Then, in an instant, Timothy realized that all along he had been the split personality.
He was the imaginary friend.
He was the intruder in Dale’s mind, not the other way around.
And worst of all, he was the awkward third wheel during every date with his girlfriend.
Ok, so this isn’t a gif of me. It just happens to be one of my favorite animated runcycles of all time ever in the history of all runcycles since forever. It’s from a short film by Adam Phillips.
LOOK HOW SQUISHY, GUYS.
(Source: natedoodles)
* To the tune of “The Christmas Waltz” or if you’re really talented, “La Cucaracha.”
It’s that time of year
When it’s that time of year,
Not another time - it’s this time.
It is currently right now this time heeeeeere!
And this useless rhyme telling you the time
(Namely now, that is) - it’s kiiiinda weeiiiiiiird.
Merry Not-A-Holiday-Day Day, everyone!
If you’re reading this on an actual holiday, stop it immediately.
If you’re reading this on not-a-holiday, it is advisable that you stop reading for the sake of your health anyway.
If you’re reading this and you’re not sure if it’s a holiday, it isn’t. Unless it is, in which case ignore that previous sentence.
If you’re not reading this, congratulations! You’re among the lucky folks not currently looking at this sentence!
Here is your Not-A-Holiday-Day Day Celebratory Traditions Checklist:
1. Do steps 2-7 only.
2. Read Step 7 before continuing.
3. Actually wait, disregard the first part of Step 7.
4. Skip to Step 6.
5. Do all of the steps.
6. No, wait. Go back go Step 5. My mistake.
7. Ignore all steps. You may now return to Step 3.
8. Almonds are delicious.
Quoth the raven, “CAWWWWWW.”
It was three days ago, just about 3:14 and 20 seconds in the afternoon. Eastern Pacific Time.
You decided to write a story in the second person. About yourself. This is that story.
Clearly you don’t quite understand when and how to use second person.
You are walking along a dark and dusty plank- one which is surrounded by several other dark, dusty planks. Together, they form a floor made of dusty planks that would be less dark if you’d turn the light on. But you don’t. Because it’s daytime, and even though the planks are made of dark wood, they’re reasonably well lit. It’s just that they’d be even LESS dark with the light on.
Anyway-
You approach a door that says “ ” on it. Which is to say, it is not labeled in any particular way. Before you have a chance to open it, R. L. Stine gets kind of upset that you’re writing such a horrid second-person story and he takes over just long enough to inject the following two lines of text:
Turn to Page 33 if you GO THROUGH THE DOOR.
Turn to Page 190 if you SKIP TO THE END OF THE BOOK.
…you turn to Page 190. It reads:
“Flippin’ heck, are you really that lazy? You couldn’t be bothered to actually make your way through the adventure? It’s not like you’d have wound up getting eaten by rats or something**.”
**ok yeah, you totally would have.
So I suppose that’s that. Kind of sad. But hey, they’re your words- not mine (See sentences three through six, where I clearly explain that you wrote this abomination).
Look at what you’ve done. R. L. Stine would be turning over in his grave, and he’s not even dead! But then again, it kinda still makes sense. Considering who it is. Y’know.
Ehh hemm.
Nathan “Nathan Taylor” Taylor, Author
You “Your Nickname” Yourlastname,
Actual Author Of This Thing
I spent the majority of yesterday evening this morning running to the edge of the middle of nowhere. When I reached the spot I’d been looking for, I realized that I’d done the impossible. Then I decided that was the stupidest thing I’d realized all day, because simply by doing it, it had been made possible, and therefore could not be counted as impossible. Thus, I concluded that it is possible to do the possible.
“That is incorrect,” remarked an incredibly middle-aged woman to my left. “It is only possible to do the possible if you have not the will to strive for what isn’t, and if that be the case, you have not the will to do even what you can.”
I rolled my eyes at her, and she picked them up and then rolled them right back at me, apparently too pleased with herself for having said something so philosophical to feel like taking any silliness from me.
“That doesn’t count,” I retorted. “Because you commented on something I’d only concluded mentally, you prove yourself a psychic, thereby nullifying any witty remarks you make, because there’s no way to ascertain that you didn’t steal it from someone else who was thinking about saying it first.”
“You’re a rather quick young man, aren’t you?” She inquired.
“As a matter of fact, I’m the quickest young man you’ve just said that to.” I responded.
“In that case, answer me this: what is the answer to this question?”
“This.”
“Ok, fine. Your turn.”
“It’s my turn, is it? You know what that means, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Ok, then. THAT (pronoun, adjective, adverb, conjunction) -most commonly used as an indicator towards pronoun and adjective use, or with adjectives or adverbs to extent, or in dialect as an adverb, or used elliptically to introduce an exclaimed feeling.”
The woman took a long look at me, which I promptly took right back. Thus ensued a small scuffle over the long look, which resulted in a few bruises, a smiling cactus, and a diseased pufferfish.
At this point, we decided to break for some of the most incredibly mediocre tea I’d ever tasted. Then we fixed what was broken and went back to scuffling.
