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.
* 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.
The moon was very large that afternoon, and I distinctly remember it being rounded off at the edges. It might have been mistaken for a dirty plate suspended in midair and covered with glow-in-the-dark paint by someone whose eye had not been trained to see that it wasn’t and who had no concept of reality.
The sun was nowhere to be seen. Then I realized there was a glow-painted dirty plate hanging from the windowframe, and when I pulled it down, I saw that the sun had simply been behind it from where I was standing. Of course, any time someone has hung a dirty glow-painted plate from your windowframe, it means you must engage in a fistfight with them… and the only weapons you can use are swords and rubber-soled boots. Unfortunately for me, I then remembered that I had put the plate there. So I challenged myself to a duel, accepted my challenge, and somehow lost before I’d even started fighting. This would have struck me as nothing unusual had I won as well, but I didn’t. I just lost.
Frustrated, I decided to make some cotton candy, a task that would have been much simpler if I knew how or had the means to do so. Instead I ended up wrenching the walkers from the hands of some fossilized people who happened to be walking down the hallway of the nursing home where I was working at that moment. Freed from their need to go slow, the old people began to rejoice, and ran down the hallway for about a foot and a half before they all collapsed into a useless, elderly heap on the carpet, which was the same shade of gray as most of their clothing and hair, preventing me from finding them. They chortled very loudly to themselves, and in a blind fit of happiness, I sat down and took a nap.
While asleep, something interesting happened. Fortunately, I can’t remember what it was, so I’ll just leave you with a few things that come to mind at the moment. An aluminum-reinforced chair with poorly painted fiberboard backing. A small fragment of the sun, turned into a paste and brushed with nineteen times. A green dot that I don’t want anymore because the warranty is up and I can’t see green very well anyway.
That’s it! Now, off to find a small fragment of the sun to brush with.
I’ve half a mind not to write this story right now. Unfortunately for you lot, that half has wandered off, so I’m going to anyway. So, then… and so, now- because then and now combine in a most glorious fashion when you’ve no sense of time.
I was sitting in a chair yesterday morning, drawing conclusions about people I vaguely knew on a piece of notebook paper with a quill pen, when I realized my drawings were just rubbish. They weren’t badly drawn, mind you. They were actually drawings of rubbish. This led me to the conclusion that some people I vaguely know are the approximate equivalent of rubbish. There might have been exceptions to this, but because I don’t remember anything about these exceptions, they are less than vaguely known, and therefore not true exceptions due to their apparent inability to be “more-or-less,” “so-so,” or “perchance-ish.” So be warned, if you’re vaguely known by me, you may be approximately rubbish… which is only good for you because my approximations skills leave something to be desired. To be specific, they leave a piece of dried-out pear to be desired.
If this is inconvenient for anyone, then I don’t really give a darn. Regrettably, I’m totally out of darns to give. I could give a crap, but nobody wants that. I mean, seriously. It’s like throwing cheese at a koala.
If the next sentence seems to have a point to any of you, or make sense, please reconsider your existence.
I, having but thought but not one but won willn’t adversely counter-complete affable conjunction-laden aphrodisiacs, thusly alas.
If anyone wants to race, you’ll have to do better than that! I’m miles behind you, but I’ve switched the start and the finish lines! Ha-ha! If you don’t want to race, then you’d better get off the track. If you aren’t on the track, then by jove, get on the track! Unless, of course, you aren’t and you’d rather not be on it… but if you’re not sure if you’re on the track and want to race, or aren’t sure if you aren’t on the track and don’t want to race, please take a moment to establish where the nearest exit row is, keeping in mind it may be behind you. Also, keep in mind that the exit row behind you, whether or not it is the nearest one, is rigged with firecrackers that may cause some insignificant welts on your arms as you leave the dirigible.
Also, for anyone who’s wondering, here’s the lyrics to that song I never wrote… and didn’t tell you I was writing in the first place… and that I’m not even going to write now:
If the facial completion were running awry,
Your three doglike siblings could vanish in space.
Were they to return, you’d just color the eye
and the beef would be milky if that were the case.
Have two tutus too to have had two halved twos.
This song will end soonish, and likely you’ll be
Annoyed because it won’t end in the right rhythmic pattern.
In other news, there is no other news.
Ta ta!
