July 2010
43 posts
Super Friends
Aquaman is living with my parents. They advertised their spare room (formerly my bedroom) on Craigslist, and a day later he just turned up. Didn’t call beforehand, didn’t even have any references. He just introduced himself, and moved in.
They like him just fine. He keeps himself to himself, and always pays his rent (usually in doubloons.) A couple of times, they’ve taken him...
A Fragile Illusion
Congratulations on your purchase of a JenTek Holographic Girlfriend!
Do not ask it if it loves you.
My hobby.
There’s this old Simpsons episode that has a joke about bowling pins. Homer asks how they get picked up after they’re knocked over, and the camera pulls back and shows us an individual pin being grabbed by a mechanical arm and thrown out a window onto an enormous pile of other pins.
Then we see a felled and cut tree delivered to the alley, its sides shaved down even more until it is...
The Entertainment Business.
Jones was a puppet. Literally. Negotiations with the Ventriloquist’s Union always went through a two-foot tall, solid wood middle-man, and Barnaby Jones was my dummy of the day.
“All we’re asking for is decent pay, capped hours, and a full genefits package.” The clacking of his mouth gave his speech percussive accompaniment.
“I’m sorry, Barney, what was that...
The Big Bang.
Years ago, during my residency, I had a patient who was very old, and very sick. I spoke to him about his treatment options, and he waved them all away, and smiled.
“I think that it is time for me to go, Doctor. But thank you for your help.”
I had heard responses like his before, but usually they were uncertain, more a question that a statement. A patient could often be swayed with...
On camera.
I found a stack of photos on the day of your funeral. They were poorly shot, and looked like they had come from a disposable camera, but that was okay because it just gave them that nostalgic glow. You know what I mean? That faint over-exposure that looks like forgotten memories.
The pictures were all of you, and they were all of one place — our kitchen. It was before the redecoration, so...
Patterns.
I used to have an inbred cat. His name was Marmajeke, and his mother and father were siblings, and so he wasn’t quite right in the head. He would spend hours, every day, staring at the carpet, captivated by the patterns. He would be completely absorbed, wouldn’t even notice if you put a bowl of food right next to his head.
That’s why I imagine that he never saw the car that...
Espionage.
When David found the memory bomb, he didn’t attempt to disarm it, because that hadn’t been included in his training. Instead he searched — as taught — for something sentimental to hide behind, to limit the bomb’s effects.
He moved through the house quickly, dismissing the couch in the living room because — although they’d spent many nights there,...
In camera.
After a couple of years, all that tilt-shift photography really got to some people. There would be posts on Flickr and Tumblr from users who had stared at too many of the images, and now couldn’t see the world as anything other than a toy landscape; the people around them reduced to needle-thin bodies with blurred heads and lives of little consequence.
The rush these self-styled giants...
47 minutes.
1:43pm
This interview is going to be different. This time, when he asks me about my references, I’m not just going to say “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel. No, I’m… Look, I’ll have to call you back.” I am not going to poke him in the eyes and then leave the room, pausing to pee on the potted plant by the office door. I am not going to...
Security.
Um, okay, so, when you open up my laptop you might see some — how do I put this — some disreputable folders sitting on my desktop. I want to, uh, I want to reassure you, and tell you, Kate, that you really don’t need to look into them. In fact, please don’t, because they contain plans for — um — for your birthday! Yes, many birthday plans, and presents, and yes...
A Single Bound.
You talk to me every day. All of you. When you can hear the entire planet, every single word is part of a larger conversation. The coincidences are intriguing. When you were discussing curtains the other day, a man in India said “Yes Janice, that is a nice fabric.” And your name is Janice. Lots of you are named Janice.
It is distracting, all this chatter. I am fighting someone, and...
Never worn.
The thing is, Mrs. Wheeler, that that Hemingway dude you talked about had a whole lifetime to get good at telling little stories, and I’ve just had a few English classes. And I can’t come up with anything as short as you want, and the things I do come up with are just rip-offs of what he wrote, of that baby shoes thing.
And I got so stressed out about this assignment, and I could see...
Archive.
I’ve been reading through your blog. I started with today, and kept hitting the “back” button, and found myself — hours later — at the twenty-second of December, 2001.
As I read all those pages (well, skimmed, but that’s reading, nowadays, isn’t it?) I wondered if I would discover something new about you. Some essential truth that could be distilled from...
Side-show.
I saw the palm lady over the weekend. She invited me into her tent, and I broke my no-hastily-erected-outdoor-structures rule and went in because I was curious.
She looked at my hands and told me I was mean, and dishonest. She told me that I lied to people about how sick I was so I wouldn’t have to go to their parties. She told me that I was malicious, and destructive, and cruel. She told...
