Hey, readers! Thanks for waiting here while the airlock cycled and while the decontamination showers did their thing.

Do I have any actual news for you? I do not.

You don’t want to hear about all the board games I played yesterday with friends, celebrating International Tabletop Day. You don’t want to hear about how slow progress has been on editing my witches.town microfiction project. You don’t want to hear about how waiting for witches.town to disappear at month’s end feels like watching the last train roll out of town.

Dang. There’s a lot you folks don’t want to hear about. Picky, much?

Oh, here’s something interesting I can share. A long-time friend of mine spent some time in jail recently and yesterday shared some knowledge he learned from his bunkie “Caveman.” Caveman had spent enough time in the penal institution that he had some recipes one could follow using items available in the commissary.

You can make this next one at home, if you want to follow along. You can skip the steps where you get incarcerated and start with the food prep:

Okay, start by getting your hands on some Slim Jims. If you can’t find the name brand, any dense salami-esque meat product can be substituted. Got it? Okay great. Next thing you do is slice it into tiny pieces, then add it to a marinade made from soy sauce packets and grape jelly. You can usually source soy sauce packets from your junk drawer, left over from years of accumulated Chinese food delivery. Grape jelly can be obtained by planting and maintaining a vineyard, waiting for harvest, and watching YouTube videos on how to convert all your grapes into jelly.

Now that you’ve marinated your meat stick bits, you’re ready for plating. Get yourself a tortilla and carefully spoon your meat out of the marinade and into the tortilla’s center. Then, depending on one’s own sense of tortilla style, either fold the tortilla into a vaguely taco shape, or tuck and roll the tortilla for something like a burrito. Ready to eat!

Delicious!

Then it’s right back to spending time with your thoughts and waiting for your daily 30 minute period where you can leave your cell.

Now that you’ve learned something useful, here’s a series of not-at-all-useful strings of words designed to amuse and confuse. But first, with GDPR legislation coming into effect in Europe within the month, we have some housekeeping to take care of:

 

we’re updating our privacy policy
Your privacy is important to us.

In years past, we’ve had ourselves sewn inside your easy chairs and sofas, just to feel your warmth through the upholstery, giving you hugs as only furniture can.

We want you to know that we’re updating our terms of service, and we’re throwing out our collections of your tears (which we were keeping in case you wanted them back!) and the fiber samples we collected from your shoelaces for research purposes.

[click here to accept or seriously, you have to for-real stop reading,
or unsubscribe, or take a hammer to your computer or phone]

 

rules for dating my daughter
1) Strip your ego from you and enter the Cave of Lost Hope holding nothing but faith

2) Face the Lizards Three, sisters who can taste fear, whose riddles kill kings, and solve whatever puzzle they put to you, untangling their web of words

3) Help me put some antivirus stuff on my computer ’cause– and I don’t know why– I’m getting these rude pop-ups that I am NOT interested in

4) Oh, I should probably mention somewhere in this list: I don’t have a daughter. I just have computer problems, and a lizard problem

5) [an unintended image advertising a salacious service]

 

announcement: this year’s BOTTOM OF THE WELL FILM FESTIVAL line-up
A Circle of Light (documentary) – Footage of the light that drifts down from that hole way above us at the top of the well

Mr. Teeth and the Snail Fortune (drama) – A man in a well finds where the snails congregate and this fortune destroys his relationships with the rest of us in the well when he doesn’t share

Wet Wet Wet (comedy) – Just splashing water sounds in the dark. Hilarious. Why would anyone want to leave this damp well

 

ending theme song
Thanks for reading another one of these. Hope to see you at the film festival, where the popcorn’s fresh and the water’s up to your ankles and the picture plays on a well’s crumbling brick walls and no one ever wants to leave.

—Michael Van Vleet

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