since i wasn’t using it, i lowered my chin-up bar to 12 inches above the floor. i damn myself every time i trip over it. instead of fixing the situation properly, i put a traffic cone in front of it and damned myself when i tripped over it and the bar. instead of fixing the new situation properly, i put a flag pole in the traffic cone and retrieved an autumn-themed flag for the pole to remind myself that there was a chin-up bar impeder. i damned myself again as i saw the flag and thought about how much i enjoy autumn weather and seeing leaves change color and then tripped over the chin-up bar again. instead of fixing the situation properly, i bought a sensor that connected to my record player. when I passed the sensor, the sensor triggered the needle on the record player to land on a random part of a John Philip Sousa record reminding me of the chin-up bar. that seemed to work.
then i damned myself for impeding my life.
Archive for the 'Stories' Category
There was this man who worked at a sanctuary for chimpanzees in Florida. He used to be a nightwatchman for a company that made gps chips for pets. Some vets would put them in but not others. Some vets thought it ridiculous to put a chip inside an animal in order to keep track of it. One vet said, “I saw Gattaca. It was nice.” And then he railed on treating people and pets as products. “People will be fucking idiots if you let them.”
The former nightwatchman, Larry, remembered a friend who took empty pill cases and filled them with candy and then didn’t go further with his project. It’s good when cleverness sees a red light, thought Larry. But his drive to make something amazing dimmed that light, so he could see behind it clearly.
What he saw was a way to inject prions with a cognitive ability to speak.
In the sanctuary there was a chimp who loved to watch television. Her name was Stacey and she watched soaps and infomercials and sometimes talk shows. Her mate had passed away a few years prior to this time and she mainly kept to herself. Larry would sit with her, watching tv from the floor every night while she sat in the comfortable chair.
And every night, he stirred trying to figure a out way to inject this chip into her head without much fuss. He didn’t want to hurt her and was afraid his curiosity would end up killing her. Then, a commercial for a flea and tick spray came on the tv and so did his lightbulb: He would put the chip inside a tick, let it rest upon on her head, and once the tick had burrowed in, wait until it filled with blood. Then, he would then squeeze the tick, deflating its body like a turkey baster of blood and chip that goes into the chimp to be delivered into the brain.
He was so nervous that night but it worked. Furthermore, he looked like a hero for taking off the tick.
He sat and waited to see if anything – if anything at all - would happen.
2 hours later, she turned to him and just stared. Larry started to cry knowing he’d done wrong and then she said, “I’d really like to watch tv alone if you don’t mind.”
On a blanket on some rocks next to a boulder under a tree among the pine needles lay a tired old prospector. Too tired to cook, the old man used the sack of beans for a pillow. The faint smell of bear poop kept his danger sense awake but the rest of him collapsed in slumber. And this was his dream:
“Hello, Cracky!” said the barman. It was the most fantastic saloon he’d ever seen. The women who worked there were gorgeous.
The old man was suddenly awakened by the moist nose and warm breath of the bear he’d sensed nearby. Somewhat comforted, most of his body wanted to go back to sleep. But before the internal debate could transpire, the bear bit into his head like an apple. Not a mealy roma but a hard crisp granny smith.
There was no gold anywhere.
How did you know where to find the IBM 5100?
Yesterday, I used the gravitational machine as a transporter for distance rather than time. It’s almost like walking through a door from your room in NYC to a room in Hot Springs, AR, which is where I went.
Did you set the machine to go there?
I set the machine to find the parts I needed through a plugin I’d installed. It’s like a search engine except that instead of ending at website, I end up in Hot Springs, AR at an antique mall.
Upon arriving in a stall in the lavatory (it gauges the closest and safest destination) I noticed a fellow washing his hands. I think he noticed I’d mysteriously come out of a bathroom I’d never gone into. He began following me without much discretion, looking away when I turned around. He was very bad at it.
My destination was a toy store located in the middle of the mall. I inquired as to where the handheld video games were located and was directed to a display case where I found the needed items: one MB Electronics Merlin, one MB Electronics Microvision, and a Mattel Electronics Baseball.
After my purchase I took these items, with my new friend in tow, to the snack bar. I took each of them apart and arrayed the circuit boards in a triangle. I have a triangular, synthesized crystal that is able to “sense” the data of the boards and record them. I set the crystal on the boards, under the watchful eye of my friend who didn’t order anything from the snack bar. I had ordered a root beer and some onion rings.
With that, I pocketed the crystal, tucked a piece of my shirt into the Merlin’s shell, placed my root beer on top of the Merlin, and proceeded to get up, allowing the root beer to spill all over the circuitry. This would provide a quick distraction to the bystanders and especially to my pursuer who had just punched three times onto his mobile phone.
I doubled over some ketchup packets and exploded them onto the pursuer’s shirt. Vehemently apologizing, I offered to get some wet paper towels while heading to the lavatory. All this was done in a flowing, quick manner that would have made WC Fields proud.
