Category: My stories

Steve the barkeep shouts LAST CALL, and everybody laughs.
This is a cop bar. Who’s gonna tell Steve that he’s in violation for serving after… what is it now? Two? Three?
Shit, who cares, right?
City doesn’t need us anymore. There’s no more drug problem, no more gangs, no more littering and loitering.
Cameras, drones, robots, and that weird shit they play on tv and computers and phones that makes people good.
The union contracts, though, those keep us oldtimers going. So, we drink. We hold retirement parties. We hold wakes.
Robots play the bagpipes now.
Amazing Grace, my ass.

I can’t believe how fast time flies.
Things that were ten years ago are popping up as twenty years ago. And twenty years ago is the new thirty years ago.
Heck, I’m hearing a few forty years ago things I remember from when I was really little.
So when someone tells you that forty is the new twenty and fifty is the new thirty and all that crap, tell them yeah, okay. Then try to give them a twenty when the bill is fifty bucks.
You’ll get three to five for that, unless five is the new three these days.

Four hundred years ago, surgeons transplanted the first heart.
If they saw what people can do now with nanobots and universal tissue printing, their jaws would drop and never come back up.
And they don’t even need a surgical team. Just schedule some time in a bodymod tank, and your nanobots can pretty much work up anything you can imagine.
Just make sure you run morphology backups before you get fancy. My cousin Jake went centaur and he had to wait a week while Central Archives dug up his file.
I swear, his apartment still reeks of rancid horse poop.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling when you go out to the grocery store, come back with a trunk full of food, and after you put it all away, you don’t feel like eating anything you picked up.
So, you order a pizza, but when you put it on the counter and open the box, you don’t want it, either.
You get in your car and drive out to restaurant row in your town… fast food, sit-downs, diners… none of it jumps out at you.
You drive back home, crack open a beer, and watch the game.
Maybe tomorrow, okay?

When you christen a large ship, you use a bottle of champagne.
So, when you open a champagne bottling plant, do you use a ship?
Remy DeSanto’s new champagne bottling plant was almost ready to open. He’d hired workers and plant managers and scheduled the inspections and suppliers.
Just needed the formal opening ceremonies to get things started.
Because the plant was nowhere near the coast or a river or a canal, Remy bought a ship in a bottle, and he smashed it across the front doors to open them.
The workers swept up the broken glass, and production began.

If you ask for tea in England or in a Chinese restaurant, you’ll get a pot of hot tea.
On the other hand, if you ask for tea in Texas, you’ll get iced tea.
But if you’re in the South, such as Georgia or Florida, you’ll get sweet tea.
Here, you’re taking your life into your hands if you ask for a tea. Heck, outsiders like you shouldn’t be here in the first place.
Just get back on that horse and ride if you know what’s good for you.
Otherwise, stay a while.
So, care for a cup of tea?

A lightning talk is a fast-paced presentation at a conference that’s on a timer and it’s usually funny.
Fred does lightning talks about lightning. Well, how to manage lightning with such things as surge protectors, lightning rods, and circuit breakers.
His views are rather controversial, so people call his lightning talk about lightning a lighting rod.
He’s tried to lighten the mood for his lightning talk on lighting talks, but most people tighten up, if they’re not frightened by Fred.
That’s when the gong hits, and Fred’s talk is done.
Fred exhales, wipes his brow, and is struck by lightning.

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.