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Tenor Eleven: Legitimizing Random Thoughts by Typing Them Out

Sublime Electroencephalographic imagery reader experiences after finishing this story.

God Speaks with One Voice…Through 7 Billion Translators

After our Lord created the Universe, I found him lolling on a chaise in the lobby of the Hotel Sui Generis, blithely reading, “A Catcher in the Rye.” So typical of him. I recognized the Lord from peripheral glimpses I’d stolen during orgasms or that time I almost choked to death on red skin potato juice while trying to heal a spastic colon. He knew who I was but feigned ignorance. Our relationship is freighted with misconception.

So this was my frame of reference when I confronted his Plasmatic Manifestation. It seemed my entire life had led to this moment when I could finally posit the irreconcilable question that troubled me most. His numinous response would gracefully dissolve ignorance, remedy years of tedious inertia and remove the veil of happy distraction so common to postmodern man. I wasn’t asking much. I was only asking everything. Not hesitating for an instant I strode over to the Godman, got right in his face and earnestly posed my momentous query: “Why do people ask rhetorical questions?” Read the rest of this entry »

Unfathomable

Single testicled bathyscaphe ready for deployment.

Well off the coast of Japan in a tiny bathyscaphe, 35,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, two Navy SEALS conduct research deep within the Marianas Trench. The trench is an active earthquake region seven miles beneath the waves where the Pacific plate is being subducted underneath the Philippine plate. It is farther below sea level than Mt. Everest is above sea level. The outside pressure in these unfathomable inky depths is 1000 times greater than standard atmosphere. Nothing survives down here except for a lone Starbucks.

Inside the bathyscaphe there’s an eerie background din of whirring fans and humming battery packs pinging off the smooth white enamel paint. An other worldly reality pervades the spherical submersible as Colonel Jack Wisdom and Major Fillmore Artery meticulously unwrap that evening’s dinner rations and slowly begin chewing on their extruded sustenance. The now stuporous crew is obviously suffering from either too much or too little oxygen. They eyeball each other like a psychiatrist stares at his diploma; not knowing what to say, but knowing that if anyone does say something, it will be very significant.

Colonel Wisdom (his left foot resting on a ledge that warns in red stenciled letters: No Step): Y’know Major, I’ve known you for what, five years now. And in that time I’ve heard you talk a lot about how much you like pizza. <10 second pause, strokes his chin> But y’know something Major – In all that time I’ve never seen you actually eat pizza.

Major Artery: Hmmm. Wow. <10 second pause, strokes his chin> I guess that’s true – kinda like with you and bobble heads.

Colonel Wisdom: <10 second pause, strokes his chin>

Major Artery: <gazing wistfully out the porthole, strokes his chin> It looks so cool out there. When are we going to go outside for a walk on the lunar surface?

Colonel Wisdom: That sounds great Major. If we we’re on the moon you jack ass. <10 second pause, strokes his penis by mistake>

With that statement Col. Wisdom unthinkingly steps up on the ledge he’d been resting his foot on, which of course breaks off, causing him to rocket down the smooth enameled walls of the spherical bathyscaphe where, after a few pendulous swings up and down the interior surface, he comes to rest at the bottom sprawled out like an overturned turtle. Meanwhile Major Artery prepares for his space walk by donning scuba gear and stating, “I’m just gonna step out and get some fresh air.”

 

Author’s note: Do we continue the story?

 

 

 

BRIDGE AUTHORITY TAKES ITS’ TOLL

“Yes, this job does take a toll on me. And no, I hadn’t heard that before. That’ll be $12 now.”

Inching my way along the asphalt one Monday morning, I prepared to stop at the upcoming toll booth and pay $6 for the privilege of crossing a bridge that had been paid for nearly 30 years ago. Surely the nauseating regularity of this antiquated ritual, steeped in serfdom and mired in bureaucracy, can serve no useful purpose. I condemn the mindless acceptance of this medieval vestige. Why, why do we still countenance the noxious bottlenecks of resource depleting bridge tolls? I decry the baronial pleasure bridge authorities seem to delight in as they benignly coerce me into yet another galling tribute. I resent these gatekeepers who are poised with a chokehold on the people’s high trafficked arteries. Trolls should have receded into the dusty horizon of history like heliocentric heresies or bubonic plague. Why, why must we still pay these infernal bridge tolls?

After a moment of reflection I remembered something my father told me many years ago; “Ask not for whom the bridge tolls, for it tolls for thee.”