Category: My stories

Paul loves fezzes. He loves fezzes a lot.
He’s a fez evangelist.
“You’d look good in a fez,” he says to me.
He carries a tape measure with him. There’s a spare tape measure in his jacket, in case he breaks or loses the first one.
The bookmark for a fez shop is one of his home row icons.
He taps my phone, and now I’ve got the site up.
“Go ahead.”
I enter my credit card, and in 3 days I will have a fez.
Unless I hit the cancel button.
I wait until Paul’s gone to do that.

Home is the place you miss more each day you are away.
Home is the place where you don’t wish you were somewhere else.
Home is where you begin, and where you end.
Home is where people know they can find you, and where you can tell them to leave you alone.
Home is where you don’t just walk away from problems, but solve them.
Home is at the intersection of peace and quiet.
Home is where nowhere else feels more like home.
Ted touched the Home key on his keyboard.
Nothing happened.
So, he touched it again, and waited.

For the longest time, I thought that Michael Jackson was singing about Eddie in the song “Smooth Criminal.”
“Eddie, are you okay?” Michael Jackson kept asking.
But it turns out that he was worried about Annie, not Eddie.
I looked at the lyrics online, and sure enough, it says Annie, not Eddie.
All this time, I was worried about Eddie, when I should worry about Annie.
But then, who’s Annie?
Well, reading the rest of these lyrics, she’s probably dead.
While Eddie should be fine.
Or so I assume.
If you’re listening to this, Eddie, let me know you’re okay.

Kennedy said that he could enact civil rights legislation in America with the stroke of a pen.
When he failed to deliver, black people sent him pens with the note “Use this one, Jack.”
But Kennedy didn’t have the guts or balls to do it.
So, black men castrated and eviscerated themselves, and had their guts and balls sent to Kennedy.
“Use these,” said the gory notes that they had written with their own blood.
Jackie was horrified at the carnage. Johnson was enraged.
“I need this like a hole in the head,” said Kennedy.
So, Johnson gave him one.

The FBI has a file on Frank Sinatra with over 2,000 pages in it.
And it’s still growing.
For a while after Frank’s death, FBI kept his grave under observation.
At first, with an around-the-clock stakeout.
But later, with cameras that fed into an observation post.
Nothing ever happened there, except for fans leaving flowers, or the occasional celebrity friend paying respects.
The agency maintained the cameras for a few years, until they were no longer in the budget. There were more important threats to society to watch.
Nobody ever picked up the cameras. They just left them there.

Back in the Eighties, nobody was more awesome than Captain Lou Albano.
He was this huge hairy loud Italian professional wrestling coach.
The dude was freaky. He had rubber bands in his beard and pinned to his face.
He was in Cyndi Lauper’s music videos.
But then, wasn’t everybody?
His blustering shouts of wisdom held simple truths.
No, I wouldn’t vote for him if he ran for president.
And I’d hate for him to be a governor, like that Jesse guy was.
Maybe a mayor of some dying Rust Belt city.
Like Youngstown. Or Akron.
Or somewhere in New Jersey.

My friend the economist tried to convince me that economists are like master gardeners.
Some of them tell the hired help to pull weeds, while others tell the hired help to spread seeds.
I think they’re all just tossing a load of shit around, and they don’t care if it gets all over the hired help, the weeds, or the crops.
And they issue commands to their hired help, but none of them actually get their hands dirty.
Based on how fat my economist friend is, he doesn’t leave much of the harvest for others.
If anything, economists are vermin.

Some of our cats have been big, while others were small.
We’ve had red ones, orange ones, black ones, stripey ones, silly calicos, and other crazy coat colors.
They eat. They sleep. They poop. They barf.
We get them collars so that people know that someone loves them very much.
“This one is mine,” we are saying. “That one is mine too.”
I keep spare collars handy, in case they lose their collars.
There must be a pile of collars somewhere out there.
Just like the pile of collars here, the ones we took off, and don’t give out again.

Me and this tree have had a long life together.
I was born under this tree.
I did all my homework under the branches.
Learned archery by firing arrows at this tree.
How to make a fire, from the branches.
Proposed to the woman who became my wife under it.
Married her here, obviously.
And hung her from that branch over there.
Buried her on the other side.
I hid in the branches while the police looked for me.
I refused to come down, so they set fire to my tree.
The flames are spreading quickly.
Everything smells like smoke.

I like to watch the “How Stuff Gets Made” show.
But I watch it on Youtube, not television. I don’t like to be told when to watch things, and I like to watch a lot of them in a row.
Most industrial production of the stuff we use is done by robots and gigantic mixers, with as little human intervention as possible.
Watching these videos, I wondered what would happen when the human component of the production process were replaced by robots.
Then, I had an epiphany… what if these videos were produced by robots?
And, ultimately, viewed by them.