Category: Words Words Words

some fragment

When your journalist friend says “Oh, by the way, there’s a dangerous frog cult in this town, so watch what you say,” it’s perfectly natural to laugh. But when they have notes, and photographs, and stories they can’t publish about ruined lives… lives ruined in the dripping catacombs beneath the public library, the same ones high schoolers dare each other to enter, no matter how many of their older siblings warn them off with tales of lost classmates no one will talk about or acknowledge… well then. Then you just have to listen. And wonder how much of the croaking you hear on warm nights with your window open is benign… and how much of it may be plotting.

Career Advice from Elliot

Elliot was the kind of criminal to put on 18 different latex masks for a midnight burglary. Every surveillance camera sees a different Elliot.

“Almost passing out is part of the thrill,” he said. “At first you can’t breathe but as you discard a face in each room you enter, it gets easier.”

not so smart now, are you, robot

tired: Making AIs self-destruct by telling them “This statement is a lie.”

wired: Making an AI vent me into space because I asked them to prioritize the task of creating a portmanteau for “manager” and “manger” so I had a word for where managers would eat from if they lived in barns and didn’t have hands.

healthy debate

Is it a spell book that smells like it was written in blood, not ink? Yes.

Does its cover feature what seems to be an actual face instead of a nice illustration, or the expected title & author’s name? Again, yes.

But to the question “Shouldn’t we put it back where we found it instead of reading from it during a thunderstorm in this abandoned farmhouse surrounded by farm equipment such as pickaxes and pitchforks, far from home, our cellphones dead?”

Well. I object to that question’s framing.

less of a party, more of an obligation

On a cliffside, the masked parents proudly hold their new child aloft next to the box-and-plunger.

“Thanks for coming to our gender reveal party!” they squawk through their talkboxes. The assembled politely applaud, the plunger is depressed, and the night sky lights up as the 2nd moon explodes, sending glittering rock plummeting through the atmosphere.

“Our child’s gender is… DESTROYER OF WORLDS!”

More polite applause and a race to the parking lot to “beat the rush.”

Doctor Yeti: Tuesdays at 8

A yeti, captured by humans, escapes and goes to medical school. This fall: DOCTOR YETI.

NURSE: Doctor, this patient has a sprained wrist.

DOCTOR YETI: Pack them tightly in the snow and check on them in the spring.

NURSE: Oooo-kay.

DOCTOR YETI! His cultural frames of reference are all based on an animal-level existence in a snowy mountainous region! He was also really terrible at school. Tuesdays, 8 p.m.!

greatest show on earth

A circus strongman in the middle of a Big Top, surrounded by a spiral series of weights that increase in size, small in the center where the strongman starts and out by the tent’s edge, equal in height to the circus’s elephants.

The strongman lifts the first and sets down, moves over, lifts and sets down, moves over.

He follows the dumbbell trail out beyond the tent’s flaps to the parking lot where there awaits an enormous weight labeled THE HISTORICAL INJUSTICES FROM WHICH WE BENEFIT.

unlocked goals

Please stop donating to the GoFundMe called “Pushing Michael Down a Well.”

For one thing, it doesn’t cost anything to push me down a well, and for another, I only just climbed out the well from the LAST time, and that was because someone made “pushing Michael down a well” a stretch goal on their Kickstarter.

Which FUNDED, by the way.