I had an epiphany about four seconds from now. That is, I have this bad habit of being interrupted by people who annoy me. Like for instance - actually wait, let me say that I like to - wait, no. I don’t. Oh yeah, you know how sometimes people will be in mid-sentence and then not finish what they’re saying so you just have to… y’know…
(At this point I’m rudely interrupted by Captain Curmudgeon)
CC: Get off my lawn, you darn kids!
Me: But daaaad…
CC: I disown you. Now get off my lawn!
Me: *walks away glumly*
But good fortune took me in its stride, for I had found a dollar on the ground as I walked away, with which I could purchase a heart attack from the Mick Ronald’s “$1.04 after tax” menu, once I’d found four more pennies. Then, in an instant, I left good fortune’s stride, likely because my legs are short and he was going about four hundred thousand miles an hour to reach some undeserving loaf somewhere in Japan by lunchtime. Thus, I realized the dollar had been glued to the sidewalk.
I angrily hurled a potato patty (without even knowing what the heck a potato patty is) at my own face, and it tasted bad, so I never did it again.
Then I choked on a small fragment of the patty and died.
I found myself eating some rather poorly prepared sushi in an upscale restaurant last night. This, of course, forced me to demand that I stop getting lost (because it takes me forever to find myself when I am), at which point my mind ceased to wander and plopped itself rather glumly back into my skull with a lovely “thplat.”
Before I had the chance to wonder why the sound effects that evening had a lithp, I saw via my peripheral vision that someone had just left the restroom across the way. I shouted across the restaurant at him, “Hey! You didn’t wash your hands!”
He stared at me blankly for a moment and a half, then turned to make a hasty getaway. It was this that convinced me that he was, in fact, the Handswashless Bandit. I was also clued in by the name tag he was wearing.
“HELLO, MY NAME IS: The H. Bandit”
Unfortunately, I had to ponder (briefly) the significance of one naming one’s child “The” with a middle name like “Handswashless,” so he made his escape. Luckily for me, he had made it rather hastily, with shoddy craftsmanship, so I had no trouble in disassembling it and removing him from the ensuing pile of rubble.
I pulled my lucky gum from my left ear, my lucky horseshoe from my hat, my lucky lint from my trousers, my lucky teddy bear from a rift in the time-space continuum, and a rather unlucky bald cat from a stranger’s handbag. I then threw the cat at The Handswashless Bandit (who from this point forward will be referred to as “Jim,” while everyone else in the story excepting myself will be referred to as “Jimmy”) and produced a fire hose attached to a tank of sudsy detergent water, with which I then blasted Jim until he was nothing more than a mere penny. Of course, as would be typical of my fortune (or lack thereof), the penny was heads-down, despite my horde of lucky things, so I couldn’t pick it up.
And that is why I’m poor.
In other news, I have a bit of glorious gossip on Jimmy. Turns out he’s dating Jimmy, who kicked Jimmy out of Jimmy’s house because Jimmy was the first person who wanted to date Jimmy after Jimmy left Jimmy because Jimmy found out about Jimmy while Jim was in the bathroom not washing his hands.
A mighty cauliflower thus ended its reign over small unexplored parts of Zimbabwe, while people lacking extremities raced fruitlessly to the store nearest you.
Merfle.
What started off as a brilliantly unusual day at the carnival quickly lost its glamour when I realized I wasn’t at the carnival. I was sitting in my basement, pretending to be a llama with a cold. Actually, I don’t even like the carnival that much.
But I digress… unless digress doesn’t mean what I think it means, which it probably actually does.
But I digress… again, only if it’s the right word…
Allow me, briefly, to interrupt myself.
Okay, I’m done now. Back to me.
*ahem*
Being a llama with a cold is about as much fun as pretending to be an ill farm animal, so I decided to play some gideo vames. I would have played a video game, but they’re too difficult when you’re suffering from dyslexia. So, gideo vames it was. Then I realized that gideo vames don’t exist.
I then drifted off to sea in the canoe I’d actually been in the entire time, and it was a very long four and a half second journey, let me tell you. Actually now you don’t have to, because I just did. Heheh… gotcha.
Anyway, I arrived at a desert island about ten feet offshore with a resounding “WHAP!”
“WHAP!”
Hey! Stop that! That isn’t what I meant by REsounding! Idiotic pun-goblin, jumping in and typing unnecessary stupidities into my otherwise worthless stories.
