Doyle studied the angel feather sticking out of his bran muffin, unsure of who to sue.
“I’ve never eaten a mango.” [Keith]
Science made us lovers.
She walked around the grocery store sobbing, clutching the carton of eggs and her pregnant belly…does no one think about the chickens she wondered.
Having placed the nation under Librarian Law, the LSA could now be openly seen around the neighborhood, forcing in doors to “Dewetize” innocent citizens’ book collections, moving from home to home in what witnesses often described as “an unnatural, eerie silence, void of electronic beeps or rings, the soldiers’ sensible shoes leaving no sound, as if the sounds of the world itself had suddenly been swallowed by a sea of well-padded carpet.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the time of iPods and hip real estate acronyms, it was the time of handwritten cardboard signs and street corner regulars, it was the time of demise, the time of failing language, the time of false promise and useless hope—it short, it was the time of precarious balance, when looking the other way became the drug of choice, the only thing that kept the balancing act from collapsing under the crippling weight of its own imagined brilliance.
The computer’s adoration for Jared turned downright unsavory when it pretended to acquire all kinds of viruses, spyware, and illicit freeware downloads, in a desperate bid for his attention.
Having always been a bit fruity with his speech, upon seeing his wife’s goth-encrusted nephew, he asked, ‘Whence came this dark-eyed boob, who darkens our door with his cosmetically-challenged eye black and soils our throw rug with his humorously elevated boots that reek of self-hatred and hound poop?’
Noah hated playing poker on the ark because he kept getting dealt a pair of 2’s.
It was the usual cliched Bollywood plot: boy meets girl; girl ignores boy; boy follows his heart and girl into countryside; bandits attack girl; girl conjures Cthuhlu; spontaneous singing; Cthulhlu eats bandits, boy, and girl; ends with a dance number.
They closed their eyes and pressed their ears to the ground, trying to hear the ocean.
My family has plans to celebrate Thanksgiving in the most traditional way, by getting the neighbors drunk and taking their land by force.
The Social Anxiety Support Group had only one member show up, and she came drunk.
One of the many differences between my dog and John Lennon is that my dog says he would never hump Yoko’s leg.
After grading for almost 24 hours straight, the sentence “This day in age the inner workings of companies need to run both smoothly internally and externally in order to be successful in our dog eat dog world” is enough to make me swallow a cyanide tablet just to end the pain.
Wanted: Something to fill the emptiness and stop the pain.
Sisyphus just about had the boulder to the top when his cellphone rang.
Her muse had teeth and a tail, and the payments were steep.
If the internet taught her anything, it was the fact that reality is overrated and underutilized.
“Here, Fate, here, Fatey, Fatey, Fatey, Fate - I’ve a great big Biscuit of Trouble-Brewing for you!”
So far, the movie of my life has stuck pretty faithfully to the book, except for the regretable omission of the Bombadil scene.
Einstein proposed legislation that every vagina should come with an user’s manual because, while the clitoris was easy to find, not every woman was wired the same, but Schrödinger’s cat believed that while it may be easy to find you still couldn’t prevent it from going into hiding due to third party mismanagement, so why add an additional layer of inefficient government bureaucracy to an already overstressed situation, but Einstein countered by reminding his incorrigible feline friend of their trip to the Vagina Monologs which clearly demonstrated that having a hoo hoo did not mean you knew anything about it or how to use it, leaving the cat to concede, but adding that ‘men didn’t like to stop and ask directions anyway so what good what is a user’s manual in the first place?
Her name was Tits LaRue and she blew into my office like a sultry wind before a midsummer hail storm her ample bosom spilling over the neckline of her shirt -twin air bags deployed on sudden impact –and I knew instantly my life was about to become as complicated as a 42 car pile up on the 405.
My son has obviously mutated and grown a caffeine organ, and from the sound of him, I’m almost sure it’s leaking.
“Sure I walked a mile in my dad’s shoes,” Harvey DePinkle wrote in his bestseller, Fight Hard, Run Fast, “but I also walked a mile in my mom’s underpants, and two miles in my sister’s best friend’s cheerleading outfit, and it was at that moment, more than any other, when I learned the importance of fighting hard and running fast.”
O metal bird of non-blinking whatnot, I’m going to use this arena as an outlet because I’m 5 days away from defending a thesis and my advisor just told me that my argument, which is soundly based on math and science, YOU JACKASS, is baseless, which is only going to make me more correct during the defense and I think she knows this because she’s remarkably intelligent and wily in that way that makes you nervous, but that’s not the point, no, the point is that I feel like the time has come to do what I’d mentioned in a recent comment and follow Mr. Mencken’s advice and ‘raise the black flag…’, even though I realize ‘mouse is a lawyer and may end up prosecuting me for what follows, but what the hell, anger with no outlet leads to reality TV and that’s totally unacceptable, so here goes…If I was the kind of 16-year old in a 35-year old’s body willing to teepee someone’s house, I’d totally do it to my advisor’s hizzy, only instead of toilet paper, I’d probably use a flame-thrower, and instead of soap, I’d probably use napalm, and oh by the way, f*ck you, Auqa Man, for never destroying Sea World and freeing your watery brethren, yes, it’s a tangent, but I figured while I was getting things off my chest, I may as well be thorough about it.
