From an email I received from my aunt:
I had a few mini strokes last night followed by one big stroke. I’m okay now but I wanted to let you know what happened just so you won’t worry too much. I know how you worry.
So, the lunar marriage of my lycanthropy problem and my high blood pressure caused me to have a sudden change into the werewolf, while I was having the big stroke. I can’t give up cheeseburgers like you can.
The result of the stroke was a temporal locked-down syndrome which paralyzed my entire body, except for my eyes. So, any danger that I posed was to those who might faint at the sight of me.
You should have seen Doris!
My body shut down to the point of appearing dead. Right now, I am emotionally exhausted.
This morning, I had to listen to some kids watch some crazy movie for the first time. They were so proud of themselves. I don’t think they even watched the movie.
I hope you can come over this morning. I need a human lap and some sunlight.
My friend, Joey, built a rinky dink ice cream machine out of cardboard and pencils. When he poured the cream into the top hole, the sides would darken and the box would leak. He swore this was the best way, even though he would lose a lot of it in the process. You could always tell when he’d made a batch because the floor was sticky.
Once, he made a batch with broken candy canes and almond paste. He didn’t mop the floor for a whole week because the room smelled that good.
Lately, his cat has been clawing at the machine, so he has held off on making more.
He says his next project is to build an ice cream machine that makes a regular ice cream encased in a ball of astronaut ice cream. He says that in the future, astronauts will enjoy tasting the sweet danger of a potential accident by breaking the candy sphere, as it could spread inside the ship and ruin the controls. Figuring out how to get back to earth in the lunar module with a sugar rush could be part of the culinary experience, he says.
I don’t think Joey’s ever met an astronaut. I hope he gets his meeting because I’m looking forward to watching him talk out loud to the NASA guy and hoping that the NASA guy peppers his reply with the words “fuhhk” and “dammit”.
Jim was working on two projects. The first one was a pipe organ made of robotic mouths. It was based on a toy that he’d seen as a child which was a musical keyboard where each key made a tone and triggered the release of a puppet character ascribed to the sound. Jim’s organ ascribed a series of robotic mouths to respective keys and stops. Each mouth was able to pronounce vowels but not consonants. The mouths were visible to the audience, whose reaction possibly dipped into the uncanny valley, a place usually reserved for androids. Jim worked on a set of 3 songs for his organ’s debut: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor and the main themes of Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. His debut was a success. People loved his organ and his performance. Word got out and he was asked to play his organ on a semi-popular television program. The excitement inspired him to buy a fitted suit. Looking very sharp, he went on the television show, performed the Bach piece and stood in front of the hosts who also happened to be judges. One of the judges was in a couple of popular bands sometime ago and therefore could not be judged on anything.
“How long did it take you to build this?”
“Six years.”
“So, you wasted six years of your life?”
Jim promptly put his second project on hold.
Some background information: John Titor is the Paul Bunyan of time travel. Eloi Cole is either the James Frey of time travel or the Billy the Kid of time travel.
John Titor and Eloi Cole are sitting at a bar. John is drinking beer and Eloi is drinking 12-year-old single malt. Both are getting to the point of talking too much. ?
At one point, John says, “Eloi, what year did you say you came from again?”
?Eloi responds, “That depends, John. What year did you come from?”
The Price-is-Right strategy comes into play at this moment. If Eloi says 2016, then John will say 2017. John can say whatever he wants about the year 2017 because Eloi doesn’t know what has happened in 2017. Furthermore, John can ask Eloi who won the World Series in 2016. In addition, John can always use the future civil war to combat the World Series question. Yet, there are too many chess moves for both of them so it’s best that the subject changes.
Eloi says, “What’s the best joke of the day from whence you came?”
?John says, “Two eagles walk into a bar full of snakes. The bartender says, ‘Hi, what can I get you?’’”?
Eloi says, “And then what?”
?John says, “That’s the joke. When the civil war comes, nothing is funny. Uplifting stories are preferred.”
Eloi can’t think of a move and says, “Bartender, I’ll have another Mountain Dew Code Red.”
He then turns to John and says, “Thank God for time machines.”
Old Josh and Regular Susan had just come back from the Museum of Natural History. Regular Susan had just taken off her shoes and was hoping to take off more.
“So, what do you want to do now?”
“I have the Monster Manual under my bed.”
“And?”
“We can look through it. Together.”
“That sounds fascinating.”
“You have to be naked to look at it.”
“Well, then. Let me take my clothes off.”
At that point, Old Josh realized that Stormbringer was the only weapon he could use at this point. Yet, although he was all chaotic evil on the outside he was still neutral good on the inside. So, he feigned sickness and told regular Susan she should probably leave on account of his contagion.