But I digress… and at some point will digress about digression. Seriously, though…
The desert island was very, very large. It was then I realized I’d landed on Australia, which had been covered in sand, and had actually been living on a three-foot diameter smaller outlying desert island for the entirety of my life up to this point. The only person in sight was a soldier, who was standing at the end of a line of many other soldiers, presumably part of a troop. The other soldiers, however, were hiding behind various pieces of jumbo-industrial sized platterware from a cheap catalogue that I’m sure some college-dropout-turned-hairstylist wannabe had dropped off about thirty seconds ago. I wouldn’t have ventured a guess quite so bold had I not suddenly noticed her walking away, thusly making her the second person in sight.
The commanding officer was tirelessly barking commands at the troops, but none of them were paying attention because, after all, he was only a terrier.
But I die…
Actually, guess what?
No, besides bicycles. This isn’t a story about ADD, you fool!
Errhuhuhh… Bleurugheghgheurgh Fizzleblort ffffffffffffffffffpshhhhhh
Disclaimer: This story is an outright lie. Any similarity between its author and someone who tells the truth is a mistake.
I was busily minding my own business at the sub shop today when I was rudely interrupted by a thought. I was going to tell you what it was, but I seem to have forgotten it. Instead, I’m just going to complain about the goings-on around me during the lunch break I used to go to the sub shop.
The guy sitting to my right was one of those people who looks like they might’ve had a comb-over if they had any hair, and his glasses were pushed so far up his nose that his eyeballs rubbed against the thick lenses which were crammed ungracefully into their frames. He turned to me as if to say something, and then he did.
“I was trying to find my wallet earlier today, and wouldn’t you just know it… it was in the last place I looked. Doesn’t that figure?”
I responded with a less-than-tactful but more-than-boring retort: “You, sir, are an imbecile. Things will ALWAYS be in the last place you look. If they weren’t, that would mean that you kept looking after you’d already found them. That, incidentally, would make you just as stupid as the statement you just made lets me know that you are.”
Unfortunately, Anti-combover Glassesman didn’t have time to be offended because his lunch break had ended, and he wasn’t allowed to have emotions while on duty. Apparently he was a lawyer.
Then I turned to find a very old man who looked much like a relative of Confucius sitting on my left.
“How did you get there?” I asked, half-expecting some very philosophical answer.
“I opened the door, walked over here, and sat down.”
“I see. A walker-sitter, are you? I’ll teach you a thing or four about walking and sitting.”
This, of course, sparked a very intense competition between the old man and myself involving walking around and sitting down a lot. Turns out I’m better at walking, but the old man was a far better sitter.
Then the Confucius impersonator threw a grape at me, and without bothering to accompany his fruity assault with a witty, insightful quote, left the building.
My inner monologue at this point went something like this: “Y’know. I really can’t stand people who think they can sit around being better at sitting than me. How dare he grape me in the face? I’m going to train my ability to sit by watching TV twice as much next week. Then I’ll show him.”
Unfortunately, I hadn’t turned off my outer monologue while thinking this, and it seems I’d been ranting about how ugly some woman’s baby was, and loud enough that she could hear me from across the restaurant, so I was snapped harshly back into reality by a slap to the face with a pancake.
“Where did you get a pancake in a sub shop?” I asked her, incredulous.
“Some old chinese-looking man gave it to me. He said it would come in handy, but be my downfall. I suppose it did come in handy. I can’t see any problems that slapping you caused me, though… so I suppose he was wrong.” Then she took a bite of the pancake and started choking on it.
Afraid to think what “downfall” might have meant, I hurried out of the sub shop and ran smack into a slab of concrete that someone had put right outside the door and painted to look like what was behind it.
And that, my friends, is how I came up with the word “avbhoeilnh,” with a little help from randomly mashing my fingers on the keyboard. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get something to eat. Probably that grape that’s still stuck in my collar. What? You won’t excuse me?
…well, I don’t care. I’m going to excuse myself and leave now.
And now I’m back. Seems like I was only gone moments to you, but in reality, I was gone less than moments. Only one moment passed while I was away. Seriously, though. I now take my leave. Maybe I’ll give it back later.
If I didn’t spend so much time wondering if I could ever learn first aid, I’d probably have time to learn it. Of course, doing is less fun than pondering when it comes to things like that, so for now I’ll just sit here and drink my cranberry cocktail. What a lonely night at the bar. I’m the only person here. Even the bartender seems to have gone elsewhere.
Wait, there’s a woman walking in. Wait even longer— it’s an attractive woman!
*Abrupt change of storytelling modes*
She sat down next to me and pulled a box of cigarettes from thin air. I one-upped her by pulling an emu from thick air. I then proceeded to put him back because he smelled bad.
