Category: My stories

The mayor never liked it when people called Centerville, a one traffic light town. So he had the traffic light removed and replaced with a four-way stop. And the accident rate didn’t change that much, considering that there were never any accidents in the town. You thought about putting in a traffic circle. Things that he read on the Internet said that traffic circles were safer, but it was a small intersection already and didn’t need all the ruckus to build up the traffic circle. Although putting some flowers or a flag pole in the round would’ve looked nice.

When Lucy lost her first tooth, she kind of freaked out. She thought she was gonna completely fall apart. I told her now it’s just teeth, although every now and then a fingernail might come loose and hair and eyelashes will fall out. The tooth fairy gave her a dollar that night. However, when my friend Bill came over, who had lost a leg to cancer, Lucy completely freaked out. By the time Bill and I calmed her down, she asked how much money the leg fairy gave Bill. Bill laughed, and said nothing. But it cost him a lot.

Sometimes I like to look down the list of saints to see who is the patron saint of something that was invented centuries after the saint had died. I mean, Saint Wally was hung upside down and burned at the stake in the 13th century, yet he’s the patron saint of magnetic residence imaging. I’m not sure why, you’d have to ask a Catholic MRI technician or something. I mean, back, then they had farming and sculpting and simple stuff, but unless someone was made a saint just recently, I don’t think a patron saint to the Internet is valid.

Private Joseph Mongo would’ve earned himself a Medal of Honor for falling on a grenade to keep it from killing his platoon mates, but the problem was the way he landed on it. It not only exploded out fragments, but also propelled his 17 silver fillings from his teeth throughout the company. So by throwing himself on the grenade caused even more carnage than if he had run for cover like everybody else was trying to. The fact that he was the idiot who pulled the pin and fumbled the grenade only adds to the consternation of the command structure.

I remember doing a report in eighth grade history on the Doolittle raids over Japan. I went to the local college library and pulled every source I could find on it. And I looked through newspaper accounts of the attacks. My report was quite lame and copy paste from the limited sources. Just now, I finished watching a video with excruciating detail of the Japanese patrol boat spotting them early, the crew man hit by a propeller on the deck, and all sorts of other amazing details I never learned about. Middle schoolers are such lazy, ineffective researchers, I guess.

What do deaf people use as safe words?
I’m asking for a friend. Who I have tied up in the basement.
So he can’t sign out HELP. And he’s never quite learned how to talk right.
How the hell am I supposed to tell one grunt from another?
And he’s got a ballgag, so rolling his tongue won’t work either.
Never learned Morse code, so all that blinking isn’t working.
Now, when it’s the other way around, yeah, that’s even worse.
I can shout MUENSTER CHEESE! all day long, and he’ll keep swatting me with the cat-o-nine-tails.
So, any ideas?

The old general had gone senile years ago. He kept calling his caretaker, his chief of staff, and he would ask about reports from the field. The nurse would print out the same report every day, just with the weather and date changed. The general would nod, dictate orders, and the nurse would pretend to take notes so that she could give them to the brigade. This carried on for several years, and when the general would ask to inspect the troops, the nurse would say they’re being assembled and would be ready for inspection by six, past his bedtime.

Last time I went back to the old school, it was for Professor Ellsworth’s funeral. A lot of his former students came, came out for the memorial service. The poetry we read was probably some of the worst poetry ever written. Professor Ellsworth had marked it all with failing grades and bitter criticism. With occasional demands for us to read works on the same subject by Milton, Wordsworth, and other masters. But now, the old Gas bag was in an urn, and there was nothing he could do to stop us from sharing our incompetent and juvenile compositions at will.

If I win the lottery, I will call a few major symphonies and buy the oboe chair. There’s no reason for it. It’s just so strange, nobody would understand it. And that’s the point. We only write our names in sand. Unless it’s with an oboe, I suppose. And every oboist in that city will strive to sit in the chair I bought for them. Or they could remain standing or sit on the floor, I suppose. How silly that would be, dressing up, bringing out your finest oboe, and sitting on the dirty floor. Go get a chair, dummy!

I saw so many things in the city that I’d never experienced before.
The people. The lights. The stores. The streets. The buildings.
And in the middle of it all, a statue.
A tall man, his face full of hate, lashing a whip.
What was he lashing the whip at?
The plaque at the bottom of the statue had been defaced and was no longer legible.
I asked the people around it, but nobody knew who or what it was.
“Maybe it’s one of those lion tamers,” I said.
I got a coffee, saw a show, and went back home.