# neXt

ALSO BY LANCE MANION

**Merciful Flush**

**Results May Vary**

**The Ball Washer**

**Homo Sayswhaticus**

**The Trembling Fist**

**The Song Between Her Legs**

**What You Don't Understand**

# neXt

Lance Manion

www.lancemanion.com
Copyright 2019 by Lance Manion Enterprises

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.

ISBN: 9781092831772

_Edited by Andira Dodge_ wordrummager@gmail.com

_Cover Art by James Flaxman_ <https://www.deviantart.com/jflaxman>

Printed in the United States of America

# **Contents**

Introduction

holocene

her safe place

the spoon diatribe

in the red

free fallin'

spin

so no one told you life was gonna be this way

lunatic

mice, men, and monsters

puzzled pieces

everything involved in getting a trout stamp

a fish story

routines

Neddy dreams of wild ape-men and regular men

snakes on a higher plane

she don't fade

goodbye #4

I hate all the scooters in the whole world

a wonderful thought... ruined

time flies

a case of too much time on my hands

why I'm not successful as a writer

it tolls for thee

please...

the milkman and human kindness

stranger than strangers

the sterile variety

entanglement

flooded

giving a crap

Can Holding In A Fart Kill You?

the fifth noble truth

all wet

the volunteer state

Burger Place

love me Tinder

hoop dreams

a big heart in a big fish in a small pond

swing low

I am visited by a crow

RetroActiv

I'm no superman

the tiller

the price is right but at what cost?

the elephant

sleepliving

Dear Penthouse Forum

Christopher from Columbus (the aesthetics of lostness)

St. Cleophis: patron saint of incomplete or abbreviated thoughts

2018/2019 (part 1)

let me catch you up

2018/2019 (part 2)

incident in San Juan

who are the monsters?

Love. Sex. Friendship.

year of the cat (roll tide)

his disadvantage (originally titled "her disadvantage")

World War P

just like Ronnie sang...

give me a hand any day

overheard baggage

Terry's Chocolate Orange

Director of the ODoPA

drive

Father's Day

the game

for Peete's sake

Hollywood bones me yet again

the cornfield

let the balls fall where they may

Milkness

a touchy subject

01134... a story of terror

take a good look at my Rod

true life incident

Breaking Sad

rrrrrrrr rated

messages in a bottle

snake on a plain

the vagina: to Google or not to Google

the many faces of fate

Gene the hero barber

the audition

a checkered flag

the one where the guy gets three wishes

putting out feelers

let's make another deal

the amazing Manion

Jerry gets burned

it did feel like Saturday

the stupid crap I think about

first contact

that damn twelfth option

off to the races

who's the beef?

the eyes have it

the power of love

mac and cheese and Andrea

About the Author

# **Introduction**

Lance Manion is not my real name. It is a nom de plume, which is French for "Too embarrassed to use a real name." I have a real life that has nothing to do with writing. A life that would be negatively impacted if anyone I actually knew read what I write as Lance Manion.

The book was originally going to be called _Short Pointless (?) Stories for Your Long Pointless (?) Trip_. The question marks being there to show that everything is a matter of context, whether it be why I write these dumb things or why you get out of bed in the morning. I changed it because I thought I would wait until you've read a few of them before realizing your terrible mistake.

Who is my ideal reader? If I had to put a finger on it, I'd say an ex-FBI agent who was kicked out of the bureau because they kept sending things into the crime lab for analysis that had nothing to do with any active cases. Things they found under their seat at the theater, for example.

Smart, but not as smart as they think they are. Normal on the outside but tremendously odd inside. If life is indeed a box of chocolates, then they definitely have a nut lurking within.   
But back to me (perhaps my favorite sentence of all time). I used to classify my writing as humor but only about half of these stories even attempt to be funny. The other half aim to show just how funny life isn't. It was only after reviewing things that I realized how many revolved around bad ideas and people ill-equipped for success.

Like me.

Don't worry; I don't want to be famous. I don't even want to be known. I write to get all the dumb ideas out of my brain. Like an exorcism of sorts. I don't care what anyone thinks about them.  
Having said that, I sincerely hope you find some of them interesting.

# **holocene**

I hit a deer.

I wasn't speeding but the roads were icy and it jumped out of the woods. I had no chance to even apply the brakes. I mean to say, I did, but only for a fraction of a second. Just enough for it to think to itself, "Those are the breaks."

It leapt out of the way and I clipped it with a dull thump. It spun right into the path of an oncoming car in the other lane. It happened so fast, I couldn't confirm that the car hit the deer (again) but it seemed unlikely that it could have dodged the hurtling vehicle. I craned my neck to look back but all I saw were the red tail lights of the other car as it slowed down and then kept driving. Late for work perhaps or just the driver thinking to himself "My work here is done."

"It was just a deer." Not my dear.

I turned around awkwardly, as it was a narrow winding street- it took a few back-and-forths- and drove back to the scene of the crime where I pulled over and got out.

I needed to know it was dead and wasn't suffering.

The air was cold. Crisp but cold and I wasn't dressed for such activities. The snow crunched accusationally beneath my feet. It was the quiet that got to me.

Nothing moved except my eyes over the snow. There was no twitching carcass. No big dead eyes to look up at me. Not even a few red drops on the white ground. No hoof prints to follow to their grim end.

It was like it never happened. I was emotional and the damn thing didn't have the courtesy to let me grieve.

I could feel hundreds of forest eyes on me. All of them waiting for me to leave so they could exhale. There was no wind, but the clouds raced across the sky; the moon was there one minute, gone the next. Everything cast a shadow.

I got back in my car and made the drive home. I turned off the radio. I turned off the heater because I thought the very least I could do was shudder a little. In fifteen minutes, I was walking through my door.

I lay in my bed, alone in the dark, and realized the shadows had followed me home.

Life is like that. And death, apparently.

I hadn't known the deer existed a few seconds before I hit it and as I lay there, I had no idea what had happened to it. A few seconds. A few decisions. If I had left five minutes earlier or five minutes later. Actions taken and things not done and things that can't be undone.

It was the quiet that got to me. I couldn't see the moon from my bed, but I knew it was out there. I knew that it had seen the whole thing despite being 238,550 miles away, give or take a few miles. Hanging there in space with nothing better to do and without the good manners to abandon its usual synchronous rotation and look away for a few minutes.

The next morning, I went out to my car to see if the deer had done any damage and saw hoof prints on my lawn.

And little red drops sprinkled around.

It was, of course, impossible that the same deer had followed me home. Things like that don't follow you home.

I had hit the deer a good five or ten miles away. It was either fine and had made a narrow escape or it was broken and had crawled off to die alone in the dark. It couldn't have tracked me down. I wasn't guilty of anything. I wasn't accountable.

All the best villains believe that, I think.

The sun was warm and shone as usual but I got the feeling the moon had told it everything at daybreak. "Anything happen last night?" Satellites are like that. Can't keep their mouths shut.

If I sported a handlebar mustache, it was at that moment I would have twirled the ends.

Instead, I went back into the house.

There were red dots on the white tiles in the hall.

Odd. These things don't follow you home.

# **her safe place**

"Why are you dressed like that?" she inquired through the intercom.

He laughed a little. "Fair question," he conceded.

He was a burglar. He was dressed in a black and white striped shirt, black pants, and a Lone Ranger mask.

She was dressed in her pajamas. I'll let you decide what her pajamas looked like. It may change as the story proceeds.

"You have to admit... it's a little weird to actually dress as a cliché. I mean, I would understand a black ski mask to hide who you are, but why the Lone Ranger mask?"

"It's interesting that you call it a Lone Ranger mask as opposed to just a mask," he said. Now I'm interested too as I did the exact same thing.

He continued. "Being a burglar is a lonely profession, so the term Lone Ranger has a couple of different connotations."

"Why are you still here?" she asked. "Shouldn't you leave now that you have all of my valuables? Are you waiting to kill me?"

"Oh, no. Quite the contrary, in fact." He paused and then walked to the front of the locked panic room she had fled into.

"I had the opportunity to review your CD collection and your video collection and take in all the posters and artwork on your walls," he said as he sat and looked into the small camera over the giant iron door. "I think I'd like to ask you out on a date."

Silence.

He wished there was a camera on her side so he could see her reaction. Trust me though; he would not have been encouraged.

"You're very pretty," he added. "I've been admiring some of your pictures. You seem nice."

Now be honest, the fact that you now know she is attractive has totally changed your opinion of her pajamas. I bet she's probably wearing a skimpy nightie now, isn't she?

She is in my story, I'll tell you that much.

"So... what do you think?" he asked, looking hopefully up at the camera.

"I think you're a lunatic who wants me to open the door so he can murder me because he wore a fucking Lone Ranger mask instead of a real one and he knows I can probably identify him in a court of law."

Not the answer he was hoping for. He tried to look more sincere and gave it another try.

"What if I tie up my hands? Would you come out then?"

More silence. More wishing he could see her reaction. More of him being happy he couldn't.

She had a gun in her safe room. She was loading it.

"I mean," he continued, "love is a strange thing. You never know when you're going to meet 'the One,' right?"

"I've called the police, burglar guy. You and your bad Lone Ranger mask should go. Try and find a costume party," she said coldly. Love was definitely not in the air.

"I don't want to be the Lone Ranger anymore," he offered up.

"Tonto then?" she said tentatively, not sure that Tonto wore a mask. She wasn't sure if one was necessary in the role of Kemo Sabe. Then she was worried that the Lone Ranger was the Kemo Sabe and if that was the case, what did that make Tonto? Relationships and roles therein can be tricky.

"I'll be your Tonto if you agree to be my kemo sabe," he replied.

"Well, that answers that," she thought to herself, although she could tell by the way he said it that he didn't capitalize kemo sabe.

He felt like it was time to try and close her.

"I went through your purse and I know your name is Sandy. I don't want to be too familiar though. Is it ok if I call you Sandy?"

"I'm going to come out and shoot you now," was her reply.

"I'm Brad," he countered.

"Ok. I'm going to come out and shoot you now, Brad."

He smiled. She called him Brad.

He heard a rustling behind the door. She was opening it.

"I know it takes a lot of trust for a relationship to work, Sandy. I love your musical tastes and your taste in art. I see all the pictures of you with other men. Boyfriends, I assume. I appreciate you might have trust issues. You might not want to feel vulnerable. You're in your safe place now. I get it. I think if you get to know me, we could be wonderful together. Will you give me a shot?"

It was a tremendously poor choice of words.

The door opened and Sandy shot him right through his Lone Ranger mask.

Women... am I right?

# **the spoon diatribe**

Now, the easy thing for me to do would be to pretend this didn't happen. That it was some crazy diatribe delivered by a fictional character in one of my dumb stories.

But it wasn't. This was actually something I said, almost word for word. I believe the bond between writer and reader is sacred and demands honesty... even when it makes me look like a moron. Before I offer up the aforementioned diatribe, let me try to put it into some sort of context. I think most people agree we can't lash out every time we're angry or disappointed. Instead, we tuck it away somewhere inside our heads, and it's fair to say psychologists make a pretty penny sorting through the accumulated rage inside patients' conscious and subconscious. If people can't afford a shrink or don't believe in the science they trade in, this is the shit that happens.

Date: This morning. Time: 8:07 a.m.

Subject (me): pours a bowl of cereal and opens a drawer to retrieve a spoon. There are no spoons.

"What the fuck?! How can we be out of spoons? There are fifty fucking forks and a hundred fucking knives but not one motherfucking spoon? Are you shitting me? Do the people in this house eat nothing but soup? What's for dinner? Roast beef? Nope! We're having soup again! Soup for dinner and soup for breakfast and soup for lunch and if you want a snack, it better fucking be some sort of bisque, bouillon, or fucking consommé because god forbid we dirty a fucking fork in case the Queen herself stops by to inspect our forks! If you want roast beef, you better throw it in a blender and puree that shit because we only use spoons in _this_ household!"

It's at this point I decided to pull the silverware drawer all the way out and hurl the assorted utensils across the kitchen floor. With the same focus, I decided to return the drawer back into the confines beneath the countertop in one swift motion, missed by a good margin, and watched it disintegrate into a twisted pile of cheap particle board at my feet. I was left holding only the drawer front.

Which I held onto throughout the rest of the tirade.

"I distinctly remembering going out and buying extra spoons to avoid just this scenario. I bought them in bulk. I needed someone from the store to help me get the giant box full of spoons to my car!"

At this point, I shook my fist in the general direction of the box of cereal and, forgetting I was still clutching a - until recent events - drawer front which, due to very recent events, was transformed into just a piece of wood with a handle on it, knocked it over, spilling out what seemed to be an avalanche of Froot Loops.

"What the fuck are you looking at, toucan?! At least come out and admit you're gay. Look at yourself! Look at yourself! Take a look in the mirror, Sam, and just come out of the fucking closet! Are you going to clean up this mess? No? I didn't think so! Who spells fruit f-r-o-o-t?!"

I surveyed the damage and for a moment, it appeared I'd be able to collect myself.

"If only female mosquitoes bite people and only male crickets chirp, why can't we make them mate so that at least we'll hear those fucking moscricketoes coming at us? What the fuck is science for if it can't get that done? You're not helping anyone, science!"

Nope.

"Does every fucker in this house approach their plate the same way a baseball player does? Do they bring three spoons to the table, swing them all around for a few seconds and then hurl two of them into the sink? Batter up! Does it occur to anyone to wash a spoon every year or two? Nooooooo, we just use spoons for everything and then throw them out so I can't have a bowl of fucking cereal to start my day! God forbid I enjoy a bowl of cocksucking cereal with a fucking gay parrot on the box- fuck you toucan; you're a parrot now. Neanderthals had spoons. Fucking Neanderthals had spoons and I don't. They probably had fucking Froot Loops too, but I can't find a spoon to save my life! Neanderthals! They didn't have dick but even they could dig up a fucking spoon. Cars? Nope! Televisions? Nope. Spoon? Check! I bet they'd look at me and assume I'm a caveman because even they had spoons and now I'm going to have to pour milk all over the floor and get down on all fours and eat my Fruity Fucking Loops off the dirty tile! I bet the first cave painting ever found was some fuckwad eating something with a spoon and smiling ear to ear with a 'I might get eaten later today and I'll probably die before I'm thirty but at least I have this spoon' look on his face!"

It dawned on me where all the spoons were. Across the kitchen in the dishwasher. I advanced upon it as if opening it and finding it devoid of spoons would be the "All work and no spoons makes Lance a dull boy" moment that sends me upstairs to murder everyone in the house. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I made my way over, little red and yellow and green crunched rings marking my progress.

I opened the dishwasher and spoons poured out. Thousands of them. Instantly, I was waist-deep in spoons. The windows of the kitchen exploded outwards with the pressure of so many spoons coming forth. Millions of them. The very roof was lifted off by the sheer number of spoons that filled the house.

Ok, that last part didn't happen, but the rest is totally true. Give yourself bonus points if you asked yourself why I didn't at least mention possibly becoming a "cereal" killer.

The terrible truth is that had I known that Mary Tyler Moore was going to die later in the day, I would have no doubt crumbled to the ground and remained there sobbing until the proper authorities could be summoned.

# **in the red**

The End.

Worst first sentence you can have for a story... but the truth is I never expected it to end in the first place. I thought it would go on forever. Call me a romantic, but it started so optimistically that the idea of starting another story from scratch was the furthest thing from my mind.

We use words to try and capture memories then spend the rest of our lives trying to erase some of them. Chew them out and spit them up. Then eventually, they're all erased for us and the big "The End" comes.

Seems like a good premise for a new start but maybe that's just the romantic in me surfacing again. Is there any story worth telling that doesn't involve romance?

Here's one. A story about a man who invented a wood chipper that had an opening that looked like a mouth where you fed the wood and then the backside, where the chips were shot out, looked like a human anus.

It really wasn't anything other than a wood chipper, no better or worse than the other models on the market, but the slick advertising made it seem like a brilliant metaphor for what happens when humans eat. Just a lot faster.

The thing is, what makes it a story about romance is the fact that, along with copious amounts of wood, the second most fed-into-a-wood-chipper item is human remains. Murder victims and folks that have gotten on the wrong side of the mafia.

You're trying to tell me that most of those stories don't involve some sort of romance?

I won't believe it.

I can't. Not now anyway.

I need to believe my new story will have the same possibilities as my last one... and what could be more romantic than a large chute spewing out chewed-up skin and organs in a shower of Valentine's Day-red?

As hard as it might be to believe, that's how my last story ended. Except it wasn't a wood chipper doing the spewing.

It was a girl.

And the skin and organs were mine.

So, if you don't mind, I'd like you to take a minute to imagine a wood chipper that has an opening that looks like a mouth where you feed the wood and then the backside, where the chips are shot out, looks like a human anus. Then imagine the inventor selling a lot of them and becoming wildly wealthy on the back of this new take on an old chipper.

An old-fashioned "crazy dreamer makes good" story. And what does making good lead to? More romance. In the form of a beautiful woman who wants the good life. And what does a beautiful woman lead to?

Well, that's where I'm trying to stay romantic. The thing is, I bet your first instinct was that a beautiful woman leads to one or the other of them ending up in the wood chipper.

Too easy. Too obvious, because of course, a beautiful woman marrying a man who is a wood chipper mogul ends in one of them being fed into the mouth and shot out of the anus of one of his products.

So again, if you don't mind, I'd really like you to take a minute to imagine a wood chipper that has an opening that looks like a mouth where you feed the wood and then the backside, where the chips are shot out, looks like a human anus. Perhaps a big smiling maw and an anus so realistic that parents put their hands over the eyes of their children as they walk by. Imagine the noises it makes- could it giggle or burp amidst all the grinding sounds? - and if the inventor could make it shake and hop up and down every now and then.

I'm afraid right now that's about as romantic as I can get. Thankfully, this story is about to end and another will pop out any time now. No doubt in a chunky, disturbing spray of Valentine's Day-red.

The End.

# **free fallin'**

All you had to do was have one of your quarters stay on the little glass pedestal to win. Even though you saw the guy manning the booth walk by and blast the top of the pedestal with some sort of no-stick spray every now and then, it appeared to be a winnable proposition. Put a little arc on the coin and try to have it land softly.

If your coin managed to hang on, you won a goldfish.

They sat on a shelf in the back. Amidst all the noise and colored lights. Swimming in little circles in their plastic bowls.

It made me imagine they must think this existence is perfectly normal for a goldfish. They see other goldfish in identical situations so they probably assume all goldfish live this way. Life is a series of being dragged out of one tank and being put in another. If their god was a narrator with a British accent, he'd be describing everything as completely reasonable. As if nothing unusual was going on.

If it were a salmon in the little bowl, the fish would probably assume that at some point after being won and whisked off to some other destination far away, it would be expected of them to somehow make it back to the fairgrounds to die. They might even wonder how a salmon might make its way back short of a taxi. And how they would pay for it.

Of course, if you've ever seen a fish out of water, the way their mouth moves, you'd have to assume the salmon might have to offer oral gratification to the driver of the taxi in exchange for the ride. The British narrator would not go into much detail on this point.

The two goldfish at the end of the shelf clearly had something going on between them. Some chemistry. They were doing that same kissing motion as if they were both out of water. You couldn't tell which was male or which was female, but you assumed they knew and they were in the throes of some aquatic romance.

The narrator would explain everything to their satisfaction.

Except that the male goldfish, the one on the left, had overheard a conversation between the man that ran the booth and another man who ran the tilt-a-whirl that had him a little confused. The two men were arguing about a Tom Petty song that the fish had never heard. _Free Fallin'_.

One man argued it was an upbeat song. A song about how "bad boys" have it easy and can float from one girl to the next. No strings.

The other claimed that while the word "free" was repeated often, it was always followed by "free fallin'," which clearly had a negative connotation. The "bad boy" would eventually get his, ending up alone and at least as miserable as the "good girl" with the broken heart.

Now, you must understand that a fish doesn't understand the idea of falling to begin with. A fish's world is not only side-to-side but up-and-down. There's no falling in the world of a fish.

Nor are there "bad boys" or "good girls." There are just fish sitting in bowls blowing kisses to each other before they are scooped up and sent off with a teenager that will no doubt feed them to his pet piranha as soon he arrives home with his prize.

All described in a very blasé and unemotional way by the British narrator/god.

So, loud music is blaring and shrieks can be heard from the rollercoaster and Haunted House. Dirt hangs in the air from the thousands of feet walking up and down the concourse and corn dogs and cotton candy litter the ground. The male goldfish hopes that when his love is finally won, she is taken to a home with a big pond and she can live out the rest of her days under lily pads. A narrator with a thick British accent explains to the fish the point of it all.

The rough-looking man running the booth doesn't see me staring at his fish. Trying to make eye contact. Trying to hear the narrator with a thick British accent explain the point of it all.

_I wanna glide down over Mulholland_

_I wanna write her name in the sky_

_I'm gonna free fall out into nothin'_

_Gonna leave this world for awhile_

-Tom Petty

# **spin**

I hope your imagination is all limbered up for this one. You're really going to need to follow along closely or this could go nowhere pretty fast.

Premise: There is an alternate existence where the word "spin," as used by salespeople, has a very different connotation. In this world, when a salesperson is presenting their product or solution to an end user, they often get so caught up in what they're saying, they begin to spin in circles as they talk. Always counter-clockwise, their left leg stationary while their right leg pushes off.

Think of the image of the "whirling dervish." Sufi Muslims, whose dhikr (devotional act) includes whirling with arms open: his right arm directed to the sky, ready to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, turned toward the earth. They whirl themselves into a state of ecstasy.

Such is their belief.

Insincere or inexperienced salespeople sometimes finish entire presentations without spinning even once. Such is their lack of belief in their product or themselves. Any word that sits before the word salesperson that begins with "in-" is probably a bad sign. Maybe it's a coincidence that infidel begins with "in" or maybe it isn't.

Experienced salespeople, on the other hand, become so moved by what they're saying that they spin. Most of them stretch before their presentations. Loose-fitting dress isn't unusual. Sometimes they will bring other associates and occasionally these people will get so caught up in what's being said, they too will start to spin.

On rare occasions, clients begin to believe whatever product is being pitched will help their company do whatever it's intended to do with such fervor, they too will begin to spin.

For instance, a secretary will walk by a large glass conference room and see thirty people standing up, spinning in place and will say to herself, "Wow, Dale is killing it."

The younger salespeople have more trouble spinning. Not because of a lack of belief but because of their footwear. Old veterans still wear leather dress shoes with no grip on the soles while young hipsters wear shoes that allow them to leave work and head directly up the side of Steep Mountain (a high point at the west end of the South Lateral Moraine in Rocky Mountain National Park). They sometimes leave marks on the carpeting of their clients.

The common denominator between the whirling dervish and the spinning salesperson is belief. In this reality, the salesperson has to believe what he or she is saying. It's a litmus test for what's being said. The salesperson that does not at some point in time spin will not be believed and it is nearly impossible to fake the spin.

For the customer, this different reality is superior to ours. And because we're all customers at one time or another, it's overall a far superior reality to ours.

I sit in a chair that has a swivel base just in case I ever get so caught up in what I'm writing, I can begin to spin. This story is as close as I've ever been to wanting to spin around a bit.

Honestly, I just tried it. Counter-clockwise. While it was a bit fun, I didn't believe it. Not in the same way I've seen kids spin around in office chairs.

I can only assume there's an alternate universe where writers who believe in what they're writing will stop and spin in their chairs as they work. Of course, as nobody typically watches them as they write, I guess nobody would be the wiser if they published things that they didn't really believe in.

Like this.

# **so no one told you life was gonna be this way**

Typically, in a story with romantic overtones, your biggest concern as a reader is that the author will get in the way. You'll be humming along, reading away as you project yourself into every scene, and then the writer will make some clumsy inference that totally doesn't sit well with your life experience, and the bubble bursts.

Let's get that out of the way right now. I'm a bubble-burster from way back. It might be the only talent I have.

Why am I so pessimistic about this particular story?

Because the two main characters are traveling together looking for metaphors. Actively seeking them out. As a writer who loves metaphors, I'm now completely handcuffed. There's no way to slip one in without these two catching it.

I'll give you a taste and you can decide whether you want to risk your bubble.

The two of them set off on a car ride in order to see a total eclipse. Where they currently reside, the moon would only cover about 60% of the sun and 60% was just not enough. They needed complete closure.

Closure of a sort anyway. You see, they had dated previously but were currently both spoken for. Their names were Ross and Rachel, so anyone who's ever watched _Friends_ constantly waited for them to get back together. I have to admit I watched a lot of _Friends_ , but I'm not sure if Ross and Rachel ended up together or not when the show ended. A more motivated author might quickly look up this information, but as I've already started typing, I feel it would bias me. My Ross and Rachel cannot be influenced by a sitcom.

Although they constantly felt influenced by their names, they felt like their relationship was actually a sitcom being watched by the rest of the universe. Not a hit series by any means, but having a small but loyal viewership.

Anyway, if either of their significant others suspected they had gone on this road trip, it would have meant curtains for that relationship. But they set off anyway.

Looking for a sign from the universe. Not the same sign, of course. As simpatico as they were, they were still individuals. Individuals that might have even agreed on the sign they were looking for, but any time there are two brains involved, you're going to get two interpretations of what constitutes a sign and what it means.

The spot they decided upon to witness the eclipse was Great Smokey Mountains National Park on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. They chose this place because in addition to the one minute and seventeen seconds of total darkness, they would get to see the moon's shadow racing across the landscape just prior to the event. The drive down would take just under ten hours.

"So far, so good," many of you are no doubt thinking to yourself. What could possibly go wrong? Two ex-lovers in a car for ten hours looking for a sign. Seems like a perfect story shaping up, am I right?

Wrong.

The first time I even hint at the sign they were looking for, at least half of you will stop reading because it wasn't the sign you'd hoped for. And half of an already painfully small readership is just... well... painful.

And yes, the girl is young and beautiful, as much as I wish she wasn't. It's so cliché, I know. And yes, she will be in shorts and not more than five minutes into the drive, she will put her cute feet up on the dashboard and the poor male will be distracted and unable to think clearly for at least a hundred miles and within these hundred miles, he will realize the CD player isn't working and thus the two CDs he'd made of his favorite mood music will become moot.

He will take this as a sign. Not THE sign, but a sign.

He will turn on the radio and the first song playing is the first song on the CD he made, so he will take this as the sign.

The sign of what? He was still working on it.

You see, he desperately wanted a sign but he wasn't sure what the sign was supposed to tell him. He wasn't much of a believer in signs until he met Rachel and couldn't help but feel that signs were just the kind of sorcery she was capable of.

The odds of the next song on the radio being the second song on the CD he had made were about a million to one but sure enough, that's exactly what made its way out of the speakers. He glanced over to say something to her and saw she was staring out the window. He took that opportunity to try and see if she was wearing a bra. Rachel had large, almost-gravity-defying breasts that he simply adored and if she had decided to take the trip without a bra, then that would also be a sign. Ross thought that almost-gravity-defying breasts were a sign unto themselves; her breasts were particularly almost-gravity-defying so they counted as two signs, so in his head, there was suddenly a four-sign pileup on the highway of his subconscious.

She sensed the commotion going on to her left and smiled and changed the station. He grimaced until he realized the new song being belt out was perhaps her favorite song of all time. Although not a fan of Miss Britney Spears' music, he was certainly a fan of the effect her music had on Rachel.

She moved in such a way to let him know that she was wearing a bra.

I know this isn't what you had in mind. How could a one-in-a-million musical coincidence end up in talk about boobs and bras?

How can I not tell you what his two songs were?

How could he fall for a girl who loved Britney Spears?

If I were to explain the next eight hours in the car, you might have a clue, but I don't think either of us has it in us to write/read eight more hours of this.

They arrived at the park and saw the moon's shadow race across the top of the trees from their scenic vantage point and they spent a minute and seventeen seconds in the dark. He tried to kiss her and she rejected him.

They got separate rooms at a hotel, then drove back home in awkward silence. Except for talk radio, because every time he tried to listen to the regular radio, it played yet another one of the songs he'd put on his CD and he felt the universe was tormenting him. Of course, on the trip home, it was obvious she didn't wear a bar and she jiggled and shook in such a way that he contemplated driving the car into a tree a dozen times, but didn't.

Now that I think about it, I think Ross and Rachel ended up together on _Friends_.

My Ross and Rachel? Probably not.

How could I not explore the whole total eclipse metaphor thing?

Or any metaphors from the trip when I specifically stated that they were going to be on the lookout for them?

Because I know you too well.

# **lunatic**

She got the dog a few days before he moved in. One of a series of curious decisions she made around that time. His moving in being one of them. He immediately hated the dog, finding it a distraction every time he sat down to write.

He was a writer.

So was she... in theory. She had yet to write anything.

He wrote a lot but as far as the literary community was concerned, she had a real leg up, as she'd yet to write anything terrible.

His latest project started off as a retelling of a children's story he'd once read about a girl who suffers heartbreak as a child and makes the decision to take out her heart and carry it around in a glass bottle with her. The point being she feels nothing and misses out on a lot of things in life. The hero in his tale had set out to save her.

Every time he seemed to be making progress, the dog would jump onto his lap or start barking or chew on the cable to his laptop. He would try and be nice and push the dog away, but the dog's behavior particularly upset the girl. She would yell and complain about the dog and it appeared at times she was even embarrassed she'd ever let the dog into her life.

Over dinner one night, she asked him if she should get rid of the dog. He said no, that once you agree to own a dog, it's a lifetime commitment. She disagreed, pointing out that sometimes you have to correct bad decisions. She then went on to list a litany of transgressions the dog kept committing.

Around this time, the setting for his story changed to Transylvania. A significant shift in mood. The girl in the story began to change as well.

The girl in his life talked about starting writing in earnest. But she didn't. She did however elaborate on why she thought she needed to get rid of the dog. It wasn't just its bad behavior, it was its unwillingness to learn and modify its behavior. It kept doing the same dumb things over and over and no number of smacks on the nose seemed to change things.

The girl in his story became a vampire and instead of the main character trying to get the girl to trust him and open up and feel love again, it started to be about the girl tricking him into pulling out the stake in her heart so she could once again terrify the locals with her unholy appetites.

The girl in his life couldn't start writing her story because every time she did, it seemed the dog would do something like crap on the carpet and ruin all the work she'd done setting up her writing desk with pretty colored pencils, arranging all the books on her shelf by color, and pouring a big glass of wine.

He wrote anyway, the sounds of her whining in the background seemingly making the vampire in his story more and more loathsome.

She didn't write, saying she couldn't capture what she wanted with the distractions in her life.

One day, he got a text message from the girl saying she had started to read his new story and that she looked forward to seeing if the main character had found success in his efforts to rescue the girl. He thought momentarily about texting back asking her not read it or at least to explain that the premise had changed since he originally described it to her.

He did neither.

When he arrived back at the house, he found all of his stuff outside in a large box. On the top of it sat a note that read "Sometimes difficult choices have to be made." His laptop was damaged beyond repair... apparently one of those difficult choices. The dog sat at the window yapping and watching as he loaded the box into his car and drove away. He kept the note, thinking to himself "Well, at least she started writing."

As far as he knew, she still had the dog.

# **mice, men, and monsters**

Any time there's censorship - and that's all this Politically Correct environment that has developed is - it makes it hard on those with a dark sense of humor. Instead of being able to share the cruelty and horribleness of the world with other like-minded idiots, we're forced to keep a stiff upper lip while all around us the wheels come off.

I hesitate to even relate this 100% true story but the truth is, if I don't, nobody will. Only someone with nothing to lose can afford to be honest in this country anymore.

I was attending a high school football game Friday night and one of the cheerleaders was profoundly mentally handicapped.

So, right there, you think I'm a jerk for pointing that out.

I'm not. It's a fact. One of the cheerleaders was "challenged." If you think I'm against her participating as a cheerleader, you're wrong and fuck you for jumping to conclusions.

Ok. Sorry for saying fuck you. Emotions are running pretty high.

I'm all for any girl who wants to cheer getting up there and cheering and trying to form pyramids and such. Of course, the downside is sitting there stone-faced as nine other girls perform a cheer, their arms and legs synchronized perfectly, while the handicapped girl hurls her arms in every direction with seemingly no rhyme or reason.  Twenty years ago, this would have been the funny part of a movie and everyone would be howling with laughter, but these days, everyone has to keep terrible things they think to themselves. Smiles fixed on glazed-over faces. The parents of the other cheerleaders forced to mutter bitter comments under their breath as routine after routine crashes and burns under the weight of the one girl.

All of us waiting for the inevitable news that a mentally-handicapped girl will be joining the Rockettes and going forward, every Xmas will be fucked up for everyone and nobody will be able to say a word. There will soon be a "courageous" victim of multiple sclerosis crashing down the runway at the Miss America Pageant, the rattling of her leg braces drowning out the theme music, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

But don't get me wrong; that's not what this story is about.

It's about something that happened and yes, it involves the mentally handicapped cheerleader. It's innocuous and in a normal, sane world, it would be a quick story that everyone shared and thought was mildly amusing. But not these dark, PC days.

Today, just sharing it makes you a monster.

But share it I will.

We need monsters.

So here it is... at one point in the game, the mentally handicapped girl was trying to say something to another cheerleader and that cheerleader didn't understand what she was saying so the mentally handicapped cheerleader put her hands on her hips, looked at her mother, rolled her tiny eyes and gave her mother the mother of all "that girl is retarded" looks.

It was so wonderfully human, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry so I did what I always do in those situations. I laughed. And made a mental note to share it with everyone I know despite how uncomfortable the subject matter is. Not to share it would be the real bias.

If I could have taken a picture of the girl's look, I would blow it up and have it as a poster over my desk.

What's that?

You want another funny story about that cheerleader? You think that if I keep them to myself I'm being hypocritical?

Well, ok. You asked for it.

The coach of the other team kept complaining to the refs about calls. After he'd done this an annoying number of times, someone on our side of the stands let out an impossibly loud "Waaaah!" (Imitating the sound a baby would make if that baby was three stories tall). Our side of the field erupted in laughter.

This was not lost on the mentally handicapped cheerleader. Seeing the response, he received from the fans, she proceeded to let out a terrifying "Waaaah!" every three or four minutes for the balance of the game, usually when the other girls were in the middle of a routine. As someone who revels in awkwardness, I was in heaven.

Ok. I think I should have stopped with the first story.

_Monsters are real. They live inside us, and sometimes they win._

-Stephen King

# **puzzled pieces**

If you choose to, you can connect any two things. Or any three.

Or everything.

Perhaps the greatest misconception people have is believing life is a puzzle, with specific pieces coming together to form a pre-determined picture. Perhaps all pieces go together and there isn't any one picture that's being created. Maybe the picture is different for everyone. Maybe any two pieces can fit together with a little work.

Perhaps some people have an eight-piece puzzle they finish early and spend the rest of their lives enjoying or regretting.

Perhaps others enjoy 50,000 pieces or a puzzle that's completely blank with no clues how the pieces go together or even a 50,000-piece puzzle that's completely blank and they know that they'll reach the end of their lives without finishing it and they'll be fine with that or they'll regret it.

Maybe at some point, a puzzle metaphor will grow tiresome to anyone unfortunate enough to start thinking about it but even then, they'll have to admit that connecting a puzzle metaphor to anything else you can think of is as easy as pie.

Even pie.

If everyone on the planet is connected by seven people, maybe that means dwarves are only connected by three because it's a much smaller community. Maybe things can be funny to think about but still be true.

Maybe the guitar solo from _Freebird_ is all you need to prove String Theory. Maybe things don't have to be funny to be true.

Maybe eyebrows are nothing more than mustaches that sit over people's eyes.

# **everything involved in getting a trout stamp**

Beth was a romantic. She started looking at the county clerk's office in her quest to get a stalking license. The same place you get marriage licenses.

Yep. Beth was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic.

She couldn't find the necessary form online so she created her own, including all the information she thought might be pertinent. While it must be supremely flattering to acquire a stalker, many stalkers don't appreciate the commitment stalking requires. The hours involved. She was very thorough in creating her application, including three references. Two of which had filed restraining orders against her.

That would speak volumes to whomever was making the decision.

The restraining orders were an unfortunate side effect of her not knowing the particulars involved in ending a relationship. Beth thought it odd that she was not allowed within 500 yards of one of her ex-boyfriends when apparently it's perfectly fine to sell drugs if you are 1001 feet away from a school.

The math simply didn't add up.

The county clerk just stared at her when she inquired about the stalking license and proved to be absolutely no help in directing her to the correct room.

The thing was, she knew that he still loved her. There could be no question about it. All the signs were there. It was just a dance they were doing.

The gentleman who issues death certificates was equally unhelpful. She thought for a moment that the government would find the demise of relationship on equal footing with the passing of a loved one, but apparently not.

She took that as a sign that the local officials knew their relationship wasn't dead after all. She just needed to put in some quality time lurking in bushes and hacking emails to show her ex that she was committed to the idea of happily ever after. Perhaps where they issue birth certificates...

She was hit with a wave of nostalgia when she passed the machine that took fingerprints. After a misunderstanding that resulted in the first restraining order, she'd been introduced to the guy who took her prints. They'd had such a nice time talking, she returned again the next day.

And the next.

Hence the second restraining order.

But that wasn't love. She understood that now. He was the rebound restraining order... although she kept a copy of her fingerprints over her bed just the same. Some ink just doesn't wash off.

The old woman at the naturalization office thought she was kidding, even after reviewing her paperwork. "You know you can't stalk people, right?" she asked Beth.

"Of course not. You need a permit for that," she replied and rolled her eyes.

"No," the lady countered "There are no permits for stalking. You can't do it." She fixed her gaze on Beth and added "It's simply not done."

Beth turned on her heel and departed. It was bad enough that this woman didn't know the answer to her question but to simply pretend that a stalking license didn't exist just to avoid admitting it seemed almost belligerent.

She drew a familiar blank stare from the guy who issues passport applications. Ditto with the man entrusted to process property deeds.

Exasperated, she even tried the Fish & Boat Commission but succeeded only in getting her yearly trout stamp. This year they had lumped in trout with salmon. "Typical," she muttered to herself.

Beth enjoyed fishing. Something about there always being more fish in the sea.

SPOILER ALERT: The guy who took her fingerprints really did love Beth. It was complicated.

# **a fish story**

Eugene had a problem.

Eugene loved fishing.

As a squeamish youth, his dad told him fish didn't have nerve endings in their mouths and he bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Let me take a moment to point out how witty that was. I hope you appreciated it and will keep a sharp lookout moving forward for similar bursts of genius.

Anyway, back to Eugene's problem. This idea that barbed hooks sinking into the mouth of a fish in order to haul it out of the water didn't actually hurt the fish in any way seemed all well and good until Eugene pulled out a fish only to see that the hook had gone right through the fish's eye. When he pulled the hook out, he held the fish in one hand but the eye still clung to the hook.

Hard to imagine the fish was fine with that.

Then came the catfish that had swallowed the hook so deeply that when Eugene finally got it out, most of the fish's intestines came with it. He dutifully threw the fish back into the water but about five minutes later the fish floated to the surface.

The fish couldn't possibly have been ok with being dead.

Fishing was barbaric and yet Eugene still wanted to fish. What did that make him?

A monster?

He imagined his father sitting in a boat eating a sandwich only to discover there was a huge hook in it and he was suddenly being pulled out of the boat by a fish swimming next to his small fish-son showing how to land a big one. His dad clinging to the railing desperately, not wanting to be pulled under the water. Blood pouring from his mouth. Hearing the father fish say to the son "Don't worry, they don't feel a thing in their mouths."

And he had this thought standing in the river casting. Still casting.

And feeling somehow that his dad deserved it. "What else did you lie about?" he wondered aloud. Still casting.

"Maybe the breakup wasn't mutual. Maybe mom did have feelings!" poured out and then he felt the tug on the line. He sunk the hook in and started to reel it in.

A big one.

He remembered the time he foul-hooked a big dumb carp right in the side of the body and had to drag it in sideways. It wasn't even trying to eat another living creature. That made it sadder. Somehow Eugene thought it made it easier to be cruel to a fish that was actively involved in being cruel to another fish, insect, or crawfish.

