When you find a sock in the middle of the floor, you know the dog has gotten into the laundry.
Or the cat. Or the kid.
At least you can yell at a kid and you might have a hope that they learn to clean up.
Dogs take a bit more effort to train. Spray bottles and shock collars.
For kids, too. Just don’t get caught.
And cats, well, good luck. Better put locks on everything.
I don’t wear socks.
Or have kids. Or dogs.
And cats, well, I fill all the unused socks with catnip and let them play.
Category: My stories
AM Radio
FM radio is crap.
Crooners and Doo Whop and Bubblegum.
But at night, the atmosphere changes, and AM radio spreads far and wide.
Stations from all over, and over the border.
We went to bed, but we didn’t go to sleep.
We listened to the radio and the sweet sounds carried across the country.
Blues. And Jazz. And other things.
Wolfman Jack howling across the sky.
Luring us out of our shells, breaking out, and learning the true gospel of Rock.
All night long.
The sun breaks over the horizon, and the music fades to static.
Until the night returns.
Bleach is tasty
Okay, so the president said that maybe people should be drinking and injecting bleach to cure the virus.
But he said this mockingly after reporters kept asking stupid questions.
The odd thing is, some people actually did inject and drink bleach.
And they got horribly sick and died.
Are people that blisteringly stupid and gullible?
Maybe this should be taken as an opportunity to cull those genes out of the population?
Tell people that jumping off of buildings cures the virus. Setting themselves on fire.
Or, something more productive, like not watching these ranting and hyperbolic idiots on network television.
Doctor Odd’s Mother
You can have a past, or you can have a future.
You only get one, so choose wisely.
Doctor Odd’s mother was full of regrets, and she told her son these words of wisdom.
Or warning.
Doctor Odd dedicated his life to this question.
Using a wormhole and temporal stabilizers, he engineered a pocket universe.
And he bent time into a loop.
“Because time is a loop, the past is the future and the future is the past,” he told his mother.
And he put her in the pocket universe.
Which made where to send Mothers Day cards very confusing.
The drive in days
Long ago, there were so many drive-in theatres.
Drive up, tune in the radio to the special station, or take the speaker off of the post and put it in your car.
One by one, they shut down.
And then the virus came.
Wash your hands, wear masks, social distancing.
So, the drive-ins came back.
We hide in our cars, eating the bags of popcorn and drinking the sodas we brought with us.
Okay, fine. We brought beer and wine.
And we watch the old movies on the screen.
Because nobody’s making any new ones.
With the virus and all.
A billion miles away
We spend billions and billions of dollars to build the probe.
So many tests and fixes and re-tests.
Hauling it up to the rocket and fitting it.
Launching it, and slingshotting it from planet to planet.
Parking it in orbit with the gentlest and most cautious braking rocket thrusts.
Success! Success!
We all cheer!
Time to work.
It takes 90 minutes for commands to reach the probe.
And 90 minutes for confirmation to return.
A billion miles away, we wait for the images to appear.
Black. More black. Endless black.
Only then do we realize… nobody took the lenscap off.
The barbershop singers
They were a strange barbershop quartet.
All four men were bald.
And not clean-shaven bald, but patchy and scruffy bald.
With unkempt beards and mustaches, looking like savages and wildmen.
They couldn’t sing.
They screamed and hollered and shrieked.
There was no musical quality to what was coming out of their mouths.
They also varied in numbers.
Only rarely were there four of them.
Three, Five, Two, Twenty… who knew how many of these strange men would show up to yell and moan together.
The barber called the asylum to pick up their patients.
My how the butterfly nets flew!
Bad moose
My moose is a very bad moose.
I won’t just leave my moose at the pound.
So he ends up someone else’s bad moose.
A cycle of badness, not good for the moose.
Or let him loose.
A bad moose on the loose?
Very bad.
So, I took him to moose school.
To learn to be a better moose.
The best instructors teach at moose school.
Moose experts, each and every one.
They teach moose to be better moose.
They use the latest moose teaching techniques.
None of them are abusive.
Abused moose are bad moose.
And they never learn.
The mailing lists
The great thing about this lockdown is that I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
I used to get spam from Ticketmaster, promoting concerts and sports events and local art shows.
And the restaurant guides would fill my inbox with so many places to eat.
Sometimes, I’d think about one or two of them.
Maybe even look them up on a map.
No, I never went to any of these.
Never had the heart to unsubscribe from the mailers, either.
Because, what if… maybe… nah.
Who am I kidding?
Now that everything is closed down, the lists went mercifully silent.
Knock on my office door
It’s been a while since someone knocked on the door to my office and walked in anyway.
No waiting for me to say come in. Or to say I’m busy with something.
Or them asking what I’m working on.
It never ends well.
Now, I’m working from home. Everyone is working from home.
We’re connected via a Slack messaging platform.
So, they now ping me with a message of “Hi.”
Not what they need. Just a “Hi.”
It’s bait. So I wait.
Eventually, they ask for what they need.
“Thinking. I’ll get back to you on this.”
Maybe I will.