A vampire walked briskly to get home around 5am. It was almost daylight and he was cursing because he had forgotten about the time change due to daylight savings time. This happened every year, every year since it was instituted and every year he forgot. He tried not to look like he was in too much of a hurry because then everyone would suspect he was a vampire. He also didn’t want anyone to see how he ran because he ran like a 19th century crab-billy.
Read MoreCategory Stories
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...
“How many pull-ups can you do?”
“Who wants to know?”
And then, the conversation ended.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Read MoreThere 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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Read MoreThere was this man who worked at a sanctuary for chimpanzees in Florida. He used to be a nightwatchman for a company that made RFID chips for pets. Some veterinarians 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 once. It was nice.” And then he railed on about people 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 but then didn’t go further with the project. It’s good when cleverness sees a red light and stops, thought Larry...
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 a good 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.
This was his dream:
“Hello, Cracky!” said the barman.
The old prospector looked around the most fantastic saloon he had ever seen. The women who worked there were gorgeous. The whiskey was on tap along with beer. The piano player was a retired president.
The old man was suddenly awakened by the moist nose and warm breath of a bear. 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...
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...
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 real bird. Inside the marzipan, he packed corn-based sweetened breakfast cereal to mimic thorny bones and used salted jellies to mimic organs.
In a similar contest, there was a real tiger behind the old guy, doing the same thing but with the wax figure of a gentleman. When the old guy turned around, the tiger looked at him and cocked his head like a house cat asking to go outside in its cutest manner. The man nodded in deference, as cats killing birds around the home is congruent to natural selection because they evolved a face that is darling to humans...
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 fashioned my semblance to an amphibian, webbing my hands with 2 pairs of rubber gloves and attaching fish fins to my toenails with the aid of Lee Press-On Nails. The gloves are excellent. The toe fins are still in trial stages.
Unfortunately, I managed to bore a hole in my neck on accident due to an attempt to fix a rake I bought from an Amish fellow...
Chapter 1
There were these 2 guys who had been pulling tobacco for five hours. A net of yellow weeds covered the patch but came off like Velcro. The 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. He kept swallowing the juice created by his skoal bandits due to the presence of a bear in his co-worker’s truck, as it 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 that his skoal smell and skoal spit was akin to oozing gravy to that bear in the truck who was also named Larry.
Larry, the man, wanted to get drive-thru for lunch and Yancy wanted sit-down, “like Denny’s...
I miss the ghosts in my neighborhood. Robert Dillard Ghost used to sit on the stoop 2 doors down always 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 is 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 torpid 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...
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 shark’s 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 defibrillator I made from 2 clothing irons, with the hope being 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 (using the defibrillator). I guess you have Tartuffe going on in your mouth or better yet, an online relationship...