Santa’s making his list, checking it twice.
Too bad for John Bettencourt (now known as Paul Miller of Orlando, Florida) that he doesn’t check with the Witness Protection Program.
John wanted chocolate-covered truffles from his favorite online catalog store, but instead of using a new shopper ID, he used his old one.
Santa didn’t notice. But the crooked defense contractor that John blew the whistle on did.
A box arrived the next day.
“Mmmmmmmm… truffles!” John said.
He opened it, setting off the parcel bomb.
It wasn’t reindeer on the rootops, but bloody bits of John raining down on them.
Category: My stories
Ground Hog
It be Groundhog Day.
We has a special on groundhog burgers today.
What do it taste like?
I dunno, I ain’t tried one yet.
Go ahead. Try one. It on special, so it don’t cost much.
And you get fries and Coke. Free refills.
(The Coke, not fries. That extra.)
What you say? “This groundhog fresh?”
Course it’s fresh. Just runned them over with my truck this mornin’.
Even got one big sucker with my fender that some dude in the park was holdin’ up.
Yeah, the news say there’s six more weeks of winter comin’, but not for him.
The Lost Ring
I’ve lost so much weight, my ring slipped off the other day.
I searched along the path I took, but couldn’t find it.
When I first got the ring, I felt its presence, but quickly got used to it.
Now that it’s gone, I constantly notice that it’s not there.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling, and I want to put it back on, but it’s gone.
So I will get a new one soon.
My wife was deathly ill last year.
Would I have had to remove the ring if she hadn’t have recovered?
I’d have kept it.
For remembrance.
(Right?)
Die In A Fire
Did I ever tell you about my friend Diana Fire?
Parents can be cruel, choosing names.
When she was a child, she liked to play with matches. Every year, she’d ask for a new Barbie Dream House, but by Valentine’s day, Barbie would be back in her shoebox, hair singed and skin scorched a bit more.
Through the years, she blazed a trial through homes, jobs – burning every bridge.
I got a call this morning. Had to identify her body.
Froze to death after getting locked in a walk-in cooler. Ruined the irony potential there.
So we’ll have her cremated.
Hit Somebody
Every February 29th, we celebrate St. Punch Somebody In The Face Day.
Everybody gets to throw one punch.
But there’s no limit on how many punches you’ll take.
It’s fun to look out the window, watching the neighbors run around, frightened and excited at the same time.
Me, I’m a masochist, because I walk down the street, smiling my shit-eating grin and daring people.
By the time I get back home, not a single punch.
Well, not this year.
In the past, I got my share. Messed me up good.
Now they turn away, disgusted at what they see.
Cowards.
Looms
Don’t believe the horror stories about textile mills.
Sometimes, they can be fun places.
Once a year, when we’ve made our production targets and have some material left over to play with, I like to go down into the floor and shuffle the punchcards like a Vegas dealer.
Then, I stack them back into the machine and start up the looms.
The patterns that emerge are stomach-wrenching eyesores, complete and total crimes against fashion and decency.
We get out the patterns, make them into slacks, and what we don’t sell to professional golfers we give as gifts to our grandfathers.
Double Rainbow
I’m not sure about the science of it, but every time we see a rainbow here in Skittles Valley, it rains bits of colorful candy.
Everybody runs around with buckets, catching the candy.
When all of our silos are full, the candy company comes around and buys up our annual harvest.
However, every now and then, there’s a double rainbow.
Nobody’s standing around with a camera shouting “WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”
Instead, we run to our cellars and wait for the storm to pass.
Glass breaks.
Wood splinters.
The winds howl.
What does it mean?
Insurance rates are going up.
What On Earth?
Everybody’s going to the new salon on Fifth Street.
For some reason, it’s all the rage, but the styles they come up with are dreadful.
“You look like you stuck your finger in a light socket,” I told my friend. Her hair was standing a foot tall from her head. “What on earth made you do such a thing?”
Then I caught a sparkle inside her hair. The updo was meant to conceal an antenna.
But there was a fully-exposed pod on the back of her neck. No coverage at all.
They might conquer earth, but they’ll never be in-style.
Hear The Horns
The world is out of sync.
Maybe God got the speed of sound and the speed of light got mixed up this morning, but now I hear things before I see them.
The alarm going off before the clock showed 6.
Birds singing on empty telephone wires.
I try to cross the street and I hear cars honking, the screeching of brakes.
But it’s a red light. The WALK sign is lit.
I am crushed to the curb.
Hit by a car?
People shouting. Sirens. Unseen hands lift me.
So much pain.
I still haven’t seen what hit me yet.
Laminated
Flat Stanley became flat when a bulletin board fell on him.
You believe that he went on a series of wild adventures, right? Catching art thieves, sliding under doors, and mailing himself to far-off distant lands?
What really happened was a quiet, closed-coffin funeral.
His little brother Arthur was traumatized, shipped off to a mental hospital.
Every time his parents visited, he’d hand them another book he’d written about Stanley.
Alive. Adventuring.
Under his hospital bed, they found crushed and laminated mice.
“Experiments,” said Arthur, grinning
He escaped last night. Stole a steamroller.
Oh my God! The Mall!
Stop him!