Category: My stories

They say that if you meet Buddha by the side of the road, you must kill him.
But that is not Buddha.
It is Adam West.
You know, the guy who played Batman on television.
He was a voice in that cartoon show as the mayor.
And you killed him.
I mean, yeah, people mistake him for the Buddha a lot, I admit it.
If they were in a police lineup, you’d have a hard time telling them apart.
As if the Buddha would be stealing from a bodega or groping people on the subway.
Adam West? Maybe he would.

The alphabet started small. Two or three marginalized groups, bringing their causes together, fighting for their rights. Then other groups added themselves to the alphabet, trying to pin their demand for rights to the causes of others. More and more groups jumped aboard. Pretty soon, the reading of the alphabet took longer than whatever speech or presentation an activist was giving. God forbid they left anyone out of the alphabet, or there would be screaming accusations of marginalization among the marginalized. Eventually, it got too difficult to remember or say, and it was shortened to We hate white straight men.

Art critics are racists.
Take two neo-expressionist artists: Cy Tombly and Jean Basquiat.
Both made rudimentary art, scribbles and scrawled words.
They described Twombly as brilliant, sublime, and amazing.
Praising garbage.
And they described Basquiat as chaotic, primitive, untrained, and child-like.
A graffiti-spraying amateur.
Which, to be fair, he was.
A homeless drug addict scraped off the sidewalk by Andy Warhol, caged up in a basement, and pumping out art for the dealer upstairs to peddle.
Warhol orders an employee to silk-screen up a logo, and then Basquiat defaces it.
Me, I describe both as crap.
Regardless of their race.

My parents are dead.
My father’s brother, my gay uncle, had no children.
And before that, the name was what some clerk wrote down.
At the immigration desk in the port of San Francisco.
When my great-grandfather said Zigmund.
And he heard Simon.
So, nobody in the old country.
Not that any would have survived what happened there.
I have no children.
My brother does.
He has a daughter.
But she will take on the name of whatever husband or wife she takes.
Her children will have their name.
And my family name will be no more.
Simon says, disappear.

It’s a small town, and the grocery store, pharmacy, and a few restaurants are about seven minutes walk. So, unless I’ve got a lot of groceries to pick up, I like to walk. I mean, I walk two or three times a day for exercise and it’s working. The other night, I walked to the pharmacy to pick something up and they had already closed early. And I laughed. I hadn’t run out of pills yet, so I could wait till tomorrow, and I enjoyed the walk there, and I enjoyed the walk back, and I’ll walk there again tomorrow.

A lot of people have opinions on the robot umpires, but I’m looking forward to robot hot dog vendors.
Because I don’t want to wait for that shouting guy to walk around with the hot dogs.
Nor do I want to get up and go get a hot dog.
I know I can order a hot dog and have it delivered to me, but that guy often has a bunch of orders in his route and ends up taking as long as the shoutong guy walking around.
Just put a cannon on the roof, aim it, and I’ll catch it.

Jesus may have said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but when it came to his next-door neighbor Ralph, he said screw that creep.
Ralph was always dumping his lawn clippings over the fence on to Jesus’ yard.
And he parked his chariot in a way that blocked Jesus’ driveway.
He once caught Ralph with his mail, and Ralph said he was just coming over to hand it to Jesus.
Yeah, right.
Jesus never believed that Judas betrayed him.
He thought it was Ralph.
Judas confessed, but Jesus said “Yeah, right. Uh huh. I know it was Ralph.”

I was sitting by a stream when an old man carrying a worn out map, walked up to the stream, crossed it, and made a mark on his map.
I’ve done it, he shouted. I finally done it.
I got up and walked to the stream edge and asked him done what
I’ve climbed every mountain and forwarded every stream, he said. I did everything that singing bitch told me to do, and I finally done it.
He showed me the map, and sure enough, every mountain and stream had been marked with ink.
Congratulations, I said. And we hugged.

I guess it isn’t working out so well.
Protestors without masks.
People coming across the border for health care.
Kids being kids.
Fingerpointing. Blame.
Fools in stores refusing to wear masks.
Beaches. Parks.
Going out when we don’t have to.
(You know, like my third grocery run of the week.)
Or when we’re sick.
I see the neighbors doing laundry without masks.
Or going to their cars or walking their dogs.
Dumbasses.
Not washing our hands.
We’re fat. We’re sick.
We’re having the same unhealthy shit delivered to us.
It’s all bad choices.
You can only control your own actions.

Two months ago, they launched a new series of video cards.
But they didn’t make enough of them, so they were impossible to get.
Unless you went through a scalper on eBay, of course.
And they were damned expensive.
For the past two months, barely any of the cards get to the stores.
Scalpers keep snapping them up.
But, thankfully, the prices are coming down.
I did the math, and finally ordered one.
I bookmarked the shipping tracker.
It’s up in a browser tab.
Every five minutes, I hit refresh.
A watched pot never boils.
And the doorbell doesn’t ring.