By the time we’d finished, the woman had left a half hour ago and I was nowhere to be found. This may seem unlikely to you, but consider the fact that you may have actually tried to make sense of this thus far, and it shall perhaps seem less unusual in context.
A pair of britches made of some rather burlap-like silk then ran squarely into the wall I’d found during my travels. This wouldn’t have hurt if I hadn’t been wearing them at the time. Furthermore, I clocked myself in the nose with an overripe peach that wasn’t too keen on the mahogany chairs I’d upholstered earlier that day, so I changed my mind and tossed the old one in the laundry machine.
The oldest child I’ve seen in the last fourteen and one-sixteenth seconds starting now interrupted my string of thoughts, which therefore became rather entangled within themselves. Perhaps that is why what is about to happen just did and what has happened is about to. Happenings, namely, that couldn’t be more de-anti-un-incorrect about the political advantages of realizing that it’s a poor choice to run for office. Conversely, there aren’t.
And therefore, my dear friends, mortal enemies, and people who I don’t know and will never meet (and nobody in between, and excluding my mortal enemies and those following), I bid you a fond farewell for now, and when I see you again, I’ll bid you farewell once more… because sooner or later, I’ll get to leave again, and won’t have to put up with your constant sneezing.
The sign above the door read as follows:
Hanksworth W. Britcheschaps, Mishap Collector.
Normally I would pass a store like this without a second glance. However, the phrase “Mishap Collector” justified three glances and an abnormal failure to pass. I eagerly pushed open the door and stepped inside. Just a few feet past the front door was a second door. I could see the owner shuffling around through the glass pane in the middle. He yelled something indistinguishable to me from behind the glass.
”What?” I yelled back.
He took the fishbowl off of his head. “I said if you’re looking for a mishap, come on in! I’ve got more than enough to go around. All sales are final though, so if you accidentally get something you didn’t want, then it sucks to be you.”
The bell on the inner door was broken, and as I twisted the handle and planted my left foot forward, the door finally earned freedom from its hinges and landed on the owner with a resounding ‘THWUMPF,’ killing him instantly. I hurried back outside, tripping over a pile of garden gnomes and getting struck by lightning en route.
This, incidentally, is why I rarely go shopping on Wednesdays. Strange things always happen. Thankfully today is Tuesday, so I can classify the unexpected events included in today’s excursion as “bizarre” instead of “strange,” and I won’t have broken my streak.
It’s not widely known, but the secret to having an effective, continuous running streak of any sort is to mislabel the requirements of said goal. For instance, if you intend to never take a left turn for the rest of your life, and you want to prove your achievement, here’s the simple solution. Create a file to record every turn you make. This file should consist of the following directional labels: “Up,” “down,” “right,” “wrong,” “vaguely northeastish,” “sour,” and “for the worse.” Because there is no “left” included in the file, any turn you make that might otherwise be considered so will instead be likely filed under “wrong” or “sour.”
Voila! You have completed your goal and technically avoided making left turns. You have also wasted a bunch of time recording data towards an utterly meaningless goal. You have already wasted plenty of time reading about said meaningless goal, so I must recommend that you choose something more purposeful if you intend to create a file to redefine your actions. Perhaps you could spend the rest of your life attempting to live under the delusion that you never read this. If you succeed, then you have used my logic to cancel itself out. Congratulations, you’re well on your way to an asylum.
Unwanted digression or no, you may consider reading the rest of this tale. Ahem.
As I traipsed down the street, I was suddenly aware that there were a few important signs I had failed to notice previously. The first clearly read “NO TRAIPSING.” The second had a picture of my face and said “WANTED FOR TRAIPSING A FEW SECONDS AGO.” The third sign was a drawing of me reading the third sign, with the subtitle “THIS IS WHAT HE IS CURRENTLY DOING.”
The law enforcement, in an unusually prompt manner, had put me in jail while I was reading the sign, so as I turned away from the poster to make a break for it, I came face-to-face with the bars of the prison cell I was locked in. Regrettably my encounter with the iron bars was at full “making a break” speed. When I regained coherence, the constable was outside my cell eating an apple.
“Excuse me, sir… I think there may be a mistake,” I said to him.
“Oh, what mistake is that?”
“This sign depicts a man reading the sign that the sign depicts. And so on.”
“And?”
“I am not currently reading that sign, so clearly I can’t be the person you’re looking for.”
“…I suppose you’re right. You’re free to go.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you on Thursday, Dad.”
“All right. Don’t forget to take out the trash in Cell Block F. Give your mother this note for me.” He handed me a slip of paper with a moderately accurate drawing of a fairly inaccurate sculpture of a rhinoceros.
Of course after all this nonsense there is no clear moral to share, except that I have determined something about my near future.
Tomorrow it will be Wednesday, and I won’t go shopping.
As I stood at the corner where two parallel roads met, I stopped for a minute to go where I’d never failed to be before. On the way, but off the record, I heard a delightful smell that made me cringe with fear. When all of this had passed, I was still in the middle of it. Then out of the blue, just as I expected, came a godsend in the form of a cinderblock to the face. The pain was less than I could bear, so I snapped back out of reality… which is to say I didn’t not pretend to do what I just said, and therefore more or less remained in a state which I had not previously occupied.
