Tag: society

Assembly

assembly.mp3

I like to walk through the drive through lane at the bank and ask for a loan for a car.
Usually, I get a laugh, but one day – that pneumatic tube machine wheezes and PLOMP! It lands on the hopper.
I open it up, and there”s a set of car keys.
I pull the keys out and hit the Call button – “Very funny,” I said. “What should I do with these?”
PLOMP! Another tube shows up. There”s an instruction booklet in there for assembling a car.
PLOMP! Some spark plugs.
PLOMP! A fanbelt.
PLOMP! PLOMP! PLOMP!
This could get messy.

Shopping List

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My shopping list is on the New York Times Bestseller’s List.
I don’t know what happened, but I got a call from a reporter asking me questions about being an author, and I had no idea what was going on.
Oprah, Good Morning America, Regis… they all want to talk to me.
I don’t know what’s so compelling about my shopping list, but I guess it touched a whole bunch of people.
One critic claims that I plagiarized my list. Another says that it was ghostwritten.
All I know is that I really need milk, eggs, butter, and trash bags.

Fiddle

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If hillbillies call a violin a fiddle, what do they call themselves a cello?
Truth is, hillbilly ain’t seen no cellos never. But they always a first time.
First time a hillbilly seen himself a cello, he thought it warn’t nothin’ but a big ol fiddle for a big ol giant.
So the hillbilly think himself a big man, all hillbilly do, put the cello up at his fool neck and he try to play the thing fiddle-like.
Yeah, he break his neck, fall down dead right there, cello fallin on him.
They says a giant kilt him dead, sir.

Your Other Left

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The road turned left.
Macy turned right.
They found her truck the next morning, smashed into a big oak tree.
Macy was sitting in the bed of the pickup, smoking a cigarette through shattered teeth.
The Sheriff asked her if she was alright.
Macy looked back through two black eyes and shrugged.
“I guess so,” she said. “I”ve felt better, though.”
The Sheriff got up in the truck bed and bummed a smoke off of Macy. “Shame about the truck,” he said.
“Shame about the tree, too,” she said.
He nodded, and they waited for the tow truck in silence.

Moonshine

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Nothing ever good comes out of a mason jar, my grandmother always says.
And if you’re drinking her special blend of moonshine out of one, well, she’s absolutely right.
What’s stronger than a mule kicking you? An elephant? An ostrich?
This shit kicks harder that a whole zoo stampede.
Takes the wallpaper off of the walls, too. Every damn clich” you can come up with for moonshine, well, this shit does it to you worse.
That’s why I poured mine out on the daisies and filled my mason jar with water.
I may be kinfolk, but I ain’t fuckin crazy.

Space Program

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You know all those monkeys and dogs they shot up into space in the Sixties?
They never told the public the truth about those animals in the space program.
But I will.
Every time they fired up one of those monkeys up into the sky, a dog would come down.
And when they fired a dog into space, back down they’d get a monkey.
Scientists couldn’t explain it. Dogs turned into monkeys and monkeys turned into dogs.
Years later, the Russians revealed that their dogs also turned into monkeys and their monkeys turned into dogs.
They couldn’t explain it either.

The Trucks

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Around the clock, the trucks keep coming across the border.
The ones heading North are full of dirt and rocks.
The ones heading South are also full of dirt and rocks, but it’s different dirt and rocks.
We’re not sure why Canada and Mexico are sending all this stuff back and forth, but as long as their trucks keep paying the toll and buying our gas, we really don’t care.
They could haul more back and forth if they used freight trains, but some treaty requires that they use trucks.
So they are.
But why do it at all?
Strange.

Broken Notes

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Walter’s saxophone was tired of screaming out the same, broken notes every night.
Practice makes perfect, but in Walter’s case, it just made more noise.
And it made Walter’s saxophone utterly miserable.
One day, Walter tried to take the saxophone out of its case, but it had been locked.
He looked all over the place for the key, but he couldn’t find it.
He accused his neighbors of stealing the key, but none of them had taken it.
Walter didn’t want to break the lock, because it might damage the saxophone.
Never mind that the damage had already been done.

Flying To Peru

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I can’t remember if it’s starve a cold or feed a fever, but I’m quite sure that neither is cured by flying to Peru.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked my doctor.
“What, you want to get a second opinion?” he said.
Sure enough, the other doctor looked me over and said “Fly to Peru.”
So here I am, flying to Peru.
Not sure what I’m supposed to do when I get there, but when two doctors agree on something, you’re supposed to do it.
My insurance plan agreed, but they’re not flying me first class.
Damn cheap HMO’s.

Level Playing Field

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All of the headstones are flush with the ground, which has been flattened to allow for quick and easy lawn maintenance.
The groundskeepers are supposed to collect up the flowers and flags and candles and other items left behind, but they never do.
There’s a brief change in tone of the drone of the lawnmower as it chews up and spits out pieces of whatever trinket it’s absorbed, spraying it across the lawn with the grass clippings.
The leaf-blowers toss the grass clippings, leaves, and shards of shared memory into the air.
I’m sure it lands somewhere. Not my problem.