" doesn't have an umlaut?

You know the music that plays in the background of movies that tells you if things are great or if they are about to get scary? It's there in real life too. You just have to really listen.

In the interest of full disclosure, the ruler I have tattooed on my inner thigh is not entirely accurate ... but it helps sell the product.

Tiny farts can be more socially crippling than large ones. I'd rather have somebody think I farted than think that's how I smell.

Fact: I am two pounds heavier when I have an erection.

Sitting at the park last night, I was watching an overweight guy jogging when he suddenly let loose with the loudest and most glorious fart I'd ever heard. Then, to my left, I saw a man dragging his golf clubs across a patch of pavement and realized that was where the sound came from. I was so disappointed. True story.

I'm not saying that every woman would go lesbian if they knew what men were really thinking. I'm just saying that they might give the brochure a longer look.

The other day I was walking when I heard a familiar voice, that I couldn't quite place, say "Hey, I spy a Lance Manion," to which I replied "Shhhh, if you're quiet you can watch him in his natural environment."

I then pecked at the ground and began to gather twigs. An hour later I had finished a serviceable nest. Turning to finally see the owner of the familiar yet unknown voice I found that he was no longer there.

How rude.

Pausing a TV show because someone in the room is talking is like asking them to be quiet. Pausing and then staring at the ceiling is like saying "shut the fuck up."

Not saying "Yay!" out loud when something good happens is missing an opportunity. Even the smallest things. Just because other people are too inhibited to verbalize it doesn't mean you have to be. Throw your hands in the air if you want. If you want to be happy, be happy.

An interesting dilemma is walking by a retarded man fishing in a pond that you know unequivocally has no fish.

I think if you made traffic lights take even 30 seconds longer to change, that most major cities would burn. That's how fragile I think our civilization is.

I was asked to write a children's story so I did. It was titled "Gary The Dragon With Erectile Dysfunction."

Gentlemen, when at the bar and witnessing a girl about to sit down be careful of how you say "May I push in your stool?" If you don't lift your eyebrow just so she might miss your meaning.

If you're going to stage a protest, make sure your message is clear. For example, last summer all of the squirrels in our local woods disappeared. Just packed up and left. Not one squirrel was seen all summer. This spring they're back. Not sure what their point was. Fucking squirrels don't know dick about protesting.

In fairness to the Pope's decision to canonize John Paul II, Catholicism did need a Patron Saint of Covering Up Rampant Pedophilia In The Church.

I sat at the bar listening to her and putting her words in my pan and swirling them around like some horny 49er in the hopes of spotting gold.

I realize saying that I don't enjoy burlesque as much as I do strippers might be as fine a line as saying I like hookers more than escorts but there it is.

So let me get this straight... Donald Sterling was caught saying anti-black comments to his half-black girlfriend and Jay Z was wearing an anti-white medallion while sitting next to his bleached-her-skin-to-look-more-white wife. How can average folks deal with their own racial identity issues when even the racists don't know what they want?

As time passes too many of us are like trees on the outside but bars of soap on the inside.

I'm alright with the "For he's a jolly good fellow" part, as redundant as it may be; it's the last bit that has me a bit skeptical. Nobody?

I'm sure that this makes me a horrible person but I just love to look at the promo pictures of shitty TV series that get cancelled after one season. Everyone in the picture smiling like an asshole, convinced that that they are part of the next big show.

If you want to ruin a wedding toast, include some real advice to the groom: "And finally, and most importantly, always clear your browser history. Never forget. Ever. Not once." Half the women in attendance will glare at their husband.

I remember sitting at the edge of the bed with a good friend. I said "Will this make things weird?" She said "I certainly hope so." It forever changed the word. From that moment on I equated weird with good.

It was just one of those games... three pucks in a row sailed into the crowd and killed somebody. You know how Pee Wee hockey gets...

If bombs sounded like mosquitoes then more people would be swatting at their necks before they died.

The desire to take a good look in the mirror is usually replaced with a realization that I strongly dislike mirrors.

Assuming for a minute that birds could use briefcases, would they? I like the idea of the skies filled with birds carrying little briefcases. One bird turning to the other in the nest, grabbing their briefcase and saying "Gotta fly," before launching themselves off to work. Occasionally you'd get bonked on the head by a dropped bird briefcase but then you'd not only get the enjoyment of rummaging through it quickly before they swooped down to collect it but the amusement of them giving you the "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" face.

After reading that 90% of the medical advice on Wikipedia is incorrect I think it's time to remove the bacon wrap from my testicles and go see a professional.

Last night there was a huge thunderstorm and a tree fell into my neighbor's hot tub, flattening it. In surveying the damage this morning they looked at me straight-faced and said "Well, at least no one was hurt." "Yeah, cause going out in the hot tub during a freak electrical storm is so commonplace." I replied. They stared back. To clarify I said "Yep, you really dodged a bullet." They continued to stare as I went back inside.

Of course the thumb is a finger. Otherwise the middle finger wouldn't be the middle finger. Duh!

I picture a dark raincloud coming over the mountain and looking at the parched plains lustily and saying "Where do you want it?"

The defense attorney finished his arguments by saying "Don't judge lest you yourself be judged." The judge then said "Fine, but just so you know... I was going to rule in your client's favor."

I think it would be fascinating to watch a very muscular man take a dump in a field.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. Except she was a spider and one day the owner of the shoe returned and crushed her to death putting it on.

The time I'm most bewildered by humanity? When I hear someone calling another human being "His Majesty" or "His Holiness." It's just embarrassing. "Hey buddy" would work just as well.

What kind of demented mind writes circus music?

I want to write a book about finding love after 50 entitled "Finding The Perfect Mate Amongst All The People That Nobody Else Wanted."

While I never give much thought to the coordination required to dry myself off when it comes time for each arm to dry the other I will invariably imagine one thanking the other followed by the second saying "Right back at you señor," when it is their turn to wield the towel. I'm not sure why but whenever my limbs communicate with each other they do it in a heavy Spanish accent.

Men who have lived alone for a long time will usually start unzipping in the hall and have their dick out before they even reach the toilet.

Given that Tony the Tiger is the pitchman for Frosted Flakes, you'd think that there would be chunks of antelope in it.

When I imagine a product being shipped over to America on an enormous ocean-going freighter and then unloaded and placed on a giant, yet slightly-smaller train and then placed in a huge, yet slightly-smaller 18-wheeler and then again in a big, yet slightly-smaller van I like to finish the thought by picturing it being delivered to my door by a midget riding a unicycle.

Went to a Phillies game yesterday in an effort to blend in. As my fellow males debated the finer points of bunting and the designated hitter I finally offered up "And don't try and tell me that home plate doesn't give the other bases attitude." Cover blown.

If I ever get a talk show I will have my guests sit on a leather couch on a slightly elevated platform and I, to show my humility, will sit in a pit of my own filth.

The past is the past. Who you were doesn't matter. All that matters is who you are now. Who you are at this very moment. At this very moment I'm a drunk asshole.

All I know is that if I were a pro golfer, I'd get the oldest and frailest caddy I could find. That way nobody would worry about my score, they'd all be watching to see if he made it from hole to hole. Especially since I'd carry 40 clubs in my bag.

Whenever I see someone who is pigeon-toed it reminds me of when I was twelve. When I was twelve I thought I was a pigeon.

Given that the average gorilla weighs 400 lbs the 800 lb gorilla in the room would be who let the gorilla get so obese.

My friends tried to warn me that buying her a drink was wasted money. Her on/off switch was an off/really off switch.

If you smile broadly enough, long enough, people will conclude that you're an asshole.

Is there anything I hate worse than listening to someone tell me how the child of a famous actor/actress chose to use a different last name in order to make it "on their own?" As if they weren't handed roles because they were the child of a famous actor/actress. As if they earned them and changing their last name meant anything. They've earned nothing. It was given to them. Is there anything I hate worse than listening to someone tell me how the child of a famous actor/actress chose to use a different last name in order to make it "on their own?" No.

To the rest of the soccer-crazy world ... just remember that we're using our, at best, fifth-best athletes. Only after our football, baseball, basketball and hockey teams are filled do we ever start looking for soccer players. If LeBron James played soccer all his life, he'd average three goals a game. Just saying.

I think the worst part of being a fish would be constantly swimming through other fish's pee. You'd never get the taste out of your mouth.

Don't try and tell me that a unique idea isn't powerful. It's a unique idea, not an unique idea. It breaks the rules of English for starters.

Another day wasted trying to teach the dog to yawn on command. It's just not boring enough for her.

Some days are just frustrating. I'm shooting this porn where all the girls are flowers and all the men are bees and we spend the whole movie pollinating and the prop department just doesn't understand why I need bigger wings.

How do men with beards do it in the summer? When things heat up their faces must be itchy as hell ... said my ZZ Top-esque ballsack.

I think if I had only a week to live and wanted to leave the world a better place I would buy a rifle and kill all the lawyers who advertise on the Maury Povich Show. I would probably end up getting a national holiday.

What is it that makes a dog suddenly start licking its bunghole? Is it the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?

The home furniture place near me closed yesterday. I didn't realize how serious they were about their liquidation sale until I heard that at the end of the day they killed all the employees.

I hate when speakers or comedians have a guitar up on stage with them, as if to say "Look at me. Look at how talented I am." If I was good at golf should I interrupt my talk to drive balls into the crowd?

One-night stands are fun for the same reason you drive less carefully in a rented car.

It's one thing to catch someone on the toilet. It's another to catch them wiping.

I can't help think that men would handle menstruation more efficiently. None of this three to four days of acting crabby. Perhaps a pop-out uterus that can be hosed off. Tell-tale cramp. Get the scraper. Done!

There's just something hot about watching a 21 year old girl ride a big wheel.

I once wrote about listening to a neighbor's kid practice the banjo on his driveway every summer. It's true, most days it's my favorite part of the day ... walking past the house and listening. Typically I take a walk each day not so much to clear my head as refill it. Like a hungry person pushing a shopping cart.

A public speaking tip. Start off by explaining to your audience that before you underwent hypnosis you were too terrified to even get up in front of a group of people. Then laugh and ask that for the next hour that nobody clap three times. If somebody does, begin to bark.

Writing Tip #8: If you are describing someone swimming and they are doing well don't say they are doing swimmingly. Use a different word.

Some people prefer to get into a made bed at night. As long as the wet spots from the previous evening have dried I'm good.

The question isn't so much "Do fish sleep?" as it is "Who gives a shit?"

I was watching a movie where they kept focusing on a girl's ass and all I could think was "That's where the poop comes out."

I wonder how many women are afraid of getting caught poisoning their husbands so instead have put the 10 year 'saturated fats' plan into effect. "Bratwurst again? Thanks Honey!" "No problem Dear." (small smile creeps across her face)

This morning I did an inadvertent magic trick. I took a crap and then wiped. As I reached back to flush I looked down and saw the turd sitting on top of the toilet paper. Tada!

I don't know how people who live in huts do it. All the biting insects would drive me crazy. If I were a caveman I know the second thing that would have been invented. "Well, that's fire out of the way. Now I can get working on mosquito netting."

I just watched something so bad that I couldn't turn away. Like a traffic accident ... involving clowns.

Apparently there is just something about me that doesn't allow me to eyeball somebody. All I can do is look at them.

Things that never need to be said at a Manhattan Bagel at 8 a.m. "Behold my penis and despair!"

I can't imagine anything more horrible than to be sitting in bed watching TV and having the batteries of the remote die on you. You sit waving it like some demented conductor as it's perched there in your hand seemingly mocking you. "Where is your god now?" You feel like the main character from A Clockwork Orange, strapped down with your eyeballs held open having to watch a program that you don't want to watch because the only other alternative is to get out of bed and find new batteries. Subjected to a bit of the old ultastupid involving three cows looking for a wedding dress as their inbred family squabbles amongst themselves. You take off the back of the remote and wiggle the batteries, desperate for them to find enough juice to turn the TV off and end your torment. But that doesn't work. It's like a horror nightmare.

It's gotten to where my morning fart is equal parts the crowing of a rooster, a bugle blowing reveille and a starter's pistol.

If you tell the truth for a living you are a comedian. If you lie you are a politician. Sad.

It is now my fondest wish that karaoke be outlawed across the country. I would walk into bars and taverns across the land and apply the axe to each machine with the same zeal that the old abolitionists would have when destroying a barrel of beer.

I think I had the same reaction upon hearing the news of Robin William's suicide as everyone else; "Why? Why?! Why couldn't it have been Howie Mandel?"

While flipping through channels I came upon Jimmy Fallon interviewing Carson Daly. Thankfully it was muted but watching them exchange grins and grimaces it became obvious I had stumbled on the two least interesting people to have ever walked the Earth having the least interesting conversation to ever take place. These are the people that entertain us?

For reasons I can't begin to understand whenever I see someone driving with their hand out the window and I watch it move up and down riding the breeze I feel a sense of hope.

### why men can't stay faithful

There seems to be this crazy idea that when the skirts start to get higher on the leg men become less faithful to their girlfriends/wives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me tell you, even back in the days when it took a hundred buttons just to get at a woman's breasts men were lining up for the opportunity. Men have always been unfaithful and will always be unfaithful. While women are wired to be nest-builders, men have a genetic predisposition to spread their special sauce to any buns that make themselves available.