Of course, he understood the argument that eating isn't actually cruelty. It's just the nature of things. The way things are.

He leaned over and pulled the fish out of the water. Removed the hook, the only thing that had brought the two together. The only thing keeping it there.

Eugene put it back in the water and watched her drive away.

# **routines**

Once summer has succumbed to fall and until the icy grasp of winter has given way to spring, I start every morning by having a bowl of oatmeal.

I realize this might endanger the hard-partying image of myself I have created through the years, where most of you imagine I simply start the day by finishing off whatever is left in the bottle by my nightstand and introducing myself to whatever buxom woman is sprawled next to me, but I will not lie about my need for morning fiber.

Oatmeal with raisins, dates, and walnuts. And a scoop of strawberry jam.

Which jam isn't important. The type of oatmeal is critical and here's why: I tried a generic brand of oatmeal that contained raisins, dates, and walnuts and deeply regretted it. While my oatmeal-of-choice, Quaker, obviously travels the globe looking for the ideal spots to grow raisins, dates, and walnuts, it was obvious after one mouthful of the generic brand that they grew their raisins, dates, and walnuts side-by-side in a parking lot behind the factory.

Quaker knows what they're doing. Now believe me, I'm not happy about buying a product where there's a Quaker on the box staring out and judging me. I know it appears he's grinning, but I can see the scowl hovering beneath it. The alternative is to start every morning with sub-standard raisins, dates, and walnuts, so I just turn his judgmental face away from me and try and forget about Quaker minister James Nayler riding into Bristol (England) in the pouring rain back in 1656, chanting "Holy, holy, holy" and throwing off his clothes because he thought he was Jesus Christ.

Thus it was that I began this morning like I do every fall/winter morning with a bowl of oatmeal. I think I started the last sentence with "Thus it was" because my last paragraph mentioned 1656. A minor detail, but as the next few things I write will be very minor details, I thought I'd get you warmed up.

Every morning I take out two packets, shake them to get all of the contents to the bottom, tear the packets, and pour them into a bowl. This morning, for reasons I will never comprehend, I saw the contents clumped long-ways instead of top-to-bottom (the packets are horizontal) and instead of shaking them to the bottom to perform the morning packet-opening ritual, I decided – again, I have no idea why - to open the packets lengthwise.

It was a disaster. Oatmeal spilled out all over the place. Oatmeal, raisins, dates, and walnuts littered the countertop. It took nearly a minute to get all of the contents into the bowl. That's not even the worst part. I was so discombobulated, that after I poured in the milk and placed the bowl in the microwave, I threw away the packets. The very packets that I usually place the spoon upon as I await the oatmeal as it's heated in the microwave. Instead, I had to hold the spoon the full sixty seconds it took to heat the oatmeal. Standing there, hoping no nosy neighbor would peer into my kitchen and see me standing there like a complete idiot holding a spoon.

And people wonder why I'm not more spontaneous!

Why it was impossible to run off with that girl. That crazy wind-in-her-hair girl who preached making impulsive decisions with the same earnest look the guy on the Quaker box has. Earnest but you can see a shimmering sternness behind it.

Every day, my dog wants me to throw her ball so she can chase it and bring it back. You could wake her up in the depths of night and the first thing she'd want to do is chase her ball. She lives to chase her ball. Not a week ago, I saw her in the back yard so I decided to go out and play with her. I picked up her ball and threw it with all my strength to the far corner of the yard. My dog looked at me with a "You don't think I'm going to get that, do you?" look on her face.

My point being that you can never be sure about females.

Or yourself really.

I might be rambling a bit, but I think it's only fair to include all the details before asking you to reach a decision on why I'm not more spontaneous. Yesterday, I saw a book on my bookshelf that I hadn't read in years. _Rubber Balls and Liquor_ by Gilbert Gottfried. Smiling broadly, I removed it from the shelf and saw a bookmark of sorts poking out the back of it. It was the boarding pass from my flight to Paris where I read the book cover to cover. US Airways. Flight 754. I flipped through the book nostalgically, remembering not only how much I enjoyed Mr. Gottfried's autobiography but the trip to Paris.

On page 51, I found a pubic hair in the book.

How in the world could a pubic hair have gotten into the book? At no time did I take out my junk during the flight, I haven't cracked open the book since, and I'm quite certain I would have seen this rogue hair when I first read the book.

It just goes to show you.

You can't trust generic oatmeal, you can't trust Quaker ministers, you can't trust breaking routines, you can't trust females, and you certainly can't trust books by comedians not to attract pubic hair.

And then some people want to know why I'm not more spontaneous?

Holy, holy, holy shit, we know nothing about the chaos that swirls around us and inside us.

# **Neddy dreams of wild ape-men and regular men**

Neddy had a dream. Not a dream in the sense of some over-arching goal that put his life on any particular path, more like a one-time dream that had him sitting in bed trying to process what it meant.

The dream went something like this:

Bigfoot was real. After centuries of being considered nothing more than a myth, a large number of beasts suddenly walked out of the forest and introduced themselves to humanity. Towering creatures, these Bigfoots. A certain nervousness went through the human population making those first few months of interaction a bit awkward.

Dreams are vague like that. Other topics would intermittently pop up in Neddy's dream and sidetrack him for awhile before returning to the main storyline. Blurring whatever point this dream was supposed to make. Neddy read that dreams are all id; the superego doesn't get involved. Or maybe it was the opposite. Either way, Neddy took them very seriously because obviously part of his consciousness had something important to say. He even bought a book on dreams but the cover looked too much like it was a book on witchcraft so he had to toss it. He thought about writing down his dreams but he was afraid it might fall into the wrong hands and destroy his promising career as a movie theater usher.

He could point to a couple of dreams that would have the ticket-buying public unwilling to let him tear their ticket let alone butter their popcorn.

All of this should answer your question about what exactly would constitute awkwardness when it came to Bigfoot/human coexistence. That answer? Vague at best.

No further questions please.

Just an odd feeling that the Bigfoot didn't belong, if you want to press the issue.

That's when Neddy rode in to the rescue.

The fact that it involved a Squatty Potty did not come as a surprise to Neddy. He'd received one as a gift and although he'd never actually tried it, he'd dutifully put it next to his toilet and had routinely hit his feet against it every night as he completed his midnight piss. Squatty Potties had been present in at least half of his dreams ever since the day he'd unwrapped it. If only it looked more like a book on witchcraft so he could throw it out.

My thought, not his. Had he thought this, there's no doubt his next dream would be about a Squatty Potty with the ability to cast spells and fly around on a broomstick.

So, this divide between Bigfoot and humanity seemed unbridgeable and in Neddy's dream there seemed to be some terrible consequence right around the corner. That's when Neddy did his best work though. When the chips were down.

Like the time at the theater when they ran out of chips and he had to run to a nearby Sam's Club to buy more before the nacho-eating crowds descended.

So, he considered the physical magnitude of Bigfoot and realized the Squatty Potty as currently designed would never suffice. The size of the thing wasn't tall enough to raise the Bigfoots' knees above their hips and therefore they would never get the most from their bowel movements, so Neddy sat down and did some math in his dream. He wasn't sure which song was playing in the background; all he could remember was that it was inspiring. Perhaps _Eye of the Tiger_.

He made the Squatty Potty 20% larger and he called it the Sasquatty Potty and the Bigfoots were so appreciative of this, all the walls between Bigfoots and humans came tumbling down and they apparently were on track to live happily ever after.

Then he woke up and the real work began.

A simple act of kindness. A small gesture can mean so much. Blah blah blah. The point of the dream was so clear but Neddy couldn't figure out how or to whom to apply this lesson to. The Squatty Potty was a gift... but one he had not appreciated. In fact, it constantly hurt his feet.

Was he the Bigfoot?

Should he give the Squatty Potty a try?

The ads made them seem too much like witchcraft.

# **snakes on a higher plane**

If you believe truth is stranger than fiction, then I'm afraid you're going to be very disappointed in the following. Just putting that out there.

I awoke this morning to the grim realization that I had dreamt of snakes for the third night in a row. While no expert in dream analysis, I'm pretty sure that snakes and male genitalia are closely linked, so obviously some serious changes need to be made.

The fact that I'd seen a show called  _StarTalk_  last night, hosted by the delightful Neil deGrasse Tyson, where they were discussing meditation with Sam Harris, seemed like a sign that perhaps I should put aside my distrust of all things metaphysical and give it a quick look. So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I sat down and watched a few YouTube videos on how to meditate. I paid extra attention when the voice on the video sounded Far Eastern and yogi-like. After that, I showered and shaved, ate a somewhat tardy breakfast, bordering on brunch -what did I tell you about truth being duller than fiction? - then retired to my home office for a bit of the ol' looking inward.

It was a total bust.

I had even set a timer for five minutes so as not to overdo it. I can't believe I can't even sit up straight with my legs crossed without my body aching, making assorted cracking noises and generally complaining. I figure I had about fifteen to twenty seconds of listening to my breathing before my mind jumped in with a loud "Fuck this!"

I tried to wrestle back control but then my brain offered the following defense of its boorish disobedience: for the past sixteen billion years, the atoms that make up my body have been unable to express themselves. Completely inert. Not conscious in the least. In roughly thirty or so years, they will return to that state and it is likely they will stay that way for another sixteen billion years. Why waste a single second trying to suppress their thinking?! Have at it, atoms! I shouldn't even sleep if it means I can get off one more thought about boobs or farting!

Obviously, my brain made a powerful case against this meditation stuff.

But then I thought about the possibility of having yet another dream with a snake in it and decided to try again. On this  _StarTalk  _program (I always think calling it a program instead of a show makes me seem more intelligent), there was also a quick Skype interview with author Robert Wright talking about his new book  _Why Buddhism is True_. He had crazy eyes, so I thought the best course of action would be to immediately go to Barnes & Noble and buy the book. Perhaps he could make coherent argument for meditation that my brain could buy into.

I will tell you I purchased the book, but it almost didn't happen. I think I'd rather be caught flipping through books in the Adult Romance section (again) with my pants bulging in appreciation than linger in the section where this book was housed. I realize that life can seem pointless and harsh at times, but holy shit, are there some dumb ways to deal with it lurking out there! If I hadn't already known what the book looked like, and had it not have been prominently displayed, there is no way I would have been able to stand there, elbow-deep in such crack-pot stupidity for more than a few seconds.

I'm really hoping that meditation isn't a gateway drug to putting crystals on my nude body.

I'm sure the crystals would agree wholeheartedly. I might be an ego-maniac, but I'm well aware that if I was one of those people who lay naked at upscale parties covered in sushi, that at the end of the night, they'd be throwing away a lot of uneaten sushi.

It should be obvious by that last sentence why meditation is such a chore for me. It would seem to be a crime against humanity to squander even one brilliant thought of mine. But I put aside such arrogance and soldiered on, such was my fear of another snake dream.

Luckily for me, I'm good friends with a respected yoga instructor who's an expert on such things as meditation and bending your body into shapes it was never intended to form. After a quick exchange of text messages, he encouraged me to give it a sincere try, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. This evening will be spent curled up with  _Why Buddhism is True  _and a good cup of English Breakfast tea, with the goal of starting the day tomorrow with five solid minutes of exposing my inner complexes, immaturities, and unproductive habits.

And hopefully, getting rid of those fucking snakes in my dreams.

See? I told you. Truth is nowhere near as strange as fiction.

# **she don't fade**

It starts with a weird question that only she would take seriously.

Not even a question so much as an idea that led to several pressing questions.

"It would be hard to design a theater for pufferfish."

Simple. Eloquent in its stupidity. It assumes so many things about pufferfish and evolution and their desire to see scary movies; the mind reels.

I asked her to imagine a theater full of pufferfish the first time there was a scary scene.

I asked her to remember what pufferfish do when they get scared.

Suddenly, all those comfy seats are no longer occupied.

She soaked it all in. It took a moment and I could see her mind struggling to remove itself from the mire.

Instead of laughing it off or even calling local authorities to warn them that there was a madman on the loose, she simply closed her eyes and imagined a theater full of puffed-up pufferfish. Returning to their seats would be a lengthy process. Snacks would have been spilled. Chaos would reign and all the while the movie would still be playing.

Slowly, she asked the first of a dozen questions.

"How would they hold their snacks?"

In every picture I've ever seen of her, there's a glint in her eye that seems to ask the question "How do pufferfish hold their snacks in the theater?" I think she likes me because I believe I'm the only one who has ever seen that particular glint for what it is.

To begin answering that question, we had to tackle the physics behind a pufferfish theater. Location. Construction. The intelligence not only to build it but overcome the stigma of puffing up in front of their friends. Would a fish this smart mind watching a scary movie knowing eventually they would puff?

"Get back to the snack question," she politely prodded, knowing I was grasping at straws and boxes of candy trying to come up with an answer that met her high standards.

"Would pufferfish mind netting being placed overhead so that they didn't float all over the theater?"

She was nice enough to ask another question. This one I handled in a graceful and thought-out manner.

"Of course not. They know they're in for a good puffing. The netting will help them re-take their seats more quickly when they're done deflating."

Things inflate and deflate but I've never heard of anything flating. I was going to mention it but for the moment, she was lost in thought.

She stood near the edge of my bed, her back to the door.

She avoided any mention of what would scare a pufferfish in the first place. Something as simple as a shark, or would it take a machete-wielding mackerel to rattle the average pufferfish? I was dying to delve into that very topic, but she was having none of it.

"Would they rate the movie by how likely the viewer is to puff up? Perhaps the number of times in the film the fish was expected to lose it enough to puff?"

I asked her again if she thought a pufferfish would even like to be scared into puffing up. She answered that this was one of the givens in my idea. We assume this race of highly intelligent fish enjoy going to the theater and being scared. Take away this premise, and the whole thing collapses upon itself. Challenge the fact that an  _arothron hispidus_ would mind getting scared enough to puff up is unpleasant and you're left with a sentence that's possibly one of the dumbest things ever stated aloud.

I really liked this girl. The clarity of her imagination and the short skirts she usually wore to visit.

"Are we assuming that pufferfish are the only intelligent fish or can we add a wrinkle that some other fish actually build these theaters for them?"

She mentions that because she went on to suggest perhaps these other fish are the ones actually getting pleasure from the pufferfish puffing up during scary movies. Perhaps these fish actually watch the pufferfish watch the movie and roar with laughter every time the entire theater suddenly explodes with puffed-up pufferfish. They then share it on their Instagram account with everyone they know with titles like "Pufferfish watch _The Ring_."

Trying to keep her on topic, I simply answered that of course pufferfish are the only ones intelligent enough to build their theaters.

"Ok. Well... can popcorn pop under water?"

Suddenly, an orderly walked into the room with my medications and right through her. She gasped a little and like so much mist, she was cleaved in two and melted away.

I really miss her.

# **goodbye #4**

He climbed out on the fire escape and realized he was ready to have the realization. He'd been putting it off for so long, there was a part of him that started to believe there wasn't even a realization to be had.

But he owed it to himself. And he owed it to her.

And the city was going to hold its breath, however long it took.

All the neighborhood villains stopped their villaining so the neighborhood cops could sit quietly in their cars.

Fires decided to smolder and extinguish, which in turn allowed the local firemen to stay asleep in their bunks and avoid sliding down poles to turn on wailing sirens.

Traffic took a break from honking and even the restless spirits pushing their shopping carts through the alleys decided to sit down and rest. Restlessly, as would be expected, but silent.

The city skyline was dark in all the right places and lights shone everywhere else and the stars, planes, and satellites were especially twinkly above him.

There was a pleasant breeze.

It was time.

He sat there and acknowledged to himself that he'd never really wanted her to be happy without him.

He exhaled. His heart ached.

His head, suddenly heavy, sunk into his hands and stayed there for a long time.

He thought about her and them, and laughed and sniffled.

Could he really claim to care about her if he wanted her to miss him wildly? To feel how he felt? Is that how it worked?

He then realized, for the first time since they ended their relationship (here it was, the big realization, drum roll please), that he did sincerely want her to be happy. (Can something true be felt grudgingly?) He wanted her to move on and find happiness, even if that meant her being with someone else. To relegate him to the Fond Memory Department. The dreaded FMD.

"Ouch."

All the neighborhood villains returned to their villaining, so the neighborhood cops sat up straight and responded to their radios.

Impatient fires burst forth and the local firemen slid down their poles and turned on screeching sirens.

Traffic started honking again and restless spirits resumed searching dumpsters for bottles and cans and scraps of discarded food.

The city was still dark and lights flickered and sluggish clouds hid the stars.

The background hum had returned but he had one last realization to wrestle with.

The entire time he had thought that it was their story... but it wasn't.

It had been her story all along.

He inhaled long and leisurely.

And smiled. There was still a nice breeze after all along.

Goodbye #4.

# **I hate all the scooters in the whole world**

Spend a week at Disney World and you learn a few things. Some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them that legally can't be shared due to oppressive copyright laws that would have a flock of Walt's finest legal minds descending on you like a pack of hyenas if you so much as mentioned them.

With that in mind, I'd like to share a few thoughts with you about my week.

First of all, they should change the name of the joint to It's a Fat World After All. I can't believe they don't have to replace the sidewalks every few weeks. America has really let itself go. You don't even have to listen to the cacophony of goofy languages being spoken; you can pick out the local folks by the way they waddle their asses down Main Street. That is to say, the ones who are actually waddling under their own power.

In a dramatic example of "No good deed goes unpunished," Disney allowed a few people who had difficulty walking to drive scooters and now the streets are clogged with people who have no right to be sitting in scooters. The fat. The old. The lazy. They're all there... and usually about to board the same bus as I am. Once a fat person gets fat enough where they no longer even try to walk, you know they're never getting any thinner. It's over for them, mouse ears or not. At Disney, you can see the morbidly obese waving their own white flags as they power to the front of every line.

The only people giving them any resistance are the couples who feel that their one-year-old can only enjoy the sights and sounds of an amusement park when being pushed at speeds of over ten miles an hour. They use their offspring as battering rams as they crash through both pedestrians and food carts alike. If I had a dollar for every fat person on a scooter/high speed stroller pile-up, I'd have hundreds of dollars, which is just enough to buy a churro and a soft drink.

At Animal Kingdom, I learned that every animal alive runs faster than I do. There wasn't a single animal pointed out during the safari that didn't run at least forty miles an hour. Alligators. Hippos. Rhinos. Manatees. They all can haul ass compared to us puny humans.

The other thing they all have in common? The number one threat to their continued existence is, you guessed it, humans... despite the fact that we're apparently unable to outrun any of them. Watch any of the numerous presentations on the planet and you'll hear the narrator get all somber when it comes time to mention how people are ass-fucking every animal on the planet. For every picture they show of a happy baboon playing with a stick, they show a human jamming that stick right in the baboon's anus.

One unexpected wrinkle in my plans was the fact that there was some sort of cheerleading competition going on in the park. Everywhere I went, there were cheerleaders. You'd be standing in line for some ride and there would be unprovoked outbursts of clapping and shrieking. Everyone biting their lips and hoping these empty-headed whore-wannabes wouldn't find enough room to form a pyramid. All of them seemingly delirious with joy with their placing 83rd in whatever region they came from in tumbling or some other nonsense.

The worst part about Disney was the fact that although they claim the park isn't just for children, when I ended up in Fantasyland with my mind racing, search as I did, I could find nowhere to snort coke off the naked breasts of one of the whore-wannabes. Don't call a place Fantasyland and then expect me to sit and spin in a fucking teacup, ok? Maybe if I got to sit in the teacup and snort coke off the naked tits of a cheerleader... but I guess that's not exactly what ol' Walt had in mind.

Easily the best thing about Disney?

No poor people.

If you go to any other amusement park in the country, it's riddled with loud, annoying, shirtless poor youth who got in using some discount coupon or other. Heaven forbid you bring an even remotely attractive girl to the park; you'd spend the day listening to crude comments from these hooligans and poorly worded explanations as to why she decided to leave with one of them.

No such problem at Disney. The pricing makes it such that only middle-class people and above can afford to make the trip to the most magic of kingdoms.

If you're waiting for me to talk about the rides, you'll have to keep waiting. Nothing interesting goes on in a metal cart designed to reach G-forces that would make a mountain gorilla sterile. The only remotely interesting thing would be the picture they take of you and your fellow riders as you're starting your plunge into the murky depths. The look you get on your face makes it imperative that everyone else in the picture be killed in case they decide to reveal the photo to the world. Luckily, Disney has a solution for this. The Murder Package is expensive but worth every penny.

If you want interesting, go to the Disney gym in the morning. Not only do they have every machine known to mankind, you'll also get an old woman who shows up every day to do some sort of demented dance routine for a solid hour. There's no reason she needs to drag her carcass to the gym; clearly, she could do this in her room, but somehow you get the idea that it's important to her. Her hair is so jet black, it would be hysterical if it wasn't so sad. As soon as you see it, you wonder if the beat-up carpet matches the curtains. She seemed limber enough to throw a leg up on the counter and dye whatever remains of her aging bush, so I didn't count it out.

As I watched her, I could see the young version of her doing the same moves and getting a much different response from any man taking it in. It seemed almost like a vaudeville routine and after a few mornings, I could tell she did it exactly the same way. Lots of bending and hip shaking and I felt the presence of a thousand boner ghosts from days gone by.

If you want to be creeped out, imagine a thousand boner ghosts. Detached and floating at eye level.

Top that, Haunted Mansion.

It's at this point I should warn those of you who expect me to continue to poop on the Disney experience that you might be in for a shock.

I know I was when I thought this next thought.

Ironically, I'd had the same feeling a week earlier when I saw _The Lion King_ on Broadway. During a weepy song when Simba talks to his dead father in the stars, of all things.

I got the same rush of emotions watching the fireworks at the end of my day at Magic Kingdom.

What emotions, you ask?

It's complicated, but let me try to explain.

During both incidences, I realized that somewhere there were people whose only task in life is to bring joy and wonder to other people. I know, I know. I was sitting at ground zero of crass commercialism having this epiphany, but it's true. There are, of course, bankers and businessmen on Broadway and Disney watching our every buying habit and exploiting them, but they don't sing the songs or shoot off the fireworks.

Those people exist. The people who write the songs and dance the dances and light the fuses and the only thing in the world that motivates them is trying to make me happy.

I almost got choked up when it hit me.

In a planet choked with horrible people, there are still people who want to provide others with transcendent moments. And yes, I count myself among the horrible people - make no mistake. As they rehearse and scour the globe for new and more wonderful fireworks, I sit here and pollute the page with observations about fat people and cheerleaders and naked mole rats that have been clocked at speeds over fifty miles an hour.

I didn't belong at Disney. In the end, I didn't enjoy it. So much of the simple things about it were simply lost on me. I spent the whole time there looking for things to make fun of. I've always hated the stupid mouse and loathed the people who choose to wear a set of his ears on their head. Rollercoasters make me nauseous.

I looked up into the sky and knew that I was unworthy of the pyrotechnics going off over my head.

_"The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique."_

Walt Disney

_"No matter who you are or where you are, instinct tells you to go home."_

Laura Marney, " _No Wonder I Take A Drink"_

So, I came home.

And wrote about fat people on scooters.

# **a wonderful thought... ruined**

I overheard a woman marveling at the fact that a tiny seed can end up growing into a mighty redwood. Presumably mighty because of its size. I wondered to myself if she ever sat back and truly appreciated how amazing it is that a human embryo grows into the most intelligent creature to ever walk the Earth.

I got the feeling she didn't. Women, am I right?

Size matters.

This is where most people, when wondering to themselves, will call it a day and stop wondering.  They have wandered the safe wondering territory and then they head back to reality ready and eager to deal with life on its own terms.

I wondered one too many wonders. A common problem for me, it seems. I wondered what life would be like if humans grew like trees. We start out the same size as babies but keep growing straight up like trees do.

Now I got you wondering, haven't I?

The first thing you're probably wondering about is proportion. Do we all shoot up to redwood/300-feet-tall status or are we more modest in our growth? You could even make the argument for humans continuing to grow at the same rate we do as when we are children. Of course, this line of wondering grinds to halt when you realize that if you double in size every year for 80 years, you'll soon have problems getting enough oxygen in the inky blackness of space. Either that, or you have to imagine a race of giant hunchbacks crawling around the planet.

Let's just make 300 feet the ceiling in this wondering.

You'd have to wonder, given the PC world we live in, if different races would grow to different heights just like tree species. I'm definitely going to leave you to wonder about that on your own. I hope you appreciate how many funny and terribly racists things I'm leaving on the table here.

Dwarves could be shrubs. Just saying... no judgment here.

I would imagine that dating older men would be far more hazardous to younger women. Hazardous to their vaginas, to be more specific. How this would change the culture is really Grade A wondering material. How this would change the porn industry is really Grade Z stuff, but it probably won't stop you from doing a little wondering in that direction.

If you're waiting for me to say something like "getting wood" or "laying the lumber," you're obviously thinking of trees and not people. I never asked you to imagine tree people. Just normal people but enormous in scale.

Hopefully, there are some of you indignant that I'm even having to mention the role of sex in this new world we're wondering about and you've already started to wonder about the toll that this new size will have on our limited resources. I like to pretend that my audience isn't made up entirely of deviants and cretins, so wonderings like that are perfectly in line with my desired demographic. Wonder on, smart person!

But you do also have to wonder how awesome it would be if you're a 45-year-old man and you're whipping out a 34-foot erection. And the truth is, I do sort of picture it having tree-like qualities.

Damn it, you can see why I shouldn't be allowed to wonder to myself and then wonder out loud. I have this relatively interesting premise and all I can seem to attract are readers who envision giant tree people lumbering around tearing apart the vaginas of slutty younger girls trying to get free drinks (in a world where drinks must certainly be highly prized) or ahead at the company that makes shirts in one thousand sizes.

One last try at a reasonably intelligent observation about a planet populated with 300-foot-tall humans...

Seating! Chair sizes would vary wildly. How could you be expected to operate a restaurant?

And would people yell "Timber!" every time someone tripped?

What? No! Of course not! They're not fucking tree people. What don't you understand about this? Stop with the fucking tree people.

Ever wonder why you suck at wondering? Leave the damned wondering to experts like myself. Just look at the mess you've made of this.

Happy? Giant fucking tree people when all I asked you to wonder about is people larger than normal.

It's a wonder I even bother.

# **time flies**

Mosquitoes have netting and roaches have motels but there's only one insect that has a swatter: the fly. Think of all the annoying, stinging and/or dangerous insects around you (in Australia that means a solid hour plus of thinking) and yet humanity has designed only one weapon whose sole purpose is to eradicate this particular pest.

_Musca domestica_  of the suborder Cyclorrhapha. Living only a couple of weeks, they spend their entire lives flying around, contributing to the transfer of pathogens and food-borne illnesses.

Did I mention they were annoying?

Earlier today, a fly was buzzing around my head incessantly, trying its best to land on my face and deliver some hideous payload. After about the tenth time of brushing it away, I grabbed a fly swatter. One good swat later, the fly sat stunned at my feet. Not yet dead but clearly needing a moment to compose itself.

_Little Fly _  
_ Thy summer's play, _  
_My thoughtless hand _  
_Has brush'd away._

I did what any fly-hating man would do... I scooped it up and hurled it into the toilet. Not content with that, I tore a single sheet of toilet paper from the roll and delicately placed it over the fly to ensure its fate. Then, like any good Bond villain, I retired elsewhere, not needing to see the final act of the play. Secure in the knowledge of the fly's demise.

What could go wrong?

_Am not I _  
_ A fly like thee? _  
_Or art not thou _  
_A man like me?_

Later in the day, long after any thoughts of my triumph over said fly had passed, I returned to the scene of the crime to pee.

The fly was gone.

It was impossible. It should have drowned. I searched the entire bathroom, knowing without a shadow of a doubt it couldn't have gone far.

No body.

_For I dance _  
_ And drink & sing; _  
_Till some blind hand _  
_Shall brush my wing._

In World War II, the Japanese actually used flies as weapons, coating them with bacteria that caused cholera and dropping them in bombs on China. In Baoshan, the flies killed 200,000 people; in Shandong 210,000.

My point? You can't underestimate flies. They've been around since the Cenozoic era. They've picked up a few things.

_If thought is life _  
_ And strength & breath; _  
_And the want _  
_Of thought is death;_

I've pretty much gone through life assuming I was James Bond and yet there I was feeling more like the bad guy. I had the fly. Right where I wanted it. What made me think mere toilet paper would seal its fate? Was it that I was too squeamish to watch it twitch and struggle and finally expire, or was I just too arrogant to feel the need to see the act through?

I was right to be worried but even I underestimated the danger I was in.

Less than an hour later, I smelled gas. Normally I wouldn't have thought twice, but I was feeling on edge and it turned out my instincts were right on.

I ran for the front window and launched myself through it just as I felt the heat from the blast hit me.

_Then am I _  
_ A happy fly, _  
_If I live, _  
_Or if I die.*_

_*William Blake, "A Little Fly"_

# **a case of too much time on my hands**

The two men stood in the apartment, looking around. One held a small notepad and the other held his tongue.

There was nothing in particular he wanted to say, but you know how words get away from us.

They were detectives. One, a grizzled veteran and one, a hot-headed rookie. I can imagine how hard it is for you to figure out which was holding his tongue. They both have good reasons that you've probably mulled over, but I'll let you try and figure it out for yourself.

I was surprised to learn that "grizzled" just means graying. I had intended it to mean hard-boiled, someone who has seen it all. The older detective had been through the grizzling process and back so I hope you'll understand that graying really doesn't do him justice. Which, of course, is ironic for a detective.

Throw a few more lines on his face than you were imagining and we'll call it even.

A third man entered from the kitchen holding cups of hot chocolate. That right there should tell you that this was not the scene of a grisly murder. I originally spelled it grizzly but I'm sure that if there was a giant bear dead in the room, I would have mentioned it. I'm a bad writer, but that not bad. Had it been a large grey bear, would I have called it a grizzledly?

No. I might be a bad writer... yep... that about sums it up.

The man, who was the reason the two detectives were standing in the room to begin with, handed them each a mug.

"So, you want to tell us again why we're here?" asked the younger detective, noting quickly that his hot chocolate lacked tiny marshmallows. Detectives are good like that. Even when it might not look like it, they are usually taking note of something.

"As I explained, I received a rather large shipment of dog treats and toys and I have reason to believe that the culprit who ordered them is currently incarcerated in a cage in the kitchen."

The older detective looked out the open window and saw a grey cat sitting on the outside ledge, watching the proceedings with a great deal of interest.

Yes, I know I could have called him a grizzled cat at this point, but I didn't want you picturing him with lines on his face.

"Can we speak to the perp?" asked the younger detective. He loved using the word perp almost as much as he hated hot chocolate without tiny marshmallows.

"Not unless you speak dog," replied the home owner.

The older detective turned the corner to see a large dog (not grizzled as far as color but very grizzled when it came to lines on his face) sitting forlorn in his crate.

The homeowner walked to the kitchen and hit a key on his laptop so that it would wake up and allow him to continue his story. "If you'll come over here, gentlemen, you'll see my web history indicates someone was on my laptop when I was at work two days ago." Dutifully, the two men strolled over to take a look.

"And you think it was your dog?" asked the older detective.

"Yes," the man replied. "It makes perfect sense. He could have watched me enter my password and then jumped up on a chair when I was out." I realize that's an awkward sentence, but it's just as he said it. Can't blame me for that.

"Man's best friend indeed," snarled the younger detective.

"How could he possibly manipulate the keyboard with those big paws?" asked the older detective, more to himself than anyone else.

"I don't know," admitted the homeowner. "But who else would have ordered nothing but dog treats and toys?"

The younger detective drew his weapon and stuck it through the bars of the cage, pressing it against the dog's head. "Finally... some action," he said more to anyone else than himself.

"Wait!" implored his older partner.

"I'm sick of waiting!" barked his hot-headed partner, his finger tightening on the trigger of his weapon. And yes, I characterized it as barking because of his proximity to a dog.

"You fool! Don't you see that this dog was framed?" roared the grizzled and getting gristlier partner.

"You mean....?" Was all the homeowner could splutter out before he saw movement behind him.

"That's right, it was me!" said the cat.

"He's got a gun!" warned the older detective and quickly pulled the homeowner to the ground.

The young detective responded instinctively and shot two rounds into the wall on the opposite side of the kitchen and one into the ceiling fan. The cat, although being much faster, was still attempting to figure out a way to fire his weapon without an opposable thumb.

Regaining his composure, the younger detective opened the cage and the dog sprang into action, quickly crossing the short distance between himself and his furry arch-nemesis, running by him completely and launching himself into the giant pile of boxes containing dog toys and treats.

"You won this round, coppers!" said the cat as he dropped the gun and made for the window.

"Who says coppers?" asked the homeowner.

"What's a copper?" asked the younger detective.

"This," said the veteran detective "is a copper," and with that, he grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck.

"I don't understand," said the younger detective.

"He means that he is a copper," said the homeowner.

"But what is a copper?" asked the younger detective again.

Then the homeowner and the older detective had a good laugh.

Then the younger detective drowned the cat.

Then, mercifully, the story was over.

# **why I'm not successful as a writer**

The question of why I'm not successful as a writer is an easy one to answer, really. And it goes well beyond my inability to know if you capitalize the "as" in the title  _Why I'm Not Successful as a Writer_.

It's because I'm unlikable as a person. Truly unlikeable. To know me is to loathe me.

What's worse is I won't truly accept this. In fact, I have created this outside entity I call "The Universe" to avoid being accountable for my own failings.

I blame "The Universe" for all good and bad things that befall me, as if I'm the lead character in some cosmic sitcom and helpless to affect my destiny in any way. Trapped to live out the circumstances presented by some cruel and hilarious "Universe" for the amusement of some other-worldly audience.

You want an example, don't you?

You're so predictable.

Did you know that if you keep an almond in your mouth long enough, the skin comes off?

It does.

And creates these little chunks (I accidentally typed "chinks" and spent a few moments wondering if I could work in a Chinese reference... unsuccessfully. Exhibit #317 why I'm a bad guy) of brown skin that adhere nicely to your teeth. This allows you to walk around and talk to people with what appears to be advanced stages of tooth decay.

Walk around and talk to people and continuously smile broadly to make them uncomfortable. That's what I do to amuse myself. The more they squirm and find my visage unbearable, the more I beam.

A 100% pure asshole move. And to what end? I'm the only person who gets a laugh out of it. I'm not on some hidden camera show where I'm making faceless masses chuckle away. No. I'm doing it just to make myself laugh.

Bad enough, I realize, but then I have the balls to blame "The Universe" when these very same hijinks blow up in my face.

So, I'm driving around smiling at other drivers when I pull into a grocery store to buy sunflower seeds (I realize you didn't need to know what I was buying and even if you did, sunflower seeds are about the lamest items you could imagine someone offering up unprovoked. Exhibit #673 why I'm a bad writer) and singing a song at the top of my lungs. When I depart my vehicle, I continue bellowing  _32 Flavors_  by Ani DiFranco, a decision that had some very unexpected consequences.

But first, a quick clarification about the song choice. Obviously, I sing "I'm a poster boy with no poster" instead of "I'm a poster girl with no poster," but what you might not see coming is that I sing "22 Flavors" instead of "32 Flavors" because Ani clearly has 10 more flavors than I do on my best day.

About 22 feet from my car, a ridiculously beautiful girl walks up from behind me and starts to tell me that  _32 Flavors_  is her favorite song in a way that makes it very apparent that the spoils that await a man who is caught singing the song in her presence are nothing less than carnal in nature.

This is very good news.

The type of news that has a man smiling broadly.

The type of news that has a man smiling broadly without remembering that his teeth are littered with bits of almond skin.

Almond skin... the 33rd flavor.

A flavor that has her throwing up a little in her mouth.

She briskly retreats back to her car and I have the gall to begin blaming "The Universe." Almond skin still sticking to my teeth, I lean back and bellow "WHY?!" at the top of my lungs even though I know why.

Why? Because I'm an idiot.

I know that when other writers ask the question "Why Am I Not a Successful Writer?" they probably list dozens of reasons having to do with the lack of sophistication of the masses, their own edginess, or being ahead of their time, but the truth is, I know exactly why I'm not successful.

I'm a bad writer. What I write is bad, and while that doesn't necessarily mean I can't be successful (insert any number of truly hideous book titles that have gone on to sell millions), it does mean that I should try a little to promote these horrible things I write.

But I don't.

And then I blame "The Universe." With the release of every new book, I look at the sales numbers and then lean back and bellow "WHY?!" at the top of my lungs even though I know why.

And then I take a deep breath and think of that scene in Batman where the Joker says "See, I'm a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder... and gasoline! Do you know what all of these things have in common? They're cheap!"

So are almonds, "Universe."

So are almonds.

# **it tolls for thee**

And so it came to pass that the brilliant writer Ernest Hemingway approached the studios of NBC in 1989 clutching a manuscript entitled  _For Whom the Bell Saved_...

And.... in record time, I'm going to pull the plug on this story.

One sentence and done.

You see, the premise is that in an alternate universe, Hemingway was not born until the mid 60's and, having been raised on a diet of new wave music and bad sitcoms, he never developed the insights that made him such an iconic figure in our reality. Alas,  _The Sun Also Rises_  and  _A Farewell to Arms_  were destined never to escape from his pen. Instead, his literary attention was held captive by the lighthearted antics of a group of attractive high school kids and their principal.

You can see why I brought the whole thing to screeching halt like I did.

The biggest problem?

Who the hell would get it if I followed through and began to describe a mash-up of F _or Whom the Bell Tolls_  and  _Saved by the Bell_? I can draw humorous comparisons between Robert Jordan and Zack Morris all day long and, no matter how brilliant they might be, nobody on the planet will be familiar with both of these characters. The world is neatly divided up between people who are familiar with Robert Jordan and those familiar with Zack Morris.

You see the problem? There is no audience for this particular story. Zip. Zero.

I can juxtapose Rafael and Screech 'til the cows come home, but there will simply be nobody to appreciate it.

It's a shame, really. I had a couple of Spanish Civil War metaphors that would have been especially captivating when played out at Bayside High School.

Speaking of metaphors, it is true that I tend to lean on them a bit too much. This was brought home to me when I wanted to ask a simple question but couldn't do it without making it appear as though I was writing an elaborate metaphor. I swear I wasn't.

I just was wondering where hummingbirds go in the winter. I fully realize that our version of Ernest Hemingway would be off and running with that question, implicating the fragile nature of the hummingbird with the cold indifference of winter and cranking out a hundred thousand words that would leave no dry eyes in the house.

Even the Ernest who was born in the mid 60's and wrote such hella-crap as  _For Whom the Bell Saved  _would probably be able to wrestle a decent premise out of such a question.

Not me. I just stood outside and looked longingly at the flowers that attract said hummingbirds when the weather is nicer and got to missing them and hoping they were ok.

Fucking cold out today. The kind of cold that would make a hummincicle if they weren't careful.

Civil wars or high school hallways or winters, the world can be a rough place.

And here it comes.... the goddamned metaphor.

_No man is an  Island, entire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee._

And so it came to pass that the brilliant writer Lance Manion approached the studios of NBC in 2018 clutching a manuscript entitled  _For Whom the Bell Saved_...

# **please...**

He moved into the house freshman year of high school. The tree was already grown enough to sit outside his second-story bedroom window. When it was windy, it would scratch the siding and when he'd seen a scary movie, it would throw shadows in his room and make it difficult to fall asleep.

Sophomore year, he met her; just as he was able to convince himself that there were no such things as monsters, he found another reason to have difficulties getting to sleep.

Not all nights spent tossing and turning on your bed are scary.

Some are.

They were friends and they dated and they had arguments and they grew up.

When they were in college, they were friends and they dated and they had arguments and he found that he missed the sound of branches on his window at night. When it got really windy and yet remained silent, he had no alternative but to miss her.

His parents were killed in an accident his senior year. He wished he had missed them more when they were alive. He felt angry at himself for all the hours he had missed her when they could have been spent being homesick.