Weather report.
It is raining here. Like, really raining. Pouring it down, God-is-angry-at-us type, batten-down-the-hatches rain. I am using your umbrella.
I keep thinking about how water is supposed to be symbolic, supposed to be all about rebirth, and baptism, and change, and all I can think of, instead, is you drowning.
They say you can die in an inch of water. How many raindrops is that? Did you count...
Party.
This is what we are going to do for your birthday. We are going to dress up as your friends, and we are going to act like everything is okay. We are going to talk to you about work, and we are going to excuse ourselves to go to the bathroom and we are going to fix our make-up and we are going to compare notes on you.
We are going to wheel out an ice statue of a swan, and we are going to get our...
Test subject.
Laura was a college student, and was therefore in that perpetual condition of needing a little extra cash. When she saw an advertisement for a psychological study that would pay her three hundred dollars, she got excited by the possibility of being able to buy those textbooks the professors said were so important.
She was met by a small, thin man, with glasses and a ponytail, and a beard so fine...
Family business.
There’s always this little kid down at the bowling alley, and whenever I see him he’s usually only four to five minutes away from grabbing his fourteen pound ball and slamming it into his head.
He’s actually a really good bowler, and he gets a lot of strikes, and he picks up a bunch of spares, and he seems to have a really powerful throw considering his age. But every now and...
Lesson learned.
I wanted a puppy. I begged for a puppy. But my parents said I wasn’t responsible enough, so instead they got me an African child.
Not a real one, obviously. Looped footage of this tiny little boy, playing on the TV in my room 24 hours a day. They made me sit there and watch him. He didn’t do much. I remember thinking that his eyes were glazed, like donuts, and then I felt bad...
Fairy tale.
The town was in chaos. Full, mad, literal chaos. Nothing was the same twice. We would tie our shoelaces, or try to, and end up barefoot, in the loft, with a straw hat on our head. Or we would try and spoon cereal into our mouths and end up in the bathroom, trying to fix the toilet. Neither of these cases were anything special. They were part of the scenery, really. Nothing ever happened the same...
The Candidate.
“All Tuesday, all the time!” was his campaign slogan. None of us knew what it meant, but I guess enough of us thought it was funny, or cool, or interesting, and we voted him in. It was a landslide.
And then it was Tuesday. All the time. Every day we woke up, and it was Tuesday again. Calendars, computers, even the newspaper — everything said it was Tuesday.
So we all just...
A minute of your time.
When does the opposite of cliche start to become cliche itself? Does the purposeful avoidance of expectations trend towards boredom? How many times can you do extraordinary things until that is all you are, a mundane wonder, a life too large, a show-off with no audience — at least, not one that cares.
Anyway, I broke into prison last night. You see, it’s funny because normally people...
In case of emergency.
“To listen to your jumpsuit, dial five now” the voice said, and you did, and the switchboard connected you, and you heard nothing. That’s always a good sign, when you hear nothing. It’s what you’re looking for. The jumpsuits are kept in a vacuum-sealed pod, and the only reason you’d ever hear anything is if the seal had broken, or if there was a tear in your...
Science lesson.
The thing everyone always forgets about lightning is the fact that it doesn’t fall down from the heavens. It shoots up, from the ground. It’s been a stormy summer, and I’ve had my hi-speed camera, and I’ve actually seen it happen. And if lightning can go up, I figure other things can too.
I started with small stuff. Some books, an old CD, a jar of preserves. I wrapped...
My struggle.
I don’t trust anybody who was born after April 30th, 1945. That includes almost everyone I meet, except the old people I hang out with on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. I like to spend time with them, because they are the only people who you can be sure weren’t Hitler in a past life.
The odds of any single person I meet being Adolf Hitler’s reincarnation are, of course, six...
Super hero.
Sometimes when I’m bored at work, I talk to Wolverine in my head.
One day, I said to him that it must kind of suck to be Wolverine, and he disagreed and asked me why I thought that. And I told him that being Wolverine means being Wolverine all the time, and that there is never any room for him to take up stamp collecting, or watercolor painting or something else normal, because he has to...
Here are some things the game likes.
The game...
Division of assets.
The day we broke up,...
Foothold.
I tell people I’m a rock climber, when they ask, which they always do. People ask because I turn up to parties with chalk still on my hands, and they want to make sure that it’s not some huge quantity of cocaine. Actually, some of them probably hope that it is.
The usual response is “Oh, I didn’t know there was much money in that!” and I have to tell them that no,...
I don't want to call my family a bunch of racists.
But they have never looked kindly upon Alesha, my best friend. It’s not the fact that she’s from Africa that bothers them. It’s that’s she’s a giraffe. Specifically, a Rothschild giraffe. There are many different kinds, and sometimes they get offended when you mix them up.
