“You make my skin crawl,” hissed Sally, “and being a snake, I don’t think I can make it any clearer than that.”
For my 200th sentence, I was thinking maybe something especially… oh crap, so much for that idea.
where’d everybody go??
All is forgotten!
Henry slept like a whiskery, beer-breathed baby.
The deeper meaning behind human history, in its intricate Hegelian complexity and its eons of rising and falling civilizations, can be found in one thing, and one thing only: the Perfect Fish Taco.
The moment you find yourself laying sprinkler pipe in the rain in October is the moment you’ll realize you’ve made an unfortunate career blunder.
“A day can really slip by when you’re deliberately avoiding what you’re supposed to do.”
What does one fill as the declared value on a Fedex package that’s mailed out with the signed deed to one’s house—there’s not enough space to write “years and years of blood, sweat and tears” but I may be able to fit “everything” if I write small.
This is the sound of a desk monkey at a box factory reminding herself that although her major customer has decided to reaward the lion’s share of their business to other vendors, that does not mean that said desk monkey is about to be fired; no, no, no, absolutely not.
Small children who are pretending to be sick, but who spend the morning torturing the cat and giggling insanely, must be firmly denied any kind of happy fun for quite some time.
“Since I’m made in his image, that means he’s a depressed, underachieving, balding, middle-aged white guy going soft around the middle,” Bob said to his beer, “That explains a lot.”
That ain’t carp bait, that’s a chubby white pair of legs that are going to be nasty sunburned in a few more minutes, thought the carp.
If they all commit suicide, does Bush get to appoint his household pets, favorite Sunday school teachers, and bartenders from his college years to sit on the bench?
God looked in the mirror and thought, “Carp bait, now he’s gone and made me in HIS image!”
Bob wondered if the Supreme Court would make assisted suicide legal nation-wide, as long as people promised to set up trust funds for the government, so that the monetary rape could continue long after the body was in the grave.
If I was not a rusty bird stuck here with no one listening to me, I would go pick the numbers 2, 7, 12, 13, 30 and 42 for the October 8, 2005 Oregon Megabucks Lotto.
My new (and definitive) life plan in terms of what I want to do when I grow up is simply to win the lottery and travel.
Josh knew his addiction was getting out of control when he started buying large bottles at Costco, smuggling them home, hiding them and using them to refill the carafe his wife kept on the counter, but he rationalized that he hadn’t really sunk to rock bottom and didn’t really need professional help since he was still buying name-brand jelly-bellies instead of generics.
I find myself wondering (yet again) why Oscar, my pet bunny, would insist on inviting strange birds (yes, the kind with wings) into my open house.
“Carp bait!” thought Bob, miserably, glaring at the cover article on Sportsman Illustrated as he sat on the can, wondering if he could muster the energy to find a straght-razor to slit his wrists, “I can’t believe Ed Shushucker, that slimy shyster from high school, made ten million dollars selling carp bait.”
My resume in feces: Cowshit, bullshit, pigshit, chickenshit, goatshit, rabbitshit, dogshit, sheepshit, horseshit, pigeonshit, batshit, catshit, deershit, babyshit.
“Wait for it, quietly.”
“Never fight with your ingredients, because your ingredients will always win.”
At this moment, I would sell everything I own, even the antique cookbooks, for a bowl of chicken, leek and ginger wontons in a rich brown double-strength chicken stock, with dumpling wrappers so fresh and slippery that eating them really does feel like swallowing clouds.
I will now attempt to bill someone for the hours I’ve spent in my lifetime staring blankly into space.
In a dream I had last night, aliens were turning people into animals, and even though I’d been turned into a cat, I remember these things happening - when I ran, it was in great big strides like I still had two long legs, I was walking through a downtown and came across an art gallery whose sidewalk out front was made entirely of headstones, laid on their backs, and that I went inside the gallery after being lured in by a woman who seemed to be the owner and was offering me a slice of cake, and that once inside, I kept looking out a side window, insisting to people who passed between the buildings that I had not been turned into a cat, but was, in fact, a duck.