When he graduated, he moved back into his house. She got a job in another city. Her last night in town, they went out and got drunk and made a promise that if in ten years they hadn't both found someone, they would reunite and get married and live happily ever after. They agreed on the meeting place and the day and time and then they kissed goodbye.

Nine years and nine months later, there was a storm and the tree outside his bedroom window fell down. It cost a fortune to remove and he was disappointed to find they couldn't install another tree of equal size in its place. Eventually, he went out and bought two small trees and placed them close enough that they would have no option but to grow into each other.

One for his dad. One for his mom.

The first windy night after the tree had toppled to the ground, he sat on his bed and missed the noise of branches scraping the house. He missed his parents. After all the years that had passed, he missed her.

And remembered the promise they had made.

The next morning, he bought the plane ticket.

The next night, he drew a tree on his window blind.

It wasn't enough.

The next day, he bought a small fan and a transparent curtain to put over the blind. On that, he drew smaller branches. That night, he put the fan on the ground on its slowest setting to blow against the curtain and make the branches sway.

It helped.

So much effort to try and recapture something that was gone.

He decided it was best not to remind the girl of their meeting. Chances were that she'd forgotten and it would hurt too much to hear it.

A few months later, he walked into a barber shop with a picture of how he wanted his hair to look. In fairness to the barber, it was a very common style, but the model that was shirtless and buff and he knew however much he emulated the cut, his client would be disappointed.

He was, but the next day he boarded the flight anyway. He pulled down the little shade over the window and drew a few branches.

He knew she probably wouldn't be there but he hailed a cab and was dropped off in front of their agreed upon destination.

He closed his eyes and thought to himself "Please..."

He opened his eyes and said out loud "Please..."

He walked down the little corridor and his heart ached and he repeated the word "Please" one more time.

He turned the corner and she was there.

# **the milkman and human kindness**

The year was 1925. Cars looked very similar to how they appear today but they were pulled by horses, as the engine hadn't been invented yet. Houses had refrigerators but they were still room temperature. They had figured out ice centuries before but they couldn't figure out how to keep it cool so it could keep other things cool.

The whole domino theory of technology. Which makes you think... one can only imagine what dominos will look like in the future... or how they'll fall.

Anyway, Sam Cauldwell brought people their milk every day. He didn't start out being a milkman. In fact, at one time in his life, it would have been the last thing he thought he would end up doing. He started out selling dry goods before he met the love of his life.

What are dry goods?

I was afraid you'd ask that. I heard the term in an old Western and while I realize that 1925 is a long way away from the Old West, I still imagine, given the aforementioned problems associated with refrigeration, that most goods were probably dry or even dehydrated.

Whatever the case, when he fell in love (we'll call her Diane), all of that ended. You see, he fell in love just as Diane had decided to stop dating him. Literally, the two decisions came within minutes of each other. One of those "I have something to tell you, too. You go first," type of things.

He was heartbroken.

So much so that he gave up his promising career in selling dry and dehydrated goods and got the only job where he could visit her on a daily basis. Lady Macbeth might have been quoted as saying " _Glamis  thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be what thou art promis'd. Yet do I fear thy nature, it is too full o' the' milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way,"_ but the rest of us typically have warmer sentiments for milkmen and milk and kindness and whatnot. Had Lady M been around to give him some career guidance, things might have been different.

Why didn't Diane love him back, you ask?

Outstanding question and one which takes a little imagination to answer. You see, his idea of a romantic game was for the two of them to go to the park and play Duck Duck Goose. Just the two of them.

See what I mean about the imagination part?

I'll start you off. She would sit in the middle of the field and he would circle her for minutes at a time patting her head and saying "Duck." Eventually he would say "Goose!" and she would spring up and not know what to do. He would typically run away a few feet then fall over laughing, barely able to contain his glee.

He also believed that when Galileo first concluded the Earth wasn't the center of existence, it caused small tidal waves and earthquakes as the planet sorted out the new rules. If everyone had reached that conclusion at the same time, it would have been an extinction event.

I never implied that she didn't have a good reason not to love him.

So as her milkman, Sam got to have a front-row seat to her various romantic endeavors. While math had yet to be invented, he figured she had far more Ducks and Gooses visiting her than most. He would see them leaving her house every morning as he dropped off her cream, cheese, and butter for the day. Feeling the bitterness of secretly knowing that these men had recently dropped off their own version of yogurt.

But every day, he made his rounds nonetheless, checking up on her and making sure she had enough calcium- and this was before calcium had even been discovered. He just felt that milk was something important for her bones and teeth.

Love is like that. It gives us insights into vitamins and minerals and then turns a blind eye to affairs of the heart.

The weird thing is that due to crazy circumstances, he ended up starting his own delivery company. Due to his reliability, all of the dairy farmers trusted him over his competitors, and he became a very successful milkman. You might even call him a milk tycoon.

Unfortunately, Diane didn't stay around long enough to see him become successful. She moved and eventually he forgot about her entirely. This was before self-help books.

Love was like that back then.

# **stranger than strangers**

David Grey owns the diner. It was a slow day, so he told the waitress she could leave early, which left him alone to both work the counter and cook the food.

David looks surprisingly similar to Dennis Quaid... but this is not his story. Not David's and certainly not Dennis Quaid's. How I wish it were. I would actually be getting paid to write it. But then again, he'd probably want it to be true, which would mean research and interviewing other people and frankly, he'd probably fire me after reading the first paragraph. Probably a paragraph where the word probably appeared twice for no good reason.

There's only one customer in the diner at present. His name is William Stanton. His friends call him Bill.

This is his story.

And yes, I realize nobody is clamoring to hear it and I will definitely not get paid to tell it. Well, probably not.

Bill sits at the counter waiting for his omelet to come out. David is pouring him a cup of coffee.

When I tell you that the diner is empty, I should also add that it's almost always empty. It's located in such a bad spot that if you look out of one of the dirty windows, you can see the middle of nowhere. The type of diner where the only people who walk in are usually there to grab something to eat while they wait for a tow truck.

Like Bill.

"What brings you to our neck of the woods?" David asks amiably. And ironically, as there aren't more than a few dozen trees within a hundred miles of the place.

"My truck broke down," Bill answers equally amiably but without irony.

David disappears into the kitchen and returns moments later with an omelet. I'll leave it to you if there are hash browns and/or toast on the plate.

Trying to keep up the amiable momentum, David inquires, "How long until your tow gets here?"

"I didn't call one. I don't have enough money to tow it anywhere let alone fix it. The thing weighs 55,000 pounds."

Taking in this information, David frowns, feeling his chances of remaining purely amiable starting to dry up. He switches gears and tries a more conciliatory approach.

"I wish I had something a little stronger than coffee to offer you."

Bill offers up a grin in return. He finishes his coffee in one large gulp and gestures for a refill in the time-honored tradition of lifting the empty cup and nodding slightly in its direction.

David nods back and leans over to grab the pot from behind him.

Bill looks a lot like the actor who played Shooter McGavin in _Happy Gilmore_. Honestly, I think I'd rather be telling you the Christopher "Shooter" McDonald story, but I guess I should accept the fact I'm not going to be writing any famous person's autobiography any time soon. I should count myself lucky to be telling you about William "Bill" Stanton, given my attention span. I'm sure Bill would much rather have his story told by Rich Cohen or Walter Isaacson but as you'll soon see, he should be happy I took the time to jot it down.

Three cups of coffee later, Bill gets down to it. Truth is, David enjoys hearing travelers' tales. It takes his mind off his failing business.

"I'm driving back from Hollywood. Well, I was driving back. I appeared on one of those competition shows on the Food Network."

David perks up. "How did you do?"

"Terrible. It couldn't have gone worse."

"Things can always be worse," David says in his most comforting voice.

In order to clarify things, Bill takes a long breath and begins what we call in the literary game as the "money shot."

"You see, I was on a show that featured ice cream trucks. We all had to set up shop outside some fairgrounds and at the end of the day, everyone who stopped by rated us and the one with the highest rating won $10,000. It was going to be my big chance to showcase my big idea."

Like yourself, David stands up a little straighter and awaits the big idea.

"I had this idea... something that would change ice cream trucks forever. What if..." and his voice trails off. He looks at the ceiling.

"Go on," urges David.

"What if ice cream trucks were combined with other things that have to make their way through neighborhoods?"

"Like mail trucks?" David inquires.

"Sort of. Actually, that's a pretty good one. I wish I would have thought of mail trucks." His attention returns to the fascinating things not taking place on the ceiling. Eventually, he continues.

"I had the idea to combine an ice cream man with a garbage truck."

David looks at the door in the hopes of a new customer's arrival. Or the arrival of a pack of stampeding wild rhinos. The diner remains annoyingly rhino-free.

"Hear me out," Bill pleads, worried his new friend will disappear back into the kitchen never to return. "Two birds with one stone. The garbage man has to stop at every house; why not throw a big speaker on the top of the truck, play some happy music, and sell ice cream as you pick up trash?"

It becomes clear that Bill would like some validation, so after a few seconds David comes up with "Sure. The kids wouldn't even have to chase the truck. It would stop right at their house."

"Exactly! I built a garbage truck that had an attached ice cream section in back."

It's at this juncture in the story that David is suddenly awash with pride with his own business plan of buying a diner hours away from any population center.

"I was going to use this ice cream truck TV program to introduce the concept to the world," he sighs. "But it didn't go so well."

David pours himself a cup of coffee as Bill works up the nerve to share.

"No matter how much you scrub out the garbage part of the truck, the smell just won't go away. The flies! Merciful heavens, the flies. Great swarms of them. I was asked to leave before the challenge was even over. It was humiliating. I should have never agreed to sit stationary at a spot that has dozens of food vendors within a stone's throw. The idea of the garbage/ice cream truck is dependent on constant movement so the flies don't get a chance to become a thick black horde."

"So, what'll you do now?" asks David.

"I'm going to sit and drink coffee awhile."

And so he does and thinks about mail/ice cream trucks and fire/ice cream trucks and even garbage/mail/fire/ice cream trucks that are a city block long. All the things that could have been.

Eventually, the sun starts to set outside and the light gets all squinty in the diner.

"Is there a Mrs. Garbage/Ice Cream Truck?" David asks.

"No. There was one girl I was vetting for the position but that ended recently. Want to hear the last thing I ever texted her?"

Given the fact David has been alone with Bill for a few hours now, he feels he has to be tactful about how he responds to this question. Bill jumps in before he can answer.

"I texted her 'Dyslexic: the eighth dwarf.'" Bill, feeling like quite the showman, lets it sink in before continuing. "You see, we'd been fighting and I wanted to say 'hi' but I typed 'ho' instead and sent it without looking. Once I realized my mistake, I quickly typed it correctly and hit send. Then it occurred to me that 'ho' might have some negative connotations so I'd better come up with something witty to defuse the situation... so I typed 'Dyslexic: the eighth dwarf.'"

David clearly doesn't get it, so Bill starts to whistle the _Heigh-Ho_ song. Once David understands the reference, he wonders if the potential Mrs. Garbage/Ice Cream Truck would have ever gotten it without the accompanying whistling. Feeling like this possibility needs to be explored a little, David says "That was the last thing you ever said to her?"

"Yep. I couldn't imagine a better or worse way to wrap things up, so I let sleeping dogs lie."

"How in the world is a relationship like a sleeping dog?" David wonders to himself but doesn't say it. What he does say next changes things for both of them.

Which incidentally explains why my career as an autobiographer begins and ends with William Stanton. The more I disclose about a person, the less I understand why events unfold as they do. At some point, you're going to ask why in the world Bill would accept the offer to start an ice cream stand outside a diner butting right up against the middle of nowhere and I'm not going to be able to explain it.

I guess that's your job now.

# **the sterile variety**

Daniel's life was not one that included any threat of being followed. Both his career and personal life allowed him to feel that not only was he not being watched, but there wasn't another person on the planet who was paying any attention to him whatsoever. At no point in time had he ever had the feeling he was being observed.

Which, he thought to himself, is just what they want you to believe.

What, he also thought to himself, could it hurt to spend a day making sure he wasn't being tailed?

Because he was certain he was in no danger of actually being tailed, he thought he'd better make sure his method of eluding the aforementioned wasn't the run-of-the-mill stuff you see in movies. That might shake a trained government operative, but it certainly wasn't going to lose the type of non-entity he was completely sure wasn't following him to begin with.

Start out with a good breakfast. He was going to need it. Then walk into the middle of the town and get on the first bus he saw. Get off at the third stop. Hail the nearest taxi and ask them to take him to where they picked up their last passenger.

Repeat this taxi maneuver three more times.

Have a good lunch and, wherever it might be, tell anyone who will listen that this was your favorite place to eat growing up.

That really didn't really have much to do with shaking a tail, but that was one of the luxuries of not actually being followed by anyone.

I'm not even going to bother to tell you about his plans for after lunch because he never got that far.

The first bus was a non-stop to Toledo. "Toledo? I didn't know buses even went there. Only in cartoons do they go to Toledo. Or maybe a musical from the 40's," he fumed to himself. He got on anyway.

That took him until lunch and then some.

On the trip, he had plenty of time to think about things. Assuming that the bus went back and forth between his town and Toledo, the third stop would be in Toledo so he wasn't really violating his rules. He also thought about how there weren't many things on the human body that came in pairs.

Eyes and testicles were about it.

And he was pretty sure about kidneys.

Then, as he crossed the Ohio state line, he realized he'd have to count hands and feet and ears. All of a sudden, it seemed to Daniel that everything on or in the human body came in pairs.

Except for heads and hearts.

And noses and buttholes and every other internal organ. Upon further review, it appeared everything was split pretty evenly between one and two. He had an uncle that had three nipples, but that didn't make the drive to Toledo pass any quicker. The person sitting next to him must have held the same opinion because after hearing about Daniel's uncle's third nipple, he got up and moved to another seat.

Eager to return to the plan, he grabbed the first taxi he saw after leaving the confines of the bus in Toledo and found out the driver had just started his day of driving, had not picked up anybody before Daniel and refused to take him to his home. Daniel tried to explain his plan to the driver and the necessity to end up where the driver last was.

"And then what will you do?" inquired the driver.

"Well, call a cab, I guess."

"Which will be me. And by your own rules I'll be forced to take you right back here."

"I see your point," confessed Daniel, following the logic of his argument. "I guess you have me on a technicality."

So, Daniel gave him a twenty-dollar bill for the two trips he didn't take and was about to close the door when the driver added one last thing. "Sounds to me like events are conspiring to make sure that you stay followed."

Then he drove off.

Daniel looked around as inconspicuously as he could. The surrounding Toledians seemed a shifty lot. To anything but the keenest eye, they would seem almost completely oblivious to Daniel's presence.

A few minutes later, a taxi wandered by. It was hailed and Daniel climbed in. Instructions were given.

Some minutes later (some being a few more than few), he climbed out at the Ritter Planetarium on the campus of the University of Toledo and was just in time to catch their new presentation,  _Ghost Particle_.

A "ghost particle" is the nickname given to a specific set of sub-atomic particles called a neutrino by physicists because they're so hard to detect. Because they don't carry an electric charge, the only practical way to spot them is to wait until one bumps into a proton or a neutron and causes a reaction.

"So, I'm being watched after all," said Daniel as he sat in the dark.

# **entanglement**

Just before my hand reached the door of my car, my dog jumping and fidgeting in a hyper manner to my right in her enthusiasm to depart said vehicle, my other hand produced an iPod from my pocket. My dog leaving the car would have to wait a tick as what sat in my hand defied all logical explanation. The cord to my headphones was tangled.

Impossibly tangled.

Only minutes before, I had untangled them before putting them in my pocket. In the course of a five-minute car ride, they had become tangled again. From sitting motionless in my pocket.

Instead of doing what I would typically do and rip and tear at them while peppering the air with profanities, I took a breath and examined them a little closer. There was no doubt about it; what I was observing was physically impossible. They were tangled and knotted in such a way that could not have happened in five minutes if I gave them to someone who's sole task was to spend those three hundred seconds tangling them and tying them in knots.

I was holding something in a state that I could not be holding it.

Which is a very similar sentiment held by many physicists about quantum entanglement. For those of you who do not know what quantum entanglement is, let me give you a quick definition lest you miss the full impact of the soul-rousing conclusion I have in store for you. Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance – instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole. In other words, one particle of an entangled pair "knows" what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.

As I sat holding my tangled headphones, I couldn't help feeling that both realities involved some sort of sorcery.

It wasn't until I was deep in the woods with my dog that it hit me that people become entangled as well. In the fashion of my headphones and, if the physics behind quantum entanglement can be believed, connected to one other person in a way that appears to be nothing short of creepy and wonderful at the same time.

I believe I recently unknowingly conducted an experiment that could help to prove or disprove said theory, one involving sitting alone in my living room with a guitar, singing a song at the top of my lungs in the hope that a certain girl several million miles away would think of me for reasons she could not fully understand.

Tests have to date proved inconclusive.

Maybe she's just another knot in my headphone cord.

Long walks in the woods typically help me untangle life's little problems but, in this case, I felt like many of the early physicists who couldn't quite make the leap from what works on paper to what they actually believe.

Then I thought of another person who spent a great deal of time hiking through woods, Henry David Thoreau, and his observation "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see," and the rest of the walk was delightful.

He would have made a great physicist.

# **flooded**

A few weeks ago, Sandra was awakened in the depths of night by her phone loudly beeping and flashing. The word WARNING was scrolling across her screen and a brief panic swept over her as she imagined nuclear armageddon or an alien invasion.

As a side note, you can't believe what a struggle I had with autocorrect to stop it from capitalizing "armageddon." Just because something is mentioned in the bible, doesn't mean it gets capitalized in my book. I'm clearly using it as a generic reference to an end of the world scenario, so hold the A.

And that end of the world scenario ran through Sandra's head as she opened the message to find that it was only a flood alert.

Sandra lives on high ground. Very high ground. The only end of the world scenario involving a flood at her house would have to involve an ark containing two of every animal.

You'll notice I didn't capitalize ark either. I like to be consistent.

Sandra sat in bed, wide awake at three in the morning, and raged at the government and their intrusion into her life and sleep. "Nanny state bullshit," she fumed. If they didn't have the technology to determine who would and would not be affected by the flood, they shouldn't have abused their authority by waking everyone just to reach only a few people, was her opinion.

Last night, she again woke up with a start.

The dream started with her in line for some sort of attraction. It was unclear exactly what. She was herded onto an open top double-decker bus but instead of a regular seat, she was led into an individual compartment on the second level (a dressing room, maybe?). The man standing in the booth next to her looked a lot like Karl Pilkington. In retrospect, she assumed that was because she always associated double-decker buses with being British.

You'll note that I have no problem capitalizing British. To my knowledge, it was never directly mentioned in the bible. As another side note to note, had the bible mentioned Karl Pilkington, I would have been much more impressed with it.

In her dream, she's driving along when suddenly, on a road stretching between the mainland and some small island, water starts to pour in from either side. She stands up to warn the other passengers when the flooding starts to swallow up cars in front of them. She feels panic welling up as she realizes Karl is trying to hang on to her. She rips his hands off of her and shouts at him that she can't swim.

That's a lie. While she is definitely not a strong swimmer, she can swim. Any mixed emotions about her reaction are soon swept away as the water reaches the second level of the bus and she is forced to try and leap off the bus and grab a hold of the metal railing that has somehow materialized over the highway.

She hurls herself out of the bus and swims and somehow manages to climb up the railing to safety. Karl does not fare so well. The moment her feet are clear of the water, she clutches the heavy black metal but there is no water anywhere to be seen. She is in a sleepy small town on a beautiful day with the sun shining down. She steps down from the railing and starts to walk and then she wakes up, her heart still hammering in her chest from her close call.

It takes a while but she ends up thinking she was wrong about the government sending out the flood warning a few weeks back. She regrets the nasty email she sent to local authorities.

I personally don't agree with her conclusion at all. How she arrived at it is beyond me. I guess I should have warned you that Sandra is a crazy person.

# **giving a crap**

_"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."_

-Arthur C. Clarke

That's the quote that was running through my head as I flushed. The porcelain portal that whisks away the poop. I can't think of a single gadget that mankind has come up with that smacks of sorcery more than the toilet. Touching a single lever removes our foulest secretions and hurls them to some unseen facility miles away from our five senses.

Whenever I hear a door creak as it's opened, I think the sound is its way of protesting. Same when I push down the plunger on the toilet. Like I'm forcing it to accept another load of my feces, the swirling water just a way for the toilet to brace itself until it's ready to swallow. To further anthropomorphize it, the following suddenly pops into my mind:

_"I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid._

_The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning._

_I keep on swallowing."_

-C.S. Lewis

And don't pretend you know where the crap is going or how it gets there. I can throw out the usual terms like sewage drains and treatment facilities, but the truth is, I have no idea what my poop is in store for and neither do you. The only difference between us is this lack of wisdom bothers me and no amount of research seems to help. I simply don't believe the explanations. It all seems so dubious. If you look at a large apartment building, you're looking at hundreds upon hundreds of toilets, each used numerous times a day. How many pounds of waste are we talking about? Then imagine that large apartment building being one of hundreds in a large city and the mind boggles. Tons and tons of smelly crap going where? We're not talking some rustic compost set-up where bacteria and insects can slowly absorb it into the surrounding ecosystems where people are dumb enough to buy the road-stand tomatoes that were raised entirely on some yokels' excrement. I'm talking about an endless flow of crap that would choke the life out of any futuristic septic system that neither Arthur or C.S. could imagine.

If we are to believe the EPA, simple charts fully explain how through a series of filters, our avalanche of crap is somehow cheerfully fed back into our idyllic streams and rivers as clean water. I don't want to seem cynical, but there's no way that a few blasts of chlorine could handle what I churn out after Taco Night at the Lion's Club. It all seems too perfect to be believed.

And I can find nobody to accompany me to one of these so-called "treatment plants" to see for myself nor will any literary magazine return my calls regarding my availability to do an in-depth piece on the topic.

_"As soon as you sit down to write about something, you are pressing_

_your nose deeper into the sewer of facts."_

-Theo Van Gogh

They want to turn a blind nose to the subject just because I'm the person asking for their money? Who better to write about crap than someone whose writing is universally acknowledged as being crappy?

So now instead of spending my time on the commode reading other people's crappy writing as I once did, I'm now consumed with the fact that my exposed anus is sitting over an aquatic gateway to the who-knows-what. Will it come to pass that even as I enjoy a meal, I'll be considering my intestines a conspirator into turning a lovely meal of meat and vegetables into another smelly brown passenger to who-knows-where?

_"As much deeper you go as much more shit you find down there._

_But what happens with you?"_

―Deyth Banger

# **Can Holding In A Fart Kill You?**

Every year around the holidays, you can expect a story about one of the shitty Xmas gifts I got. There's no use asking me to be stoic and keep it to myself. If I get a shitty present, you're going to suffer as well, so you might as well get used to it. This year's shitty gift was a book entitled _Can Holding In A Fart Kill You?_ This book consists of over 150 answers to "curious" questions.

Typically, I enjoy such reading. It makes the time on the toilet pass that much quicker. But as I began to flip through it, the questions weren't "curious" at all. They were shitty. Not all 150 of them, but enough to ruin the precious time I spend on the toilet. Perhaps that's why the word "shitty" sprang to mind.

The first question was "Can The Great Wall of China Be Seen From Space?" It goes on to list all the places this assertion has been offered up as true, from Trivial Pursuit to the movie _The Truman Show_ , but in reality, it can't be seen from space. No made-man object can.

"What's wrong with this question?" you might ask yourself. Nothing. It's a great question and I can't wait to start correcting people. This might be the only question in the whole damn book I found not only interesting but useful in making me an even more annoying asshole at the next party I attend.

"Why Is The Ocean Salty?" was the next question. Do you know why? Because of all the salt in it. That's their answer. Sodium and chloride are components of salt and there are a lot of those chemicals in the ocean. Not only that, but all the salt in the ocean is the reason it tastes so salty.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to poop when your anus is clenched in rage? That was the second question! They didn't even have the decency to bury it in the middle of the book like I do with all my bad stories (for the record, I usually start with two or three good stories and then end with a strong one; all other stories are considered the middle of the book).

The third question? "What Causes Headaches?"

What should it have been titled? "Disproving God In Three Paragraphs."

Why? Because it explains that to combat the pain of a headache, the body releases chemicals such as serotonin. It then goes on to explain that the release of these chemicals causes swelling of blood vessels in the brain which in turn irritates nerve fibers surrounding them and causes the headache to worsen.

I just want to sit there and take a shit without my head exploding.

So, the book is telling me that a perfect god made a body in which one of the ways that body combats the pain of a headache is to make it worse. This, no doubt, causes the release of more serotonin and the cycle continues until the poor bastard with the headache slowly smiles to reveal a small trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth and he pitches forward, dead.

Praise Jesus!

This is third question of over 150. You'll notice I spelled small numbers earlier in the story but use numbers when it comes to 150. If you think I'm going to sit here and take twenty minutes to type out all the letters in 150, you're kidding yourself. Twenty is about my limit. 27 is getting the ol' number treatment.

It's at the point where you must be asking yourself if I'm really going to go through each and every one of the more than 150 questions.

Well, if you're going to take that attitude, you can forget all about knowing if exorcisms work, if Ouija Boards work, or if Bigfoot exists. I bet you wish now you'd have kept your big trap shut.

Out of fairness, you did endure my commentary about the first three questions. I will tell you that holding in your farts cannot kill you.

You're welcome.

# **the fifth noble truth**

Location: the Ganden Monastery, Dagzê County in Tibet.

A Lama (spiritual master) sits crossed-legged in front of a man who appears to be a Westerner.

The Lama says, "If you wish to dream about being a bookmark, it is best to sleep between 19 blankets and 3 mattresses."

The Westerner absorbs the statement.

"Do you understand?" asks the Lama.

"Yes," he replies.

The Lama lifts his eyebrows and tilts his head as if encouraging the man to explain.

"You are saying that all advice is just finding a way to make the recipient think about what is otherwise obvious to them."

The Lama nodded. After a few minutes, the Lama continued. "You have traveled many miles and endured both physical and financial hardships to receive this wisdom. How does this make you feel?"

The Westerner thought it over. Finally, he said "When I was a child, we had a tradition of painting eggs during our Easter celebration. My mother would give me a dozen hard-boiled eggs and I would spend many hours decorating them. Some of them didn't turn out well and others I was quite proud of. In the six days after Easter, I would start each morning by eating two of them. The first day, I would select the two that I felt were the ugliest. Every morning after that, I would look over the remaining eggs and eat the two that were the least attractive until, on the sixth day, the last two eggs were the ones that I felt reflected my best efforts."

"I see," replied the Lama, lifting his eyebrows and tilting his head as if encouraging the man to explain.

"I'm saying that in the end, it doesn't matter."

# **all wet**

Consider this a public service. Not so much telling you how water came to be on Earth but reminding you that at one point, Earth was just a smoldering hunk of rock and dust slowly pulled together by gravity.

It would be especially helpful if you were reading this at the beach, but since you insist on not being at a beach, you'll just have to remind yourself of the awe-inspiring feeling of gazing out at an ocean. That feeling will make you feel much better about not being able to understand the math and science involved in explaining how water ended up here.

Water, literally the wettest stuff in the Universe, only exists to begin with because the necessary molecule H2O was formed in the center of the hottest place you can imagine, the center of a sun. I don't think all the scientists and mathematicians in the Universe could explain whether that is irony or drama. I know none of them could honestly make you understand how a chunk of molten rock hanging in space with a high ambient temperature and no enveloping atmosphere could end up covered by over 70% water.

So far, you might have noticed how condescending I've been to your intelligence. I believe no less than three times I've mentioned that there's no way you could understand something. I hope you don't hold it against me. I'm just being honest. In the end, this fact may make my ending all the more poignant but I'll certainly understand if you go storming off to find other reading material that isn't so demeaning to your IQ.

Here's something you're certain to appreciate - pandering a little I admit, but I want happy readers- even the greatest minds on the planet are a little unsure how all the water got here. There are a few theories but all of them include two basic elements: water that was here originally, and water that came from other sources. Things from within and things externally added.

If you're starting to feel like there's a point to all of this, I must congratulate you on your unbridled optimism.

When it came time to mention those things that were contributed by "space," I wrestled with the decision whether to say carbonaceous chondrites or meteorites. Obviously, I want you to think I'm a brilliant guy and throwing in a little carbonaceous chondrite certainly gives you that impression, but I also didn't want you to feel any worse than you already do about your IQ and nothing inspires feelings of inadequacy like having to read carbonaceous chondrites and having no idea what they are. Had I just come right out and said meteorites you would probably have smiled broadly, secure in the knowledge that you exactly what a meteorite is.

If you're starting to feel like there's no point to all of this, I must congratulate you on your unbridled perceptiveness.

But let me just say this in my defense... you're neither as bright nor dumb as you think you are. You're only as perceptive as you want to be.

Case in point: all of the rocks that probably sat bemused as the first drops of rain started to come down. Could they have ever imagined what those little wet spots would create?

Of course not. They're rocks. They lack not only imagination but any consciousness at all. But, BUT, even they would have to admit, if they could, how much nicer our planet looks than the moon. You can almost hear them muttering to themselves "Canyons carved out by rivers _are_ a nice touch." This is in no way disrespectful to wind and volcanic eruptions, obviously.

The point is (the one you've been anxiously waiting for), we all come out of the womb as barren hunks of rock and dust. Whatever we have within us or whatever forces act upon us from the outside, there's no way of knowing exactly how spectacular we can end up. No one can explain your transformation from lifeless and bleak to towering redwoods filled with adorable squirrels.

I should mention how much cooler this ending would be if you were sitting by the ocean.

# **the volunteer state**

Sometimes I think the radio should come with a warning. Perhaps a small bulletin that comes on every time you start the car simply stating that once the music begins, there exists the possibility that a particular song will come on that will take you back to a moment in time that you may or may not want to remember. I'm sure everyone would ignore it, much like the warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes, but if it could save just one person from hearing a song that hurls them lengthwise into some unwanted memory, then perhaps it would be money well spent.

So it was with me this very evening. Innocently driving along, minding my own beeswax, (I'm sure you didn't know I owned my own beeswax business) when on comes a song that reminds me of a long-forgotten summer. Obviously, you might be surprised to learn about the beeswax business but at the same time, it can't surprise you that I don't earn my living from writing. In fact, the only obvious thing is that there must be good money to be made in beeswax for me to continue putting out books that nobody on the planet wants to read. One could argue that bees are nature's little enablers.

I don't want you to get the idea that when the song came on, it hit me so violently I was startled and swerved dangerously and all the beeswax in my car suddenly went flying, covering the interior. Not at all. It took a little while for the music to whisk me away to that summer long ago.

The summer I sold books door-to-door. In Tennessee. Actually, a more accurate description would be the summer I tried to sell books door-to-door in Tennessee. Now that I think about it, it was actually great training for not selling books later in my life... but as I've just thought about it like that, I'll let it go lest I risk grinding the entire tale to a halt. That assumes this story was ever moving forward in the first place. One could argue that it started at a halt and has just sat there from the opening paragraph.

Anyway, they corralled a bunch of college kids looking for summer work, drove us down to Tennessee, and separated us into two groups, girls and boys. The girls they dropped off in affluent neighborhoods each morning where people had money to buy books and could actually read and the boys were delivered to demilitarized zones where everyone was always home and looking to throw things and berate college kids trying to sell books door-to-door. Once the sun set in these parts of town, we'd have been murdered and our skulls made into ashtrays if the van would have been so much as five minutes late.

On the weekends, I'd drive up to the mountains with my best friend at the time and we'd listen to the radio and watch the sunset from the hood of his car. One song in particular- you know how these Top 40 stations are. They play a few songs over and over and there's always one that seems to be on an endless loop.

That was the song I heard tonight. And I was back on the hood of the car. And I drove and spent tortured minutes trying to remember the guy's name. My best friend at the time. The guy I spent every waking moment with for two months in the bowels of Tennessee enduring the heat and the rejection of America's Least Educated day in and day out and now I couldn't even remember his name. I kept thinking to myself what a dog-shit person I must be. And how people come in and out of your life and then disappear like they never existed. Like I was never in Tennessee at all.

Then I realized how gay the song was. So gay. If I told you the song, you'd probably assume we spent most of the time on the hood of the car fucking each other and how the hood was soaked with our cum and we'd keep sliding off due to the excessive amount of jizz on it. This one song would have you imagining all of the guys waking up each morning in Tennessee and having sex on the floor of the house we were staying and in the shower and in the kitchen and finally the homeowners asking us all to leave because of the staggering amount of semen covering every square inch of our living area due to the all blowing of loads that went on 24/7.

So to recap: the first half of the song, I was trying to remember this guy's name, and the second half, I was laughing at how gay the song was.

The name of the song?

None of your beeswax.

# **Burger Place**

"Be careful! Don't step on that fry!" I heard a shrill voice admonishing a yet-unseen child as I stood waiting for my food at Burger King. At least I assumed it was a child. If someone spoke that way to an adult, I'm sure it would have been answered with a burst of violence.

It distracted me from looking at the fundraising bottle on the counter. It was one of those jugs filled with water where you attempt to have your coin land on a little platform at the bottom of the jug in order to win a free burger. All proceeds going to the most inaccurately named charitable organization out there: the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Given that recipients of said foundation are all terminally ill children, I would assume if they had a wish, it would be not to have their terminal disease. Perhaps they should consider changing the name to the Make-Another-Lesser-Wish Foundation. I plopped in my coins and watched them flutter down to the bottom of the jug, the friction ensuring they never had a chance to make their way down to their intended destinations, which was just as well because the jug was placed at the end of the ordering line so even in the off chance you won, you'd be getting an additional burger to the one you'd already purchased. A burger you wouldn't actually be able to eat. In other words, if your coin landed on the little platform, you got to throw away a burger.

So obviously, I was relieved to have something new to look at.

I turned and soaked in the woman with the shrill voice. I immediately knew everything I needed to know about her. She was the kind of woman that, even when she agreed to let a man finger her, she would insist he used only his pinkie.

You know the type.

And there, lurking only a few feet from my feet, was the fry in question. I say lurking because apparently there was untold peril should one step on it. Which makes me wonder if I should be using the name of the establishment. Now that I'm insinuating their fries are a menace to life and limb, perhaps Burger King wouldn't appreciate seeing their name being used as the creator of said fry. They might even have legal recourse.

What I meant to say was that I was standing in line at Burger Queen.

So I thought, being the generous man I am, that I would show this woman's child exactly how perilous a fry being stepped on can be. I realize that in my opening observations about the woman, it might appear as though I didn't like her, but that's beside the point. Like her or not, I understood her role as a mother and thought she'd appreciate help raising her dour-faced offspring.

I stepped on the fry and then let loose with anguished cries as I went head over heels, landing hard on the sticky Burger Queen tile.

Believe it or not, there are fast food places in America called Burger Queens. I'm glad I Googled it at the last minute. What do I have to call a damned restaurant so I don't have to worry about some fast-food legal recourse?

Perhaps I went a bit far in making my point of the dangers of stepping on a fry because it never occurred to me that when the bone pokes out of the ankle, it will actually start to bleed like a wilderness river. Pandemonium broke out as I lay there spilling out the contents of my circulatory system all over the Burger Dick's floor. I went in and out of consciousness as I watched my ankle flop back and forth at the end of my leg, the white bone jutting out contrasting against the otherwise red scene in front of me.

The child was transfixed. She stared at me in horror. She began to scream. Her screams almost as loud and high-pitched as my own. Her cute white dress covered in red dots from my flailing leg showering her with blood.

I looked at her. "Do you understand now? Do you?!"

Her mother pulled her close.

"Your mother was right! Mothers are always right!"

With that, I finally slipped into a deep, swirling vortex of black.

If you're waiting for me to wrap this up by saying that moments later, the girl put a coin in the jug and won a free burger and actually ate it and it led her down the path to obesity and eventually to a terminal disease related to obesity that required she make an additional wish on top of the wish that she never got the terminal disease in the first place, a wish that I'd never broken my ankle in the first place, you're going to be disappointed. The Make-A Wish-Foundation cannot, and does not, promote itself as being able to bend time and space in granting their wishes. The girl was old enough to know that, so your premise for this ending is flawed.

I simply awoke at the emergency room in a cast, which gave me time to start writing a jingle for Burger Dick. Perhaps a large clown character that sings about the dangers of stepping on fries.

# **love me Tinder**

"When you use Tinder, you get a whore. What did you expect? That's who uses that app," she said matter-of-factly.

Great opening line, I know, but let me back up a bit.

Walter walked into the adult book store and was immediately surprised. Not by the breathtakingly large variety of dildos and vibrators that lined the back wall but by the fact that Elvis was playing in the background. He wasn't sure what he expected but he certainly didn't expect the King.

Ann watched him walk in with the same indifference she watched all the customers walk in. She watched him take a small shopping basket and begin to wander up and down the aisles, occasionally stopping to add something to the quickly-filling basket. Finally, he approached her at checkout.

"Got everything you need?" she asked in a tone that suggested the last thing in the world she cared about was if he had gotten everything needed.

"I'm not sure actually..." he replied.

She looked him up and down. He seemed harmless enough to engage in conversation. "Can I help you with something?" she finally inquired.

"I'm not sure. I'm a bit new at this." And with that, he plopped down his basket in front of her. It held a cornucopia of sex toys and bondage accessories.

"Wow..." was all she could get out.

"You see, I met this girl and she's a bit of a freak."

"I see," she said as she began to unload the treasure trove of perverted items and ring them. Walter was fumbling with his wallet and finally pulled out a credit card.

"It's a gift card. From my mother. It would kill her to know I was using it at an adult book store." They both laughed.

Ann stopped ringing things up and looked at him. "Was there a question you wanted to ask?"

"Hi. I'm Walter," he began and extended his hand across the counter. She looked at it for a moment and then shook it briefly.

"I'm Ann. I always wanted to spell it with an E at the end but it's just A N N. Seems like a lot of trouble to change your name just to add a silent letter, you know what I mean?"

"I would have never known, if that makes you feel better. You look like an Anne.  I guess if you wanted to be Annie it would be worth the trouble but I see what you mean about going from Ann to Anne," he said, seemingly genuinely interested.

"So, Walter," she continued, "About this girl- this freak- where did you meet her?"

He hesitated a moment then said "On Tinder," in a slightly embarrassed tone.

"When you use Tinder, you get a whore. What did you expect? That's who uses that app," she said matter-of-factly.

"My brother met his wife there," he countered.

She refused to continue down that road, instead zeroing in on trying to help. "What's she into?" she asked.

"I'm not sure, hence the variety of items. Going to cast a wide net."

"Why not call her up and ask her what she's into?" Ann, who wanted to be Anne, asked.

Walter answered "She's tied up at the moment," and then smiled almost to himself. Almost. He smiled a tiny bit at Ann, just enough for her to realize that something was up.

Finally his smile turned into a full-blown laugh. "She's actually tied up. Right now. Back at her place. When I took her home, she asked me to handcuff her to the bed. I didn't know what to do... I panicked. So, after handcuffing her, I stuck her dog's chew toy in her mouth, put packing tape around her head so she couldn't yell, and drove straight here."

"That, Walter," she said, "was a terrible idea." They both laughed.

"You're an 'experienced' girl, right? Tell me what I should do," he half said, half pleaded.

"Experienced? What do you mean by that?" And then, before he could answer she barreled on, "You assume because I work here I'm a whore too? I hate to shatter your illusions, Walter but I'm a psych student putting myself through college. I work here because it's a fascinating place to watch how people really behave."

"I didn't mean any offense," Walter stammered.

She stared at him for a few moments, letting him sweat a bit, then laughed. "None taken. It's a common mistake. Comes with the job. I view myself more like those nature photographers that document things without participating in them."

"It's funny you said that. Just last night, I watched a documentary about elephants. There was a family of them and there was this drought in Africa and all of us viewers got to watch a baby elephant starve to death. It was gruesome. I was screaming at the TV for the cameraman to get a fucking bale of hay and a bucket of water and break whatever oath they took not to interfere."

