Author Archive

Absolute freedom exists in literature. One can write about the ridiculously small world of Quantum Mechanics or the ridiculously small world of Garage Mechanics. It’s a small world after all. It’s a small world after all (Sorry – this paragraph sponsored by Disney). We may write prose or poems. We may write about being a fly on the wall in the Oval Office who wishes he were an ant on the frosting of a same sex wedding cake. We may even write about a false prophet whose hard earned truths are showcased in his best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Cadillac.” 

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Yes, one may conjure innumerable esoteric permutations of charming lterary expression, but the following story is not for mindless snacking. Nope. We need to graduate from the deceptively empty calories of: Read the rest of this entry »

 

It happened quite naturally – like light waves propagating from a source or Meryl Streep getting an Oscar nomination or, in this case, yours truly gaining access to his past lives. With faith in the precept that those who fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it, I’d resolved to learn from my past and apply it to the future. I had beseeched God regularly for access to my past lives and he finally sent my guardian angel Cyrus to facilitate the matter. Although I really think God just wanted me to stop pestering him so he could address more pressing issues like the possibility of a Rocky 7 movie. I even had the audacity (chutzpah if I was Jewish) to request access to my future incarnations, but Cyrus reminded me, “You can’t see what hasn’t happened yet.”

“What about the movie Back to the Future,” I queried?

“Listen David. Don’t be so cute. We can arrange for you to pass a kidney stone very easily. Is that what you want?” Cyrus warned.

“Well yes,” I affirmed. “I mean if I have to pass a kidney stone, I would like to pass it very easily.”

“David, you try my patience,” Cyrus intoned.

“Oh really? Well you should try mine some time,” I countered.

“Do you want to see your past lives or not?” an exasperated Cyrus declared.

“Yes, yes of course I do,” I exclaimed. Read the rest of this entry »

I couldn’t help myself. After ordering the mahi-mahi at Chi-Chi’s in Walla Walla WA, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and just enjoy my lunch lunch. No. In the background, my mind kept trying to rewrite The Mamas And The Papas hit “Monday, Monday” using the words mahi-mahi. The idea arrived uninvited and pursued me while I speared the mahi-mahi with my tines till the prongs were full, then I thrust them into my mouth and, closing my teeth,  pulled out the fork thereby placing its freight in my capacious jaws. Oh sure I’d eaten less descriptively before, but as I’d recently survived a plane crash and felt alive on the planet, I lived life like someone left the forking gate open.  Read the rest of this entry »

 

When Neil Armstrong returned from his first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin, who was laboring under the hallucinogenic effects of an unnoticed nitrous oxide leak in the Eagle, had locked the door and refused him entry. The situation grew tense, but, as had occurred during their entire journey, good fortune soon smiled on them and the situation was resolved. Under the Freedom of Information Act I obtained a transcript of their conversation and post its contents verbatim: 

Neil:    Hey Buzz let me in. Hey Buzz, the door is locked. Let me in. (He knocks on the hatch and even though sound waves cannot travel in a vacuum, buzzed Buzz can hear them anyway)

Buzz:   Who is it?

Neil:    Who do you think Buzz? We’re on the god damn moon. C’mon, let me in.

Buzz:   Neil is that you?

Neil:    No. It’s Helen Keller. Read the rest of this entry »

Very rarely am I blindsided and tickled pink by a literary passage that packs the unintentionally humorous punch of a Linear Particle Accelerator. Such was the case when this unsuspecting reader was suddenly seized by a powerfully jocular elation; when all he really wanted to do was drift off gently to safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep. Allow me to set the scene. It’s late evening and I’m reading in bed prior to an early morning shift at the local satis factory (yes, we manufacture satis). As my pursuit of Early American history is unquenchable, I’m curled up to an esoteric and anecdotally superb book called  Beauties and Celebrities of the Nation which describes the social life of Washington DC during the early Presidential administrations. In this particular chapter, George Washington’s administration (which in 1794 was located in Philadelphia pending the construction of our new Capitol in DC) is being surveyed. Read the rest of this entry »

Mmmm! Yummers. These are just some of my favorite astral plane Pepperidge Farm cookies. Are they on your list?

Toucan Sandies

Transgendered Gingerbread Something er Others

Roadside Clusters

Lemon Nothings

Heimlich Chokies

Whoopsie Daisy Flourishes

Buttered Goobledygooks

Powdered Snowglobes

Chess Guys

Multi-Striped, Triple-Dipped, Neo-Drizzled Fancher Snaps

Flightless Shortbread Spinsters

Origami Cannibal Chews

Double Stuff Oreogasms  (Women may have as many as they’d like. Men must wait at least 1 hour between cookies)

Esophageal Conundrums

Snicker Nipples

Nutted Doofuses

Silicon Wafers

Isaac Newtons

 

Pepperidge Farm does remember. My name is Orville Redenbacher and I approved this message.