It goes beyond simple explanation. Men understand that unless their woman just lays there with the enthusiasm of a Thanksgiving turkey getting stuffed or has a defective vagina, if they close their eyes they all pretty much feel the same. Any girl can be the lovely Yvonne Strahovski, even their non-Strahovski-esque girlfriend/wife.

It's not just the physical act of intercourse that we desire and women will never be able to understand that because they are women. You can use any logic you want but at the end of the discussion they will remain stubbornly and steadfastly female.

Conquest is hard-wired into us. It's what makes us men. When Ferdinand Magellan first stepped onto the deck of the Santa Maria (Santa Maria? Forget it, he's rolling) he felt more alive than the people who were sending him over to plunder Incan gold could ever hope to feel. Looking at the horizon, feeling the wind in his hair, I have no doubts whatsoever that he was sporting the biggest exploring boner France had ever seen.

That's why it's a common expression that the sea is a sailor's mistress, and there's never been any sailor who spent his whole life trolling back and forth over the same patch of water. He's erecting his sail and going wherever the wind blows him. Plowing resolutely through the waves of testosterone, plowing onward, seeing every point of light in the sky as some sort of North Star imploring him to plow and plow some more. North, south, whatever the course may be as long as there is plowing involved.

You want to read a short book? Look for one entitled "Great Female Explorers." That will be the quickest read you've ever had. Why? Because back in the exploring heyday there were no women involved. They stayed in port having songs written about them. (Am I right, Brandy?) It was too risky for women to be onboard ocean-going vessels what with their breasts getting tangled up in the rigging, getting pregnant by pirates and attracting sharks with their constant menstruating and all. It's a shame because while men were capable of making their own sandwiches, a woman would have instinctively added a few orange slices and cleared up that scurvy nonsense in a flash. They're good like that.

While I hate to use the term "manly," the truth is that exploring is manly stuff. Like plowing. Men are plowers and women the plowed. Men will be forever driven by plowing.

And flag planting. Women kid themselves but there has to be some part of them that realizes that they are nothing more than new land to be captured. And plowed.

Perhaps they look at what typically happens to the indigenous people after men have found their way to a new shore, and begun their inevitable shenanigans, and feel a little queasy about giving in to our more carnal urges. Well, they have a point there. Again, I'm not trying to rationalize our behavior, just explain it. It rarely works out well for the post-plowed.

It all sounds very seedy but in the end there's nobody to blame. Our DNA is the puppet master and we dance on the end of its string. It calls the tunes. And those tunes are baby-making tunes. When a girl in a short skirt bends over Barry White starts singing in our heads and there is fuck all we can do about it.

Frankly now that I give it some thought, I'm a little tired of explaining myself on the topic. Women want some sort of defense for this caddish behavior and no amount of scientific data seems to be able to quell their need to blame some sort of character flaw in men. A character flaw would be never leaving a penny in the little dish at the 7-11. What we have going on below the waist demands that we plow our girlfriend/wife on her Mom's casket at the wake if the opportunity presents itself. Our girlfriend/wife or any other female in the room that gives us a wink. Open or closed lid. We will stare right into our Mom's cold dead eyes as we ejaculate and think nothing of it. You think we want to do that?

Want has nothing to do with it.

It's a switch that gets flipped and from that point on our penis is on auto-pilot.

While it might be argued these urges may be all that keep a man from cutting off the head of nagging woman, in the end, if she is not available to be on the receiving end of his gooey burden, he will simply find the next suitable candidate and not give it a second thought.

I think a better strategy would be to come up with more realistic coping mechanisms as opposed to constantly trying to change us. We might pretend to change for a few days but in the end our true nature will reveal itself. The salty smell of the sea will fill our noses and we'll be setting sail to harbors unknown in search of sweaty adventure.

And plowing.

Lots of plowing.

### Elvis Wings

Walking by a downtown storefront window I see a plaster bust of The King. Somebody has made him into a table lamp ... but they've made him silver wings.

It makes me remember (again) an old friend of mine. The most talented guy I'd ever had the pleasure of knowing. His complete lack of success had been a big reason I'd lost faith not only in the music industry but in people in general. Of course, he'd been aware of his lack of success but he'd be quick to remind me that I was defining success in a very narrow context. I wanted to believe it didn't haunt him but I could never bring myself to believe.

My lack of belief amused him.

He would defend The King.

"Maybe he was fat and maybe he was a pervert. He took pills and drank booze like tea. Maybe that's just the kind of a cracked-up angel that they'd send for a fool like me."

He believed.

And yet ... how could he? His belief concerned me. How could he believe? Here he was, talent so obvious it oozed out of him whenever he picked up a guitar and yet he sang his songs to half-filled rooms of disinterested people. Pearls before swine.

Whenever I'd get too worked up he'd tell me "If you go down to Memphis town and you hear angels sing, you may see some fat old clown in a velvet crown ... but he may have silver wings."

Again with the pearls before swine. I didn't get it at the time and I don't get it now but I think that he believed one day I would. He never seemed to lose faith and I hated that. That ragged certainty. I raged against it but only because I was confident I would never put a dent in his armor. It allowed me a certain license and I took full advantage.

Of course, if you didn't know the whole story you'd think he was a choirboy and you'd be wrong. After a show we would walk empty streets drunk and full of life. We would argue with each other and boast at complete strangers. So young that remembering it now it seems like it was someone else in my shoes.

He was just seemed virtuous to me because he made me look so petty and self-absorbed by comparison. Maybe I just felt he was just a better version of myself. Sometimes I thought he was just like me, except talented, and if he couldn't make it what chance did I have?

He would sing a phrase that said more than I could in twenty pages.

"And maybe if my time on earth is over and I leave this world of pain, remember Manion nothing happens for nothing ... and I may see you again."

That shit would haunt me. It made my inside ache because I could never imagine a world that didn't have him in it. He had enough faith for both of us and I hated that and I would use every argument I could muster to tear down his perspective. To find a chink. I had reason and logic behind me.

He had Elvis.

"Cause maybe there's a patron saint for the loser, for the queer-birds and the strange. For the junkies and the boozers ... when it's just too late to change."

I can still hear him in my head. That voice that would quiver and hold a note too long. The unnecessary falsetto and that big foot clomping along in time. Muttonchops that went on for days.

So here I am down in Memphis walking along and saying a prayer for him. Listening for angels.

"Manion, I will hover there on Elvis wings ... and pray God's love ... to thee."

### bargains

(first appeared in Psychopomp volume #7 7/29/14)

Few people knew that there was a lower level to the department store. As the anchor of the mall it sat at the end lording over all the shoe stores and candle stores and pretzel vendors and not only was it two stories but it had a lower level as well. That wasn't the lower level that most people didn't know about. There was a level underneath that one. A lower lower level. That was the one that few people were aware of.

Fewer still were aware of the one under that one.

All told, the store went hundreds of feet beneath the earth. Most of the levels below the lower lower level and the one beneath that weren't so much polished floors, colorfully-dressed mannequins and attractive lighting as caverns. They got progressively danker the further you went down.

People who ended up exploring these twisting tunnels in the hopes of finding additional discounts usually ended up extremely disappointed.

The man who was currently moving through the darkness had originally set out to find a restroom while his wife shopped. One thing led to another... and here he was.

Had it been the narrow passage with the restricted sign and little chain across it or was it the hidden trap door he'd found on the lower lower level? It was of no consequence. Now he was here he wanted to find the bottom. One thought kept repeating itself again and again in his head "There are good bargains to be had in the deep places of the world."

He could feel things moving around in the darkness. He was only twenty minutes removed from the glare of the mirrored sales counters and his eyes struggled to adapt. In the distance, how far away he couldn't tell, something dripped.

He switched the bag in his hand from the left to the right, the weight of the waffle cone maker beginning to make itself felt, and crouched down to stay balanced as the floor sloped down more steeply. Finally it opened into a large space, he could feel it more than see it, and in the middle of the darkness there were unseen hands loading blackness into black boxes. Tearing away the shadows and loading them into nothingness.

He went to take a step forward when he heard a voice and felt an arm blocking his path.

"Don't go in there."

He turned and his eyes strained to follow the arm to its source. His nostrils filled with the smell of stale sweat.

"Who are you?" the man whispered to the other end of the arm.

"I'm Gabe. From menswear."

The words seemed to shake loose gloomy specters from the walls and they flew crazily around the man's head for a few moments before buggering off. After he was done ducking and weaving he saw that Gabe had moved closer to him. He looked like every homeless man looks, a mixture of mountain man and bad luck. His clothing was covered in grime and he wore a battered tie around his head. There was no way of knowing that color the tie had originally been. His eyes carried a wild gleam and they darted back and forth as they peered into the darkness behind the man.

They grew wide and the man felt a burst of panic.

"Don't turn around."

The man did not turn around.

"It's my boss. I've been down here for three weeks now ... I figured she'd come looking."

"What is this place Gabe?"

"Not now. Just go back the way you came. There's nothing for you down here."

The man moved the waffle cone maker back into his left hand.

"I'm gonna trust you on this one Gabe," and with that the man headed back to find his wife.

### the fart

I will occasionally introduce a little truth into my stories in order to keep them fresh but this tale, I'm sorry to report, is a whole boatload of true. I'm not sure how to even introduce this story, that's how true it is.

I awoke in the middle of the night, still slightly intoxicated I will admit, with some intestinal distress. Having digested nothing different from the norm that evening my mind swam as to why I was suddenly get the cold sweats and feeling the need to relieve myself of some tremendous burden. Without thinking I rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up, intent on making the trip to the bathroom and back without getting myself fully awake. It must have been this combination of stomach trouble and sleepiness that didn't alert me to the fact that I couldn't feel either of arms. They were hanging off my body like two dead things.

That's when I felt the pain. I know you are, much like myself, sick to death of people comparing some pain to getting shot but I swear on all that is holy I looked down at my belly and was completely surprised to see that it was hanging open as a result of a gunshot wound. It was so obvious that the bullet had entered my back near my spine and passed through all the plumbing that a phantom ringing started in my ears. As evidence of the degree to which I was overcome with pain my legs both buckled and I crumpled to the floor.

I thought I was dying.

The only thing a reasonable man would do at a time like that would be to get to a phone and call 911. Being nothing if not reasonable I attempted to put that very plan into action when I realized that getting up off the floor without the use of your arms is damn near impossible. An inhuman cry left my lips as I tried to flop back on top of my bed like a spawning salmon but try as I might I couldn't make it happen.

The grudging respect for snakes that was beginning to grow in my breast was interrupted nearly a dozen times by the feeling of a large sword being driven through my midsection. Not a dagger or knife, as sick as of those analogies as you are, but a great sword. The type usually associated with Vikings and other men of violence.

I'm being especially descriptive because these days it seems that what you read and what you get are sometimes two entirely different things. Take for instance clear plastic wrap. I usually buy a brand name clear plastic wrap and when I apply it to some dish that needs to be stuck in the microwave it clings with the enthusiasm of a drowning person holding on to a life preserver at sea. Not so the budget clear plastic wrap I recently procured. It was indeed clear and I assume that it was some sort of plastic but it didn't have the slightest inclination to cling to anything. It sat on top of my dish in a relaxed posture that seemed immune to my attempts to mold it. As soon as my hands released the pressure it immediately resumed laying atop the dish in a very lazy, dare I say arrogant, way.

And if I am to be honest here, I am the closest thing you're going to find to a budget writer. Hence the need for me to be as clear as I can: it was a great sword that was being thrusted in and out of my midsection ... not a knife.

It was at this time that I felt certain that it was curtains for one Lance Manion. Unable to use my arms and being violated by some ghostly blade I began to sob to myself. I was now like the salmon you see sluggishly flopping around after it has delivered its payload and is now coming to terms with its own mortality. While I am no stranger to looking pathetic, it was certainly a low point.

And that's when I farted.

I say farted, but it was no mere fart. I had never, nor will ever, fart like this again. It was more like a groan escaping my ass. Everything was wide open. From the right angle you could probably have looked into my ass and seen a little light from my throat. Papers slowly floated down on the other side of the room. And then I could feel my arms. And then, as quickly as it began, the great sword abruptly stopped its assault. All that was left to remind me of the incident were the tears slowly making their way down my face and a nose full of snot.

Well, that and the horrified-looking girl slowly getting out of my bed and collecting her things. No words were needed. She'd seen everything, which was ironic given that my first few attempts at finding love were with blind girls. Apparently I'd misunderstood the expression.

But that's another story.

### Mr. Old Fashioned

The dark-skinned girl behind the counter with eight vowels and only three consonants in her name looked up at me. I was next. If there was ever a time for finger-pointing it was now. It was show time.

I had twelve to pick for my morning presentation and any veteran salesperson will tell you that your choice of donuts can make or break you. To add to my stress, the meeting would include both flaky interior designers and hard-boiled engineers. Two entirely different groups of donut consumers.

"I'll start with three old fashioned."

Old fashioned donuts represented fundamentals. The backbone of a good box of donuts.

My eyes crawled back and forth over the racks. To include a lemon filled donut would be tantamount to calling the designers a bunch of squealing fairies. Same for the coconut guava. Anything with sprinkles would probably get me punched in the mouth by a grizzled engineer.

