“It’s not every day you see a disembodied monster cock attacking a kid in a wheelchair.”
What if, despite all best efforts and all most optimistic thoughts, this too shall never pass?
Lawyers were called to the religious fair before the misunderstanding was realised, everything having stemmed from Dan telling Percy’s mother “He’s turned himself in at the penance-tent-Sheree,” in response to a question about Percy’s whereabouts.
Warren felt totally justified emptying several hundred rounds into the phone company headquarters building after they assigned him the number 867-5309.
Scrining makes me regular, every day!
When we are young, our dreams are powerful and plentiful, so we do everything with enthusiastic speed…as we age, our strength fades along with our dreams…eventually they die, and so do we.
yesterday, i found myself smiling at a cute pudgy little baby, then opening the door for his stroller, then tripping over the curb that i wasn’t looking at and sprawling across the asphalt; i’ve got a bruised shoulder and two skinned knees, and i should have a bruise on my ego as well, but apparently i’m no longer capable of embarrassment (i laughed, so did the baby).
Here on our first night in the new house, I quickly discovered that it apparently comes with free high-speed Internet, compliments of a mysterious new neighbor I know only as Gordon.
They all scoffed at Gerald when he said that his hair seemed noticeably longer every morning…but no one was laughing two weeks later, when his head had shrunk to the size of a walnut.
I know that you mean well, and are only trying to cheer me up, when you call me and say, jovially, “hey, at least you won’t run out of boxes!,” but I promise you that you will cheer me up more effectively if you refrain from doing so.
She opened her mouth at the interview and out popped a small frog.
Schuster couldn’t help me move on account of the trial, but each night he’d stop by to help polish off the beer and tell me something new about Mr. Bevins.
As inspired by: e's guest scriner: neil gaiman
My friend Schuster told me he agreed with Neil Gaiman’s plan for world peace and harmony nearly 100%, and that although he loved pandas dearly, he was inclined to think a stripper on his lap might please him slightly more.
Dale never frightened the neighborhood children with his dry, ugly feet, but he sure could have.
Since Carl Sagan is dead, I guess I’ll never know if he would have come over to help me move.
From her back porch just last night she was able to see four moons circling around Jupiter—and felt the lesser and the greater for it.
I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months.
A squashed Blackberry gathers no messages.
I’m not sure what Arwen did when I fell asleep in her chair, but ever since my last haircut, my nostrils look bigger.
Patty shook the young boy’s head and was satisfied to see it sounded as empty as it looked.
Greg felt that melting the flowerpots and clocks had been a pretty easy undertaking, but was worried the dog might be a bit trickier.
Don’t saw off one of your arms before you are sure you can grow a spare one.
Grow an extra arm.
Incredibly, yuk is not a sub-species of yak, but merely a slightly weirder way of spelling ‘yuck’.
All things considered, Gertrude was just relieved the damn thing hadn’t poofed as well.
The booglybears watched skif and waited for her to post, and as they did they nibbled on their Cheezoid snacks and sipped on Pineycolas.
As inspired by:
grudknows
Face it lady, you’re kind, generous, thoughtful and sharing, so just get over it.
… another beaut from the Big Book of Inherently Funny Words.
I feel a bout of the Internet Wallabies coming on…
Red, yellow, purple, egg (and I shall say no more).
Schuster was sure all the secrets were trying to kill him.
My body may be caught in this bland, bland place, but my mind has been set free and is roaming.
I don’t know what I did to deserve such beautiful people in my life, but it must have been something amazing.
Far better to sleep on a bed of indecision before it’s made.
“Why oh why,” she grumbled to her eleven-year-old son when he got her up to view the lunar eclipse at 3:45 in the morning, “did I have to give birth to Mr. Science?”
Snow chuckled gleefully at her desk when she realized that the corporate demons in charge of blocking any internet fun had neglected to block the Scrine site.
i would spend it here.
There’s a stairway to heaven; there’s an elevator to hell.