She absorbed what he'd said for a moment then asked, "Are you saying I should go on a date with you?"

He absorbed what she's said for a moment and replied, "I guess....?"

"Good. I get off in fifteen minutes."

"What about the girl I have tied up?"

"The Tinder whore?" asked Ann mockingly, "What about her? She'll probably enjoy being handcuffed to a bed overnight." She laughed. He didn't look convinced.

"And you won't be needing this stuff," she said, sweeping it all back into the basket.

He looked slightly disappointed.

She smiled at him and winked. "I have my own."

Elvis sang in the background.

_Love me tender, love me true_  
_All my dreams fulfill_  
_For my darling I love you_  
_And I always will_

# **hoop dreams**

The day started out as so many Sundays before it. What to do? What to do?

A gust of wind sorted it out.

It knocked over my badly dilapidated basketball hoop in the driveway. The reason it was able to be blown over so easily?

My laziness a decade ago.

Someone was giving away the portable hoop and because I've been known to dribble the ball a bit, I happily agreed to have them drop it off in my driveway. The problem?

In order for me to exhibit my full arsenal of dunks, I would need to weigh it down. The answer?

A bag of cement from Home Depot.  Just going there gives me an erection for reasons I don't fully understand.

The original plan was for me to dig a hole and then pour cement over the top of the base and thus turn the mobile hoop into a permanent fixture, but when I put the bag of cement mix down on the back of the hoop, it seemed to solve the problem, so I left it there. The problem didn't start for about five years.

It never occurred to me that the bag of cement mix would turn into a block of cement when Mother Nature added rain water. Fine for the first few years, but eventually the paper crumbled away and then the cement started to deteriorate. Flash forward to the day before yesterday: all that remained was a handful of white powder holding down my hoop.

Or, as it turned out, not holding down my hoop. Down it came. Sunday ruined.

I had to take it apart. I couldn't just chuck it in the bin; the bolts had the kind of rust on them that you usually only see on archaeological digs. I could just see my neighbors making popcorn and pulling their chairs up to the window to witness what must have been one of the most amazing demonstrations of physical prowess outside of the Dwarf Empire Amusement Park in China. I couldn't even begrudge them the entertainment value of me wrestling with rusted bolts using a set of wrenches that could have easily been named A Boy's First Set of Wrenches.

The evidence of why I never bothered to maintain the hoop to begin with started to tumble out; I was dismantling the Wasp Empire Amusement Park. The entire thing was honeycombed with generations of wasp offspring. From the beginning, they staked their claim and by the second year, it wasn't worth shooting the ball and getting swarmed by angry insects.

My neighbors must have been muttering "Get on with it," under their breaths as I paused to marvel at Nature's handiwork.

Eventually, the fun continued. When I got down to the base, I realized it was still full of sand and therefore weighed more than a dozen elephants. I would need to pour out some of the sand before I could move it.

I went into the garage to retrieve a bucket and once again, Nature provided me with another glimpse of her handiwork. This time it was the decomposing bodies of two mice at the bottom of the bucket. You didn't have to be a crime scene investigator to figure out what had happened. The bucket had been tucked under some camping supplies, a slippery tent among them, and one of them had obviously slipped and fallen in. Unable to climb out, he'd called upon his best friend in the world to rescue him from the predicament. Tragedy had ensued and instead of springing his buddy, the other mouse tumbled in and got stuck as well. Well, eventually the first mouse realized that help would not arrive in time, so he was forced to murder and eat his best friend in the world. You might think that the definition of best friend in the world must vary significantly in the mouse world from the human world, but that's only because you're not stuck in a forty-foot deep bucket with your best friend in the world.

After a few days... bon appétit.

Anyway, there was mouse fur and bones strewn about the bucket, so any other mouse that came upon his cannibal comrade wouldn't have needed to be a mouse crime scene investigator to know to give him a wide berth. The first mouse died of starvation and I'm sure the first mouse waiting for him in mouse heaven will be his pal that he ate.

Awkward.

But not as awkward as the spelling of awkward. What kind of a word has "awkwa" in it? If it were a palindrome I could see it but the "rd" really crashes that particular party.

Awkwa.

Much better.

Anyway, by the time I was done staring into my white plastic bucket, I was drained, so I threw the parts and pieces into the trash and dragged the sixty-ton base to the side of the house. I tried tipping it over to let the sand out but apparently that had turned into cement as well.

Apparently, anything left out in the rain eventually turns into cement. Which explains fossils, I guess. Nature is amazing.

And awkwa.

# **a big heart in a big fish in a small pond**

Keith is a fish. Let's get that right out of the way. I don't want you halfway through this, suddenly slapping your forehead and saying, "Of course! Keith is a fish!" and having to start the whole thing over again.

Keith is a fish.

And not just any fish. Keith is a whopper. Even in a big pond, he would be considered a big fish. A big fish with numerous gaping holes in his lips and torn up gills. Keith looks like a very rough customer.

But he has a heart of gold.

So how, you might ask yourself, did his mouth get so beat up?

It's simple really; Keith loves to strike lures. Other fish will literally swim next to him and point out that the "crayfish" he's chasing is clearly not a crayfish at all but an apparatus equipped with barbed hooks, designed to snag him in his face and drag him into some nearby boat. They will yell and scream the obvious and yet Keith will still hurtle towards a rendezvous with said lure. They will openly mock him about how bad-looking the lure is, how it doesn't even resemble a crayfish in numerous important details, and yet Keith never misses a chance to try and eat a fake crayfish.

You might wonder if this behavior is limited to fake crayfish. It's not. He will chase fake minnows, fake worms, fake frogs. He will even bite a hook with corn on it.

Corn.

Only catfish eat corn and believe me when I say that Keith is no catfish.

Could it be as simple as Keith knowing that at the end of that line there's a fisherman who wants to catch a fish? That he understands for that to happen, there has to be a fish willing to strike the lure? Does he think that somehow this fisherman deserves to catch a fish for all his efforts?

At this juncture, I could say that it's not my intention to romanticize Keith, but that would be dishonest. Not only do I want to romanticize his actions but I want to compare them indirectly to romance itself. Not the romanticized version of romance but the all-too-common type of romance where one party is taking advantage of the other.

Or so it appears to everyone else who isn't part of that romance. Everyone who doesn't hear the music that Keith is dancing to. Which is pretty much all fish as they don't have ears.

Keith knows exactly what he's getting himself into. He's aware of the consequences and yet he still hauls ass and does his best to take the bait. You could even argue that this makes his struggle even more romantic than typical, healthy romances.

He knows, when he feels the sting of the hook once again sinking into his mouth, that there's a battle of wills ahead. A give and take, with him fighting for his life and the fisherman trying to get what he wants. But to say he's an unwilling participant is just plain disingenuous.

To Keith, there's only one fisherman. Keith sees him in his head. He romanticizes him. The other fish imagine the fisherman as someone you wouldn't touch with his ten-foot pole but not Keith. On some level, Keith is just happy to be involved with the fisherman. To be the tug on his line. The fish that allows the fisherman to feel the rush of reeling one in. The fight to land him.

And, at least so far in his career, to give the fisherman a melancholy memory of the one that got away.

Maybe Keith isn't a fish after all. Feel free to slap your forehead.

# **swing low**

There comes a time in every boy's life when he looks in a mirror and realizes it's time to move from tighty-whitey underwear to boxers. The first day of wearing boxers is an epiphany. His testicles sway in a way that reminds a casual observer of footage of releasing an animal into the wild after a lifetime in a cage.

Freedom.

And then, a few decades later, he is forced to go back to tighty-whiteys. His testicles herded back into the cottony confines like footage of two animals released into the wild after a lifetime in a cage if played in reverse. Two animals that are damn glad to be there.

In case you haven't caught on, I am that man and I simply got sick of sitting on my own balls. Every day, I was wracking myself because my testicles hung so low that if I didn't remember to lift them out of the way, the simple act of having a seat led to squishing my nuts flat. Boxers aided and abetted this squishing and frankly, the fashion consequences of switching back to TWs seemed like no big deal compared to the constant ache of swollen balls.

Now what I need to invent is some sort of apparatus that stops my balls from touching the water when I'm on the toilet. I'm not sure what this apparatus would look like but there's nothing worse than sitting there and suddenly feeling a ball touch the water... especially after the business at hand has been completed. If there was a camera in the bowl, it would be suspenseful viewing as the sack slowly relaxes and the ball begins to descend towards the foul liquid below, like a secret agent being lowered to his doom by some demented villain. The trouble is, I'm sitting there completely unaware of this little drama until it's too late. One minute I'm sitting there reading something and the next, I'm leaping up, trying to dry off my sack as my nuts swing wildly around like two bees in a bonnet.

When you watch TV, you're constantly assaulted with every manner of uncomfortable advertisement, from condoms to feminine hygiene products, but I've never seen anyone talk about the problems associated with the male sack getting droopy with age. Are we to believe that every man is supposed to silently migrate back to tighty-whiteys without raising a fuss?

Perhaps this will become my cause. I've been looking for a noble pursuit to be the beneficiary of my ever-increasing star-power and influence. Of course, if my devoted readers ever got wind that I have saggy balls, I might endanger that very rock-star status.

Forget I mentioned it.

# **I am visited by a crow**

I had no intention of writing today. None whatsoever.

The bird on my driveway had other plans.

A crow. Enormous as far as birds go and as black as black gets. Not all of him, of course. His beak was simply black and his eyes, even from as far away as I sat, seemed pretty standard in the blackness department. It was his feathers that stood out. They had an oily blackness that jumped out as supernatural. His head seemed to have a shine to it, sort of like all these bald guys who over-wax their heads these days.

He kept looking up at me. There was no mistaking it. He was hopping up and down on the driveway and looking straight up at me as I sat at my computer.

He wanted me to write something.

I would have been happy to oblige; it's rare that anyone wants me to write anything these days, but I had nothing. He sensed this and began pecking at the ground. He seemed to be eating little bits of the asphalt. Was he trying to tell me I should write about the importance of driveway maintenance? Parts of the left side of my driveway were crumbling a little bit but I'd been putting off repairs.

It didn't seem appropriate that a bird would make such a production to get me to write about driveway maintenance. I'm telling you, the whole thing had an otherworldly feel to it. It was like at any moment, I would look down and he would have transformed himself into an American Indian shaman, complete with feathers and beads and necklaces made of teeth and whatnot.

I sprang into action... and went on YouTube to search Native American shaman music. Perhaps this little encounter needed a soundtrack to move it along. The bird continued to dance impatiently on my driveway.

I still had no ideas so I stared a little more at the crow. He seemed like the kind of bird who would be content eating out of a garbage can but secretly longed to eat other birds. He just had that kind of vibe.

Like seagulls that eat puffins. They snatch them right out of the air and gulp them down. It's actually quite heartless. It leaves me to wonder how the puffins actually die. Is it asphyxiation? How long does it take?

I can't imagine a worse way to go.

And yet, I bet that if you advertised getting snatched out of the air, swallowed up by total darkness, shoved down a throat with your final destination being the stomach acids of some avian menace and made it into a ride at an amusement park, there would be lines around the block.

I became aware of the disconnect between the dull droning of Indian drums in the background and the dull content of my story. Out on the driveway, the crow seemed unamused. Perhaps he didn't like my insinuating that he wanted to eat other birds. Secret longings can be a bitch. Perhaps crows are more thin-skinned than we've been led to believe.

Anyway, I've never understood why amusement parks don't just take the paint shakers you see at hardware stores and just blow them up to human size. It would seem like a no-brainer. Just have these morons who love to get their brains scrambled sit in it and then shake the living shit out of them. Maybe even kill them. There would still be people clamoring to get inside.

The drumming on YouTube had become more of a throbbing in my head, no doubt expressing the crow's disappointment with what I was typing. I can imagine that a crow expects some pretty lofty things if he takes the time to sit on someone's driveway and makes eye contact and threatens to turn into a shaman. Possible topics might have included, but would not have been limited to: reality, perception, the afterlife, and/or the mysteries of love. The big stuff. All I could come up with is that a paint shaker would make a great ride.

I looked back down at the driveway and the crow was gone.

I felt like I'd blown it but I tried not to blame myself. The crow must have known who he was visiting. My track record of bad writing speaks for itself. I turned off the drumming.

Maybe he did want me to write about the importance of driveway maintenance after all. Maybe a truck with _Crow Paving_ splashed on the side, an old Indian-looking fella who calls everybody "kemosabe" at the wheel, will drive by later and clear this all up.

Or maybe, just maybe (I've used so many maybes in the last few sentences that I either had to use a different word or just go all in with the maybes), you never know why things like that happen.

# **RetroActiv**

Maybe it's my recent obsession with advertising that had me dreaming a dream like I dreamt. Maybe you should never read a story that that begins with the word maybe. Next thing you know, you're reading a sentence that includes "dreaming a dream like I dreamt."

I hate advertising. The 24/7 barrage of lame attempts to sell me something. To understand me. To relate. Every square inch of space pitching me. Every wavelength clogged with marketing.

Buy. Buy. Buy.

Look at yourself. How can you be happy with this?

And if that isn't enough, when the commercial is over, the TV show that's starting is a show glorifying the very morons who make the damn commercials! Showing me how cool they are.

Are you fucking kidding me?

This is the rage I live with. The reality that keeps me at a constant simmer. The reason why, when I finally lay my head on the pillow at night, even my dreams get polluted by this nonsense.

But what glorious nonsense.

Maybe you can make something of this dream. I certainly can't.

"Until recently, did you have problem acne?"

I'm listening to the voice on the television and staring at a smiling teen face.

"Did it clear up recently? Of course it did... because you're going to use RetroActiv."

The teen dutifully begins to apply a cream to her face.

"RetroActiv is so effective, it clears up your skin weeks, or even months, before you even use it. That's our guarantee."

A cavalcade of freshly-scrubbed teens began appearing on the screen, one after the other, each happier than the previous to exclaim the virtues of the product.

"Your skin is clear so march right down today and pick up your RetroActiv."

The obvious question is "Or what?"

Is it ironic that the expression _"There's a sucker born every minute"_ was attributed to P.T. Barnum when in fact he never said it? My life has become so bogged down in irony, I'm not even sure I'd recognize it if it were staring me in the face. Furthermore, it is said that Mark Twain went on to add _"There's a sucker born every minute... and two to take him."_ Well, it is said he said that but actually, he never did. Perhaps it makes both quotes sexier to attribute them to big names, proof that advertising knows no boundaries.

Neither did RetroActiv in my dream.

How did they solve the "Or what?" dilemma?

A porcelain-skinned youth stared right at the camera and announced "If your skin is clear, you need to use RetroActiv. Otherwise, it would never had gotten clear."

This was offered up with no shame. In fact, to drive home the point, I quickly saw an image of the pizza-faced nightmare this teen was only a few short months ago and it was all I could do not to jump in the car and go buy a crate-load of the stuff, lest my face return to an acne-ridden state.

Despite the fact I've never had acne.

Perhaps I will need to use RetroActiv for a few years to balance the scales.

So what did Mark Twain actually say?

_"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."_

He said a lot more, obviously, but I think the makers of RetroActive would appreciate this quote the most. The makers of RetroActive being my subconscious of course. This choice was, of course, determined by my conscious mind so I wouldn't assume I'm right about that.

The characters in _Mad Men_ would have loved the dream. Sell a product where the results have already occurred and all you have to do is convince the masses to attribute that success to your product.

Fuck _Mad Men_. THE _Mad Men_ , the writers and actors and the people who sold it to the network, and "mad men" everywhere.

What say you, P.T.?

_"Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung."_

Got that right, brother. I just want my dreams back.

# **I'm no superman**

Perhaps Freud got it wrong.

Of course, he'd never met Dustin.

Neither have you but that's about to change. Afterwards, you might sit contemplating the id, the ego, the super ego and, perhaps, the alter ego.

Out of nowhere, evolution took a giant leap with Dustin. His musculature was unique. Improved. One might say super-human. He had the strength of ten men. The speed of a cheetah and he could leap like a gazelle. Eyes like a hawk.

And nobody ever knew.

Dustin is seventy-four now and lives alone.

When he was a child, he realized quite early on that he was special. Physical activities came easily to him. Just by seeing something being done, he could translate it to a form of muscle memory and repeat the act flawlessly.

But he didn't.

Although his personality was fine, events conspired to keep him somewhat isolated from the herd. In grade school, he would invite friends over and they would seemingly have a good time but never accept a return engagement. The reason would have Freud doubling over with laughter.

His mother collected rude statues. In particular, anything that prominently displayed the male sex organ. They were scattered around the house and even snuck up on you at the dinner table. The salt and pepper shakers seemed innocent enough until you tipped them over to sprinkle their contents over your food. Then a big phallus and balls would pop out the side.

One of his friends actually dropped the salt shaker into his food when the little cock touched his hand. He was the same kid that pulled the string on the giant clown doll that sat square in the center of the living room, thinking perhaps it would talk, only to see the clown drop his pants and expose his painted tackle.

Dick trauma.

By the start of high school, everyone knew not to stop by his house. He was, of course, teased mercilessly but never stood up for himself despite the fact he could have easily snapped the necks of everyone in the building without breaking a sweat. He didn't play football and he didn't run track.

His father was a nature videographer. He was away from the house a lot, documenting the beauty and savagery of life in the wild. In case you're wondering, Dustin never caught a glimpse of his dad's penis.

Strange that you'd be wondering that... but who am I to judge?

He clearly remembered an evening when one of his father's videos was on TV. They sat next to each other as the screen was lit up red and orange by a wildfire. The fire was spreading rapidly and the camera focused on a nest of baby birds sitting on the ground in the dry brush. The fire crept closer and closer and Dustin felt his stomach tighten. The camera panned away and when it eventually panned back, the nest was black and inside sat the charred remains of the five chicks.

Dustin looked at his father and asked "Couldn't you have saved them?"

"No," came the reply. "As a videographer, I'm not there. I just document things. I can't get involved."

This did not sit well with Dustin. "But you were there!" he yelled.

"No, son. I wasn't."

"Then neither am I," Dustin spat and stormed out of the room. A minute later, he stormed back in, pulled the string on the top of the clown's head and ripped off his junk. He re-stormed out.

He went to college and got a job and started a life that in no way incorporated crime fighting or acts of heroism.

In his twenties, he saw an old lady getting mugged and did nothing to help.

In his thirties, he was mugged by a haggard-looking homeless man pretending to have a gun in his coat. He handed over his money and watch.

In his forties, he watched his neighborhood get swallowed up by drugs and violence, so he moved.

In his fifties, he went to a Halloween party dressed as Superman.

In his sixties, he bought his first nude porcelain figure that was anatomically correct. That was the same year his parents passed away.

Now, he sits in his house and listens to the birds; his hearing is also enhanced. The birds he listens to are miles away.

An entire life spent as Clark Kent without ever once ducking into a phone booth.

Chew on that awhile...

# **the tiller**

A little bias is to be expected when you're hearing stories about artificial intelligence taking over and getting rid of humans. Films make it very clear the hellish world it would become if machines ever usurped us. _The Terminator,_ for instance. Most humans believe this to be a pretty fair appraisal of how the world would look if the guiding hand of humanity was removed from the tiller.

Imagine though how that movie would play to an all-robot audience. They would sit back in horror at their portrayal and the ending would have them all wishing they could weep.

I bring this up as a way for you to digest the following premise for a story: cartoons no longer need people to draw them. They become free and start their own world.

Take a minute if you need.

The single biggest decision proud cartoon parents ever get to make is when they sit down to draw their kids.

Need another minute?

Don't be shy; it means you're really trying to think this one through. I went from _Terminator_ imagery to an entire world that's drawn. If you can seriously read the above without pause, it just means you're really not paying attention.

Humans do that a lot.

And judge. Humans are very judgmental.

Not so in the cartoon world. Kids drawn like Elmer Fudd and something Johannes Vermeer might have sat down and painted mingle side-by-side without anyone ever raising an eyebrow over their appearance. An abstract-looking cartoon and an expressionist-looking cartoon and a stick figure all walk into a bar. Hold the drum roll. They all have a good time.

The world in which these beings walk through shifts from anime to graphic novel to the desert scenes we're so familiar with thanks to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. The background that they know as reality shifts like a fluid behind them.

Hold on. Now I need a minute. What the hell have I created in my head?

Everything in this world is beautiful. Even the dark places.

Especially the dark places.

Because there's always music playing to let everyone know what's coming next and what's coming next is always going to fix anything that came previously.

Some of you might be snorting and saying to yourself I'm just romanticizing cartoon world. That eventually the cartoons, free of our meddling, will find their own inner demons and greed and lust and jealousy will creep their way in and then these so-called-cartoons will end up just as miserable as we are with our tyrannical E=mc2.

That's the kind of thinking that led to them going it on their own in the first place and the exact kind of thinking that will make sure we're never able to visit them. Don't think for a second we can devise some elaborate a-ha  _Take On Me_ portal in which to drop in and plead for a second chance. A-ha had it all wrong. We're the ones with the wrenches wanting to do permanent harm to others.

We're the machines. We're the ones that deserve to get squished at the end of the movie while a cartoon Billy Idol sings  _Monet Monet_  in front of _San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk_ as the credits roll.

Assuming that a cartoon parent decided to draw their son like Billy Idol. Honestly, I think I might be guilty of being a bit of anthropocentric. The last thing the cartoons would probably draw is anything that reminded them of the world they abandoned.

In my defense, though, I couldn't bring myself to ignore the obvious  _Monet Monet_ reference.

The only thing left to do is try and imagine how you would draw your kids.

Take a few minutes... you'll be happy you did.

# **the price is right but at what cost?**

For the first time since it began in 1956, _The Price is Right_ ran a disclaimer at the beginning of a show saying viewer discretion was advised.

The reason?

Dr. Franklin Stein and his last day as a practicing dentist. Frank had a number of issues involving various addictions and all of them came to a head, a very unfortunate head that contained a very, very unfortunate mouth, during one very tragic appointment. He was scheduled to replace all the teeth of a man involved in a bad accident. While details remain murky, due to his being under the influence of a number of illegal narcotics, he had the chart upside down and ended up putting all the top teeth on the bottom and all the bottom teeth on the top thereby giving the patient an upside-down-looking mouth.

Laugh if you will, but words alone cannot describe what the end result looked like. To gaze upon it was to question the nature of existence... at least that's how the state Dental Commission phrased it when they revoked his license.

The patients name?

"Gene Shaftner... come on down!" belted out George Grey, announcer for _The Price is Right_.

Gene stood and proceeded to come on down. He was overjoyed to have been selected from the teeming mass of game show enthusiasts but he was careful not to smile too much. He remembered something his mother always used to say to him as a boy. "It's better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a monster than to open it and remove all doubt."

This was years before the incident with the dentist and Gene always found it so ironic that she continually mangled that Mark Twain quote during his formative years. It made her both his mother and the mother of all foreshadowing.

When Gene had finally made his way down, he stood behind a podium along with the other three contestants and braced himself to soak in the item to be bid on and make his best guess. His was the last bid and, feeling his rivals had greatly overestimated the worth of a toaster, he offered up $1 and won.

He sprinted up to join Drew Carey on stage. He was so happy, he was bursting.

For months afterwards, everyone associated with _The Price is Right_ spoke in hushed tones about where they were the moment Gene Shaftner smiled. Those that were still with the show that is. The cameraman walked out after that episode and was never heard from again.

The studio audience gasped as one and fell silent. A woman dressed as a swan swooned. If she had been dressed as a chicken, or any other domestic bird that would fall under the classification of poultry, she would have simply fainted but because she was a swan, she swooned. The accuracy of this literary truth was verified when the man next to her, dressed as either a duck or quail (it was difficult to ascertain), passed out cold.

Being the trooper that he was, the host Mr. Carey shook off the effects of Gene's grin and led him to an area where, if he was successful in arranging three items in ascending order of cost, he would win the chance to move on to spin the wheel. Furrowing his brow in anticipation, Gene snapped shut his maw and thus gave the audience a moment to collect themselves.

Mouthwash.

Toothpaste.

Floss.

Immediately, Gene felt he was up to the task and couldn't help again unleashing his smile. Pandemonium broke out all around him. The audience, each member dressed more absurdly than the next, sat with their heads in their hands or shaking their fists at the heavens. Even the stoic Drew Carey looked away to try to compose himself. One of the models that was paid to point at things and look adorable became so disoriented gazing at his smile, she fell hard into Door #2.

Eventually, a grizzled sound engineer with an iron constitution led Gene off into a dark corner to wait for his turn to spin the wheel and they were able to cut to a commercial. During that time, George Grey splashed water on his face and Drew Carey walked around offering $100 for either a cold compress or liquor of any sort, muttering to himself, "I can't stop thinking about him eating corn on the cob! Make it stop!"

At this point, I can't help but wonder how you see Gene Shaftner. Typically, I let you picture people how you will but in this case, I must interject and point out that except for his mouth, Gene appeared to be a perfectly normal man. Some might even call him attractive.

And that's why _The Price is Right_ was losing its mind. If he had been a dwarf or morbidly obese or a homeless person from some inner city, nobody would have batted an eye. But put that mouth in an ordinary guy and it just doesn't compute.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cram a point into an otherwise dumb story, but the fact that _The Price is Right_ actually warned viewers of "disturbing content" made it impossible to stay on the sidelines.

Let me tie things up by telling you that during the Showcase Showdown, Gene had the opportunity to win $40,000 in dental services, hastily arranged by the producers of the program, but instead chose to go to Hawaii for two weeks. He was so happy that as the credits rolled he stood beaming and the show was forced to mute the studio audience and insert some stock footage of an old program to hide the chaos going on.

All because Gene Shaftner, the man with the upside-down mouth, came on down.

# **the elephant**

"Before we begin, I have a favor to ask," the man with the graying temples began. "Please refer to me as a psychiatrist. I am not a psychologist nor am I a therapist."

"So, continuing to call you a shrink won't fly?" the younger man seated across from him replied, attempting unsuccessfully to remove any sarcasm from his tone.

"Correct. So, tell me why you're here."

"I think you already know why I'm here."

"I want to hear why you think you're here."

Sean was in his early 30's. Single. He had recently been involved in a robbery. He wasn't the perpetrator; the criminal involved had died at the scene of the crime.

Sean had killed him.

He thought over the question a bit. "Perhaps the court just wants to make sure I'm not a threat to anyone."

"What about to yourself?" asked the psychiatrist.

Sean laughed.

During the hold-up, the deceased wannabe-robber brandished a large knife and, during the course of the attempted robbery, threatened a couple of young girls with it. Sean had just stopped at the convenience store to buy a sandwich and a drink. It had never occurred to him to think about what would have happened if he'd have chosen to stop at a fast food place instead.

"You think I might have a death wish?" asked Sean.

"We just met. I have no idea what wishes you might have."

Sean rolled his eyes to indicate that if anyone was truly honest about what wishes they had, they'd probably be at a shrink three times a week trying to figure them out.

"Can't somebody just be brave? Just react without thinking?"

The psychiatrist jotted something down on his pad and then seemed to give the question some thought.

"Is that what you did, Sean? React without thinking?"

Sean wondered if the psychiatrist had seen the footage from the security camera. He assumed he had so he decided to tell the truth... to the best of his ability anyway.

Sean was on the other side of the store when the robber had approached the counter and it wasn't until the younger of the two girls, she might have been thirteen or fourteen, screamed that he was even aware of what was going on. After only a moment's hesitation, he walked towards the counter. The criminal told him to stop but he didn't.

"Tell me, Sean," the psychiatrist continued, "have you had any military or self-defense training?"

Again, Sean laughed. "If you saw the video you'd know I have not. I believe I got my purple belt in karate when I was eight. My mom worried about school violence so she enrolled me in one of those McKarate studios you find in every strip mall."

"Were you picked on as a kid?" the psychiatrist dutifully asked.

"We both know that's not why I did what I did."

Sean never broke stride. He walked straight up to the robber and attempted to wrestle the knife away. He was stabbed twice during the process. Both cuts were deep and bled like a pair of wilderness rivers. In the end, that's what saved him. The robber clearly was not ready to kill someone for the forty-some dollars in the register.

"So why did you intervene when the safer play was to sit back and watch?"

"I guess I'm not getting out of here without answering that, right?" Sean's laugh was different that time. "Ok. If you really want to know, here it is..." He sat back and stared at the ceiling. "I knew I wasn't going to die. No matter what happened, I wouldn't die, so why not?"

The psychiatrist scribbled on his pad a little more intently. Usually a statement like that doesn't come in the first session. He tried to control his enthusiasm.

"And why did you believe you weren't going to die?" When Sean didn't immediately reply, he added, "The man had a knife."

"When I was twenty-five, I went to a fortune teller. The woman told me I'd live a long life."

The scribbling stopped abruptly. The psychiatrist looked at Sean, trying to figure out if he was kidding.

"I know fortune tellers and psychics and all that are bullshit. I'm not an idiot."

This time the psychiatrist let the silence linger. He could see that Sean was wrestling with how to continue.

"This woman, the fortune teller, she was a fraud. It was obvious. The cheap sitting room. The bad gypsy headdress."

The robber had let go of the knife after stabbing Sean a second time. It stuck in his chest as the robber stepped back. Nobody in the store moved. It was like the whole city held its breath. Sean looked down at the knife and the girls screamed again. He removed the knife and drove it into the neck of the robber.

Nobody in the room breathed. Sean was trying to figure out how to explain why he believed the fortune teller and the psychiatrist was remembering the few seconds in the security footage where it was clear the robber was going to flee.

"Would you like a glass of water?" asked the psychiatrist.

Sean took a deep breath instead.

"I don't know if you know this story, but last month there was this celebrity in Hollywood who wanted to see a live elephant. His house was decorated with elephants. Everywhere you looked, there was some statue or painting of an elephant. Hindu this and African that."

Clearly, this was not the direction the psychiatrist had seen the conversation going, so he relaxed a little and listened.

"So anyway, the movie star didn't want to go all the way to Africa to see an elephant, so he decided to have one brought to his house. He was conflicted of course. He liked to think of himself as an animal lover and if it ever got out that he made some poor elephant schlep all the way to his house just so he could see one, it would certainly hurt his image... but he was a movie star so he did it anyway."

The police didn't press charges. It was obvious that it was self-defense. The media made Sean into a mini-celebrity. He got his fifteen minutes on TV as a hero.

Still... when a judge watched the video and saw that moment when the robber could have fled, she decided to have Sean sit down with a court-appointed professional. Better safe than sorry.

"It took the elephant hours to get to this guy's place. Stuck in a small trailer, stuck in traffic in one-hundred-degree heat. The movie star and his people and the handler and his assistant all had the same thought. This elephant was going to be in the presence of the top-grossing movie star of the year. Even if it didn't appreciate it, it was still quite an honor for an elephant."

The psychiatrist shook his head slightly.

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"I thought you wanted to know why I killed that man."

"I do," said the psychiatrist.

"I wanted to see an elephant," replied Sean.

# **sleepliving**

It started with a crappy pillow.

_And they pretend they're orphans_

Whatever lurked beneath the yellowing fabric would shift only a few minutes after his head settled upon it, necessitating it being constantly flipped so he could rest comfortably. Again and again, he was forced to make this adjustment.

_And their memory's like a train_

Eventually, he trained himself to do this in his sleep.

_You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away_

Shortly after that, he learned to get up and pee without waking up. There were a few complications along the way, which resulted in piss on the sink and the occasional smell of urine wafting up from the shower, but after enough nights had passed, the nightly journey went without incident.

_And the things you can't remember_

Of course, no amount of discipline would allow him to drive to work while asleep but he did learn to take the bus and wake up in his cubicle alert and refreshed.

_Tell the things you can't forget_

Interacting with people was a bit trickier but ultimately, the conversations he had with his friends when he was awake and the conversations he had with them while asleep were indistinguishable. Nobody knew the difference or maybe they were asleep as well.

_History puts a saint in every dream_

He could always tell the difference between when he was awake and when he was asleep. He was happier sleeping. Lost in the kaleidoscope of joy and regret. Wonderfully blurry and none of which made much sense. What was he really losing anyway?

_And it's Time, Time, Time_

This retreat... was it innocence or cowardice? He couldn't bring himself to care why anyone would care.

_That you love*_

*Tom Waits, _Time_

# **Dear Penthouse Forum**

I've read Penthouse Forum for years and for years. I've seen people write "I can't believe this happened to me," but I'm writing to tell you a story that actually happened to me... but I can't believe it happened to me.

Forgive me if it takes a while to get good.

I had dated her a few times and we seemed to get along well. She was an actress, the lead in the big play in town, so I was always wary of her abilities to pretend to be someone else or say something sincerely. I guess you can never trust a woman, but in the case of an actress, I imagined that went double.

I went to see her play last night. She got me front row seats and I made a point to try to watch her expressions as closely as possible to see if I could get an insight into when she was acting and when she was being herself.

The makeup made it hard. I guess those happy/sad masks that represent theater could just as easily be layers of lip gloss, cheek blush, and eyeliner. A mask is a mask.

The play went well and she seemed in a great mood backstage. After she was able to slip away from her admirers, we grabbed a bite to eat and I walked her to the front door of her house.

She invited me in.

A four-alarm fire burst in my pants.

She gave me a glass of water and said she needed to go upstairs and change. I almost had to pour the water down the front of my khakis.

Moments later, I heard the stairs creak as she started down. I casually looked up to see what she was wearing.

She descended the stairs in a cropped brown jacket and high-waisted black skinny jeans. She looked great but not particularly comfortable. She plopped down on the couch next to me and started flipping through channels to find something to watch.

I had the feeling it was about to get good.

It wasn't. Not yet anyway.

After a few minutes of trying to find a comfy position on the couch in her tight jeans, she stood up and excused herself again.

I heard her moving around in the bedroom above me and eventually the stairs once again creaked their tell-tale creak announcing her imminent arrival.

This time, she floated down in a delightful pink and purple boho dress. The floating took her almost to the bottom of the stairs before she turned and floated back up with a short "This is too floaty."

More minutes passed and I realized that my pants no longer needed the fire department. I sunk into the couch and started to watch an episode of  _Community_ that I rather liked.

I looked up briefly to see her start down the stairs again in a striking floral long-sleeved midi and white boots, only making it a quarter of the way down before wordlessly pivoting and disappearing back upstairs.

The episode of  _Community_  ended and another one began. I went to the refrigerator and got myself a soda and, after some rummaging through her cabinets, found a bag of chips to snack on. A television commercial in the other room was blurting out "Until you're twenty, you have the face you were born with, and after that, you have the face you deserve." Before I could return to the living room, I heard the stairs creak for a few seconds, stop and then start creaking in the reverse direction. I felt bad that I had missed an outfit.

But plenty more were to come.

I saw a white shirtdress over printed trousers and a matching neck scarf, a yellow plaid jacket over vintage denim pants, and a crème-hued sweater and skirt combo.

Finally, she made it all the way down the stairs and returned to the couch in an airy maxi skirt and a graphic tee. I don't have to tell you she was worth the wait. She looked amazing.

I don't want to disappoint the readers, but nothing sexual happened. She wouldn't remove her makeup and I didn't want to kiss a girl I didn't know.

If you know what I mean.

I sincerely couldn't believe it happened to me.

The good part?

Out of nowhere, I remembered a quote from poet David Whyte:

"Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival."

Yours Sincerely,

Well Hung Up On Someone

Bangor, Maine

# **Christopher from Columbus (the aesthetics of lostness)**

People say that when you live near an airport, it isn't long before you don't even hear the planes flying overhead.

Not so for Christopher from Columbus. He has lived by John Glenn International Airport his whole life and he hears every plane that arrives and departs and he wouldn't have it any other way. He relishes the sound. They're his friends and conspirators. Since he was little, the giant hunks of metal lifting off and defying gravity were vessels that allowed him to explore the world without having to leave his backyard.

And while it's true that he imagines beautiful locales and exotic destinations, he always remains realistic that the majority of the aircraft are headed to less exciting places.

Omaha. Wichita. Alabama. (The "a" at the end of Alabama pronounced like the previous cities, Alabamaw, as in "Aw crap, look where we're headed." If you don't take the time to pronounce the three of them together with this new spin on Alabama, you're going to miss out on a lot of things in life.)

Christopher thinks a lot about missing out on things. He sits at the end of the largest runway and watches the planes overhead and he wonders if there was a little boy centuries ago sitting at the dock of some large port city watching the big ships come in and out, wishing he could jump aboard, and he wonders if that kid ever did and where he ended up and how things turned out.

Christopher learned in school that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British Royal Navy used a tactic called impressment to recruit sailors. What that term meant was that groups of sailors, "press gangs," would grab men off the street and force them to serve on ships. One minute you're walking along the shore, the next you were in the middle of the ocean headed for unknown shores.

Christopher wonders if British Airways ever considered that policy for stewards and stewardesses. One minute, you're at the mall and the next, you're handing out peanuts 30,000 feet above the ground.

He would like to be impressed if they were headed to Hawaii but would be less impressed if the landing spot was somewhere like Birmingham, Alabamaw.

He sometimes had trouble using the term impressment correctly.

(If you didn't take the time to pronounce Alabama like Wichita, you continue to fight against your own jollity. You might not get another opportunity. I'm not sure I can squeeze in another Alabama reference.)

Christopher often thinks that school is the land-based equivalent of impressment, but that thought is hardly unique in Columbus.

He looks up at the airplanes and wonders what the kid from the seventeenth century would make of them. Probably the same thing he would feel watching rockets disappear into space or men walking through a portal and stepping out on the other side of the universe.

His dad works as a mechanic for one of the airlines and his mom is a secretary for one of the companies that provide the in-flight meals. Neither has ever left Ohio.

"The businessmen who spend their lives going from one city to another having their little meetings and never feeling lost are kidding themselves if they think they are travelers," his dad would often say. "The Holiday Inn in Phoenix looks just like the one in Columbus." One time his dad added "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving... Lao Tzu said that."

He wrote down that quote. It made the poster over his bed, which had a beat-up-looking hobbit depicted and bold print at the bottom saying "Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to" seem a bit more pessimistic than JRR Tolkien had probably intended. Christopher wondered if Mr. Tolkien had heard about press gangs.

Either way, his mom bought him the poster and it has hung over his bed ever since.

He knows all the planes. He sits cross-legged in a field and feels the roar of their engines sweep over him. Occasionally, he will say the model of a plane he hasn't seen in awhile out loud. He finds the idea of building model planes silly.

Finally, he lies down and stares up the planes and says "They have to speak a different language where you land for it to count as travel."

He closes his eyes and feels his skin vibrating as each plane thunders past.

"Or at least the trees have to look different."

# **St. Cleophis: patron saint of incomplete or abbreviated thoughts**

Like everything involved in religion, the truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is fiction. So, I feel compelled to add to it.

As you probably know, in the same casual way you know there was a shark involved in  _Jaws_ , when you die, you end up in front of Saint Peter at the pearly gates. He takes a look at this big book he has and decides whether you spend eternity in bliss or in a lake of fire enduring endless torment. Needless to say, the contents of that book seem pretty important.

What you don't know are a couple things: the first being that supposedly, the pearly gates are called that because they (12 of them apparently) are each carved from a single pearl.

That is one a big-ass oyster.

The second thing you probably don't know, and the basis for this story, is what lurks inside the pages of the aforementioned book. It's actually harder to believe than an entire gate being made from a single oyster but it doesn't make it any less true.

Or any more.

Ever heard of Saint Bernard? I hadn't and assumed there wasn't one because of the dog. There actually is a Saint Bernard and he is the patron saint of skiing and snowboarding. I shit you not. Now I have to come up with another funny saint name.

Ever heard of Saint Cleophis? I'm guessing you haven't because I just made him up.

I mean, Saint Cleophis is the guy who fills the Saint Peter's book with the necessary data for him to make a pretty pivotal judgment when it comes to people walking in the front gate to heaven or taking the elevator down.

And what data might that be?

