There’s gotta be a faster way to get caffiene into the system; this oral administration thing is not working for me.
Whenever the guys down at the mill asked Joe what his two boys were up to, he never told them the truth - that one was sitting around waiting for the perfect sentence, the other one on some barstool, waiting for another beer - but usually just went with the story that they both ended up gay, which he’d discovered over the years was much easier to explain, even to old lumberjacks.
The way Lloyd is moving in on my space, I’m probably about to lose this sad fucking excuse of a job too, Bob sighed into his second Sunday afternoon beer.
I wear lots of brown clothes, because I am very clumsy with coffee.
Some men dream of fortunes, others dream of cookies.
“You could get hit on the leg with bananas and you’d still bruise right up.”
“Now, see, if you and some of your pseudo-lesbian friends at Chatham had formed a band, that could be you right now!”
The best things about the BlogHer Conference were the Estrogen Tent and the Knit-’n’-Bond sessions.
There are a lot of things about depression that I hate, thought Bob, but the one that really pisses me off is the way gravity increases about 25%.
Bob contemplated (wanted) to storm (sneak off to) the Blogher Conference (the pub), but feared (feared) being turned away (caught) by a mob of angry women (his wife).
“I don’t think I’m the same Lloyd as the one who was pondering those other things.”
“It says the best sentence ever is coming, but I’ll bet if I sit here and wait it never does.”
Stay tuned for the best sentence ever!
“That’s my foot,” thought Jim, but not before the crocodile thought, “That’s my lunch.”
Gwen Stefani burst from the rafters in a full body slam, crying “A LALALALALALALALALA!”
Essay, 25 points: How do I inform Neighbor Bill, who has three - no, five pets, and no sense of smell, about the odiferous state of his wall-to-wall carpet?
“Take that, Joni Mitchell!” said Avril, with a powerful rabbit punch to the gut.
But who would fight in tonight’s secret, feature heavyweight match - that devil in disguise Nancy Wilson, the slippery gypsy, Stevie Nicks, perhaps the ghost of Cass herself; there were so many unanswered and exciting questions - would Blondie bump up a weight class, had Benatar ever grown, could Morissette deliver a convincing jackhammer, and would anyone take the 4 Non Blondes cage match challenge?
Every beautiful random-play segue on the computer jukebox will be punished by an equal and opposite mind-wrenching transition like the Laurie Anderson-to-Dwight Yoakam catastrophe that has ‘mouse lying on the floor quivering in pain.
Frankly, subject/verb agreement is fascism.
As he looked down at his sleeping wife of 25 years, feeling both attraction and revulsion, Henry began to think about the role habit had come to play in both their lives.
I am going to stop procrastinating tomorrow.
Last week I met with a numerologist with the hope of understanding my failed marriages, but all she could come up with for my fifty bucks were a few tentative dates when I may or may not lose another wallet, and/or car keys, and my pet turtle (which I’m both excited and sad about, since I don’t currently have a pet turtle, but am now worried about getting someday, since it sounds like I’ll just lose him.)
When the guy in front of you at the staircase in the subway station sighs loudly and mutters obscenities because there is a small queue at the stairs due to the bottleneck created by the new security measures, and you think, “Exactly when the N line become the Whiny Little Bitch…
Hot enough for ya?
“It’s all in vain,” Bob was heard muttering just before he asked the bartender for another beer.
Have you ever been 44 years old and working under a boiling hot sun, digging in the dirt, and almost passing out because you’re out of shape and out of focus and out of breath, basically, and then finished the job, still 44 years old but feeling much older, and then stumbled into your car and driven into the downtown of the nearest small town, and then stumbled even more into the first little tavern you came to with a long, wooden bar, air conditioning, cold beer, and wireless internet service, and for whatever reason, you happened to have your laptop strapped to your back, because, if you must know, you thought you were absolutely going to die because of that boiling hot sun and you weren’t sure you would make it to the shade of a barstool before you gave up the ghost, and if you didn’t make it, you wanted to make damn sure you died with all your typed words close by, even if they would just be grabbed up by some old drunk who just liked the look of your backpack - well, I just did.
Update: Due to an official complaint filed against this sentence, it will be provided with an alternate ending until an official ruling is handed down from the Dash & Question Mark Subcommittee. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Have you ever been . . . . grabbed up by some old drunk?