It seems to me that being a kind and generous person is not cool (and saying ‘cool’ is probably not cool either), but to that I say “raspberries”.
I’ve seen people threatened with forks over such things.
Schuster knew he should be paying attention, but he couldn’t help but let his mind wander as he worked through the various ways of killing Mr. Bevins.
“Absolutely nothing is to be left behind,” announced the office manager; as she spoke, Bronwyn looked at her cubicle wall, considered the sheer amount of thumbtacks she would have to pack, and instantly felt bone-tired.
After a strong start in the headline, the sentence went nowhere at all.
“Are we bad parents or are these people freaks?”
It angers me (or is it just sadness?) that my son is running out of needing my advice faster than I am running out of things I need to teach him.
It was clear to Schuster that Mr. Bevins, as the jury foreman, clearly understood the need to be as pompous as possible.
Today could be a very important day for me, but then, maybe it’ll be tomorrow.
Once again, it was the dog days of summer, when each hour of Juan’s work day felt like seven.
She wrote a sentence about nothing at all, just to be companionable with her fellow Scriners whom she held in great esteem.
Schuster believed in Herman Heaven—the place he thought all the Hermans went to be happy after they died.
“Are you kidding, Sally, I love you because of your buck teeth.”
Make no mistake about it, give in to it and you’re as good as dead, and it won’t matter how much money’s in your pocket because it won’t buy it back, not even close.
“I attribute my general good health, and the fact I haven’t been sick or had a cold in ten years to three limes a day… wrapped in tequila and triple sec.”
That was the morning when Juan realized music was the only thing maintaining his sanity.
When suddenly, she had a job interview (gleep!)
It just felt good to be accepted by anything, even if it was a web-bot gatekeeper.
Kevin was rumored to be a very good lover, but it was his reputation and a cunning linguist that got him so many dates.
As another year of life came to completion, boot stood at her front gate and forlornly waved her ‘age with an 8 in it’ farewell.
Ghosts have no say-so
as to how they are honored…
the living just guess at it
and do their best.
As beer is my witness, this night will be one to remember.
Spacious apartment living obviously means there’s almost room for a bed and a dresser in the master bedroom, which, incidentally, makes me think that perhaps the meaning of “master” also takes on a different meaning when you rent.
“If I don’t rock it, chalk it up to the blues.”
Seems ironic to me that the house disclosure statements I was asked to fill out were so concerned about hidden fuel tanks and septic lines, but didn’t ask one single question about buried bodies or unsolved murders asscociated with the property; oh well.
The strangers begin arriving tomorrow to walk around my house and decide whether or not it looks like home; call me bitter, but I refuse to tell them about Mr. Cooper’s bones, and I certainly won’t mention the ghost.
After a couple of hours spent tweezing cactus spines from her friend’s foot, Janice concluded that she really needed to get a more interesting dream life.
“dear, if you’re going to lay on the sarcasm any thicker, you’ll need a trowel.”
No, and it’s not a plane either; it’s a beer (beer o’clock has come a day early for some of us).
Too late she realized that she would ever be compulsively summing things up into neat little packages, but in her heart she sought just one more ellipsis.
If I had to pick a year to live over again, I’d have to say that it hasn’t happened yet.
Chuck, my darling, I love you, but don’t even think of getting started on British food with me, for that’s a conversation that can only end one way. ;)
During his extensive study of obscure beliefs and sayings, Dr. Leugentheld was able to determine that the number of people who have actually witnessed shit hitting the fan was only slightly larger than the number of children who’d lost an eye running with scissors, and that the occurrence of either was of such low probability that he ranked both sayings only slightly higher than “hell freezing over.”
What if, despite all best efforts and all most optimistic thoughts, this too shall never pass?
Chuck lived by three simple rules: Red meat, barbequed rare; no quiche, ever; and, never use those ridiculous paper toilet seat covers.
As inspired by:
the inner machinations of scrine
… and late in the 23rd century, the plagues finally reached their epidemic peak, with each Robert annoying entire cities into annihilation.
