2012 brought our community a lot of playground fires. Far more than I ever remember before. Tire swings full of hope and fun bursting into flame. Rubber slide mats and monkey bars melting into liquid chemical lava. Swing set chains glowing red then – whoosh! – the wood chip play area is an inferno. Kick ball games ruined by the thousands. Kids had to start wearing those National Geographic tin foil space suits during recess and family portraits.
There's no official explanation. My suspicions, though, point to the same thing that gave us no hockey season this year: God's Hatred for the Children of the Wicked.

What the older generations will soon learn – painfully, reluctantly learn – is how much hatred the rest of us have for their lawn furniture.

The problem is we let them play with a parachute as children. This was unsupervised. We were busy with our novels and our cigarette smoking. These kids got the idea that everything should be so stimulating. That everything should be as freeing as waving a surplus parachute up and down.
To counteract these misconceptions, we have teams rounding up these individuals and delivering them to our disabusement center in the Dakotas. There they are forced to hold hands with professional artists and help them paint over their own murals or face deportation.
From there 18 additional weeks are devoted to cost-benefit analysis of each frequency of the visible light spectrum.

Little David was forced into a jukebox apprenticeship. Yes it involved years of study and practice. Tearing jukeboxes apart and putting them back together. Dusting them inside and out. Counting all the records and then counting them again. But it also involved being forced into a jukebox itself. Crammed inside one against his will, Little David spent two weeks pulling records for patrons of the Yellow Bench All-Nite Cafeteria. Quickly counting coins while cuing up Chicago singles brought Little David a richer understanding of what a jukebox is really up against. It made him recognize all the advantages his birth had provided him that he had taken for granted. He thought about, for perhaps the first time, the thousands of hunched over men toiling inside jukeboxes all over the country. He...

I figure now is a great time to get into the newspaper business. I'm starting big. January will see the debut of my new, single-panel daily comic strip, Wright Angle. It's about the Wright brothers scaring children off their property and away from their workshop by waving rakes and swinging sticks at them. On Sundays, I'll switch it up with a domestic strip called The Fall Down Family. They help each other up.
And run a youth ministry.