Don’t fool yourself, bedtime means something different every single time you climb in.
They say you can get anything you want, ‘ceptin’ Alice, but through the wonder that is the Internet, Keith and Alice have now consumated their relationship.
She put on the goggles and flipped on the newly-installed ultraviolet light, to reveal the shocking truth that everything in her house was held together with liquified stress stretched unbearably tight.
Bob survived the tsunami by stuffing his clothes full of plastic, kids meal toys, which he found floating in the water by the millions.
Actually, Dave, Bronwyn thought as she listened to him hit the high note, there are at least 36 damn songs that can make me break down and cry.
Let’s see if I’ve got this right—the school doesn’t take Columbus Day off when there’s a post-office and bank holiday and many people are off work, because, that’d be like, thumbing your nose at the native peoples, but instead they take next Friday off for a teacher “in-service” day and make us re-arrange our lives one more time to so as to make sure our kiddies are supervised.
Since none of your sites seem to be working anymore, you’ll all be showing up here soon—let me say on his behalf, welcome to Keith’s (reliable and user-friendly) clubhouse!
My car needs a new motto - it used to be “Hootie-Free Zone”, but now everybody hates Hootie and the Blowfish.
I’ve decided to hook up my cats to small treadmills, and decode their little steps (long, short, long long short short) to write sentences.
“That’s why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”
Oddly enough, a man with twelve toes is no more steady on his feet then then a ten-toed man.
That sugar high was great while it lasted.
Surrounded by everything, everything awash with colour and dizzy with life; the city gently but firmly reached out , took my heart in its hands and removed a small piece forever.
Go ahead, snickered the new blister on the ball of Jen’s left foot, just try to ignore me.
People who live in glass houses should never sneeze uncontrollably while hauling laundry down the hallway using both hands.
Wait, wait, did you just say, keep a poem in your pocket and a picture in your head, and you’ll never be lonely at night when you are dead?
Initiating the new “shameless self-promotion category” I just wanted to announce, pictures are up.
My mother was a feminist, but she’d be shocked, simply shocked by these forward women nowadays who think it’s okay to demand that a guy they hardly know send them pictures of his tools over the ‘net.
“Look at the tools on that guy,” whispered Adrienne to her companion, who shuddered in response, “and then imagine them cleaning your house...”
Since pumpkins look so much like boobs, it seems only fair that some equivalently phallic vegetable be sold as well.
The woodworking club met every week in Bob’s shop,
Although his wife swore there was nothing mundaner,
Then fully grown men discussing wood grain and tools,
And each week growing slightly insaner;
But then Bob became treasurer (after mitering his thumb),
And his wife thought, “Can it get more inaner?”
The president himself was missing a hand,
“A gift,” he claimed, “to my Craftsmen wood planer.”
Not so long ago, the weather deities mocked us here on the East Coast with their excessive frolicking; this week, they share our misery, and, in so doing, enhance it.
On discovering the haiku secrets website - a site not unlike Scrine - grudknows desperately wanted to be one of the first to add to the collection but could think of not a word, let alone many syllables.
What is this “weather” you write about, queried the California native who had never heard of such a thing.
Dear weasels: Eight straight days of rain is a grind, a burden, and, for people whose apartments are flooded, a nightmare; it is not, however, a sign of the impending apocalypse, so please get those looks of bug-eyed gravity off your faces.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“‘Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is, and nothing more.”
As she returned the icepick to her handbag, Miss Jane thought to herself “yeah, so what does that mean, that I look like the bottom of someone’s shoe on other days?”
The sun came up like a used teabag, bleeding and weak after last night’s poor showing.
The “used” teabag, for so long a symbol of nostalgia for all that is lost, for those moments exploded and now gone; now reinterpreted and recontextualized as having spent its mortality, turning it in for some new existence, back into the cycle of being; embarking upon freedom at the bottom of that garbage truck.
