I once asked a mystic why they called it a “third eye.”
They said they had tried to use “center eye” and “middle eye” but people got them confused with Cyclops.
“What if a Cyclops is psychic?” I responded. “Do they have a second eye? And what about people born without eyes?”
We got horribly bogged down in semantics, and I think it was when I asked if a blind psychic had a fifth sense that he took a punch at me.
I ducked his punch, threw a right hook, and knocked him out cold.
“Didn’t see that one coming.”
Category: My stories
In What Size?
We get a lot of catalogs in the mail.
Especially during the holidays.
Some of them are geek toy catalogs for me, but by far my wife gets more of the furniture, clothing, and fancy stuff catalogs.
Sometimes, I circle something interesting and leave it in her chair.
She does the same to me, circling stuff she might want and leaving it in my workbag.
One day, there’s a Victoria’s Secret catalog in the bag.
I look through it, but nothing’s circled.
Except for the name.
Mine.
It’s my catalog?
I laugh, and write “What size do you want this?”
The Elegant Elephant
The Elegant Elephant
Dons his top hat
Puts on a tuxedo
Gives his wallet a pat
“Where are the tickets
To the opera?” he thinks
”Are they lost? Are they gone
If they are, well, that stinks”
”They’re at the box office”
Says his wife, heaving sighs
”I knew that, I knew that”
The old elephant lies
His wife says “You’re senile
Or maybe you’re drunk
If it weren’t attached
You’d forget your trunk!”
“How do I look?”
“I think you look fine.”
She gives him a stare.
“I mean, you look simply divine.”
And they had a good time.
Sockpuppet
Nobody paid Walter Drub any notice.
But his sockpuppet, Senator Fenton, was leading the polls in October. Practically a shoe-in for the presidency.
I can’t explain how this happened. It’s just as weird to me as it is to you, and I’m his chief of staff.
But somehow, Boston elected a sockpuppet mayor, then senator, and now the entire country was falling in love with him.
Sadly, it all came crashing down when Walter tried to wash Fenton, and he vanished in the dryer.
He tried using a right sock.
“Impostor!” people shouted, and poor Walter ran for his life.
Conversion
Frank had told Tony and Vinny to beat the punk to within an inch of his life to teach him a lesson.
So when he heard that his goons had beaten the guy to death, he was pissed.
“What the hell did you two do that for?” he yelled.
“Sorry, boss,” said Tony. “Vinny’s trying to teach me this new Metric System they got in France, so we tried converting centermeters to inches and all that, and we kinda went too far.”
Frank hung them both in a meat locker set to minus forty degrees.
Same in Fairyheight and Celtsius.
War No More
In Micah and Isaiah, spears are bent into pruning-hooks and swords into plowshares, but in Joel they are bent back.
I guess they didn’t have enough metal to maintain a reasonable inventory of both.
These days, we’ve got lots of metal, but it’s always good to recycle.
Plus, who really needs plow-shares or pruning-hooks these days? Instead of bending swords and spears into them, you can make good money selling weaponry to some Renaissance festival role-player.
Sure, you might need to dull the edges a bit or encase them in a hard resin for safety, but that’s easier than bending.
Ghost Writer
When I was young, my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I said “I want to be a writer.”
The guidance counselor laughed. “Writer? Not a doctor? A lawyer?”
“No, I want to be a writer.”
“Nobody is a writer,” said the counselor.
I pointed at his bookshelf. “Then who wrote those?”
He picked one out. “Shakespeare. He’s dead.” He picked out another. “Freud. Dead.”
Every book chosen, it was by someone dead.
So, I got a typewriter, paper, and killed myself.
People assume I’m a ghostwriter.
But these days, I prefer editing.
The Road
The soldiers gather up the women and children from the village, tie them together, and drive them out into the road.
Every so often, you hear an explosion and screaming.
Then crying… and shouting from the soldiers, gunfire in the air to get them walking the road again.
The commander’s translator shouts: “If there are any mines left in the road when we move the convoy through here, we will burn the village down and kill everyone.”
Thirty minutes goes by without an explosion, and the commander gives the all-clear signal.
More gunfire, the villagers are slaughtered.
Dirt. Stones. Blood.
A Hard Lesson To Learn
The teacher held a globe near a bright light.
“Let’s say the light is the sun,” she said. “As we turn the globe, we see how the sunlight falls on different parts of the world, making night and day.”
She went on to demonstrate the earth’s axis, seasons, the earth’s orbit…
But Joshua had heard enough.
“This proves that there is no God, no Heaven, no angels,” he whispered to the angel standing next to his desk. “So go away.”
“Who do you think set all this up?” asked the angel.
Joshua sighed, and changed his milk to chocolate milk.
Humpty Pepsi
The sodas in the break room machines are free.
If you select the wrong one, you’re supposed to put it on the table for someone else to take.
Nobody ever does, though. They’re warm by then.
So, I took a diet Pepsi and put it on my cubicle divider.
I named it Humpty Pepsi.
After five months, a coworker’s elbow hit it, and it fell on the floor, spraying him and all of his stuff.
He was not amused.
I wasn’t either, because all of my horses and all of my men will never put Humpty Pepsi back together again.