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MUNSI
Drop the Anchors
By Christopher Munroe
Anchors away?
Never! And to hell with anyone who’d suggest such a thing!
To hell!
There’s an anchor crisis here, at home! Right in our own backyard there are no anchors, unless you live near a shipyard in which case maybe, but what about the people who DON’T live near shipyards? What about them?
Yet some would send our anchors away? Never! An anchor in every garage! I believe in anchors for everyone, and nothing’s stopping us but our own unwillingness to act!
So act we shall!
Something something, and let’s set course to this bold, new, anchorful future, together!
JEFFREY
Retirement
by Jeffrey Fischer
I helped my friend Mike pack his office. He was retiring at the end of the week and wanted to take home his handful of personal items. While Mike sorted through desk drawers, I removed anything hanging on the walls.
Most were pictures of family or vacation spots, but occupying a place of honor was Mike’s treasured “Employee of the Year” plaque. I tugged at it, but the plaque refused to move. Studying it, I saw a large bolt anchoring it to the wall. The plaque wasn’t going home without a large chunk of plasterboard.
“Oh, just leave that,” Mike said.
“Your award? Your recognition for years of hard work?”
“Well, someone’s hard work. It came with the office. I guess the previous guy couldn’t pry it loose.”
The Diagnosis
by Jeffrey Fischer
My wife came out of the physician’s office with a grim look on her face. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Dr. Boothe said the pains were likely from a tumor.” She fought back tears. “Judging from the size and position, he said I may have only a few weeks.”
I sank into a chair, my legs unable to hold me. How could this be? My rock, my anchor, the one person I could always rely on – gone in a few weeks?
My wife saw my grief-stricken expression and laughed. “April Fool! He thinks it’s just indigestion and I’ll be fine. Had you going, though.”
I later told the police, after I killed her, that she didn’t even have the month right.
RICHARD
Sailor
I never realised just how difficult being a sailor could be for someone who takes things as literally as me.
It started when the captain told me to weigh anchor… It took me a week to find a set of scales that could handle it.
Then I was told to station myself in the crow’s nest – but just how do you find a crow so far out to sea? In the end I settled for a seagull, but I can’t say the captain was impressed.
It was time to quit, when I was ordered to scrub the poop deck!
SERENDIPITY
When you told me to throw out the anchor, you should really have been far more careful about how you phrased it.
Right this minute, you’re wondering why we’re still drifting… creeping ever closer, inexorably towards the jagged reef and its needle sharp coral fingers.
And, as the hull splinters and splits on the rocks below; as the sea rushes in to drag you under to your doom, you’ll turn to me, eyes imploring ‘Why?’
And, I’ll smile back, and your final memory will be the siren’s song, echoing across the waves, as my sisters welcome me home, once more.
ZACKMANN
“What brings you into Cliff’s Tattoo Parlor today?”
“Well, I just got this job as an anchorman for a new cable news network;Unbroken News. They thought I would be edgier if I got a tattoo.”
“Are they the ones whose slogan is At least as accurate as The Onion.”? That seems like a low standard” said Cliff
“You would think but three of the existing networks can’t manage to do it.” said the newsman “Unbroken New instructed prior Navy gets an anchor tattoo.”
“A ship’s anchor?”
“No. I can still follow instructions getting Walter Cronkite’s character from We’re Back”
LIZZIE
Survivor
“I refuse to sink” read the tattoo on her chest. Decades of wars and narrow escapes turned her into a survivor. Yet, she knew. The capsule injected under her skin was her anchor.
As a child, she disappeared for a week, to her parents’ frantic despair. When she returned, the stories of strange looking beings with oddly shaped eyes and white skin were hurriedly dismissed.
When they finally came back for the data in the capsule, she smiled. That was the moment she had lived for. She asked them “take me with you” and they did. She’s over 250 today.
TOM
Hay Kid we can put on a show.
Why so glum Timmy? Cindy Lu needs a new iron lung, but Grandpa Joe can’t raise the money because the Bank is foreclosing on his farm,” said the lad plopping down on a bale of hay. “Heck Kid you gave me a great idea. We can take all this hay and make it into seating for a Musical Extravaganza right here in the barn. Will do a review, call it Anchors Way. A wandering Hollywood executive will see it and will make it into a big old Hollywood movie, make plenty of scratch get Cindy that brand new iron lung.
American Enterprise
The treasure fleet anchored in the bay. The Pomo representative boarded the Great Khan’s flagship with five oaken chests. In Chinese fluent, he greeted the Master Merchant with a long riddle. Tinsu Lang replied in prefect Pomo, “Coyote would ask the turtle.” “Then we are in agreement.” 30 bolts of crimson silk appeared alongside 30 pots of crimson spices. The Pomo dealer opened the oak chests filled to the top with Lake Diamonds and Konocti Obsidian arrow heads. Of all the riches that flowed across the continent the most valuable was beware the Europeans. The guns sure came in handy.
NORVAL JOE
Popeye went into the tattoo shop and asked to have his trademark anchor tattoo removed.
“If we remove it, we won’t know it’s you. It would be as bad as getting rid of the spinach.”
“Thacks the poink,” Popeye said, explaining that the belief that spinach had more iron was based on a decimal error on a government report from the late 1800. It’s no better for you than broccoli.
“It’s easier to cover the tattoo with something, than remove it,” the tattooist said. “How about Olive oil?”
They settled on Bluto, whom Popeye had secretly loved all these years.
TURA
Anchor
——–
There was once an anchoress, walled up in a cell in a church, to spend her days in contemplation. There was no door, only a barred window through which she might hear mass.
One day, the devil came to tempt her.
“Holy mother,” he said, “how brave to rise above the sneers of the ignorant, to be willingly shut up in the darkness! Do you never long to walk through the world of God’s creation?”
“What?” exclaimed the man who swept up the elephant dung in the circus, who had wandered in from another joke. “And give up show business?”
——–
KIMI
I sat in the third row on a metal folding chair in a small room off of the main chapel. Bill’s casket was open and I could see a few wisps of curly black hair and the heavy horn-rimmed glasses set astride his waxy nose.
Leaning back, I closed my eyes and ears to the goings on around me and thought of the sweet big guy that would wrap his burly arms around you and snug in close as he shared his amazing ooey-gooeyness.
I will miss those long, I Really Mean It hugs, Anchors AWeigh, my friend
PLANET Z
My first job out of college was with a public television station.
After my internship finished, I was asked to help the transmitter engineer with computer support.
Lots of already-ancient Tandy 1000’s stacked up in the warehouse, gathering dust.
Someone joked that we should give them away, like we did with mugs, tote bags, and Three Tenors CDs.
“Or use them as boat anchors,” said the transmitter engineer.
I left that place years ago. Never went back, didn’t keep in touch.
I imagine that old transmitter engineer out on his boat, hauling up a dead PC and sailing for Cuba.