“Cancerstick?” she asked me casually.
“No, the name’s Jefferson.”
“No, do you want a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I. That’s why I’m trying to get rid of these things on other people.”
“Right.”
What followed was a very uncomfortable silence, punctuated very sharply by the occasional stray ellipsis or semicolon. I finally got the courage to tell her what I was thinking.
“I don’t like oranges that much. They always get juice in my eyes.”
She got this look on her face that seemed to imply that I was a nutcase. Then I remembered that right before telling her what I thought of oranges, I’d put on some of those slinky-eye glasses that nobody really ever wears because they look so stupid, but which for some reason were also my prescription glasses, as I had the need to read the line about oranges from a scrap of paper I had written it on which was in my pocket. In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m farsighted. I’m also nearsighted, but that has nothing to do with how good my vision is.
Finally, she responded:
“Grapefruits are far worse. Avoid them at all costs. They’ll kill you. They’re probably conspiring to do so right now.”
I took this advice to heart instantly.
“You know,” I said, “you may be the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t say much for you, because I’ve never actually seen another woman… I always forget to wear my glasses, and the ones that are far enough away for me to see clearly always have guns pointed in my direction. Guns, of course, with scopes that cover most of their faces. Also, they usually have ski masks and replica WWII flying ace goggles on. Don’t know why that is.”
She lit a cigarette with a flamethrower she had somehow acquired during my speech, then threw it away. I took note that after what I’d said, her face simply glowed.
“Um, miss?” I said. “Your face is on fire.”
She responded with something very odd: “I’m a grapefruit.”
“Well, crap.” I said, and pulling an invisible, nonexistent handgun from some incredibly viscous air, I shot her fourteen times before I had a chance to pull the trigger. Luckily, it only takes 13 invisible nonexistent bullets to kill a grapefruit disguised as an attractive woman that has lit itself on fire. This may be because fire alone is enough to kill a grapefruit. Also, wigs are very flammable.
I left the crime scene with nothing but a smile and twenty bucks I found on the floor on the way out of the bar. Naturally, everyone laughed at me out on the street because I hadn’t thought to tell you that I’d brought my clothes, and therefore hadn’t. I shrugged it off, then shrugged on a trenchcoat that some passing streaker had thrown at me. This was enough of a distraction to the surrounding public for me to end my story.
It was just another boring day in the office, and I was making my usual 8:01 am rounds when I remembered I hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet. This was my first clue that it was not going to be a normal day.
I knew this because I don’t drink coffee, and I never have. So why the heck would it occur to me that I should have already done so?
“Morning, John.” Erick said as he passed me in the space between the cubicles.
“That’s… not my name. Feel free to wear it out,” Was my response. “My name is Samuel.”
“Ha! Nice try, John. I already had my coffee, no practical jokes are going to work on me today. And you should probably move your cart. You’ve got a line a mile long waiting to get past you.”
I swiveled my neck about 90 degrees to the left before it started to hurt… so with a heavy sigh, I mustered up the energy to pivot my torso enough to look behind me. What I saw next really was a surprise- There was a very thick, very neon green line on the floor behind me, sort of lying there in a tangled mess.
“What the h-” I started to say, but I was interrupted.
“Hey, buddy. If you’re just gonna stand there, you could at least try to get this knot out of my back.”
“Who said that?” I asked, twisting my torso more in the direction it was already going, and setting off a painful twinge in my own back.
“I did. Down here. The green line whose regularly triumphant path through the universe your rather dull existence seems to have gotten in the way of.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” I said, untying a knot at the end of the line. I was about to ask what a line might be doing in an office building, but the instant his knot was gone, he zipped straight past me at a very high speed. Unfortunately for me, his tail end caught on my shoelace. Even more unfortunately for me, humans (unlike green universe-traveling lines) cannot pass effortlessly through windows as if they don’t exist. The resulting event was, as you may have guessed, very amusing to behold, but very painful for me.
I hit the ground like an obese sack of dried-out potatoes. WHUNCKTH. Then before I knew what was happening, I didn’t know what was happening! Why this occured to me made very little sense, for I’ve been a very logical person for most of the third quarter of my adult life to this point, and since that time an even more logical one.
By the end of this train of thought, which I just realized I had spoken out loud (but which didn’t matter because nobody was listening), I remembered I was being dragged toward an office window at approximately 432.1 miles per hour, give or take a smidgen. I prevented myself from screaming for a minute, so I could be amused at the perfect numeric order that was displayed in such a velocity.
