Category: My stories

They say you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
But you can kill it and chop it up and put the pieces in a blender and pour it back in.
Yes, genies are bigger than the bottle, but they managed to fit in there before, and they will again when you pour them back in.
There are perfectly rational explanations through physics.
Genies might be low-density creatures, who compact easily.
Or the inside of the bottle may have neutrino star material with a highly-localized gravity field to compress the contents.
Or, yeah, it could just be fucking magic.

You’re welcome to tell me anything you want to tell me.
Directly. You to me. Nobody in between.
Anonymous, relayed criticism is meaningless and cowardly.
If anyone has an issue with anything I do, they are welcome to tell me directly.
I’m not hard to find. Especially if I’m on their friends list.
Don’t have the courage to tell me directly?
Then you don’t stand behind what you say about me.
Just empty words without a name. Meaningless noise.
From a nobody.
Why should I listen to a nobody?
Might as well just listen to the wind through the trees.

Talleyrand said that he was more afraid of a hundred sheep led by a lion than a hundred lions led by a sheep.
Personally, I’d be concerned about the hundred lions led by the sheep.
All it takes is one of those hundred lions to kill that sheep and get it out of the way.
A lion mutiny.
Then, the dead sheep’s lion lieutenant gets promoted to leader.
And you’ve got ninety-nine lions led by a lion.
Which, if you put them against a hundred sheep led by a lion, will win every time.
I’ll gladly take that bet, Talleyrand.

When you copy a living human mind, you need to capture all of the quantum states of energy in the physical brain.
Although this will not result in a perfect copy.
A digital copy is not the same as a biochemical copy.
Biochemical energy does not behave the same as electrical energy in a virtual model.
So, a copied mind does not function properly.
We try to erase the self-awareness and the pain systems, adding fake sensory feedback to simulate a live vessel.
But they all collapse in the end, going silent and catatonic in their own private digital hells.

At first, my WiFi router had no password, and people mocked me for not being secure.
Then I set it to password, and people mocked me for being lazy.
Then I let it set the password to a random phrase, and people mocked me for not being clever enough to come up with something easy to remember or type.
Then I set the password to three random words and a number, and people mocked me for being simple and silly.
Finally, I locked my WiFi. And when people ask me for the password, I tell them to go fuck themselves.

When Billie was little, she read that girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Being a curious kid, she decided to test this scientifically.
Inviting her schoolmates over one after the other, she put them through various tests.
If you could call them tests. Most just involved a carving knife and a grinder.
She then tried to make new friends by mixing sugar and spice and everything nice.
But she broke the Kitchenaid’s mixing bowl.
“They’re made of meat, bone, and blood,” she wrote in her diary.
She never did earn any badges for her Scouts sash.

Toilet paper, napkins, paper towels, Kleenex, and wipes were all in short supply.
People were buying up all they could, along with bleach and hand sanitizer.
There were some shortages of other things, but nothing quite like the paper products and the sanitizer.
Well, okay… the masks.
Medical grade ones ran out quickly.
Which was especially bad, being that medical people needed them.
There was plenty of gasoline, though.
A lot fewer people on the road.
So I filled up some bottles, stuck in some rags.
This will teach the neighbor not to let his dog crap in my yard.

Steve Allen. Jack Keourac.
Maybe you’ve seen the tape? Sure.
The beat poet and the talk show host.
Jack would compose stories on the fly, and the audience didn’t really get it.
So, Steve said maybe if there was piano accompanying the stories?
So, Jack agreed.
And the audience still didn’t get it.
The stories came out more like jokes, and the piano playing was awful.
Maybe, said Steve, Jack should read the stories and Steve should play on the piano.
And that’s when the magic happened, and years later, Tom Waits did both the piano and the storytelling himself.

I had a shelf full of Torani syrups, but I’d bought too many flavors that I didn’t like, and the ones I did like, I was running out of.
So, I walked to the nearby store that stocks Torani syrup. For exercise.
But by the time I got there, it had closed to focus on curbside pickup orders.
I pulled out my phone and called, but they said no, not for walkup.
I used the app, but once again, I was rebuffed.
So, I’ll order the Torani syrups on Amazon from now on.
And I’ll walk on the treadmill for exercise.

A long time ago, I heard a story about a guy with a parrot on his shoulder who robbed a bank.
“STICK EM UP!” shouted the parrot. “GIMME ALL YOUR CASH!”
The guy didn’t say a thing. Didn’t make any faces or gestures.
He just had his hand in his pocket, he might have had a gun.
“STICK EM UP!” the parrot said again.
The teller called for the manager.
The manager went into the break room and got a packet of saltines.
He gave one to the parrot, who ate the crackers.
And the guy walked out the door.