Category: My stories

So, my parents finally sold their house.
But they didn’t sell the wooded empty lot next door.
They had bought that lot to preserve their peace and quiet.
It didn’t sell along with the house, though.
They gave the lot to me.
And I need to sell it.
The golf course it’s near doesn’t want it.
They gave me an insultingly low offer.
So, I told them thank you, but I’m going ahead with my plans to build a shrine to Satan.
And their golfers are welcome to pray there, of course.
I’m sure they’ll rethink their offer pretty soon.

I used to play the violin. But I didn’t play it well.
“Maybe I need a better violin?”
So, I’d buy violin after violin, until I had a Stradivarius.
It didn’t have a name, though. It was a badly-damaged body that was refurbished.
Still, it sounded great.
But I didn’t play it well.
I paid for lessons, practiced a lot, until I finally got good with it.
Then, I broke my elbow and lost a lot of range of motion.
The surgeries and rehab were expensive and I had to sell the Stradivarius.
Now, I play “Violin” playlists on Spotify.

Mickey Mantle jumped the line, got a new liver, but it didn’t do him much good.
He got sicker and sicker, and former teammates came to Dallas to wish him goodbye.
The orderlies moved his body to a gurney and rolled it into an elevator,
Down in the basement, they moved his body to a cabinet in the morgue.
It took a day for his final exam.
They carved him up, pulled out his organs to examine and weigh them, including the liver he’d received, and sewed them all back into him.
And off to the funeral home he went.

Sinclair Lewis once said that every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
In spite of his Socialist tendencies, Sinclair Lewis liked to put on stilts and act like a complete tyrant.
“I AM KING!” Sinclair would shout. “BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR KING!”
It made sense when he’d put on an Uncle Sam suit and march in the Fourth of July Parade, but he wore them year-round.
This made it awfully awkward for him to sneak into meatpacking plants as part of his investigation for The Jungle, let alone go to the bathroom.

When my sister in law comes to visit, I set up a bed in the spare room.
And the cats check it out.
At bedtime, Tinny the cat becomes a snuggle cat.
And she sleeps on the bed during the day, too.
Usually, Tinny is my sofa companion while I work.
She can be a pest and gets in the way, but when she’s being a traitor, I miss her.
So when it’s time for my sister in law to go home, I put away the bed.
Instead of snuggling with me, Tinny goes into the other room and screams.

Some kids want to be policemen, others want to be astronauts.
Joey wanted to be boxing champion of the local prison.
He trained and built up his body and police record.
Winning fight after fight, and losing case after case.
He climbed the ranks outside the walls and inside.
Until his manager told him to lose.
He refused, and killed him.
Life in prison for murder.
Joey walked through the gate, smiling wide.
“I’m going to own this place,” he said.
“Guess again,” said a voice in his ear, and he was stabbed a dozen times. “We own this place.”

The Apple card is three percent at Apple, Exxon, and Walgreens.
I don’t need a new iPhone, I’m not going to use it on an insecure gas pump.
But Walgreens? Sure.
I have a lot of prescriptions. All my crazy pills.
When I read my last statement, I only got one percent last time.
I yelled at Support, and they said I need to use Apple Pay, not the physical card.
The co-pay on all my pills is a dollar.
Which means instead of three cents cashback for each, I was getting one cent.
I guess the pills aren’t working.

The sysco truck has the motto follow me to your next grade meal on its back. I’ve got time to kill. So I did, thinking that it was gonna stop at one of the restaurants in this small town. But to my great surprise, it’s next stop was at the local prison. I don’t know whether it’s telling me that I’m going to jail or that they’re picking up prisoners to chop up and put in the beef soup, that hardly call that or ringing endorsement. Maybe I’ll just stick to the local Whataburger or DoorDash a bunch of salads.

Teddy had a good gig, standing in line for other people.
The more important the thing people were waiting for in line, the more he’d make.
He also got a side hustle filling seats for celebrities or dignitaries leaving a televised performance.
That way there were no empty seats.
He started his own company of line-standers and seat-sitters.
But his workers complained of working conditions.
“We won’t stand for this!”
“We won’t take this sitting down!”
They formed a union, and went on strike.
The line-standers formed a picket line.
The seat-sitters organized a sit-in.
Teddy, exhausted, folded the company.

A group of coffee warehouse workers looked around the warehouse and grumbled.
The tasters kept approving cheaper and cheaper crap.
So, they quit and became coffee traders, trading in quality coffee.
Then, the coffee traders became coffee roasters and the money poured in.
It poured in faster when they opened their own coffee houses.
Sure, the money was good, but there was some guilt over living wages.
They were getting rich while the farmers stayed poor and wrecked their environments.
So, the group bought up all the farms, built robots and automated warehouses.
And the technicians were paid living wages.