Here is where it gets a little hard to believe. It has nothing to do with your good works or transgressions against god. Acts of charity or various blasphemies do not make their way into this book. Nope. The only things listed, the only things that ol' Saint Cleophis manages to include are the words that would have followed every time you ever said "I was about to say..." in your lifetime.

You know those moments when you misheard, misunderstood, or are shocked by what has just left someone's mouth and you stand there dumbfounded for a few seconds until someone, possibly the person who uttered the words that had you confused to begin with, clears things up and you exhale, laugh, shake your head and say "I was about to say..." and then trail off?

The thing you were about to say? That's what makes it into the book.

"That can't be right!" I hear you saying to yourself.

Oh, can't it?

Is there a moment where your true self is revealed clearer than this?

"How arbitrary!" I hear you saying to yourself and, without sounding pissy, I wish you'd stop saying things to yourself when you're reading.

Have you read the bible, torah, or koran?! You're going to tell me that this is any more or less arbitrary than some of the stupid shit that goes in those books? Makes Harry Potter look like the instructions for a toaster oven.

If you must, just put it off to Lance Manion working in mysterious ways.

Because I do.

But in this case, I'm just telling you the truth as I know it. When you die, you end up in front of a man with a book and in that book is a list of things you thought to yourself after uttering the phrase "I was about to say..." and those things determine where you spend the rest of eternity.

You might want to think about that the next time someone confuses or shocks you.

Actually, I'm just kidding. I just made that whole thing up.

I hear you laughing and saying to yourself "I was about to say..."

(Careful!)

# **2018/2019 (part 1)**

On January 31st, 2018 he set off for Reno. The year had been a bitch so he decided that when he arrived at his destination, he would call himself "Lucky" and never tell another soul his real name.

He would stop somewhere in the Midwest and pick up a dog traveling companion. He would name the dog, male or female, Lucky. This, he thought, would make him seem more interesting to whatever women he might meet. He even thought it might make him seem endearing.

He had never been endearing before so he thought it was high time.

He liked to refer to 2018 as "her," like the year was a boat or a woman.

She'd been a bit up and down but when he was honest enough with himself, in a tally, the "downs" won, hands down. "Luck," he thought to himself, "can be a lady and still fuck you over."

The previous day, he'd picked up a copy of  _The Picture of Dorian Gray_  by Oscar Wilde, a gallon of cheap vodka, and some orange juice. He needed to read more and he needed to drink more... and he needed to get to Reno.

He would drive a few hours then pull over and make himself a screwdriver and sit and read. The book was more than he'd bargained for. Within the first forty-one pages there was both

_"Young men want to be faithful, and are not;_

_old men want to be faithless, and cannot; that is all one can say."_

and

_"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."_

He felt that somehow 2018 had gotten into the car with him and decided to spend her remaining few hours reminding him of why he set off to Reno in the first place. A last road trip for the two of them.

He never put much stock in tarot cards but on January 30, 2018, he had flipped open a book on them to see what 2019 might hold. Nestled on that page was the Queen of Wands.

"The Queen of Wands reminds you to see through your creative visions and life purpose, even in the face of adversity and challenge.

The Queen of Wands asks you to be bold and courageous in your undertakings and actions.

The Queen of Wands also indicates that this is the perfect time to put yourself out there and meet new people.

Finally, the Queen of Wands encourages you to get to know your shadow self – the lesser-known and sometimes darker side of who you really are."

2018 didn't like that page one bit... so it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time to throw all of his belongings into his car and just leave. It was his shadow-self that chose Reno. It might have also had a hand in the book he chose. While this Dorian Gray character had yet to start his life of debauchery, the book flap promised it was only a matter of time. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he skipped reading at one of his rest stops and instead downed two screw drivers.

He could feel New Year's Eve coming. The countdown to her death.

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...

How would he feel?

Lucky?

Around eleven thirty, he turned off the radio. He didn't want to know the exact moment of her demise. She'd been a heartless bitch but they'd also had a few laughs. It wasn't just her that was dying either. He hummed to himself "We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine; But seas between us broad have roared since auld lang syne."

When he felt sure that 2019 had begun, he exhaled and smiled. His engine roared.

He was Lucky.

# **let me catch you up**

I live on a ¼ acre of property which I must mow every week. It takes me under an hour. If I had more property, it would take longer. If I had a really large lawn, I might have to invest in a riding mower. I was thinking about this as I was shaving and it got me to thinking about if I had a much larger face. Like a face a hundred yards across. I might need a riding razor... but how would that work?

Is this what going crazy feels like?

My clothes were not ready for the new washer. It spun the hell out of them. When I took out my pants, they had little stars swirling around them.

Last year, I tried my hand at having a nice potted plant on my back deck. It didn't work out. The plant died but I left the pot there. This year, a random weed somehow took root and now it stands about three feet high. It's sitting in the pot like it belongs there. A fine example of whatever plant species it is. Now I don't have the heart to throw it out. I wouldn't want to make it feel like it wasn't pot-worthy. I'd feel like sort of a plant racist. So now I have a giant weed growing on my back deck.

A cobra has enough venom to kill 30 people. It would almost be worth getting bit if I could choose the other 29 people.

I was invited to go up in a hot air balloon. Fuck that. Wicker baskets are for holding decorative soaps in the bathroom, not 215 lbs of Manion thousands of feet above the ground. Half of them get blown out to sea never to be seen again and fully 30% of the rest hit power lines on the way down and burst into flames. Fuck hot air balloons and the people who invite their so-called friends to go up in them.

While I'm certainly no stranger to dumb thoughts, I might have had my dumbest ever last night. I was thinking about the first animals that evolved eyes and how they probably made a lot of snippy comments to all the other animals that couldn't see.... no, that's not the dumb part yet. The dumb part was when I wondered what life would be like if no animals ever evolved eyes. How different human lives would be. We'd have all these cars but nobody could drive them. I know that sounds dumb, but think about it. There are deeper depths of dumbness to plumb. The more you think about it, the dumber it gets. It is jaw-droppingly, staggeringly dumb. I am strangely proud of myself. I might have thought the dumbest thought ever.

Wrangler jeans asks in their commercials if I am ready for anything. No. No I am not. In fact, there are very few things I am ready for. I shall not be buying their jeans.

Driving home with the windows down, I was hit with a powerful scent of decay. Obviously, a large animal had died nearby. The aroma hung in the air a long time and I realized my nose could still detect it a lot longer than I had imagined I could. I quickly pulled over and got out of the car and started walking back to see if I could locate the corpse using my sense of smell. I couldn't. I realized I would make a terrible vulture. It was a real bummer as it was the tenth animal this week I realized I could never be. Humans being one of them. This post being a good indication why.

Nobody remembers who came in 2nd. Or, in the case of the WNBA, 1st.

I read somewhere that flies shit every time they land. Seems like a lot of shit. A lot of pressure to shit. I can picture a young fly getting yelled at by his parents. "What was that?" The young fly's compound eyes looking down sheepishly. "Now you go back over there and take a shit, mister."

I don't like the expression "It remains to be seen." Everything remains to be seen. That's how time works.

I have a lot of respect for evolution. Survival of the fittest, the generational tinkering that takes place. I don't imagine that the male's original equipment was as complicated as it is now. The inflating, the deflating, all the blood vessels and pulleys required. I assume at first, men just walked around completely erect 24/7. I wonder what it was that made it so important to hide the size of the penis. Seems like a big undertaking just to keep the size of your rig a mystery. Imagine if female breasts underwent the same machinations. Having to wait until the moment was right to see them inflate to their full size. (Muttering under your breath "keep going... keep going.") Yep, I have a healthy admiration for evolution.

I sleep with two pillows. They're different thicknesses and I use both of them when watching TV in bed and then flip one up when I go to sleep. Last night, it fell down over my head... which explains why I dreamt I was a sandwich. Obviously, not a meatball sandwich or cheesesteak. I'm glad I wasn't ham but disappointed I wasn't HAM (hardass motherfucker). My best guess is a turkey club. Details are fuzzy.

Written in the margins of a magazine at the dentist: Papa John... his first girlfriend ended up a topping.

The subconscious is an amazing thing. Earlier today, I saw a small box containing wax strips to remove hair. The brand name was written in cursive up and down instead of left to right so it was hard to see clearly. I read it as "Salty Harvest" instead of the correct "Sally Hansen." I have to wonder what in my brain led me to that.

I suggest the next time you walk through a field inhabited by grasshoppers, you take a moment to imagine things from their perspective. How enormous you seem as you approach. It might help.

Texans Owner Bob McNair apologized for saying "We can't have inmates running the prison" regarding ongoing NFL player protests. He explained what he meant to say was "We can't have people who would otherwise be inmates running the prison."

From far away, a shark's skin looks smooth and unblemished. When you get closer though it shows the countless scars of battles with other sharks, dolphins and sea turtles. Same as my dick. For the same reason. I'm hoping that one day, I'll be allowed back into Sea World.

If you knew that in 10,000 years the person you are dating's skeleton was going to be in a museum, would it change the way you treated them?

You know how Matt Damon's character in _The Martian_ felt when he realized his team had assumed he was dead and left him on Mars alone with no way of getting back to Earth? That's how I felt when my car didn't start at the mall. Exactly like that.

The trunk of an elephant has over 100,000 muscles in it. When I think what I've been able to accomplish with my penis, which only has one, I have to wonder what a tremendous elephant I would have made.

Can we just end the suspense and accuse every man with a job of improper sexual conduct?

You know who I hate? The guy from My Pillow. In his commercials, he lists a bunch of sleeping-related ailments then says "That's why I invented My Pillow." He didn't invent shit. It's a fucking pillow.

Know who else I hate? The douchebag in the Nationwide commercials who wants us to believe that he and his cool musician buddies sit around singing about insurance. You insincere whore!

So gross! I have hundreds of little things growing out of my face and head. Hairs.

After watching back-to-back commercials for tactical sunglasses and a tactical flashlight, I've decided to become a mercenary.

He looked at her and said: "We pretend we've lived dozens of lives and have things figured out. We accept at face value the rules of right and wrong offered up by people also on their first go round. The truth is that they could all be robots and we'd have no idea. Perhaps this whole reality thing is an experiment to see if two sentient beings who are meant to be together can find each other among seven billion extras." She was unmoved by this idea.

Saw the first Kellogg's commercial without a black person in it in the last ten years and it was for Chocolate Frosted Flakes. Racist?

If I were one of those guys who competes in World's Strongest Man competitions, there's no way I'd help someone open a stuck jar. There's no upside. If you struggled even the slightest, you know they'd roll their eyes.

I think if the zombie apocalypse comes and I get bitten and know I'm going to turn and become one of the living dead, I think I'd take off all my clothes. I've never been particularly comfortable being nude but the idea of spending eternity wandering around naked appeals to me. Even though zombies are inherently terrifying, I'd like to think that when survivors get an eyeful of me that, as jaded as they've become, they'll go "Yikes" despite themselves.

Does the word "breasts" in Braille have different sized dots? It would seem to save the need for additional words.

I like to think that when talk show hosts wake up their first thought is "And we're back..."

The dot over the "I" is called a tittle. The word titillating has three tittles. That has to mean something.

And just like that, he was decapitated, his head toppling to the dusty ground. Luckily, I was able to cauterize the wound. He did, however, lose the body.

I feel like I'm the only one who cares that Kilimanjaro is nowhere near the Serengeti. Therefore it can't rise above it like Olympus. Just because they are both in Tanzania doesn't mean you can lump them together into your shitty song, _Toto_.

If video games have taught us one thing, it's that whomever designed the vagina didn't understand the male psyche. It can't be a "hit it and quit it" affair. It needs levels that can only be unlocked with return visits. Bottom line? A few secret levels wouldn't kill the vagina.

Romeo and Moby Dick: What through yonder window blows?

Yesterday, my mom told me how proud she was of me. It felt great until I realized it was only because she isn't a Viking. Imagine a man of my age and I've yet to burn down a single village.

If you wish to dream about being a bookmark, it is best to sleep between 19 blankets and 3 mattresses.

Our artwork is bigger than our pictures. It usually features more prominently in our homes. Maybe that's what keeps us sane.

# **2018/2019 (part 2)**

She stood at the door and pressed the doorbell. She of the many last names and at least one nickname. Each change in name a conscious attempt at transformation.

There was no answer.

She of the many last names and at least one nickname knocked, softly at first, then louder. It was eleven thirty on New Year's Eve but she had assumed he would be home.

Missing her.

Missing them.

She was making a grand gesture. He would assume she was off living the life that had caused their split, New Year's Eve being the high holy day of irresponsible behavior, but instead, she would arrive at his door bearing gifts, offering apologies, and the affection he so craved and he would hop back on the rollercoaster. At least, that was the plan.

He wasn't home.

For a moment, unprovoked, she thought about the scene in  _Good Will Hunting_ where Ben Affleck's character walked up to the door of Matt Damon's character only to find him not there. What was it she was hoping for?

She stood there for a few moments and thought about calling him. Instead, she tried the doorknob and found that the door was open. She thought about texting him but instead turned the knob and went inside.

She said his name out loud and although the space wasn't big enough to echo, it seemed to confirm that not only was he not home, but the apartment was truly empty.

She walked over to the kitchen table and put down the book she had bought for him.  _Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations_ , a mini-anthology of poetry and stories by Rainer Maria Rilke. It was filled with bookmarks, highlighting what she felt were particularly relevant bits of advice such as:

"Self-transformation is precisely what life is, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling from minute to minute, and lovers are those in whose relationship and contact no one moment resembles another."

She wondered where he was. She wondered if he was happy and what he was doing and if he was wondering where she was and if she was happy. She wondered how long it was until the ball dropped in Times Square and if she was going to get the kiss she had hoped for.

She walked over to his stereo to see what CD he had last listened to, believing that if you know that information, you know a man's heart.

For the duration of the CD at least.

_Technicolor_  by Chris Trapper. She didn't know it... and so she didn't know what was in his heart the last time he stood where she stood. Suddenly, the room felt not only empty but like it could stay empty. If she knew that he'd listened to  _Th_ e _Accident_  ten times in a row before hitting the power button, it would have felt worse ("walk beside me, through the thunder, 'cause I fear what's comin' round the corner's more than one of us can take alone").

"Oh well," she said to herself and then tried to paraphrase Epictetus the best she could; "What harm is it while you are wanting to kiss your friend to say with a lisping voice, 'Tomorrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again'?"

She sighed then said aloud "Tomorrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again."

She walked into his bedroom. The place he'd wanted her to wake up so many times before. She looked at her phone. It was eleven forty-eight. She opened a drawer.

His socks and underwear were gone.

She didn't need to check the closet to know his shirts were AWOL.

She sat on the corner of his bed. She could feel New Year's Eve coming. 2019 was circling like a bird of prey.

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...

For better or worse, slopes run and picked daises aside, she was not going to get Lucky.

" _If you're not confused, you're not paying attention."_

-Tom Peters

# **incident in San Juan**

They were adding on to the D terminal at the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in suburban Carolina, Puerto Rico. A fact that she shouldn't have even been aware of except for the mechanical difficulties on her flight that caused her layover to stretch from one hour to eight.

Bored, she spent many hours walking zig-zag through the airport, exploring every nook that sold alcohol and cranny that pitched perfumes. Except, of course, the area that lay beyond the rope in D terminal.

For the first few hours anyway.

When it became late evening and the airport started to clear out, her curiosity got the better of her and nobody really seemed to care anyway when she slipped behind the rope and started down a long corridor that led off to the nether regions of D. A left turn followed by a right turn and she was suddenly very alone. She enjoyed the feeling that she wasn't supposed to be there.

She entered the area where construction was under way and everywhere there were signs saying "Please Excuse Us As We Work To Give You A Modern Facility." Eventually, she reached the end, a small cluster of seats sat in front of a counter where soon, thousands of people a day would be approaching, tickets in hand, on their way to various glamorous and non-glamorous destinations. There were only a few flickering lights on overhead so she couldn't fully imagine the hustle and bustle to come and she wondered why flickering lights had always made her feel like something was about to happen.

She leaned against the counter and pretended she was a gate agent asking to see a ticket.

The security guard, obviously wearing footwear that allowed him to creep around unnoticed, turned the corner. He looked like a normal Puerto Rican airport security guard, but if you'd like to imagine him a bit more handsome, who am I to stop you? Being airport security, he did not carry a weapon, only zip ties and mace, but he still looked somewhat imposing in his uniform.

She froze. Busted.

He said something in Spanish that she did not understand. She smiled awkwardly and said something in English that he did not understand. He smiled unawkwardly.

She realized she was still leaning on the counter. The guard's eyes briefly took in the ample bosom that was on full display courtesy of her little sun dress, then tried to glance nonchalantly back up to her face without being noticed.

But she noticed and he noticed that she noticed. She smiled again.

Because there was no air conditioning in this section of the airport, the air was warm and humid. She went from zero to glistening. He began to approach her and ever so slightly, she arched her back. If, as the idiom goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, many of them were in a very universal language.

He walked behind her and she remained motionless, eyes forward.

She heard his heavy belt hit the ground.

Once, on an Alaskan cruise, she had seen an enormous chunk of a glacier fall off into the ocean. It made a deafening roar that she felt in her bones.

The sound of the belt was like that, except janglier.

She felt him behind her, leaning over. Gently, he took one of her wrists and put a zip tie on it, then attached it to the counter. He repeated the operation with her other wrist. She did not breathe the entire time.

She felt his hand on her back, pushing her flat on the counter. She arched her back again, ever so noticeably, and felt her dress being lifted up.

He was neither large nor small. Gentle nor rough. He didn't grope her breasts or bite her neck or try to kiss her. His hands remained on her hips throughout the procedure. All she was aware of, all she could process, was the fact that the counter had yet to be permanently fixed to the ground as it slowly, one thrust at a time, made its way forward.

Afterwards, she heard him pick up his belt. It sounded the way an enormous chunk of ice falling up from the ocean and attaching itself to a glacier would sound.

Except janglier.

She heard a rustling and then he leaned over her again, taking a pair of tin snips and cutting the zip tie from one wrist. He then laid it down by her other wrist.

She watched him walk away, still slumped over the counter (which now sat pressed against some gang-seating in the middle of the room). Before she snipped her other restraint, she took a picture of the zip tie cutting into the adorable little tattoo on her wrist.

When she was done, she posted the pic on Instagram.

It got over two hundred shares. Her previous record was four.

The only thing she'd written under it was "Thanks to my 'special friend' in San Juan."

Frederick R. Barnard, in an ad in Printer's Ink magazine in 1921, incorrectly attributed the phrase "One look is worth a thousand words" to a Japanese philosopher. Later, in 1927, that same magazine suggested a Chinese origin but said they claimed one picture is worth ten thousand words.

My point is... she said a lot in eight.

# **who are the monsters?**

The day after Halloween is always a weird day. As you're pulling down the toilet paper out of your trees and cleaning off the egg from the windows and painting over the "Die Fag!" graffiti on your garage and sweeping up broken glass from the bricks thrown through your car windows and making sure the flames are completely extinguished from where the shed used to be, you can't help but wonder what the term "monster" really means.

The night before, it starts just as the sun begins to sink below the horizon with the real little kids coming to your door all dressed up. Princesses and Spidermen clutching plastic pumpkins asking politely for a piece of candy while their parents hover at the end of the driveway, just in case you decide to grab their offspring and throw them in a pit you dug in the basement. ("It puts the candy in the bag or it gets the hose.")

It ends with the usual screaming at teenage Donald Trumps and Hillarys to stop lighting bags of dog shit on my doorstep.

That's Halloween. So, who are the real monsters?

Ghosts and werewolves clog the streets and yet the scariest person I saw all day was the man at McDonald's hours before. He was dressed up as a cashier and he was being mean to a small balding man who had come as a small balding man with no self-esteem. The man at the cash register was yelling at him because he had wanted a plain hamburger in his kid's Happy Meal but the man dressed in his McCostume made it plain he had heard a cheeseburger and that's exactly what he was going to give him. I knew that if I had ordered the wrong sandwich, this guy would have never uttered a word but because the small man was one of those people that just looks like he expects life to climb up on the counter at every opportunity and take a giant dump on him and he is helpless to do anything about it, the cashier saw a chance to make another human being even more miserable than they already were.

So, who was the real monster?

I have to believe they both were. They exist and crash around and inflict themselves on everybody they meet and the truth is, on any given day, you and I could have easily switched masks and played either role. Two monsters acting out their little scene surrounded by other monsters waiting for their food. Some of them waiting to bring that food home to their own little monsters. Monsters that will shriek with glee at the site of the most unhealthy, shitty food that has ever existed before throwing on another mask and heading out to reap a bounty of sugary treats. Shit in. Shit out.

I read these words and realize that the best and worst monsters live in my own head. Why bother with a disguise? I want to march out to social events dressed as a lonely basket case and dare anyone to try to guess who I am. But I don't.

I'm the guy cleaning up the urine around my pumpkins.

So, who are the monsters?

We are.

# **Love. Sex. Friendship.**

It's been shown by numerous credible sources that there's a strong connection between physical health and mental well-being. Get your body into better shape and your mind is sure to follow. That's the surefire cure for any malaise.

Or so they say.

With this in mind, I decided on a course of action to get both my body and spirits into better shape and the vehicle I chose was rock climbing. Not out in the wilderness but in the cozy confines of a rock wall gym.

For those unfamiliar with what a rock wall is, let me enlighten you. A rock wall is a man-made structure where there is a wall and jutting out of that wall are a number of small hand-holds that allow you to quickly and easily climb. Quickly and easily if you have a large amount of mountain goat or orangutan in your DNA.

The rest of us are left looking up and wondering aloud if there wasn't a better way to have spent twenty dollars.

To make matters worse, after a few visits to said gym, you'll be encouraged to leave behind the fleeting feelings of accomplishment you get by successfully making it to the top of a particular set of hand-holds - even though you understand that this is the same set they lead the obese ten-year-old to for his birthday climb - and try something called "bouldering." Bouldering is where you follow a set of colored hand-holds that don't require a harness or being helped by any of the facilities' many employees. In fact, you never make it more than a few feet off the ground as you try to figure out a way to complete the various paths.

It is cruel and brutal and no fun whatsoever. It makes your arms ache, your fingers burn, and your legs cramp. All within sight of the obese ten-year-old and his opinionated friends.

At this gym, there were three sets of colored hand-hold paths to choose from. They were named Love, Sex, and Friendship. To make things even more unnecessarily difficult, their coloring wasn't particularly distinctive. Red for Love, pink for Sex, and a pale orange for Friendship. When you're desperately clinging to a wall and reaching out for something to hold onto, the subtleties of these differences can easily be missed. Just when you think you're making real progress with Friendship, you end up grabbing a little Sex and ruining the whole thing.

I couldn't even get a straight answer from the instructor on which path I should take. I wanted the easiest one and he explained that it depends on a lot of factors, body type and attitude being the most important. I just wanted a little exercise and the next thing I knew, I had to decide if I'm the type of person who likes slow but steady or if I'm willing to take a few risks.

I spent a few hours trying to see which path was more to my liking and found that I was a failure at all of them. Each one seemed to have some facet I couldn't overcome.

I sat on the padded flooring and wondered why I bothered to follow the rules to begin with. I had paid my money. Why did I care if a bunch of people I didn't know or care about thought of how I was spending my rock-climbing time? If I had used whatever climbing holds were within reach instead of worrying if they were red, pink, or orange, I would have had a much more enjoyable experience. Mountains don't have colors!

If I sound like I'm just making excuses for my poor performance, you're probably right. The thing is, I wasn't prepared like some of the people who strode up to the counter and plopped down their membership cards. They had special shoes. They had their own helmets. They had bags of white powder that I can only assume was cocaine.

I was in jeans and a t-shirt and I'm the first to admit I have the mental fortitude of an obese ten-year-old kid... and I don't even know where to buy cocaine anymore.

Before you roll your eyes though and give up on me, just know that I'm not going to give up that easily. I'm going back until I'm a veteran of Love, Sex, and Friendship. Until I know the right ways to go. Until I know when and where to grab for each. Until I can hold on as long as necessary.

Until I'm a slimmer ten-year-old.

# **year of the cat (roll tide)**

Peter Yoon began to suspect something during the campus tour.

From the time he was little, all his dad talked about was his time at the University of Alabama. Every Saturday, they would watch the Crimson Tide squash whatever hapless opponent their football team was facing and his dad would stomp and yell and rejoice with every touchdown.

Peter never met his mother. "She was from Auburn," was all his dad would say on the matter. Well, that's not exactly all; he would sometimes add "Never trust a woman from Auburn."

His dad's name is Zhang. For the longest time, he thought his parents, first generation immigrants, had picked for him the most American-sounding name they could, but he later found out he was named after Peter Lorre.

More on that in a minute.

Peter's grandmother was killed by a mule- much more common than you think- and his grandfather's English was poor so when he came to visit, their conversations seemed forced and awkward. Plus, his grandfather's name was Wang and Peter had a hard-enough time being Asian in the South without having to suppress a laugh every time he thought about that name.

Which made the upcoming conversation he had with his grandfather even more odd.

More on that in a minute.

When he was a young boy, his dad told him the first song he danced to with the freshly-minted Mrs. Yoon was  _Year of the Cat_. At the time, he assumed this was something to do with Chinese zodiac. When he was a teenager, he found out the cat is not one of the twelve animals but did show up on the Vietnamese calendar (taking the place of the rabbit). This led him to believe that his mother was Vietnamese and that his dad had been lying to him all along.

"Why didn't you tell me that my mom wasn't Chinese?!" he thundered at his surprised dad.

That's when his dad told him that she was and that the  _Year of the Cat_  was a song by Al Stewart.

His dad hummed "While she looks at you so coolly... and her eyes shine like the moon in the sea... She comes in incense and patchouli... So, you take her, to find what's waiting inside," quietly to himself and got a very faraway look in his eyes.

Content with that answer and wanting to let his dad enjoy whatever flashback he was having, Peter turned to walk away when his dad added, "And you were named after Peter Lorre."

Assuming you read at a normal rate, you'll find that it's been almost exactly a minute since I promised to explain the Peter Lorre reference.

I'm good like that. (Although who looks at "almost exactly" and decides to leave it as is?)

I'd like to boast more but I have another explanation coming up in about exactly thirty seconds.

After the Peter Lorre revelation, Peter watched all of his movies and became a bit of an aficionado on films of that era. If there is any more on that, it will be on your end after this tale is over. Not only don't I blame you for giving it some additional thought, but I highly encourage it. It might be the most interesting part of the whole story.

After years of hearing about the various exploits of his dad at U of Alabama, Peter found it curious that his dad got lost getting there. When they finally arrived, his dad had no clue where any of the buildings were. "A lot has changed since I've been here," was all he said.

"What could have changed so much?" wondered Peter as every building looked a hundred years old.

By the time the overly-cheery people responsible for shepherding prospective students and parents through the grounds were wrapping things up, he was convinced that his dad had never stepped foot on the school grounds before.

"Why did you tell me you went to Alabama?!" he thundered at his befuddled dad. I'm going to come right out and say it: Peter was a bit of a thunderer.

This time, his dad had no reply.

Furious, and fresh off his thundering, Peter ran off and ended up taking a two-hour taxi ride home.

When he arrived home, he found his dad wasn't there but his grandfather was.

"Your dad went to Auburn," he said with a thick accent.

"But... um..." was all Peter could come up with.

So, his grandfather explained that a long time ago, his son was wildly in love with Peter's mom but she was only wild. When she left, his dad was so broken, he rejected everything about her, himself, and their brief life together.

"That's crazy," said Peter.

"What is love but insanity?" countered his grandfather.

After digesting this, Peter said only one thing. "Roll Tide."

A few miles away, his dad sat alone at a bar. A familiar song came on the jukebox as a result of a few quarters he'd deposited moments earlier.

_She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running  
Like a watercolor in the rain  
Don't bother asking for explanations  
She'll just tell you that she came  
In the year of the cat_

Glassy-eyed, he lifted his bottle in the air... "Roll Tide."

# **his disadvantage (originally titled "her disadvantage")**

Wally leaned across the table, pushing the breadsticks aside, and tried to explain. "I believe old lovers are like unobserved particles... they exist everywhere simultaneously."

Molly reached for a breadstick. Not only was she hungry but she sensed this explanation was going to take awhile. While she adored Wally, his explanations often made her forget what he was trying to explain.

"What I mean by that is..." he continued, "you imagine them traveling and seeing the world and having an exciting job and a string of whirlwind love affairs. You also see them as homeless and broke and lonely."

Molly seemed to perk up for a second. "Like that cat you told me about? Schroeder's cat?" she inquired.

"You mean Schrödinger's cat?" he corrected her. "Schroeder was the piano-playing friend of Charlie Brown."

"Yes."

"No. Well... maybe- if you're wondering if they're alive or dead." He clearly didn't anticipate this diversion in his explanation and Molly could clearly hear the train sliding noisily off the tracks. This pleased her a great deal. She tried to hide this fact.

She took a large bite of the breadstick.

Wally regrouped.

I should tell you at this juncture that Wally and Molly were old lovers who had not seen each other in a very long time. Ok. Back to the action.

"Old lovers, like particles, live out every possible future. When we think of them, we can imagine any scenario we want and there exists the possibility that _this_ is their life." Wally leaned back in his chair as if he'd said something that explained why he'd called her after all these years.

Molly swallowed.

Obviously, when I mentioned getting back "to the action," I might have been overstating it.

"So, you wanted to see which reality I ended up living out," she finally said.

"Once observed, the particle is forced to choose one path," he replied.

"So, what you're really saying is you're too chicken shit to admit you've been wondering about me. Trying to cloak it in scientific mumbo-jumbo to avoid coming out and just asking me." Molly said this seemingly without anger, delivering it completely bereft of malice.

Sensing she missed out on the opportunity for a bit of malice, she added, "In fact, all you've done by observing me is taken away the chance that I might be wealthy and living on an island paradise with a brigade of well-built men at my beck and call."

She sat back and awaited an apology.

Wally laughed nervously and reached for the breadsticks. Luckily, moments later a waitress approached them and asked them for their order, thus ending the assault on the breadsticks.

Finally, he spoke again. "Is there a special man in your life?"

She smiled in a way that turned everything below his waist into both particles and waves simultaneously.

"Look at the evidence sitting before you, Wally. Would I be wearing a short skirt if I was in a relationship?"

"I don't suppose you would. I'm guessing you'd go with a tasteful pair of jeans," he said.

Looking back at the story so far, I think the entire thing would collapse without the breadsticks. When I began it, I never thought they'd play such an important role. Perhaps I should have described them in more detail. Were there sesame seeds involved? Maybe I should have at the very least referred to them as grissini instead of breadsticks.

How would the story have changed if I made them baguettes instead?

The one thing I won't do is lower myself, and my story, to making them olisbokollix, an Ancient Greek term where kollix refers to bread and olisbos refers to a dildo. Two old lovers sitting in a restaurant eating bread dildos precludes the possibility of any subtle sentimentality escaping from the story.

Read the word "dildo" and all romance comes to a crashing halt.

Forget I mentioned it.

Too late?

Some things can't be forgotten?

I disagree and I offer as proof the fact that Wally and Molly had a wonderful meal and made plans to see each other again.

Sort of ironic that the term cynicism comes from the Greek word κυνισμός, originally meaning a school of thought where people gain happiness by living in a simple way, rejecting all conventional desires like wealth, sex and fame. Of course, now it means something totally different.

Like olisbokollix.

Wally originally called her because he kept recalling the most intimate feelings towards her with astounding clarity.

Molly accepted because she missed him the same way a small craft is tossed during high seas, her trembling hand on the rudder providing the only comfort she'd permit herself to have.

I believe that stories involving old lovers are like unobserved particles... they end everywhere simultaneously.

# **World War P**

Have you ever heard the phrase "I'm actually dumber having listened to that"? It got me to thinking...

And wouldn't you know it, I have a great idea for a story just as I undo my fly to pee. I can't tell you the number of times I've had some brilliant idea only to see it slip away while I try and get to my computer to write it down. Ok, I admit that "brilliant" might be an overstatement, but you get my drift.

As I start to pee, it comes to me. A virus that's transmitted by words. It attacks the victim's IQ instead of their flesh. If you listen to someone who is infected, you find yourself literally getting dumber. People who are infected don't know they're carriers; they just walk around spewing stupid thoughts.

I'm getting excited by the plot but I also noticed that I'm still peeing and my stream is steadier than ever.

The virus can start with the mentally handicapped. I can barely contain myself. I will call it World War T. The T standing for Tards. Politically incorrect I realize, but when the masses realize that something's terribly wrong, all concern for the infected disappears. Plagues tend to bring out the worst in people.

I look down and noticed my toilet is almost half filled with urine. Amazing. I've never peed like this is my life.

This could be the premise I've waited for all my life!

Why can't I stop peeing so I can write this down?!

It takes years until some intrepid scientist figures out that humanity is truly at risk. Ironically, college campuses become ground zero for transmitting the virus, given the large number of dumbass professors teaching revised world history and believing a socialistic economy can ever work. Two prominent MSNBC talk show hosts have to be removed when it's discovered their IQs have fallen to 85 (from 95) and they risked infecting dozens of others who still watched their programs.

This could be my  _Atlas Shrugged_! My social manifesto.

The toilet only has another inch until it starts to overflow. I try to concentrate on WWT but I'm starting to get a little nervous. The urine shows no sign of stopping and I'm running out of toilet. I try to stop peeing, to no avail. If anything, the flow is getting stronger.

I need a plan. Looking around the cramped bathroom, I realize my only recourse is to pee in the sink.

What was I saying about the virus? Something about it being spread by weenie college professors?

I try to pinch off the flow of urine as I make the move from the toilet to the sink but my dick is having none of it. Pee goes flying everywhere as I unsuccessfully try to squeeze down and disable the plumbing. Finally, after briefly redecorating the walls and towels, I'm finally peeing in the sink.

Finally, the government has to act to stop the intellectual epidemic. The evidence is in and it it's not good news. Almost half the population is infected and every time they interact, things get worse. People are getting dumber and dumber. Ratings for reality TV shows are soaring.

How much can someone pee before they die? My stomach is getting concave and I'm starting to feel a bit dehydrated.

The inner cities are already lost and even in the suburbs, many people are communicating through rude emoticons. Libraries are ghost towns and massive numbers of people are congregating at sports stadiums for no apparent reason. Dogs and cats... living together.

Quarantine is the only answer. What troops remain force the population into long lines and individually ask people a simple question, "Do you think college should be free to all?" Those that answer "Yes" are obviously contaminated and are shipped away to internment camps until a cure is found.

I need to think of a great ending but I can't stop peeing. Is this the price that other authors have had to pay for their breakout novel? If so, I've never heard of the phenomenon.

How do you stop a virus that is transmitted by people talking shit?

How do you stop peeing when you feel your very life exiting through your dick?

Are the two somehow connected?

Is... there... a... cure...?

My head begins to swim. My aim grows less steady and I realize I'm peeing on the mirror. I catch a glimpse and realize how dim-witted I look.

Blackness dances at the edge of my vision. I feel the warmness of my pee start to soak into my pants and shirt. Just as I slip into unconsciousness, I realize I'm Patient Zero.

World War T has begun.

# **just like Ronnie sang...**

Jane always believed "caveat emptor" was something you learned at garage sales, where you got an education of sorts, and not something that actually pertained to education. Somewhere between "you get what you pay for" and "beware of what you want for you shall surely get it" stood senior year of college.

She was far enough into her studies of psychology to start learning some cold, hard truths. While it always troubled her that she couldn't really understand the combustion engine or explain how her cell phone worked, she arrived on campus feeling that the human mind was something she could wrap her head around. Impulses and motivations, things that could be understood, measured and eventually predicted.

Senior year is when she realized just the opposite. Every study ever done reinforced the harsh yet simple reality that people are random and vary between sometimes being assholes to always being assholes. That is the spectrum we exist in day in and day out.

Studies proved that if someone exhibited an act of kindness one day, they were no more or less likely to do the same the following day and if they showed cruelty one day... you guessed it, they were just as likely to be kind an hour later. There were no patterns or signs, no way to predict the way people would respond to situations or stimuli one minute to the next. Every interaction was a crapshoot.

She distinctly remembers the moment when her interest in the brain first crystallized. She was young and her mom was driving on some errand or other and a song came on the radio,  _Take Me Home Tonight_. Her mom was clearly delighted to hear it because just before the vocals kicked in she said "Time to put Eddie Money where my mouth is." She then went on to belt out the lyrics with a particular emphasis on the line "Just like Ronnie sang."

Her mom's name, not really ironically, was Ronnie.

After the song was over, and her mom had calmed down a bit, she asked her what she meant by "Time to put Eddie Money where my mouth is." Her mom laughed and said she had no idea; it just popped out.

How could she not know? She was the one who'd said it! But at the same time, Jane believed her. Just the same, she did some digging just to confirm that her mom wasn't the Ronnie in the song.

She wasn't... and so began her interest in psychology.

Years later, when she driving and heard an odd rattle under the hood, she felt stupid and powerless because she didn't understand cars. She ate grapes and could explain how we created the seedless variety but could in no way articulate how humanity was able to produce them on such a grand scale.

And she was ok with all that.

But she needed to know how to find the right man to give her heart to. The right boss to work for. The right best friend or workout partner. Now, she swam in oceans of research telling her quite clearly that it was impossible to know anyone. Nobody and everyone was right. Nobody and everyone was wrong.

She spent her last semester watching people. She didn't even take notes. She just sat at cafes and sporting events and took them all in. The happy ones and the sad ones and the winners and the losers and never forgot that they were all happy and sad and winning and losing. Soaking in all their quirks and idiosyncrasies.

And they became hers.

The month before graduation, her mom passed away unexpectedly. On the drive to the cemetery, after an emotional service, she turned on the radio and there was Eddie singing "Just like Ronnie sang."

Had her mom been happy and sad? Had she felt like a winner and loser?

"Just like Ronnie sang... be my little baby."

She smiled, looked upward and said "Thanks, mom."

She decided to begin a new major. Her dad was not thrilled and her brothers and sisters thought she was crazy.

She entered the theater program.

# **give me a hand any day**

I've always wondered how many epiphanies I've had in the middle of the night only to forget them in the morning. This one I wouldn't forget.

Lying on my bed with my eyes open and hands on my chest, fingers intertwined, unable to sleep.

Letting my hands fall to my sides and closing my eyes, suddenly feeling very drowsy.

Keeping my eyes closed but sliding my hands together and feeling my fingers again entwined, knowing beyond doubt I can never nod off like this.

You can't sleep when your fingers are touching.

I'd cracked the case.

Your eyes might be how you see view the world, but what exactly do you think all of those nerve endings and tiny muscles in your hands are up to when everything goes dark? Still longing for shape, size, and texture. Every time I close my eyes, I see a shower of tiny sparks coming off my fingers each time they make contact with each other. Like eight high-tension wires and two twiddling thumbs.

Your lips might have more nerve endings in them, but given that their only function is to kiss and blow raspberries at people whose opinions you don't agree with, they're really not that important when you stop to think of it. Which I was in the throes of doing.

And your feet? They're far too concerned with balance to be much good to you at night. They're just happy to be elevated and off duty for a few hours.

Snapping fingers. Pointing fingers. Crossed fingers. Fists. All of these manifestations springing to life every time they so much as brush up against one another. How is it I never noticed this before?

I read an article that said nerve endings in your fingertips perform complex neural computations that were until recently thought to be carried out exclusively in the brain. Is that why I'm thinking about my hands this late at night?

Do they dream?

They touch again and this time, a shiver runs up my spine to the base of my neck.

I remember when I first realized that when my eyes closed, my retinas didn't turn off. It was just a thin sheet of skin had been pulled over them, blocking the light. Once I understood this, I saw tiny bits of dust floating on my eyeball like tiny creatures projected upon a black backdrop. As long as I was awake, my eyes remained on.

Sleep was never the same and it took me years to unknow this.

Now I'm lying here and try to not know if my hands are touching or not.

But I can't. I can only sleep when they're separated so they can dream about important handshakes and gliding softly down a lover's back.

