Category: My stories

If I win the lottery, I will call a few major symphonies and buy the oboe chair. There’s no reason for it. It’s just so strange, nobody would understand it. And that’s the point. We only write our names in sand. Unless it’s with an oboe, I suppose. And every oboist in that city will strive to sit in the chair I bought for them. Or they could remain standing or sit on the floor, I suppose. How silly that would be, dressing up, bringing out your finest oboe, and sitting on the dirty floor. Go get a chair, dummy!

I saw so many things in the city that I’d never experienced before.
The people. The lights. The stores. The streets. The buildings.
And in the middle of it all, a statue.
A tall man, his face full of hate, lashing a whip.
What was he lashing the whip at?
The plaque at the bottom of the statue had been defaced and was no longer legible.
I asked the people around it, but nobody knew who or what it was.
“Maybe it’s one of those lion tamers,” I said.
I got a coffee, saw a show, and went back home.

And the prince and princess didn’t live happily ever after.
After a few miscarriages, the princess had four daughters in a row.
The prince cheated on her with a maid, producing a bastard.
That was awkward.
And then, the princess had a son.
The king and queen lived well into their eighties, so it took a long time for the prince and princess to take power.
By then, the kingdom was a bit of a mess financially.
The bastard killed the king, queen, and their family, usurping the throne.
Parliament had him arrested, tried, convicted, and hung.
The people rejoiced.

Toby came up with really good ideas late at night. He’d be brushing his teeth or putting on a night shirt for climbing the bed and an idea we just hit them. But you didn’t have a notepad by his nightstand. So he’d forget them in the morning trying to remember what he’d come up with. He tried using the voice assistant on his phone to remember things for him, but he’d be so sleeping groggy, the voice to text would come out incomprehensible. Eventually, he put a pad and pen on the nightstand, but all he made were scribbles.

After the wildfire destroyed part of the city, the mayor and city council promised they do everything to help rebuild. But despite millions of dollars spent on planning and outreach, not a single environmental impact regulation or building code or contract was addressed. Eventually, the frustrated homeowners enlisted dozens of homeless people to raid the mayor and city council‘s homes and build campfires in their fancy living rooms. Their suburban mansions all burned down. The fire chief was lambasted for the slow response. He shrugged and said I was off duty, and the hotel I’m in has lousy cell reception.

After months of job hunting, I’ve picked up a lot of good tips for questions to ask during interviews. Not that I get a lot of interviews. A lot of places use AI to filter out applications before a human ever sees them, let alone you have a chance at a face-to-face interview. But one of the good ones is why is this job opportunity open. You can find out if somebody got promoted or if they downsized and are re-hiring. I asked it as an assistant in a magicians knife throwing act. He said early retirement.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle. Well it turns out that our princess likes to hang out at the White Castle Thursday nights and sure enough. She’s getting her sliders and Dr Pepper fix tonight. We probably should’ve told you because instead of dodging mushrooms and fireballs and bridges and some giant turtle dude, it’s a lot easier to find a parking space at the White Castle and walk in. Although if you hang around, sometimes she gets her order to go, and she brings back a little extra.

I’ve been a Houston Astros fan for a pretty long time, back when they were good then they got to the World Series somehow, then they really sucked, and then they were good and cheated, and we’re still good until they really started to slide. Now, instead of catching their games on TV or through streaming from the Internet, I watch all the commentators bitch about how much they suck. It’s a lot more entertaining and a hell of a lot less anxiety about watching the actual games. I know they’ll lose, the only mystery is how and how badly.

Papa Joe made Papa Wally, my daddy, promise not to sell the farm.
Daddy kept his promise, but when he gave me the farm, he also gave me overdue property tax bills.
All our neighbors had left with the money developers gave them, and the developers built all these houses.
Those families didn’t want us to sell out to developers, so they bribe me to keep the farm as a kind of nature preserve.
Even more than the cost of the property taxes. And your college bills.
Just keep talking to the developers to scare up their bribes a bit.

Doctors called Jeremy‘s fear of sundials irrational, but he had a perfectly valid reason to fear the diabolical contraptions. His father was found speared through the heart by a sundial in the families front yard. The strange thing was, they didn’t own a sundial. Perhaps that explained how his father wandered into the thing fatally. His fear extended to other yard bound timekeeping devices, such as orreries, Astrolabes, and even more arcane mechanisms. He only had a slight aversion to classic yard decorations, such as ceramic lawn gnomes and plastic pink flamingos. He eventually moved to an urban high-rise.