I had to tread lightly.

"Two more old fashioned."

You could never go wrong with old fashioned. Old fashioned donuts are what built this country.

My eyes left the face of the apathetic counter girl and returned to the sea of choices. I wanted to show the flair of a glazed apple maple without the cockiness of a vanilla berry shortcake. My head began to swim a little, the sweet scent of sugar entwined with the intoxicating odor of coffee distracting me from my task.

"Actually, give me two more old fashioned while you're at it."

They would never see that coming. I was certain that both the designers and engineers were probably pummeled on a daily basis by blueberry crumbs, butternuts and Bavarian kremes. They were probably numb from opening box after box of brightly colored donuts, half of them with unknown fillings lurking within.

I felt the customers behind me start to grow restless. I didn't care. It's a man's world and if I needed a little more time, I would take it.

"Why don't you throw in another old fashioned. What's the count up to?"

The girl, without even looking into the box, said "Eight." Obviously she was more of a pro than I gave her credit for. There was no way I would have guessed I was already up to eight. I wasn't making such bad time after all.

The double chocolate cake was out of the question. It would stand out amongst the old fashioneds and I'm sure fate would have it that there would be only one black guy at the presentation and everyone would wait awkwardly for him to take it. I'm not sure what I would do if he didn't. I'm not a big perspiration guy but I would hate to put my deodorant to such a test.

What if I included one French cruller and I walked in to find two people wearing berets? Or one dulce de leche only to find three men sporting bombaches? The donuts that aren't in the box can be as important as the ones that are.

It had taken me three months to get this appointment. A lot was riding on it. I had spent forty minutes at the copy place deciding which paper stock to print my handouts on and over an hour selecting a tie to wear. If you must know, I had finally decided on the one that was a parody of Andy Warhol's soup cans except it featured numerous pictures of Austin Powers.

"You have four more sir." There was a hint of exasperation in her tone. I found I was growing to respect the young lady. I could see myself handling the situation in a very similar manner.

"Understood. Now let's see..." my voice trailed off as I was once again faced with a myriad of choices. A cheeky cocoa confetti poked its head up, the rugged powdered cakes stood at attention and the iconic jellies all fought for my attention. I was swimming in the deep end now.

Which to choose? Which ones would add that certain something?

"Let me just grab four more old fashioned."

The girl stuffed the last of the old fashioneds into the box and then hesitated. She looked up at me. My eyebrow cocked ever so slightly.

"We have a special today. You get a free donut with the purchase of a dozen." I heard a groan from behind me.

I hadn't planned on this contingency. The girl took out a small bag, obviously designed for a single passenger, and glanced at me expectantly.

I think we all know which donut I selected. A reverse Boston kreme. They're my favorite simply because the name is steeped in sexual innuendo. I could hear someone saying it as a punchline. If that makes me an old fashioned guy then so be it.

"A reverse Boston kreme please," I said with a small laugh.

I gave the counter girl a little wink, paid my bill and headed off to the big meeting.

### Miss Ham and Eggar

It was somewhere in her mid-thirties that Dana Eggar gave up on her dream of meeting someone special, settling down and raising a family. It was also about this time that she completely devoted herself to teaching.

She had been a 5th grade teacher at Walcott Elementary for the last 12 years but it was only in the last few that she had really hit her stride. She was easily the most liked teacher amongst the student population and the parents had no issues driving their children over to her house once a month for her notoriously fun "popcorn parties." The simple fact was that the parents trusted her completely for the best of reasons. She sincerely loved the kids and her affection was returned.

Students who came back from junior high and the local high school even felt comfortable enough around her to call her by the name that the younger kids whispered and giggled out of her earshot... Miss Ham and Eggar. The nickname went all the way back to her own elementary years but she would never admit that to her former pupils and take away their pride of thinking that they coined it themselves.

It was midday and the children were running around on the playground behind the school. As she sat and watched her charges scamper around she realized that she enjoyed recess as much as any of them. These were the moments where the solitude left her alone.

She never understood why she never found Mr. Right. She was not an unattractive woman and she had both wit and a nurturing nature. Many nights as she laid in her bed staring at the ceiling she wondered if that was perhaps exactly why she slept alone. There was something good about her that made a man feel bad about not giving her the love and devotion she so obviously deserved so they usually ran for the hills. She had dated but it was rare that she made it more than a few dates when the man would get a "shit or get off the pot" feeling that he normally didn't feel around other women. She both laughed and cried about this warped male radar that had driven away so many interesting prospects.

So she poured herself into her students.

It was a nice day and only a few clouds hung in the sky. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on her face. A light breeze moved over the pavement like a sigh.

She couldn't help but watch the kids playing four square. For some reason they took this game very seriously and the social order often times revolved around which child could dominate this seemingly innocuous game played with a red rubber ball. Despite the occasionally heated arguments over whether a ball was in or out Miss Eggar found it a lot less worrisome than the dodge ball games that used to have the red rubber ball bouncing off of faces and groins and seemingly requiring her constant medical opinions on everything from scrapes to contusions.

Let them argue all they want about who is in and who is out. If they didn't bleed then it was a step in the right direction as far as she was concerned.

Today's game was particularly well attended and there was a line of boys and girls shifting their weight from one foot to the other anxiously as they waited their turn to get into the first square and show off their ball-slapping prowess.

As it was almost noon the sun was nearly overhead. As she watched the children there was something gnawing away at the back of her mind. Something wasn't right but she had no idea what it could be.

Something seemed a little off about the scene.

It started to annoy her. What was it about these kids playing four square that had her intellect annoyed? She laughed and made the analogy to herself that it was as if she was looking at a Where's Waldo picture but she had neither the time or interest to actually look for him.

She closed her eyes and tried to enjoy the breeze again.

It had stopped.

She opened her eyes again and suddenly found the cause of her anxiety.

Some the kids were casting long shadows while some of them cast very small ones.

She wanted to laugh it off but when she started to look closer she even noticed that some of the children had shadows that went in the opposite direction of the child next to them.

A few of them cast two distinct shadows.

She wanted the breeze back.

Her mind raced for explanations. Her mouth had gone dry even though she had no idea what this could even mean and appeared to pose no visible threat to her class. It had to be some weather phenomena that would easily be explained by a science textbook.

She felt the protective side of her personality coming forward with surprising force.

She saw a few shadows racing around, seemingly playing happily, that had no corresponding person to cast them.

Recess needed to be over.

She fumbled for the whistle in her pocket and looked down.

At her own shadow.

The shadow that had one arm up.

Waving back at her.

### Caesar can't sling the batter

(first appeared at www.herecomeseveryone.me Boy/Girl issue 8/16/2014)

For some people the world around them and the world they live are distinctly different places. Such was the case for Caesar. Born Brad, he changed his name to sound more exotic. He would be the first to admit that he liked the name Caesar because it sounded like "seize her."

Unfortunately there was a distinct lack of "seizing" going on in his life so he was forced to "seize" himself from time to time.

Which drove his wife crazy.

She hated the idea of him pleasuring himself to other women on the internet and felt that it was a direct violation of the wedding vows. Numerous times she would feel that he had been in the other room tossing one off and they would end up in a brawl as he denied everything. She would feel hurt and he would pretend to be insulted at the very idea that he would resort to masturbating to images of women he would never meet.

If you remember the opening line of this story you'll understand that Caesar wasn't being quite honest. There was a part of him that felt closer to these women than he did to most of his friends. How could he ever feel intimacy with people that still called him Brad?

One night his wife had had enough. She lay in bed waiting for him deep into the night. She heard familiar rustlings in his den and suspected that he was up to his old tricks so she decided a bold move was required. When he walked in she sat up in bed pretending to be feeling amorous and offered him a blowjob.

Caesar had a problem.

He had indeed been up to no good in his den and he was suddenly in a gunfight with no bullets. Obviously he couldn't pretend that he wasn't in the mood. Every man is always in the mood for a blow job. He was going to have to call her bluff.

He walked forward with a large grin on his face. He expressed his enthusiasm for her little scheme.

This startled her. It was not the reaction she expected. Had she been wrong about the rustlings?

Had he been playing her all along with the ol' fake masturbation ruse?

It was too late to back down now. She hopped out of bed and assumed the position in front of him.

Caesar, suddenly feeling very Brad, suddenly got the feeling you get when you pull into your favorite restaurant only to find it closed. It will make you suddenly feel two things at once. No amount of desire for pancakes will turn on the lights in the establishment nor get the chef back behind the grill.

He pressed his face against the glass and wondered how long it would be until it was open.

His wife was wondering something very similar as his member hung limply before her.

She looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

Awkward.

Then a smile slowly started to creep across his wife's face.

"Something wrong?" she inquired.

Truth be told, if you've just had a meal of pancakes the last thing you want is more pancakes. He looked back at the empty parking lot and up at the huge sign that usually was brightly lit and offering up the daily specials. Sometimes it helped to undo the top button of your pants when you're faced with a second meal but in this case the pants were not only unbuttoned but resting comfortably around his ankles.

"Admit it. Admit that you were just whacking it," his wife said as her smile began to evaporate.

His response required some delicacy as his soft member was now being clutched in the formidable hand of his mad-and-getting-madder spouse.

The distance between where they were and where he was was getting further. Any time the word was appears twice in a row you know it's a bad sign.

He looked through the door into the darkened restaurant and hoped that a key would suddenly appear to slide into the lock and allow the phantom personnel to take their rightful place behind the griddle and start slinging the necessary batter.

But none appeared. Pancakes just don't work like that.

His wife, growing tired of waiting for an apology, explanation or alibi, eventually stormed out of the room. He banged on the window of the closed establishment then threw up his hands to the stars and cursed fate. The only other sound being the buzzing of the obligatory flickering streetlight a few hundred yards away or maybe it was a mile. It's always hard to tell in these metaphors.

Brad, his pants still down, shuffled off to find his wife.

### House the house

When I tell people that I have a dull house they assume I am talking about the grey paint color on its exterior.

They are wrong, but understandably so. You see, apparently I'm a "house whisperer" and I'll be the first to admit that it is a gift you really don't want to go around advertising. When people ask if by dull I mean the paint I nod and say "Yes. The paint color. That's exactly what I mean."

But it's not.

I say it's dull because houses do not have senses of humor. I learned that the hard way. I asked my dwelling if nails hurt. The heat shut off for two days and I almost got hypothermia.

My house talks to me through the heating and cooling ducts. Any time they are in use my house talks to me. The air passing through the vents allows it to take on a whispering tone and it's easy for me to see where a lot of haunting legends got their start.

I wish it were that easy.

Most of our chats are dull and revolve around mundane topics but occasionally we'll get involved in a deep conversation that goes on for hours. Last summer we had a debate about consciousness that went on the better part of an entire afternoon and by the end of it I could see my breath and the windows were covered in frost.

In July.

One of the downsides of engaging an entity that has to communicate through air conditioning.

The house was telling me, in much greater detail than was necessary, that humans and most other animate objects have a very strong bias against the inanimate. A bias that stops them from understanding that consciousness rubs off, that was about as scientific as the house could phrase it, when the animate and inanimate spend enough time in close proximity.

I wouldn't have believed a word of it weren't for the fact that those words were coming up from the vents of my residence.

Whether it is a tree fort or a ship, it's not the lack of trying that stops these objects from talking. It's only that humans don't pay any attention.

I argued that a conclusion like that sounded very arrogant and my heat shut off and didn't come on again for a week despite my endless fiddling with the thermostat and shaking my fist at the walls.

In January.

When people tell me that their heating and cooling systems are temperamental, I only laugh and say "You have no idea."

My domicile has never answered, to my satisfaction anyway, why it is that it can turn the air and heat on and off at will but can't be bothered to lock the doors after I leave, strobe the lights a little when I'm listening to my Saturday Night Fever CD or open the garage when it sees me pull in.

"Get a garage door opener," is its only response.

How does a house even keep up with such technological advances?

I once asked my abode if houses are scared of dying. It answered that it feared the wrecking ball the same way I feared a heart attack, which led me to ask if hotels have one consciousness or each room has its own. I asked because I suddenly had that footage of an old casino being imploded in Las Vegas run through my head and I wondered if behind the noise of the explosion a thousand rooms wailing away and crumbling into non-existence sounded in any way like a thousand bubbles bursting at once.

I later found out that each room does indeed have a unique personality, as I spent a sleepless night at a Best Western listening to schizophrenic suites bicker among themselves.

"Do houses in France speak French?" I once queried. That's how I first knew that houses had no sense of humor. I marched around using my best French accent for the next half hour and didn't get one snicker. Perhaps it's related to the fact that houses don't perceive things as right or wrong, only sound and unsound ... although it did admit that it enjoyed a good coat of new paint now and again and that when I cranked up Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side" it made its pipes drip.

I told it that the song has the same effect on me.

Common ground is important when you're living inside something else. Perhaps it will remember that little moment we shared and decide to turn the air back on soon.

It's been off since I asked it "If a man's home is his castle, are castles stuck up?"

No sense of humor at all.

### Porn World: The Movie Pitch

The chimpanzee and dolphin are the only other animals that have sex just for fun.

They are also among the most highly evolved. What does that say about sex?