You can't sleep when your fingers are touching.

# **overheard baggage**

So, it was off to Texas.

Austin, to be specific.

I walked onto the plane and tried to count the soul patches. I lost count at seven.

I took my window seat and the drama began. Perhaps drama is too strong a word given that similar dramas were no doubt playing out on every inch of soil beneath us as we made our way to Texas but it was much closer to drama than a casual conversation.

At least to the trained ears of a grizzled writer of fiction.

Take one mildly attractive man, one wildly attractive female, sit them next to each other for four hours, and you have all the elements necessary to make perusing the in-flight magazine entirely unnecessary.

Even before my ears had popped, it had become interesting. Peeking between the little crack between the seats, I could make out his face, and on that face a look I recognized immediately. A face I have often worn myself.

He yearned for her.

I discreetly reached up and turned off the hissing of the air nozzle over my head so I could better make out what they were saying.

He began. "I don't know why, but I can never stop myself from clapping during that part in the _Friends_ theme song. It's embarrassing. Doesn't matter where I am... I clap. My friends think I'm so uncool, but what can I do?" As if to show his helplessness, he quietly whipped off the five little claps.

She shrugged.

"Ironic if you think about it. The show is _Friends_ and yet the theme song causes friction between me and my... friends." His voice indicated that this is not where he had planned to go with this little story. It occurred to me that as an opening salvo, it wasn't bad. It showed vulnerability and that he had a sense of humor about himself. But now it was in danger of heading south.

"I swear, if I heard that song at a funeral, I would clap."

I saw her head turn ever so slightly and heard her speak for the first time. What a voice she had! If my tray table had been down at the time, it wouldn't have stayed that way for long. What I'm trying to say is that her voice made my tray table stand in the upright and locked position.

"Why would the _Friends_ theme song be playing at a funeral?" she inquired.

I saw his seat push back and it became obvious she had really stumped him.

I took a look out the little window to my right and saw the setting sun. All round and orange and it occurred to me this giant ball of plasma didn't give a crap how this conversation turned out. Given that the sun is about 99.9% of the mass of the solar system, I felt my own interest in the proceedings wane a little bit. Who was I to argue with 99.9% of the mass of the solar system?

Then he spoke again and all the helium in the universe couldn't stop my attention from swinging back to the two people seated directly in front of me.

"I bet men tell you all the time that you're beautiful," he offered.

There was a slight pause. The words hung in the air and I leaned forward ever so slightly to see what her reaction would be.

"I'm a lesbian."

I did not see that coming. I'm guessing the mildly attractive man was even more taken aback.

I heard five little claps and somewhere in the back of my head, a small ripple of laughter went through a non-existent studio audience.

He continued as if he had not heard her bit of news.

"Maybe when one of the cast of _Friends_ dies, they'll play the theme song at their funeral."

The sun set at almost that exact second as if giving a derisive snort and a fifteen million degree told-you-so. That assumes that you're partial to the unit of measure suggested by William Lord Kelvin as opposed to the more mainstream Fahrenheit. Actually, as if making some obscure point I've yet to figure out, the kelvin is actually not referred to as a degree so much as a unit of temperature measurement.

If you feel like the kelvin has a little bit of an attitude problem, you're not wrong.

Much like the girl sitting in front of me.

As I listened to the man continue his pitch for her, I began to resent her lesbianism. It was ruining what could have been a perfectly romantic moment.

"So, you've never been with a man?"

"Nope."

"So how do you know you wouldn't enjoy it?"

She asked if he'd ever been with a man.

The plane lurched violently to and fro with the motion of his head.

You could tell he had reached a crossroads. Still an hour in the air sitting next to what he obviously considered to be his sexual destiny and he was no closer to the mile-high club than when we left the tarmac in Philadelphia.

By now, the moon was out and as I soaked it in, 33,000 feet closer than usual, I realized that while the attraction going on only a few feet in front of me seemed powerful, it paled in comparison to the pull the sun had over the moon. Hanging in the sky and shining like it did, it was easy to forget that it owed everything to the sun and its every movement was determined by it.

I hummed the _Friends_ theme and felt a quick pang of sadness that the moon didn't have the requisite hands to clap along.

The girl in front of me was pointing out again to the mildly attractive man that she was a lesbian and therefore immune to his charms. I wasn't sure about her plans for the evening but the only thing in the universe I knew for certain was that the man in front of me would be spending the evening alone in a hotel room. Dreaming of heavenly bodies and wrestling once again, knowingly or otherwise, with whether he'd rather be the sun or the moon.

Or was that what I was going to be doing?

_No one could ever know me_

_No one could ever see me_

_Seems you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me_

_Someone to face the day with, make it through all the rest with_

_Someone I'll always laugh with_

_Even at my worst, I'm best with you_

# **Terry's Chocolate Orange**

Two things before we start: I was born in England, and I'm a big fan of zombie movies.

Now off we go.

There's a scene in the film _28 Days Later_ where Naomie Harris says "If l never see another chocolate bar again, it'll be too soon. Not counting Terry's Chocolate Orange!"

Every year since I was a boy, my mother has bought me a Terry's Chocolate Orange for Xmas. I believe it's a way for her to keep me connected to my British roots. I can't say for sure, of course, but it's become something of a tradition.

And, interestingly enough, I can't think of the words Terry's Chocolate Orange in my own voice. Can't do it. In my head, whenever I think of this orange-shaped ball of chocolate and orange oil, I hear Naomie's voice saying "Terry's Chocolate Orange." It's impossible for me to get through the entire name without her voice taking over.

It's funny the things we remember and the things we forget. I guess in a way, all we are is what we remember. For all the lofty things we hope to be, at the end of the day, neurons fire and something emerges from some secret vault between our ears; that is what we are.

Whether you believe it's karma or our subconscious, most of us want to believe there's a gatekeeper fishing through all the possible candidates to be brought forth and remembered. A reason a particular memory surfaces out of the mire and that reason is for our own benefit.

However unlikely it might seem.

In our heads, our thoughts are like the lines on an Etch A Sketch. Some haphazard zig zags and squiggles and some drawn with the greatest of care and either way, life comes along and shakes them and gives them equal value, making sure that we can never be the person we were ten minutes ago.

So, we scramble to find who we want to be for the next ten.

The lucky ones turn to sorcery and spells. Incantations that save us from ourselves.

Poetry.

Collections of common words that when put in the right order act as shepherds. Imploring us to exalt. Warning us of the road ahead.

_So, bum me a cigarette, buy me a beer till I'm happy to be here, happy to be here._

_With all of my family hookers in heels and the men who watch them like hungry black eels._

\- Noah Gundersen - _Family_

You were expecting Frost or Longfellow?

Whatever floats your boat.

This isn't an advice column. I'm not a particularly good writer and I'm an even worse source of wisdom. All I can do is arrange a few thoughts in such a way as to perhaps jar something loose in your own head... as I stated I would try to do back in 2012 when I started my dumb website. Something greater than the sum of my parts. Something for you to take into the daylight.

Plus, I'm a terrible poet. Not my fault.

Nothing rhymes with Terry's Chocolate Orange.

# **Director of the ODoPA**

Sometime in the year 2024- which sounds so far away but will be here before we know it- Congress, with little enthusiasm and less oversight, passed a resolution creating the Department of the Patently Absurd. Its first official action was to investigate how it came to pass that Congress would create such a department.

They called it "absurd."

There was much fanfare but, as they really had no authority to do anything outside of pointing out the absurd, nothing came of it.

It's at this point I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "If I know my Lance Manion, and I do, he'll try to milk a thousand words from this very thin premise. I sincerely don't think he can."

Well, you know what I say to that? Oh, ye of little faith! I have written much longer stories with much, much, much weaker ideas. Besides that, you have nothing better to do than continue reading. I feel no pressure whatsoever to deliver something interesting because you're incapable of clicking out of this page and reading something else.

"What's that?" you say, "That's it. I'm outta here!"

The thing is, if you're reading this, then you didn't get outta here.

Which in 2024 will be grounds for launching a full investigation from the DoPA.

See how I returned to the original concept? That's why you're still here.

The truth is though, I would have had much more respect for you if you had clicked out. In fact, I would love nothing more than spend the day sitting at the feet of someone who had the internal fortitude to stop reading this.

But if you harbor any secret desire to have a Lance Manion sit at your feet and admire you, you can kiss those aspirations goodbye because you simply can't bring yourself to click out.

I'll even give you another chance.

I'll wait.

See?

You can't do it.

Which is simply absurd.

Which is why in 2026 they changed the name to The Office of the Department of the Patently Absurd. Everyone involved in this decision was later hauled up in front of the ODoPA.

There has to be someone asking themselves how a statement I made in 2019 made them change the name of the department in 2026. Do I really expect you to believe something so absurd?

You will if you expect a position in my administration.

That's right. I end up the Director of The Office of the Department of the Patently Absurd in 2027 and the first thing I do is utilize the awe-inspiring power of the government to track down all those people who originally clicked out of this post and have them executed.

So, count yourself, and your low literary expectations, very lucky.

I, of course, will still spend a full day sitting at their lifeless feet admiring them.

Which will be, of course, absurd, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I will take my job very seriously.

Picture it in your head, please, it's the reason you stayed and kept reading.

Am I wearing a tie?

# **drive**

I guess if you want to get a handle on something, it's best to start by putting a handle on it.

And by handle, I mean definition.

When I was overseas, I got the opportunity to drive in a car with the steering wheel on the other side in a country where they drive on the other side of the road.

I saw an old picture of me while there and it hit me.

That's how you make me feel.

Sure, the physics of the engine are the same and the point of getting in the car is the same and even the traffic laws are, give or take, basically the same... but... it's different.

That's how I feel around you.

Not better or worse. Just different. Awkward.

Sure, there's a certain sense of excitement I haven't felt in awhile but there's also a nervousness. Like I don't exactly know what I'm doing. I know what I'm supposed to be doing and I know how to do it in theory, but actually doing it seems trickier than it needs to be.

I see everyone else doing it. Nonchalantly. Seemingly without a care in the world. But my instincts are always to turn the wrong way and my sense of spacing is all screwed up. All of my previous experiences actually work against me.

Work against us.

Every time we're together, I keep waiting for it to get easier, but it doesn't.

And I don't know if I want it to.

I'm scared that it won't.

And I'm terrified it will.

Like any good metaphor, a car is a vehicle. It's not about the destination; it's just the way to get there.

# **Father's Day**

My earliest memory of my dad?

I was young. Maybe eight or nine. Memories at that age are vague and details may or may not be accurate, but I'll relate the story the best I can.

It was a Saturday and the weekend project was meant to toughen me up. To do that, my dad had scheduled us to chop firewood with our neighbor. If I remember right, he was the coach of a football team and oozed manliness. Perhaps my dad thought I might absorb a little of it from him.

Not that I needed outside oozing. My dad was plenty tough as well. He grew up an orphan and was scrapping from the day he was born. I always wondered what he thought about me, a kid raised in the suburbs. Soft as the day is long. What was nice is he never showed any disappointment in my wimpiness. He grew up playing sports. I grew up being picked on by the kids who played sports.

He must have spent a few nights wondering whose kid I really was.

Child labor laws be damned, they handed me an axe and we spent the next eight hours (or a few hours or maybe an hour) chopping. Immediately, my hands erupted into blisters, my arms burned, and my breath came in ragged bursts. My second swing, it only got worse.  On this day though, I would not wimp out and disappoint my dad.

When it seemed we had turned an entire forest into logs that would conveniently fit into a fireplace, my dad looked over and said the words I'd been waiting to hear all day: "I think we're done."

I had done it. I had done a day's work. A day's worth of man's work.

I was overjoyed and I believe I even saw a little pride welling up in the corners of my dad's eyes. It was more than I could handle.

The only detail I'm fuzzy about in what transpired next was if I said "Yippee!" out loud or just thought it in my head. Either way, the next thing I did was hurl the axe up into the air as high as I could throw it. I was so happy, it was the only course of action I could see.

I never asked if my dad was proud of how high I threw it or how amazingly straight up I'd managed to get it, but a few seconds later, the lights went out.

Apparently, gravity, despite demonstrating abysmal manners, was still functioning and returned the axe roughly from where it had begun.

It landed squarely on the top of my head. Had it been at a different angle, it might have completely removed my head. The only positive thing about being unconscious was I didn't have to witness the looks on the faces of my dad and our neighbor.

I rejoined the living in the truck on the way to the emergency room. This was before the days of concussions so once they realized I wasn't split in half, they gave me some aspirin and sent me home.

Looking back now, I imagine my dad took a few painkillers as well, as he knew what he was going to face when my mother heard about my little incident.

She took the news poorly, which made me feel even worse about it. A bystander would have thought my dad was the one that hit me on the head with an axe. I'm not sure my mother was aware that I was standing right there when she said "You know what an idiot your son is!"

To celebrate my big day out with my dad, my mom had made steak for dinner. She did not make my dad a steak. While my mom, brother, grandmother, grandfather, and I sat at the table enjoying steak, my dad sat there eating a bowl of cereal that he'd prepared himself. I knew then and there I would never in my life eat a bowl of cereal so stoically.

I think my mom was just surprised he knew where the cereal was.

I know that Father's Day is a supposed to be the third Sunday in June but that day will always be Father's Day to me.

Why?

Because later that night after I went to bed, my dad crept in and kissed me on top of my swollen head and somehow made me feel like he would always be proud of me. Despite the fact I'd embarrassed him in front of the neighbor. Despite the fact that he had to eat cereal for dinner.

Despite the fact that I really was (and remain) an idiot.

An idiot who was (and remains) loved. In the end, what more could an idiot ask for?

# **the game**

It's been a long time since I've run.

Not jog. I try to jog every now and then at the park. I had a friend once tell me the healthiest way for a body to jog is barefoot through the grass. I tried it.

I looked like the Bruce Willis character in  _Die Hard_  when he tried to jog across the broken glass. There was, of course, no broken glass. Just subtle imperfections in the soil beneath the grass.

I have the soft feet of a newly born infant.

But I did not, at any time at the park, run.

The last time I ran, I had good reason.

Allow me to elaborate.

This was a decade ago. A friend (which I misspelled as fiend originally and then realized adding the r might have actually been the misspelling) asked me if I was interested in a pick-up game of football one Sunday morning. Being the fine athlete I was, I jumped at the opportunity to showcase my football skills. I awoke early, had a big bowl of oatmeal and a tall glass of orange juice. It would not be understating it to say I was feeling at the height of my powers.

We drove over together and he told me about some of my teammates. Most of them were fellow designers and engineers he worked with. Seemed like a swell group of fellows. After reviewing their various strengths and weaknesses, I felt confident they had found the quarterback they so obviously needed.

I emerged from the car and quickly stretched before the short walk to the field which was behind a tall group of shrubs which completely obscured what lay beyond.

Pain.

I turned the corner and saw the other team.

Each man larger and angrier than the next.

I would later learn they were the New Jersey Prison Guards Association. They were tuning up before their big game against a similarly named group of firemen.

My fiend (no misspelling) announced the game would be tackle.

My team looked like every man you've ever seen running the clock at a child's athletic event, working the concession stand at a child's athletic event, or towel boy who's ever longed to run the clock or work at the concession stand at a child's athletic event.

I needed to pee.

A lot.

Instead, I was told I would be on the defensive line. I am tall. A lot of people mistake that for being big. I am not big. I am tall.

And thin.

And frail.

I cannot overstate that I am not big. A fact that was quickly apparent on the first play of the game. Where a lot of quarterbacks like to mix up the snap count with a lot of "hut huts" and a few "Omahas" or "Sets" sprinkled in. Their quarterback always went on one "hut." Like he couldn't wait to get the play started. He'd approach the line, say the word "hut" and then the onslaught would begin.

Their playbook consisted of two plays: sweep left and sweep right. If I were appearing on their chalkboard, I'd be the X with a giant red line running through it.

"Hutt!"

Crunch.

Low moan.

Repeat one hundred times. For the day, I went tackleless, although I do remember being tripped over on a number of occasions.

I think at the end of the first quarter, it was 84-0 and I was coughing up blood. I was actually afraid to pee for fear it would just come out as a river of red.

In the second half, the other team, having stretched their lead to triple figures, decided to attempt a pass. Assuming I would immediately assume my fetal position at their blocker's feet, the quarterback launched a pass and I, in a moment of unparalleled stupidity, stepped forward and intercepted it.

It was like a cartoon where a group of dogs suddenly notice there is a cat in their midst. As one, they turned and looked at me.

So, I ran.

I ran like the wind.

Or a gentle breeze. Yeah, more like a gentle breeze being chased by eleven hurricanes.

I'm not sure the last time you were chased in earnest, but I don't recommend it at all.

Terrifying when you realize that you're not as fast as someone who means to harm you. You see them closing and you're doing the math in your head (if Lance is going seven miles an hour and Rocky, Knuckles and Big Ed are all going fifteen miles an hour and they're four feet away from Lance, how long will it be until Lance needs medical attention?) and you're suddenly aware of the gaps in your insurance coverage and all the people who might miss you if you were unexpectedly taken from them and yet your feet don't seem to be moving any faster.

But then... glorious adrenaline!

I became the antelope being chased by the lion. Long beautiful strides, the whole time screaming like a little girl. Full throated and high pitched. Not ironically. Seriously.

The next thing I knew, I was about to cross the goal line. It was at that moment I saw the gentleman who had been giving chase from across the field at an angle that would have us arriving at the aforementioned goal line at precisely the same moment.

Another man might have flinched or ran out of bounds, but this Manion is made of sterner stuff, let me assure you.

I leapt. I leapt in a way that had onlookers gaping and sucking in their breath and making the sign of the cross. Women sighed. For a moment, I blotted out the sun... if you were a cricket directly underneath me.

And then I crossed the goal line.

TOUCHDOWN!!!!

My legs were jelly and my lungs felt as though they were filled with molten lava and I couldn't actually regain my feet let alone spike the ball, but I had scored. It was like an Afternoon Special on TV. _"The Special Boy Scores."_

But fuck those prison guards and their hundred-point lead! I had scored.

That's it. I just felt you should know exactly who you read from time to time. A full-on, dyed in the wool bad-ass. How is that for a Monday morning, "get you going" tale?!

You're welcome.

Lance Manion's lifetime stat line: 1 interception. 1 TD.

# **for Peete's sake**

There was a quarterback named Rodney Peete who played for the Philadelphia Eagles when Bob was growing up. Although he was a serviceable quarterback, he never caught on in the town because he had a nervous tick that caused him to smile whenever he felt stressed.

Like when he threw an interception.

That kind of reaction will not endear you to the fans.

Bob always felt sympathetic towards Rodney because he too had a similar tick. Except his happened every few minutes, unprovoked, and was the kind of smile that you only saw on the face of a person who just won a million dollars or heard that their ex had fallen down a well to their death. For a few seconds every now and then, he would absolutely beam.

Rodney Peete had gotten off light compared to Bob. His tick hadn't caused him too many issues and Bob was pretty sure he ended up marrying some beautiful sitcom star despite his little tick.

Bob's eulogy at his mother's funeral was the kind of thing that stuck with people. They would wake up in the middle of night saying to themselves "Jesus... that fucking smile..."

Which was ironic because his mom had always told him that his smile came from Jesus. "It's how Jesus reminds people he loves them. Through your smile," she would say.

He remembers saying "Jesus" over and over the time in the airplane lavatory when he joined the Mile-High Club as a direct result of flashing his pearly whites at the exact right time to an attractive yet lonely middle-aged woman across the aisle from him on an empty cross-country flight.

Apparently, Jesus does work in mysteries ways. He giveth and taketh away and throws the Bob the occasional bone.

His high school guidance counselor said it was a shame that society didn't need executioners anymore. Although he would have to wear a hood, it would be wonderfully ironic that he might be smiling as he lopped off the head of a criminal. Bob always thought that was an odd thing to say to a seventeen-year-old.

Back in the here and now, Bob sat at the table in his kitchen in his Rodney Peete jersey and read the letter telling him he'd been called for jury duty. He sat for a minute and imagined how that little scenario would play out. The prosecutor explaining the grisly murder in detail and the judge asking him what he was so happy about. Relatives of the victim glaring at him.

Not a chance.

The last time he had talked himself into trying something like that had been in high school when the drama club needed another male to be in a play. He can still remember the local paper's review calling him out by name and saying how he ruined  _Long Day's Journey into Night_.

He wondered what the penalty for not showing up for jury duty was. Could they charge him with anything?

Suddenly he smiled.

If they did, could he request a jury trial?

Another huge smile.

And, by definition, could they ever assemble a jury of his peers, given the charge? If they showed up to the courthouse, how could they be considered his peers?

A third, enormous smile.

That one wasn't the tick. That was all Bob.

They would literally have to go to the homes of twelve separate people and present each of them the case. He imagined the judge, prosecutor, defense attorney and himself spending the whole day driving all over town. Separate cars of course.

He smiled again. A giant grin. His eyes twinkled. Danced. Alive.

That was the tick.

# **Hollywood bones me yet again**

I've just about had it with Hollywood. I was just notified that yet another one of my scripts was rejected. This rejection is particularly hard to take because I feel I swung for the fences on this one.

This one was big budget.

The perfect vehicle for some hunky A-lister to rule next summer. This was a blockbuster waiting to happen. It had it all: the sci-fi angle, suspense, taglines, and just a hint of creepiness.

A crew of astronauts lands on a far-off world to investigate an unknown monolith that sits in the center of the planet. Under the direction of Skip Mangold, the stone-jawed veteran of dozens of such missions despite his youthful appearance, the team sets out to solve the puzzle of this deserted ruin.

With the help of the nerdy yet stunningly-attractive Sara Leeson, an expert in countless alien languages, they plunge into a scenario nobody outside of the millions of eager theatergoers would ever suspect.

After putting the pieces together, Sara turns to the camera and states "This isn't a monolith. This is a baking pan."

You see, they are exploring a planet that was occupied at one time by a highly intelligent race of creatures that needed bodies to move around in. Thin sheets of plasma, they baked huge bodies and would wrap themselves around the heads. Somehow this allowed them to control them and lumber around.

And when I say they baked these bodies, I mean no such thing. They had slaves bake them.

All of this is slowly uncovered as the intrepid team of explorers delves further and further into the structure.

Finally, they uncover the most horrifying secret of all. At one time these creatures had visited Earth with the intention of subjugating humanity and making them their slaves.

"The Gingerbread Man. The story my Mom told me as a kid," says a solemn Captain Mangold.

"Yes... but she had it all wrong," offers up their resident historian Voltaire Severin. "We were the ones who needed to run as fast as we can. Could. As fast as we could." He then begins to decipher the events as told on a battered scroll they uncover near an ancient oven. Ingredients vary throughout the cosmos but there are certain things necessary for these ghostlike-bodies to manipulate what comes out of the oven.

"This scroll tells what is needed to bake the perfect body."

"Bodies that will then go on to enslave the population," whispers a clearly rattled Miss Leeson.

"Which makes this scroll...." The camera pulls tight to Skip Mangold's face. The background music stops. All noise on the entire planet stops. The people responsible for making the movie trailer have to look no further than this scene.

Ok, let me do that again without commentating so you get the full gravity of the tagline.

"This scroll tells what is needed to bake the perfect body."

"Bodies that will then go on to enslave the population," whispers a clearly rattled Miss Leeson.

"Which makes this scroll... a recipe for disaster."

I know. I know. Brilliant.

You could have the spooky retelling of the Gingerbread Man. The epic flashback of a fox eating the delectable alien to save the planet from certain doom. Maybe even a cameo from Clooney or Pitt as a man named Fox. Or even David Duchovny as a tip of the hat to _X-Files_ fans.

My point being that this film has it all. Expensive sets. Actors floating around in space. Dark corridors filled with secrets and opportunities to make the audiences jump out of their seats. Diabolicalness. Movie-related snacks at the concession stand.

The tie-ins with the Food Network are too many to count.

"This summer... run... run... as fast as you can!" should be blasting across every TV in America, but no.

Hollywood has once again rejected me and my vision.

Pearls before swine.

# **the cornfield**

She never saw the shovel coming.

It didn't kill her and it wasn't much of an escape plan after all.

I met her husband at the swinging door that separated the living room from the kitchen, before he could see her sprawled out and bleeding on the tile floor.

"Let's get this done," I muttered and pushed him towards the front door.

The truck started the first time he turned the key, which must have been some sort of record. I didn't know who we were setting out to kill and neither did he. We had one stop to make before doing the deed and that was to find out who it was we'd be killing.

One day, long ago, he'd made a similar stop and was told to kill me. As far as anyone knew, he had.

In a way, he did.

He and his ugly wife.

I was young and nobody really cared if I was alive or dead so they kept me around, mostly alive but a little dead.

If you're a man reading this, you'll assume I'm a man and if you're a girl you'll assume I'm a girl because we all project everything into things we can identify with, except the man who treated me like a girl and his ugly wife who treated me like a man.

The truck had one headlight out and I sat praying that a cop would pull us over to give us a ticket so I could grab him and hold on tight and tell him everything but around here, there are never any cops around.

Just cornfields.

So, we drove through a big one. It swallowed up everything that wasn't directly above us and the clouds were doing a good job of swallowing the rest. Eventually, the dirt road offered up a driveway and we turned onto it. Up ahead stood a house- I'd been here a few times before, and around that house were parked a half dozen beat up cars or more. A few people milled around the porch.

The man pulled up, turned off the truck's engine and got out. He strode up to the house, nodding to a few of the men loitering around like sheep, and disappeared into the house.

Just then his phone began to buzz on the seat. He had left it behind and it made a short series of beeps.

She was awake.

I read her messages that were obviously meant to have been read discretely by her husband.

"Kill that little fuck."

"Now."

"No questions."

I turned the volume off on the phone, erased her messages and blocked her number, but I still felt like a countdown had begun.

I watched the man walk up and get back into the truck.

Silently, he slid the key into the ignition and turned it. It took about a dozen tries before it started.

Usually, we had quite a drive before we arrived at the door of the person whom we were going to kill but tonight it was a local. We never left the cornfields. One just blended into the next.

The man knocked on the door and when the person answered, the man pulled his gun and shot him. It wasn't as nonchalant as I make it out; the sound of the gun firing always makes me jump a little and the sound of the last groan is always bad and the sound of the body collapsing to the ground is always worse.

I got out of the truck to help move the body.

"Shit," I said. "I forgot the shovel."

"You have one fucking job," he snarled.

"That's because I hit your pig wife over the head with it, asshole. I probably knocked out a few of her teeth," I thought to myself and came as close to smiling as was possible for me.

"See if you can find one in the house. Or the garage," the man said flatly.

"Will do," I said.

I walked through the house then walked out the back door and ran into the cornfield.

Like I said... it wasn't much of an escape plan.

# **let the balls fall where they may**

For those of you unfamiliar with the Powerball lottery, Powerball is a multi-state lottery run in all but eight US states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) is a non-profit, government-benefit association and is responsible for security standards and inspections of lottery vendor sites.

It was the first lottery game to use two drums to draw winners. One drum is used for the white balls and one for the red ball which gives the Powerball Lottery its name. The white balls pop out one at a time followed by the red ball.

Winners are drawn on Wednesday and Saturday nights at 10:59 PM Eastern Time through drawings conducted at the Florida Lottery's studio in Tallahassee.

The winning numbers are shown live on television and announced on the Powerball website, in newspapers, and online.

People who decide to play select five numbers from 1 to 69 for the white balls then select one number from 1 to 26 for the red Powerball. Each attempt costs $2. Chances of guessing every number correctly are 1 in 292,201,338.

People love(d) their Powerball.

But Wednesday February 17, 2021 the Powerball drawing ended life as we know it.

Here's why...

"It's America's favorite jackpot game! Get ready everybody. Tonight's jackpot is an estimated 535 million dollars. I hope you have your Powerball tickets. Let's see how you did...."

"First number down is 6. After that, we've got 5. Next number is 4."

The smiling young man didn't see it until the next number.

"3."

"2."

He saw it and everyone else saw he saw it and they saw it and they all held their breath.

"Now for your winning Powerball number and it is... 1"

There was usually more for him to say but he didn't say it.

The winning numbers sat at the bottom of the screen: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Three viewers immediately jumped to their deaths.

Before you assume that this immediately sparked the apocalypse, let me stop you there. People aren't that dumb. They assumed there was a problem with the machines that shoot out the balls or they assumed that it was a practical joke or they assumed that someone at the lottery had rigged the machines.

In the week that followed, it was proved that the machines were in perfect working order, nobody was playing a joke, and nobody had tampered with the machines in any way. The Powerball folks even trotted out several experts in the field of mathematics to say that 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, in that order, was just as likely to occur as any other six numbers in any other order.

This sparked the apocalypse.

The religious type felt this must mean something and flocked to churches. Agnostics felt this must mean something and flocked to churches and farmers markets. Atheists felt this must mean something and flocked to planetariums and Starbucks. Fans of the movie  _The Matrix_  felt this must mean something and flocked to science fiction conventions. Fans of  _The Truman Show_  flocked to their therapists. Birds continued to flock.... as expected.

The point being that nobody was flocking to work.

Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah were the last hit as they didn't have Powerball... but eventually, their evening news brought them the story and they started not flocking to work as well.

Next came English-speaking countries and eventually everyone else around the world. Even the countries where people were used to not flocking to work because they were too busy starving.

For those of you who always thought that the end would involve a great deal more fire and chaos, what makes you think that this little scenario didn't eventually involve heaping helpings of both?

It would be convenient to tell you that someone actually won that fateful night, having picked 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 as their numbers, and therefore allow me to describe some whimsical individual, but nobody had. The next night, however, 7% of all tickets purchased reflected those same digits but, however whimsical it might have been to tell you those numbers appeared again, no drawing was held due to the possibility, however slim, of those numbers coming up again.

The folks at Powerball were afraid of the consequences. In the end- the very end, I mean- it didn't matter. Those consequences came anyway.

Really try and imagine each and every consequence and how things ended.

6.

5..

4...

3....

2.....

1.

Time's up.

# **Milkness**

It's the little things. Little things that keep friends together and little things that tear relationships apart.

Relationships like the one between Mike and Jerry. Roommates for two years, Jerry was almost finished packing up.

Here's what happened: three weeks ago, they had been at a bar having a few drinks when something little happened. Something little that became big.

Two very attractive women and their equally attractive boyfriends were sitting in the booth next to them.

Mike and Jerry were not attractive. Not particularly unattractive but average on their best day.

An argument began at the attractive table and soon Mike and Jerry had no choice but to overhear what was going on. Just before they were about to leave and seek quieter surroundings, the attractive boyfriends beat them to it. They left their girlfriends with a barrage of insults and condescending laughter. The girlfriends, seemingly as intoxicated as they were attractive, stood up and, after some whispering and giggling, made their way over to Mike and Jerry's table.

They sat down, smiled and said, "This is your lucky night, guys."

Looking back on it, perhaps it wasn't such a little thing. Things like that never happen to guys like Mike and Jerry. They were both standing in the living room now, both of them with faraway looks on their faces. As if they were both reliving the events of that fateful night one more time.

"Here's the thing," began one of the beautiful girls, her ample breasts spilling out of her top. "We want to make those guys regret treating us like that so we're going to sleep with you tonight."

"Is that so?" inquired Mike.

"It's so," replied the other beautiful girl.

"And just like that, you think we're going to sleep with you?" Jerry asked, clearly offended by the presumption.

"Yes," said the girl with the spilling breasts.

"Yes," said the other girl.

"Yes," said his friend Mike.

The awkward silence in the living room continued. Had the boyfriends just been nice to their girlfriends, none of this would have happened. Jerry and Mike would be sitting playing video games or making plans for the afternoon. A butterfly beats its wings in China and now all of Jerry's stuff is sitting in boxes waiting to be carried away.

Side note: as a staunch admirer of the subconscious, I have to wonder if it was an accident that I typed "wongs" instead of "wings" in that last sentence (reread it, please).

"Mike, have some self-respect!" stammered Jerry in disbelief. "These girls just want to use us."

"Of course they do!" stammered Mike, thrilled with the prospect. "What's wrong with that?"

Jerry just sat there. Apparently stammered out.

The girl with the ample breasts looked at Jerry and added, "Looks like it's a threesome for your friend and another night of jerking it for you."

And that's what happened. Jerry sat in his bedroom that night and listened to his friend Mike have a noisy threesome with two beautiful girls.

And he jerked it.

Twice.

And the friendship could never recover.

The two old friends finally spoke. "So, I guess that's that" said Jerry, picking up a box.

"Yeah... do you need a hand with anything?"

"Nah, it'll just take a few trips but I'll be ok."

You see, Jerry regretted having self-respect that night. It was to become his biggest regret and he could never admit that to Mike. He couldn't get past that long night of listening.

Mike assumed that Jerry regretted his decision but could never admit it.

He remembered a conversation they had about milk months beforehand. There were two containers in the fridge one morning, and as Jerry was preparing his cereal, he grabbed the unopened jug and was half way to his bowl before noticing the older one behind it that still had a little left. He put the new one back and finished the other one. Mike thought that was a thoughtful (little) thing to do and mentioned it to Jerry.

"No problem," said Jerry, "I prefer the experienced milk anyway."

"Experienced milk?" Mike asked.

"Yeah. It's been around. It's more comfortable with its milkness."

"Milkness?" Mike thought to himself. He looked at Jerry and saw that he believed what he'd just said.

"Milkness" Mike thought to himself again. Jerry was leaving. Mike realized that in the end he would have traded a good friend for the threesome with the beautiful buxom girls and now it was time to pay up.

"I wish you'd stay," Mike finally offered up.

Jerry sighed.

They both knew he couldn't.

Something to do with milkness.

# **a touchy subject**

I need to be clear what the point of this is. It's not to ask if masturbation should be considered a sin. What I'm wondering about is what motivated somebody to want to consider it a sin.

Also, if you believe the bible was written by an all-knowing, all-powerful entity, then you might want to skip this.

I write for grown-ups.

(And for Christians who are sick of writers making fun of the bible but not the koran, please be assured that I consider that document even more dumb because not only does it include the same silly stuff but the people who believe it probably want to lop off my head for saying so.)

Ok, on the off chance that there is anyone I haven't offended, I'll continue...

I can totally understand why people putting together a book of do's and don'ts would have a lot of critical things to say about sex. I get it. Sex leads more people down dark and dangerous roads than drugs and rock n' roll combined.

_"The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?"_

Jeremiah 17:9

Can I get an amen?

Reading that verse, I'm surprised the bible is actually pro-love. If I was writing some thoughts on how to keep the masses happy and in line, I think I would have lumped in love with sex. Drugs might have led a few more people astray but what the fuck do you think all the rock songs are about?

But I digress. Once I start thinking about writing a sequel to the bible, it's hours until I can get my head straight again. The Newer Testament by Lance Manion. Has a nice ring to it. No wonder L. Ron had such a fun time.

Holy shit, even my digressions have digressions.

So, we're back to the time when a group of men were sitting around jotting things down for yet another attempt at a new god. I think it was after caveman times and right around the Stone Age. Can that be right? It's hard to reference time when the year is 0. Whenever I see B.C. written down, I immediately think of people wearing fur singlets like professional wrestlers except they carried clubs. Before you scoff, just know I Googled it and cavemen did indeed wear leopard leotards so they were probably way more fabulous than you've been imagining them.

Hard to believe I went into that paragraph trying to recover from my last digression. Harder still to believe the bible doesn't consider digressing a sin worthy of a lake that burns with fire and sulfur.

But back to sexual immorality and "the flesh."

Who was the guy that wanted to make masturbation wrong?! It seems the perfect way to address the church's preoccupation with sex. "Rub One Out and Avoid Hell" would seem like such a great slogan. At some point in time, there really was a guy who argued against masturbation. One guy fucked it up for billions of people to come (excuse the pun). It just seems so counter-intuitive. How could someone think touching your own flesh is bad?

If it weren't for him, I imagine a world where not only is masturbation looked down upon, but it is understood and celebrated. When a girl asks how her new miniskirt looks, you could smile and excuse yourself with a knowing wink. At work, you could put your "special time" right in your Outlook schedule. In school, you could raise your hand and let the teacher know you needed to jerk off the same way you'd ask to go #1 or #2.

#3.

It would have made my high school years so much easier. Particularly on the days the football team had a game and all the cheerleaders wore their outfits to school. There was this one girl in particular- I believe her name was Lynn, she would have had me leaving social studies two or three times a class. In fact (yes, it's another digression) the only reason I even considered going to my high school reunion was to try and bang her now that I was all grown up. Even I admit that type of behavior is pretty sinny, but the truth is the truth. If I ever meet her, I'm going to try to climb her like Everest.

Another truth? Using the word sinny is should probably also be a sin.

And while sex might be a sin, I bet comparing sex to climbing Everest has to be even more sinny.

Shit... I did it again.

(Perhaps Britney Spears' final album title?)

Ok... this story, or whatever the hell it is, is unsavable.

I was going to say unsalvageable but given that masturbation is considered a sin, I think, much like my soul, unsavable is more appropriate.

# **01134... a story of terror**

Halloween got me to thinking. And remembering. And wondering if I should share.

To a large degree, a man is judged by what scares him. Or doesn't scare him.

Is it violence? Spooky places? Emotional intimacy?

There are men who can dash into combat seemingly without a care but cannot stand the sight of blood. Nerds who can walk boldly into a graveyard at midnight while the jocks cower in the car. Apparently, fear isn't so much a litmus test as a wild card in the human psyche.

Because I like to write seasonally, I want to write a scary Halloween story, but the truth is the only scary story I have is one that 99.9% of the population will not find scary at all. They'll just add it to the growing body of evidence that I'm not only a poor writer, but a mental case.

But in the spirit of the season, I'll share it nonetheless.

When I was a child, the scariest Halloween costume I ever wore was a calculator.

Wait! Come back! I'm not finished!

If you are in the .1% of the population that thinks like me, I'm about to explain why this is scary.

I built it as a large rectangle. I spent a lot of time making sure it was accurate, every number and obelus in place. For those of you in the 99.9% crowd, an obelus is the horizontal line with a dot above and below that represents the division sign. So even if this story doesn't fill you with terror, at least you learned something.

Near my feet was the LCD display screen and on that screen was the number 01134.

If you just felt a small chill run down your spine, then there's hope for this tale yet.

When I said I made sure that every number and obelus was spot on, I should have mentioned the one button that caused my blood to run cold.

There was a button that generated a random number. You set the parameters you wanted and it would generate a random number between those two numbers. That button had me laying awake at night (the depths of this fear reflected by the fact that I was laying awake instead of lying awake as I grammatically should have been).

Honestly.

As a kid, the idea that this inanimate object was making a decision freaked me out. I was ok with it adding and subtracting but who/what was deciding on this number?

I used to hold the calculator, an object assembled by various natural resources and chemicals created by science, and instead of asking myself how mankind ever came to creating such a marvel, I instead stared at it as if it contained some devil.

How does a calculator decide a random number?

I wasn't imagining some Terminator-type robot roaming the landscape killing the very humans that had created it so much as some inter-dimensional being that was using the seemingly-harmless bit of technology to influence our world.

And I was holding this portal in my hands.

Then it happened. 5th grade. 3rd period.

The stuff of nightmares.

My friend approached me with his calculator held upside down.

'hEll0' on the screen.

A scream escaped my lips. So long and high-pitched, I ended up in the nurse's office.

It had spoken to me. It had introduced itself. Across the cold abyss, it had found a way. I had never been so scared in all my life. To this day, when I see a hand-held calculator, my heart skips a beat.

I remember making my Halloween costume. Putting it on and walking out into the brisk October night. Wondering if somewhere in another dimension, a hyper-intelligent creature was allowing a smile to creep across its enormous dark maw. I visited house after house and was met with curious and amused faces. A few asked if I was afraid of math. I snorted a curt reply, scooped up a handful of candy and moved on.

Moving randomly though neighborhood after neighborhood.