Fortunately, the pursuer was very passive and just stared as I passed him to the lavatory. I went into stall number 2 and made my escape with the gravitational machine, which was now programmed with the crystal, taking me to Rochester, MN, 1975.
When I arrived, I called my relative and we met at Macho Nacho.
I had nachos.
John Titor’s Real Blog
This old guy from town fashioned a bird out of marzipan for a contest to see who could make the best Ortolan Bunting dining experience without harming a bird. Inside the marzipan, he packed corn-based sweetened breakfast cereal to mimic thorny bones and salted jellies for organs. There was a tiger behind him doing the same thing with a wax figure. When he turned around, the tiger cocked his head like a kitty asking to go outside in its cutest manner (cats killing birds around the home is congruent to natural selection because they evolved a darling face to humans). The cat was gnawing on a large stick to fashion a femur within its paws, then taking the wood bone by its mouth to the fake leg and nudging it inside the pants with its nose. Behind the tiger was a baby and the baby had fangs and was laughing at the funny papers someone had glued to the ceiling. The comic was Howard Huge and the enormous dog had eaten a room of marzipanned figures: a tiger, a man, and an Orontal Bunting. The frustrated cartoon child next to the cartoon dog said something funny but the baby couldn’t read and the laughing eventually showed the fangs to be rice pudding spittle.
Dear Girl,
Hopefully you’ll get this letter. I wrote the first part of it a year ago and just finished the last part today. I couldn’t figure out why I wrote to you but now I do.
I can only tell you part of what I’m doing and then I want you to guess the rest. I’ve been living by the pond near your house, eating tadpoles and minnows and the occasional horse apple (the last one I keep throwing up). I bore a resemblance to an amphibian, webbing my hands with 2 pairs of rubber gloves and fish fins attached to my toenails with the aid of Lee Press-On Nails. The gloves are excellent. The toe fins are still in trial stages.
I've also managed to bore a hole in my neck on accident due to an attempt to fix a rake I bought from an Amish fellow. I kept pulling on one of the pointy pegs and it jabbed into my neck. I thought I had finally found my invitation to heaven but the bleeding miraculously stopped, leaving an awkward hole to my esophagus. I was inspired to fashion a blow hole with a stopper to prevent water from coming in. I had a couple of mistakes.
After the blow hole was a success I tried to make a gill out of pvc pipe embedded with a device that would filter in H2O, triggering the emission of an equal amount of cariporide (a sodium-hydrogen inhibitor), with the goal of oxygen entry. I had a couple of mistakes.
With success of gills, I attempted to present myself as a plausible frog, swimming in the benthic zones (due to my size) and sitting on larger rocks for great lengths of time. I had no inspiration to coexist with them, merely to study. I earlier mentioned eating the tadpoles for protein.
After a month of sitting naked by the pond and swimming in its murky water, I forgot why I had begun the experiment in the first place and wondered if it even was an experiment. The lack of inspiration led to boredom and want for something else. That something else was a sandwich and soup. I broke into your house because it was the closest and made myself a peanut butter sandwich with bean and bacon soup. After eating manfood I realized I was naked in a stranger’s house and ran back to the pond, immediately fashioning some shorts out of a plastic bucket I'd found in the old shed. It looked more like a dress, so I drew a line with a pen down the middle in order to resemble shorts.
Here’s the second part:
I want to know if I could use your phone because I think I should check my bank account and see if I have any money to afford a proper apartment lease.
Love,
Randy
Chapter 1
There were these 2 guys that had been pulling tobacco for five hours. A net of yellow weeds covered the patch and came off like Velcro. These pulled weeds accumulated on a pile of red tarps and soon resembled fries on ketchup. Larry, the first guy, hadn’t eaten since the day before and kept swallowing the juice from his skoal bandits as the bear in his co-worker’s truck kept startling him. His co-worker, Yancy, caught the gentleben when he was a cub and took care of him ever since. No bear is sacred to the best meats and Larry sensed his skoal smell and skoal spit was akin to oozing gravy to the bear who was also named Larry.
Larry, the man, wanted to get drive-thru for lunch and Yancy wanted sit-down, “like Denny’s. I’m craving a club house.”
Larry, the bear, couldn’t relay what he wanted but it seemed obvious to Larry, the man, what he wanted.
They chose sit-down.
Larry, the bear, wasn’t hungry because he’d eaten a baby and was pretending to be pregnant, eating a jar of pickles just to show off.
Chapter 2
In the restaurant, Larry, the man, pulled out a cassette-tape of 1984, the one he’d borrowed from Yancy a year ago and gave it to Yancy, signaling he was about to disengage their colleagueship.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s yours.”
“I know its mine. Why are you giving it to me now?”
“Because its yours.”
“I said I know its mine. Why are you giving it to me now?”
“Because its yours.”
The bear wanted to make a mobius strip out of paper with this continued parley written on both sides but couldn’t find tape or paper and moreover couldn’t paw together such a task. This quieted his exuberance over such a clever idea to the point of frustration. In the end he just growled to get this repetitive argument to cease.