“The experience of being born was so terrifying for me,” Bob told the classroom full of kids on career day, “that I’ve been jumpy ever since.”
Please, no references to my hair color.
I keep telling myself, if you’re not flatout terrified every now and then, you’re just not doing anything.
It might be nice to coordinate some kind of country-wide event in which everyone makes the same noise at the same time, or has the same simple idea, or maybe faces the same direction, however briefly.
I was torn between “Well, I’m a practicing heterosexual as lord knows I need a lot of work” and “So he was already perfect at it?”
It’s 2005, there’s got to be something better than Preparation H for these bags under my eyes.
Yeah, well, it’s not just a sound.
“I haue seene your head with it full many a tyme, Couered as safe as it had bene with a skrine.”
I believe it is a function of our spiffy new Scriner’s site, but now there is the capacity to upload ones photo to ones Scrine account and yet I have seen none but mine and Keith’s—come’on fellows, show us something you find representative of your current state of being!
i realize that age creeps up on little cat feet, but not upon our rodent; take a gander yonder, at 62: http://www.mickjagger.com/
Today might just be that day when it all works together.
at first I was sanguine and then I got upbeat, but now it’s really getting to be so ridiculous that it’s almost impossible to imagine being depressed over it all; are we curs-ed?
“Uh, isn’t that the whole reason you hired me?”
you shake your head at Good Charlotte complaining about “that noise kids listen to nowadays” and then you crank up AC/DC to clear your head.
Standing ankle deep in the bills, he sometimes thought, “Duck slaughterhouse, which seemed both funny and sad, just like his floor.
Scrining makes me regular, every day!
Summer is just so damned inevitable.
There’s been a rumor growing lately that famed anthropologist, Dr. Louis Leakey, tired of losing games to chimpanzees, consequently chose Jane Goodall as his assistant based solely on her skills on the checker board.
The man has really great hamstrings.
For two long days and nights the ragged, tired and depressed man stumbled along, coffeeless.
GodDAMN, it takes a long time to haul children as far away as humanly possible.
“Baby, I can multi-task;I hate the player AND the game.”
It might have been some type of miracle that sunny afternoon,
a tiny little miracle that made her realize you could change the way you saw it all.
“You can have my husband, but please don’t mess with my man.”
“There is no world record for being depressed,” the doctor told Bob, “so you might as well just stop looking forward to that right here and now.”
my tub faucet turns itself on in the middle of the night, by itself; I think an exorcist will be cheaper than the plumber?
Mr. Johnson, PhD. didn’t seem quite as amused as I was when, after he’d just spent 10 minutes telling me how he spent his career designing software used to model and build next-generation helicopters, I snappily tossed off the comment, “Well, that’s interesting, but it’s not exactly rocket science.”
Thanks to her parents, poor Sally grew up thinking effective birth control meant not planting cabbages in the garden, and couldn’t for the life of her figure out where all her babies kept coming from.
The convenience store clerk, for whom the English language had always been a perplexing series of ear-assaulting noises that could only be toned down with liberal inhalations of marijuana smoke, nodded benignly during Muriel’s feeble joke.
“Oooh, pretty,” she said, putting the gun down slowly and making her way cautiously down the attic stairs.
I think I’m as ready for the Scrine revamp as I’m ever going to be, having hoarded water, canned goods, and firearms up here in the attic with my best (and only) friends, the rats.
“You see,” Muriel explained to the nodding 7-11 clerk, “we would rob you, but then what with the police chase and being booked in jail and all, we’d be so late for work.”
Nothing emerges from the fire quite as glorious as a metal bird.
I like progress as much as the next guy; especially the way it’s boots feel on my back as it stomps on by.
Muriel’s fleeting vision of the grab, the flight, and the thrilling tri-state robbery spree that would eventually land her on the six o’clock news after a spectacular freeway chase, was interrupted with a sad jolt by the realization she was going to be late for work.
Can I have my own bells and my own whistles?
Goodbye old Scrine (sniff), we sure hope that you’re like a phoenix which wil rise from the ashes stronger and more beautiful than ever a few days hence.
