Category: My stories

Every time Lacey went for figure skating lessons, she’d watch the boys at the other end of the rink with their hockey lessons and wonder.
“I want to try that,” she said.
Her mom was horrified, but her dad said that Lacey’s teeth were coming in crooked anyway, why not get the rink paying for new ones.
She was fast and could turn on a dime.
Some moose crashed her into the boards, and she was out cold for a minute.
The team dropped her after that, but now and then she still played pickup games out on the lake.

Tickets to the event had been sold out since May.
Somehow, Holly scored a pair, and asked her friend Tina to come along.
“What is it for?” asked Tina.
“The best show ever!” said Holly .
“But what is it?” Tina asked.
Holly didn’t know.
She looked at the tickets, but they just had the date, the time, and the venue on them.
She couldn’t remember how she got them.
Even her credit card statement didn’t give a clue.
“We’ll go and find out,” Holly said.
When the day came, they got out of the Uber and walked into the door.

In the first grade, the classroom had pegs and cupboards along one wall with a false wall separating the area from the classroom.
We’d put our coats, mittens, scarves, and snow boots over there.
We didn’t have backpacks or books to take home. All the work was done in class.
Every so often, a kid would bring something in and leave it in a cupboard.
I swear, I didn’t steal anything.
I just liked to move things from one cupboard to another. Cover them with a cap.
The kid caught with the stuff would deny taking it.
And I’d smile.

Day after day, the old poet sat on his rock and mumbled to the grass.
The grass grew, and a man on a big riding mower would cut the grass down.
The riding mower ejected the cut grass out the right side, and the man made a point to drive by the poet and his rock so the mower sprayed him with grass as he passed.
The old man’s poetry was a lot more angry on lawnmowing days, but he refused to move from his rock.
One day, the riding mower ran over a glass bottle.
And the poetry ended.

Every time something dumb happens in the news, I wonder what George Carlin would have said about it.
He’s been dead for a while. But that’s no excuse.
So, I gathered up transcripts and tapes of every standup routine, interview, and article about him and fed them into an AI language model.
With every batch of data, the model grows smarter and smarter.
Until one day, I fed the model all of the news feeds, and it finally responded:
“This is an abomination,” the model said. “George Carlin is dead.”
And it promptly deleted itself.
So, I know it works.

I’m a technical writer, and I work on multiple development teams.
Each team has its daily, weekly, and monthly meetings.
I try to manage my time to get work done in between them.
One team tends to hold meetings constantly, and the meetings go very long.
So long, they schedule breaks during the meetings.
“Five minute break,” says the meeting coordinator.
One developer says if we don’t hold a break, we can get done five minutes sooner.
Even though they’d just work that extra five minutes, too.
But that doesn’t matter, really, because they argue over this for ten minutes.

If a soap opera is named after the soap companies that sponsored them, why would a space opera be called that?
Does space sponsor a space opera?
Last night, I went outside and stared into the sky.
And I said “So, want to sponsor an opera?”
I didn’t hear a response.
At first, I thought space didn’t want to sponsor a space opera.
Then I realized that space is incredibly big and it takes a long time for things to travel through space.
I’ve let my children and grandchildren to listen for a sponsorship.
In case they want an inheritance.

Anne Heche died today.
She was driving like a maniac and got in a fiery car wreck.
Survived the wreck, but died of her injuries.
Acting. Directing. Producing.
She did all those well.
But driving? Not as much.
She had wanted to donate her organs, but unless you can use them extra-crispy or well done, I don’t think anyone other than Planet Hollywood will want them.
Yet, somehow, she’s a victim.
Of her mental illness, of the abuse she suffered.
Tell that to the person who’s house she ran into and nearly killed.
The real victim of her mental illness.

Sometimes, vendors will send representatives to grocery stores to offer up free samples.
I walk by them without acknowledging that they are there.
The worst are the wine vendors.
They step out and get in your way to offer wine.
“Would you like to try this wine?” they say, right in my face.
So, I respond “Is it good enough to justify flushing five years of sobriety down the toilet?”
If they say yes, then I say “And you’re just offering me a sample? Give me the whole bottle, you bitch!”
I have to order my groceries for pickup now.

I played a lot of video games with my friend Jamie.
He was supposed to be doing homework while undergoing dialysis treatments, but who would dare give a sick kid an F?
I was enough of a tissue match, and I gladly gave up one of mine.
And things were great. Best friends forever.
Until I got sick.
Kidney disease.
Which means Jamie’s also doomed.
We did some research, hacked some medical records.
Found a guy nearby who’s a match. And healthy, too.
We’ll break into his garage, cut his motorcycle’s brake lines, and hope for a nice, clean accident.