On discovering the church of the FSM, she finally understood the motivation that had people standing on street corners handing out religous brochures - it’s a mischievous route to self amusement.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from…
Love had become for him not so unlike a teabag,
Once drawn from the cupboard with anticipation;
A symbol, hope and warmth, comfort,
Cupped between hands like a reward
That will be lost, set aside to grow cold and useless,
Yet lying there on the saucer
As he sips slowly the last tepid drops from the cup,
Reminding him of all that has slipped away.
Just when you think that your outlook on life is completely cynical and real life can’t possibly ever match it, something happens (again) to exceed your wildest cynical dreams.
I thought, when i received an email demanding my tea bag ode from Boot that it was to go on haiku secrets, so I posted but… for what it’s worth, here ‘tis:
Used teabags don’t exist
until they have decomposed
nuturing the earth
When you get there start looking for another… don’t wait until the end.
It’s becoming apparently clear that used tea bags actually turn in to wire coat hangers.
My day started out fine but then it all went surgleyfonk.
One should not scrine from boredom alone.
bleep bip blllleeeeeep bip bip bip, my new morse code watch chirps as it merrily tells me the time.
Amir found that he could spend hours looking at these pictures, scrolling down, clicking for larger images, imagining running his fingers over their perfection, smelling them, losing himself in stories of their myriad individual histories, smelling them, running his fingers over them, maybe, just maybe even tasting them.. imagining.
“Thank you in advance for not praying for me, as it’s an ‘act of god’ to begin with!”
Oh my God, you guys, she jumped off the BRIDGE.
When the little voices inside your computer begin to bother you, it’s time to seek professional help—or at least take a break.
Stay? go? where? how?; or….?
I took a hold of her near the neck and rear leg, trying to avoid stepping in blood that had pooled around her, then slid her to the side of the road before another car could drive by, hoping that her intestines weren’t stringing out behind her, wondering what I would do if they had, and worrying, most of all, about how to break the news to the boy.
The couger looked down on the city lights far below and at the new jogging trail much closer, licked its paw and contemplated its hunger.
Today, if wishes come true, the hurricane will soften into a mere puff, send only a gentle patter of rain, and scatter flower petals over metropolitan Cancun, saving only the fragrance of lavender for its caress of Florida’s shores.
Some sentences are written because they demand to be written, some sentences are written to impress, some are written to amuse, some to challenge, some to to turn the ticker, but this sentence has only one, simple, humble purpose—to provide fodder to the “most recent scrine” feed over on ‘mouse so that the pretty kitty picture that causes extreme havoc to my formatting gets bumped off the page.
Y’know, ‘mouse is a trusting sort, but even at that I’m not sure if I should believe everything everyone tells me out here on the ‘net—for example, just when I’m beginning to get used to the idea that Boot’s a female-person, I read the interview that claims she’s 78, with pink hair, and a ladder fetish.
All gods appear to require violent sacrifice from their worshippers.
The entity known as boot is certainly 78, has pink hair and is keen on ladders, however, the real woman that wears the boot is definitely not 78, has had hair coloured purple, red, orange, brown and so on (but never pink) and is only interested in ladders as a functional device… but who are you going to believe; a boot or a woman?
For my 200th sentence, I was thinking maybe something especially… oh crap, so much for that idea.
‘Mouse is shivering, not with fear, but with pixel envy at Kimberly’s incredible skill, her fine new camera and, her cool cats.
Time takes on a completely different guise on weekends, more like the bubbles in fizzy water than the weekday bubbles, which are embedded in cement.
If you find yourself watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, considering the major plot point and thinking, “you know, that’s not a bad idea,” rather than “yikes!”, you might want to get some help.
It is a cloudy Sunday afternoon, and on the corner down the block from my apartment, a man dressed as a giant head of garlic is handing out samples of breath-freshening gum.
