“I’ve never eaten a mango.” [Keith]
Science made us lovers.
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.
Doyle studied the angel feather sticking out of his bran muffin, unsure of who to sue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Much to Kierkegaard’s surprise, the gods showed up every Tuesday morning to sit on his porch and whittle time.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
The skin on her hands had turned translucent with age; looking at my own hands, I had a glimpse of their future likeness.
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.
we walked through the storm until our feet left the ground and our futures weren’t the only thing up in the air.
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.
“Here, Fate, here, Fatey, Fatey, Fatey, Fate - I’ve a great big Biscuit of Trouble-Brewing for you!”
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.
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.
The syllable scheme
of the haiku makes a poor
sugar substitute.
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.
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!”
Mr. and Mrs. Moss lived like two different plotlines in the same novel.
Ira Goldman, the wild west’s first gynecologist, rode into town on a horse with funny stirrups.
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.
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.
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 discovering a certain poetry in words like methyl bromide, pendimethalin, and parquat dichloride.
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.”
My son has obviously mutated and grown a caffeine organ, and from the sound of him, I’m almost sure it’s leaking.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
You haven’t truly tackled the vagaries of the English language until you’ve tried to explain to a seven year-old why getting addicted to drugs is a terrible idea, the worst idea ever, while being addicted to caffeine is … um, not so bad.
My assault on her metaphorical windmill would have reached a more satisfying conclusion had the vanes of her desire not had quite such a firm literal grounding.
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.
“That car is dirty,” she mused; “It’s a Jeep… it’s supposed to be dirty, it means it is loved,” he countered: she thought about that for a moment and then blurted, “does that mean if I’m not dirty, you won’t love me,” looking worried while he laughed “no… it just means I haven’t loved you recently.”
He was her everything, she was his almost.
Betty laughed in glee as panic spread among the online networkers … being a luddite, she’d looked at such websites with contempt, hating the cultural changes, the popularity competitions and the eventual exclusion of Those Who Didn’t Conform.
He often recalled the long stretches of his life when he’d write the word ‘endure’ backwards in the foggy mirror every morning just to let the person staring back know that there was at least one person in the world pulling for him.
When my daughter was seven she asked me what Jesus tasted like - she was preparing for her first communion - and I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer until it dawned on me she was horrified by the whole “body and blood” element, and so I just responded, ”like chicken, sweetheart, just like chicken,” but years later I wished I had become a Unitarian before scaring the holy bejeezus out of her (bad pun intended) and turned her into a vegan.
“Well, in a bit of a pickle there aren’t you Pete, spot of a jam indeed, stuck between rock salt and a hard place I’d say,” cracked Pepper and all Pete’s condiments fell about laughing.
we walked on the ocean; we stepped out on the sea; we tripped the light fantastic; until you fell for me.
You know your neighborhood is dangerous when even the lions, tigers, and wolverines won’t come out at night.
The rather promising dream involving boats, scaling old castle walls and warm water and warmer sunlight faded into some schlock about a gift of a large bag of green onions that needed to be washed.
In the past hour, I’ve managed to burn my finger, give myself a colossal sinus headache, accidentally pack a library book into a box of books destined for a month of storage and 10 days of cross-country travel, and drop a small but surprisingly heavy external hard drive onto my head from a distance of four feet; I wonder if this is my apartment’s way of telling me that it’s sick to death of the sight of me, and I really should go to the library now.
The student wrote so poorly that he actually tripped, fell down the stairs and wound up in a bloody pool of his own words.
Tammy returned to work on Monday with singed eyebrows, full of indefinable tubed meat, watermelon and potato salad, and wondering what freedom re-chained her to her desk for another week.
Miss Dillman was a crotchety 12th grade English teacher who shuffled around campus with a shopping cart full of homework assignments; she could have been an object of derision, but instead, she had scores of teenaged fans, and this is why: one stormy afternoon in class, while reading aloud a particularly frightening passage from MacBeth, she stabbed her finger toward the ceiling - and the lights went out.
I wonder if words dream.
Five year old Nathan quietly shuffled to the kitchen, slippers shuffling against linoleum like surgical booties, to grab a midnight snack of chocolate bunny from the freezer where they laid quietly in their boxes head first like victims in a morgue waiting for their turn on the autopsy table, the freezer light flickering, adding to the eerie ambience of the night might have scared the boy if his mouth wasn’t filled with heavenly milk chocolate.
