You got passed over for the really nice wizard school. The community wizard school wants you to come on out though and they sent you messengers.
You haven’t seen them? They can only afford moths as messengers. You don’t have a porch light, do you? You don’t have a bug zapper, do you?
A 3-color pamphlet sparking and burning in the twilight.
Pick up a spectral hitchhiker, learn they died 40 years ago this very night. Pull over for a second spectral hitchhiker: a driver who picked up the first spectral hitchhiker this very night, 30 years ago and died of fright. The two sit awkwardly in the back seat, not acknowledging each other at all… at least, not ’til another spectral hitchhiker appears in the mist and as I slow down to help, they hiss “20 years!” and high-five each other.
Rich enough to run a train around my whole property along the property line in lieu of a fence. Rich enough to hire a professional hobo to ride that rail, chewing on genetically modified straw, blowing sad lonesome tunes through the harmonica equivalent of a Stradivarius. Rich enough to pay someone else to rig the bridge with dynamite so I can push the plunger and send the whole train to hell and I’m going to do it someday. Or pay someone to do it, which is like: Close enough.
Been working on a character recently, who I call “My Roommate Dracula.” I think I’m really getting the voice down. Goes something like this:
“I don’t sound ANYthing LIKE that! Vhy do you insist that you can DO an imPRESSion of me, you svine? Haff I no feelings to be hurt?”
But like, pretend I was wearing a cape. That’s a big part of it.
Spent hours walking around the neighborhood trying to find out where an accordion player was drowning in an outdoor pool filled with expired pudding until a member of the crew told me that was just my theme music.
If anyone were to ask me, the Opinion Haver, what it was that jazz fused with to create “jazz fusion” my response would be: garbage.
Nobody has asked me yet but I didn’t don the mantle of Opinion Haver without having full awareness of what a commitment like that might entail.
I see the reason for the misunderstanding. No, it’s called CASTLE SKELETON not because this stone building is housing any of the skeletons that regularly sweep through the village, dragging people through the mud and causing terror.
No, it’s just that a very rich skeleton paid us for naming rights to the place. Purely transactional, no endorsement implied.
A business card in the shape of a key.
A resume in the shape of a straitjacket with brass locks.
A job fair at the bottom of a tank of water.
Once again I was the only person marching in protest outside the ACE Hardware, trying to change hearts and minds, convincing people that meathooks and dangling chains can be quaint “ceiling accents” and don’t have to indicate that one is in a horror movie.
A community of pointy-eared forest dwellers all agree: the giant tree in the center of their leaf-thatched village sucks.
“Bark,” spat one. “Ugh.”
“I don’t see why it had to grow so high. What could possibly be up there?” added another.
“We’d burn it down,” said Dewlip, a local elder, “if we knew how.”