The new, mirrored photo frame on Madeline’s desk enabled her to see what fresh hell was sneaking up on her.
No one accuses me of bleating, sir; prepare to defend yourself.
If I moved back and forth across this city any faster, I’d certainly burst into flames.
Mrs. Moses furiously built a tricked-out Honda with enormous tires and flames from nose to tailpipe, in preparation for the inevitably receding waters, or so she said.
It should be too obvious to say out loud, but, sadly, it is not: If someone offers you a piece of cake they made themselves, from scratch, and if your only response to them is that baking from scratch is a snobbish affectation, then YOU DO NOT DESERVE CAKE.
“Damn this war, Reginald, we can’t win battles marching on outdated arch support technology.”
No one accuses me of bleating, sir; prepare to defend yourself.
Mini-golf establishments are the warts on the side of the freeway.
The probability of rain increases exponentially in relationship to what activity?
As soon as I get time, I need to tell what I know about the Sassy Pants of Sassparilla.
There is no best way to spend the final hour before going to work on a Sunday morning, but sitting outside in the cool air, soaking in warm sun and hot coffee while listening to birds seems as good a way as any.
Alice raised her hand, waited a second to be called on and then blurted out the answer, “Only one!” all without waking from a sound sleep.
“You know, if I wanted to be patronized, I’d open a branch of myself.”
I’d rather go plumming this afternoon (or even pluming) instead of the plumbing that waits for me, but then, either of those beats the hell out of plummeting.
If it has skin, make it crawl.
If it’s got words, make it read.
If you can’t make it big, make it red.
Watching your new toy coming across the country with UPS shipment tracking feels somehow obscene.
Why is always time to get the boy out of bed for school?
The other morning I got my leg stuck in the hydraulic lift of my office chair, which was painful and humiliating but also inspiring, because even after all these years of being clumsy it’s reassuring to know there are still new frontiers for me to explore.
What are those tiny inner pockets hidden in trousers meant for, aside from getting my keys caught in them and making me rip my pockets?
It is true that tailgating someone at 80km/h (i.e. the speed limit!), speeding to illegally overtake them then pulling in front of them and slowing down “to show them” does make a statement, but I really dont think that the message received (i.e. I am a dickhead) was the statement intended.
While good intentions rarely get the job done, if you can lay your hands on them, good indentureds will often do the trick.
Not if you do it the right way, honey.
Now that I’m in the garage, I’m like a hard rockin’ garage band, only older (stiff back), and more garage office than garage band, but still rockin’!
Like all good sentences, this one is about sex and money.
So, as I understand it, the FTP server is like Gringott’s bank; the FTP software on your computer is like the vault key; and the files in the network are like the contents of the vaults, guarded by mysterious creatures who don’t ask too much about their contents.
When going on any extended hike, it is always a good idea to bring along an extra pair of hiking boots, in case you become lost for years and years and your first pair wear out; if carrying along an extra pair of boots is not practical, or you simply want to avoid the excess weight, you can always make sure you hike with a buddy who wears the same size boot as yourself, then simply take the necessary steps to assure that your hiking buddy has an “unfortunate accident” before his boots become too worn.
Tom wrote into his prenuptial that he and Jan would have a “time-out” for one week each year when neither would ask where the other disappeared to or what they did, however his push to get a nationwide law passed so everyone could enjoy a week of freedom each year never got very far.
Do you remember the fear that above all things dismantled your willpower, that one thing that brought us together, feathers on wings pressed together in avian prayer, and how it was only after the thunderclap of a new sun breaking apart the miserable morning that followed after the bliss hung around your delicate neck by the finest ecstacy measured in milligrams and sold in dollars had evaporated?
No, neither do I.
AP (Vatican City) In a stunning reversal of centuries of Catholic dogma, the Pope announced today that the Church will no longer teach that decapitated Barbies do not go to Heaven.
I don’t care if I am poor, quit trying to pay your bill in alms.
Deep in a cavern under our feet is an enormous cache of every barbie head ever severed from its body.
Throwing out her daughter’s naked, headless Barbies was always traumatic to Jean.
As inspired by: 'mouse's Foreplay (second grade version)
John stared at Scrine with the most complex expression of confusion, concentration and sadness, wondering if it would be posible to pinpoint exactly when in the last 11681 days since that perfect spring afternoon, his life went wrong.
Make mine a chemical spine, please, straight up.
There’s nothing funnier than a comb over on a windy day, unless the comb over is yours.
There are days when I don’t know which holds more truth - the passing days of my existence, or that void so quick to usher me in, then out again with barely a gesture.
I don’t care how skilled is your baker, how fine are your ingredients, how competitive is your price point or how willing your customers are to pay it: if your palmier is larger than a human head, it’s too damn big.
