Category: My stories

To prove how easy it is to get an assault rifle, reporters have been going to gun shops and purchasing AR-15s and ammunition.
The problem is, what do the reporters do with these rifles after they buy them?
Some turn them back in to the gun store for a refund. For others to buy.
Some turn them in to the police, who auction them off.
Some leave the gun in their closet. No child safety lock or gun safe.
So, their kids might come across the gun and… shoot themselves? Shoot others?
More proof how dangerous guns are, of course!

Every time there’s a tragedy or terrorism or bombing.
Or worse.
We are all…
Parisians.
New Yorkers.
Barcelonans.
Orlando.
Charlie.
We change our Facebook and Twitter icons.
We post our hashtags.
Je Suis… what is it today?
Except, not always.
There’s one exception:
Israel.
Oh, it’s not Anti-Semitism, it’s Anti-Zionism.
How dare you accuse me of that, you filthy Jew?
Go back to where you came from.
Well, we did. And they want to kill us there, too.
Fifty-seven hundred years, we’ve watched empires rise and fall.
We’ll watch yours rot and crumble, too, as the next takes its place.

The blood wasn’t even dry when the investigators went into the club.
Counting the bodies and bullets and shell casings.
Measuring this, photographing that.
Puling out wallets, looking in purses. Identifying the dead so others could tell their families.
The ones who were calling over and over.
The cell phones rang. So many of them.
A mad symphony surrounded the investigators.
One had a gunfire ringtone.
They set that phone to vibrate.
It fell off of the evidence table.
And it danced on the floor, skittering around in a circle.
Over and over.
As its brothers and sisters played on.

They say that watching paint dry is boring, but have you ever done bodypaint?
That’s not boring to watch, although you’re not really watching the paint dry.
You’re looking at the body.
The best bodypainting doesn’t look naked at all, but you still sense that something’s unusual about it.
And then you see it. And you can’t unsee it.
That person is naked, and what you thought were clothes are actually painted on.
Or stripes. Or some other pattern.
That’s a powerful magic, really.
And here we are, you and me.
And some paint and a brush.
Who goes first?

The blood wasn’t dry in Orlando before the agendas came out.
Talking points, for every color in the political spectrum.
Gun control, immigration, gay rights, terrorism…
Accusations without solutions, calls for togetherness and understanding that end up just polarizing people even more.
I’d say that pointing fingers is more dangerous than pointing guns, but a pointed finger never gets anybody killed.
Unless its to point out more people to hate. And shoot.
Oh, is the blood dry yet?
Hey, can you take a photo of me?
It’s this button here. It’ll focus automatically.
Take a few, in case I blink.

Sometimes, I wake up early to do my laundry before work.
One morning, as I was doing my laundry, I came across a tiny wet kitten.
The kitten had either fallen into the pool or been thrown in.
Either way, the little thing was sitting on the sidewalk.
I leaned down, extended a hand, and the kitten mewed and approached.
I pet the kitten, and then went back in for a can of chicken.
The kitten rubbed against my legs, but eventually ate the chicken.
By the time I finished laundry, the kitten was gone.
I hope that it’s alright.

Feminists are right when they claim that God is a she, but God’s not the maternal type.
God’s a washed-up old barfly, the last out the door at Last Call every night.
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
So, who does God stay with?
Whoever she manages to pass out on, she always manages that.
A mumbling, wrinkled old hag on the sofa.
She’s never there the next morning.
Where did she go? Did she steal anything?
Who knows?
Until the bar opens again, when she’s the first in the door, ready for another night.

It’s not every day that you see a star explode.
We parked the ship a safe distance from the explosion, raised our deflector shields, and watched as a bright light erupted in the middle of our long-distance telescopes.
Everything in the system was incinerated.
Solar heat and charged mass spread out in all directions.
Then, nothing.
We sent a subspace message back to headquarters that the system had been annihilated.
“Good,” they said. “That’ll teach ’em to miss three payments in a row.”
We lowered shields, charged up our power reserves, and set a course for the next deadbeat system.

After every concert, every night, Janis shot up.
She shot up a lot, more and more every night.
She tried to kick the habit in Rio. But she started again.
A lot of other performers died from overdoses.
Blind Owl Wilson.
Jimi Hendrix.
“My people are pioneer stock,” she said. “They came across country and settled in Texas. They’re tough. I won’t die like that.”
But she did.
They found her by the side of her hotel bed, dead from an overdose.
Where are her ashes?
Did they ever make it back to Texas?
Did they ever make it home?

The Mindy Miller Show has been going strong for 75 years.
There used to be a real Mindy Miller, but she had issues, and she kept making all kinds of demands.
The network owned her likeness and name, so the network dumped her and replaced her with a clone.
Sadly, the clone had replication errors, so the studio built a robot.
It was pretty lifelike, too, and it suffered less breakdowns than the real Mindy Miller.
Eventually, they replaced that with a computer-generated hologram.
A friendly, tireless virtual extroverted lovable chatterbox.
And best of all, you can turn her off.