Angelo was certain of only one thing in his life. He was not getting enough. His wife, although physically attractive, had never in the fifteen years of their marriage instigated sex. In fact, she treated the matter with the same enthusiasm she had for getting the oil changed in the car.

A necessary evil.

Not Angelo. All around him he saw sexuality. Behind the facade of daily interactions loomed sex. Insinuated, implied and injected into everything.

It could drive a red-blooded man like Angelo crazy.

Perhaps it did, because one day he woke up in Porn World. He should have realized that things were different when his wife rolled over and said a string of the filthiest things he'd ever heard. No small feat given Angelo's favorite website was thefilthiestthingsyouveeverheard.com. His wife threw off her clothes and did all the things he thought she'd never do.

And then she showered and went to work without so much as a look back.

Angelo smiled, rolled out of bed and got dressed. He brushed, flossed and went to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice. He was interrupted by a knock at the door and when he opened it he was greeted by a buxom young lady asking if there was any way she could convince him to buy some magazine subscriptions.

Any possible way.

Moments later Angelo was violating her in such a way that he ended up with not only a 2-year subscription to Rolling Stone but also six months of Field & Stream. After what she did to him, an act more appropriately done in a field than on a kitchen counter, it seemed only fair.

After she left he tucked his shirt in and, in a bit of a daze, made the short drive to the building where he worked. He wasn't halfway to the front door when he spied a young woman trying unsuccessfully to change a flat tire. Feeling pretty good about things Angelo sauntered up and offered his assistance. After making short work of throwing on the spare the woman was so grateful that she immediately dropped to her knees and polished his knob with a ferocity that left him frozen to the spot for a full five minutes after she drove off.

He wasn't in his office five minutes before his secretary walked in with the strangest look on her face. And a short skirt and fishnet stockings and heels that must have been at least five inches. He'd always had a crush on her but in the eight years she'd work for him she'd never shown him the slightest interest. She dropped the legal pad she was carrying and when she bent over to pick it up Angelo noticed she wasn't wearing any panties. She looked back at him and asked if he liked what he saw.

When he entered her she let out with a moan that had dust falling from every ceiling on the block followed by a whimper that had dolphins beaching themselves miles away. Just before he erupted she spun around and greedily swallowed up his creamy payload.

She closed the door behind her as she left.

Angelo slumped back in his leather desk chair and wondered if he was dreaming. He lazily looked out the window and a small smile crept across his face. It didn't feel like any dream he'd ever had. He continued to stare out of the window awhile before he noticed a woman in the next building staring at him.

Her skirt bunched up around her waist and her enormous breasts swaying as her hand disappeared rhythmically between her thighs.

Angelo decided to get some air and slowly backed out of his office. And into the new UPS delivery woman wearing short shorts and a brown halter top. She immediately launched into barrage of sexual innuendo involving deliveries, each punctuated with her licking her lips. Angelo made a quick excuse and dashed out into the street. Flustered he half-walked, half-ran down to his favorite coffee place to collect himself. He walked in to find the usually-busy establishment empty except for the girl behind the counter. The very young and very hot girl behind the counter. Without asking what he wanted, she held a can of whipped cream between her heaving breasts and shot some into her open mouth.

Angelo turned and ran back to his car. On the frantic drive back home he was caught speeding by a gorgeous female police officer and forced to perform a breathtaking variety of sexual acts to get off without a ticket.

He was forced to circle the block twice before the voluptuous woman from the electric company standing at his door finally went away and allowed him to get safely inside his house. For the next hour he crouched down to avoid answering the door as a dizzying array of visitors made their way his door.

Finally he heard keys jingling in the door and went to greet his wife.

And her friend Patty. Patty, the six foot Amazonian beauty that worked with his wife. The woman he had secretly lusted over for years.

The woman who was now standing in front of him with a smirk on her face.

"You know that one thing you always wanted me to try ..." his wife began.

Angelo screamed so loud that he actually woke himself up.

He lay in the bed covered in sweat, his heart racing. Finally, after blinking comically a few times, he sighed a lazy sigh and realized that despite the panic he had recently felt he still maintained one hell of a large erection.

He leaned over to his wife and touched her shoulder.

"Not tonight."

Angelo smiled and rolled over. He was home.

### the tough questions

Sometimes a man must ask himself the tough questions. Face the music. Unfortunately for me, that music is the theme song from Jeopardy and suddenly Alex Trebek is sitting in front of my id, ego and super ego.

Before I plunge into the meat of this, let me give you a quick review of the id, ego, and super ego. Without that basic knowledge, you won't be able to imagine how the three versions of myself would be dressed. As much as I'd like to believe that the people who read Lance Manion are doing so during a small break in their typical day of unraveling the mysteries of the universe in their lab at M.I.T., I am realistic enough to know that most of you have a Big Gulp in your other hand and you're listening to your iPod, loaded with a collection of Queen songs done on the banjo at the same time you're reading this.

I'm not thrilled with this reality but the truth is I love the part where it goes "Bismillah! No, we will not let you go... twang twang twang" just as much as you do.

The id, ego, and super ego are the three parts of Sigmund Freud's model of the human psyche. The id is made up of our basic instincts. Our unconscious desires. Our primal impulses. The id is the reservoir of our libido. There is no right or wrong in the id.

That stuff is handled by the super ego. This is the repository of all the rules and morality we've been taught. The super ego demands perfection and is better known in psychological circles as "the party pooper."

Acting as the mediator between these two forces is the ego. The ego is all about balance. The ego tries to give the id a little of what it wants without having the super ego get all pissy about it. Realism rules the day as far as the ego is concerned.

Armed with this information, you may now proceed to imagine the three versions of myself standing there behind our podiums, buzzers in hand.

And the categories are:

"Bad decisions I have made."

"Things that I am embarrassed about."

"Things I am ashamed of."

"Things that if anybody knew I'd be mortified."

And finally... "Things that if anyone knew I'd be incarcerated."

You'll note that there isn't a category titled "Things I would take back." Maybe that's why I hate this game so much. All the categories might as well be "Things that are wrong with me." I'm not even half way through "Things I am ashamed of" and the audience has transformed into the frothing crowd of ignoramuses that make up the Jerry Springer Show. They are calling for my blood and the whole time my id is laughing and flipping them off and my super ego is being held back by my ego because all he wants to do is punch my id in the face.

By the time the words "'Things that if anyone knew I'd be incarcerated' for $500" have left the mouth of Alex Trebek, he has sprouted enormous twisted horns and has cloven feet and a barbed tail. Even my id doesn't seem to have the intestinal fortitude to buzz in with the answer.

And the whole time I'm desperately looking for the "Things I would change" category but it's not there and the game keeps going on and on and my id keeps building his lead because although they all know the answers to the questions, neither of the other two want to say them aloud. The ego was hanging in there for awhile but once the real stuff started to come out he gets all pale and looks like he needs some air.

Then comes Final Jeopardy and Alex has huge bat wings and tusks jutting out of his dripping maw and the audience is a choir of demons and the word "jeopardy" starts to echo in my head with such ferocity that I can barely make out the question.

But I do.

And my ego, in a last desperate attempt to win, bets it all as the music builds to a crescendo.

What would your answer be?

### so much for high society

Life is absurd enough without the added indignity of having to give people respect for things that are just plain stupid. There are so many things that have been created for the sole reason of allowing some people to feel superior to others that it's all I can do not spend my entire writing energies listing them on a daily basis.

In the interest of my time and your painfully short attention span let me give you a few brief examples.

Professional wine tasters.

What a bunch of pretentious dickwads. Get a fucking real job. Dig a ditch for fuck's sake.

If you want to pollute your body with alcohol go right ahead. I do it all the time. Knock yourself out, just don't drive into my house at the end of the evening, but to sit there and try to make a profession of tasting wine ...? Are you fucking kidding me?

I'm not saying that every winery shouldn't have a guy at the end of the line taking a swig every now and then to make sure it still tastes like wine and something didn't go horribly wrong, but to pretend that you're somehow "cultured" because you swirl it around in your glass and sniff it before you start chugging it down is just embarrassing. When otherwise-intelligent adults start talking about how the bouquet is "impish" I want to smack them in the mouth.

It's a drink. Drink it and shut the fuck up.

There are dogs that can smell cancer, if you want to put your super-cool taste buds to work learn how to gargle pee and tell if the person has a urinary tract infection.

That's a constructive occupation. That would be contributing to the greater good.

Wine tasting is something invented by people with empty lives to try to somehow feel "classy".

The same goes with the morons who claim to be cigar aficionados. You do realize that cigars cause mouth cancer, lip cancer, tongue cancer, throat cancer, esophagus cancer, larynx cancer and lung cancer right? That in addition to heart, lung and gum diseases. You are literally judging something that will kill you.

"I particularly like the way this bullet feels as it passes through my head. It leaves a nice clean hole."

It's one more way for empty people to pretend to be better than others. They want to take something that is painfully self-destructive and somehow spin it into something hip.

It's not.

It's like starting an exclusive club to taste various household cleaning products.

"Mr. Clean has a nice clean finish ... now if you'll excuse me I feel a little lightheaded. I think I'll retire to a nearby hospital and writhe in agony."

A subscription to a magazine that rates cigars is the best way I know of to tell the world that you are a completely vapid, soulless douche. They should sell the subscribers list to those in need of organs. You know who you see enjoying a lot of expensive cigars? Lawyers. Enough said.

I'm not as angry as I no doubt sound but sometimes I feel like I'm living in Bizarro World when I see the time and money people invest in such dumbfuckery. Celebrities and politicians and yuppies loitering in cigar bars with literally nothing better to do with themselves than to sit there puffing themselves to death.

And everyone else buys into it. How glamorous. An entire industry built on self-importance. There are people that think that snorting buffalo semen would be the height of sophistication if they saw Rush Limbaugh doing it.

Even when these dipshit cigar smokers eventually get face cancer and we all have to absorb the cost of their treatment.

"I bet they get the coolest rooms at the hospital!"

You'll notice I used quotation marks when I said "cultured" and "classy". That's because these are made-up words that don't mean dick. If you are worried about being either you are wasting the precious moments of your life on nonsense.

Wake the fuck up. Don't buy in. It's all bullshit. There are real and very valid reasons that other people are better than you.

Or do you keep tugging on this thread and watch the whole sweater come apart?

### imprevious

Jameer shook his head and decided to go through it all again, to see if he could make any more sense of it than the imprevious attempts had provided. Imprevious was a word he'd come up with as he thought things over. A previous thought that seemed impervious to reason resulted in imprevious.

If he doesn't recognize someone that knows him it means that the relationship that that person thought he or she had with Jameer wasn't the relationship he or she had with Jameer.

Ok, so far so good.

It takes two to have a relationship and if one of those two parties doesn't have the same impression of the relationship, or doesn't acknowledge it the first place, it basically invalidates the relationship.

Thinking the word relationship so many times began to make his head hurt. Did it have to have four syllables?

One more problem with relationships.

So if that person had a relationship that turned out to be different than he or she thought, doesn't that bring into question not only their decision-making ability but all of the relationships that they had up to that time?

There was an expression that seemed appropriate to support that last contention, something about a house built on sand, but Jameer couldn't come up with it.

Jameer began to walk around squinting his eyes and rubbing his head much like the way he imagined a dog would at the onset of rabies.

Originally this line of thinking had him feeling bad for the person he didn't remember. As they walked away he felt a pang of grief over their sorry state that bordered on embarrassment. But there was something else eating at him.

So he started to think it through a bit more.

"So if that person had a relationship that turned out to be different than he or she thought, doesn't that bring into question not only their decision-making ability but all of the relationships that they had up to that time?"

His words.

"It takes two to have a relationship and if one of those two parties doesn't have the same impression of the relationship, or doesn't acknowledge it the first place, it basically invalidates the relationship."

Also his words. Why did his words always seem to include the word relationship so damn many times?

"Takes two to tango."

That wasn't his. That came from a 1952 Pearl Bailey song but the inference was clear. If the poor bastard slinking away was worthy of a cringe of embarrassment, then surely there should be a sprinkling of embarrassment left over for Jameer.

Embarrassment. Another damn four syllable word. He thought it was only four-letter words that were supposed to be trouble. Wrong again.

The saying about a house built on sand had something to do with a bad foundation. It was coming back to him now. The foundation would be subject to erosion and thus made it a dubious investment. He now feared it wasn't a house built on sand that should be his primary concern. It was looking more and more like it was a house of cards, built on whatever substrate he chose, that was his problem. For every person who thought there existed a relationship with Jameer that, when staring into the cold light of reality, turned out not to be a relationship at all it was like taking one card away from the base of Jameer's house.

And one was it all it needed to falter and fold and flop into an impromptu game of 52 pickup.

An outside observer of Jameer would note he seemed only moments away from a frothing mouth.

So because he didn't recognize someone from his past he now has to go back and re-evaluate every relationship he's ever had? Is that what he was trying to tell himself? He liked to think that he led a logical life but if this is where logic was leading him he wondered what was the worst that could happen if he decided to take a sharp right and follow the path of least resistance.

George Carlin noted "It takes two to tango. Sounds good, but simple reasoning will reveal that it only takes one to tango. It takes two to tango together, maybe, but one person is certainly capable of tangoing on his own."

The words tango and tangled seemed intertwined to Jameer ... which in itself was ironic.

