Money drained through her life like water, and unfortunately it left little residue besides the occasional five dollar bill found taped to the underside of her desk.
Voted off the island, it wasn’t long before Charon lost his Spicy Thai potato chip endorsement deal with Kettle Chips, forcing him to return to Hades to resume work as a boat captain.
Sometimes life brings you to the government office, where the waiting has permeated all the walls, the chairs; everything is hangdog with perspiration and long dreaming.
The poetry of the smoke-filled tavern stared back at him from the dirty mirror while a single feather tapped the measure of the failed rhyme scheme against the edge of his glass.
They sat around the kitchen table, drinking cherry cokes and playing scrabble like they had done every night…their past transgressions had earned them an uncomfortable silence…grudges were forgotten, hate was set aside for another day and for the first time…they talked.
Finally, the words he had been wanting to say for so long were loosed, an avalanche of pent-up longing, an expression of all the love he felt for her now and for as long as he could recall, though she was dead these many long years.
He was such a big liar that his words bent around and starting telling truth despite themselves.
Tammy couldn’t help it; every time she saw a store that advertised “Parking in Rear” she giggled like a 12-year old school girl.
The fact that she didn’t own a single pair of panty hose usually seemed like some kind of grand symbol of her freedom; now, when faced with the chill of the building, it was merely folly.
Peter wondered why people said There’s no accounting for taste, and yet, found that everything tasted like chicken.
Coming home on the train I gave up my book and listened to the random snatches of conversation around me; “but we saw YOUR PARENTS the other weekend and haven’t spent time with mine” - from the girl with the eyebrows that seemed to be drawn downward in a perpetual frown, her full lips also giving into gravity - or put on upside down - making her look like someone who’d be difficult to live with; the young guy debating his tattoo, “of course, when in court, I’d have to have it fully covered” - I believe he was on the side of the law; and finally the chatter from the generic gossip girls (or the “‘like’ n’ thong brigade”) wondering whether they should go all the way, exchanging gossip on their BBF’s and admiring one another’s makeup.
After hearing about all the changes that had taken place over the last couple of hundred years, Napoleon grew more and more excited about buying a reincarnation ticket (so excited, in fact, that after hearing about advancements in military weaponry he found himself sporting a rather uncomfortable, albeit small erection), but when the sales pitch mentioned the so-called “pleasure” of daily bathing in the new millennium, Napoleon began to think that maybe Earth wasn’t the place for a sensible man like him after all, and that perhaps he should just stay where he was and stick to the strategies he’d already put into motion.
She was late to the monster truck rally and knew that it would likely cause Ty to snap at her, so she tied her hair back in a severe bun and prepared her speech out loud as she sped over the railroad tracks and out of town.
Victor’s great love of death extended only so far.
One day in dawned on Sally that the syntactic expletive it that her husband had been referring to for 38 straight years was her.
As inspired by: Keith's It Made Sense
It felt truly insulted and cried out to no one in particular, “Dummy pronoun, am I, well need I remind you that I’m the most versatile two-letter non-preposition since ‘id’ and ‘oh’ and some people’s version of ‘ax’?!?!”
Nothing lurks quite so well as midnight words of menace.
When the bomb hit, it wasn’t so much the ruined buildings that caused panic, it was the loss of the Internet, of social networks and of thousands of her BFF’s that made Maggie sob uncontrollably.
Betty laughed in glee as panic spread among the online networkers … being a luddite, she’d looked at such websites with contempt, hating the cultural changes, the popularity competitions and the eventual exclusion of Those Who Didn’t Conform.
As inspired by: grudknows's Betty’s take on the truth
When suddenly, Betty and Maggie found themselves having lunch.
Dear Urinal User: In addition to your embarrasing lack of aim (which we have discussed in this venue before, but about which you persist in refusing to sit when peeing and/or seeing a urologist to see about solving your “problem”), you are hereby strongly advised to speak to your primary care physician, because the stickiness lately indicated in your piss-puddle suggests you should be screened for diabetes.
At night, you can see them twitching as they strain under the imaginary weight of their rambling adventures, and when they finally pop open in the morning—stand back!—because tiny black periods shoot out in all directions, finishing off anything in their path.