After running over Odin’s toes with the mower, Jorgyn, Norse Goddess of Failing Light and Things Fall Apart, caught a train into the city, all the while trying hard not to think about how unfortunate the whole business was, especially the uncut grass.
After years of therapy, I was finally able to admit that lying about owning a house giraffe was actually nothing more than a lifetime of pent up frustration regarding my mother’s embarrassingly long neck.
Henry didn’t consider himself homeless, just a man between homes, and to keep himself happy applied this same style of thinking to beer, women, and hot showers.
The man who loved rhyming was in luck
Whenever his wife saw a duck
“Hey, it’s really no crime
To rhyme words all the time,
Particularly when it leads to a coffee shop.”
Boar, shmoar: As far as I’m concerned, 2007 was the Year of Giant Moose C*ck.
If you suspect you might have a drinking problem, the last thing you should do is try to give up drinking—that kind of failure is what drives a person to drink.
Sarah Rae Walker stood alone in her blue Sunday dress at the counter where mom always used to stand (where she stood when she heard the news about daddy) cutting wholes into halves only to take up her blunt Oneida knife to halve them again – making these beautiful crafted ham and cheese sandwiches into neat little isosceles triangles that fed our hungry mouths, and the light that shone through the kitchen window behind her beautiful head of brown hair made her look like a god making things easier to hold, making every bit of bread taste like her slender fingers.
When life gives you lemons, hunt down and destroy every lemon farmer you can find, then set their fields aflame so that the glow of the fire will signal other lemon farmers of irony’s arrival on a flaming chariot driven by life, who is now handing out lemons to lemon farmers.
At my seminars I will call it Sideways Learning™, but at home I will still call it lying.
The poetry of the smoke-filled tavern stared back at him from the dirty mirror while a single feather tapped the measure of the failed rhyme scheme against the edge of his glass.
Mr. and Mrs. Moss lived like two different plotlines in the same novel.
“New year, new chances,” said Muriel, in direct contradiction of centuries of evidence.
The library was the garden
where my mother took me for
swimming lessons and I
learned to drown.
As he studied the x-ray, Dr. Theopolis had the uncanny feeling that he’d seen Mr. Fitz’s bones somewhere before.
While I was trying not to grind my teeth into powder as I read the pathetic excuses my students call resumes, I noticed the girl next to me was reading an “urban erotic” novel (I didn’t even know this was a genre until I read the back bookflap) entitled “Thong on Fire” with the blurb on the front proclaiming “If you get thrown in the snake pit, you better learn how to wriggle!”
The Penguin Olympics seemed like a great idea until it came time to run the hurdles.
I hear there’s all sorts of bad stuff in coffee, but my mind and I are in agreement on this one; we’re willing to filter it all out.
The polar bear delegate to the UN pounded his large paw on the podium vehemently roaring that if human penises started shrinking because of global warming there would be a huge outcry.
I don’t know how I’ll ever get this coffee stain out of my soul.
Much to Kierkegaard’s surprise, the gods showed up every Tuesday morning to sit on his porch and whittle time.
He was the only one laughing at his own funeral, a fact completely missed by the timid who’d run off at the first chuckle.
My heart burns with the fire of creation and unless it is quenched it will scorch the earth; I am a god maker and in my heart a new mythos is born today.
Many an opossum dreams of an adventurous life on the road.
God sent her a note: “Make an ARF,” it said, so she stood outside in the pouring rain barking all day until he boomed out “ARK, you idiot, make an ARK!” but she had the physical evidence, and took God to court, and the ruling passed down said it was an F, not a K, and then the whole place flooded so it was a moot point anyway.
Watching her die, even just in a dream, was much harder than I expected.
When the mysteries of the past and the beauty of the greats lay right beneath your feet, there is a small part of your mind that clings desperately to the feeling, knowing soon memory will do her best to erase them.
The syllable scheme
of the haiku makes a poor
sugar substitute.
Jeremiah was a certain green amphibian with whom I was in close aquaintence…he was quite difficult to comprehend but his taste in alcoholic drinks was quite impeccible.
Laura rarely bothered with the daily horoscope found within the bowels of the newspaper among the advertisements for movie theatres, or restaurants, for she usually just threw that section for the cat to shred up and roll around in, but out of pure boredom, she choose to take a gander.
