The front door to every apartment on the sixth floor was gone.
Nothing else had been stolen, nothing else had been disturbed.
Nobody heard or saw anything out of the ordinary.
The security cameras in the stairwells, elevators, garage, and lobby showed nothing strange.
One moment, the doors were all there.
The next moment, they were gone.
Why would somebody steal all the doors on the sixth floor?
They were just ordinary doors.
And why chose that floor?
Why not the fifth? Or the seventh?
The next day, they were back.
Nobody said a thing about it.
Was I dreaming?
Category: My stories
Fair Trade
This morning, I asked the girl at the coffeeshop what “Fair Trade” coffee means.
She had no idea.
So, I asked her what “Unfair Trade” coffee would be.
“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “The coffee distributor makes the grower’s negotiator stay at the airport in a room next to the ice machine so they can’t get any sleep. Then, they give them the sucky chair in the conference room, the one with broken springs and not enough padding. Oh, and they offer them sodas and coffee, but the bathroom door’s locked when they need it.”
I smiled… and ordered tea.
Walk away from a fight
I always found it hard to walk away from a fight.
Now, I have a hard time walking.
I always found it hard to talk my way out of a fight.
Now, I have a hard time talking.
I always found it hard to think my way out of a fight.
Now, I have a hard time thinking
I always found it hard to work my way out of a fight.
Now, I have a hard time working.
I always found it hard to walk away from a fight.
Now, I have a hard time walking…
Talking…
Thinking…
Working…
Fighting.
Elegantly
Lying in his hospital bed, Albert Einstein, the smartest man in the world, was dying.
He coughed, smiled and told the doctors “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
They nodded respectfully and left the room.
The next morning, he was dead.
Nobody knows Albert Einstein’s last words because he spoke them in German, but the nurse at his bedside only spoke English.
However, I suspect he was saying “Get that pillow off of my face, you bitch!”
Bowling
Martin was from one of those frozen European countries.
Finland?
Denmark?
Sweden?
Fuck if I can remember. I was nine. It was a long time ago.
What I do remember was that the teachers encouraged us to expose him to culture and that kind of crap.
So, we took him bowling.
“Knock down the pins with the ball,” I said to Martin.
He grinned, ran down the lane, and swung the ball like a wrecking ball.
“I go on strike!” he shouted, and went to the next lane… and the next one…
We got thrown out.
Martin kept the shoes.
Pageant
When I was in school, a teacher thought it would look cool to have crepe paper ribbons tied to our wrists for the Thanksgiving Pageant.
As we moved our arms for the song, the ribbons crinkled and waved.
Some kids tripped over them. Others got behind other kids and tried to strangle them.
Because they were crepe paper, they’d snap, so no kids got hurt when they tripped, and no kids ended up strangled.
The teacher, on the other hand, was found hanging from their belt in the bathroom.
For Christmas Pageant, the substitute just had us sing Jingle Bells.
The Caged Bird
I don’t know what that Maya Angelou is getting on about, but she’s so full of shit.
I know the real reason why the caged bird sings: it’s a trick.
If you look closely, the bird’s stuffed. And when it sings, the beak doesn’t move. (It’s broken)
The singing came from a tape recorder built into the perch. Look. See it?
The switch is here on the electrical cord.
So that’s why the caged bird sings.
Why it sings Van Halen’s 1984 album? Because, I like classic Van Halen.
And I lost the bird songs tape that came with it.
The Senator
Politicians are often described as sticking their finger into the wind, but then there’s Senator Hardcastle, who has ordered her staff to lug around an entire weather station.
You might think she’d read the paper or watch the news for the weather forecast, but the news hasn’t been kind to the senator.
They say horrible things about her personal spending.
So, she doesn’t read. Or watch.
And she’s ordered her staff not to read or watch, either.
Instead, they lug around the weather station.
What’s the humidity, she asks. Is it too damp? My hair must be perfect, you know.
Horse
Growing up, I didn’t have a basketball hoop and backboard over the garage.
It wouldn’t have made sense. The driveway was at a 15 degree angle.
Instead, several of our neighbors had them, including one on a pole in the cul-de-sac our driveway connected to.
It didn’t matter, though. I sucked at basketball.
Even without the dribbling, I lost enough times at Horse to provide mounts for all of Genghis and Kublai Khan’s armies.
So, how did I get that varsity letter in basketball?
It’s for women’s basketball. My high school girlfriend.
She left it to me in her will.
Only So Much
There’s only so much red laser pointer games or ribbon on a stick teasing you can do with your cat.
Sometimes, when I’m really bored, I’ll slip my cell phone under a sleeping cat and then call it with another phone.
Most cats jump up startled, but we had this one cat who would just twitch his ear once and ignore the thing.
It didn’t matter what ringtone was set up, or if I’d set it on vibrate mode. He’d just twitch his ear and ignore it.
We figured he was smart enough to realize the call wasn’t for him.