As a dog who had wholeheartedly embraced the efficiencies of the 21st century, Rover felt no need to go outside, choosing instead to take his regular morning walk through his electronic neighborhood, sniffing amongst various blogs for news of his friends.
“In Latin?” the Pope asked.
“Now put on these ruby slippers,” Bob told the Pope, “tap your heels together three times, each time repeating - there’s no place like Rome.”
Our lives hide here behind words, our shadows reaching out from around the corner of some building we’ve hidden behind, where we hang on tightly to our armload of emotion and secrets, thinking no one will ever find us.
In Scrine, you’re mine, you’re divine, say it fine, never whine; it’s a spline chime kind of lime!
A wise man (or perhaps it was a wise woman, my memory is understandably hazy) once said that the solution to seeing double when you’re drunk is simple—just close one eye.
All this rotating and revolving is making me dizzy.
“If knowledge is power, and power corrupts, it’s got to be all these books making you so damn evil.” Mildred explained to Ursula.
A person who does not believe in airplanes probably should not fly twice each week.
It seemed like such a simple plan - a sleeping bag, a night sky full of stars, a head full of thoughts and dreams - and it would have worked, if it weren’t for his hip bones and a piece of hard ground that couldn’t seem to get along for just one night.
When I made my first million, I fulfilled a promise I’d made to myself long before by paying the world’s leading competitive cyclists to ride the Pyrenees stages of the Tour de France course on big wheels.
Every day without fail, Joe greeted the waitress at the diner, “I wouldn’t actually kill for a cup of coffee, but only because I’m too tired to pull the trigger.”
It’s okay with me if my clients are batshit crazy or if they are unreasonable, but if I sense at all that they’re going to be both batshit crazy and unreasonable, their retainer doubles on the spot.
I sometimes see Scrine muttering to himself, “Is it omouse, imouse, or emouse, I wonder?”
Flakes of rust fell to the ground as Scrine rubbed the tips of his metal wings together, the curve of a smile broke across his normally stiff beak, and his hard, rebar-constructed feet stomped at the dirt nervously, as the secret in his head grew and grew, nearing fruition.
I can turn around, look at my hands, I can see my own breath here, at this site, where my friends all conspire.
Raymond’s highly-polished collection of productive Thursdays was one of the finest in the neighborhood.
but then I found la pate a son
Keith did not get the Alice’s Restaurant “I wanna kill, Kill, KILL” reference, which I must assume means he does not hear the song at least once a year, every Thanksgiving (as all people must), which means he must have been raised by (and may still be held hostage by) musically deprived wolves—what shall we do, Scriners?
She actually thought she was the first person to say “I mean, it’s real, but it’s really real” when asked to describe tripping on acid.
Today I replaced my ratty 15-year-old office chair with a 100-year-old chair that’s in far better condition, ready for another 100 years of service to asses like me… er, mine.
As Scott paddled his kayak across the lake in the morning light he could sense the silver salmon under him on their annual migration, connecting him to the earth and sky and water the way northwest Indians must have felt on this lake for hundreds of generations—but then the shattering roar of a jet overhead destroyed his timeless revery and brought him firmly back to July 2005 where he would soon have to return to land and face up to his failures.
After much introspection, Rufus realized the anger management classes he’d taken had not only been a tremendous waste of money, but were now, in fact, also making him quite angry.
I nearly made a scriney shrine here to the best sentence from today’s post, but then I remembered that I’m the sort of girl who listens to albums not songs, and really, if one good phrase wrenched from a mediocre rant isn’t a misleadingly good single off an otherwise unlistenable record, I don’t know what is.
What kind of evil wife reminds her husband of his recent lack of exercise and his increasing spare tire and then goes and leaves him alone to work late at the office where she has left a baited ‘Mouse-trap in the break room with a half dozen homemade cranberry muffins and a fresh, new bag of Nutter Butter cookies?
At that precise moment, she realized that things would never improve, and furthermore that she really didn’t care.
While on vacation recently, I almost had the opportunity to meet a lactose intolerant dairy farmer.
If ‘Mouse could be granted just one wish, just one, it would be to be able to share the music in his head with y’all.
In describing his development as a teenager, my student lamented, “I grew the feeling of gloom and obscurity.”
In her diagnostic exam, one of my students described her boyfriend as being “strategically built.”