Then I came to Old Man Robinson's house. A widow. A recluse. A man rumored to be unstable and brilliant. He opened the door, took one look at me, his eyes wandering down to the screen near my feet, and promptly had a massive coronary and died on the spot.

I'll never forget the look of terror on his face.

I'll never forget the smile that crawled slowly across my tiny dark maw.

# **take a good look at my Rod**

Rod is a janitor.

Not much in the way of an opening line, but my first attempt ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for Rod the janitor") gave me the weirdest sense I'd read that before somewhere. That, and it was neither the best nor worst of times for Rod.

Other than those two small objections, I felt it was really in the running for the opening line but I decided that brevity, being the soul of wit and whatnot, started things off on more solid footing.

So... Rod is a janitor.

I'll tell you that his last name is Mop (pronounced /mäp/- which is just a fancy way of saying mop) just to get it out of the way. There is no way to ignore the fact that having a last name of Mop makes your decision to be a janitor almost preordained.

It was. Well, maybe not preordained but certainly very likely. Especially once I tell you that Rod's father was a janitor and his father's father was a janitor and his father's father's father was a janitor. In fact, as far back as you can go, the Mop name was involved in janitoring. And they actually paid one of those ancestry places to do some digging and they found nothing to indicate that the first man to ever clean up after another man wasn't named Mop.

Rod's father swears that his ancestors, back in 1496, actually invented the mop. Before then, people had to get on their hands and knees to clean. Along comes a Mop and throws some string on a stick and cleaning was never the same. "Sometimes it takes a Mop to make a mop," as they like to say in the Mop household.

Rod worked in a giant building but he was the only janitor. The place was, ironically enough, littered with superintendents, custodians, and custodial engineers but he was the only janitor. When somebody had too much wine in the conference room last Thursday night and used their finger to write "Blood" on the wall, you can bet they all came running up, sponges in hand, regardless of titles.

Rod calls his mop Medusa. He tells people that it's because he pictures himself as some sort of Perseus, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

When he was little, his mom got sick of finding all the baby snakes that had been born late in the summer dead when the temperature got cold. "It's irresponsible of those snakes to have babies they know will never make it through the winter," she used to say. So, she would spend her post-July days marching around the woods behind their house yelling at any snakes attempting coitus. She would flip over logs and large rocks and scowl at the writhing occupants underneath, lecturing them on parental responsibilities and thrusting a stick between their male and female parts.

When he saw the movie version of Medusa, with her wriggling head, he immediately thought of his mother. He might have been the only boy in the theater rooting for her over Perseus.

She was a stern woman. Rod's dad, knowing she would have none of his flowery romantic talk when they were dating, would write her long and exceedingly weird letters. What she didn't know was that embedded in them, in code, were long heartfelt bursts of poetry. The second letter of every word, if highlighted, went into great detail about how his heart longed for her.

Rod, of course, was born in the spring.

The same Rod who stood with two superintendents, two custodians, and a custodial engineer who had tried to figure out how to remove the word "Blood" from the expensive, and apparently fragile, wall treatment. Wall treatments are obviously more expensive and fragile than wallpaper. The very same Rod that was the only one present who knew that "Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death — the last, much the easiest to bestow" had been written in pen under the table. He had found it months ago and had been very careful to avoid having any of his various cleaning fluids come in contact with it while he went about his duties.

But this "Blood" could not be allowed to share a similar fate.

He looked his perplexed peers up and down and said "I got this one, boys." One by one, they excused themselves until it was just Rod in the room. He knew they would have attacked it with corrosive cleaners and toxic chemicals when all it required was warm soapy water and a little patience.

At a few minutes before midnight, he stood up and made his way out of the room, out of the building and into the night.

"Well, that's that, sorted."

Rod is a good janitor.

Not much in the way of a closing line but my first attempt ("It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known") seemed a bit of overkill and, if I'm being perfectly honest, wasn't exactly true.

# **true life incident**

At some point in time, things that happen evolve into incidents. I'm not sure that Darwin would appreciate appropriating the term evolve for a story such as this impending tale, but there it is. He never struck me as someone who would appreciate my stories anyway so it's all water evolving into a bridge.

Conversations typically start off such nonsense and it's the same with this incident. A neighbor telling me about a squatter taking up residence in the woods between the industrial park and the train station. Apparently, he'd set up not one but two tents and had made this little bit of forest his own.

My neighbor, having stumbled upon him during a reflective walk through the woods, notified the police of this unlawful behavior but the officer later reported that when he went into the designated stretch of forest, only hours later, it was completely devoid of this scofflaw.

My neighbor found this completely unbelievable and began to doubt the story of the individual sworn to protect and serve and keep unwanted campers out of our bit of forest between the industrial park and the train station. Someone, he suggested, needed to plunge back into murky depths of the woods and see if this guy had truly departed.

It was a job that had Manion written all over it.

When I used terms like "forest" and "woods" to describe the environment I was headed into, I might be underselling it a bit.  As soon as I left the safety of the railroad tracks and plunged in, all sense of direction immediately evaporated. I was suddenly confronted with the type of jungle you only read about in travel magazines. The droning of large carnivorous insects was punctuated with the cry of the occasional howler monkey or enormous colorful bird whose beak could easily pluck a man's eye out at twenty paces. What little light that was able to squeeze itself through the canopy above my head was hazy and golden. The shadows that seemed intent on gobbling up everything else lurked in every nook and cranny of the place.

The smell of cabbage was overpowering.

Eventually after trudging through the thick underbrush for what seemed like hours, I came upon the camp in question. Which is an easy way of saying that the squatter was still present. I reached for my phone in order to take some pictures that I could show the officer who hadn't bothered to do his duty and lied so brazenly to my neighbor. Then all that would be left to do would be make my escape.

That's when I heard the tell-tale crunch of someone approaching. As a veteran of scary movies, an uncomfortable number of which take place in surroundings very similar to those I was presently occupying, I knew the difference between the happy little crunch of an approaching deer and the foreboding crunch of a man who would do anything to keep his little secret and was presently carrying an axe.

While other men would have turned and fled, I bravely ducked behind a tree and hid. The crunching continued until I felt the next crunch would have the maniac standing face to face with me.

Then I heard another crunch. This one behind me and every bit as foreboding. In fact, I couldn't be sure but I'd swear it was actually a bit more foreboding. It sounded as if it were coming from a man carrying two axes. A second just in case the first failed to do the job of separating my head from my spine.

I made a run for it, hurling myself through thick vegetation until I suddenly ran into the second cruncher.

At this point I'd like to point out that many literary experts and critics advise against using the word "suddenly." They actually go so far as to say some downright disparaging things about a writer who feels compelled to use the word in their stories. As someone who will suddenly use the word in every other sentence, you can imagine how I feel about it. The truth is that I suddenly ran into the second guy. It was both rapid and unexpected and unless these critics want me to have to use two words instead of one, I'd prefer they keep their cakeholes shut while I'm in the grips of relating a tale of high adventure.

This second cruncher made believe he didn't know I was there but there was something about his posture that made me very aware of his dark intentions. Trying to compose myself, I whipped out my cell phone to get a picture of this brute. Only later when I had time to review the evidence I'd obtained did I realize how badly my hands must have been shaking because it made the pictures you sometimes see thrust upon you as undeniable evidence of Bigfoot look like the hairy beast had sat down to have his portrait painted in comparison.

My picture was blurry but, I have to admit, it did make the whole scene look much more menacing in retrospect.

After that, I ran. For miles I ran, certain that the slightest stumble would have the two crunchers and their three axes making short work of me.

This incident came back to me yesterday afternoon as I stepped off the train back from Philadelphia. Before I had departed, I had the misfortune of being hungry and had decided to roll the gastronomic dice and purchased a roast beef sandwich from a somewhat-shady local vendor and his somewhat-refrigerated sandwiches at the station.

This roast beef sandwich had not agreed with me during the entire train ride. If I were to pull the handle of an all-knowing Fisher-Price See 'n Say and ask what animal the roast beef had originated from, it seemed at least as likely to have responded that "the dog goes woof" as it would "the cow goes moo." Either way, "the Manion goes uuughh."

When I stepped off the train, I immediately (not suddenly... not suddenly at all) looked for and found a bench to sit down upon.

I was looking through the bare trees at the industrial park. As my stomach rumbled ("the stomach goes gggrrrrrr"), I realized that the entire incident I just described took place in what had to be under an acre of woods.

If I wasn't in such distress, I might have reflected on and marveled at how people's perception of a situation can be so far from what it really is minus some foliage.

I did reflect a little on the topic upon arriving home and dashing to the toilet but as you might have guessed, "the anus goes sssccchhhhpppllllaaaatttt" took center stage.

Ok, you might not have exactly guessed sssccchhhhpppllllaaaatttt, but I bet you were close.

Closer than I am to having a point to this.

# **Breaking Sad**

The older I get, the less I seem to be able to not only control my emotions but understand where they come from. I can read psychology books all day but understanding why I get so upset when I watch the last episode of _Breaking Bad_ still eludes me.

AMC ran a _Breaking Bad_ marathon this week and I must have watched at least twenty episodes, including staying up until four in the morning to see the finale. Again.

For at least the 10th time.

And for the 10th time feeling myself experience real grief when _Baby Blue_ starts to play. Tears. The whole shebang.

Tears for the fake death of a fictional character who made crystal meth. I will spare you my take on how Walt is a tragic figure, yet another example of how things that start off with all the best intentions end up crashing and burning. If the ghost of David Foster Wallace wants to pipe up about his thoughts on the topic, I'd heartily encourage you to read it but Lance Manion ...?... I'd have to make the suggestion that you pass.

Although putting a ? in the middle of ... is the first time I've seen that, so there might be hope for me yet.

But reading me as I clumsily muddle through some lame analysis of motivations and intentions and right and wrong...?... No thanks.

So, about the blubbering at 4 a.m. ... (no ? needed). I know Bryan Cranston is fine. Well, I hope he is. I assume as much because he's rich and famous and knows he did some damn fine work with _Breaking Bad_. That's about as good as an actor's life gets.

But what about the bald children in the St. Jude commercials that peppered the _Breaking Bad_ marathon? What about the babies with flies on their faces that were offered up every twenty minutes on the UNICEF ads? What about the beat up ASPCA dogs and cats that interrupted _Breaking Bad_ every episode?

You know what you'll never read? David Foster Wallace's thoughts on why there were so many pleas for monthly charitable donations during a marathon of shows that dealt with someone manufacturing illegal drugs. A show that dealt with horrible people doing horrible things. THAT'S when these organizations chose to reach out to viewers and ask for money.

Money. The stuff that seemed to fill pockets, bags, and barrels of every criminal featured on that show.

I don't even know where I'm going with this. It's just fucked up on some cosmic level that you can watch almost every other TV show at any other time and maybe see ONE commercial asking for money to fight cancer, starvation, or animal abuse, but if you want to sit and enjoy the story of a dying man who tried to make some quick cash for his family by making drugs, then you'll get all three each and every episode.

It's like a subconscious Shakespearian drama taking place behind a real Shakespearian drama. On the screen and on the couch. What ugly sights of death within my eyes! Except ol' King Richard couldn't fast forward through the real ugly sights.

But I did. Past the real kids who need my real help. For only a few dollars a month.

Fuck 'em, I said to myself. I needed to watch the antics of the guy who made meth so I could ask myself for the hundredth time what I would do if I were him. If I would have done it in the first place. If I would have been willing to do all those terrible things. When and if I would have stopped. What I would have done with all the money.

What I would do with all the money.

I don't have barrels, or even pockets, full of cash but I do have the money to donate to all three organizations that I fast-forwarded past.

Is that it? Is that where this hurt comes from?

Fuck if I know. Like I said, if you want answers, I'd suggest starting with DFW. LM doesn't appear to know shit. Who can really know what makes us think what we think and feel what we feel when we don't even know these things about ourselves? Would we even recognize a good person if we met them?

I guess I should at least end with something about _Breaking Bad_ as that was the thin premise for this story before it got sidetracked.

At least Walt let Jesse go. He let someone he cared about walk away. "Just one thing before I go." As good an ending as you could expect, given the circumstances. He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.

# **rrrrrrrr rated**

I think the hardest part of writing a pirate story is deciding what to name the pirates. When you Google "Most common pirate names," all you get is a list of famous pirates. Being that none of the pirates in the upcoming tale are particularly noteworthy, I was just looking for run-of-the-mill pirate names, not the big hitters.

It didn't help that they also listed famous privateers and Buccaneers. While they were at it, they might as well have thrown in venture capitalists.

In the end, I chose Bartholomew, because it's very long and will give me the opportunity to whine about having to type it over and over again if I so choose, and Stede, after Stede Bonnet. Stede Bonnet was famous only because he was such an incompetent pirate. His story, however, is awesome and I strongly suggest you leave this story now and instead go read about him instead.

Still here?

Ok... but don't say I didn't warn you.

The young pirate put down the scrub brush for a moment to look up at the stars. Stede had been aboard the ship for two months and had yet to see any action outside of swabbing the deck. When he joined up, he had no idea there would be as much swabbing as there was. Feeling inquisitive, probably egged on by the cloudless sky and delightful breeze, he approached one of the older pirates to ask about this excessive need for swabbing.

Bartholomew looked a lot like Tony Robbins... if Tony Robbins had a lot of moles and sores. And liked to dress in pirate gear.

Bartholomew (holy shit he has a lot of letters in his name! I'm tempted to just shorten it to Bart but that would show a complete lack of commitment on my part) looked Stede up and down before answering.

"You see that fella over there?" Bartholomew began and pointed a bony finger at another pirate who I will choose not to name. "He has a stone that we call a 'holystone.' He throws down sand and then rubs the stone over it to get rid of the splinters." He then looked down at their bare feet as if to answer why that was important.

"It also smooths away the tar that pops up from the between the planks," he continued. "Then you come along to wash off the sand and make things all dry again."

Stede was clearly impressed with this well-thought-out reply. He was also very impressed by the sheer number of warts a single face could hold without pulling the skin right off of the skull.

After a pause, the older pirate asked Stede "Not what you thought it would be like?"

"Not really," was his reply.

"Well, that's life I suppose," said Bartholomew, and Stede braced for what surely was going to be a long-winded allegory about sailing and destinations and storms and battles and calm seas and swabbing and death.

What he got was this:

"When I was your age, I slept twelve to fourteen hours a day. I was known as the laziest man in town. Sure, I held a job but you can be sure that the moment that the work day ended, I was headed back to bed."

Bartholomew looked at Stede and awaited the inevitable "Why was that?" but it never came. Instead, Stede seemed to be counting the number of visible lesions on Bartholomew. Having started his tale, Bartholomew ignored this social faux pas and continued.

"When I reached the age of thirty, I realized I'd slept enough and became a pirate. I've never needed to sleep a wink since."

"St. Nicholas of Myra!" thought Stede to himself "I have never seen so many scabs!"

"I speak the truth or let the captain have me walk the plank," Bartholomew said sincerely. "If you come out here in the depths of night, you'll find me in this exact spot."

"I think that would be much better," Stede again thought to himself. "Your complexion leads to darkness being an ally."

"So, what do you make of that, lad?" asked Bartholomew.

"Do you ever regret spending so much of your time on land, as a youth, asleep?" he was finally able to query.

After a long pause, Bartholomew looked him the eye and roared "Shiver me timbers, you yellow-bellied swab, get back to work before I send ye to Davy Jones' locker!"

Stede turned and walked away. "Finally... some real pirate talk" he thought to himself and got his first erection at sea.

# **messages in a bottle**

Back in 1960, James V. McConnell, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, believed that information could be stored outside the brain. He created a series of tests using flatworms that seemed to indicate that Memory-RNA, a special form of RNA — the intermediary form of genetic information that fills the gap between DNA and proteins —could store long-term memories.

Not only was his work later proven to be bollocks, but he and a graduate student assistant were later blown up by a bomb sent by none other than Theodore "the Unabomber" Kaczynski. Both survived but obviously Ted "the U" was a little peeved at the idea that knowledge can not only survive outside the brain but can be transferred between organisms.

Someone a little more enthusiastic about the idea?

Ashley Bloodwell.

She was fascinated by the idea that a flatworm could be trained to react a certain way to stimulus, ground up, fed to another flatworm and then that other flatworm would have "learned" the same behavior.

So fascinated that she put her fascination into action.

Over the next ten years, she worked at such prestigious facilities as the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Uris Hall at Cornell University, the Brain Museum at the Institute of Neurological Science in Lima, Peru, the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., the Musée Dupuytren in Paris, and Yale's Cushing Center. Unbeknownst to all of them was her habit of taking a small sample of the brains stored there when nobody was around.

Eventually, she had dozens of samples of some of the most brilliant brains to have ever crashed around on the planet. Then, after giving birth to her first and only son Harold, she put these slivers of grey matter into a blender and included a small amount in each of Harold's first one hundred bottles.

Let's be clear about one thing before continuing: chemical memory transference doesn't work.

At all.

Pure drivel.

Someone who doesn't believe this?

Harold Bloodwell.

When he was told at the age of twelve about his mother's little experiment, he suddenly realized why he felt so brilliant. It made total sense to him. Despite his average test scores and completely normal performance in school, he always knew he was destined for something extraordinary. Harold knew Einstein himself was a slow starter and he even got a job at the post office as a tip of the hat to one of the other greatest minds.

Harold is now fifty-six. He sits in his modest home, the picture of his loving mother sitting center stage on the mantel above the fireplace. To the left of the portrait sits his degree in psychology from the University of Texas. To the right, a copy of the inside cover of  _The Worm Re-Turns_ , featuring a crest James McConnell designed, where the "SR" stand for stimulus-response and the Latin underneath is said to roughly translate to, "When I am done explaining this, you will understand even less."

Pictures of his many fathers decorate the rest of the house. He cleaned the place top to bottom in anticipation of his story being written. Everything was just so. Somehow, he just knew a writer was about to visit.

Not physically of course. The doorbell wouldn't be ringing. Harold just knew that a writer, me actually, was about to write a story about him. Put it down to Memory-RNA perhaps? I wouldn't, but you're free to.

Problem is that I'd much rather write about Ashley. She was a much more interesting character. Given the evidence, who could blame me?

Harold suddenly exhales. Somehow, he just knows I've decided not write about him after all.

Honestly, had I known he would be aware of this, I might have gone ahead and given it a shot. But who knew?

# **snake on a plain**

I moved a lot when I was a kid. If you moved a couple times, you might think to yourself that it was a lot but it wasn't. A lot is ten times or more.

My tally before the end of high school sat at 14.

Each move was gut wrenching and dramatic and inflicted the type of scars that have the "self-help" sections of most bookstores jammed with helpful advice from shiny men and women who appear on the covers with undisguised avarice.

Every move but one.

I believe I was in first or second grade. If this were a movie instead of a short story, the screen would be slowly dissolving into a small, dusty Texas town. Alas, this is in fact a short story, so you'll have to dissolve for yourself.

I'll give you a minute. And just because I said dusty and Texas, don't be dissolving into some Old West scenario. Think cars, not horses.

Texas. The perfect place for a first or second grader. Dust devils and horny toads. A cornucopia of things that can permanently injure a growing boy.

And yes, even at that tender age, the most dangerous of these things was a first or second grade girl.

For me, it was Debbie Ward. Equal parts dust devil and horny toad.

My first love.

My first heartbreak.

At first, everything was going smoothly in my courtship of Debbie Ward. I'd made all the right moves in the last few weeks of school, even managing to splash on a little of Dad's aftershave on the last day of classes, so when the first day of summer arrived, I was ready for romance.

That morning, I awoke to find that my jar full of diving beetles, fished out of my neighbor's pool the previous afternoon and left next to the garage overnight, had magically transformed itself into a jar crammed with formerly-hungry toads who couldn't escape their glass prison. If that didn't show that all the stars were aligned, then nothing ever would.

I wasted no time in tracking down the effervescent Debbie Ward.

I found her at what passed for a park back in those days. It was more like an abandoned lot. There were a lot of places in that town that when described, would start with the word "abandoned." Sometimes, it felt like a ghost town waiting to happen. A town waiting for the last few people to move on so the ghosts could finally claim it as their own. I realize by saying "move on," you could infer death so there would be a certain irony if the only thing standing between a town becoming a ghost town is a resident who ends up moving from the former to the latter.

But I was still there and so was Debbie Ward and between the two of us, there was enough life to push back the ghosts for another hundred years (or so I thought at the time).

I approached her in the manner befitting a dust devil and she stood there with the unflinching demeanor of a horny toad. I think everyone knows what happens when the unstoppable dust devil meets the unmovable toad.

Chemistry! Exactly right.

I wonder how many of you are at this very moment going "I didn't say chemistry!" or "Chemistry makes no sense!"

"Please, Mr. Author, don't speak for me."

Be that as it may... when I started across the abandoned lot, it was clear to all in attendance that romance was in the air. I wasn't exactly sure what that entailed at my tender age, but I was only yards away from finding out.

And that's when fate interceded in the form of a snake. Sitting in a puddle directly between myself and the love of my young life. I'm not sure why but the words "All coiled up and hissing" from the REO Speedwagon song  _Keep On Loving You_ suddenly popped into my head despite the fact that I don't remember it hissing. My apologies for mentioning it. REO Speedwagon has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

To this day, I'm not sure why but I saw the snake as an opportunity to prove myself to Debbie Ward. What first or second grade girl wouldn't be impressed with a boy who casually picks up a venomous reptile on her behalf?

So, I approached the snake in a manner that would have had Perseus nodding his approval. Thing is, if my memory is correct, at no time during Perseus' battle with Medusa did his grandfather scoop him up at the last possible second and carry him to safety.

Which is exactly what happened to me. I reacted like any hero in the same position would have done; I began to cry hysterically. There was kicking and screaming and bursts of the closest thing to profanity that I had available to me at the time. Had Zeus been my father, I would have no doubt been imploring him for a little of the ol' lightning bolt remedy.

But alas, I was mortal and when the dust finally settled, or as close as it ever seemed to settle in that perpetually dusty town, I realized I could never show my face again.

I will stop briefly to note that when I looked for another word for dusty in that last sentence, there really wasn't one. It was neither grimy nor filthy. It, the town, was simply dusty.

When I tried to limit this memory to just one word, "embarrassing" seemed to fit, though about a dozen other words fought to be included, not limited to: humiliating, upsetting, mortifying, degrading... I think you get the picture... as dusty as it might be.

I was done in that town. Finished.

Two weeks later, when my parents announced we would once again be pulling up roots and heading across the country, they braced for the usual waterworks but instead, found me grinning ear to ear, packed and ready to hightail it to the next locale.

I often wonder what would have happened if my grandfather had been in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

I don't really wonder about Debbie Ward. I just assume she never forgot our time together and still pines for me to this day.

I know my grandfather didn't wonder much about anything a few years afterwards as he had several strokes and developed Alzheimer's.

He would have preferred the lightning bolt.

As for me?

I realized what I was really saying during my meltdown was "If I stayed here with you, girl, things just couldn't be the same. 'Cause I'm as free as a bird now. And this bird you'll never change."

My delivery got better as the years passed.

# **the vagina: to Google or not to Google**

They say we know more about outer space than we do about the deep ocean. You know why they say this? Because it's safe to admit that about the deep ocean. You want to know what most men know even less about than space?

The vagina.

Specifically, about what's going on in there during a woman's period.

In our defense, in many cases, it's willful ignorance. We don't want to know anything that may take away the mystique of the vagina... and nothing kills mystique like blood fountaining out of something. I used the word "something" because I'm not even sure the vagina is considered an organ. It might just be a region outside of where the organs are kept. I know from health class there's a main area and a couple of wings where eggs are kept and few tunnels and whatnot. Organ or not, something in there bleeds like a stuck pig every month.

Every time a commercial comes on for a tampon or pad, I'm terrified one of my male friends will ask me what the difference is. I have no idea. I sit awkwardly and can't even bring myself to look at the TV screen for fear I'll catch sight of something whose purpose will make me want to give up on the vagina for good. Long cotton sticks that I believe girls just ram up there to plug things up. It seems so primitive and unhygienic. The liquefied remains of their uterus sloshing around in the one area that I've literally spent years trying to insert my penis into.

Obviously, I'm lashing out because I'm too scared to spend five minutes reading about what is actually going on inside a girl during their "special" time. I could Google it and answer every question I've ever had about the vagina, but every time I try, I end up typing "Deep Ocean" instead. I might know more about the deep ocean than any man alive and I have serious concerns that there might be some striking similarities that would keep me up at night.

Particularly hydrothermal vents- fissures in the ocean's crust that belch out water upwards of 700 degrees Fahrenheit, heated by hot magma lurking beneath the surface. Sound familiar?

And speaking of squirters... add that to the list of things I have no idea about. It's really a wonder I've ever ventured into the pants of a willing female to begin with. One minute you're working hard to please your partner, and the next you're getting hit in the face with some mystery liquid. You have the same sensation as leaning over to smell a novelty flower that squirts you in the face, except you don't see it coming... and you have to wonder for what occasion a florist would ever be asked to assemble a bouquet of such terrifying flora. I can't get the image of a dozen of these flowers wrapped up and nestled in lemon leaf and thistle out of my mind.

Where does the liquid even come from? Is there a special compartment inside a vagina? Is it urine? Am I being tagged?

It reminds me of the fountain at school when I was little. The one that had two settings: the water would barely dribble out and no matter what you did with your tongue, you couldn't actually get any in your mouth, or it would unexpectedly explode out in your face and leave you soaked.

And once again, I could Google this. I could actually know the mechanics of what is going on once and for all instead of describing the vagina as a hydrothermal vent or elementary school water fountain. But I'm too scared.

There are some things better left unknown.

I'm not sure this is true or not but I believe there were certain tribes of Indians that would have their women walk alone into the forest for the days they got their period and then return when it was all clear. I don't want to appear sexist, but I think that was a perfectly reasonable way to handle it. I remember seeing a commercial where an Indian was looking at what a mess the white man had made of his sacred lands, garbage sitting against a fence by a highway I believe, and a single tear was rolling down his face. Imagine if he saw a Tampax commercial now. He'd be bawling like a baby. Racking inconsolable Indian sobbing (boo a hoo ah boo a hoo ah).

There's no way the Indian in that commercial would be Googling anything.

I guess in this Politically Correct atmosphere, a major company couldn't suggest to their female employees that they spend a few days alone in the woods when they're menstruating.

In the end, I guess I just respect the vagina enough to go nosing around too much. It would be like sneaking in and checking on its browser history. Nobody has ever done this with someone or something that they cared about and not regretted it. I don't think that there could be an explanation for the period (or squirting) that I wouldn't find completely disgusting.

I know that it has something to do with making babies and continuing the species, so I guess I'm just going to man up and live with it.

I just hope women appreciate what we have to put up with when it comes to their vaginas.

# **the many faces of fate**

She was the most dangerous woman on the planet.

A wonderful first line for a story, but not really accurate.

Like the title.

It sounds like an awesome story but it really has nothing to do with the imminent narrative. I'm just sick of readers expecting great titles and great opening lines.

And when I said "imminent narrative," I actually typed "forthcoming story," but I didn't want to use "story" for a second time in the same sentence, so I used the Synonyms option on my Word program and got carried away so I synonymed "forthcoming" as well.

Readers want stories/narratives/tales/accounts that sound real and make sense, but when does life every really make sense, let alone feel real? I would be a fraud trying to write better.

I was going to call the story "voices of the voiceless" the entire day until I got home and in front of my laptop and at the last-minute thought "the many faces of fate" sounded even better. Just like I was going to write about how I don't understand how someone like Dave Matthews, who has written so many bad songs that the mind literally reels, can out of nowhere write something wonderful. You would think someone brilliant enough to write titles like "voices of the voiceless" and "the many faces of fate" could come up with "But I do know one thing, that's where you are is where I belong. I do know where you go is where I want to be" instead of just understanding perfectly what he means.

But no.

Dave Matthews and his band have littered the musical landscape with so many steaming piles of excrement, I long ago lost track of how many times I sprained my wrist lunging at the radio knob to change the station to avoid even one note of these searing loads of *Synonym has no suggestions* and if you expect me to move seamlessly to the point of this story from this observation, then I ask you when was the last time your life moved seamlessly anywhere? Even funeral processions get caught in traffic or get lost or lose cars along the way.

So if I mention that my wrist is still sore from lunging to change the station when I realized that I was singing _I Wish You Were Here_ by Incubus at ten decibels to a certain girl, instead of just singing it, only to find the next station playing _Wish You Were Here_ by Pink Floyd, you'll understand why the next station had to be playing Queen's _You're My Best Friend_.

And if you understand that, you're a better person than I am. I have no idea.

Maybe she is the most dangerous woman on the planet after all.

Maybe you deserve a story that sounds real and makes sense, but you'll just have to be happy with a great title and a great first line (as fraudulent as they are).

And, grudgingly, a little Dave Matthews.

_I am no superman_  
_I have no reasons for you._  
_I am no hero,_  
_Aw that's for sure,_  
_But I do know one thing,_  
_That's where you are is where I belong._  
_I do know_  
_Where you go,  _  
_Is where I want to be_.

# **Gene the hero barber**

Gene is 88. He retired two years ago after working as a barber for 65 years.

The small town where he lives is apparently named after an Indian tribe that got carried away with the number of w's and u's they put in their name. Probably just to impress or confuse the white man. It's the kind of a name that when said out loud three times in a row, causes drums to beat off in the distance and rain clouds to gather.

I would say "but that's neither here nor there," but in reality, it was there.

This town had a problem. It started two years ago and just got progressively worse.

The problem?

The new barber was terrible.

Parents could no longer bear to put their children's school pictures on the mantel. The local news stopped interviewing townsfolk on camera, preferring to capture their audio while the guests sat in darkened rooms like people speaking about organized crime. Townspeople would rather let their homes burn to the ground than face the prospects of half a dozen firemen showing up with their terrible haircuts.

So, at the advanced age of 88, Gene unretired and agreed to come back to work as a barber.

It was front page news and most of the town showed up on his first day back. A colorful "Welcome Back Gene" banner hung across the front of the shop. Little Billy "One Ear" Jognson was his first client. Although nervous, he climbed up into the chair at the behest of his glowing parents.

"Gene used to cut your grandfather's hair," said his proud father.

To relax the child, Gene, in his familiar manner, decided to tell the boy a story.

"I used to fly planes back in the war," he began.

Billy wondered to himself which war. Looking at the old man, he assumed they must have had planes in the Civil War and he then imagined Gene at the controls swooping down out of the clouds and unleashing hell on General "Stonewall" Jackson.

"You see, Billy, I'm completely comfortable in the air. Which makes this story even harder to believe."

Billy stopped daydreaming about his hero barber and paid attention. As did Billy's parents and everyone crammed into the small barber shop.

"I was flying back from who knows where one time when sitting to my right was a couple that was clearly afraid to fly. They were nervous at take-off and only got worse as the flight progressed. I kept my eye on them and tried to allay their fears best I could."

Everyone could see Gene doing just that. Good ol' Gene.

"As we started to descend for landing, the latch on the luggage compartment began to rattle a little. The couple kept looking up at it with concerned looks on their faces. I leaned over and reminded them that it was only a latch. The wings were fine and the structural integrity of the hull was in tip-top shape."

Billy was no longer worried about getting a haircut. Gene had him and everyone else enthralled.

"As we got closer to landing, the rattle got louder and louder. Soon it sounded like the devil himself was trying to escape. Other passengers started to fret. Somewhere, a little girl began to scream. All of the blood drained out of the faces of the young couple. They look terrified. I didn't know what to say. Even I was getting a little rattled by the sound of this latch."

You could hear a pin drop. The only sound in the place was Gene's voice and the slow, steady sound of his scissors at work.

"Finally, just as we were about to land, the latch reached a crescendo of rattling. You could swear the top of the plane was about to rip off and go flying off into the sky and the whole time there is this little girl screaming. She wouldn't stop and it was just making things worse, so I decided to turn around and ask her to stop when I realized there wasn't a little girl and it had been me screaming the whole time."

There was a long pause, easily two or three seconds, and then suddenly the place exploded into laughter. Billy laughed. His parents laughed. The dozens of people waiting for haircuts laughed. And, loudest of all, Gene laughed.

His body shook with laughter and perhaps I should have pointed out earlier that Little Billy "One Ear" Jognson only got his nickname after this trip to the barber shop.

# **the audition**

Hollywood is known as the place that eats people up and spits them out. The town is littered with stories of naive actors and actresses arriving full of fire only to slink back to where they came, their dreams battered and their spirits broken.

And the ones that "make it?" More often than not, they end up disillusioned. Things are never as good as they expect and eventually, tired and cynical, the wolves bring them down as well.

But it doesn't stop people from coming. Every day, bus stations, train stations, and airports deliver groups of wide-eyed optimists, each eager to throw themselves into the fray.

The point?

I can hear you fidgeting. You've heard all that stuff a million times before and you're worried that you've once again been lured into a story that begins by restating the obvious and then asks the reader to make some gigantic leap to connect glamorous Hollywood with a far less sexy topic.

Like computer programming.

Or baking.

Let me just stop you here. I had no such intentions. I was going to talk about how recently I auditioned for the part of a lifetime but to do so now would seem to be a slap in the face of the fine men and women who makes up the computer programming and baking industries. Where would we be without computers and bread? I'm literally typing on a computer right this moment and any minute now, I plan on going downstairs to make myself a sandwich.

So, who's laughing now?

Certainly not you. Forgive me if I forget sometimes that the point of these little yarns is to amuse you. I get a little full of myself. It's all about you from here on in.

The big audition?

Well... if you insist.

I was older than most that auditioned. Honestly, I should have known better. Hollywood is for the pretty people, but I swear I thought this movie would be different.

It seemed to cry out for the quirky and sincere. The part needed real longing; not anyone could pull off the role. I saw myself being wonderful.

The worst part was that I was called back numerous times. Hollywood knew what it would be getting. I was probed from bow to stern. Or aft. Whichever is at the opposite end of the boat. Getting probed from the bow to another word for bow wouldn't really drive home the point I'm trying to make. Anyway, I left it all on the field and I still didn't get the part.

Although you would have no way of knowing, I stopped briefly after typing that and got myself a sandwich. As I spread the jelly, strawberry - always strawberry - and debated again the whole stern/aft issue, I wondered how honest I should be in continuing. What, if anything, I owed you.

I already shared with you quirky and real yearning, how much can you possible expect in under a thousand words?

"A point?" you ask.

Have you ever read anything I've written?! Always with the "I want a point." Change the record, for fuck's sake.

Ok, here goes. Movies are all around us. Movies are in our head. The passion. The poignancy. The...

Although you would have no way of knowing I just dripped a bit of jelly onto my keyboard. Particularly bad timing; I really felt a point coming on there. I guess it doesn't matter because I didn't get the gig and I didn't even get to visit Hollywood if you want to know the truth (don't worry if you don't, nobody really does).

But, on the other hand, my keyboard is now all sticky and fucked up so I'll have to take it down to the local computer repair store where that cute redhead works and see if she might know a casting director in the market for quirky.

My biggest problem?

I never know when to end things. That would have been a perfect pithy spot to wrap things up, but I want to squeeze in one more bread reference, perhaps using a quote, even though I know it's not the right thing to do.

_"If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens."_

– Robert Browning

See? Didn't help the story move forward at all. Way too much clutter. To summarize the story: a terrible recap of a horrible situation.

But at least I have stones enough to write something right?

Although you would have no way of knowing it, I wanted to type a lie about Hollywood but didn't.

# **a checkered flag**

NASCAR. An entire sport based on people breaking the law.

The top speed limit in Daytona Beach, Florida is 70 mph. If you are caught going faster, you are given a ticket.

Unless of course you do it in the confines of the Daytona International Speedway.

How the fuck did this happen? Everyone there is breaking the law. I want to write my congressman and have the entire track surrounded by police cars and as soon as the race starts, start pulling over all the drivers.

Now that would make interesting viewing.

Just because it generates money, how does everyone simply look the other way when week after week there are terrible crashes and people and property are destroyed? That's why there are speed limits to begin with. You can't have the cake and eat it too, NASCAR.

All races should have a top speed of 70 mph. The law is the law. And before you start bellyaching, if you're a fan of NASCAR, it might not be the worst thing in the world. The race would last a lot longer and there would be fewer wrecks.

Actually, it would be a lot longer because included in my letter to my congressman is the suggestion to put a toll booth on every track. Why shouldn't they have to pony up like the rest of us when we go out for a drive? They can buy a Fast Pass and if all goes well, they wouldn't even have to come to full stop each of the 500 times they'd have to pass through the gate.

Welcome to my driving experience, Mr. Earnhardt Jr. And when I finally make it home every night, I never shower myself with champagne or do donuts on my lawn.

It's called restraint. You should try it sometime, Dale.

I'm sick of these grease monkeys wasting our precious gasoline and growing bushy mustaches and dating women that are way too hot for them. Shut down a lane or two every now and then during these big races; see how they handle that stress of passing a group of slackers in orange vests holding shovels 500 times.

Actually, fuck giving them Fast Pass. Make them have to throw correct change into the little bucket 500 times. Imagine the instant replay of an errant dime bouncing out and causing everyone behind that driver to have to wait as he gets out and tries to find it. Tolls would give the pit crew something to do. They'd have to be handing the drivers a fistful of change every stop. Change and coffee to keep them alert. I would imagine sitting in traffic for nine straight hours might take the edge off of even the most experienced driver.

God forbid there be a fender bender. It always annoyed me that during races, there would be some hideous crash and they would just drag the wreck off to the side and continue the race. That's not how things work in the real world. We are a nation of laws. You have to stop everything and wait for the police to come and file an accident report. I want to see these drivers be held accountable. They need to climb out of their cars and exchange insurance information like the rest of us.

At this point, your mind must be scrambling to try to come up with the point of all this. It couldn't be just a mindless rambling mess- at least that's what you want to believe. Being the hyper-intelligent being you are, you're probably trying to wrestle some metaphor out of it. About applying laws too broadly or maybe the psychological impact of commuting.

Stop.

There was no point. I sincerely want to make the Daytona 500 a nightmare to watch. For no real reason. Because it's funny.

To me anyway.

Sorry.

# **the one where the guy gets three wishes**

Trevor thought he'd remembered some advice about never making a decision without sleeping on it.

So, he did.

Big mistake.

You see, the previous day, he'd had the good fortune of rubbing a particular lamp which resulted in a particular genie popping out and granting him three wishes. He asked if he had to make them then and there and the genie shook his bluish, slightly hazy head and informed him that there was no rush whatsoever and he'd always be listening, ready to grant the wishes, until all three were dished out.

Trevor thought he'd made a wise decision.

He had not.

"He who hesitates is lost," he muttered bitterly to himself.

You see, turns out that sometimes you can use up wishes when you sleep. He only found this out when the genie returned when he awoke to remind him he only had one wish left.

"What are you talking about?" the very surprised Trevor exclaimed.

"You used up two wishes last night. Don't you remember?" the not-very-surprised genie exclaimed back.

"I did no such thing!" Trevor shouted.

"Did too," the genie said.

Then the genie went on to explain what his wishes had been. Trevor was not happy. Apparently, the things you dream about aren't always the kind of stuff that wishes are made of.

First, Trevor wished that every time he sneezed all the fingers on both his hands would suffer multiple breaks and fractures. The good news? He could heal them by playing piano. The genie imagined Trevor's horribly mangled hands clawing at the ivories until they were repaired and it caused him to shudder involuntarily. Even for a genie who had seen it all this was a rough one.

"Who the fuck wishes for that?!" raged Trevor.

"Um...." Was all the genie could get out. He knew he still had to tell him what his second wish was. He was not looking forward to it. He reflected briefly on Trevor's first wish, imagining him trying to bang out Piano Man while dressed like Elton John, the whole time screaming in agony. The image made him smile. His teeth were equally bluish and hazy. He wondered if Trevor even knew how to play piano.

"What was my second wish?" asked an impatient Trevor.

The genie began, knowing Trevor was not going to like it.

"You wished for a magic toaster. It's in the kitchen."

"What. Does. It. Do?" asked Trevor.