No woman endowed with breasts larger than an A cup should EVER attempt to jumprope unless said breasts are firmly secured in a proper sports bra.
‘mouse was pleased to see that 4/7 (now 5/8) of the Scrine entries which included the word “orgasm” showed under his name, but he was quite disappointed there weren’t more orgasms overall.
Nick never told the truth about what was in his lunchbox, and when confronted, didn’t apologize, but simply told the teacher that he was feeding the world, which in his words “were hungry for lies.”
As inspired by: A PostSecret Card this week
Yolanda was so rude to Jason when he called the suicide prevention hotline that he decided to make it his mission to get her fired or at least severely reprimanded… and forgot all about killing himself.
A bottomless bowl of dandan noodles always seems like a good idea until you actually try to eat it.
It doesn’t bode well for the rest of your day when the light for oncoming traffic turns green while you are in the crosswalk with the WALK sign lit in your favor.
As the outgoing notices piled up on Jean’s desk, she kidded herself one more day wouldn’t really matter.
*Advanced Notice of Death
Why does ‘the obligatory cake’ sound better than ‘the required cake’?
The sum total of their combined IQs was of such enormity that when they were finally in the same room together and began to converse, it caused a collapse in the universal order and time stood still…literally.
Suddenly the heat reached such a point that all children in the house collapsed where they stood.
Dr. Keith gave me prescription pop (music) to soothe my savaged spirit
I try to be all calm and zen and “in the moment” and shit, but frankly, Fridays and Mondays tend to really suck in my office.
I don’t really mind being past my prime…I just wish someone would have had the decency to point out when I was peaking.
Some days Timmy felt he was nothing but a coffee stain on the white shirt of the universe.
After drinking two cans of Earth Axis, my friend Schuster was spinning so fast the buttons popped right off his shirt.
“So what if there’s global warming or another ice age and we all die—in a few million years some other animal will rise up and rule the planet again.”
Sometimes if he stretched out his arms as far as he could and held real still, Peter thought he could feel the rough, untrimmed edges of time moving in the breeze.
Lola forgave a lot of people for some pretty outrageous things, but he never did manage to forgive his parents for naming him Lola.
An avowed scotch drinker, Juan marked the beginning of his long slide downward with that first bottle of good bourbon.
Great Scott, what a ghastly piece of irony!
Schuster called them his magic glasses, but most of us knew they were really just an old pair he’d found in the dumpster.
“Potter, you can skin Malfoy’s shrivelfig.”
Her striped toes appeared almost to purr with happiness, resting in the soft winter sunlight.
Overactive imagination: is there any such thing, and if so, is it so bad?
As inspired by: Joan of Argghh!'s Truth or Dare
Juan awoke, stretched, and then dove into the pool for some exercise, feeling the pure joy of what he’d started thinking of as Joan’s Promise, knowing that by evening there’d be reproach aplenty, but deciding not to let that ruin a perfectly good summer morning.