“Four, three, two one!” I thought. “Followed, of course, by-“
But as I thought the last number in the countdown, I was dragged forcefully—and painfully—through the window of the office building. The green line disentangled itself from my foot and flew away.
I screamed as I fell earthward, knowing that at the end of that two-and-a-half foot drop lay a sidewalk that could quite possibly hurt.
And it did.
Apparently with the intention of looking like a buffoon, Jeffery set out today to become an astronaut. To clarify, “looking like a buffoon” in this instance means “earning $23.61 in pennies” and “set out today to become an astronaut” means “started picking up 2,361 pennies.”
On the other side of the world, something interesting was happening. Unfortunately, you don’t get to hear about that because I don’t speak Kangaroo. Instead, I’ll tell you a tale of the 7 seas (minus the seas, and 6, and plus “dollar bill I found on the floor while Jeffrey was picking up pennies). Actually, scratch that. Ok, don’t scratch that hard— now look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined it. Scratched into oblivion. And for what? Something edible.
And now for a premature intermission.
*tacky music*
Now then, where was I? Ah, yes. Somewhere in the Sahara, amidst the sand dunes and the neon gels, and the overstuffed duffel bags, and the squared-off semi-pentagonal spheres (with two and a half sides each, yes) and the beige checkbooks, and the rambling authors, and the unfriendly brooms, and the rather simplistically rendered beetles, and the end of this sentence.
While there, I was actually asleep. Now that I’m awake, I’ll continue my story in a less fantastic manner. Not less fantastical, mind you… it just won’t involve the brooms. Also, the checkbooks may have vanished. In fact, disregard everything you’ve read up to this point. It’ll do you no good. Nor will it do you any harm, thus removing all interest from it entirely, and rending it a useless and discombobulated cluster of slightly cracked eggshells.
If, at this point, you’d care to read something amusing, feel free. If, on the other hand, you want to stop reading this note, you may not.
Now then, let’s have some tea. Would you like some? Well unfortunately YOU CAN’T. The tea is MINE! If you wish to participate, you will have to remove that ridiculous-looking watermelon with fangs from your handbag, and purchase some tea leaves of your own. Or you can purchase “T-leaves,” which are far less useful, but shaped like 20th letter of the alphabet.
…if you just counted out what the 20th letter of the alphabet was, you are silly. This is bad news if you don’t want people to associate you with someone such as the creator of the twenty-ninth sentence of this writing. By the way, I recommend against checking what sentence that actually is.
The good news is that this story will end in another forty-four characters following the exclamation punctuating the end of this sentence and excepting line breaks!
Also, the meaning of life is as follows: the
I awoke tomorrow with the strange feeling that I could remember something that had happened today. After dismissing this as a side effect of brain-fluff, I sat down on the ceiling next to my computer and began to write a story as a follow-up to something I once read about robotic thugs, bananasicles, and crunchy stuffed animals. Then I realized the keyboard was on the desk, and got down from the ceiling to poke it in a mechanically memorized pattern to produce what you’ve already read.
Shortly thereafter, this sentence was written.
After debating the meaning of life for a few minutes, I realized that I wouldn’t be particularly successful at trying to figure it out all by myself. So I turned to myself and instructed me to use the computer I told myself I was at to go on the internet and look it up. Thusly,
Life (–noun)
1. the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.
This, I concluded, was spectacularly uninteresting. I then stepped away from the computer, convinced that it was determined to ruin my fun, and threw a baseball through the monitor, inserted a moist sponge into the DVD drive, and ingested the motherboard, which needed salt. Considering the previous sentence, I’ll never know how I managed to finish writing this note.
“Maybe I should eat a bananasicle,” I thought to myself. Then I remembered that there were none, for alas, they had been taken by robotic thugs— not to mention I needed an excuse to use the word ‘alas.’
Suddenly, I realized that in about ten seconds, I would be aware that I was writing a note, and it might start to either make sense or become boring.
In other news, I’d just like to tell you all a little about my favorite bits of a book I just read on quantum physics, followed by a lecture on our president and a detailed account of the activity in the stock market as of late.
Hang on a second, what’s that flying towards my fa… OW! Hey, wait… why did I type that? Or that? Hey, I’m automatically making myself type everything I think or say. Why can’t I stop? I guess I’d better just stop writing this note, before I say something that makes me seem even more foolish that I already may to those who have read what I’ve written so far…