People think it’s weird that Alesha and I are friends. People ask me what we do all day....
Room service.
I woke up one morning in a room that wasn’t my own, and I couldn’t remember how I got there. The walls were white, and gleaming, and the bed was comfortable. It took me a few minutes to panic.
I searched for doors, and found none. The same went for windows, hatches, vents, and tunnels. I began to cry. I rocked back and forth on the bed.
I must have rocked myself to sleep. When I...
"Take me to your leader."
“Take me to your leader” sounds trite, until you actually hear it from the mouth of an alien. I was leading a group of girl scouts on a walk through some of our town’s historical sites — the first building constructed, the first shot fired — when a strange craft touched down, and asked that cliched question of one of my charges. Nervous, but delighted — too...
Google says my house isn't there.
Which is something I disagree with them about, obviously. But if you search on Maps for my address, nothing comes up. No matter how many times you hit the enter key, nothing happens. My neighbor’s house shows up, and the one across the street. Yet if you go to streetview, and try to turn the camera around to look at my front door… it doesn’t work. Satellite view just has this...
Do you have a contact at NASA.
We were watching a documentary, something about solar winds and the craft that would one day surf them. Michelle looked over at me and said “I think I could build something like that.”
I didn’t believe it, but I went with her to the hardware store all the same. The employees thought the situation was hilarious — two young women buying sheets of metal, and welding tools,...
Downward facing dog.
I tried yoga with very clear intentions: I wanted my muscles to become stretched, and my mind to remain closed. I did not want any of that wishy-washy hippy nonsense infecting me, and I’d even prepared — in advance — an evil little smirk for when the teacher got to her inevitable “namaste” bullshit.
Every time she mentioned chakras, or auras, I did my best to ignore...
The prenup.
The one condition of our prenuptial agreement was that if we were to ever split, nobody could blame the prenup itself, or my insistence upon it. We’d spent many weekend vacations missing out on our planned relaxation and instead arguing over whether or not not we should even have a prenup, and the whole contract had become a dark force, a storm in our marriage, conjuring up resentment and...
Rules for the artist.
Selling out is the one thing that a true artist should be afraid of (except rent, and creative block, and the expectations of others with regards to your reaction to everyday events like crossing the street which — by the way — I will GET AROUND TO just as soon as the corporations put a woman on the crosswalk sign. If I put a single foot down onto that road which this gendercide is...
Cloth.
My mother brought marbles for my birthday, saying they were to replace the ones I’d lost. They sat in a velvet bag in the palm of her hand, growing warm with her body’s heat, soaking just a little in the sweat of her cupped fingers.
The wet purse tipped over, and the marbles — all of them — rolled out towards me. Some spun off to places unknown, apparently uneager for us...
Twilight Zone ideas.
Man gets to keep a reportedly haunted mansion if he spends one night in its walls. But then it turns out that HE’S A GHOST.
Woman goes to her birthday party, but is shocked to see everyone wearing black. Then it turns out that SHE’S A GHOST.
Man goes to Blockbuster to rent Ghostbusters on DVD, but the Blockbuster is CLOSED. And also HE’S A GHOST.
Inner monologue of that butterfly over in the...
Has she spotted me? She must have spotted me — she looks terrified. And rightly so, considering my evil plans and incredible destructive potential. Avery Edison definitely isn’t a wimp for being afraid of butterflies, not at all.
Boy, it’s lucky for her that she is smart enough to immediately leave the room at first sight of me, for otherwise I would certainly do something...
May 2010
1 post
Didn't submit.
Back in 2004, when I was fourteen years old, a new show called “Hustle” appeared on BBC television. It was about a bunch of grifters who tended to work long cons, and something about the show — maybe the apparent ease of living the high life without suffering as a victim of the rat race — seemed to really make an impact on the national consciousness. It looked — at...
April 2010
7 posts
WatchHey! A new Shiny Happy Peephole!
1 tag
ROUND EARTH SOCIETY BULLETIN: Further Developments...
What seems more likely to you: that a couple of actors have had a tough time getting a second gig? Or that an unknown division of the US government secretly sent a rocket to our nearest astral body, landed it, collected samples, returned the astronauts to Earth and kept everyone who ever worked on the project quiet with a series of bribes, threats, and “disappearances”?
Round...
WatchA new episode only a week after the first one! And I found a soiled penny on the street earlier! Best day ever, am I right?
Also, for some reason the sound kind of sucks. Guess I’ll be asking the internet to buy me a new video camera, huh? Ha ha ha, j/k, j/k. Seriously thank you guys so much.
Watch“The Weekly Show” returns, almost a year after it went away.