Mostly, I’m depressed because I’ve realized that I’m a person who gets depressed.
The best way to ensure another person will promptly show up to your open house is to cut yourself some nice sharp cheese.
Farewell, sweet Scrine, for today I fly!
Trailside chipmunks are too thrilled to be alive to bother with petty things like avoiding death.
I’m really mad, but I can think of no pithy way to describe it, coming at the heels of so much history.
“I’m tired of being sick and sick of being tired,” Bob said, feeling undue pride in the perceived quality of his sentence.
“You’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind,” Bob told his wife, “if you think I can remember the first girl I ever kissed; hell, I don’t even remember the last one.”
There is no reason to stare at me, sir, because I am not a Klingon—my forehead is merely peeling from sunburn.
Analogy shouts “look at me” like a petulant 2-year-old while the powerful eagle of metaphor soars gracefully through the skies of Lex.
Laughter is like cancer, spreading and consuming until there is nothing left but the memory of it.
“That just proves,” he said as we walked hand in hand down 30th Avenue, “that you’re too codependent to be truly funny.”
“Good morning Keith,” said the population of wild birds of Deadwood, uniting in their cacophony to deliver the message from my patio.
I don’t know if you have ever walked into a firestation/bar/mexican restaurant in Texas in the worst winter weather for maybe five years, soaking wet and covered in mud, carrying a hard hat under your arm with a posse of similarly attired huge guys, but I recommend it.
I seem to have infected my older daughter with the urge to record everything that ever happens to her, and to keep it all secret from her mother.
The showoff goddess in charge of Washington State is now giving out candy to attract attention to herself.
“Yes, let’s talk about brains,” I said to him, my voice getting louder with each word, “because you’re always using your’s and I’m not, and let me tell you, that’s really starting to piss me off.”
If all works according to plan, this process will have placed a copy of Taj Mahal’s version of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” from the album Blue Light Boogie where Keith can link to it in Scrine or in perhaps in Wordshadows—look for it.
[Third update - a lot changes in a year. Now we’ve got Scrinecast and you can ask Keith to put it up there if you have any special requests.]
I must tell the world that although my younger daughter is quite smelly and dirty at this moment, she left the house this morning clean and in fact shiny.
Okay, men, let me send a message over the gulf: your own breasts lose their exotic quality very quickly, particularly when they become utilitarian nozzles good for placating a squalling child, but this isn’t to say that I don’t envy Catherine Zeta-Jones’ perkiness and wonder what they would be like, you know, up close.
Have you heard of my new book, about the retired baseball player who goes on safari; it’s called Catcher in the Rhino.
My computer has 139,806 files and the number is increasing daily; my brain has about 14 and the number is decreasing at an alarming rate.
I’m so ultra-rich it’s not even funny, but try telling that to a rhinoceros, [or my] 4th wife, a vacuous, less-than-useless 30-year-old [with] breasts you could kill [for].
Is it against the law to eat nuclear waste, or only to sell it from a window, cut into the side of a delivery van, and depending on your answer to either of my questions, will the use of ketchup or hot sauce counteract any or all of the negative side effects, or should I stop and buy Tums, or life insurance, or both?
You can be pretty sure that when a rhino is checking you out and what’s going his brain is the word, “NICE,” he’s not thinking about your tits.
Apropos to nothing really, except Jo Spanglemonkey’s justifiable nervousness about the whole Eichler image, I met a woman this weekend who is a window & woodworking expert and she was telling me how, by throwing money wood and windows at the problem, she can transform an Eichler from, well, an Eichler, into something that would be identified by anyone seeing it as a Frank Lloyd Wright.
I guarantee, all fascination with titties exhibited today on this blog would evaporate immediately if the tits in question were attached to one’s very own chest, and one were then forced to drive to a mall, hunt/gather at a lingerie department, get measured by a bored clerk, and squeeze into a dozen different brassieres while viewing one’s cellulite in a dressing-room mirror.
“You know, you could kill a rhincerous with your breasts.”
I’m going to the parade today, if only to see if the firemen march without wearing pants, just like in my dream
I’m so sunburnt it’s not even funny, but try telling that to the comedian selling lotion at the pharmacy.
Doesn’t the word “rhinoplasty” summon a mental image of a fierce jungle beast about to go under the knife, a picture of Jennifer Lopez’s cute little nose fixed in its animal brain?
