Category: My stories

Alfred kept a cheat sheet tattooed on his left arm. Werewolves were silver bullets. Mummies were fire. Vampires were garlic and crosses and mirrors. And so on with the list. Not that he ran into these creatures all that much, but whenever he did, he had their weakness right there. When he ran into things that he hadn’t before, one of the locals would tell him what he needed, and he goes straight to the tattoo parlor and add to his list. Then the store. He always made sure to wear short sleeve shirts when he went out on adventures.

I put a cover over my air-conditioning heat pump to keep leaves and rocks out of it. However, somehow something got in there. There was a loud banging. I turned off the air conditioning to the house and looked under the cover. There was a severed tail at the bottom of the unit and some sort of lizard or frog chopped up and stuck in the grading on top. Apparently it kept bouncing off of the spinning blades, sticking to the grading, and eventually falling back into the blades. I cleaned out the creature, and restarted the unit. Fixed.

Early chemists discovered elements by looking around, maybe digging a little.
Maybe they had to heat something up a little.
Further on, chemists had to go digging for a really long time, mix vials of goop, and filter out lots of crap to find new elements.
As the effort increased, so did the announcements and the launch parties.
Pretty soon, they were firing electrons at lumps of stuff behind large amounts of sheeting or concrete walls.
And the parties came with parades and fireworks.
But this request for a team of skydiving Elvis impersonators?
Rejected.
Just get a damn cake.

They say that if you meet Buddha by the side of the road, you must kill him.
But that is not Buddha.
It is Adam West.
You know, the guy who played Batman on television.
He was a voice in that cartoon show as the mayor.
And you killed him.
I mean, yeah, people mistake him for the Buddha a lot, I admit it.
If they were in a police lineup, you’d have a hard time telling them apart.
As if the Buddha would be stealing from a bodega or groping people on the subway.
Adam West? Maybe he would.

The alphabet started small. Two or three marginalized groups, bringing their causes together, fighting for their rights. Then other groups added themselves to the alphabet, trying to pin their demand for rights to the causes of others. More and more groups jumped aboard. Pretty soon, the reading of the alphabet took longer than whatever speech or presentation an activist was giving. God forbid they left anyone out of the alphabet, or there would be screaming accusations of marginalization among the marginalized. Eventually, it got too difficult to remember or say, and it was shortened to We hate white straight men.

Art critics are racists.
Take two neo-expressionist artists: Cy Tombly and Jean Basquiat.
Both made rudimentary art, scribbles and scrawled words.
They described Twombly as brilliant, sublime, and amazing.
Praising garbage.
And they described Basquiat as chaotic, primitive, untrained, and child-like.
A graffiti-spraying amateur.
Which, to be fair, he was.
A homeless drug addict scraped off the sidewalk by Andy Warhol, caged up in a basement, and pumping out art for the dealer upstairs to peddle.
Warhol orders an employee to silk-screen up a logo, and then Basquiat defaces it.
Me, I describe both as crap.
Regardless of their race.

My parents are dead.
My father’s brother, my gay uncle, had no children.
And before that, the name was what some clerk wrote down.
At the immigration desk in the port of San Francisco.
When my great-grandfather said Zigmund.
And he heard Simon.
So, nobody in the old country.
Not that any would have survived what happened there.
I have no children.
My brother does.
He has a daughter.
But she will take on the name of whatever husband or wife she takes.
Her children will have their name.
And my family name will be no more.
Simon says, disappear.

It’s a small town, and the grocery store, pharmacy, and a few restaurants are about seven minutes walk. So, unless I’ve got a lot of groceries to pick up, I like to walk. I mean, I walk two or three times a day for exercise and it’s working. The other night, I walked to the pharmacy to pick something up and they had already closed early. And I laughed. I hadn’t run out of pills yet, so I could wait till tomorrow, and I enjoyed the walk there, and I enjoyed the walk back, and I’ll walk there again tomorrow.

A lot of people have opinions on the robot umpires, but I’m looking forward to robot hot dog vendors.
Because I don’t want to wait for that shouting guy to walk around with the hot dogs.
Nor do I want to get up and go get a hot dog.
I know I can order a hot dog and have it delivered to me, but that guy often has a bunch of orders in his route and ends up taking as long as the shoutong guy walking around.
Just put a cannon on the roof, aim it, and I’ll catch it.

Jesus may have said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but when it came to his next-door neighbor Ralph, he said screw that creep.
Ralph was always dumping his lawn clippings over the fence on to Jesus’ yard.
And he parked his chariot in a way that blocked Jesus’ driveway.
He once caught Ralph with his mail, and Ralph said he was just coming over to hand it to Jesus.
Yeah, right.
Jesus never believed that Judas betrayed him.
He thought it was Ralph.
Judas confessed, but Jesus said “Yeah, right. Uh huh. I know it was Ralph.”