Jameer thought that perhaps ol' George was right. He didn't have to abandon reason after all. He just had to stop thinking it takes two to get tangled. Let that other stranger walk away and don't give them a second thought.

Problem solved.

Jameer continued his day.

"You never find yourself until you face the truth." Another Pearl (Bailey) of wisdom.

### tragedy plus time

Two wannabe-comedians were sitting at the bar at The Comedy Store, hoping to get a few minutes on stage and drinking. Not enough to get sloppy, just enough to want to be truthful.

"Fat girls don't jog. They plod," the tall one offered.

The short one didn't laugh but gave a far-away smile.

"Funny. But mean. Especially considering that somewhere there is a fat girl debating whether or not to start jogging. That joke may convince her otherwise."

The tall one mulled it over. "Do you really think that a joke can affect people like that?"

"I do."

"But that's only if the joke is heard," the tall one said darkly.

"Agreed." The short one ordered another drink. It was getting very late and it appeared that neither of them would be getting any time.

After a long pause it was the short one's turn to speak. "I'm guessing water balloon fights in Antarctica can get pretty brutal."

"Not bad. The audience has to think about it a bit... but not bad."

"Cerebral is in right now."

"Think so? Ok, here's one then... if you set out to catch two rabbits, you'll catch neither. Honestly, if you set out to catch one you're not going to get one either. Rabbits are really fast. Perhaps set out to catch something else."

Honestly, I'm getting sick of referencing the two wannabe-comedians as the tall one and the short one. It makes no difference at all. There are two comedians talking, figure out which one is saying what yourself.

"I'm not sure that observation will work. You want them to think, not spend time in deep thought."

"Fair enough."

"The expression 'killing two birds with one stone' must have a much darker connotation when birds say it."

"There you go again. I think it's safer just to make fun of people. People can relate to it. It's quick and easy."

It was obvious they both had more jokes to tell but they spent a few minutes silently sorting through them to try and come up with a funny one that didn't have a cruel punchline.

"Ok. I have another bird one. In a scene reminiscent of a bird feeding her young, I watched a mother feed her baby. Actually, the scene was almost identical. Perhaps I should involve the authorities."

He sat back waiting for feedback.

"Nope. Too long. An observation that long better be particularly funny."

"Really? I really like that one. I can picture it in my head."

"I'm telling you ... pull that one out and you're going to hear crickets."

More drinks were ordered.

"Let me tell you one that would suffer the same fate. What do I do with my free time? I like to walk around in the woods wearing giant plaster Bigfoot feet, except I put another set of normal sneakers on top of them. Anyone who examines the prints closely enough will wonder to themselves 'Why? What are the Yeti playing at?'"

It might be helpful at this juncture to note that they were both starting to get fuzzy as it became apparent that they weren't going to be getting anywhere near a microphone and would soon be headed back to their small apartments alone.

"You see what I mean? When you finally figure it out it's funny but I can't exactly stop the show for five minutes and let people sort it out. It's a shame though..."

"Yep. Once you picture wearing a set of normal shoes over the enormous plaster Bigfoot feet it's kind of funny."

"Ok, I got one. I would watch a Clown Winter Olympics just for the 30 Man Bobsled event. Picture it... come on... 30 of them piling into the bobsled... their giant red shoes trying to find traction on the ice... the medal winners crowding on the podium..."

"I got you. Funny stuff."

But he didn't laugh. Neither of them had actually laughed out loud at anything that was said. They were laughing or not laughing on the inside. Where all wannabe-comedians who are soon to be headed back to small apartments alone laugh.

"The worst part about the number of illegal immigrants? George Lopez keeps getting new shows."

"Now that's funny."

"Is there a dumber expression than 'It goes without saying??' Instead there should be a long pause where everyone thinks to themselves 'It went without saying.'"

Inside both men was the belief that they belonged on that stage. The unwavering conviction that they were funny and could make an audience laugh. That they could relate. That they could translate. Distill all their anger and disappointment into a viable product.

"Don't let them fool you. Switching from vinyl to CDs had nothing to do with sound quality. With records you could control the RPM, with CDs you're forced to listen at the speed The Man wants you to."

The other man leaned back and you could almost hear him swishing the observation around in his head like wine in a glass. Thinking through the bouquet.

"Nope."

"Whenever I hear about somebody with sausage fingers I can't help but imagine how harrowing it must be for them to pet a dog."

"Yep. Not only a funny visual but you're back at making fun of fat people. That seems to be your wheelhouse."

"I guess the only thing left to ask is this ... is it too soon for Philip Seymour Hoffman jokes?"

Had there been any other wannabes or real comedians in earshot they would have no doubt leaned in for the answer to this question.

"What was it Woody Allen said? 'Comedy is tragedy plus time?' I'd give it at least another few weeks."

"Woody Allen didn't say that first you know. It was actually Steve Allen... 30 years before Woody. That quote gets a lot of miles. Carol Burnett, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, they were all quoted as saying something similar."

"I find it more ironic coming from Woody. From a movie called Crimes and Misdemeanors no less. A comedian who's nailing his step-daughter talking about tragedy. You can't write that stuff."

"What a dirtbag. Literally the lowest of the low."

"Agreed."

"I hope he gets colon cancer. I would make fun of it the very day he got his diagnosis."

"Agreed."

"If he offered you a part in one of his movies would you take it?"

"Of course."

"Me too."

### belated

My memory goes a bit in and out some days. Some days that's a good thing. Most days I'd go crazy if I was fully able to understand just how old I am. How much of my life is behind me. In the ol' rear view.

So I sit here and allow myself to drift away. I usually drift to the same spot.

Her.

Watching the movie Braveheart together. I don't know why fate would have my returning to that particular moment, perhaps fate is a cruel SOB. It was almost as though she saw something coming that I didn't. I thought everything was great and everything would continue to be great.

I think.

It's hard to tell these days.

I don't remember the exact scene that caused her to say what she said. I just remember what she said. I realize it's frustrating to listen to a story that has so many holes in it but you'll just have to try and follow along as best as you can. I could fill in the gaps with a load of made-up stuff but in the end I don't think that would do anything to help the story along. Maybe you will fill in the holes with stuff a lot more interesting than what actually happened.

She took my hand and looked at me and said "One day, when you're in a similar spot, I'll come back. I'll be there." I think it was in response to the love interest in the movie returning to Braveheart. It might have been when he was getting his head lopped off. "Fat lot of good it did him then," you might think to yourself but if memory serves me right, which it rarely does these days, he was glad to see her nonetheless.

Some days I can't remember my birthday but I remember those words as if they were spoken yesterday.

She left me soon after.

I guess a lot of people claim to have found love multiple times in their life, and I don't want to sound like I'm judging them, but I believe that if you've found love multiple times then you've never actually found it. You just have a lot of fools' gold piled up in your heart. There are those that enjoy poetry and there are those that prefer to follow the exploits of the man from Nantucket. Something along those lines.

She was it for me. My one love.

I found out the hard way that not every street runs both ways.

That was over fifty years ago.

First the Nantucket reference and then the street thing, I hope you'll forgive an old man his metaphors. It seems to take the sting out a bit when I use them. Of course, I wouldn't trade this ache for the world. It's one of only two mementos I have of her. The other is a faded picture I keep in a tattered copy of Still Life With Woodpecker. When you're my age everything you own is either faded or tattered.

Even your memories.

So she left and I carried on and lived a life. Wondering, of course, how many people could see that there was something different about me. If anyone could tell that I had loved and lost. It only occurred to me that nobody cared when I realized that I wasn't looking at anyone else with any particular interest. We all lead out lives as if we are the stars of some cosmic sitcom when it reality there's just too many of us on the planet for everyone to have their own show.

Two months ago I had a stroke. It was very touch and go and I spent six weeks in a coma. Actually, I'm not sure if it was officially a coma. I'm unclear about a lot of the medical definitions that I hear thrown around these days, all I know is that I was asleep for a long time. My insurance is good so they were happy to keep me alive by whatever means necessary.

It was the nurse that told me about my frequent visitor. Having no family it perplexed me to no end. I wondered who it was that had bothered to pop in to have a look at me laying there. It wasn't until that same nurse caught me staring at the picture of my lost love that the riddle was solved.

"That looks like her," she said and then added "about a hundred years ago" with a chuckle.

As if that wasn't enough, when I went to slip the picture back into the book I noticed that there was a part circled in black ink:

"I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."

I'd be lying if I told you my head didn't swim a little reading that. Why that line when there was a perfectly good "The only question is how to make love stay" only pages away? I'm too damn old to figure it out. If you're looking for some brilliant analogy from a man wearing an adult diaper you've come to the wrong place.

Still, it's nice to know she stopped by.

### disturbances

The steady drumming of the rain on the roof threatened to lull me into a sense of melancholy. Nothing is more dangerous than a melancholy writer sitting in front of a blank page. Rain has been responsible for some of the worst prose on the planet. One minute you're perched in front of your screen hell bent on giving the world a taste of your acerbic wit and the next you're calling stories "prose."

Luckily a small raindrop clinging to the window ledge caught my eye. While all around it there was gratuitous dripping and streaking going on, this little devil just clung. Slowly getting larger but obviously not getting enough water to force gravity into making it plunge off the window to join its damp comrades on the roof on the way to the water spout and then, eventually I guess, the ocean.

Damn that melancholy. I can feel its influence even now. Just look at that sentence. A Manion not caught in its melancolyish embrace would never have let his apparently-not-as-acerbic-as-imagined imagination wander like that.

Watching it grow I noticed a little white dot in its center. Obviously some side effect of refraction or some other scientific tomfoolery. As I watched it get larger the white dot took on the shape of a white square and then a tiny white TV screen.

And then I saw the little girl from Poltergeist sitting in front of the little white dot with her hands pressed against it.

For those of you young enough not to remember Poltergeist, or too old to remember much of anything outside of reading your daily Lance Manion prose ("stories" for those of you in a non-raining locale), or even too cultured to have watched a bad horror movie back in 1982, the movie had a scene where a little girl was able to communicate with the dead through her television set. Or at least I think that was the premise.

Suddenly there was a somebody with their hands pressed against the TV screen in the raindrop but it wasn't the little girl anymore.

It was me.

Slowly the raindrop gathered up some surrounding H2O and continued to expand. It threatened to get too big and drip away.

I stared more intently at it. I committed to the endeavor.

You know what I mean. There are times that you are doing something either too dumb or too embarrassing to let go and get into it for fear of someone seeing you. Like flying. Like when you take the garbage out and, convinced nobody is looking out their window at you from next door, you take a few running steps and try to fly.

You commit.

I'm not going to tell you about my flying incident for fear you won't believe me or, even worse, try it yourself. The last thing I need is a sky cluttered up with committed people.

Anyway, I stared at myself staring at the TV and tried to make out what was going on in the static behind my hands.

Then I saw it.

The drip shook a little. It was getting close to falling. It shimmied from side to side and instead of looking like a hammock it began to look like a drop of honey getting all thin at the top and fat at the bottom.

The TV was a telescope, some scientific voodoo or other, but instead of peering into the house across the street, upside down of course, I was looking into a room from my past.

My old living room from when I was a kid.

Don't believe me? Reach back into your past when you used to have an open mind. Just try to use that for the next couple of sentences.

Commit.

I did, so it's the least you can do.

So I'm watching the TV and my mom walks in. She's telling me to turn it off. I tell her "The TV is a wonderful light. As bright as the sun but it doesn't hurt to look into it. All the answers to all the questions you want to know are inside that light. And when you watch it... you become a part of it forever."

She tells me that my room is a mess.

I disagree.

"This house is clean."

And then the raindrop let go ... I felt the freefall, I was inside it for a fraction of a second but I jerked back into my own head just before it hit the roof. I wondered if I'd made a conscious choice. If I might have instead stayed with the raindrop as it departed and left my body sitting in the chair for police to find some days later.

We could have started our long journey to the sea.

Damn rain.

### Quera

Just a heads up as you go into this story: much of the humor is going to be based on how you say the upcoming catchphrase in your head. When you reach the word, you'll know it when you read it. Please say it with a sneer so exaggerated that it makes one of your eyes squint. Please take some time to perfect it before moving on with the story or you will find this entire enterprise rather tedious.

She wasn't unpleasant to look at. She would do. That was pretty much my criteria for sexual encounters at that time in my life. And by that I mean a month ago. In fact everything was going great until she spoke. She was a white girl who talked black but she had breasts and legs so I was willing to give her a pass for the cultural ambiguity.

Until she said that awful phrase. The phrase that burnt its way into my head and has haunted me ever since: "Make sure you pull out before you nut."

If you were to watch a replay of my penis in slow motion it would be like watching a pin make contact with a balloon. I actually felt the blood violently sloosh back into my midsection.

"Make sure you pull out before you nut."

I can still hear her say that when I think about it and when I try not to and when I'm sound asleep and when I wake up screaming in a cold sweat.

Of course, once she took off her shirt and I saw her breasts the blood hesitantly made its way back into my penis and I completed the act... including pulling out before I... ejaculated.

When she said "nut" she added a few extra u's. "Nuuut."

I was still hearing echoes of the word when I entered her. It was obvious that this wasn't her first rodeo... and by that I mean it felt like she had fucked horses and bulls. There wasn't much tread left on those tires.