My ultra-rich neighbor (4th wife, each younger and more vacuous than the last) and his less-than-useless nearly 30-year-old kids have to be among the least classy individuals on the planet.
Humans will never build perfect robots because of our own pre-programmed flaw, that one inapplicable question we can’t help but always ask - man or woman?
Finally, the ferris wheel lifted us high above the incessant noise of the tattooed and unwashed crowd, and into the stillness of nature’s evening air: a reward for our endurance that was as refreshing as it was fleeting.
If so, I musta clocked a mess of them in that swamp as I just now ventured out to the convenient next-door high-pressure car wash and Goo Goo Cluster stand in order to utilize the former and score from the latter; the swamp mud that shot out from the wheel wells had that unmistakeable, foetid, odeur morte de rongeur.
the toilet, it gurgles, you don’t suppose..not…could it be an aligator access point?
Dear Sir or Madam: When we saw the crucifix pin in the display case, with little red, green and blue flashing lights all over it, and I remarked very loudly, “Disco Christ died for your sins,” you might have had the good grace to look offended, as that was the reaction I was going for.
All other things being about equal, 160 proof bourbon will cause a far worse hangover than the same quantity of 120 proof scotch.
I know the old stereotype is about “those clever Japanese,” but I think the real cleverness is in the French, who not only get us to eat their moldy old cheese but who also have convinced us to pay premium prices for it.
And if elected, I promise to fuck over each and every American, but not in any way petroleum, military, or pharmaceutically related.
You just know you’re WAY off base when you actually resent having to pay $100 for a Holiday Inn Express room in Chipley, Florida immediately after spinning out of control on Interstate 10 because a truck lost a tire tread and you had to do some racecar moves you didn’t know you knew to get up and down and back up the median on the right side of the highway pointed in the right direction all the while managing to stay upright, and then leaping from your car as soon as it came to a rest to wave to the rather stunned man still stopping to assist and/or identify the body, who has difficulty believing that anybody who’s spun around five times over 100 yards of highway divider swamp like that is not only merely mud-covered but actually upright and leaping AND has only lost two hubcaps and knocked the car out of alignment in the process; I mean, I could have stayed three, maybe four more days in New Orleans on what I may have to pay to stay here in sharkland over the 4th of July until somebody opens to fix me! (But truly, I’m fine.)
For my birthday, I’ve asked for a massive lens for my Nikon D70, in keeping with my prowess for all things gadgety.
The only thing better than the scent from the bowl into which you’ve just scraped the froth off this year’s batch of fresh apricot jam is the feeling you get when you realize that you’ve still got one piece of cheesecake left in the fridge from last night’s dinner party.
Sometimes I fail to notice that the morning folk show on the radio has given way to the musical theater program at 10:00, until I realize that “You’re never fully dressed without a smile” is playing and I’m getting a headache.
It’d been nearly three months since the sentencing, but Bob didn’t think he’d ever get used to his cellmate’s penchant for staring, or the man’s particular fondness for repeating, “Don’t worry fireman, I got your back.”
“So, you’re telling me I’m covered,” Bob asked his insurance agent, “even if a random firework burns down the entire house three days from now and everything in it is destroyed except for my laptop, all the photographs, and my three favorite t-shirts?”
’Mouse and Goliard had been having a discussion in which ‘Mouse posited that it might be a Good Thing if his wife. Mrs. ‘Mouse, had an affair—ideally, it would make her feel sexy and desireable and reawaken feelings in her that ‘Mouse wasn’t so good at awakening anymore now that they’d fallen into old-married-person routine (despite doing his best to be a caring and attentive lover), and if things held true for women the way statistics and anecdotal evidence says it does for men, it would be very unlikely she would leave him and the family for her new lover—it would just be a dalliance which would ultimately underline for her her commitment to the long term with ‘Mouse while increasing the net-pleasure in her life; Goliard appeared to disagree with the premise though she jokingly (?) admitted to harboring some interest in the old sexy UPS-driver fantasy as a means to spice up her own sex life.
“What I’d really like,” Frank told his wife as she scratched inside his bodycast with a yardstick, “is to live someplace where the local slang for bicyclists isn’t ‘speedbumps.’”