Category: My stories

Brian got his first comic book when he was five.
He traded it to another kid for two comic books.
Those two became three. Then five.
And he would use his allowance to buy comic books off of his friends.
He’d spend his lunch money on buying more comic books.
He did errands and chores. A paper route. Yard work.
Everything went to comic books.
Thousands and thousands of comic books.
Boxes filled the basement.
He sold them all, and that’s how he paid for college.
He’d never read any of them.
Just collected them up, and then sold them.

I like to use emjois.
They are cute ways to condense a message.
There are times that I would like to use a ninja emoji.
But there is no ninja emoji.
When you think about it, why would there be?
Ninja are sneaky and hide in a crowd easily.
Masters of disguise and subterfuge.
So a ninja emoji would look like any other emoji.
Maybe the smiley.
Maybe a tree.
Maybe a pile of poo.
It could be any of them.
You wouldn’t know it was the ninja emoji until you felt the steel of its blade on your neck.

My Apple Phone’s alarm wakes me up.
It plays a song from Apple’s iTunes.
And it turns on my lamp with Apple Home.
I pull the phone off of my Apple charging stand, and I strap my Apple Watch to my wrist.
I turn on my Apple laptop and check my email while my Apple TV plays the latest news headlines.
I drive to work while Apple CarPlay plays my favorite songs.
Along the way, picking up coffee I buy with my Apple credit card.
Siri watches it all, smiles, and moves on to the next of her little slaves.

Show respect to the flag when it passes.
Don’t stand there and point and stare at it.
Yes, the flag is floating in the air on its own.
This is not for us to question or wonder why.
It just does this.
It has done this for years.
Long ago, my grandfather told me about how his grandfather told him to show respect to the flag.
Asking how long this has been happening is not respecting the flag.
The flag is here. The flag is now.
The flag always has been, and always will be.
And we must respect it.

The artist dreamed up an idea.
And he kept it in his head.
His agent sold the idea to a businessman.
“You own the idea,” said the artist to the businessman. “But you will never know it.”
“Brilliant concept!” said the businessman.
The next day, the artist went to the grocery store, where he was told he could pay for food he could never eat.
“Oh, is it for charity?” said the artist. “A food drive?”
“No,” said the grocer. ‘Thank you for shopping with us.”
The artist went home and starved to death.
The businessman sued the artist’s agent.

I am an artist.
I make art.
No, I do not paint. Or sculpt. Or draw.
I write. I write stories.
Nor do I dance or sing, but I do perform.
This is a performance. I perform what I write.
Although it’s more of a reading than a performance.
Maybe when I first read these, it was a performance.
I tried to put spirit and emotion into the words.
Now, I just read them.
Good or bad, get it on the tape.
Just like good or bad, get it on the page.
And I move on to the next story.

Double-blind trials.
Half of the patients get the drug.
Half don’t get the drug. They get a placebo.
That’s something that doesn’t do anything.
The patients don’t know if they’re getting the drug.
The doctors don’t know either.
The pills look the same.
The list of who got the drug and who got the placebo isn’t known until the trial is over.
Well, unless the patient is extremely rich.
Then, they’re taken out of the trial.
And just given the drug.
If it turns out to be horribly toxic, oh well.
Plenty more money to pay for further research, right?

We tried out a new piano bar Downtown on a friend’s recommendation.
I had the grand piano.
She had an upright piano.
They were good, but not great.
“Oh, those are the house pianos,” said the bartender, handing up menus. “I highly recommend the Steinways.”
So, we each had a Steinway Grand D9, and man, they were amazing.
The resonance and the pitch were impressive.
But at the end of the night, oh man, the check was a fortune.
I had to sell my tux, and she had to pawn her jewelry.
Next time we’ll stick with the house pianos.

Dan invented cancer.
He was trying to invent something else, like an eggbeater, and instead, he invented cancer.
He didn’t mean to.
But sitting there on his workbench, there it was.
“What the hell do I do with this?” he asked Norma, his wife.
“You should probably tell someone,” she said.
“The government?”
“Sure.”
So, they called the government.
Fifteen minutes later, men in hazmat suits barged into their house and took the cancer away.
Dan went back to his workbench, and looked over his blueprints.
“Oh, I know what I did wrong…”
Norma made the best scrambled eggs ever.

What is Gorilla Glue?
Is it glue used by gorillas?
Used to glue gorillas together?
Or is it made from gorillas?
I sent it to a lab, and they said it didn’t contain anything related to gorillas.
Then, I gave a bottle of it to a gorilla and watched.
It opened the bottle and wiped it all over its cage.
As the glue dried, things started to stick to the gorilla, and the gorilla got mad.
We introduced another gorilla to the first gorilla’s cage, and they fought for a bit.
But they never ended up stuck to each other.