Billy had just started delivering the speech of a lifetime (which he’d been practicing for months, ever since his arrest) when the hangman “accidently” released the trap door.
Her writer’s block had fangs, teeth, and terrified babies and other innocents.
Every morning at six, the monkey clipped on his bow tie, tucked the newspaper under his arm, then walked the short distance to Mr. Plinkson’s office for their customary cup of juice, chilled banana slices, and brief discussion of world affairs.
If a brick weighs about five pounds, then 2500 bricks weigh ouch.
Most of Lily’s relationships were with men who loved her more than she loved them… she found it most unpleasant the other way around.
Minimalist Jones once had one single date
With a woman with terribly long fangs,
“I thought her sophisticated,” he sometimes replied,
“Mostly on account of her bangs.”
The next person who uses the words “bangs” and “sophisticated” in the same sentence to a nearly 40 year old woman is going to be beaten about the head and neck with my blowdryer.
Surely I’m exempt from all of this?
You just know that when the latke recipe includes the direction “Let the potatoes drain in the colander while you listen to a recording of Kitty Carlisle singing ‘Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum,’” the resulting latkes are going to be great.
What a singular, shimmering pleasure it is to watch a movie and discover that it really is every bit as good as you remember it being when you first fell in love with it twenty years ago.
To help support himself, Aristotle briefly appeared in a series of dishwashing detergent commercials, where he delivered the then famous line, “It would appear that I see myself in this Plato.”
Sometimes I imagine Elvis during his martial arts phase (karate chopping in half up to 40 boards per day!), and wonder how old Bruce Lee would have to be before The King couldn’t beat him up any more.
Clean the carpets, or suck the fur off the cats?
This time “fun” arrived in the form of a hammock.
I bet if I open up my dictionary a comic will pop out of my head.
After listening to 3 songs of people trying to be funny about the fact that they can’t sing… I realized that maybe kereoke is only funny in bars…when you’re drunk…THEN I realized that while being drunk would make it a lot more tolerable…you’re still watching people trying to be funny about the fact that they cant sing…only now their drunk and doing it….heretofore the two drunks cancel eachother out and it would still suck.
“They call him The Swami,” the bartender told Stewart, “on account of his inability to conjugate verbs.”
“Decide what you want, and then BE that person; DO what that person would DO.”
Henry taught the ferrets to sleep inside his slippers so that when he woke up in the morning and slipped out of bed, his feet would have something instantly warm to slip into; the musky ferret smell also happened to break his wife of her irritating foot fetish, which he’d never enjoyed one bit.
Everything is just another form of dirt, if you think about it; everything else is about sex.
Finally, the sun broke through, winning it’s battle with the angry gray clouds, and lit up not only the sky, but the very beings of all the poor souls lost in the grey damp of a nonexistent spring.
As Joel Chandler Harris might have said after a week-long diet of matzoh, “The Tar-Baby is not your friend.”
The aptly-named Dr. Isaiah Tusch was, without exception, the most well-regarded proctologist in the entire state.
It doesn’t seem possible, but I just now realized I am missing some vital, late 70’s Southern rock.
I drempt I fell out of bed, showered, somehow navigated to work with eyes mostly closed, and wrote this sentence.
As inspired by: Keith's Civil Disobedience (Couch Potato Style)
I frowned at my daughter until she poured back her dry cereal, chastened; inside, though, I was thinking, she’s too, too young to deserve the secret joy of breakfast for dinner.
Theodore felt like a real anarchist as he ate breakfast for the dinner meal.
“But wait Jeremiah, if you will get out of your wine cellar and get to know the other people in your apartment, you will realize that getting rid of all the bars is NOT a good idea”...Jeremiah looked at his friend thoughtfully…“You look like a salesman in that hat…touche’ salesman.”
There is something about old childhood friends that revives me…all the ideals we held as kids…what we wanted to be…what we knew we would be…and the idea that you will always be friends…all comes rushing back to you.
So graduation is coming up and all of a sudden, it’s hit me…maybe the reason you graduate is not just because you’ve learned enough, or you’ve made plans elsewhere…maybe it’s also because we simply outgrow our surroundings sometimes.
I think there is something very much like the sound of the ocean that plays constantly throughout good friendships.
Boot whistled merrily as she walked along the creek-bed, heading only towards the horizon.
I miss the days when a sick day meant staying home sick and watching television or reading books in bed all day, not staying home sick and noticing how filthy I’ve let the apartment become.
I’m glad my job isn’t painting lines on the highway, because I can’t even get the words straight these days.
