Category: My stories

I don’t know why they send me to so many conferences. This stuff goes way over my head, and I end up bored, and napping through the presentation. Then I stress out over the expense reports and the post-conference summaries where I make up what I learned from the conference.
I asked to go to fewer conferences, but they sent me to more. One conference after the other. Eventually, I was always out at a conference, never coming home.
No reports, no summaries. Just endless conferences.
One day, I’ll escape this eternal prison.
Until then, hand me the tickets, please.

The school needs to cut budgets. Security and insurance costs kept rising.
Their plan was to impose a fine on parents who were late to pick up their kids from school. This would clear out the school quicker and they wouldn’t need as many guards.
After a month, the number of parents late to pick up their kids… actually went up.
“It’s cheaper than daycare or afterschool activities,” they said. “Ballet lessons and tutus are expensive.”
That’s when the district mandated organ donation. Late parents were handed a receipt to pick up the unused material.
The locker contents, they burned.

The real estate listing for my house mentions the 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and included appliances, but I left out the gargoyles.
Unless you read The Book Of Eternal Darkness during the full moon, they’re really not worth mentioning. Heck, if the ad were big enough, I’d mention the hardwood floors and excellent school district before the gargoyles.
Don’t ask me where they came from. They came with the house when I bought it, and the previous owner didn’t know either.
He was the one who put in the hardwood floors.
“Gargoyles tore up the carpeting,” he said, and laughed.

Some parents believe that vaccines cause autism and retardation, so they refuse to get their children vaccinated.
When these kids go to school or out in public, they risk picking up diseases from which they have no protection, and then tramsitting them to others.
But shouldn’t a kid that was vaccinated be protected when an unvaccinated kid exposes them to the disease?
“Resistant, not immune,” says my doctor.
So, I dress my daughter in armor with sharp spikes. Just try to touch or hug her, you filthy disease bag.
If only it wasn’t a bitch to wash in the laundry.

The immersive journalist ingested the video from the refugee camps into the simulator and rendered up the scenes.
They handed the project to their editor, who made sure there weren’t any embellishments or activist bias.
“Release it,” she said.
Dozens of Durban conference attendees were led through the scenes, which horrified and shocked them.
“What can we do?” they asked.
All the while, the journalist is taping them, and then she works up a project in the simulator that captures scenes from the conference.
She shows them to the refugees.
“They care,” she says.
But, really, does it solve anything?

I asked my friend Mary what she wanted for her birthday.
“Surprise me,” she said.
She’s blind, but I’ve known her long enough that all those crude jokes you think about surprising blind people… just grow up, okay? Dude.
What I did was: I bought her a jar of jellybeans.
The jar had beans of every flavor it in, mixed all together.
Cherry. Grape. Bubblegum. Strawberry.
You name it, it was in there.
Every flavor was a surprise to her.
“Thank you!” she said. And she tried to hug me.
She missed, and fell down the stairs, breaking her neck.

The American Military swears that they will leave no man behind.
So, when Private Joe Jenkins got captured on a raid in Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to broker a prisoner exchange.
The American Military swears that they will not negotiate with terrorists, too.
Someone suggested that they sneak in a Red Cross team to give Joe a sex change operation, but the Army lawyers determined that “no man” applies to women, too.
So, they accepted the terms without negotiation.
Private Joe Jenkins returned home on an Air Force cargo plane.
And the President promptly nuked The Great Satan into ash.

I’ve been to Florida before, but I’ve never been in a rain storm here… until today.
Driving through the Epcot parking lot, a few droplets hit the window. But my phone’s weather app showed clear skies.
We got in the gate, saw a show, and that’s when the skies opened up.
I tapped the app again.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said, and we waited under an awning to watch brave souls wrapped in plastic ponchos dash by.
And then, the rain stopped, and it was much cooler out. Which made me wish it had rained all those other times I’d visited.