But nut I did.

I nutted.

Or nuuuted to be precise.

The real problems began when I tried to have sex with other women. I didn't want to achieve orgasm or even cum. I wanted to nut.

Nuuut.

I even went back to an old girlfriend who I still had feelings for. A great girl who was filled with passion and romance and longing and who made love with the intensity of a last fling before the spaceship you're riding in crashes into the heart of a pulsing sun. You know, legs wrapped around your back, fingertips buried in your shoulders, the whole show.

My penis wanted none of it.

At one point the tenderness of her touch had me wanting to grab the nearby wastebasket and empty the contents of my stomach into it.

Finally I whispered into her ear.

The word.

What I wanted.

It did not go well from there.

They say that with some drugs you are addicted the first time you do them. Like crack. Ironic given that crack has a sexual implication. You don't want to be addicted, you just are. Except there aren't any clinics that treat my condition. Or even weepy TV commercials where I can garner sympathy for wanting to nut.

It was a disease and I am a carrier. If wanting to nut is wrong then I don't want to be right.

All I have is this burning desire that sends me out every weekend to dance clubs in the trashy part of town looking for a fix. To hear the lyrics of my soul spoken aloud by some horrid wigga bitch.

"Make sure you pull out before you nuuut."

### the father he needed

"Son, let me tell you a story. You'd better get comfortable as it might take awhile."

The man settled back into his chair and struggled to find a place to start.

"There was this man, let's call him Ed. Ed saw these two people having what seemed to him as irreconcilable differences. It pained Ed because he knew both parties were good, decent folks and he wanted nothing more than to bring them together."

Pretending to think on how to do this the man rubbed his chin and screwed up his face. Then, all of sudden, one finger popped up symbolizing that he had an idea. If light bulbs truly popped up over people's heads at these particular times there was no doubt that one would have made an entrance.

"Ed decided that nothing brings people together like a common foe. I won't go into how he managed to piss off both individuals but suffice to say that the mere mention of his name had both of them gnashing their teeth as if their dental plans were ironclad. Soon they saw the folly of their own petty disagreement and became fast friends."

The man leaned over and picked up his glass of lemonade and took a sip.

"Thinking back on his triumph Ed wondered if this same strategy could be used to solve other disputes. You have to understand, Ed's motives were always the purest. He always believed that while the road to hell is paved with good intentions, you could always turn around and head back up that particular path. You have to believe me on this point."

Now the man's face screwed up a bit for reasons that weren't quite clear. Once again it appeared that he did not know where to begin to continue.

"Seeing how professional sports teams in neighboring cities didn't get along he made sure to become such a pariah to both that they soon joined hands and sang both Kumbaya and songs involving his being drawn and quartered. You probably saw this on the news."

His son nodded.

"Intoxicated with that success he took aim at grander targets. Soon he was inserting himself into conflicts as diverse as gay marriage, race relations, political animosities, environmental issues and religious conflicts across the globe. Each of these required greater and greater atrocities to convince the two sides to come together in their hatred for Ed. The things he did in the name of bringing people together became almost unthinkable."

He paused and wiped his brow. He lifted up his beverage again but couldn't bring himself to take a sip. It was obvious that he was going through a few of these unspeakable acts in his head.

"Ed became the most vilified man to ever exist. There wasn't a man, woman or child on the planet that didn't have a very good reason to detest him. Working tirelessly he collected the widespread loathing and revulsion that people had heaped on one another for thousands of years and deposited it firmly on his own shoulders."

He tried to force a smile but it wouldn't come. He tried numerous times actually. His son watched as the corners of his mouth pushed up against the combined forces of gravity and circumstance time and again but to no avail. His face remained grim.

His son finally spoke. "Dad, your name is Ed."

"Yes son, I know ... and I know you know that I am the Ed in this story."

His son stood up and produced a pistol from underneath his jacket.

"Well then Ed, I guess you also know that I'm here to kill you."

Ed finished his glass of lemonade in one long gulp. He looked up and was finally able to get the corners of his mouth to cooperate.

### understanding racism

Given that racism has been in the news so much lately I thought I'd take a deep breath and provide my opinion on the topics of race and race relations.

They are fucked.

Irrevocably fucked.

Because we are fucked.

That's all I got on the subject.

You know who I blame for this?

That asshole who just cut me off in traffic.

It doesn't matter what sex, color, or religion he/she was, that's the person I hate. Those people can't drive for shit! They shouldn't even be allowed on the road. If it was an expensive car it just shows that rich fuckers drive like they think they are better than everybody. If it was a piece of shit car it just shows why we shouldn't let pieces of shit like that on the road. If it was a minivan it just shows that those fuckers are reproducing at an alarming rate. They probably need every seat and still have two little fuckers stacked in the back.

It's like the dumb fuck in front of me at the supermarket. Damn I hate those people. Standing there in front of me when if I wouldn't have spent so much time reading that random ethnic food label, the one designed to make people like me read it in supermarkets and thus make them end up behind someone with a full cart, I would have beaten this person with the full cart to the checkout and I wouldn't have to be standing there waiting as they unload their hundreds of predictably stupid food items. It's exactly the kind of fucking food I'd expect this cart-loader to eat. It's a wonder their cart's wheels didn't snap off under the tremendous weight of stupid food. They are the reason none of the fucking carts work right and they always have a wheel that turns in the wrong direction and squeaks. If you think it's an accident, think again. They know what they're doing.

They always know what they're doing.

It's because they are on one hand brilliant and devious and on the other hand dumb as shit.

I should have won that raffle, not them. What the fuck are they going to do with two tickets to an Eagles game? They can't appreciate football like I do so why did they even bother to buy the ticket in the first place? They're not fooling me, I know they don't give a crap about cancer research. They just wanted to make sure I have to sit home on Sunday while they go down to the stadium and enjoy me not being there.

You can't leave your house these days without seeing them running around like they own the place. Cutting me off in traffic and making me wait behind them at the grocery store and winning raffles and buying the last waffle cone at the ice cream shop.

And the look on their face as they ordered it!

You would have thought it was the last waffle cone on the planet. That after they received their stupid ice cream in it that there would be a worldwide announcement that all waffle cones had ceased to exist and it would be easier for everybody if nobody told their children that waffle cones had ever existed because the reminder of them is just too painful. The way that they smugly pretended not to even notice that they took the last waffle cone... the way they didn't look back at me and inquire if I perhaps had driven all the way to the ice cream place just to get a fucking waffle cone and would I perhaps like the last one?

No, they just ordered it and paid for it and ate it and steadfastly refused to choke to death on the unnecessarily large amount of sprinkles that the counter person had added simply because everybody knows they are in cahoots with those people. It's a big fucking conspiracy and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

Don't you ever wonder why you never get enough sprinkles on your ice cream?

Wake the fuck up.

That person who just cut you off in traffic... they are to blame. Them and all those other people that look like them. Do you see it now? If it weren't for them you wouldn't have gotten cut off. It's just simple logic. This isn't some emotional conclusion, it's a fact. If they hadn't cut you off you wouldn't have got cut off. What the world wants is for you to forget it. To move past it.

Don't!

If you do, they win. And you can't let them win. If you do then they win.

Today it's sprinkles. Tomorrow they're going to cancel your favorite TV show.

Them.

Those sitcom-canceling bastards.

Wait, is that a sprinkle on your top lip? You're one of them.

I knew it. You're fucking everywhere.

### his airtight heart

In a way you can blame Sid's lack of a long-term relationship on his parents. They set the bar so high that he's never felt even close to the love that they shared.

There were four separate parties going on in the apartment building, typical for a Saturday night in a college town. The building was on the main drag on campus, three stories high and built in the shape of an L and each apartment looked out into the same parking lot. The music from each party thumped away and you could look from one end of the structure to the other with little fear of stumbling across a sober student.

Three of the four parties contained women that were of interest to Sid. If you're looking for it to get romantic, let me stop you right here. When I say "of interest" I mean girls that he's either slept with or wanted to sleep with. Romance had very little to do with it.

He remembers after his mother's funeral he drove his father to the little house where he'd grown up and sat in the living room with him. His mom had been sick for awhile so her passing wasn't a surprise but he was still concerned at the lack of emotion his father had displayed at the cemetery. They had been not only been married but inseparable for the past fifty three years. He finally worked up the nerve to ask him why he hadn't cried.

"Because if I start I will never stop," his dad answered in such a way that the whole world suddenly froze.

On the first floor, third door from the stairs, there was a girl named Robin. A local girl Sid had met a few weeks back and with whom he had slept with twice since. As a local, there was this feeling that she was trying to marry a college boy but nothing could be further from the truth. She was just horny a lot and, being she lived at home, she liked to sleep somewhere else now and then. She was pretty and quiet and Sid enjoyed being with her.

Of course, when I say "with her" I mean inside her.

She seemed to enjoy it as well.

"Can I tell you a story about when I met your mother?" his dad asked. A reply was unnecessary.

"I might be one of the few people on the planet that remembers his last thought before he fell in love. I was sitting in a restaurant looking out the window. There was a big storm coming and the clouds were all dark and low. I thought to myself 'That one looks like a dragon duck' and then I happened to turn and see your mom walk in."

On the second floor was Jenna. She wore short skirts and too much make-up and Sid liked the way she whimpered his name when they were having sex. She would no doubt graduate but the only thing more certain than it would not be on time was that it would be with a degree that did not open many doors for her in the corporate world. She liked to drink and laugh and she had a thing for Sid that came to the forefront when she was drunk and laughing.

Now I was going to barrel ahead and talk about the girl on the third floor but I first want to make sure you're not associating the floor with some hierarchy of sexual need on the part of Sid because each girl was successively higher. It was a total coincidence that they happened to be on the floors they were on.

While I'm digressing, let me also note that at this point you might be wondering if there is a broader point to this part of the story. Both Robin and Jenna are very generic characters and offer little by way of interesting dynamics, be they social or sexual. While I understand that men readers spent their energy picturing the two women during coitus and female readers wondered if they were prettier than them when they were their age, neither of these justifies the amount of time I've spent in this building.

Sid could see his father watching the dark cloud crawl across the sky.

"Funny thought to have but that's what it looked like. A dragon duck. Then I turned and saw her. It was at that moment that I could see for years. I could see farther ahead than I ever thought possible. Clear as a bell."

His father was there but he wasn't. He could see his dad moving through the years, just as he'd seen them on that day in the restaurant.

Samona on the other hand...

She was so badly damaged that if I went into any detail about her past this story would end up in a stuffy psychology magazine. The worst part about it was that most of the damage was between her ears, completely invented by her and completely hidden from anyone not interested in having her fall for them. Sid had yet to sleep with her despite taking her to bed twice.

Later he hugged his father and drove off. In the morning he got the call that his father had died during the night. He hadn't even gotten undressed. He was just lying on the bed with his hands folded across his chest. There was no official cause of death. As the doctor put it, "It appears his head and his heart decided that they didn't want to go on any further. I wouldn't claim that he died of a broken heart... just one unwilling to live without your mom."

Sid sat on the wooden stairs that smelled of stale beer and spilled Chinese take-out and looked up at the sky. At the clouds. Examining them as he often did. Looking unsuccessfully for a dragon duck.

### the button revisited

(first appeared in East Coast Ink issue #3 July 2014)

Before I launch into this I'd better give you a quick bit of background in case you're unfamiliar with the Richard Matheson short story "Button, Button." Published in Playboy in 1970 it went on to be the basis of a Twilight Zone episode in 1985 and then was revisited in the 2009 Cameron Diaz movie "The Box." The story itself was really just a retelling of a passage from the 1802 François-René de Chateaubriand book entitled "Genius of Christianity."

What I'm trying to get at is this... in these varies incantations someone is presented with a button and if they press that button someone they don't know will die and then they will receive a huge cash payment.

You can see how if you were unfamiliar with this premise and I just went barreling along it might have caused some confusion. Now we can start.

Actually, one last thing: calling it a story might be a little inaccurate. What I'd like to do is elicit a quick giggle with a little visualization. I realize that most men, and some women, are not fans of giggling and would prefer to let loose with a full-blown laugh or just forget the whole endeavor but in this case I hope you'll make an exception.

Remember the fun of trying not to giggle in school? The more you tried to hold it in the harder it became? Perhaps try that approach, it might help you overcome your fear of silliness in general.

Knowing the kind of people that read my material I assume that you would immediately hammer that button down. I'm not here to evaluate the morality of the decision to push or not push the button. In your defense, I'm sure the person you pictured dying was from some shithole in Africa or some god-awful country in Eastern Europe where the people can live in any color house they choose as long as they choose cement grey. You're horrible like that.

I'm not here to point fingers. Be assured, if given the opportunity I would wear that button out.

Now onto the giggle-inducing part.

Instead I'd like you to imagine sitting across from the box in front of a giant bay window. I want you to see yourself struggling with the decision and at the same time take notice of various people walking by. Then I want you to see yourself pushing the button down as one of the people walking by the window drop.

Actually now I picture it in my head I get a full-blown laugh. Perhaps those of you with both an active imagination and a fear of giggling and/or snickering can proceed with renewed gusto.