"Well... if you put in burnt toast, it will pop out as bread again. Good as new."

Trevor wondered what would happen if he wished that the genie's head would explode into a billion pieces. His face was getting red. It was time for the genie to offer up a bright side.

"That's not all! If you put anything damaged by fire into the toaster it will pop up repaired. Any at all... well, anything that will fit into the slot. Phones... credit cards... mail."

Trevor did not take the bright side very well.

"That human subconscious is a real mystery, huh?" offered the genie after an awkward pause. "What do you think it all means? Your hands. A toaster. Weird huh?"

Trevor remained quiet.

"I'd suggest you make your last wish before going to bed tonight" the genie said.

"You think?!" barked Trevor.

Finally, he muttered "He who hesitates is lost," to himself (I told you he would).

He was going to add "Strike while the iron is hot," but he was afraid of saying anything involving striking and hot irons with the genie in earshot.

Filled with regret and still in the mood to mutter, he muttered "I just wish I had made my wishes before I went to bed last night."

So, with a quick poof! that's what happened.

And the three wishes were the usual stuff. Not even worth mentioning really.

# **putting out feelers**

This story is set in 2019 but I'd like you to approach it as if it's the 2019 we imagined in 2002 and not the 2019 in which we currently reside. Helping in this effort will be the fact that the technology described does not currently exist, but you sure as hell would have had no problem believing it would have existed in 2019 back in 2002. Such are our predispositions when we view the future.

To get you in the 2002 frame of mind, the top song is  _How You Remind Me_  by Nickelback and the top TV show is  _CSI: Crime Scene Investigation_... which might not be helpful given that I believe that is still the top TV show (no wonder that the soon-to-be-described technology doesn't exist yet). Number two was  _Friends,_  so go with that one.

Nickelback.  _Friends_. 2019 as imagined in 2002...

It got its start in sports science, the applications being obvious, but soon spread to all areas of patient pain management. The ability to interrupt messages sent by A-delta fibers through the delta horn in the spinal cord before they reach the somatosensory cortex in the brain didn't allow doctors to eliminate pain altogether but it did allow the patient to dictate at what rate they felt the pain. Instead of a getting all the signals immediately, they could delay whatever percentage of the electrical signals they chose to be received at a later time. At first, this delay was over a matter of minutes but within a few months, they could decide to feel whatever injury they suffered over the course of weeks or even months. It allowed professional football players to spring up after the most vicious hit and not miss a snap, knowing that over the course of the season, the hits would add up to a slow drip of 24/7 discomfort. In extreme cases, where a limb was torn off, a patient could decide to feel pain from a missing limb up to six months after the accident. It went from an excruciating few hours to an almost nostalgic long-term ache.

Later in 2019 - this 2019, not our 2019 - they made a similar breakthrough in the limbic system. Along with the frontal cortex, the limbic system handles emotional pain. The passing of loved ones, the traumatic ending of romantic relationships, or leaving friends behind in a cross-country move; people could decide to feel the pain of these events all at once or over time. The debate on the ethics of this technology dovetailed nicely with Joel's desire to start a foundation.

He worked at the hospital as an orderly and while he was unfamiliar with what a foundation actually was, he'd been pretty set on starting one since the old one, called the Miller Foundation, had closed shop last year (again, his 2018, not yours).

People who decided to postpone the pain of emotional situations became known as "carriers" as they carried around a lot of emotional hurt slowly moving through them every day. People who made the decision to feel everything fully in real time were referred to as "feelers." Obviously in this 2019, people sucked at coming up with original monikers. Feelers were always wary of carriers as they felt they entered every situation with baggage. Carriers believed that feelers wouldn't feel so high and mighty if they had any idea of what the carriers were carrying.

Scientists and psychologists argued the virtues and pitfalls of this new wrinkle in mental health and all the while, Joel stood in front of the old Miller Foundation building picturing a crane removing the Miller and replacing it with whatever side he chose to take in the debate. He was a feeler but only because he'd never really had anything bad happen to him. He'd thought about having an emotional regulator installed but he figured he'd wait until he got a taste of just how bad things could hurt before he committed.

One day as he stood outside the abandoned Miller Foundation building, he happened to speak with a real estate agent who was showing the space to a prospective client. After the agent was done walking around and pointing out the wonderful aspects of the space to the potential buyer, Joel was able to corner her and ask how much it was going for.

It was much more than he'd anticipated.

When the realtor asked what his interest was in the building, he happily stated he wanted to start a foundation of his own and that she would only have to remove the Miller and leave the Foundation.

The real estate agent, let's call her Jan, cut right to the chase and inquired whether Joel knew what a foundation was.

His definition wasn't exactly spot on so she filled in a few gaps he had in the definition. For instance, Joel was unaware that foundations gave away money as opposed to collecting it. This news clearly rattled him. Jan, a feeler despite having lived through some very trying moments, saw his face fall but figured it was better he found out now as opposed to wasting any more time on a pipe dream.

Later at work, Joel approached his boss and asked whether his insurance covered emotional regulation. It did not. His second disappointment of the day.

He didn't like the feeling of disappointment. Not one bit.

But at least he now knew which side of the debate he was on.

He then went home to watch  _Old Friends_ , the  _Friends_  reboot with the Nickelback theme song.

# **let's make another deal**

It surprised nobody when her name was called and she came running down the ramp to stand smiling and out of breath in front of Wayne Brady. The show's producers would tell you that audience participants are selected completely at random, but anyone with eyes knows that girls who dress provocatively and show a little boob will often times defy those odds and get to "Come on down."

So, she did.

I realize that "Come on down" is the tag line of  _The Price is Right_  and not  _Let's Make a Deal_  but that's how much influence she has over things. If she wanted to come on down, she was going to come on down and what I originally planned to write be damned.

She'd been "coming on down" her whole life. Find her on Halloween and she'd always be the one in the "slutty pirate" costume. Maybe not always a pirate but always slutty. "Slutty nurse" or "slutty cop" or "slutty nun."

She has few female friends.

Her male friends come and go.

Literally.

She pretends not to notice.

I don't want to paint her as heartless though. She still has the romantic note her date to prom gave her when arrived at her door all those years ago and she still occasionally pulls it out and reads it. He wrote it when he was full of optimism about the possibility they would lose their virginities together later that magical night. He was, of course, blissfully unaware he'd missed that particular ship by about two years. She'd been sailing all through high school and he might have been the last boy in the school that was unaware of that fact.

Wayne Brady was motioning to the small box in front of her and explaining how lucky she was that the contents lurking within were already hers.

A very respectable prize. She could almost hear her parents and siblings stewing over her relentless good fortunes. I'm not saying they don't love her, in a very resentful way, but to them, every day seems like Halloween.

After Mr. Brady had wrapped up explaining to her exactly what it was that she had won, seemingly as an afterthought, he hesitated and then said "Unless..."

She stared at him with her best "Unless what?" look.

"Unless... you'd like to trade what you already have for what is behind Door #1!"

The audience erupted with advice. "Stay!" screamed the cowboy, "Take what's behind the door!" bellowed the cowgirl next to him. "Don't be a fool, keep what you already have!" pleaded someone in mouse ears and whiskers. "You have to see what's behind the door!" yelled someone dressed as a jack-in-the-box. I would have described him as a Dale-in-the-box but you have no way of knowing his name was Dale.

Wayne Brady gave her his best "So what will it be?" look, which considering his occupation, was pretty much the best "So what will it be?" look on the planet.

I realize that frequent readers of mine will assume I'm about to launch into the Monty Hall problem and insinuate that the girl was at that very moment wrestling with the implications of Bertrand's Box paradox but, as much as I'd like to, she wasn't. She was completely unaware of such vertical paradoxes.

Or any paradoxes.

She was wondering if any of her ex-boyfriends were watching and what they would think of her if she settled for the safe choice of what she already had in hand.

A few years back, she emailed the boy from prom, his name was Nick, and attached a picture of the well-worn letter he'd written to her, to show that she still remembered him. He was touched and immediately jumped to some conclusions that, while reasonable at the time, he would quickly come to regret. They went out to dinner to catch up and once she realized that he still cared about her, she skipped dessert and ran for the hills.

Finally, Wayne was forced to ask "So what will it be?"

"I'll take Door #1!" she spluttered, jumping up and down a little despite herself. She just couldn't live with herself if she kept the modest prize and standing behind the door was Mr. Two-Week-All-Expenses-Paid Acapulco Vacation.

"Are you sure?" Wayne dutifully asked.

"Yes!" she said.

The door opened to reveal a donkey standing there in a straw hat.

The audience erupted in laughter and applause. Someone in mouse ears and whiskers sighed and said "I tried to warn her."

During the commercial break, Wayne Brady explained to her that the prize was just the straw hat. The donkey was just modeling it.

When they returned from the commercial break, she was still standing next to Wayne Brady. He had walked away but she had followed. He attempted to start a new conversation with someone dressed as an astronaut, but she stepped between them.

"I change my mind," she said flatly.

"You what?"

"I want to go back to the small box. That's my final answer."

Wayne Brady smiled awkwardly. "That's not how the game is played. I'm so sorry."

He wasn't really so sorry. So-so sorry at best.

He began talking to the astronaut.

The girl didn't understand. She didn't want the straw hat. "Why would anyone want a straw hat when they could have what was in the small box?" she wondered to herself. She sincerely felt screwed over.

A thousand miles away Nick was watching.

He was smiling as he watched her wander back to her seat, dazed. He could see that she clearly didn't understand what had just happened.

"Stupid bitch."

His attention returned to the astronaut.

# **the amazing Manion**

As I've stated many times, perhaps needlessly, I derive no income from writing. Not because I feel I'm above receiving money for my time and that somehow accepting cash for my thoughts is somehow selling out and a true rebel wouldn't even consider prostituting the written word for physical possessions and writing run-on sentences are really fun to read.

Wait... what?

No, the reason is that I'm a terrible writer and if anything, I should be paying you to read this.

So, what do I actually do for a living? (asks nobody ever)

If I tell you, you'll have to agree not to think less of me. Which, when you hear what I do for a living, will be difficult. So, let's pretend that we've entered into a sacred pact and you won't judge me.

I'm a psychic.

Honestly, I'm surprised you didn't see that coming.

I clearly did.

Being psychic and all.

That's contemptible enough on its own but wait 'til you hear my specialty.

I speak to the dead. Grieving people come to me and pay me to get in touch with their loved ones that have passed over to the other side.

But that's not even the worst part. Some years ago, I sat down and thought about what could be the absolute worst thing you could do for a living. What could I do, so that if I was sitting down at a dinner party and was asked my occupation, would have the other members at the table immediately pelt me with bread rolls?

And still be the funniest thing in the world to me.

After I have reached their dearly departed, I begin to tell the mourning family members the absolutely most horrible things I can imagine.

Don't you DARE stop reading. It's not a coincidence you're here reading this right now, so sit the fuck down and finish. It's time you put some skin in the game, you twisted fuck.

Do I tell the hysterical widow that I never loved her and cheated whenever I got the opportunity?

Hell no. That's child's play.

Think darker.

Do it.

What would you say that could be much, much worse?

I'll wait.

That's better. Horrible, but better.

Now what about an inconsolable parent who just lost their only child?

Don't you get soft on me now, motherfucker. Molestation claims? That's all you got?

I don't believe you for a second.

Go darker. This isn't your first rodeo, so stop pretending it is. Dig deeper into that black oozing mass you call your heart.

I'll wait.

Better. (A creepy smile creeps across my face. That's probably why it's called a creepy smile. Just sayin.')

I was going to suggest a grief-stricken lover or a bereaved son or daughter, but you're already miles ahead of me, aren't you? You're already concocting the most hideous scenarios and I couldn't be prouder.

Now, this is not something to share with others. This will be our little secret.

Clearly, I didn't suspect you'd be so good at this. I have nothing else to add, you perverse monster.

# **Jerry gets burned**

"How could you know that the criteria would be so... that the requirements would be..." Ben said, mustering all the sympathy he could muster.

"I just don't understand," replied Jerry shaking his head.

Mustered out, Ben continued to walk silently next to him.

"I mean to say, how much strength is really required to dash into a burning building and carry out terrified children? Is it fireman policy to take them all at the same time?"

Completely devoid of muster or muster substitutes, Ben braced himself for what was coming.

"So, they expect me to walk in and announce for everyone to climb on my back? I'm only making one trip? Would they really sit huddled in a burning building, see me outside, and tell me they appreciate the thought but they'll wait for a real fireman? And the running. Why is there so much running involved in the test? Here's an idea... we'll take the truck! Has there ever been a fire that everyone looked around and said 'Oh, we'll just hoof it over there. Jerry, why don't you grab the hose and we'll all meet at 18th Street and Birch.' Never. That's when."

Physically, Jerry looked like something J.R.R. Tolkien would have described if in Middle Earth there were such things as white-trash dwarves. Taller than their mountain cousins, they lived on the outskirts of human settlements for the same reason that bears do... if, of course, such creatures existed.

"Have you ever seen a firehouse that's more than a few stories tall? So, what's with the pole? People can't take the stairs? If they were serious about shaving off a few precious seconds, they'd grease the damn thing, right?"

The image made Ben want to snicker but he felt the timing wasn't right. Continuing to remain mute seemed the safest play.

"I saw the other candidates. Believe you me, there wasn't any calendar material there. The lead guy or instructor or whatever he was literally walked over and grabbed my beard and told me "This will be the first thing to go." I took it as a good sign at the time. Who grabs another man's beard? There was actually a section of the test on memory! How many things are there to remember? You know what jogs the memory? Fire! Oh right... put it out."

It was finally time for Ben to speak up. "I know what you mean. When they rejected my application to be an EMT, it seemed pretty random at the time. I was willing to..."

"What are you talking about?" interrupted Jerry, finally glad to have a target for his wrath. "Your only qualification is that you can drive! You know absolutely nothing about medicine. Do you really think when someone calls 911, what they really want is for someone to drive over and watch them die?"

"You failed the written test to be a fireman! You said water puts out everything. You said it yourself!" Ben shot back.

"It was a trick question! I thought they were asking about houses! Who could possibly know about flammable liquids and combustible metals? Have you ever heard of a metal that is combustible?"

In fact, Ben did know a little about titanium, having watched a TV show about it, but thought it best not to bring it up. Instead, he thought it best to change tactics.

"Would you really want to spend all day holding on to a large hose anyway?" he offered up, secure in the knowledge that Jerry couldn't resist the set-up.

For long moments, he watched Jerry try. His face got screwed up in a ball, his unkempt beard writhing ever so slightly. It was clear he had more ranting to do and this burst of humor would derail it completely. His eyes flashed "Damn you to hell Ben!" and for a short time, it appeared he would be able to let it go but finally...

"You mean another one?"

Big smile.

Then he tried to continue the diatribe with "Who cares how high I can or cannot leap? That's why they have ladders. They literally have them on the side of the truck," but it was no use. The fire, ironically, had gone out. It's impossible to interject a penis joke and then try to carry on where you left off.

They continued their walk.

"Honestly, I can't believe you missed the greased pole reference. I knew at that moment you were pretty worked up," said Ben.

"What really sucks is that I would have been stationed at Fire Company 69."

Another big smile.

"That would have been sweet."

Life went on.

# **it did feel like Saturday**

I could have sworn Will Rogers said "Fences make good neighbors," but apparently the idea goes back a lot further than ol' Will. Pretty much since the first fence was built and at least one of the parties being separated said to themselves, "Well _that_ works."

Robert Frost said "Good fences make good neighbors" in his poem _Mending Wall_ but he said it rather sarcastically as poets tend to do. They're a sarcastic lot, those poets, and the only person I'd less want to live next to than a sardonic poet is my current neighbor.

This fact was brought home again yesterday. It was a Wednesday and there was a frightful amount of snow dumped on the region without much notice and all activities, from school to business transactions, were a no go.

Halfway through shoveling my driveway, who sauntered out but my neighbor, shovel in hand. I gave him the requisite wave and then turned my back to him, the international sign for "Leave me alone so I can shovel."

Not ten minutes later, he caught my eye and invited himself onto my property to chat. How I longed for a wall or a moat of dizzying depth or a hedge of dizzying height.

Eventually, it was my turn to speak.

"It feels like a Saturday," I said.

I'm not going to reel off all the reasons I'd come to that conclusion; they should be obvious to all.

He looked at me and simply replied, "It isn't Saturday."

I gripped the shovel and wondered how many mighty swings it would take to completely sever his head.

Has anyone in the history of mankind ever said "It feels like a Saturday" on a Saturday? Ever?! Why would anyone say that on a Saturday? The overwhelming percentages of Saturdays feel like Saturdays and those that don't typically involve some crazy scenario like a long weekend or holiday. You might mutter to yourself that it doesn't feel like a Saturday but it would never enter your head to say that it felt like a Saturday.

In my mind, the snow around his feet was red. Soaked with the blood fountaining out of the neck that had until recently been attached to his head. His head would be lying in a nearby snow bank with its mouth moving like a fish out of water and anyone who read lips would know it was still saying "It isn't Saturday."

In reality, I simply stared at him.

I needed to know for sure that he was as big a dick as I was imagining.

I looked skyward and said "Look at the flock of geese flying by."

I had laid a trap for him. By correcting me and saying "gaggle, not flock" he would cement himself in the douchebag Hall of Fame.

"You mean skein."

"No. I think they're geese," I corrected.

"They are, but they are a skein of geese when in flight. They are only a gaggle when they are on the ground... a common misconception."

I realize now that if I were to include my address, you'd probably jump in your car right this minute with the intention of coming over and severing his head on my behalf. Even Robert Frost would be forced to concede that my neighbor is wall-worthy.

I was forced to retreat to my earlier contention that it felt like a Saturday.

I repeated it over and over like a broken toy until he left me standing alone in my driveway.

It really did feel like a Saturday.

# **the stupid crap I think about**

Watching my dog poop got me thinking about time travel.

Really.

I don't claim to understand how the brain works, but there I was looking at my dog poop and it suddenly hit me... humans are the only animal that has to wipe.

Dogs. Birds. Even snakes go to the bathroom without getting shit all over themselves.

It can't be a coincidence.

There's always a reason and that reason usually has something to do with money.

Hence the time travel.

Who would profit from people having to wipe after pooping?

The toilet paper industry.

Big Lumber.

Which, ironically enough, was the name of my radio show in college. Don't kid yourself, the 2 a.m. Tuesday shift was the place to be heard.

Let's just pretend it's 1880. We're like every other animal on the planet and we can take a dump without getting it all over our ass and we also happen to be the proud owners of huge tracts of land covered with Southern pines and Douglas firs. And business is a bit slow at the company that would soon be changing its name to British Perforated Paper Company.

So, we sit down on our then-perfectly-designed asses to figure out a way to create a little more demand for our product.

"What if," someone postulates, "people needed a few fistfuls of the stuff every time they went to the bathroom?"

Heads would begin to nod approvingly.

"Whatever for?" someone else would no doubt ask before things got too optimistic.

"Hmmmmmmm. If only there was a little shit stuck to our arses when we were done."

"If only," someone would sigh softly.

"Wait! Didn't Frank just invent a time machine?"

"Yes, but how can that help us.... unless...." a fourth person would interject, "that new DNA splicer that Gary came up with could somehow modify the human ass in such a way that poop would get smeared all over it when you shat."

"Why, it's 1880 isn't it? Of course we can use this type of cutting-edge technology to travel back in time and change what God himself created!" the first guy would proudly boast.

"But gentleman," the third guy would say, "do you think it's alright for us to doom billions of people to a life of having to wipe shit off their ass every time they go the bathroom just so we can make a little money?"

"To become the only animal that can't just poop and go on with their day like we do now just for the sake of profit?"

Someone said the last line, I lost track of who it was. One of the guys in the room.

Then a few of the other men laughed and soon a gavel was brought down and approval was given for Frank and Gary to go back in time and forever change the course of human history. The device they traveled in would later be found and turned into a prop in a _Doctor Who_ episode.

It's at this point that I'd like you to take a moment and imagine what their asses looked like before they embarked on this mission to bury the asshole deep within two fleshy flaps so that there was no earthly way to poop without it getting all over these "cheeks."

What you would look like if they hadn't listened to their superiors.

Both Frank and Gary would instantly know they were successful when their pants suddenly didn't fit right and both would deeply regret their actions the first time they sat down and took a crap.

"Frank! Are you seeing this?!" Gary would scream from the stall next to him.

"I am! Gosh what a stink! Is it going to be like this every time? What have we done?"

It's at this point that my dog and her perfectly-clean asshole start to jump up at the back door to let me know she'd like to be let back in the house.

Damn Frank and Gary.

# **first contact**

I sauntered up to her door and knocked. Obviously hoping she was somehow looking through the peephole to see the saunter I'd pulled off so well. And in case you think I'm just being cocky, there was a UPS driver across the street who saw it and gave me an appreciative nod.

Those guys know a good saunter when they witness one.

It didn't hurt that I was wearing a leather jacket. The dichotomy between leather and a leisurely stroll is powerful stuff.

She opened the door and we drank each other in. Me, in my leather, and she in her short shorts. I cut right to the chase. "I came here to fuck and chew bubble gum... and I'm all out of bubble gum."

A great line- the perfect blend of romance and action, until I realized I was chewing gum. Slowly, I stopped chewing. Comically slow. Her eyes came to rest on my until-recently-chewing jaw. I could see it in her eyes: if I would lie about something so simple as chewing gum, what other things would I keep from her?

Was my jacket even real leather?

Was I even a real man?

The confidence I'd built up from my sauntering melted away. I tried to remind myself that the little tag on my jacket had read "Real Leather" before I'd torn it out but all I could think of was my third-grade teacher dragging me to the waste paper basket by my ear and making me spit out my gum because I clearly didn't have enough for everyone.

Her eyes moved up and met mine.

"Let me go grab a jacket," she said as she turned and retreated down the hall to the closet. My eyes couldn't help taking in her super legs and super ass. It felt ok to do so; she'd practically asked me to. Just because she'd missed my saunter didn't mean I was going to miss her walking away.

Honestly, the UPS guy would probably have had a full-blown erection seeing her walk away in those shorts.

She returned in a light windbreaker and asked where we were off to. I explained that it would have to be cheap as I didn't have a lot of cash.

"About that," she replied and walked back to the closet.

She returned with a small chest filled with (I would later learn) Painite, one of the world's rarest minerals. I mean, it was packed with the stuff.

"You know how you always pretend to be an alien? Driving around and seeing things from the perspective of a being from another world?" she asked.

"Yeah....?" I replied.

"Well I'm actually from another world. I'm here observing you and your fellow earthlings."

As silly as it sounded, I believed her.

"To that end, I feel like I should pay someone for the privilege of doing my research so I hereby designate you as Earth's official representative." With that, she handed the chest over to me. Holding the chest made me feel, for a very short time anyway, like a dread pirate.

Very heavy. Both the chest and being a pirate.

"I always knew there was something very special about you," was all I could get out.

She closed the door and we walked to my car.

"So, what do you have planned?" she asked.

I stopped. "Can I ask how much this stuff is worth?"

She thought for a second. "About six million dollars, I'd guesstimate."

I realized that any attempt to saunter now would be wasted. I smiled anyway.

"Olive Garden it is!"

# **that damn twelfth option**

If you go to any self-respecting porn site, an oxymoron I realize, you will see no less than a hundred categories. I myself visit upwards of ten, perhaps eleven if I am in the mood to see what Housewives are up to.

That leaves eighty-nine undiscovered. Which leads me to ask myself if I am just a simple man with simple tastes or if I am a coward, scared to plumb my own sexual subconscious.

I fear it's the latter.

Why?

Because of something that happened years ago but still haunts me.

During an amorous encounter with a girl, she started to suck on my toes. Having never put feet on the sexual menu before, I began to object... until I realized what was going on with my private parts. They were responding with a great deal of enthusiasm. I realized that whatever she was doing was working.

I did not return the favor however because she had feet like Wilma Flintstone. Too big. Too wide.

Yabba dabba don't.

I never revisited feet and it only recently occurred to me how different my life would have been if that girl had been sporting adorable little piggies.

I might have developed a foot fetish. A real full-blown fetish. Oh joy!

I might have gotten a job at Famous Footwear.

I might enjoy watching soccer more.

I've mentioned this before, but there is a picture I saw as a kid of a pile of amputated feet outside of a doctor's tent during the Civil War. I can still see it to this day. If I had sucked the toes of that girl, would that picture now turn me on? Would I imagine myself strolling casually by the pile and sneaking a few feet into my bag as I walked by to bring home for further use?

Just the fact that feet and feat sound alike seem to indicate I'm missing out on something.

And there are eighty-nine other categories.

Schoolgirls and grandmas. Fat and skinny. Asian and Latinas.

Bondage. Rope and masks and rubber balls, for fuck's sake.

I've never been tied up. I've never wanted to be tied up.

Is there something wrong with me?

I feel like I'm missing out. I would love to be one of those guys with a terrible secret. Leading a seemingly normal life but then slipping out Friday night at 2 a.m. to visit a seedy club or dwelling in the shady part of town. Being led down rickety stairs into a basement somewhere to fulfill some dark need. Dripping pipes overhead (and not just the plumbing).

What if what I was into was illegal?

I can't imagine anything better.

Perhaps having to move to some distant country where their laws were perhaps a little more flexible in the morality department.

I just feel that girls would know when they met me. They'd look into my eyes and think "Well, here's trouble," and they'd end up begging me to let them come with me as I fled into the night, the police hot on my trail.

But no, the girl had big feet and I'm still too uptight to walk into an adult bookstore. Even alone at my keyboard, I'm scared to click on anything outside my comfort zone for fear of being watched by some government perv agency.

"We got a hit in Philadelphia. Sick bastard. Send the team to arrest him."

Then I think maybe...

"We got a hit in Philadelphia. Sick bastard. Send him an invite to our next get-together."

The eternal "might" or flight scenarios doing battle in my head.

_"If little else, the brain is an educational toy. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain."_  
― Tom Robbins,  _Even Cowgirls Get the Blues_

# **off to the races**

There is no trickle-down when it comes to cool. Rising tides do not lift all boats equally. Some, particularly in high school, sit on the shore and never touch the cool waters of popularity.

The only boat further from the water than Al was Ed. Their names were actually Allen and Edward and they would have both preferred to be called Allen and Edward but their peers could barely bring themselves to utter the one syllable that would let them know they were being discussed let alone two.

Al sincerely appreciated Ed. Not just because he was the only one in the school ignored more than he was, but because he found Ed wildly funny.

Which, the case could be made, he was. The problem was that he was crushingly shy. And physically weak-looking. His whole demeanor oozed weakness.

But his sense of humor was brutal and Al was the only one who got to hear it.

Looking back, Al remembered the day they went to the racetrack as one of his favorite memories of his youth. Now granted, there wasn't a lot of competition but it was still a treasured afternoon.

There were ten races that day and Al had brought a hundred dollars. Ten dollars to wager on each race.

Cool is a funny thing. It ebbs and flows and changes shape depending on the audience and time and day and location and, well, about every other variable you can imagine. Having Ed around made Al feel cool.

He strode around that day feeling cool and making wagers, losing every one of them.

Just before the tenth race, sitting at the refreshment area, Ed looked at Al and said, "It would be weird if the private parts of dogs looked identical to the private parts of a woman."

Al looked at him. Just looked at him.

"Every time they walked into a room, it would be uncomfortable for everyone," Ed continued after a few seconds of thought.

Al continued to stare.

"I bet there would be guys who fucked them," Ed finished with a flurry.

Soon afterwards, Al remembered to breathe.

Ed finished his burgers. They were the little burgers that came eight to a bag.

Looking down at the racing form, it was Al's turn to speak. There was a horse called Doggy Style going off at 50-1 in the finale.

"Ed, let me tell you something. I have been betting safe picks all day and I have nothing to show for it. I'm putting the entire ten dollars on Doggy Style. You want to know why?"

Ed, swallowing, nodded his approval.

"Because why not!"

Ed, his throat finally clear to respond, decided to once again go with a nod.

"We've been cool this whole time. This whole fucking time. All these years we've been cool and we didn't even appreciate it. You're the coolest damn kid I know and if I'm your friend, that makes me cool as well."

Ed, seeing how successful his previous nodding had been, stayed the course.

"I know with absolute certainty that Doggy Style will win. I know it in my bones because I finally realize how fucking cool we are and even the universe will bow and tremble before us and allow me to leave five hundred dollars richer."

Al strode to the cashier and made the requisite wager and then went on to tell Ed how the following few minutes would change their lives.

Doggy Style won by two lengths. For those of you unfamiliar with horseracing, a length is a large amount of space and two lengths is almost twice that. I realize that in any story involving the uncool, it's important to have them lose otherwise you risk being an uncool storyteller but I can only relate what happened.

From that day forward, Al was cool. Once he was aware of it, suddenly everyone else caught on. He went on to do great things in the field of medical device sales. On the downside, he lost track of Ed after college and could only hope that Ed ended up as cool as Al thought he was.

I would like to say that Ed ended up being a breeder of championship horses to complete some sprawling metaphor but I really don't know.

I'm not a cool storyteller.

# **who's the beef?**

Driving in Atlanta the other day, I saw an enormous billboard featuring a hamburger from a local fast food establishment. Traffic was moving slowly, so I got a good long look at it.

The bun.

The lettuce.

The meat.

At some point in time, that meat had been a cow. Walking around with all the other cows. Eating grass. Pooping. Staring blankly ahead. Herded into a pen. Transported to a facility that killed it and hung it up on a hook.

That very hamburger at some very real point in time breathed its last breath.

Now that cow was ground up and sitting on a billboard that thousands of people a day looked at. Famous in a way.

It made me wonder if other cows looked up at the billboard with a vague sense of being star-struck. Maybe even a little envious.

"Larry hit the big time."

This presupposes that cows can acknowledge billboards and understand that the meat sitting in the middle of the patties is actually made of them.

A stretch, I realize, but not as much of a stretch as saying that a cow could actually recognize that meat as being, at one time in the past, Larry.

Once you do this, you immediately picture a trailer full of cows driving by the sign and suddenly a mournful moo arising as Larry's sister recognizes her brother.

"That's why he never writes!"

Yes, you can add writing to the list of things that cows don't do that I have presupposed that they do. At some point during this dumb story, you're going to have stop with the literal "cows have hooves and can't hold pencils and even if they did, they could never get to the post office and even if they did, their tongues are so huge they would have no choice but to affix all of the stamps at one time because to try and lick just one would be unrealistic" stuff. Just the fact that you would think, even for a second, that a cow could manage to open the little packet of stamps but couldn't navigate ripping out a single one just shows how literal you're getting.

Stop it.

Your brain must hurt thinking this through to such a degree.

Just imagine yourself driving in Atlanta.

Got it?

Ok. You're in Atlanta (don't ask why, it doesn't matter) and you're driving and you see a billboard with a big hamburger on it.

A delicious hamburger and just the sight of it makes you hungry. You read which exit you need to take to buy such a hamburger and you pull off on said exit and make your way to the restaurant that sells them.

Good so far?

You buy one and unwrap it.

Now ... say "hi" to Larry for me.

# **the eyes have it**

"No good deed goes unpunished," thought Dixon as he unloaded his deejay gear in the small ballroom. It was Friday night and he was to be the entertainment at the retirement community's mixer.

A friend of a friend had offered his services and Dixon had accepted without looking at a calendar. He had no idea it was a weekend night when he said he'd do it.

As they slowly wheeled in the attendees and deposited them throughout the room, he made the decision to leave the fog machine in the van. Everyone seemed to be foggy enough without his help. They collectively seemed one strobe light away from a heart attack. He had imagined the crowd a little differently. These folks seemed to be a lot closer to their funerals than their retirement parties.

Nobody was dancing.

Or standing.

An hour later, nobody had moved and he started feeling a little dumb standing behind his turntables. Eventually, he sat down next to a lady that appeared to be in her hundred-and-twenties. Like everyone in the room, her mental capabilities sat somewhere between out of it and batshit crazy. This allowed him some flexibility in the music he played as it appeared nobody had their hearings aids in anyway.

Things would have been winding down if at any point they would have ever wound up but they hadn't and only the clock indicated it was time to wind things up. There had been two caretakers wandering around taking care of the residents but at the moment, one of them had stepped out for a smoke and the other had gone to the bathroom.

Dixon again plopped down next to the same female relic of days gone by and smiled at her. "What's the point?" he asked her and shook his head. She just stared back at him. Her gaze unflinching, like she was searching for something in his eyes. Slowly she smiled.

She found something.

She lifted her right hand to the side of her head and her index finger straightened. As if scratching an itch, she ran it on the outside of her ear and then on the inside. Then she pushed it in a little further. Dixon's face screwed up a little as the woman pushed her finger deeper until her the first knuckle was buried in the side of her head. He didn't know it was possible and he was about to reach over and extract the finger when the woman smiled a little wider and sunk the finger up to her second knuckle.

A small noise escaped from Dixon. "You... you shouldn't... you have to stop..." were the words his mouth was forming but no noise was coming out.

"Don't worry. It's not as bad as you think," the woman said. It was the first thing she'd said all night. It was the coherent first thing Dixon heard all night. "When you get to our age, you get to do this," she said and with that, she pushed her finger the rest of the way in.

Feeling like he was coming out of a trance, Dixon suddenly broke free and looked around, hoping to locate one of the helpers. It was only then he realized everyone else in the room was staring at him. Smiling.

Each with a hand up and a finger inside their head.

When he realized that his gelatinous legs were not going to be of any help in leaving the room, his gaze returned to the woman in front of him. She was somehow pushing her right eyeball in and out from the inside in time with the music.

"Play some Missing Persons!" someone near the back called out. This request was greeted by what definitely constituted an enthusiastic burst of applause, given the crowd, and the next thing Dixon knew, he was back behind the turntable and _Destination Unknown_ was pumping out of the speakers and he was looking at out about twenty seniors in wheelchairs pushing their eyes in perfect rhythm with the beat.

Dixon bobbed his head and smiled. It was Friday night and things were unexpectedly off the hook.

# **the power of love**

"Did I ever tell you how we met?" his son whispered. His father squeezed his son's hand and slowly shook his head.

"We met at a dance club... in New York City. Neither of us had a place to stay so we were both looking for someone to crash with."

His son's voice was so soft, it was like listening to a ghost. He squeezed his hand again and realized there were only a few squeezes left.

"Once we both realized that the other didn't have an apartment or hotel in the city, we had to decide whether to move on or continue to hang out."

His son was lying in his boyhood bed in his boyhood bedroom. No tubes or wires. Music and movie posters decorated the walls and trophies from different sports, along with a spelling bee ribbon, sat on the shelves. No beeping machines. For days now, the father hadn't been able to bring himself to look at any of the pictures on the dresser.

"We were getting along so well, we decided to stay together that night. We slept in a park... until the police made us leave anyway. I knew right away."

This was followed by the coughs that made the father wince. Hospice is a nice way of saying that there will soon be a door to a room at the top of the stairs that he will never again be able to open.

"I know mom hates her."

This was the most coherent his son had been for days. His pale skin had a sheen over it and his voice was so soft, the father had to lean in and catch every word. The curtains were drawn but the sunlight pushed its way in anyway. For a few minutes, it seemed like his son was done talking.

And then he continued.

"I know Sara doesn't get along with Mary either but you have to promise me something, dad."

His father squeezed his hand and this time didn't unsqueeze.

"You've always been nice to her. Mary has always been so jealous of my family. From the start, from the day she met you..."

More coughing. Coughing that ended in gasping. Then quiet.

"Dad... please take care of Mary for me. Make her part of the family. Please. For me."

His son was staring up into his eyes, pleading. What could he do? He did what any father would do.

"Of course, son. It will be a privilege to have her join our family. I will make sure that we take care of her. I give you my word." Tears streamed down both their faces.

"Thank you, dad. It means everything..." and with that, his eyes closed and his father felt his hand go limp.

Slowly, he stood and put his son's hand on his chest. He leaned over and kissed his son on the forehead then walked out of the room.

Mary was standing in the hallway.

"Is he....?" she asked and the father nodded.

He walked over to her, placed his hand on her shoulder and said, "Get the fuck out of my house, bitch, and never come back."

# **mac and cheese and Andrea**

Andrea looked at the bottom of the Tupperware and saw a lone macaroni still clinging to the bottom. She had already placed a bowl of mac and cheese in the microwave to heat up, but she immediately stopped it and took it out.

She took off the plastic wrap and was about to throw in the solo piece of macaroni and return the whole shebang to the microwave when she paused to examine her motivations for the last minute of her lunch preparations.

Why did it matter so much to her that this single piece of macaroni joins its comrades in the bowl? Because it clearly did. She had expended both time and energy to the endeavor of bringing them back together for one last ride. Why had she hummed  _Don't You (Forget About Me)_  when she was doing it?

She had always been one to attach human characteristics to animals but in the last few years it had started to bleed into the non-sentient world as well.

How did that piece of macaroni feel when it saw all of its friends being scraped into the bowl to be heated and consumed, only to be left behind?

At first, she imagined it might have felt a profound sense of relief but upon further consideration, she realized that being heated and consumed was its purpose. Its destiny.

Giving dogs and cats human emotions is common enough but when you start feeling bad for macaroni or statues or lint, then maybe it's time to sit down with somebody and sort some things out.

That was the advice her last boyfriend had given her. They eventually broke up because he refused to get an oil change and she happened to be a passenger when his car's engine finally seized up and died on the side of the road.

She could never forgive him. She could still hear the tortured sound it made before it finally spluttered to a stop. She cried when the tow truck took it away.

"Indians thought there were spirits inhabiting inanimate objects," she would tell her parents as a defense to refusing to throw away any of her childhood dolls.

"Yeah, and they're doing great," he dad would counter before returning to reading the paper.

She held the Tupperware container and felt the smooth bottom and then the edges. Tupperware was named after its creator Earl Silas Tupper. How could anyone not see that every piece of Tupperware was like a piece of him?

She placed the lone macaroni in with its pasta brethren and reached for the Saran Wrap to cover them all up. It was a bit wrinkled but she would never get a new piece. It wouldn't be fair to the old piece. It had started the journey and she was damn sure it was going to finish it. After all, John Reilly, the inventor of Sara Wrap, had named it after a combination of Sarah and Ann, the names of his wife and daughter. Despite the fact he worked for Dow Chemical at the time, and Andrea usually thought of chemists who worked at such companies as heartless monsters, this John Reilly character must have truly been an exception. How could she not suffer a serious bout of anthropomorphism once she knew the truth about Saran Wrap?

And macaroni and cheese? She wasn't sure but she thinks she'd heard somewhere that the inventor had named it after his two sons... Mac and... Cheese.

As she placed the bowl in the microwave, she could have sworn she saw the piece of macaroni lift its little arm up like Judd Nelson at the end of  _The Breakfast Club._

For a moment she wondered why she didn't think of that piece as two separate organisms, the mac and the cheese, enjoying a commensalistic relationship. Each with their own values and customs. She wrestled with this option until the ding of the microwave brought the raging internal debate to a close.

"Nope," she thought to herself, "It's like a sperm and egg scenario. They come together to make mac and cheese. Something bigger than themselves. Something beautiful."

With that settled, she pulled off the plastic wrap covering the bowl to let it cool. As she waited, she whispered "Time to go on a John Bender" and thrust up her fist into the air and held the pose.

Minutes passed, the mac and cheese cooled, then got cold, and still she held the pose.

No credits rolled.

That's how they found her the next day.

# About the Author

I stumbled upon a film called _The Pulitzer at 100_ and it solidified my feeling that some authors pen entire novels just so they can write the "About the Author" at the end. As an aside, I want to fight for legislation making it legal to slap poets who appear on camera to discuss their work. While I appreciate the efforts of the letters s, m, u, and g, it would take a word much longer to capture the look on the faces of the people talking about themselves in this flick. Why does writing involve such pretension?

Who cares about the author? The person who writes something is completely irrelevant. Even the story they write is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what happens in the reader's head when they read the story.

What would be interesting would be an "About the Reader" section where you tell me what series of unfortunate events led you to reading this book.
