I dreamt of the Missouri Cheese Caves again. The keeper there, a man by the name of Wallace, had recently endured another amputation. With but one ear and one good ankle left, he hobbled over to me and took me by the wrist “These cheeses, my boy. They are here many years. Forgotten by life. They are sharp. They have flavor. THEY ARE BIG AS ME!” As he yelled, the cheese spears dangling above shuddered. “But their edges, they are green. They – the cheeses – they are here too long. They are here for a reason,” he continued. The ever-present accordion music grew tighter in the distance. “These cheeses are here because you wish to forget them. You built them. Great teams – teams of MEN – worked together to make them strong. But you think...

You will not get it right the first time. This is a process. Properly hanging a motorcycle-on-fire-and-jumping-over-a-skeleton-viking-party poster is a skill developed over months, if not years. Your initial concern is not straightness or how much of the British hair cuts poster this one covers, but avoiding trapping a live mouse behind it.

Here's the vision: A giant screen. Size of a wall. It's on a wall. On the side of a building. Facing a very busy street. Enormous screen. Full color. HD. No, not HD. 4k. 4k with an option to upgrade to 8k in two years. It's on all day. 24/7. All day, full blast, full detail. Super bright. Digital bright. People across the street never go to bed again. And it's warm. It's safe. It's not hot, you can touch it. Birds gather near it. Constant glow. There's a slight hum but only dogs can sense it. Young dogs. And they're already crazy. On the screen runs, uninterrupted, all day live stream feed footage of Appalacian Mountain Top Removal coal mining operations. Nonstop. Mountains being blown to dust by machines to reach coal. Put the camera up on a tree, or on a...

Mass arrests of stuffed animals began today. I didn't believe it would happen. I was sure they'd first go after that guy at the end of the block who swallows DVDs from the library. From what I read, the teddy bears will be assigned new names and relocated to the orphanages in Las Vegas. The rest will be deported outright. The sudden loss of these brightly colored sympathy gifts underscores the importance of the Second Amendment.

You never really lose your fear of lizards.
But courage shows itself in other ways. One can lay face down on the floor during a close friend's art opening and claim ignorance of how to stand upright altogether. One may also decide to speak up – to say something – when one discovers a co-worker enthusiastically feeding ink pens to the office goat.
“I'm sorry, John, we need those pens for story writing. I'm going to have to arrest you now. Please stop being friendly to that goat.”