“Jupitur will rub up against Uranus, and inspire sparks of sensuality.”
Well, she will never do that again…
It is the relentless fine weather in California that permeates one’s psyche, the beautiful, paradisical warm days, one after another like an endless string of shining oysters stretching to the sandy beach’s horizon, each with a pearl; there are those times within memory when we found ourselves complaining because the breeze was a bit too stiff, or the rain clouds too low and thick, though they moved fast over the sky as if in apology for the necessity of the exercise; but in truth, one cannot blame one’s bad humor or mood swings on anything except oneself, for example, or bad parking, late sleeping, slovenly housewives or lazy children; which only goes to show that while there is much inside that can be found culpable, it’s so much easier to blame death or taxes or Republicans for the natural suffering that takes place in life, particularly when too many people occupy far too little space, or when one adheres to an outdated version of what was promised on that long-ago postcard with the coconut palm and the little hut and the orange groves stretching out over the earth fragrant and optimistic, and when one shows up to collect, finds only the blighted area just south of the Ontario airport where nothing ever grows and nothing ever will.
He trudged down the soggy, muddy winter lane in search of the rusty metal bird where he planned to tie his single-word sentence “Why?” where it would flutter in the desolate winter breeze like a lonely prayer flag high in the Himalayas, but then he stopped to pick up a ragged scrap of paper he spotted on the bridge over Whiskey River and, after he read it, he took out his pen, changed his note to read “Why not?” and hung it respectfully on the bird, walking away with renewed spring in his step.
It was the moments before he fell asleep that he feared the most, when all the thoughts kept at bay throughout the day took root and would cause him to stand at the foot of his bed staring at his pillow with the same apprehension that a person holding a metal knife feels when looking at an electrical socket.
Jerry thought he’d got off lightly when the judge sentenced him to a slappin’ for his crimes - but only because he’d never had one - and the judge was satisfied because he’d seen the rehabilitative results of the Justice Trout before, and so it was one of those rare days in the judicial system when, for just a little while, all the fish won.
Every night Cletus waxed the floors of the mighty Hall of Justice, and every morning like clockwork Superman would show up for work, wearing his big black boots, and scuff them all up again.
I am not a carefully-worded contract with an airtight escape clause, and I will not be treated—or loved—as if I were.
In the fall, there is one glorious week where the trees look as if they are wearing their party dresses; of course the next week they shed them which makes me think there must be a prom night involved somehow.
In the end, neither of us backed down: I, who had stopped listening to her truth, left her key on her vanity; she, who had stopped looking at my truth, left my key on my old speaker, and we never crossed thresholds again.
“Don’t kid yourselves,” Carl told his biographer shortly before his execution in 2007, “if humans grew faster and tasted better, there’d be a farm down in Arkansas raising them by the millions.”
I have found that cotton candy is bad for my self-esteem, because it confounds my spatial skills; I feel a fool for taking a large bite, yet then there seems to be nothing in my mouth.
While he never stays as long as long as he used to, his visits still occur at random intervals during which he strolls along the line of my mental vending machines, already knowing what buttons to push and always with exact change.
Once out of the ex-boyfriend’s apartment and ensconced in a hotel room near the L’arc de Triomphe with rose petals in the bathroom, my vacation seemed to be guided by a genius hand that had me drinking mulled wine while listening to jazz on a bridge by Notre Dame, walking into Sacre Coeur to hear a chorus of nuns sing, enjoying a heavenly tea at Mariage Frere, and redefining the term “room service” with a very cute french staff member at my hotel; I went to Paris looking for happiness and found something more important, that I am still capable of great things, all while leaving a wake of heartbroken men in my path.
She shuddered involuntarily, and stuffed the piece of paper back into his wallet. What kind of a man walked around carrying the word “failure” like a business card?
Ira Goldman, the wild west’s first gynecologist, rode into town on a horse with funny stirrups.
Pain that is kicked out of one’s muscles by liberal oral application of tequila is sure to come back about 12 hours later, duller, sodden, very pissed off and dead-set on taking up residence inside one’s skull.
Roy patted his empty pockets with trepidation as he watched dozens of dogs and cats he had owned in his lifetime run toward him over the verdant fields of the Afterlife; it was bad enough he had died without the foresight to bring treats for them all, but he was sure that, when they finally arrived in Heaven together, all his old pets would want to sleep on the bed.
“Sometimes I agree with you that women can overthink emotional issues, whereas guys can go out back, pee standing up, come inside and order two more beers, and hey presto, things are cool.”
“It’s one thing to be a rat alone on a sinking ship; it’s another thing entirely when you have a companion rat on the ship with you, and you don’t want him to drown.”
