Doris opens a beer, puts it in front of me.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” she says, and she opens one for herself.
I drink, and wonder if it’s Winter somewhere.
“Well, it’s Summer here, so maybe in Australia?”
I nod, pick up the phone, and try to remember if I know someone in Australia.
I check my contacts, look through my email, searched my Facebook friends…
It used to be you used phones to call people.
I put down the phone and drink my beer.
Somewhere, it’s Winter. And somewhere, it’s five o’clock.
But right here, my beer’s getting warm.
Tag: drugs
A sticky situation
You heard about Joe?
Joe spends all day sniffing glue.
It all started when he was trying to glue two things together and they didn’t stick.
“Does glue go bad?” he asked his wife. “You know, like milk.”
“Does it have an expiration date?” his wife replied.
He looked for an expiration date on the bottle, but there wasn’t one.
“Nope. Maybe if I smell it…”
And that’s when the glue-sniffing started.
“No, really,” he’d say, as high as a kite. “I’m just checking to see if it’s still good.”
Then he’d sniff and let out a long, slow “Yessssssssssssssssssss.”
A Twist Of Lime
“A twist of lime,” says the man in the green suit to the bartender.
“With what?” the bartender asks.
“Nothing. Just the lime.”
The bartender slices up the lime and the man in the green suit lays on the bar, staring up at the glasses and lights hanging over it.
He opens his mouth and says “Go for it.”
The bartender shrugs, squeezes a lime wedge into the man’s mouth.
The man in the green suit sits up with a grumble, wincing with disgust.
“I said twist, not squeeze!” He lays back.
The bartender twists another wedge.
“Oh… so… good.”
Froggy
Froggy went a courtin’, he did ride.
Sword and pistol by his side.
He was also a little drunk.
Okay, very drunk. Drunk as a skunk.
Except that the skunk he ended up courtin’ wasn’t drunk.
She was sober, and uninterested in Froggy.
Froggy wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So, the skunk sprayed him right in his gigantic bulbous eyes.
Froggy spun in circles, screaming bloody murder. We laughed.
We weren’t laughing when he pulled the pistol and began shooting wildly.
Killed three.
And really impressed the skunk.
(Later, Froggy sobered up, saw his bride, the skunk, and ran.)
The Drunk
Casey slurred his words like a drunk, but the man didn’t drink. He’d suffered a stroke a few years ago and never quite got his speech all the way back.
He wanted to hang out with us at the bar, though, and we figured he’d make a good designated driver, being sober and all.
We drank ourselves blind stinking drunk, and handed Casey the keys.
Fifteen mailboxes and trash cans later, my truck got wrapped around a lightpost.
“I thought you didn’t drink,” I growled at Casey.
“I don’t drink,” he slurred. “Or drive. I don’t have a drivers license.”
Once upon a Tim
Once upon a Tim, there was a happy colony of bacteria.
I can’t tell you where that colony was on Tim, but wherever it was, the bacteria were happy.
Tim, on the other hand, was not happy.
The bacteria were flesh-eating bacteria, and since Tim was the closest flesh to them, the bacteria were eating Tim.
Tim lay in the hospital, nurses pumping antibiotics into his body while doctors prepared for emergency radical amputation.
The bacteria lived happily ever after in a petri dish at the CDC.
Tim, or what was left of him, didn’t.
(Who cares, right?)
The end.
Noodge
My people worship Noodge, God of Constant Guidance.
There’s no priests to spread His word or prophets of His revelation, as He is here with us.
That’s him at the bar, the guy in the robe drinking a beer. That’s Noodge.
He is always telling us what to do, how to do things, and constantly judging us.
What? You don’t see Him? You don’t hear Him telling the barkeeper how to best pour a beer?
You’re serious, right? Heresy’s a dangerous thing. Noodge might hear you and… well, He just nags us more.
(Teach us how to ignore Him too!)
Look In The Mirror
I pour the white dust out on to the mirror and quickly chop it into lines.
One by one, they vanish up my nose.
I let the rush carry me for a minute and then sniff whatever I can off of the mirror before putting it away.
That’s when I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror.
My eyes are bloodshot.
My face is thin and gray.
I barely recognize myself. What have I done?
That’s the moment where I make the promise never to do it again.
I’ll never look at myself in the mirror after doing cocaine.
Rehab
731801
Things got crazy at the party. Talia overdosed on longevity drugs and went into a coma.
We handed her off to the Sleeping Beauty Ward. They gave us an estimate of 80 years before she’d come out of it.
Eighty years?
They handed me the bill for her babysitting, and I scraped up most of it.
A kidney and some skin for burn grafts covered the rest.
That was 79 years ago. Vital signs say she’ll wake up soon.
Never did find anyone else, too old for her now.
I wrote one last note and walked to the termination center.
The Man
811215
After countless adventures with Curious George, The Man in the Yellow Hat got tired of chasing him down and having to pay for damage.
For a while, he kept the rambunctious monkey locked in a cage. The little creature couldn’t escape, and he would shriek all day long.
The neighbors complained. They said The Man that he was being cruel, keeping George in a cage, so he let George out and fed him tranquilizers.
These days, you’ll see them walking hand-in-hand, The Man smiling wide with his glassy-eyed, simian zombie.
“Wipe the drool from your lip, George,” he says.
Pathetic.