Author - Chris Weagel

We will no longer be accepting Competitor’s Coupons for Gravy or Gravy-Related products. Adjust your holiday plans accordingly.

Deciding which candy-flavored shell coating to be dipped into, head-to-toe, while screaming, can be difficult. Do you wish to be sweet tasting all over? Do you want bugs and feathers and gravel to stick to your every surface in a magnetic fashion? Do you want simply not to feel as though you are burning in liquid green flame during your final 15 minutes on earth? There’s a lot to consider. Not least of which are the mood and financial resources of the mob that’s finally putting a stop to your wicked endeavors. How many of them are committed to your destruction? Do they feel personally wronged or are they simply “along for the ride” due to boredom and the high unemployment rate? Did they use up the club’s entire purse just getting the giant cauldron? How are...

Time to marry off all the rats.

With Autumn underway and the harvests wrapping up it’s time once again to take stock of local vegetable gigantism. I’m talking a really in-depth look at obscene vegetable growth. Enormous tomatoes, giant pumpkins, exceptionally heavy peas, that sort of thing. Backyard garden deformities are on the rise here and for reasons you wouldn’t readily expect. Our investigation won’t focus on the methods, although those are shot through with an inventive beautiful ugliness common to southeast Michigan. Instead we’ll look at the Why. What compels people of otherwise bland existence to draw attention to themselves this way? Is a branch of parsley the size of a man’s arm really the best expression of one’s muted hopelessness? Can the excessive fertility of a...

Eventually the anger evaporates and you’re left confused and cold, unsure of how the hand soap got it’s own daytime talk show and you got indicted on three counts of improper sitting.
You can’t go home again.

I CAN’T GET INTO TOO MUCH DETAIL ABOUT OLD RISCO’S ULTIMATUM – YOU KNOW, THE ONE HE FORCES ON ANYONE NEW TO TOWN – OTHER THAN TO SAY THAT HIS THREAT OF LAYING HIS ENTIRE BODY WEIGHT DOWN UPON YOU SHOULD YOU FAIL IS, IN FACT, TRUE.

What many people who aren’t from here don’t realize is that our soil is different. Digging down less than a foot reveals not dark, hard clay or brown growing soil, but instead small, neon-colored pebbles and stones used to line aquariums. The upper peninsula’s steep rock outcroppings offer the best view of these layers. Neon Pink, Yellow and Orange are near the top and grow some of the best lard beets available while blues and purples are deeper, surrounding most of the inland water table. All colors are sweet to the taste except for the silver stones which have a metallic-egg taste. The soil is probably the result of the healing and buffeting powers of the great lakes god Jon-Jon. Scientists have plenty of theories about how our soil got to be this way but we all know...

The Inflatable Octopus sits in the corner chair of the living room. It is orange with cartoon eyes and a painted on beak. It is filled with high-atmosphere nitrogen gas and so has never wilted nor sagged over its fifteen year stay.
I do not cover it with a cloth or blanket but I do refrain from directly acknowledging it in front of company. The Inflatable Octopus and I are not enemies but we have nothing left to say to each other.
I’m glad I ate all of that Undersea Star-Town Cereal, glad that I sent in the box tops, glad I got one last use out of the electric air pump, glad to have the Octopus in all major family portraits. It’s just…
It’s just a much longer ride than I signed up for.