Poor Charlie Brown.
Every Halloween, we’d watch his Great Pumpkin Special, hoping he’d get candy, but he ended up getting a bag full of rocks.
I’d dream of Charlie, waking up before the break of dawn with that bag full of rocks, going from house to house, tossing those rocks through windows and yelling “ALL I WANTED WAS SOME GODDAMNED CANDY!”
Instead, I think he crafted Pet Rocks out of them and made a fortune selling them as Christmas gifts.
People got bored with them, and on Halloween, they’d drop them in Charlie’s bag again.
“SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!”
Tag: commentary
The Bottom Line
He started as a software programmer, making cool games that sold millions of copies.
Now, as the CEO of his own software company, he was all about the bottom line.
Which was bottoming out.
“MAKE ME THE NEXT KILLER APP!” he shouted at his programmers.
So, the programmers worked up code that linked a phone’s motion sensors, GPS, and traffic data.
Whenever the driver of a car was in heavy traffic and going very fast, the phone would make a horribly distracting noise that would cause the driver to crash.
They installed it on the CEO’s phone.
Without telling him.
Curse The Darkness
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.
The Revolution
People are talking about a revolution with this Occupy Wall Street thing, but I’m not so sure about it.
I’m busy watching television, surfing porn, and eating Big Macs. The most I’ll do is Retweet or Like or Plus One the revolution.
The first man up against the wall when the revolution comes will be Banksy, because he’ll be tagging it with something insightful and cool and clever as the crowd starts lining up the crooked bankers and dirty lawyers and inside traders and economic traitors.
The problem with being famously anonymous is that you can’t prove who you are.
The Evil Clown
Walking home from work, I saw a strange sight.
An evil clown was at the corner, waving a sign advertising a costume shop.
Halloween is next week, you know.
Anyway, I watched the evil clown dance and wave his sign at the passing traffic.
Not the most dignified of jobs, I know, but it’s still a job.
Plus, it’s unlikely that it’ll be outsourced to India, since there’s no point in some clown in Bangalore waving a sign around there when the store it’s advertising is in Houston, Texas.
“The economy’s looking up,” I said, and went along my way.
Billy Hill
My name is William Hill.
Call me William.
Do not call me Billy.
In school, the teacher would read the roll call.
So, he’d read my name as Hill Billy.
And everyone would laugh.
They’d ask me if I bathed in a creek, slept in a pig pen, or if my dad made moonshine.
Yes, I bathed in a creek.
Yes, I slept in a pigpen.
And, yes, my dad made moonshine.
It was the best moonshine in the state, and when he got a distillery license, we got filthy stinking rich.
(Okay, so maybe the stink was the pigs.)
Out Of Network
Growing up, my pediatrician was Dr. Mengele.
Yes, it’s true. The infamous war criminal who did medical experiments in the Nazi concentration camps.
Sure, he went under the name Dr. Sherman, but he couldn’t fool me: he was Mengele.
How did I know?
Well, instead of “Feed a cold, starve a fever” he’d say “Gas a cold, gas a fever.”
When I sprained my ankle, he prescribed gas.
Same with upset stomach, chicken pox, and everything else that happened to me.
The worst part of it was that he was outside my Dad’s HMO network, so the co-pays were murder!
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.
The Prank
It was your typical kindergarten classroom.
Art supplies, colorful dangling mobiles, and a lot of construction paper cutouts.
On one board, a bunch of colors spelled out:
Red was red
Green was green
Blue was blue.
That weekend, Mom dragged me to a hobby shop.
I begged for construction paper letters.
When April first finally rolled around, the teacher left the room, and I took down the colored words.
Then, I added my own:
Blue was red
Red was yellow
Yellow was green
I got sent to the principal’s office.
But not for the prank.
They thought I was color-blind.
Change Bulbs
Instead of going out to lunch, I eat carrots and celery at my desk at work.
Then, when I get my lunch break, I go for an hourlong power walk through the tunnels under Downtown Houston.
During one of my walks, a crew of three men had spread a tarp on the floor and were changing lightbulbs.
But they were moving the ladder out of the way when people approached, not rotating it as one guy on it held the bulb.
Why they had the tarp on the floor, I never asked. I just walked back to work and pondered.