Category: My stories

Captain Blake came up with his best ideas while he was falling asleep.
So, he kept a notepad on the nightstand.
The problem was, he’d fall asleep before he could reach his notepad.
Or he’d stab himself in the leg with the pen.
He tried a voice recorder, but all it captured were his snores.
Same thing with his smartphone.
The one with the voice commands.
But even if he got a few words out, the digital assistant wouldn’t get them right.
And Captain Blake would wake up with a reminder to milk a rhinoceros or tumble-dry seventy-seven times.

I bought a new bathroom scale.
It measures body fat and bone mass and other things beyond weight.
Stuff that I don’t care about, but I probably need to know.
It also has bluetooth in it to communicate with my phone.
So it can send all those things it measures to other applications.
Then it will nag me about what I eat and how much exercise I get.
My treadmill talks to my scale, which talks to my grocery list, which then talks to the grocery for instant pickup.
At what point do I get to live my own life?

On stage and screen, they called Ted the greatest actor of our generation.
There was no limit to his range.
From hero to villain, he brought depth and humanity to every role.
Except for one.
His portrayal of the unpopular President Dan Baker was a cruel and twisted caricature.
A slander ten times greater than Shakespeare’s Richard the Third.
Baker condemned it, earning Ted all that many more Hollywood accolades.
Then, the reports came out about Ted’s ex-wife.
The abuse. The beatings.
Ted’s publicist demanded that people respect the hypocrite’s privacy.
President Baker quietly thanked the FBI for their efforts.

The commander didn’t just shout his callsign but screamed it ANGEL FIVE ANGEL FIVE before the radio cut out and his fighter dropped from the formation trailing smoke and fire and another fighter took his place at the lead before he took on heavy fire and followed the commander to his death so the rest broke formation and fired at anything they could see but at night with no moon and mountains on their first mission after training sent fighter after fighter into a tailspin trailing smoke and crashing into the mountains with not a single parachute to be seen.

Every time I fly somewhere, I load up my phone with podcasts such as Stuff You Should Know or Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.
They’re long, good, and interesting. And they chew up a lot of time pretty well.
I used to rely on the Apple Podcasts application, but it wasn’t good at retaining podcasts in its cache, and I would be left with an empty phone on a long flight.
So, I switched to Stitcher and I migrated subscriptions over to it.
It’s been working reliably for me ever since.
The plane I’m on, sadly, isn’t.
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!

My brother buried me in the snow.
I was six, he was eight or nine.
He whacked me over the head with a snow shovel, dug a hole, and pushed me into it.
Then he covered me up with snow.
Thing is, I deserved it.
I had buried his rare metal toy soldier collection in the snow.
He whacked me on the head after I tried to find where I’d buried them, but I’d covered my tracks too well.
“We’ll find them when it thaws in the Spring, right?” I said.
That’s when he whacked me harder and buried me.

The radio station held a contest.
Ten men sat up on a billboard and the last one up there would win a million dollars.
One by one, they came down until it was down to two men.
And that’s when the fight happened.
The whole town, watching the two men wrestle on the ledge of a billboard.
They threw punches and kicks and beat each other with their latrine buckets.
Both men fell from the ledge and struck the ground, dead.
The station split the prize in half, paid off the next of kin, and never ran a contest again.

Once upon a time, back in the days of gods and monsters, Silas the Rock God lost his smile.
“Go!” shouted the Reverend Sasquatch. “Find the Rock God’s smile!”
His worshipers searched far and wide for it, but it was nowhere to be found.
“We must make him a new one!” shouted the reverend.
No dentist was worthy of the Rock God, so a blacksmith was called upon to forge a new smile from the finest steel.
“Here,” whispered the exhausted blacksmith, handing over the appliance.
The Rock God put it in his mouth, picked up his guitar, and grinned.

I once knew a crazy man who rode a motor scooter from a Greek island to Scotland.
He came down with cancer, and he figured that he could claim Scottish citizenship from his ancestry and get free medical care.
He sold everything, including his custom-made boots, bought the scooter, and made his way across Europe in flip-flops and jeans.
He posted photos of the beautiful scenery and his progressively-worsening toes, all bloody and sore from road debris.
Eventually, he got to Scotland, became a citizen, and was cured.
Until the he relapsed three years later and the cancer killed him.

Black lipstick, black eyeshadow.
Black dye in her hair.
Everything she wore was black.
She looked good in black.
She even wore black to her three weddings.
And the three funerals for her late husbands.
Her furniture was white, with white wall-to-wall carpet.
She stood out like a burnt pixel on a television screen, a clot of hair in a bathtub.
She took three black betties and went to sleep.
The next day. I found her in the tub.
The coroner came and laid a white sheet over her.
“No,” I said. “Zip her up in a black body bag.”