Ted dropped his coffee as he stumbled and fell to the sidewalk.
He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t move.
They had been fully charged… he always checked before going out the door…
Ted crawled out of the way and leaned against a building, then pulled the status panel out of his pocket.
FIRMWARE 34% LOADED it said.
35%… 36%… 37%…
Updates? Now?
Weren’t those supposed to run overnight?
He called the office, told them he’d be late.
“Traffic,” he said, hanging up.
He closed the status app, tapped on Angry Birds 6, and waited for the reboot.
Tag: silly
Torrid
Fred opened up his CAD program, drew a circle, and then revolved it on a plane around a point.
He colored the resulting donut shape pink.
Then, he revolved a blue rectangle… it looked like a disk with a hole in it.
Triangle… a pentagon… a hexagon… other shapes…
The screen filled quickly.
He looked around for the original pink donut he’d made… gone?
So was the blue disk.
Searching… searching… searching…
He found them in a server in Hawaii, happily interlocked in each others’ axes.
Let them enjoy their toroid love affair, he thought, and shut down his workstation.
Bottled Up
Bob’s analyst told him not to keep his feelings bottled up.
So, Bob stopped bottling them up, and he put them in cans.
He forgot to heat them to kill the bacteria, and he ended up sick.
Then he tried dehydrating his feelings, but people accused him of being jerky to them.
Freeze-drying his feelings left him feeling cold.
“Why not just leave them fresh?” I said.
“They’re just too raw,” said Bob.
So, he went back to bottling his feelings up.
He had to get new bottles, though. I’d turned the old ones in to collect the deposit.
Emily
A friend gave me an old handmade book as a gift.
She said the book had been in Emily Dickinson’s house, and she had always kept it within reach.
I looked at the cover… it was too stained and battered to read what was on it.
So, I opened it carefully…
It was a volume of poems I’d never seen published before.
And they were terrible. Really awful.
Completely unlike anything Emily Dickinson had ever written.
“Oh, she didn’t write this book,” she said. “She used it to swat bugs and spiders. She was horribly afraid of the damned things.”
President Spider
The doctor says I need to face my fear.
So, I think about my biggest fear.
Heights.
I don’t like heights.
I get scared in glass elevators and standing at railings.
I worry about falling over. I feel like I’m falling.
Then I realize… I’m even more afraid of spiders.
They totally creep me out, with their beady little eyes and hairy little legs.
And the fangs… so gross!
The doctor says “What about spiders in high places?”
What? Like the White House?
A spider becoming president? President Spider?
Scary, sure, but he’s served two terms and can’t run again.
Play Ball
Every ballgame begins with the playing of the national anthem.
Some local choir was singing, and they sounded great…
“Over the land of the free
And the home of the brave?”
The crowd cheered, and the home plate umpire shouted “PLAY BALL!” but the players didn’t take the field.
They liked the choir’s singing so much, they wanted to hear them sing for a bit more.
“We’re not in a rush, right?” said the managers. “The stadium’s got lights. And tomorrow’s a travel day.”
So, they laid out blankets on the field, got some sodas, and everybody enjoyed the choir.
Scope
The supply room at the university hospital was manned by a lunatic, so whenever you tried to order a replacement microscope, it was highly possible you’d get something entirely different.
One technician got a periscope. He had to move his office one floor down to read his slides.
Another technician ended up with a telescope. He had to move his office to the moon.
A third technician received a kaleidoscope. He never did get much work done after that, marveling at the pretty colors all day.
I got a colonoscope and got fired for pulling data out of my ass.
Red Book
Whenever my parents fought and I had to stay overnight at my grandparents’ house, Grampa pulled a red book from the shelf and read bedtime stories to me.
They fought a lot, so I was over there once… twice a week.
And a new story each night, one I’d never heard since.
When I was a senior in high school, there was a carbon monoxide leak, and Grandma and Grampa died.
I found the red book of Grampa’s stories, opened it, and saw it was full of the raunchiest pornography I’d ever seen.
I guess Grampa was a good improviser.
Cries
The baby’s crying. And she won’t stop, no matter what I do.
I remember my mother telling me that there’s no crying over spilled milk, so I rush to the refrigerator, get the milk, and spill some on her.
And, like magic, she stops.
Through the silence, we stare at each other for a while.
She has my eyes, but the rest is so Jason.
I smile, and she smiles… and laughs.
And laughs. And laughs.
She cannot stop laughing.
What did mom say? Ah: “No laughing at the misfortune of others.”
What? How the hell do I do that?
Not yet written
My mother always said that “God has not yet written the future.”
And she was right.
God never writes shit down.
Oh, He may send an angel or a burning bush to harass someone, and they’ll freak out and tell a bunch of people about it. But, really, God doesn’t write anything down.
Ever wonder why?
It’s because His handwriting is awful. Like a child holding a crayon in their fist.
And he’s too cheap to buy a voice recorder, let alone think about starting a podcast or YouTube channel.
So, He created mankind. To write shit down for him.