Ask anyone about the Wizard of Oz and they can tell you that the Scarecrow wanted a brain, the Tin Man, a heart, the Cowardly Lion, courage and Dorothy just wanted to go home, but what many don’t know is that Baum’s earlier drafts included a young Bruce Jenner who wanted to stop wetting his bed and that the Wicked Witch of the West actually melted because he whipped it out and peed on her after she made fun of him, and not because Dorothy splashed her with a bucket of water as the Hollywood version later depicted.
When life gives you lemons, hunt down and destroy every lemon farmer you can find, then set their fields aflame so that the glow of the fire will signal other lemon farmers of irony’s arrival on a flaming chariot driven by life, who is now handing out lemons to lemon farmers.
The trees are all afroot with flowers, the sky is kerpuffled with clouds, and my heart is pitty patty with longing.
Unless you count those billions of thin slices of human hope all salted down with generations of dried tears, the answer is definitely no, God doesn’t have chips with every meal.
Voted off the island, it wasn’t long before Charon lost his Spicy Thai potato chip endorsement deal with Kettle Chips, forcing him to return to Hades to resume work as a boat captain.
Obviously the solution to global warming is nuclear winter.
She sat up far too long into the night, staring holes into the blazingly bright screen, typing keystrokes nobody would read, longing for something she dared not define.
I tell people I want to be a teacher but that’s only because I’m too scared to say I just want to grab a laptop and backpack around the world writing.
Clearly a guy measured my new hard drive—it’s advertised as 1000 GB but in real life it’s barely over 900.
Bad coffee is an affront to God and country.
Where you choose to sit along the long, cramped rows of chairs in a hearing room will serve as a litmus test of your commitment level; for instance, the chairs on the ends of rows are generally taken up by lobbyists who continuously sneak out of the chamber to answer vibrating phones, while cadres of student assistants camp out in the middle chairs, their coats, notebooks and lunchboxes casually strewn about.
i finally found something that will clean the accumulated garm of this squishy laptop screen…
Geeks everywhere grieved today for the sad death of Gary Gygax; creator of the glorious Dungeons & Dragons.
She couldn’t help it; she wanted to be the grand champion of the World Scrabble Games, except she just couldn’t figure out what to do with a Q, an X, a J, a Z, and three L’s.
Tammy wore all khaki on Fridays in an attempt to blend in with the cubicle walls (urban office camouflage, if you will) and took perverse amounts of joy in opening her red Swingline stapler and firing off staples willy-nilly as people walked by her on the way to the break room.
As he slowly rocked in the over-sized chair on the porch, his gaze leaked upward and he whispered to the heavens, “I’m waiting…”.
While drinking a Whoppers milkshake before retiring each evening won’t improve your sex life, it will bolster your hope and imagination.
As inspired by: Christopher Moore's "You Suck"
“Don’t look at me,” snapped Larry, “They don’t cover what to do with dead hookers in the MBA program—that’s part of the political science curriculum.”
I always expected that the first six-legged octopus, or “hexapus,” if you will, would be named Henry.
“Six-legged, sex-legged, the choice is yours, baby.”
As inspired by: Keith's Henry Hexapus Picks Up A Woman
Tripod Willie found that he couldn’t help but be jealous of Henry Hexapus because his girlfriend, tired of the 3-legged jokes, told him that while size is overrated - if you are a small woman - the number of legs a man has is not, and evolution clearly favors Henry over Willie when it comes to the propagation of the species by making him the more attractive lover.
Who knows where the love of God goes when your manager calls a noon conference call?
Some people’s childhood memories are just plain fun.
My professor could not be more sadistic if she tried, and I’m beginning to suspect that she did try, in this case, to stop just short of writing all the instructions for the assignment in Chinese while cackling and rubbing her hands together with glee.
Micro Management is not a small island in Micronesia.
As inspired by: Br. Ezra's My Boss Flunked World Geography
Fender looked back on his undergrad with nostalgia, particularly his year abroad, studying micromanagement in Micronesia.
As inspired by: pam's Native habitat
The paper Fender wrote on the native micromanagers of Micronesia did not become the seminal anthropological treatise he had hoped, but consulting on office-based sitcoms was rewarding in and of itself.