The thought of a sentence with five hundred words seemed to her like a river that would overflow its banks and flood the plain and simple truth of the landscape that surrounded her mind’s ebb-and-flow of temporal reaity—if reality could be the word for what went coursing through her waking moments—and really, she longed for constraint and discipline like an out-of-control woman needing a good spanking; her own thoughts being difficult and unruly, childish in one moment, soaring and esoteric the next, or else given to a deep melancholy that threatened her tenuous grip on the fact that her life wasn’t going exactly as planned…she chided herself inwardly for that weak thought, then cursed that bad habit of self-criticism—still, the thrill of something bigger and stronger, a Rule, that would take all the roaring and rushing torrent of words and make them BEHAVE in a demure, desirable form of womanhood…well, that was a challenge that she’d have to take on, if only to delight in the steadfast firmness of something, anything, that would be unchanging, solid in her gypsy imagination; five hundred words seemed almost too easy if she just wanted to prattle on, but the constraint of one.single.sentence. was just another in a long series of dares she felt compelled to take on, as though working two jobs and writing a stupid blog (oh, she needed the writing outlet and would likely kill the child in its crib before long, but as it was, the care and feeding of the damn thing seemed just one more task she compulsively took on, knowing full well that when she invited that desire into her bed, she would loathe the child of such a union and fear it would grow into a miscreant aberration of embarrassing self-revelations about family dysfunction—or worse—devolve into a whiny teenager that was never going to decide on a career path or do anything to further itself) wasn’t enough for her insatiable appetite for creative output; no, she was determined to completely alienate any chance for something remotely normal even if it meant the indescribably lonely feeling one has when they realize their obsessions have taken them places they probably shouldn’t be, but were irresistible nonetheless…places where the ego wants to expand and vaunt itself to dizzying heights just because the fear of heights was so viscerally implanted in her psyche to a point of danger, and there it was: the reason she simply could not resist the temptation of the challenge of five hundred words in one sentence was the possibility of abject failure or abiding achievement as the result of disciplining the thousands of synapses into one cohesive (and hopefully, coherent) phrase of meaning; an accomplishment that she knew she would enjoy rewinding (now there’s a new anachronism!) and replaying in her stupid blog just as soon as she posted it here in this amazing forum, concluding the deed with a sigh of almost sultry satisfaction and lighting an imaginary cigarette.
I’m not sure it’s even possible, but it certainly appears that large gangs of humans appear to be clotting.
There are a great many paths in this life if you but look for them, the problem being of course, knowing what you are looking for and knowing that, knowing if it is what you should be looking for.
For some, the millennium will always be remembered as the approximate time television ‘repeats’ became known as ‘encore performances’.
I love my friends so freaking much.
Lloyd has brought home Season 2 of The Muppet Show, one episode of which features John Cleese as a pirate laying siege to the Swinetrek in Pigs in Space, which, in turn, makes me happier than words can say.
She had nothing he wanted when he was sober; he had nothing she wanted when he was drunk—so she poured herself a double and smiled.
Jo, here’s an antidote thats nearly guaranteed to flush those nasty Eagles right out of your ears.
Farmers of words will rarely, if ever, earn as much as real farmers
Three people who have left the company over the past few years came back for a visit today, and every single one of them looks absolutely marvelous.
“Pot smoke smells much better than cigarettes and cigars.”
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
If not reproach or promise, then truth must be my paycheck.
Is truth
the stinging
reproach
we feel as
our head
hits the pillow,
or is it
the glorious
dawn of promise
that each sunrise
brings?
Ever since my brain surgery, I can’t shut up.
Dear God: What did I do to so offend that you’ve arranged for me to go to the free Mandy Moore concert this evening?
“We’ve taken the head of a journalist…and grafted it onto the body of another journalist!”
The first mention of the early cherries of springtime was uttered today and, at its whispered name, Becky began to stir.
adjective: displaying or suggesting a lack of maturity via email.
As inspired by:
the welcoming of a new Scriner (Joan)
Jake was never sure, on balance, whether his life was one of good deeds or bad, and when he came back as a welcome mat he remained as unsure as ever.
Oh the things I have to think,
to try and make my thoughts succinct!
Some people have their yoga; I have my Scrine.
Roger still thinks he should have stood his ground when he was kicked out of that fencing class (along with his bundle of pickets).
A nun walks into a bar with a duck tucked under her arm…
Father, I cannot tell a lie. I didn’t do it.”
George Washington
“Father I cannot tell a lie. I didn’t do it.”
~George Washington
The sum total of human thinking can be summarized with the question, “Why did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers?”
The editorial staff of Merriam-Websters has determined that the word, “corn,” is the funniest word in the English language.
Searching for a new place to live, Henry felt as tired and stretched as the elastic on a pair of month-old hobo underwear.
It’s too damn nice out to work in an office today.