Its not true that every child who kills their family pets grows up to be a serial killer, my best friend is a professional counselor.
Schrodinger’s Cat mused out loud to Einstein about the death of Arthur C. Clarke wondering if he had a David Bowman moment as he drew his terminal breath, but Einstein thought that instead of a “My God, it’s full of stars” moment he probably disintegrated into millions of nano particles but conceded that it would have been cool if Clarke had turned into a fetus floating through space in a bubble like David Bowman did at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is better than honey, thought Little Bear happily as he leaned against his favorite tree and gently licked at the giant lollipop the sweet little girl had dropped when her father grabbed her and dragged her away screaming about “the Mamma Bear must be around here somewhere, run!” when he caught her holding her lolli out to give Little Bear a lick.
Stand tall stand strong, voices that care are crying from your pants.
So much to read, so little time to turn pages; she decided to sing it out loud in the coffeeshop instead.
If I’m ordering a small coffee/tea/mocha latte/root beer, it’s because I want only a little coffee/tea/mocha latte/root beer, so offering me the large for only 35 cents more isn’t as helpful as you think it is.
Got a gallon of milk the other day which the homogenization had failed on and it was nicely topped with cream which I scooped off and plopped in the budding teenager’s coffee cup and she pronounced it the best thing she’d ever had and then she complained for a solid five minutes about the evils of the nanny-state and its stupid homogenization and pasteurization agenda and the demise of the milk-truck delivering milk in jars that would cool on your porch and form cream on top and… I have no idea where she gets it from.
The weatherman’s words for you’re completely fucked.
the memory is
sufficient whether or not
you really got there.
His penchant for sitting naked framed in the front window did not win him any friends in the neighborhood; it was the postwoman who finally took action.
“I call it the morally repugnant clause,” God’s attorney said during the pre-creation meeting, “and I would strongly advice you to leave it in the contract, at least for Day 6 or there’ll be hell to pay trying to explain things later; believe me, if this thing goes to trial at some point, the burden of reasonable hope will rest on our shoulders, and frankly, I don’t think either one of us have the bank for that kind of trial.”
The sky tore in shreds, searing apart in the beast’s claws, each trail drawing screams of dismay and misery from the once blue air.
And then one day sisyphus went on strike.
As he stood in line alongside his mythological counterparts waiting for their welfare check, Orpheus would always hang his head and dwell on how even the underworld had been better than this place.
Above all things, Josie hated socialism, bureaucracy, medicine, being told what to do, and growing old; it was no wonder she regarded her Medicare years as nothing less than a confluence of governmental abuse.
I have a feeling that maybe you have such a concise, yet vivid image of love because you think too much about it, as if you were afraid to find it, afraid to lose it, and afraid of where it could take you.
The authenticity of The Dog Bible has always been an issue of great concern for religious scholars—elaborate hoax or further proof of God’s infinite mystery and wisdom?—but I have always been suspicious of the writings, with the exception of the story of Noah’s Bark, which I find most believable.
Belinda toweled herself off with Dexter’s dignity.
I recall wearing
a white dress, then came the pig
blood; vengeance was mine.
The maestro and the juniper berry bush discussed their bel canto opera long into the night; the maestro was very excited about working in such a pastoral setting, and the juniper berry bush was hopeful that the cows would have the necessary agility and pitch control to pull off a convincing performance.
Sal was a mild mannered customer service representative from Yorkshire 25 days out of the month, but that last week, when the moon turned full, Sal’s inner wolf would emerge and he would wander the English countryside at night bashing in the heads of random strangers with his telephone.
It is virtually impossible to explain to someone in a single sentence why doctors cannot have mischievous sex with you and how this relates to The Hippocratic Oath, but if you must do such a thing, you might try explaining that it was Apollo who performed the first caesarean section upon his lover after he had her killed because a crow told him about her affair with another, and how Apollo’s son, Asclepius, went on to become a fine surgeon himself, a trade he picked up from a half-horse, half-man creature named Chiron, who not only taught him the art of surgery, but of the use of drugs, incantations, and love potions, and how this led Asclepius to later master the magical properties of Gorgon blood to revive the dead, which, you should probably add, made Zeus so mad after he learned that Asclepius was accepting money for being a doctor that he killed poor Asclepius with a thunderbolt to the head, proclaiming that all medicine thereafter could only make a person more comfortable while they either died or got better on their own; you might want to mention that the killing of Apollo’s son naturally made Apollo very mad, and that in retaliation, he killed the Cyclopes who made Zeus’ thunderbolts, but I’ve found that these extra facts usually only cloud the issue, and doesn’t do much to help people better understand their own family doctor at all, which is, I would certainly imagine, the sole purpose of any one-sentence explanation.