“I don’t know how we’re supposed to take this history test on the Han Dynasty, if we’re not allowed to take home our textbooks and our teacher just tells us all the answers to our worksheets, but maybe it won’t be a problem - she’s having us watch ‘Mulan’, ‘cause she says it has so much historical data in it.”
When the cute well read guy I met on Monday night called me and said, “You know I thought of you this morning,” I thought that maybe one thing would go well today, until he finished the rest of the sentence with, “when I got diagnosed with pneumonia.”
Peeing on your shoes is a sure sign that your job has become too stressful and your mind too preoccupied with things other than the present moment
As inspired by: Br. Ezra's My Boss Flunked World Geography
“Don’t worry,” my doctor announced about my concussion, “You may have a small case of amnesia, or what we call professionally, ‘micronesia,’ but you’ll be fine.”
Maslow’s Heirarchy (2008):
More Money
Faster Horses
Older Whiskey (or fresh beer)
Younger (or any available) Women
Bigger Hard Drives
Shelter
Food
I want to get ahead in terms of number of posts but at the same time I don’t want to post too much…
I’ll give up all my sentences on Scrine for just one more word from the vaults of goliard.
Whenever we dine out, my snapping turtle friend, Phil, always impresses the restaurant staff with his powerful, lightning fast jaws, but when it’s time for the check, he always plays the “turtle card”, pulling out that wallet of his so painfully slow that I usually just end up paying for the damn meal myself.
Tired of the androgeny jokes and gender confusion on the telephone Pat decided to adopt a new name, eventually settling on “Sam.”
the garage sale went swimmingly, until the old woman asked me if i would take less for the little boy.
The pre-writing of Scrine history is an exacting art and should be attempted only by those with the fortitude to address all aspects of the site’s ultimate history; for instance, when the press eventually writes “Scrine is the YMCA of blogs, taking in those who seek a warm and safe place for their homeless words,” the Scrine pre-historian must be willing, and even more so, capable of fully explaining in a clear and understandable manner how a bird improves security in the shower area.
The trouble with Veronica was her prodigious hair’s propensity toward getting stuck in the greasy cogs of the machine just when she had it adjusted properly.
‘Verily, I say unto thee, that is totally whack, yo, because some homies be needing a good slap upside they head, after which they will be welcome in the paradise of mine fly hizzy where manna will be eaten and 40s of malt liquor consumed with reckless abandon.’
Per the 1000-post decree, I am now a quarter of the way to enlightenment; however if I follow boot’s 888-rule (which I adore for symmetrical reasons) I’m past a quarter of the way there - does anything think I have 3/4 more useful stuff to say?
When confronted with peeking through Sally’s windows, Gawain of the 21st century told the officer that he wasn’t peeping at all, but looking to see if Sally had a dragon that came out at night, a misunderstood and poorly worded reply that led to his immediate arrest.
As inspired by: Keith's The Misplaced Knight
Shakespeare’s tale of mistaken identity would have been all that much more confusing had it involved the knights of the round table and the 12 apostles: one can only speculate who might have played Sir Judas.
Even though his girlfriend was quite angry, Devon did not regret shaving her yeti while she slept off a 5th of Jack on her couch.
Placing her car sideways in the midst of traffic and ignoring the honking and yelling, she realized, at last, that she really was too rich to drive.
Jesus P. Whillikers, are we really at a point where brand-new music—specifically the new Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album—can be co-opted to sell cheap shitty department store clothing?
I do hope one day that my life will make as interesting a read as some of the living books on offer, but, more so, I look forward to seeing how I explain the big rusty Scrine-bird.
I thought the old lady had gone mad and was walking two scraggly mop heads but they turned out to be dogs.
My little brother laughed and said that the old man had an old mobile as old as he was but it was just an early model Nokia.
#1: while doing dishes, the phone rings, and you don’t have a dish towel handy, but your beloved cat is roaming the counter despite your multiple attempts at spraying her off- pick her up, dry off hands (cat runs from counter) and you answer phone.
Not being able to recall a single dream involving helicopters and monkeys, Theodore consulted his therapist.
