The fear holds me tight.
The judge demands an answer, but I have none.
I take the Swiss Army Tool from my pocket, flick out the sharpest blade, and draw it cross my left palm.
It doesn’t take long for enough blood to well up, and I quickly draw a circle around my feet.
“O Great Ancestors!” I shout. “Guide me through this moment of peril!”
The dust begins to swirl… the lights grow dark… a rumbling from the skies…
“DISQUALIFIED!” shouts the judge.
The dust settles, the lights come back up.
“Next contestant: Zymurgy.”
And they spell it right.
Tag: silly
The great heaving gust
I like to flavor my iced tea with freshly-squeezed lemon.
Usually, I squeeze the lemons with a tool that catches the seeds, but sometimes I’m in a rush and squeeze them by hand, dropping the seeds into my tea.
This usually isn’t a problem. But when I drink my tea with a straw, sometimes the seeds get caught in the straw, and I have to work them out from the straw with a series of squeezes.
Or, with a great gust of breath, I can shoot the seed across the room and out the sliding glass door to the patio.
Dr. Quack
Of all the doctors I’ve had over the years, the best one was named Quack.
Yes, his name was Quack. And he was great!
When I had an ache in my foot, he cured me of it.
Okay, so he cured me by cutting off my foot, and I admit that was a bit extreme, but it hasn’t hurt since.
The ringing in my ear… solved!
The arthritis in my hand… solved!
The migraines…
Well, those, I’ve still got. I made an appointment with him, but his office was empty.
Except for his guillotine.
Mind pulling the cord for me?
Diction
September 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
All across the world, people say things like “Yarrrrr!” and “Avast, ye scurvy dogs!” and “Me hearties!” and silly pirate-speak phrases like that.
Especially to pirates they meet on that day.
Pirates don’t find this amusing.
It’s like walking up to someone from Australia and saying “Throw another shrimp on the Barbie!”
So when a pirate draws his cutlass and shouts “I’ll have ye guts fer garters!” the proper response is not to applaud at their impressive diction, but to run like hell.
Although, to be honest, pirates rarely wear garters.
Power of prayer
I knelt down by the bed and barely had said “Dear Lord” before I heard a loud booming voice shout:
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT NOW?
“God?” I whispered.
I SAID WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT NOW?
“I just wanted to say thanks, and I look forward to tomorrow,” I said.
BULLSHIT.
“Seriously, I’m cool,” I said.
WELL, HERE’S A FUCKIN BICYCLE SOME KID KEEPS ASKING FOR, BUT THE KID’S AN ASSHOLE, SO FUCK HIM.
And a bicycle appeared on my bed.
“Amen?” I said.
DAMN STRAIGHT.
It was kid-sized. Useless to me.
I donated it to charity.
Meet the Neighbors
My wife and I tend to keep to ourselves when we’re not working, so we don’t really know the neighbors in our apartment complex all that well.
Sometimes, we hear them late at night, playing the guitar. Or shouting.
So, it was a relief when we saw some guys emptying out the apartment next door into a truck.
“Moving out?” I asked.
“Yup,” said a guy.
The next day, the doorbell rang.
It was the police.
“Moving out? Those were guys robbing the place. Don’t you know your neighbors?”
An angry couple stood behind them.
I waved. “Now I do.”
Irony Rocks
The arts and crafts store sells stones engraved with words:
Welcome
Hope
Love
They’re meant to be placed in gardens.
But I like to put them in a sack, wait until midnight, and hurl them through noisy and rude neighbors’ windows.
The house full of fratboys, cranking their speakers every goddamned night.
The paperboy who comes around every week trying to sell me a subscription that I don’t want.
The jerks who never mow their lawn.
The ones with the dog that shits in my yard.
And, of course, my own window.
(So they don’t think it’s me doing it.)
Fuss
It was another quiet day at the library, right?
Wrong.
An old couple burst in through the front door, fussing and arguing with each other loudly.
Then, the old woman grabbed the gigantic dictionary off of the reference desk, opened it to the last page, and RIPPPPPPPPPPPP! tore it out.
Sticking it in her purse, she repeated this with all the other dictionaries, and then stormed out of the building.
The old man stuck some cash into my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Here’s some money for the damage.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She always insists on having the last word.”
The Whorologist Of Babylon
The first thing that Dr. Foster was told when he first joined the Royal Observatory Museum’s staff was to describe his job as researching and maintain historical timepieces.
“People crack jokes when we say horology, and they never take us seriously,” said the museum’s director.
“When I say I’m the director of a horology institute, they ask me if that makes me a pimpologist.”
The director winked, pressed a button, and twenty beautiful women in various states of undress walked into the room.
“I wind everybody else’s watch all day long,” he said. “So why not have them wind mine?”
The Alarm
What? Huh?
I wake up to a cat leaping up to the bed, walking along the blanket, and curling up on top of my butt.
I turn to look at the alarm clock.
It’s 5:29. The alarm will go off at 5:30.
I turn to look at the cat.
“That butt’s going away soon,” I say.
Eyes closed, the cat flicks an ear.
The alarm goes off.
The cat, eyes still closed, takes a firm grip with his claws.
I reach for the clock and hit the snooze bar.
We’ll deal with it later.
And I go back to sleep.