“Never buy coffee from a ‘grease’ no matter how great your need, they specialise in frying not brewing”
She stretched back her arms, sprouted feathers, and swept into the sky.
My computer’s camera must be staring right through me, because what else could explain a logic board going bad compounded by a memory problem?
“I think instead of gold or silver or diamonds or whatever, the 20-year anniversary gift ought to be a mutual exchange of ‘One Free Pass To Have An Affair’ vouchers,” Grace explained to the bartender, slurring her words only slightly.
There are those who say Ben lost his grip on reality when he petitioned to have his name legally changed to “Donald Duck” but really, that was just a marketing ploy—he actually lost it ten years earlier when he began compiling his opus, The Oxford English Duckionary.
Grud looked around at the piles of, well, stuff and vowed (once again) never to move house.
Unlike old men, computers sometimes return from the shop with their memories intact.
“Soe grete is myn myrth, ich hath wyth kaffee myn screne yshoured!”
As inspired by: Keith's Death By Banking Complications
It is a little known fact that among the angels in heaven there is an ironclad hierarchy defined by your death—with death by falling piano the extreme top of the pecking order and death by banking complications establishing the other end of the spectrum
Just when I start hoping I’ll die of old age some day, a letter arrives to remind me that the cause will be banking complications.
I now think of him as my brother, except that I’ve never seen him laugh milk out his nose or fart the alphabet.
After years of research, Doctor Doppelfang created the world’s first methane-powered elevator for use at the headquarters of The Boston Baked Beans Company.
Scientists recently discovered many of the chemical bonds found in concrete to also be present in humans, leading speculation in the pharmaceutical industry to the future availability of the so-called “anti-stubborn” pill; Dr. Mengli Bhottwano, lead scientist for the ChemCow team working on the project was quick to point out that a solution is still many years away, adding, “Despite all the testing on the Humacrete™ process, to date not one human has been successfully restructured into an attractive bird bath, although it should be noted that several quality human Buddhas have been created.”
“First of all, you’re hardly dalliancical enough to get away with it, Peter, and second of all, that’s not even a word.”
“I think you need a little mucilage on that fusillage.”
Hell is receiving an invitation to the wedding reception of the brother of a dear friend, which you accept with alacrity, knowing that this is going to be the Best Wedding Reception Ever, because a) the fare is hardcore Chinese buffet and you’ll finally be able to get you some chicken feet in black bean sauce; b) the groom is an orthodontist-by-day, rock-guitarist-by night and all of his musician friends will be playing at the reception; c) you’ll get to socialize with one of your best friends, who you see far too rarely now that she doesn’t commute into the city every day; and d) you get to kick off your reentry into the work week with a kickass party…and then having to call your friend and cancel just hours before the reception because you brought either a mild cold or a severe allergy attack home with you.
“They tried to sell us jars of peanut butter and jelly all swirled together back in the Seventies, and we laughed it off the shelves, Boy, just laughed it right off,” sneered Zeke’s father, gesturing at the grocery shelf while his motorized scooter weaved precariously, “but now look - it’s back - which is proof positive your generation is gullible enough to buy anything.”
In two days my kid starts middle school, which she persists on calling Junior High School; which one of us is right?
As inspired by: boot's underpant sadness
“Well if it’s any consolation, bud,” the bartender replied, “that 3000XT at the end of the bar has been undressing that metal butt of yours with some sort of sexual logarithm all night long.”
I’ve always wanted to be a sculpter, and what I mean by that is I’ve always wanted to have an excuse to sit in a room and make one piece ladders out of copper wiring all day.
“It’s not the fact we aren’t allowed to wear clothing that makes me unhappy,” said Randall the Robot to the bartender, “it’s just that I’ve always had a penchant for collecting underpants and there really isn’t any point.”
Today I wrote my novel in white paint on a white wall.
As inspired by: Keith's Bug Legs
The domain of the Moulders was damp and treacherous, with each village having to rebuild after the soapy floods that rushed down every few hours.