“So, yeah, you should probably go.”
“Okay. I get it.”
So, Susan left; and because of a good night’s sleep, she gave an excellent presentation the next day. Meanwhile, Old Josh played video games while thinking about Susan. That’s when he got the idea for a pause button on coin-op video games. His plan would be to wait until Young Josh caught up to the age of Real Time Old Josh before engineering the idea since an Real Time Old Josh would have the proper education for making it happen. However, by that time, Real Time Old Josh realized that not only was it a bad idea but also that no one played coin-ops anymore.
Sadness enveloped Real Time Old Josh, for no one would believe his story in the World of Warcraft.
There was a regent who ate po boys every day. He was really proud of his lunches – so much so that daily he told everyone what kind of po boy he was having.
“Guess what kind of po boy I’m having today?”
“Do I know you?”
“Oyster!”
Sometimes he would strike up a conversation about his lunch with other po boy aficionados. One of those conversations was with a guy who jumped trains. He had to constantly remind others that he was not the definition of a hobo. He liked to eat smoked oysters on hot dog buns.
That conversation lasted a long time and wasn’t repeated since the train jumper disappeared the following day.
A few weeks later, the regent regaled a story to a stranger about the time he had a regular shrimp sandwich instead of a po boy.
The stranger remarked, “Well, you are what you eat.”
The stranger was being a bit distant because he badly wanted out of the conversation and didn’t give much thought to the anecdote. The regent, however, did give it much thought and began eating rich foods.
The diet he switched to was considered rich food in some circles – cheeseburgers, meatloaf sandwiches, $7 sausages. Because of this diet, his health declined and he succumbed to gout. Because of the gout, his self-esteem grew since it was once considered to be a rich man’s disease and because his self-esteem grew, he no longer ate the rich foods. His gout went away and he looked much better.
His looks changed so much that he quit his regent job and became an actor.
His name was Mark but you know him as Daniel Craig.
Now you know the rest of the story.
Vultures are cool to look at. It’s true. I can easily watch one have dinner on a dead raccoon. But not a human.
In a ditch next to my home I found an old body being eaten away by vultures. I grabbed a rake and ran toward the scene. While shooing the vultures away with my rake I noticed that the body was still breathing. Carelessly, I threw the body over my shoulder like a sack of dog food, as the threat of the vultures seemed greater than the threat of a back injury. My bad.
Inside, I put the body on the couch and called 911 and then retrieved a glass of water. Cradling the body’s head, I served the water to the mouth. The body coughed and color began to come back on the face. Through the blood and hair and grass, I saw a woman. She was pretty.
She said, “Thanks for the water.”
Then, she handed me a subpoena and said, “You’ve been served.”
She left.
Instead of being upset, I decided to finally open an old Christmas present. It was a VHS set of the series, “Are You Being Served?” I took the VHS player out of the closet, ordered pizza and a 2-liter of coke and sat on the couch. Good times.
In the superhero scene it’s hard to one-up someone when all you have is the ability to change yourself into a pile of clothes. It’s a defense mechanism, which in the superhero world is viewed as being weak. I’ve always hated my ability because I’m too special to be considered normal and yet, not special enough to be considered super.
Yesterday, that all changed.
Five superheroes and myself were arrested for conspiring to put beer kegs in the nuclear cooler at the local plant. Since they put us in superhero confinement, there was no way for the “real” superheroes to get out since they super-proofed it. At one point in the evening, I changed my appearance to look like The Flash’s clothes and then later into a correctional officer’s clothes and then I fell into a passing laundry cart, changing again into a regular pile of clothes. It was a classic move as the cart was pushed into the back of a laundry truck which was driven to an industrial laundry plant. I walked out of there looking exactly like Matthew Broderick’s pile of clothes in Glory.
Since I wasn’t using it, I lowered my chin-up bar to a point of 12 inches above the floor. I ended up damning myself every time I tripped over it. Instead of fixing the situation properly, I just put a traffic cone in front of the bar and then damned myself when I tripped over the cone and the bar. Instead of fixing the new situation properly, I put a flag pole in the traffic cone and then retrieved an autumn-themed flag for the pole to remind myself that there was a chin-up bar impeder. Wouldn’t you know it, I damned myself again as I looked at the flag and thought about how much I enjoy autumn weather and seeing the leaves change color. I tripped over the chin-up bar again. Instead of fixing the situation properly, I bought a motion sensor that connected to my record player. When I passed by the motion 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.
I damned myself for impeding my life.
