To prove his love, Timmy would sometimes kidnap his own turtle and demand huge, impossible ransoms, which he gladly paid.
Married life is pretty much like single life except now he owns half my yarn.
He was her everything, she was his almost.
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.
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.
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.
we walked on the ocean; we stepped out on the sea; we tripped the light fantastic; until you fell for me.
I wonder if words dream.
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.
“socks spun from the words of someone like Boot”
The Social Anxiety Support Group had only one member show up, and she came drunk.
She’s always with me, one way or another, even if sometimes she’s playing marbles in my coat pocket.
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.
“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.”
As deep as our addictions may be, I’m not sure any of us are prepared for this.
Pastor Darko’s sermon on the lamentable death of the comma took an inordinately long time to deliver.
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.
I love this country—I hope whoever buys it takes as good care of it, and has as much fun with it as we did !!!
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The chant started in an overheated living room in an overheated building in a bitterly cold city; it flew outside and was carried worldwide on clear arctic winds, creating in its wake an enthusiasic army poised to throw confetti, blow noisemakers and break open pinatas, just as soon as the word, or rather, the sentence, arose from a certain capital city of a certain sundrenched western state.
While the worst Buddhist in the world beat her boss to death after making fun of her meditation technique, the second worst Buddhist in the world enjoyed throwing water bottles at the heads of students in his freshmen comp. class who failed to give his Dalai Lama video the proper attention and re-enacting Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in his office.
As a child, Bronwyn used to die a little bit on the inside every time her stepfather would say, brightly, “Okay, here’s the list!” and start writing down what needed to be accomplished that day; as far as she was concerned, “list” was synonymous with “half the day lost in tedious chores and busywork”; thus, when her dear friend/personal pillar of wisdom said “you need to make a list of what you want to get done, and it doesn’t need to be a big list, in fact, it should be doable, so that you can feel as if you’ve accomplished something,” Bronwyn could not help but pull the face of all faces...but lo and behold, the pillar of wisdom was right, leaving Bronwyn to conclude that listmaking is one of those pleasures lost on children and best saved for adulthood, like brandy, tapenade, Scrabble, and co-ed skinnydipping.
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.
Peter’s briefcase contained only a mechanical pencil with no lead, a page torn out of a Gideon’s Bible with the phone number of a dead, Salt Lake City prostitute written on it, the keys to his 1972 Gran Torino which someone had stolen ten day earlier after kicking him in the groin outside of some greasy, Memphis diner, and the rusty, .22 caliber pistol his mother had told him to hide nearly 40 years ago, placed into his then small hands while his father slowly bled to death in the next room, so when the dried up old woman on the barstool next to him leaned over and whispered into his ear that she was the witch of dreams come true and that she was about to turn him into one of whatever was in that case sitting next to his feet, Peter didn’t laugh or look away or even doubt what the woman said, but simply nodded in agreement, having known all along that he should have had better memories.
“Next time a religion-themed movie comes out,” said Darko shrewdly, “we atheists should boycott it on the premise that it perverts impressionable minds, and see if evangelists start clamoring about how we’re out of line, trying to tell people in a free and open society what to believe.”
Don Skippy loved the regalness his new Spanish honorific added to his name.
The rodent population of the tiny island nation of Habitralia voted to ignore the White House’s warning regarding their new nuclear program.
Cinnamon leant seductively against the wall, watching the passers-by sniff the air, bewildered and lost in memories of something loved and long gone.
Ira Goldman, the wild west’s first gynecologist, rode into town on a horse with funny stirrups.
Tiger Girl assiduously avoided the grocery store and other bastions of suburban normalcy in her mother’s neighborhood; while Mom had long ago gotten used to the tattooed stripes and surgically-altered ears, the weight of judgment heaped upon her by people so stupid, they willingly wore polyester uniforms for slave wages, sometimes made her long for real claws.
Jungle Bob lived just long enough to regret putting his pet elephant, Harpo, on a macrobiotic diet.
I am discovering a certain poetry in words like methyl bromide, pendimethalin, and parquat dichloride.
I don’t really mind being past my prime...I just wish someone would have had the decency to point out when I was peaking.
“One moment, gentlemen,” cried John Hancock, impetuously throwing a ruffled arm across the bottom of the parchment, “let us delay signing the Declaration of Independence until, say, Octoberish, when the weather will be far more temperate for parades.”