Staring at the polka-dotted stripes before me, I fell standing up with slack-jawed enthusiasm before the police came to arrest someone whose crime I hadn’t done the favor of committing. After this, but before it actually happened, the boat I’d flown in on came to a grinding takeoff. Unfortunately I was still attached to the back of it by a strand of nothing, and therefore I flew through the air like a deep-sea submersible.
In the most intensely mediocre way I could never imagine, my senses came to me as they went away. The first thing I remember was the last thing that happened - because alas, it wasn’t backwards day. If by this point I had taken what I gave away to the stranger to my left, he would have been on my right by four minutes previous. Now for the good and bad news. The bad news is there is no good news.
Therefore, my friends, I leave you to continue reading my story as I falsely claim I’ll conclude it with a bit of information that isn’t self-defeating, inwardly contradictory, or capped by a punctuation mark.
I hereby am not.
Myself. An egg, dying. A wilted piece of a scythe.
Have I, but not recently, upon the discovery of my albumen, requested negative criticism from a marmot?
As the neighbors who live in the castle on the edge said last fall, “get the heck out of my bathroom and stop eating my toilet paper.”
But what, yon sparrow-like stuffed animal, does that mean to my plight?
Simply that poetry is not a good choice for this note.
Thusly, I resign.
Quack.
-The poet
“Thanks, Bob.” I took the coffee from him and paid for it, then left the shop to go for a stroll down the road. It was a beautiful day outside, and since it was thunderstorming inside, I figured I’d go out to enjoy the lack of weather.
Unfortunately I was approached by a person who I don’t often associate with anymore, and in a rather unexpected manner. Don’t get me wrong… I love people, and I can think of very few that I no longer wish to associate with. It’s just that when your fourteen-years dead great grandfather falls from a helicopter and hits you going about 40 miles per hour, wrenching the coffee from your hands and easing the transition from standing to face-first-into-the-ground, you’d probably consider it unpleasantly unexpected too. The good news is that after all this happened, I realized that it hadn’t. In actuality, I had simply forgotten to take my medication. So I popped a few pills. Now, you often hear of people who “take pills like they were candy.” I’m not one of those people. I am, however, a person who “takes candy like it’s pills that are enough like candy that you want lots of them/it.” In short, I like candy. In long, I like pills because they are an excellent way to stop you from imagining that you’ve just been hit by a falling corpse and lost your coffee.
Then I realized I actually had dropped my coffee.
So, as I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, I decided to go to the movie theater. I can think of no better place on earth to go when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I mean, hey, you sit down to see something entertaining, you get candy and sodas, and everyone who walks past you after you’ve sat down apologizes to you. That’s why I always sit at the end of the row. It’s kinda nice when every time someone wants to get past it’s “Sorry, sorry. Excuse me. Sorry, I’m sorry. Pardon. I’m sorry.” Makes you feel kind of important, somehow.
The movie, however, was horrible. Watching it was like getting punched in the eyeball for an hour and a half. Come to think of it, I haven’t the faintest idea why I didn’t simply leave. At any rate, as I left the theater to take a right on Left Street… is that right? No, wait. That’s left. I mean incorrect. I took a left on Right Street, then three more lefts, then a wrong on Right, and by then was completely lost and right back where I’d started. In other words, I was back at the theater, but didn’t know how I’d gotten there in the first place. In the same words again, I was back at the theater, but didn’t know how I’d gotten there in the first place. In other words, but out of order, I until then confused or before, because how arrived I’d as to at was completely the again, I didn’t theater there even know theater there a was. In those words again, but arranged so they make more sense, I was completely confused as to how I’d arrived at the theater again, or before, because I didn’t even know there was a theater there until then.
The orange building across the street was a barbeque joint that I’d heard was pretty good, but it was actually a vaudeville jazz club, made of bricks with the occasional door or window. Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m aware that you might think I’m either constantly contradicting myself or making a small amount of sense, or a large amount of sense if you’re crazy, or some combination thereof. However, I’d like to assure you that I never ever contradict myself, except sometimes, and the sense I make is mine and you can’t have it so give it back right now, because goodness knows that the sense I have I’d better hold onto lest I write more stories like this.
Now then, on to the molar of the story… because incisors have a point and morals are overrated.
I like cheese.
Merry Christmas.
jellyfish are by nature very unlucky because anything they try to love ends up getting injured or dies. take, for instance, fish. jellyfish try to give fish hugs but the fish always die. so the jellyfish, to conceal their error, have to eat the fish to get rid of the evidence and because the jellyfish have terrible short-term memories they do it repeatedly. occasionally a jellyfish will encounter a strange tide which brings it into shore and it sees people. this makes the jellyfish very happy because it thinks “ooh! friends!” but then it goes over to play and swim with them and they all go “AHHH OH MY GOD IT’S A JELLYFISH GET OUT OF THE WATER” which is unfortunate because the jellyfish cannot hear this so he waits patiently for the people to come back, because he thinks they’ve just gone to get a snack and then they never do.
the end.