Chapter 3
Yancy sifted thru Larry the Bear’s poop as part of his daily care to make sure the bear was in good health. It almost seemed demeaning, making Yancy less of a bear owner and more of nursing home nurse, although, I know of no nursing home nurses that do this task, only the mysterious lab work technicians that go through plastic jar after plastic jar of doo doo looking for something wrong with the creator.
Yancy found no remnants of said baby but found broken glass from the pickle jar that scarred Larry the Bear’s innards creating blood in the stool.
“There ain’t no baby. And you tried to fool me by cutting yourself up inside. What the hell is wrong with you Larry?”
“Huh?” said Larry the man.
“Not you, Larry. Larry. The Bear.”
The bear started swaying his head back and forth like a circus elephant. He saw a baby goat, a kid, and thought about swallowing it whole but didn’t even muster the gumption to do it. Instead, he knocked over a display of tuna cans.
Chapter 4
After lunch - which in most workplaces would be considered a drama lunch with much murmuring via cupped hands over mouths to relay what was thought to have happened while they ate soup at their respective desks which would never occur in a tobacco patch – Yancy and Larry, the man, went back to work pulling weeds and pulling the adolescent tobacco from the patch in order to plant it later in the field for adulthood.
Larry the Bear sat in the truck replaying lunchtime in his head and how better he could have handled himself and how he shouldn’t have played up such bravado of eating a baby when he didn’t and how he shouldn’t have eaten broken glass which is surely going to mean a trip to the veterinarian who will surely put him under the gas for safety and that will mean he will have to endure a catheter. Damn, he thought to himself.
Chapter 5
Yancy had some vanilla crèmes in his glove box and offered some to Larry, the man. Larry the Bear couldn’t have any due to his scarred innards. Larry was still dipping skoal bandits and the cookie tasted like mint vanilla. He forgot that he still had the pouch between his lip and gum and swallowed the cookie and tobacco product making him swoon a bit. He lost his balance and recovered himself on Larry the Bear’s paw. Larry the Bear liked being needed and also liked face meat but felt like eating salmon so he jumped out of the truck and ran as fast as he could until he got to Bear River. That took three days. There were no salmon going upstream so he settled for perch and some rotten apples. A bear’s regret is temporary so he went into hibernation and woke up not remembering who Yancy and Larry were. Happy.
I miss the ghosts in my neighborhood. Robert Dillard Ghost used to sit on the stoop 2 doors down trying to get me to tell him what cold feels like. I couldn’t tell if he was messing with me by showing off of his ability to give me the shivers or if he really wanted to know because it had been so long since he had to wear a large coat outdoors. He can’t tell time anymore because his face goes in and out like a bad fluorescent light and those times that he’s present he thinks he’s always been there. He gets excited when I get takeout, forgetting what dinner tastes like.
I’m glad I’m not you, Robert. You’re like a retarded spirit who’s memory is reflected off of five mirrors before you get to see what it was you thought you saw. I’m gonna get you a dog. A live one. Besides, I don’t know where to find a good dead one, except the vet’s dumpster. Dogs see ghosts and real people. If a dog can trust a ghost long enough, the ghost can get inside the dog and see, albeit colorblind. You can tell a ghost dog right away. If you look in its eyes and feel despised then you’ve found a ghost dog.
Robert became a ghost dog and then all the other ghosts on my street became keen on the idea and now they’re gone, trotting along highways, sitting around White Castles and Luby’s Cafeterias, pretending to eat peanut butter with ventriloquists. Nobody believes in ventriloquists anymore except me.*
*and all others going to Vent Haven this year.
Hey T-Pro,
Don’t hate me because I don’t use a t-bar. I haven’t used it since I dropped 25 lbs. I had the setting on 12 prior to my dramatic weight loss. For you morons that think the 12 on the t-bar (now called sissy bar, sister to the “t” in t-ball) means 12 lbs, you’re sorely mistaken. It stands for 64 lbs that you CANNOT lift. Keep going. Don’t let it get you down. Because someday (and look at my eyes not my pecks when I say this) you will be t-bar free, just like me.
Love,
Pro Diamond
ps. You should drink milk and eat a banana for lunch.
About your mouth
I garnered a couple of sharks teeth from the Ripley’s Aquarium in downtown Gatlinburg, soaked them in a jar of crest glistening gel for a good thirty days, adding electrical pulses every 12 hours from a homemade difibrulator I made from 2 clothing irons.
Hoping that the crest would replace the OH ion in the hydroxylaptite thus making it a regenerative whitening tooth to be placed over your two rotting incisors. I used a metal file to shave the points to a human sized tooth and then swabbed the inside of your cheek in order to plant your own cells in the dentin to resemble pulp gum, thus tricking the tooth and your gum into joining each other (with difibrulator). I guess you have Tartuffe going on in your mouth or better yet an online relationship. Excuse my digression. By the end of the operation you will have very good teeth that will hold up during any activity. Ski Gatlinburg.