There are several different variants on the bump ‘n’ shuffle (you know the one, you’re walking along a busy street and someone gets in your way; you step sideways, they step sideways in the same direction, you both look up and, depending on the mood, you may go “hrumph” and grumble away or you might both laugh briefly and move on), anyway, today I had a new variant on the same theme: there was a man with a white cane, who I presume was blind, he was standing on a corner and seemed to be having a little trouble navigating his way to the road (it was raining, so maybe that made the surface more difficult to read), so I stood back trying to keep out of his way, very slowly edging my way around the corner, then when I hit the corner I nearly bumped into someone who, quite clearly, had been doing the same manoeuvring around the corner (we looked up, smiled warmly at each other and moved carefully on our way).
You might be pretentious if… you feel the need to justify spending a rainy weekend watching rented DVD’s of The OC by saying, “Oh well, sure, the plots are insipid and predictable, but the dialog is so well written, and, ah, the characters are not flat so much as archetypal; it really gives one insights into how America sees itself.”
All day long I looked high and low, but I’m afraid I must grudgingly conclude that my last little crumb of interest in working is harder to locate than a lost contact and could well be lost forever.
The next time I see the tall guy with the scythe, I’m gonna take to him with a baseball bat.
I didn’t write this one, but it’s worth passing on to y’all:
WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE HIM A BLOW JOB
SO WE CAN HAVE HIM IMPEACHED
’Mouse has only one tiny little competitive bone in his otherwise submissive body and today that bone is aching, just aching, to put up post 201 and tie, however briefly, with out handsome and intelligent and giving and generally wonderful host.
As Bob signalled the bartender for another beer, his eye fell on the stats and he realized with a shock that he’d been here for almost 1000 beers—hell, he’d died and talked to God and yet he always found himself back in the same damn bar—would he still be here after another 1000—or 10,000—would he ever be free?
figuring they’ll get it all bailed out by december or call it art, one, i make my reservations for art basel miami beach.
Kids these days find that the first time they’ve ever been alone is when their college roommates leave for class.
Out of slightly bloodshot eyes, Bob noticed the box score debit some 46 sentences and fighting back the tears, he turned around to the bar and announced, “Let us all have another drink and observe a moment of silence for the passing of Goliard… and let us hope that like always seems to happen to me, God or the Devil kicks her comely ass out and she finds her way back here where she belongs.”
“She made me do it!”, she said as she pointed at the nearest being (who just happened to be Smickles), “it was her fault!”, she cried desperately as the last of her life trickled down the drain.
Thirty years ago I used to run through the woods, avoiding leaves and twigs so as to not make a sound; I thought of that this morning as a big huff of air squeezed out of me, just because I was bent over, trying to put on a sock.
Do not, under any circumstances, quote Desmond Morris, and certainly do not describe him as brilliant; I’ve read Dezzie, as opposed to hearing his titillating ideas quoted on the Discovery Channel, and I happen to know that, unlike, say, Steven Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, or even for god’s sake *Darwin*, Morris’ attempts at explaining human evolution to lay people are not rooted in a thorough understanding of basic scientific principals, but are a merely a poorly researched and out of date attempt to enshrine his self centered sexual preferences as the only and inevitable product of our biology.
A poet’s hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
More beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer, more beer.
“No, son, it’s just not true; not every boy in this country can grow up and become President one day, and sadly enough, that includes you; but don’t let that get you down, because if you work hard every minute of your life, try your damndest to be a good and decent person, and stick to your guns, one day you can grow old and turn into me.”
I dreamed that Keith came to my house and built me a fence.
faced with the evidence that my computer was following me, and loudly grinding in it’s palpable pain; i decided to put it out of it’s misery, disassemble it and stick it in the closet with the other things that Don’t Work, and now that i have a library card and an unending supply of spot-on book recommendations (thanks ‘mouse) and the wonderfully calming affect of incremental suicide via smoking cigarettes- well, i’m OK.
Proof: The common cold virus.