The Penguin Olympics seemed like a great idea until it came time to run the hurdles.
You can’t tell me what to do, except sometimes when you do, and then I do, which means you did, and, of course, ultimately you can.
As he studied the x-ray, Dr. Theopolis had the uncanny feeling that he’d seen Mr. Fitz’s bones somewhere before.
I firmly believe that Fat Albert sang backup for The Miracles on “Love Machine”; no, on second thought, I firmly believe that The Miracles are Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
Schrödinger’s cat argued with Einstein about the nature of justice saying that in our legal system it’s not about the truth but about the plausibility of one story over another, but although Einstein appreciated the cat’s logic – possibly even agreeing - he still refused to lend him the bail money.
The chief remained straight-faced as 85 year old Doris complained about the squeaking bed of her young, upstairs neighbors, which began around midnight and didn’t let up until around 5 a.m.; “I don’t know what they could be up to jumping in and out of bed like that,” Doris complained, “but I suppose playing cards or something.”
The romance of a lonely boy finds meaning
Only in words that pass through his mind
And fail to slip from his lips;
Suddenly, charm and fidelity is but a myth
For the boy who cannot believe in love.
“Boing, BOING, BOIING” said the juniper berry bush to the maestro, as the parade of bouncing cows kerthudded by.
Valentine’s Day is a retailer’s holiday in the truest sense of the word, Christmas and Easter at least can make pretense about being religious, whereas February 14th is named after a saint no one really knows ever existed and, if he did, died a painfully horrible martyr’s death (maybe it is significant that we celebrate it with Chocolate, flowers and stuffed animals).
My days are awkward while I search for my new rhythm.
Her regrets about her past actions caused her to grow sullen and resentful, and the constant tabloid photographers didn’t help.
Don’tcha wish we could just all have a big Scrine group hug?!
Danielle was uncertain about kicking her smoking habit because she wasn’t sure what non-smokers did after sex – have more sex, probably – and, truth be told, she enjoyed the nicotine more than she did the lovemaking.
Pretty they may be, but how many flighty, overly pretty people do you trust?
“socks spun from the words of someone like Boot”
“Why I love Wikipedia: ‘When invigorated by spinach, Popeye can lift or press about 36 tons. [citation needed]’.
Mencken enjoyed the nightlife
And was once asked by a stripteasist,
To coin a word for her profession,
He came up with ecdysiast.
In the personal diary that would one day be referred to as Death So Sweet - The Bundt Cake Murders of Helen Perkins, Mrs. Perkins wrote: “Murder is not so unlike marriage, in that both require immense patience and an understanding that there will be many times when an unsavory act must simply be tolerated for the greater good.”
Because the state couldn’t find a way to tax my soul, I was informed by their accountant that I was free to do with it as I pleased, but that any pursuits that resulted in monetary gain would need to be reported; later that day two Mormon boys stopped by the house to to give me what I often refer to as “spiritual accounting” advice, but I told them that I still found spiritual taxation without representation preferable to anything I’d read in their pamphlets, thanked them for their time, then turned the dog loose to hasten things along.
Madison’s idea of living dangerously was ordering tacos from a sidewalk vender who cooked on a battery-powered hot plate and a cart stolen from the IBM warehouse around the corner.
I love almost everything about my French teacher: her pixie haircut, her giant hand bags, her sense of humor, her graceful hand gestures, but she is so painfully thin that I just want to feed her salami and lard sandwiches until she can’t hide behind a broom handle anymore.
“Think of it like one of your $100 fingernails,” Henry told his wife, “except instead of acetate to remove the old broken parts, my heart requires something distilled in Kentucky with a bit more bite to it.”
In my immediate future is a walk through bruising levels of heat and humidity, a lunch seasoned with habanero sauce and a margarita strong enough to fell an infantry division; all this will either render me into a paste, suitable for spackling drywall, or it will cure me once and for all.