I’ve often been accused of tooting my own horn too much.
This is an outrage!
Unlike others, who do it out in public, I have the decency to reserve a rehearsal room for my tooting sessions.
The more I practice, the better I get.
Or, are they accusing me of not letting others toot my horn?
Why would I let them do that? I paid for it, It’s mine. Mine!
And just the thought of your lips on my mouthpiece. Ewwwwww! Grosssss!
Toot your own damn horn! Leave mine alone!
Now I have to boil the damn thing, you bastards!
Category: My stories
The Cats Love
I wake up early for work. My wife wakes up late.
By the time she gets home from work, I’m either asleep or falling asleep.
We rarely see each other during the week.
The cats love this arrangement. It means they have someone around almost all of the time to beg for treats.
We don’t, but until we win the lottery or get jobs with better schedules, it’s how things are.
I go to sleep, hugging a pillow, and when my wife wakes me up, I hand it to her.
It smells like both of us.
The cats love it.
… and a salad!
My doctor says I need to eat more salad.
Romaine lettuce and onions, and a whole lot of different kinds of beans.
I like lots of different kinds of beans in my salad.
So, I open the cans of beans, dump them out into a colander, wash them off, and shake the colander to mix up the beans.
When the beans are nice and mixed, I dump them out into a few plastic containers and stick them in the fridge.
They’re ready for when I really want a salad.
Which is never, I think, as I drive to the steakhouse.
Scale
I keep the bathroom scale under the sink.
It’s one of those expensive scales that measures body fat and blood pressure and all that stuff. Tracks your progress on the Internet, too.
Well, every so often, my littlest cat likes to walk into the bathroom, pull down the hanging towels, and she then stands on the scale.
Ten pounds.
“Who’s a happy little kitty?” I ask her.
She arches her back, ears twitching, and blinks happily at me.
Meanwhile, the scale talks to Weight Watchers, and at the end of the week, my chart is a wacky series of spikes.
Flower Shop
The whole town loves Evelyn’s flower shop.
It’s a nice store, right there on Main Street.
The awning needs a bit of work. And the paint’s faded on the glass on the door.
She keeps saying she’ll touch it up, but she never does.
The flowers are pretty. She grows them herself in greenhouses behind her house, right outside of town.
There, she plants the seeds, keeps the plants fed and watered.
She cuts her finger, sings the magic spell, and rubs the blood on silver shears.
Snip.
Snip.
And we all love her shop just a little bit more.
People Are Stupid
Most people are stupid.
Despite the fact that most people are stupid, a tiny few are smart, and they come up with the things that keep the stupid ones from screwing it all up.
It only takes a few smart ones to invent things. And even smarter ones to dumb that stuff down so the stupid ones stop falling off cliffs or getting eaten by bears.
The extremely smart people want to let the bears eat the dumb ones and live in stupidity-free peace.
Which, I suppose, proves that the smart people aren’t as smart as they think they are.
The Glop
I like to add berries to my iced tea.
Blueberries.
Strawberries.
Raspberries.
I drop them into my glass, mash them up, and then pour in the tea.
However, I get lazy, and forget to mash them.
Sometimes, I can spear them out with my straw.
But they often just go to waste.
That’s why I got the blender. To blend up the berries for my tea.
Now, I’ve got the berry slurry sitting nearby, ready to pour into my tea.
So, I pour… and it all comes out.
SPLASH!
There’s glop all over the table.
I should switch to coffee.
The Killer Pool
Every week, I have to fish a dead neighborhood kid out of the pool.
No, they don’t drown in it. The coroner’s made that perfectly clear after every autopsy.
No water in the lungs.
And the fact the children have had their throats cut.
The blood. I don’t know if that gets taken care of by the chemicals and the filter. And I don’t care… I drain the pool, scrub it down, and replace the water.
The water bill is killing me.
One more, and I’m just going to fill the thing in with dirt and raise a vegetable garden.
In The Dead Of Night
The tooth fairies exchange money for teeth.
Then, the sandmen grind them up into dream dust.
Overprotective dogs aren’t a problem with a face full of dream dust, but motion-sensing alarms can be.
Then there’s the sandmen and fairies who think the whole racket is stupid, so they steal jewelry, credit cards, and MacBooks.
Don’t get me started with the bootleg videos of hot celebrities and models sleeping. The Council can barely deal with the Lindbergh baby incident, let alone Internet paparazzi stalker porn. Technology’s like magic to them.
We’ll pay for Lady Gaga’s dentures and a new laptop, okay?
The Search
The producer for NPR’s Fresh Air says that every time they listen to an interesting interview, they want to quit their job and do whatever the guest is doing.
This is the ultimate irony, because the more they love their job, the more they want to quit it and do something else.
They said the next interview is with a guest searching for extraterrestrial life.
Endless years of scanning radio waves for signals.
Boring!
I believe in being so interesting and unusual, extraterrestrial life seeks ME out.
And if we never find it, well, at least we had fun, right?