Children are not known for their time-management skills, though it’s true that they know how to use time effectively in their own way, and time passes extremely quickly when you have one in your house.
They didnt call him Naive Neil for no reason; faced with a situation in which a naked crack addict in a compromising position told Neil he was “cleaning his pipes”, Neil chose to believe this meant he was a singer.
Emmaline decided the feeling was that of being on the cusp of something; but like all good cusps, the damn thing would probably not make sense until long after.
There’s very little a good hearty artichoke can’t set right.
Is there anyway I can run away to that does NOT have homicidal college students, reality tv, cancer, dumbass ex husbands, gangsta rap, and cilantro?
The time has come to schedule Scrinefest, but where?
Someday the secret of your life will become the subject of some poorly researched not even feigned interested paper penned by a student who will achieve far more success financially, emotionally, and sexually than you can ever hope to have in this life.
The next time I feel inclined to complain about the time in which we live as being full of fools, blowhards and philistines, I should remember that a) fools, blowhards and philistines have always been with us, and b) all I need to do to get clean, hot water is to grasp a faucet and flex my wrist a little.
To overcome her fear of crossing the street, she lifted her knees high and walked on pointed toes, crossing over each ankle, arms akimbo, one and two and one and two and.
“I’m sorry, Henry, but your health insurance plan does not cover cases of pre-existing gondolaism.
As the young woman held her baby in her arms and they gazed at the moonlit sky together, something passed between, something that never dimmed and that forever changed the life of the little girl.
I’ve been played.
One t-shirt, two sweatshirts and a coat later, Keith decided he better light a fire.
She spread her limbs against the spring breeze and engaged in unashamed wind sex.
The good thing about that statement is that it does its job like none other; the bad thing about it is that it will leave Rod Stewart’s voice in your head for at least two hours.
I’m confused; doesn’t sunshine always mean “warm?”
I tink I godanudder code.
Watching the news and the fancy graphics used to entice us, it occurred to me that it was actually someone’s job to decide which font would actually look best to describe the killings.
The mother heart, connected to all mother hearts, cannot bear to ever again beat the same rhythm after today.
Of course, since we’ve only been seeing one another a very short time, it will not bother me at all if you decide to share an apartment with a former girlfriend who just last week told you she’d still like to have sex with you occasionally just for old time’s sake.
Neckties flapping in the wind, the lawyers at the watering hole were amazed to find a helicopter landing on the road.
Monday assaulted his sensibilities like a Barbara Walters Special conducted in FFN Vision*.
*Full Frontal Nudity Vision
If you stay in the same place long enough, not only will the whole world pass you by, but everyone who has ever wronged you will show up and apologize.
For the past week or two Ive seen elephants on the way to work and it’s made my day but this morning, like a temporary mist lifting from the valley, the carnies and their elephants were gone and my day was poorer for it.
“Too many irons in the fire,” is a saying generally understood by most, but any saying involving the words “red hot poker” is prone to misinterpretation.
We’ve had the year of rice, the year of the pig, the year of the dolphin, even the year of the heliophysical, so why not other stuff as well?
Though she had lived with her fair share of both all her life, Patti was still amazed at how long dogs and men could sleep.
What with all the singing witnesses, and the wax 44 lit up atop the approaching cake, Rosemary realized she would no longer be allowed to deny middle age.
He wept with dismay as he watched his daughter kicking the crap out of him at Scrabble for the second time that day.
We returned to the dusty haven of bits, bobs, books and what-nots, but this time we took the camera.
Pregnancy really does change everything: instead of standing around in The Gap for ages while my wife didn’t buy anything, today I stood around for ages in Gap Maternity.
Lulled by the swush swush of the dishwasher, they collapsed into a pile, and, always alert, she was able to roll exhausted to the phone to call the authorities.
If she stayed down low, sometimes on her belly, she was able to dodge the food thrown by her savage children and their wild-eyed friends.
According to the diary kept by Henry during the climb, it was Emilio who left early on that day in search of breakfast gravy, and not Henry, who opted to stay behind and worry.
A man can dream.
Juan realized, with some dismay, that last night’s gin apparently drowned the brain cell that controlled his mind’s ability to process time linearly.
Round trip train ticket to Penn Sta..$19.00;
Taxicab to the upper east side…$18.00;
Humongous cup of pumpkin spice coffee at cute funky coffee shop $3.00;
Coffee with the lovely and brilliant Bunni….PRICELESS!
Bad, out-of-season tomatoes are worse than no tomatoes at all.
I’m wearing a tie for the second time this week, and I am even less happy about it than I was the first time.