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 turns out my father used to offer to take the dog on a walk every night so he could go over to his mistress’s house; and here I’d thought he was heroically selfless.
It turns out my mother used to offer to do the dishes every night because that was her way of carving some alone time out of her hectic day; and here I’d thought she was heroically selfless.
I have lost my ability to convince strangers of outlandish things.
Many mistakenly believe in two types of men’s blue jeans--clean and dirty--which completely ignores one of the most overlooked kinds of all--clean enough.
Though the Suburban Amish are a thrifty people who religiously take their soda cans to the local recycling center for a return on their deposit, they never scrounge for aluminum from dumpsters or garbage bins, as they prefer not to be linked to the more fanatical Urban Shaker sects.
“I’ve never eaten a mango.” [Keith]
There was one single, inconvenient impulse of creativity left in Ambrose that he had not yet found and squelched; every few months its tiny peep managed to hypnotize him and lead him to purchase hundreds of dollars’ worth of oil pastels or woodcarving tools, which he would then neglect to return to the store after he recovered his senses.
I walked beside the barefoot king, and for the briefest of moments, with that soft, warm water lapping gently at our ankles, I felt the tremendous weight of his kingdom, the feeling that he must have felt with his every waking moment, and I nearly cried out, fearing that I would be pushed down into the sand and buried alive if it had gone on even one second longer.
“Whimsy, fulcrum, seminole, scribe; awesome, winsome, reconcile, jibe,” recited the ghost as he hopped off the bus, leaving in his ectoplasmic wake a vague, frowning confusion.
“This is yer pirate speakin’, we have reached cruisin’ latitude and we have extinguished th’ ‘no smokin’ and no rowdy drinkin’ sign;’ ye are now free t’ move aroun’ th’ ship; in a few hours th’ wenches will be servin’ grog and yer choice o’ skewered rat or th’ vegetarian offerin’, moldy bread; our travelin’ time t’ Canton will be three months, give or take a few weeks as th’ national weather service (that albatross ye saw afore) has predicted heavy winds; if ye feel sick, please use th’ bag hangin’ from th’ hammock in front o’ ye; in th’ event o’ a water evacuation, it’s been nice knowin’ ye.”
Two weeks away at that lame death camp every summer was almost more than the devil’s kids could bear.
Cafe Press does not mention if the new Scrine caps are roomy enough for an inner layer of tinfoil.
I think it’s probably best that my children never have my exact blog address, but rather a false front I erect replete with charming little stories about their innocent antics.
“Sanjay told Mikaela that Roberto likes Jessica,” explained the fourth-grade girl with exaggerated patience, “an’ Jessica has always liked Roberto, so Jessica told Genesis to tell Sanjay that she DOESN’T like Roberto, so that Roberto will wonder if she really DOES like him, and now he’ll probably get somebody like Dreamah or Jacob to tease Jessica that she really likes Roberto and see if she tries to hit them.”
My son has obviously mutated and grown a caffeine organ, and from the sound of him, I’m almost sure it’s leaking.
Breaking into houses has never been the hard part; it’s the cleaning, rearranging, and reprogramming of the TiVo that take the most out of a person, and then there’re the library books to be taken out in the homeowner’s name…
In signing on the dotted line, he had cut the last thread that kept his heart from falling into as many pieces as his grandmother had used in her quilts.
I developed a love of hyperbole in adulthood during a period when many, many bill-collectors would call us, night and day; fighting down hysterical giggles borne of panic, I would weave fantastic tales about ten-car pileups or alcoholic payroll embezzlers.
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.
Bob’s favorite part of the political process was that politicians always got old, died, and eventually forgotten.
“There is no world record for being depressed,” the doctor told Bob, “so you might as well just stop looking forward to that right here and now.”
If there was a law stating that everyone was required to be buried directly beneath the spot where they dropped over dead, I think people would tend to get out a little more; I also think nursing homes would try a lot harder, and that highway fatalities would drop, because of all the new speed bumps.
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.
As Bob sat staring blankly at the computer screen a gnawing anxiety began to grow, what if comments had been turned off on his favorite website because its owner had decided that Bob was a babbling idiot who wasn’t adding anything to the conversation, and was there a conversation, or was Bob just a babbling idiot who had been fooling himself all along?