I trusted you with my life.
I gave you the backup drive, and what did you do?
You got drunk, and did a restore with mine instead of a backup of yours.
Now you’re me. And you don’t want me to restore you with the right drive and files.
You know I’m afraid to be overwritten. You’re me, after all.
Well, sorta.
There was some corruption. Because you were drunk.
I’m sorry about the broken arm, but you broke my nose.
You wiped your drive, but unlike you, I can be trusted to keep your spare safe.
Sit still, stupid.
Category: My stories
Gene
Every time I read about a road fatality, I check to see if the people in the car were wearing seatbelts or the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet.
Oh, and if they were drinking.
Despite decades of education and laws, people still do shit like that, and they die or occasionally kill people.
I wonder if it’s a set of genes. The “Don’t Wear Seatbelts” gene or the “Drink While Driving” gene.
Sadly, they’re not linked, so sometimes a drunk driver wears a seatbelt, crashes, and lives.
It’ll take a few more generations to weed those genes out, I think.
Haunted
Call them Ghosts.
Collecting up all the papers of someone’s who’s died, processing them into an AI personality engine, and plugging it into a hologram might make sense for historical figures like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, but doing that with the Facebook and Twitter and blog and email archives of my son…
He stood there. Right by the coffin, delivering his own eulogy.
He can say he loves me and thanks me for everything, how much he misses his mother, but this is torture.
It’s 2AM. The bottle is empty.
Standing there. By the bed. Staring.
Turn it off!
Unscholarly
“Sic Semper Tyrannis!”
John Wilkes Booth limps off the stage as chaos overtakes Ford’s Theater.
In the background…
Singing?
“STOP!” shouts Professor Rathbone, clicking a hand control.
Everyone freezes in place, frozen in time.
Rathbone twists a knob on the control, scrolling the scene backwards.
Women and men point and sit back down, Booth flies up to the Presidential box, scuffles with an Army major, and unshoots Lincoln.
Rathbone clicks again, walks to the stage, and spots the quietly singing Rick Astley.
He points the control, clicks, and the hologram vanishes.
The grad students chuckle as Rathbone resets the scene.
To Don’t
A lot of people make TO DO lists to get their chores done.
I stuck mine to a corkboard, and I put colored pins in chores I need to get done, removing pins once they’ve gotten done.
However, some people make TO DON’T lists to list all the things they do to waste time, and then they try not to do those things.
I tried a TO DON’T list, but the first thing I put on it was my TO DON’T list.
A paradox wormhole opened up, swallowing everything in the room.
I scratched “Laundry” off my TO DO list.
Black Cats
Most black cats I’ve known get named Midnight or Blackie. Or Shadow.
We named ours Bruwyn and Myst.
Bruwyn is short for Bruce Wayne, because his ears are pointy and tall like Batman’s cowl.
Myst was called Michelle, but we don’t like Obama much in our house, so she got renamed Myst because she likes to hide and she’s easily missed.
Well, when I say we named our cats, I really mean my wife.
She got naming rights on both of these cats.
I call them Boo Boo and Baby.
Or “Get in here, you little shits!” when it’s dinnertime.
Neighborhood Watch
WHAM WHAM!
Stan nailed a NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign to the side of the house.
“You have it facing the wrong way, Stan,” I say.
“Shit,” says Stan, and he pries it off with the claw hammer. He sticks the bent nail into the pocket of his tool belt, pulls out another, and tries again.
WHAM WHAM!
“Now?”
“Upside-down.”
“Shit!”
He pried it loose again, got out another nail, and…
WHAM WHAM!
“Third time’s the charm, but it’s my house.”
Stan unfolded his cane and grabbed his dog’s harness.
“Of course it is. They don’t take blind people, stupid,” he said.
Fetch The Stick
The sign on the front door of Le Ho Kim says NO DOGS ALLOWED.
Under it: DELIVERIES IN BACK.
The band jokes about chow dogs being in the chow mein, puppies in the dumplings.
Benny’s been coming here since we were two years old, and he still can’t work chopsticks.
“Use a fork!” growls Damien. “I’m sick of watching you with those sticks.”
Benny’s the goddamned drummer, right? You’d think he could by now.
“Woof!” I say, holding up a dumpling, and everybody laughs.
“Fetch!” says Benny, tossing a chopstick.
I throw the dumpling after it, and everybody laughs harder.
Big Moe
Big Moe checks his watch, struggles to get up from the sidewalk, and says he needs to go to the gym.
Everybody laughs.
Big Moe’s wider than he is tall, and I swear he takes up an elevator all by himself.
“I gotta go get my little brother,” he says. “He goes down to the gym every day to work out.”
Ricky: “What does he do? Lift you over his head?”
Everybody laughs again.
Big Moe snorts, rumbles down the sidewalk.
Strange. Moe doesn’t look as big as he usually does.
Walking to the gym every day’s a start, right?
Reach
Imagination is like a magical place of ideas and stories.
Reach in, and pull something out… that’s creativity.
In between you and that place is the world, with all its problems and stresses and frustrations, clouding your vision and making it hard to pull anything from there, blocking you.
But every now and then, when you hear something strange, or something looks kinda weird, the world glimmers and gives way, letting imagination peek through.
Reach through quickly!
Grab on to it!
Pull it out!
Grab it!
Missed!
Keep trying. Keep at it.
Don’t stop looking.
Don’t give up the search.