I don’t claim to understand all conspiracies; the toilet paper industry, for example, continually entices the consumer with increasingly soft toilet tissue—so soft, in fact, that bits of it are now prone to break off and roll into little tiny balls that stick between your cheeks if you’re not careful—but as to what the TP industry is really up to, or why they would ever want to do this to us, is beyond me.
I was giving myself a haircut in the dream and things were going pretty well right up until the moment I noticed that the head of the clipper looked more like a small TV antenna than hair clipper blades, and that is when I accidentally cut off all my chest hair.
Henry believed in hand delivering bad news.
It sounds funny until you actually see one and then it’s not.
The ground was so fertile that even her children, whom she buried up to the ankles for an hour each day, grew enormously tall, healthy and leafy.
New Scrine skins are like baths…you wash away everything dull and it’ll give you a lovely scent too.
“Not all men are annoying,” Alice replied. “Some are dead.”
I once got a job selling shoes at Sears, just so I could hide my brain in one of the shoeboxes, but as you might imagine, that didn’t really work out too well.
As inspired by: grudknows's heh Heh HEH
The other woman tore one of the front pages out of her book, just because she thought the quote was interesting and she couldn’t be bothered writing it down.
Oh, excuse me, is my decaying brain showing?
There is so much about the modern bathroom I don’t understand; for instance, why is there an old banana peel sitting on the counter, and why doesn’t it ever leave?
At 95 she held onto her independence as best she could, hiring us to mow the lawn that was as small, tired, and lumpy as she was, and each time we arrived she would push open that aluminum screen door just enough to poke her head through, turtle-like, the house around her protecting her like a shell, the loose skin of her neck stretching long, then tightening slightly as the smile came to her face and she’d say the same thing to us with each and every visit: “You boys are here to mow the valley, aren’t you? Have at it, then! Time’s a wastin’!”
The freak explosion over at the big box store scattered giant bottles of mayonnaise all over her lawn, while the neighbor on her right received four thousand duffel bags on two large pallets.
As a gardener, I am full of free advice; yesterday, for instance, I told the 82 year old woman that she should take her cane and give her money-grubbing nephew two or three good solid whacks on the head the next time he showed up in her garden.
The woman so intently focused on her book, ‘The history of the world, pt 1’, didn’t realise that her process of reading and ripping each page out as she was done was attracting the horrified attention of her fellow commuters.
All the things you’ve lost have been sucked down into Earth’s molten magma core, where they languish, floating around, conspiring against us all.
It was easy deciding to name the company BoredDuck Enterprises; it was much harder determining what to sell.
As inspired by: steve's optimist
Everyone in the world is more interesting up close, even if they happen to be smelly.
I don’t know what it’s made of, but I’m certain that I’ll love it.
A week after the soliloquy ended, Hamlet’s words were still echoing inside her skull.
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a gloom cookie.”
Seems to me that small, single-serving bags of snack food should not be allowed to claim 120-calories per serving and then quietly note in microprint that there are seven servings in aforementioned tiny bag.
Imagine her surprise when she realized she’d been ignoring the laundry for a full month.
General contractors often don’t read as much as others because talking to many prospective customers for an hour contains roughly the same amount of story material as three thick books.
I need to remember that rescheduling impossible-to-please 82 year old women/men (still impossible-to-tell) only delays the inevitable.
People always smell bad when you get right up close.
Everyone in the world is more interesting than they seem from a distance.
Spring break with two bickering children has to count for more points than Christmas break, for the traffic as much as anything else.
Henry was shocked to learn he’d wasted four long years researching fondness when Ruth, his lab assistant, informed him that it was absence that made the heart grow fonder, and not abstinence, although this did prove once and for all that doctors should never test theories on themselves.
I must remember to reschedule the impossible-to-please 82 year old woman/man (impossible-to-tell over the phone).
If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.
from The Diving-bell and the Butterfly
“Let’s see, I’ve got my beetroot, some plums, I’m wearing my purple suede boots… what am I missing?”
I’m so convinced that the SciFi network can make a horror movie out of anything that I’ve sent them my terrifying screenplay Kukes!
The Christians in the house were naturally joyous, but Uncle Bob, the family atheist, always refused to get out of bed on Easter because, as he put it, “It drives home the point that no one, including me, rises again on this day.”
Woops, we forgot baskets!
The Easter Bunny deposited his eggs, working stealthily in the predawn light, taking great joy in the annual ritual of finding ever tougher spots that the growing children demanded.
Meanwhile, the Easter father remembered the day last summer when the lawnmower made short work of one missed 3-month-old Easter egg.
“If I had to choose between giving up my taste buds or my testicles, I’d be singing soprano.”
Snow in April is not really okay with me.
Sometimes there are small sheets of paper layered between the slices of cheese, and you should peel those off before making your sandwich.