Now I'd like you to imagine the same exact scene except this time the button gets stuck and everybody walking by the window starts to drop. Of course, you are there fiddling with the box with a concerned look on your face. Looking around helplessly with a "Is it supposed to stick like this?" look on your face as the bodies start to stack up outside like so much cordwood.

If you haven't laughed yet I don't want to jump to the conclusion that you're a humorless turd, I've been told that being sensitive occasionally is exactly what could cause my readership to one day surge into the double digits, instead I'd like to think that you're just a bit squeamish and the idea of people dying just for a laugh upsets you.

Honestly though, if that's the case I've lost all respect for you.

Anyway, try imagining the effect of pushing the button to be something less than death. See if that works for you.

Wait, wait, wait... you thought of something like erectile dysfunction, didn't you? Something that wouldn't change the behavior of the people walking past the big bay window.

Honestly, that's why I can't trust you to do anything on your own.

It has to be giving them a hunchback or explosive diarrhea, something that would result in hilarity behind you as you pushed the button. Like blindness. You push the button and suddenly someone comes crashing through the window.

If you imagined yourself hitting the button and seeing yourself fall over dead because we can't truly know ourselves so you sit there smugly thinking you've outsmarted Richard Matheson, François-René de Chateaubriand and myself then I wish I had a button in front of me that when I hit it you would die. Painfully. I'd probably sprain my wrist I'd hit it so hard.

Then I'd find out it was one of the six people who actually bought my last book.

Even in a stupid story a moral is always trying to inject itself in where it's not wanted.

### cooler

Eddie Brickel sat in the sweltering heat and sweltered. The fact that he was given a last name just goes to show you the interestingness of the coming tale. He sat in his new car and fiddled with the air conditioning and briefly thought about how ironic it was that he'd bought the car to be cooler.

When he returned the vehicle to the dealership where he'd purchased it they gave him a loaner and, seemingly against all odds, within hours of pulling out of their parking lot the air conditioning stopped working. This was during the biggest heat wave the area had seen in years so you can imagine his temperament on the return visit. If you were to have used one of those thermal imagers on him he would have appeared entirely red with a band of darker red under his collar.

With an attempt at humor and some heartfelt apologies they handed him the keys to yet another car and sent him on his way.

It was early the next morning that the air conditioning on this loaner went kaput.

This time the dealership summoned their Service Manager. His name, inconveniently enough, was also Eddie. Eddie the Service Manager asked Eddie the new car owner to sit with him in his cramped little office.

"Have you ever seen the movie The Cooler?" he began.

Unbeknownst to Eddie the Service Manager Eddie the new car owner was a huge William H. Macy fan.

"Of course I have. Why?" Eddie the new car owner inquired. If this seems a bit snippy please remember that this was his third trip to this automobile establishment in the past two days.

Eddie the Service Manager, realizing the foul mood of the gentleman sitting across from him, went right to the point. "The premise of the movie is that there was a man who could affect the luck of gamblers simply by being in close proximity to them."

"And?" The "and" was said in a way that if anything but a clear reason for mentioning the premise of the movie was offered that Eddie the new car owner would no longer be responsible for his actions. In order to ease the tension Eddie the Service Manager leaned back and took a breath.

"I'd like to tell you a brief story, if you'll allow me, that will throw some clarity onto my Cooler reference."

Eddie the new car owner, with a slight grimace, nodded his approval.

"This was a few years back, at a dealership a few counties away. Near Flint. I heard it straight from the mouth of a mechanic up there so I know it's true." Eddie the Service Manager licked his lips in a way that made it clear that storytelling was not his strong suit.

"There was this guy and he bought a new car and after only a week the driver's side window wouldn't close."

Eddie the new car owner shifted in his chair as if to say that the story was not living up to his expectations vis-a-vis explaining the William H. Macy allusion. Eddie the Service Manager lifted his hand up as if to say the next few sentences would make it all clear.

"They gave him a loaner car and lo and behold who drives back into the dealership an hour later with a stuck window? The same guy. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

After a moment of deep reflection Eddie the new car owner could only offer up a "No."

"So they give this guy another loaner and send him on his way. Now I didn't mention it at first but it bears mentioning now ... it was the depths of winter. So this guy ends up driving with his family to visit his folks in Saginaw and rolls down his window at a toll booth. It wouldn't go back up. They have to drive the whole way home with the window down. They all nearly got frostbite."

Eddie the new car owner digested it and then asked "Rolled down? The loaner didn't have power windows?"

"Of course it had power windows ... I said rolled down because it means the same thing."

"Good. I was gonna say, who would give a loaner car without power windows? It would reflect badly on the dealership."

It was Eddie the Service Manager's turn to get annoyed. "You're missing the point. The point is that much like William H. Macy, some people just interact badly with things. The guy in Flint ... power windows. You ... air conditioning."

"So what do you suggest?" asked Eddie the new car owner.

" What did William H. Macy do to change his luck?"

"Are you as an auto care professional suggesting a trip to Vegas?" Eddie the new car owner seemed to brighten up ever so slightly.

"Not exactly" countered Eddie the Service Manager. "I just thought a cocktail waitress might be exactly what your air conditioner needs."

"But that's what buying the new car was all about in the first place. I wanted to be cool enough to get a girl." He paused briefly. "I knew I should have gotten the sun roof."

The chicken or the egg nature of the dilemma hung in the air between them.

### brother

I brought my laptop in the hopes of capturing something profound.

I knew I had a long night in front of me. I'd been dreading it for weeks. Ever since I heard the news that my brother Ron needed the heart surgery.

We said our teary-eyed goodbyes and he went under just after one in the afternoon. He was done sometime after eight. It would be another hour or so before we got to see him and we were told that he would not wake up before the next morning so everyone left but me.

I would sit at his bedside for the next twelve hours to make sure he was ok.

Not that there was anything I could do but panic and alert the proper medical personnel if something came up but there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

He was my brother.

I brought my laptop and wondered if I was going to gain any insights that I could share.

So I waited for some brilliant epiphany as I sat and watched him breathe in and out amongst the bright lights and beeping machines.

I ended up settling for a memory.

I was in college, in a giant lecture hall, and the instructor was lecturing on life and death. I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure it was a class that had nothing to do with philosophy so I'm not sure why the topic was even being discussed. But the teacher was prattling on about it anyway. If memory serves I think it was an astronomy class. Maybe it had to do with some astrological sign or mythology or something but he was making a point about how final death is and how everyone, secretly or not, fears it. To make his point he asked everyone with a sibling to raise their hand.

"Now, how many of you would trade your life for theirs? Truly die to let them continue living."

Every hand in the class of over three hundred went down. Except mine.

He looked at me.

"You would trade your life for theirs?" he asked contemptuously.

"Yes" I answered without hesitating. He took this as a sign I was lying.

"I don't believe you," he said.

I looked at him and said the only words I would speak in his class all semester: "I don't give a shit what you believe."

A machine chirped out a vague alarm and brought me back to my brother's bedside.

Maybe fate didn't believe me either because years later my brother would face cancer twice and neither time was I asked to step in for him. The kind of cancer that stole your hair, ended marriages and dashed any hopes of happy endings. Radiation and chemotherapy would allow him to survive both bouts but would leave his body ravaged and in need of the heart surgery that left him lying comatose in front of me with tubes sticking out of every opening.

As the hours passed I thought about love and mortality and hope and irony and waited for some wisdom to hit me. If I wasn't able to find some deeper meaning about life here next to my brother as he fought for his then where was I ever going to find it? Between staring at him and crying I wrestled with the familiar doubt that every writer deals with. Here I was facing an emotional crisis and nothing was coming.

I felt like a fraud. A charlatan. Empty. Hollow.

I wanted to feel something beautiful. I wanted to capture something powerful. I thought I was being unselfish. I wanted to bring something moving to you.

And nothing came. Nothing but the hurt of watching my brother groan and gag on the ventilator shoved down his throat. Just mundane concern.

About six thirty in the morning his eyes fluttered and he squeezed my hand. He finally seemed out of the woods after an endless night where every minute seemed like an hour.

You might think that had he died I would have something more profound to pass on to you than a boring story of relief. You might even believe that as a writer it is my obligation to want to feel things that most people fear and that by having my brother live I have cheated you out of something but in the end I realized that as long as my brother is alive, I don't give a shit what you believe.

### Mr. Swansong

"An earthquake is the only time the roots of a tree get to sway," his neighbor began. Bob knew him well enough to know that this was only the opening salvo. He never had just one thing to say. There were no simple observations or quick platitudes with his neighbor Hank.

Bob decided to play along.

"So the roots of a tree look enough like brain synopsis that you're implying that an earthquake represents a troubling event of some kind?"

Bob knew that Hank didn't know what he was talking about and enjoyed the moment. Hank, standing slack-jawed while he attempted to absorb the new spin on his statement, began to nod ever so slightly.

Bob continued. "That would make swaying a triumph of sorts?"

Gathering himself up Hank replied "Yes, in a manner of speaking. Adversity and all that." Hank's face then took on the quiet serenity that can only be achieved by the complete moron.

Bob owned a small but thriving company that centered on Bob lending himself out to corporations and government agencies to speak about motivation and efficiency in the workplace.

Hank had been unemployed for going on six months. He was formerly a salesman who sold gardening implements and before that he was a salesperson for a litany of unrelated consumer goods. His resume was a tour de force of mediocrity and low expectations.

Instead of pursuing the root metaphor Hank took a sudden turn and point-blank asked Bob if his company could use another associate. Bob would have been startled if he wasn't so stunned. In all their year of pseudo-witty banter Hank had never broached the subject of employment.

"You know what would make me a good speaker?" Hank offered.

Trying to move past stunned and into the safe waters of being not remotely interested Bob adjusted his stance and braced himself for the incoming stupidity.

He was not to be disappointed.

"Half the people in the world are annoying because they are different than everybody else but don't know it. The other half are annoying because they think they are different but they're not. I can tell them apart almost instantly." His face once again took on a serene quality.

"But," Bob interjected "What's the difference if you find them both annoying?"

On the face of it a fair question but clearly one that Hank was prepared to answer. "You have to know who's annoying you."

"Ahh, I see," answered Bob though he didn't.

Feeling like Hank's presentation was over Bob mulled over his situation. He was in a bit of tight spot. He didn't want to offend a neighbor, whose lawn mower he had borrowed countless times in the past when the discount ones he always bought ended up engulfed in flames, but at the same time he could never inflict an empty-headed buffoon on a paying client. Then the answer came to him in a flash of inspiration.

"Tell you what Hank. If I'm ever unable to make a commitment to speak due to illness or a scheduling snafu you'll be the first one I call."

While not what Hank was hoping for, it seemed to do the trick and soon they were back to talking about topics that no other human on the planet but Hank would find palatable.

The problem, for Bob anyway, was that while he was done having a flash of inspiration Hank was just getting warmed up. The words "due to illness" had barely left Bob's lips when Hank had a flash himself. Upon returning home, he went to his computer and, in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, he had found an over-the-counter medication that would cause the imbiber to immediately suffer side- effects that would render them useless for the better part of two days.

Three weeks later, and only hours before he was to depart for the airport, Bob unknowingly imbibed it. One fortuitous phone call later Hank was hastily packing and heading to the airport. Halfway across the Atlantic, on his way to Uzbekistan, Hank decided to call his old pal to check up on him and to get some additional details about his upcoming presentation. Knowing that the call was being charged to Bob's account he felt no pressure to keep things short. In fact, he immediately asked the sniffling Bob something off the subject; something totally and completely off the subject.

He asked him whether or not he knew if it were true that the European Mute Swan is silent throughout its entire life, only to sing one glorious song just before it dies.

Bob had to confess that he had no idea.

"It's not true. There is no such thing as a 'swan song'. It's a myth." Hank sunk back smugly in his first class seat and tried again to catch the eye of the stewardess to let her know that another glass of champagne would hit the spot.

Sniffing softly Bob grinned to himself and said, "I wouldn't be so sure. Have a great trip Hank. Goodbye and good luck," and with that he disconnected.

An odd way to wrap up a conversation... unless of course you were somebody that knew you'd been poisoned and were having the responsible party met at the airport by a small group of dangerous men involved in sex trafficking.

"I hope you enjoy your new life you annoying prick." With that Bob smiled and threw up.

### National Have Sex With An Ugly Person Day: Year 2

Last year I had the brilliant idea to start a new holiday: National Have Sex With An Ugly Person Day. It was met with offense by the ugly community and bewilderment by the beautiful crowd. That's how I knew I was on to something.

I was reminded of that fact during a recent visit to a farmer's market. Having never before been to a farmer's market I was not prepared for the ugly people I saw there. It is literally Ground Zero for ugly. I want to have sympathy for my fellow man but holy shit were these people ugly! The kind of ugly you don't come across every day. The kind where you sharply draw in your breath and shudder a tiny bit. The problem was, at a farmer's market there is so much concentrated ugly that you walk along sharply drawing in your breath and shuddering so much that it's all you can do not to pass out into one of the discount meat stalls.

That's right, I said stalls. Not stores. Stalls.

And I'm not sure why but at least half the people there have a limp. People at farmer's markets don't walk around, they hobble. As soon as they injure themselves the doctor must look at them, shake their head slowly and say "It's the farmer's market for you."

