Category: My stories

The guy at the deli counter says that life is like meat in a meat slicer.
You slice off a bit at a time, one slice after the other, until you get to the end.
Thin slices or thick slices, you still come to the end eventually.
All the while, he’s slicing up a chub of ham, and it’s getting shorter… shorter… shorter… and I wonder if he’s going to slice his hand to bits.
He stops just in time.
“You thought I was gonna cut my hand up?” he asks me.
Ever since then, I buy the prepackaged stuff.

The old man in the penthouse condo had himself a harem of young mistresses, and when he died, they fought with each other over whom he loved the most.
Out of respect, the building manager let them be, and didn’t ask about the maintenance fees or bills.
So, they wept. And fought. And annoyed the neighbors.
One of the mistresses asked him for help to get her luggage to a taxi.
“Oh, by the way,” she said. “He really didn’t care what happened to the place after he died.”
The next day, he threw the rest out into the street.

I refuse to eat McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s burgers.
The McDonalds is next to Goode Company’s mesquite grill. Great mesquite grilled burgers, but with fries and drink it’s eighteen bucks! Crazy!
Burger King is next to Goode Company Barbecue. A brisket sandwich on jalapeno cheese bread with two sides is the superior choice there.
What about Wendy’s? Who gives a fuck? I drive to Bubba’s Buffalo Burger Shack and load up a lean bison beef burger with everything. Best in town.
If it has a drive through window, drive past it and go park at a real burger joint.

I don’t care what the best-selling hamburger is.
Or soda. Or beer.
Or which movie
I want quality, not quantity.
I want expert testing for products, and if it’s a subjective decision on taste, then something I will like.
I want warranties, just in case something goes wrong.
Which I hope doesn’t, but it might.
If price is a factor, then I will sacrifice only so much quality that I can afford, and then assume that I save on future repairs and maintenance and the cost of replacing a shoddy alternative.
Because the cheaper you go, the regret is free.

They say that Barbara Walters had her finger on the pulse of America. But interviewing celebrities with soft-pitch questions is hardly having your finger on the pulse. Nor is an ignorant gab-fest with a panel of opinionated and ill-informed women.
Just a vapid, fawning hack, marketed as some kind of hard-hitting journalist, when all she really did was plumb the shallows of a prettyboy or fancygirl, or stroke the ego of a politician or flavor of the day.
She leaves the profession worse than she found it, her audience dumber than she found it, and we haven’t hit bottom yet.

A day after you eat corn, you shit corn.

No matter how much you chew it up, a whole bunch of indigestible yellow kernels will show up floating in the bowl.

It’s a good way to see how quickly things are passing through you.

There are probably times when you eat corn and nothing appears in your poop. Maybe you chew your food up too well.

Then there’s the times you poop corn, but can’t remember when you last ate it.

A week? Two weeks? Three?

Me, I don’t care. As long as the condom full of diamonds comes out.

Mexu, God of Iron, sleeps under the mountains.

“War,” he calls to us. “Bring me to war.”

We dig down to him, cut him from the rock, and haul him out in thousands of chunks.

Then, we melt him out of the ore in the furnace and release his white-hot rage into the molds.

The glowing bars and blanks go to the blacksmiths, who hammer and shape them into the swords and shields of Mexu’s bones and skin.

Hissing fury in barrels of water to cool.

Mexu comes together on the battlefield, flexes his followers’ muscles, and marches to victory.

Ted was a pretty good sheriff. He kept the peace, usually through talking to people and getting them to calmly work out their differences.
However, the one thing he never got the hang of was… well, hanging.
No matter how much he practiced, he never tied the knot properly, and the cattle rustler would fall to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
“Damn it,” grumbled Ted, dragging the outlaw back to the jail cell.
The jail filled up pretty quick, so Ted just started shooting the bastards.
Someone threatened to complain to the governor, but Ted shot them, too.

I parked my time machine in the municipal courthouse lot.

Jury duty.

It took hours for everything to be explained, then my group went to a courtroom.

Voir Dire. Question time. They try to weed out the biased and smart aleks.

It wasn’t until they brought in the defendant that I asked to be excused.

“That’s me,” I said.

The judge didn’t believe me.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

As foreman, I made sure the jury found me not guilty.

Excused, I went back to the municipal lot, saw the parking ticket, and growled.

I’ll just pay the fine this time, okay?