Loathing

Every morning when I wake up, I look in the mirror and I don’t like what I see there.
So, to save time and effort, I just signed a contract to outsource all of my self-loathing to India. The entire city of Mumbai now despises me for me.
They send me a daily report through email, with the occasional critical updates via text message to my phone.
This frees me up to focus on loathing everybody and everything else.
I’d outsource my self-righteousness to them, too, but they can’t possibly do as good a job at it as I can!

Skates

I met an ogre named Wilson.
We became friends.
I introduced him to my other friends.
They welcomed him into our circle of friends.
We went to the movies.
We went out for pizza.
We watched a baseball game.
But when we went roller-skating, they didn’t have any shoes Wilson’s size.
We took turns sitting with Wilson as he watched the others skate.
We tried to make roller-skates his size, and they fit great.
Wilson took a few steps…. and he fell on his ass.
We laughed.
Wilson didn’t. And he attacked the village.
Go get your pitchforks and torches.

Brain

If I suffer some horrific tragic accident that reduces me to becoming just a brain in a jar, I want that jar to be a cookie jar.
Because, let’s face it: the kids these days are fat.
And there’s nothing that puts a kid off of between-meal snacks like reaching for a Chips Ahoy and coming up with a handful of grey matter.
But then again, kids don’t wash their hands, either. Disgusting, nasty creatures!
Pawing around my lobes, their booger-covered fingers scrambling my neurons… ewwwwww!
They’d reduce me to a drooling, blithering idiot.
(Unlike how I am now, right?)

Dead Switch

Roger found a service called DeadSwitch that would let him address a note to be sent after his death.
If he didn’t log in once a week, the service would assume he had died and release the note.
The problem was, he didn’t have very much to say to anyone, let alone anybody to say it to.
So, he wrote a joke note to the president, saying he wouldn’t have to pardon him for all his brutal and horrific crimes now.
A week later, the site got hacked, and all the notes were sent.
Roger never did get a pardon.

Sonnet 18

I see him, wrestling through would-be Plaths, Frosts and Burkowskis at the coffeeshop:
It’s Open Mike Night, and, like a schoolchild, he’ll recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 from memory.
Dreadful.
From the stage’s barstool, he’s downright singsongy, ruining the verse, digging up Shakespeare’s grave, skullfucking the corpse…
Enough! I shout. I would rather be beaten across the face and chest with a volume of Shakespeare’s work than hear you open it and read from it!
The crowd is stunned. Shakespeare’s torturer stares blankly.
Reciting from memory, he has no volume to beat me with.
But he’s got the barstool.
I run.

Big Moe

Big Moe checks his watch, struggles to get up from the sidewalk, and says he needs to go to the gym.
Everybody laughs.
Big Moe’s wider than he is tall, and I swear he takes up an elevator all by himself.
“I gotta go get my little brother,” he says. “He goes down to the gym every day to work out.”
Ricky: “What does he do? Lift you over his head?”
Everybody laughs again.
Big Moe snorts, rumbles down the sidewalk.
Strange. Moe doesn’t look as big as he usually does.
Walking to the gym every day’s a start, right?

The Activist

A woman filed a complaint against the restaurant because we asked her not to breast-feed her baby outside of the bathroom.
After doing a little research, we found out that she was a woman’s rights activist who had a history of filing complaints like these.
A while back, she’d had breast cancer and a double radical mastectomy, and after the reconstructive surgery her nipples were well-made but completely nonfunctional tattoos.
But even odder was that she didn’t actually have a baby. She used a lifelike doll that she carried around.
We set up a quiet table in the back anyway.

Elephant In The Newsroom

New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal said that he didn’t care if his reporters were fucking elephants, as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
However, Rosenthal changed his mind after paying a rash of elevator repair bills when reporters brought their dates to the office.
Then there was the stampede at the paper’s Christmas Party. I guess the peanut martinis were too strong, and there was an argument between two elephants wearing the same dress.
Abe put out a memo the next day: no dating elephants.
But clowns? Totally okay with him.
Care to sniff my flower, Mr. Friedman?

Pulling Out The Stops

Second Evangelical’s roof collapsed in a heavy thunderstorm. They used the insurance money to get as much as they could repaired, but the policy didn’t cover their massive pipe organ, once an array of gleaming copper tubes and an magnificent console of keys, switches and stops, now a dripping, bent pile of ruin.
After several bake sales and poker nights, the funds were raised, and the church director found a match: a bankrupt church in Bulgaria.
They signed the contract, had the organ dismantled, shipped, and transplanted it into Second Evangelical.
Engage the pumps, and pull out all the stops!

Savage – Eighth Anniversary

NOTE: This podcast is now 8 years old.
I’ve heard stories about jungle tribes that didn’t want their pictures taken because they thought that the camera would steal and capture their soul.
They also thought that there were tiny men inside the radio, cargo planes were gods that dropped gifts from heaven, and that the world was created by a giant fish laying the stars like eggs.
We’d have told them they were full of shit, but it’s kinda rude to be trashing people on their turf.
And they had spears. Lots of spears.
We’ll go back with guns next time.
(The mining company will cover the cost.)