You never got poked in the eye with a spork.
Me and a man with a mohawk on his head found a dirty butterfly half dead.
I should be thrilled that with the push of a few buttons I can pay a private investigator in London via Paypal; instead I’m just vaguely sickened that I get less than half a pound for each of my US dollars.
Jill and Mark had a beautiful romance, exchanging valentines, kissing in secret and declaring their love for all eternity and all went swimmingly until Mark pooped his pants and the kindergarten teacher announced recess was over.
Tell me, Theodore, do these dreams you don’t recall having involve monkeys flying in helicopters, or do you specifically not recall them being about monkeys behind the controls of the helicopter, because those are quite different dreams to have absolutely no recollection of.
I drank way WAY too much coffee this morning and am only now in the process of coming down off the wave, finding myself fluctuating between rage and depression, setting people on fire then putting them out, and it seems that by this time in my life I’d know to be more careful with such a potentially lethal beverage.
I’m sorry, but you space aliens will continue to look pasty and green in our photos until you give in and share your camera filter technology with us.
I call my left armpit ‘The Marvelous Armpit’ because it always smells better than its rival.
It’s pretty darn hard to meditate when you have a cat dancing on your head.
I’d like to get angry with someone about the continuing horrendous heat, but it’s just too bloody hot to be bothered.
I hear there’s all sorts of bad stuff in coffee, but my mind and I are in agreement on this one; we’re willing to filter it all out.
You haven’t truly tackled the vagaries of the English language until you’ve tried to explain to a seven year-old why getting addicted to drugs is a terrible idea, the worst idea ever, while being addicted to caffeine is … um, not so bad.
Down at the local shockingly good taco stand a new kind of meat appeared on the menu next to cabeza and lengua, “buche,” which my dictionary translates as “button, nub, knob.”
You think you’re paranoid until you find out your friends really are having parties behind your back.
There’s a special sort of boredom that comes from being too hot to do anything, knowing there are things you should be doing and not wanting to do any of them.
I just don’t do fruitcake; after all, that would be cannibalistic.
Takeout, shmakeout, whispered God, and the next thing I knew, I was biting into a sandwich made from a baguette from the wholesale artisan bakery a mile away; fresh basil grown by the folks who own the fruit and vegetable market around the corner; real prosciutto de Parma; unsulfured dried plum tomatoes; sherry vinegar from Spain and olive oil from Crete; and a ball of mozzarella made an hour before I bought it, still warm when I cut into it.
The best thing about writing papers is when they are finished and the partying can begin.
Nobody ever remembers to wonder what happened to the wife of the giant (of beanstalk fame) after her husband fell to the earth, though an intrepid few have speculated how big his grave had to have been.
Dear Ohio and Points East: Just remember when March is in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb.
You know your neighborhood is dangerous when even the lions, tigers, and wolverines won’t come out at night.
As inspired by: Jo's Jungle
When encountering a wolverine in an urban setting, it is important to remember that the urban wolverine is extremely territorial, and that its aggressive behavior stems from the belief that its unique Latin name, Gulo gulo, meaning literally “glutton glutton”, is at risk of being reclassified as a Homo sapien subspecies.
The most existential question of them all had her stymied each and every day; what’s for dinner?
hijacked: when one’s inlaws come into town unannounced and require transportation for the entire weekend; moderated only slightly when they take you shopping and they foot the bill
My head is destroying my heart and I’m stuck in the middle, barely able to dodge the threats being made or the plates smashing against the walls.
The rather promising dream involving boats, scaling old castle walls and warm water and warmer sunlight faded into some schlock about a gift of a large bag of green onions that needed to be washed.
Peter, I can see your house from up here!
The air in the salon was muggy making it impossible for me to take my eyes off my stylist’s breasts as strands of cut hair slipped between her cleavage adhering themselves to her sticky, glistening skin.
Elizabeth – that was my stylist’s name – was the perfect height for my face to commune with her lovely breasts as she clipped my hair and flirted herself happily to a very large tip, the amount of money I planned to leave growing larger each time she leaned across me and the warm, sweaty flesh of her boobs brushed against my face.