Be it ever so humble there’s no place like Now. In fact, it’s the only place there is. Time wise you can’t be any other place else. Forget Greenwich Mean Time or Daylight Savings Time or even Hammer Time. There is only one time you can actually be at and that time is Now. Of course there’s a future known as “Soon” and a past known as “Then”, but you can only refer to those times. You can’t actually be there because of the inescapability of Now. Now is everywhere, forever yoking us to its immediacy. It never stops. Now is both obsolete and reborn every instant. It repopulates as soon as it’s able to like fruit flies or Mormons. Read the rest of this entry »

• Calls event “Hecka Rad, Way Better than Gaming and Profoundly Filthy in a Good Way”
• Vows to repeat act to the exclusion of all else
• College likely to be a six year plan now
• Tells parents,”Mom, Dad – I’m all about bullet points now” 

Steubenville, OH

Hyperventilation marked the first sexual congress between Kyle Mahorn (age unimportant) and Sara Chambers (age also unimportant). This premeditated coitus went off as planned last Sunday morning when Kyle’s parents were praying at St. John the Baptist Church. “I’m just beside myself,” an excited Kyle gushed after gushing. “I’m like completely a convert to ‘strange’ now. I mean I’d heard all about it and I’d spent a lot of time practicing alone, but I never thought it’d be like this. All the time you hear about the fraying of society and the loss of community and all this disintegration stuff, but this…this is like interstellar superglue and will bind a society together faster than martial law or Costco coupons ever could. Boy Howdy, this thing looms large in my future and will naturally cause me to straighten up and fly right…well straighten up anyway. Man, I’ve got to tell everybody how good this is, although I’m probably just preaching to the choir.”

 

When asked why his passion with Ms. Chambers was so transformative, Kyle got that far away look in his groin and explained; “I’d always looked at sex as sort of a solo act because that’s the way I’d been doing it for the past (number of years unimportant), but when I was with sweet, sweet Sara, I found the more I thought about her, the more my universe compressed into an infinite singularity until va va voom – the Big Bang. I’ve since developed an intense affection for her and plan to repeat the experience to the exclusion of all else. In fact it’s not even a plan. It’s just something I’m going to do.”

 

“It’s funny how perspectives can change. Until now I’ve always been vitally interested in playing World of Warcraft, but since I’ve made love to sweet, sweet Sara, somehow whether the the Druids of Le Grange can storm the armory and retake ancestral Beulah Land just doesn’t seem so important now. No, this act, and it’s no act, is a real game changer. Sara possesses telekinetic powers. She just looks at my pants and they begin to move. In the middle of our lovemaking it struck me how much unnecessary complaining people do when they should be down on their hands and knees doing exactly what I was doing. This is a free gift to mankind. You can even pay for it if you want to. The point is this should be the headline everyday, everywhere:  Sex allows transcendence of space-time. Confirms Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.”

“And Sara, sweet, sweet Sara. Like I say, I’m attached to her in ways I can’t explain. I want to have her children, buy her a house, protect her from evil and if marriage charts are any indication, divorce her in 12 years and repeat the process with someone else. It’s that good!”

Kyle continued, “Anyway this is my calling. It’s all I want to do and although I may not be God’s gift to women, they sure are to me.”

Sociologist estimate this freakish hallucination occurs in American males somewhere around 5000 times a day, more so on weekends.

Why did the Pilgrims journey from England to Plymouth Rock? And more to the point, how did Americans get from Plymouth Rock to ribbed cranberry sauce thwocked onto a plate straight from the can? These are questions I hope to address one day in a thoughtful essay on the topic. Meanwhile, I hope you’ve brought an appetite for extravagant history as I serve up the rich saga of the Pilgrim’s progress featuring healthy dollops of mashed truths and stuffed with agonizing analogies. Note: For those readers on a on a sodium restricted diet I’ve written this version with the salty language removed. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonah Scrimshaw was never too keen on the whole earthly model of “Born, live and die.” It sounded too much like a rejected state motto. He resented being subject to the karma of a world he neither asked to be born into, nor had any say in how it was run. Revolutionary thinking? Hardly. It was simply the old Colonial quarrel of “No taxation without representation,” whereby the King (God) taxes us from afar as he sees fit, and we the people (souls) have no vote (influence) on how our fate is determined. As Jonah considered the implications of this argument, his heart raced, his mood soured and he developed a supremely unhip outbreak of jazz hands. Then he thought, “Maybe it would be better if I didn’t drink a 4-pak of Red Bull so close to bed.” Read the rest of this entry »