Someone once said that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, but they didn’t have their house burn down because the candle set their drapes on fire.
Oh, sure, I tried to blow out the flames, but they spread too quickly.
Tear down the drapes and stomp them? They were on fire! What do I grab?
I did manage to blow out the candle, though. But then I needed it to find the fire extinguisher.
I tried to light it off of the drapes.
Nope.
So, my house burned down, and my hand’s got hot wax burns.
Tag: tragedy
Christmas Wish
It takes a lot of energy to make a wish come true.
The amount of energy depends on the wish.
Little wishes, a little bit of energy.
Big wishes, lots of energy.
Where does the energy come from?
From the mass of the star, of course, based on Einstein’s formula.
You know our sun is a star, right?
Scientists thought we could slow Global Warming by wishing the sun slightly smaller.
But something went wrong. We wished too much of it away.
So, go ahead and sing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”
But not like you really mean it.
Job Market
The job market out there is tough, and everybody’s beefing up their resume with exaggerations and lies.
Me, I’m beefing up my resume with beef.
I started by sending my resume with the finest steaks packed in a cooler with dry ice.
The recruiter threw out the resume and ate the steaks.
Then, I developed a special dye to etch my resume on to the steaks.
The writing vanished as the steaks cooked.
Finally, I made sheets of jerky and printed the resume on those.
By then, the recruiter had died of a heart attack.
And I got his job.
Ears
Our first four cats never cleaned each others ears.
They didn’t bond with each other.
Then, when Nardo was alone, the last cat standing, I found Bruwyn the kitten in the rain.
He bonded with Nardo, and tried to clean his ears.
Nardo freaked out, thinking it was an attack.
When we got Myst, she and Bruwyn cleaned each others ears.
And tried to groom Nardo’s.
Over time, he let them, and then would poke his head at them while they groomed themselves.
When he died, Bruwyn and Myst cleaned his ears, a final sign of respect to their mentor.
Whisper
“He’ll tell you when it’s time,” the vet had said.
After scrubbing so many sticky sprays of vomit out of the carpet and bedsheets, I kneel down and whisper into the old cat’s ear…
“Is it time?”
He gives no response. He doesn’t look up, ears back, eyes closed tighter, and I wait…
Slowly, he struggles to his feet.
Looking up, he meows. Twice.
Tail crookedly lifted high, he stumbles to the food bowl again.
Past the bottles of carpet stain remover.
The spat-out pills hidden in half-chewed treats.
I’m exhausted, and I feel guilty for wishing he’d say:
“Now.”
Freedom Riders
They called themselves the Freedom Riders.
No, I’m not talking about the brave who rode interstate buses to break up segregationist policies.
I’m talking about the passengers on Kendargu freighters who, despite paying a fortune for passage, suffered cramped and horrible conditions in the ships.
So, they put together a plan to break out of their tiny cabin mid-voyage.
The cabin was cramped because temporal and inertial dampers take up a lot of room.
Those that didn’t get phase-shifted to jumpspace ended up as that messy paste spread out on the cargo bay walls.
Oh well. Go get some mops.
Mother’s Day
We watch the suntigers weave among the clouds, chasing each other.
Every so often, they fight, and a glinting tooth falls from the sky.
Picking through the underbrush, we collect them in baskets and return to the archmage’s hut.
He looks over our harvest, tosses away the fractured ones, and spots a good solid crystal.
“Perfect,” he says.
He places it over the eyes of our mother’s corpse, chants something, and then holds the crystal up to the light.
Mother’s battered face appears on the opposite wall.
“Parker the Butcher,” it says.
The killer is arrested, and justice is done.
Hole in the ground
Bobby wanted to dig a hole to China.
His mother said it couldn’t be done.
So, instead of digging to China, he dug a hole to Hell.
That wasn’t so hard to do, really. Just took him a few minutes dripping some blood from his fingertip on to his trowel.
The trowel bit into the dirt, drew out a clump, and a large blast of fire and heat exploded from the back yard.
Bobby, his mother, and the house vanished instantly.
After a day of infernal madness, the government sealed off the block and said “It’s just a gas leak.”
The Invasion
After the invasion, we spent trillions of dollars rebuilding the infrastructure we’d bombed and destroyed, sacrificing thousands of soldiers fighting the insurgents thwarting those rebuilding efforts.
Despite the unpopularity and the massive expense of the project, the politicians ordered the military and the contractors to continue.
Then, one day, a builder took off his hard hat, looked around at the beautifully-paved streets and newly-painted shopping malls and schools and houses and hospitals, and he said “It looks like we’re done.”
A security contractor nodded his head, and then said: “Nice place. But quiet. Is anybody left alive to enjoy it?
The Bodyguard Is Totally Fucked
The beautiful
Amazing
Talented
Whitney Houston,
The butt
Of so many jokes
Over the years
And years
Of drug abuse,
Was found dead
By her bodyguard
In the bathtub
Of her hotel room
With a bottle of pills
In her hand,
And the first thing
That I think of
Is that the bodyguard
Is totally
Fucked.
His job?
To protect her!
Stalkers?
Paparazzi?
Her ex husband,
Bobby Brown,
That motherfucking
Son of a bitch!
He couldn’t protect her
From her worst enemy:
Herself.
She was in a movie
Called “The Bodyguard”
For crying out loud!
The bodyguard
Is totally
Fucked.