Author - Chris Weagel

Rebecca the neighbor lady cuts hair in the front yard. She does it as a challenge to the local Sanitary Board. She has no permit nor license and she never will. She leaves the cut hair on the grass to delight the mushroom people. Her favorite customers are the blind. People born without sight, those with a heavy prescription and local martyrs who've stabbed out their eyes during municipal passion fits. Rebecca takes a lot of pride in making them look respectable and drawing attention from their eye holes. She accepts their money but secretly safety pins it back onto their sweaters as they go. The county Barber Board (plenty of overlap with the Sanitary and Wiping boards) objects to all of this. They don't like Rebecca's lack of a ceiling. They don't like her cavalier...

According to an official letter delivered today from city hall, sometime in the next 72 hours all citizens will be issued a parachute and a handshake and be on their own when next Thursday comes and the municipality throws up its hands, turns off the power and reverts back, legally, to unclaimed Indian land. We can all agree, I think, that we've done our best but these arrangements aren't working out. We can't stand each other and there's really no use in pretending any longer.
Once the town water tower is emptied, I plan on moving into it with a raccoon family. If any of you are interested, I'll be pushing over my ladder for the final time after my first evening in the tower. Sell it for scrap, I've had enough.

Emergency meetings are such fun to call. The urgency, the sense of impending doom creates a great atmosphere. The mood reminds all involved of their importance. Everyone gets a fresh pad of paper and an excuse for not calling people back. Emergency meetings also give you a great excuse to mention ladders, to openly suggest their use. If there's enough dread you might even convince them to pay for a helicopter ride. The emergency meetings around here are wonderful examples of people Doing Something. We're actively Getting Things Under Control. Even though they are just talk, they aren't Just Talk. They're action! Or, better, the authorization of action. And they can be abruptly ended at any point. No commitment. At an emergency meeting, everyone gets to fold their arms. At...

Certain allowances have been made. Understandings have been reached. He can start his home stuffed animal factory but the turbines may only operate from sunrise to sunset. None of the resulting stuffed animals may be delivered by cannon. Animal selection must be diverse. Teddy bears and rabbits are fine, but we expect more. We hope to see children hugging stuffed rhinos and millipedes, headless snakes and salamanders this Christmas. The neighbors shall not be disturbed by odd smells or the sounds of the eyeball machine. He can market the stuffed animals under a hong kong label and sew on the wrong number of legs. That's up to him. But if he's going to use our river water and embarrass our grandfathers he'll have to give back.

Society cannot function without your brilliance? Pwssssssh! Straight into the volcano. Mass market wall poster designer. I've excelled in knowing when to employ a skull. I know where to get the best polar bear stock photography. I can get this drawing as close to a Rockwell without being sued while not reducing the requested teal/fuschia ratio. Hate Crime Coordinator. Organize and schedule beatings and street pursuits. Work with local religious leaders to concentrate and amplify division and isolation programs. Throw annual Christmas party at local bowling alley. Unlicensed Cake Decorator. I recreate, through frosting and sprinkles, images of popular cartoon and pop music singers from torn out magazine pages and blurry cell phone photos supplied by impatient step parents. Sometimes...

Many people think the miniature golf industry is beyond saving. They say, “they did this to themselves, they deserve to suffer.” The American people have always been uneasy with the whole concept of miniature golf. It's the smallness. They can't understand how there'd be interest in anything not large or on the way to enlarging. It's regarded as something for dull children, just a stinking half-assed playground built too close to the highway that charges too much for flavorless ice cream with visible freezer burn and features an all-cousin staff. A lot of folks are waiting for a bank auction where they can get a life-sized cement elephant for cheap. And they're all probably right. All you ever hear about miniature golf is the state ordering the courses...

This is the lesson people like me never learned. This is what America wants. America wants 30 cents off coupons for roast beef sandwiches. America wants a state shaped like a dog. It wants to go to church. America wants barrels of immigrant pee stored underground in salt mines, just in case. America wants to be cross-eyed. The people of this blessed land of ours want these things. They wouldn't put forth so much effort if they didn't. Americans want to boil zebras in swimming pools just to see if the stripes come off. They're disgusting. And if you really are smarter and better and better smelling than them, you'll just have to make peace with all of this and find somewhere to hide when they start forcing everyone to eat corn dogs.