Polly found it maddening that the men in her life worried about her safety, but completely disregarded her sanity.
I am discovering a certain poetry in words like methyl bromide, pendimethalin, and parquat dichloride.
“Jonathan’s a fool,” Rudy told the other seagulls; “If you want to dream, dream about something beautiful and fantastic - like maybe waking up with a second beak one morning or flying along the coast and finding a roofless McDonalds guarded only by a handful of pimply, scared teenagers.”
we walked through the storm until our feet left the ground and our futures weren’t the only thing up in the air.
Queen Rudolfa suggested that Umberto Vallencio (womanizer, xenophobe, Yes-man, zebra-trainer and bartender) crafted deadly euphemisms; fairly good, he invented Jamaica’s King Leonard’s mephitic nickname of “piddler”.
I’ve heard of people who can’t live without the sunlight, but I’m fine with the constant clouds rolling slowly overhead, tumbling along in the gray light, the sun more concept then reality as it draws my shadow on the sidewalk with such soft edges that I can finally bear to stare at it without questioning what it is to be a man; I lived in the sunlight once, and it hurt, no matter which way I turned my head.
Capture it before it goes, the wind, his thoughts, his smile, the moment, the memory, the last time she ever spoke your name, the way she kissed you and held your face, capture it before it’s gone, before you say goodbye.
She hoped all the checks floating relentlessly through the air would land effortlessly on Friday’s payday with a minimum of fluttering and fussing.
I just received the membership packet for my 8-year-deceased grandfather accepting his 1953 application to Procrastinators Anonymous.
The skin on her hands had turned translucent with age; looking at my own hands, I had a glimpse of their future likeness.
She spoke of being older, she said it was time to write about what it had all meant, her hands trembled slightly as she made the coffee, yet she clambered over boulders to bring you lemons from her garden, and hugging her goodbye felt like trying to hold a rose in your arms.
A baby was born with a shiny bald head,
He suckled a bit, then went straight off to bed;
Days turned to weeks, then months and then years,
He swapped breast milk for pop, and then finally beers,
Until eighty years passed and he was left tired and weak,
His eyes watery and lost, his dreams now oblique;
“A pair of fine breasts and a soft comfortable bed,
Those are the things I’ll miss when I’m dead.”
A night like no other, his night began with such hope and joy, but he ended up feeling little more than numb.
One morning, young Carmen stopped believing in Santa Claus; in the mid-afternoon, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny had lost their cachet, and by dinner time Carmen was an avowed atheist, demanding to know if coffee would really stunt her growth.
“I’d give my left hand to be able to play really good boogie woogie piano.”
If this is supposed to convince me that I like Vista, maybe they should make sure the website actually works…
how is it that we now find ourselves living in an era where the PIRATES are winning?
Secretly, she enjoyed the second-hand smoke smell wafting through her apartment.
The recent chaotic events had led Polly to conclude that the hospitality industry was not unlike the weather in Oklahoma: Completely calm and comforting right up until the minute it picked up your house and threw it across the street.
“So let me get this straight,” said the teenaged, purple-haired Bronwyn to the doughy middle-aged woman claiming to be her future self, “George Bush’s idiot son has run the country into the ground, the World Trade Center has been blown off the face of the earth, the Soviets aren’t called Soviets anymore, and nobody pays much attention to nuclear weapons unless they’re being built in North Korea or Iran, Arnold Schwarzenegger—Arnold Schwarzenegger? we’re talking about the guy who plays the killer robot and Conan the Barbarian, right?—is the governor of California, the most popular shows on television are called “reality tv” even though they’re heavily scripted by non-unionized writers, and the best political commentary on tv is made by the guy who does the sports features on CNN…do you have any more of that chocolate-chip-mint-flavored angel dust you are obviously on?”
I smile all the damn time, because the lines are a-coming like it or not, so they might as well be ones of laughter instead of misery.
Now that he was retired and living on a budget, Henry found it ironic, although somewhat comforting, that only the most affordable girls wore his favorite blue eye shadow.
“Ma’am, I don’t care how sharp his claws are, this is a job for firefighters, not the SWAT team,” snarled Captain Jones.
Not much of a life,
really; *gobble* *gobble* THWACK
Then served with stuffing.
Rather than move to Boca, I plan to buy a tank chair, get it kitted out at the local gun show, lie in wait at the local supermarket for disabled parking spot poachers and then SPRING UPON MY PREY-guns blazing shrieking, “That’s Handi-CAPABLE you MOFOS!”
If those dogs continue to poop on my porch I’ll have to go poop on theirs.
I don’t believe in airplanes, I don’t believe in the internet, I don’t believe there is a place called Scotland, but I do believe in scotch.