If you think with all of our scientific advances that people who've had throat cancer no longer talk through a box in their neck think again. Farmer's markets are choked with people talking through boxes in their neck. They don't even wear scarves. They just crash around with these big things stuck in their necks and talk their creepy electronic talk as they negotiate the purchase of a talk box made in 1995 at the "Used Talk Box" stall.

Thankfully the sound of the dilapidated shopping carts being pushed around by overweight freaks in velour sweat pants drowns out most of the racket. Farmer's markets are where shopping carts go to die. When a grocery store throws out a shopping cart because it can no longer be pushed around without all the birds in the area taking flight every time someone attempts to give it the slightest shove it ends up at the farmer's market.

There's always a pet store there and even the animals are ugly. Ugly fucking rabbits looking through the glass as ugly faces peer back at them.

Hopefully by now you've realized how traumatized I was by my visit. I had no idea that things were so bad. That's why I've renewed my enthusiasm for National Have Sex With An Ugly Person Day. For awhile I toyed with putting my energies into National Roll A 16+ On A d20 Day but clearly the ugly issue is a far more pressing problem. These fucking troopers are having sex with each other day in and day out and you never hear a complaint. There people are heroes. If you saw some of the hot messes that were shambling around with wedding rings on their deformed, scaly, gnarled fingers you'd want to track down their spouse and give them some sort of award. Last year, when I started this holiday, I had no idea of how terrifying some people were. You would think that there was an underground lab somewhere breeding these revolting creatures.

Women with muttonchops. Men with swaying breasts.

It's time to act. We can no longer sit on the sidelines and pretend that life is fair. There are empty-headed super models running around without a care in the world, having never once done anything for their fellow man. It's time for them to take one for the team. A year ago I suggested that if beautiful people and ugly people happened to come into contact on April 2nd, the beautiful people should go out of their way to sleep with them. Now I want more direction action.

I want bus loads of beautiful people shipped out to farmer's markets across the country. I want them to rent a stall and I want them to bang the first ugly person that happens to shuffle in.

No games. No excuses.

It's the very least they can do.

If you happen to be very attractive... it's the very least you can do.

Remember the date: April 2nd.

Find an ugly person and have sex with them.

### and now for the news ...

Let's say for instance that you're part of a sports team and you see highlights of your last game on the television. I'm sure there's no small amount of pride involved.

Now let's say you're part of a larger group, say the Knights of Columbus or 4H and you see your organization mentioned in the news. Perhaps not as intense but there is still a small rush of recognition.

Taking it a step further, if you're overseas and you see a TV report involving someone from your country I bet there is still some small tingle inside as you sit amongst foreigners.

Now what if your team lost?

What if your club was involved in wrongdoing?

What if your country was being talked about in an unflattering way?

Imagine for a moment you could buy into the concept that as a human every story involved you. You were actively part of a larger whole, every story would reflect on you. You would take it to heart because they might as well be talking about you personally because they are talking about a human and you are a human.

You are aren't you?

You'd avoid any TV news programs, I'll tell you that much. To the very best of your ability.

### Occam's knife

You know when somebody goes from a friend to a "good friend?" When they are trying to sell you something.

That's how I knew that my friend from college had suddenly gained lofty "good" status. He was sitting in my kitchen with what looked like a large duffel bag telling me all about the unique opportunity that was sitting in front of me.

A unique opportunity I wouldn't have had to endure had the dumb bastard just studied more. When I said I went to college with him I wasn't lying, but I didn't say he graduated. He quit senior year because he couldn't pass his calculus class.

He just walked away. I wonder if he romanticized it like people do when they see a balloon get away from a child and float off.

And then a few years later he walked into my kitchen after calling me up and asking for a few minutes of my time to discuss his exciting new career.

Knives. He now sold knives.

Who the hell sells knives?

I'll tell you who sells knives... old friends who never got their degree. That's who sells knives. He didn't even have courtesy to barge into my kitchen and try to sell me insurance or pitch me on some crazy investment.

He wanted to sell me knives.

So I sat and listened and pretended to care about all things cutlery for the sake of an old friend. The first thing he did was try to shame my current knives. I leapt to their defense. It was the least I could do after all the years of service they had put in. To that end I opened up with a salvo from one of my favorite old English brewers Charles Buxton: "The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon."

I could almost feel my silverware drawer titter in appreciation. Truly a quote that would have sent most knife salesman scrambling, but this was a "good friend" who was only three credits away from a degree so after a small wince he unzipped his bag and produced a knife.

"Temptation is like a knife, that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his poison, his exercise or his destruction," he countered. I appreciated that he stayed in Jolly Old with his choice of John Owen.

Now before you start to think that we are eggheads who attended some prestigious university let me admit right now that I had to use autocorrect to spell prestigious correctly. Both times. That second i is a sneaky one. To be quite honest, we spent the vast majority of our time drunk and/or high and on an endless hunt for sexual encounters. We were far from the polished specimens exchanging knife quotes.

"So did they give you a list of quotations about knives for moments like this?" I inquired.

"Nope. I Googled them after I got the job." He seemed proud in a "not bad for a man who never finished college" way. I gave him a "you were only three credits short you dumbass" look back but I'm not sure he caught it.

The thing about balloons is that you imagine them traveling a great distance, on some great adventure and seeing a lot of cool sights, but typically they just go up. Up will give you as nice view for awhile but eventually up gets cold.

He fished out a larger knife and began to extol its virtues. He went Italian on me during the big close. "Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge." He just assumed that I would know a quote from a Nobel Prize in Literature winner and I appreciated that. If he was willing to whip out a little Eugenio Montale to influence me then I was only too happy to be on the receiving end.

Then he got to the price. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I had spent less on automobiles and much less on beautiful women. There were samurais back in the day, whose very existence depended on a keen blade, that did not spend that much cash on their sword. If I bought one lone knife it would become the most expensive item in my kitchen.

"Hell no. Sorry but I can't afford that." I was firm.

He launched back into his sales pitch, noting repeatedly how we were "good friends." This seemed to imply I should feel on the hook for at least the 5-piece starter set. Why? Just because I finished my degree and got a decent job and didn't have to schlep around with a bag of knives humiliating myself in front of all my "good" friends?

Irritated I got all Lao Tzu on him. "Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt." I hoped he would get the hint.

He did not. Instead he went for the throat with a little Sophocles. "A wise doctor does not mutter incantations over a sore that needs the knife." Sophocles... a tragedian. The room grew silent and I understood.

Sometimes you see deflated balloons in the oddest places. Like in your kitchen trying to sell you knives.

If someone close to me was kidnapped and a ransom in the same amount was required to assure their safe release I would probably have to receive at least a few fingers before I finally coughed it up but because he was a "good friend" I forked it over and sent him on his way.

Now before you leap to the conclusion that this makes me a nice guy I want you know that I'm not. I put the knives on top of the cabinet and I haven't touched them since. Out of sight. Up high where hopefully they'll soon be forgotten.

### glasses

I've been putting off a visit to the optometrist and I've been trying to figure out why. My first thought was that I've always associated poor eyesight with weakness. I can't be the only one otherwise Superman wouldn't have found a pair of glasses such an effective disguise. It always seemed that it was the bespectacled kid getting punched in the face at recess and you didn't even need to see his glasses hit the ground to know they would break and need to be taped up to make it through the rest of the day. Sympathy for the kid was always in short supply because while all the other kids always imagined him perched over a chess board and while they knew how all the pieces moved they never knew how to play.

I never wanted to be that kid.

I don't like to think that my hesitancy is caused by the fact there are so many eye charts out there that it is impossible to study for the test. I understand that it's not a pass/fail situation but I don't like to be unprepared. Sure, I might resent the dryness of the exam (would it kill the makers of the eye chart to make I C U P the second line?) but I can't believe that I'd be so intolerant of the stuffiness of the process that I'd risk the health of my eyes (do they think that a little humor would eventually result in some eye chart manufacturers adding more and more outrageous content until the final line of some eye charts would be a string of profanity?).

Maybe it's a fear of weakness on my part. As much as I wouldn't want to wear glasses I don't think I could find it within myself to have LASIK (laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis) surgery. I just don't trust lasers. I picture myself sitting there in the chair after a quick blast with a smoking, empty eye socket. Screaming, crashing around, the whole shebang. Not trusting lasers seems to indicate I don't trust technology and by not trusting technology it seems I don't trust my fellow man.

I don't so I'd end up wearing big clunky glasses while the other people who had bad eyesight but had the stones to get the surgery can now blend in and not get beat up at recess anymore. They blend as I crash around conspicuously all because the girl behind the counter didn't have the heart to tell me that the giant black frames I picked make me look like a cross between Buddy Holly and someone even dumber looking than Buddy Holly.

As an aside, nobody has ever said that I have attractive eyes so I'm left to assume they are like my nipples and are ordinary on their best day.

When words start to get blurry it freaks you out. For awhile you can blink a few times and will your eyes to focus a little harder but eventually the blurriness starts to hang around and you realize that 20/20 vision has an expiration date and that could be the reason that you don't want to go to the eye doctor because he'll sit there in his white jacket and confirm that time is passing and that you're not as young as you used to be and you never learned to play chess and the kid that used to get beat up now wears contacts and owns a large company and you're afraid that having poor hindsight would be too ironic for you to bear.

Can you blame run-on sentences on poor vision?

I'm going to go ahead and say yes.

Before they had glasses people just saw the world get fuzzier as they aged. Perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be and wanting to see things clearly when we're old as hell is an unnatural desire. There's a part of me that thinks the world looks better hazy around the edges.

So I put down the phone and put off the appointment a little longer because once your eyesight starts to go your hearing will think it's ok to start slacking and the next thing you know you can't get a boner without ingesting liberal amount of pharmaceuticals that have side-effects ranging from blood in your stool to not being able to get boners ... which seems a bit redundant because if I've got blood in my stool I don't think there would be any boners on the horizon.

I don't want to live to see that ... clearly.

### advice from a dodo

The people who piss me off the most are the ones that tell you how lucky you are to have been born in the country you were born in or born into the family that you have. It just shows such a profound lack of understanding of what's going on around them that it's everything I can do not to break their necks like people do in all those kung fu movies.

"You're just lucky you weren't born in Africa."

Snap!

We don't start out as souls hovering on the edges of time waiting for the next baby to insert ourselves into. We're here because of a decision two people made. We are the product of a sex act and our genetic material is made up of those two people. And the two people who created them and the two people who made them. We are the echoes of thousands of decisions made since mankind decided to stand erect and begin waltzing around the planet.

In other words, I could only have been born in Africa if my parents happened to be in Africa nine months after humping.

There might be a small element of chance as to which chromosomes made it through the heads or tails selection process but other than that we are here because of a single act of procreation. Intended or otherwise. As hard as it might be to believe when you look in the mirror, we are the result of natural selection, not some cosmic throw of the dice.

This fundamental flaw in reasoning also goes a long way in explains why those same people hate professional gamblers so much. They think it's luck that they win so much money. They believe you have to play the hand you're dealt when every successful gambler will tell you that the cards you're dealt aren't as important as the cards everyone else thinks you have. They are so busy looking at their shitty hand it never occurs to them that most people are holding the same cards or worse.

It's at times like these when it's important to remember our friend the dodo. Before this bird went extinct it chose to become flightless. I would give my left nut to be able to fly and yet here is a bird that literally walked away from the opportunity. Perhaps things aren't always everything they are cracked up to be. The point, of course, isn't that this decision eventually caught up to this stupid fowl and directly led to its demise; it's that... sometimes... well... I forgot the point I was trying to make but be assured that it would have made you stop and think a bit.

I think it had something to do with the fact that sometimes you lose a hand even though you're holding bullets.

I remember a day recently where I went for a long walk. It was in the low 80's, light breeze, not a cloud in the sky. For some reason my legs seemed up to every challenge that the path could throw in front of me. Hills and valleys, downed trees and soggy ravines, none of these seemed a match for me. I could have walked forever it seemed. Every gulp of air was sweet and birds circled me and sang like I was in a Disney flick. For a little while I literally felt the road rise up to meet me.

I just wish I could hold on to that feeling forever, especially when the weather isn't as nice. Perhaps a dodo went on one of these walks back in the day and that's what made it give up flying, a thought that actually muddies the waters a bit but there it is. That's life in all its mystery I guess.

We're not accidentally here. There is a reason you're here despite my belief that there really isn't a reason that we're here. Following me so far? It's all pointless which makes it even more important that you find a point.

You are a collection of things you aspire to be and you gravitate towards people that buy into this persona. You have to put up with other people that see you differently but it's important that you keep these annoying individuals around because you never know who you'll end up being sometime down the road. Don't let the dodo dissuade you from aspiring to fly, just remember it might not be in the cards. Walk the walk either way, even if the temperature isn't in the low 80's. Even if your parents weren't born in Africa and you're on the hook for the expectations of their DNA.

And don't resent the gamblers. Learn from them.

You have a hand but sometimes in the high-stakes game of life it's ok to bluff.

### About The Author

Unless you've read and rejected George Steiner's book Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say? you'll never understand Lance Manion. His writing aims to violate "the small house of our cautionary being" and leave it "no longer inhabitable in quite the same way as it was before."

As well as give you something to read on the toilet.

Mostly to give you something to read on the toilet.
