Taped to the underside of each drawer in this living room is a full color photograph of various full time adult occupations. Whichever you pull loose will be your job for the next forty-eight years. There is no negotiating, no refusal and no trading with the others. Each of the sixteen cadets removes a drawer and flips it over revealing their fate. “I’ve got a picture of a man with a paint brush looking through a magnifying glass at an open printed book, carefully dotting each of the lower case i’s,” said Ralph. “So do I,” said Augustus. “I do too,” echoed Francis, Samson and everyone else, except David, Jr. With all eyes on him, David, Jr., slowly held up his drawer bottom. There, in color too vivid to deny, a painting of a Pony King...

You cannot fully grasp the scope of God's hatred for America until you spend a few days reading every greeting card for sale at your local drug store.

I don’t know what I expected from all this. I was certain there’d be puppetry involved. Lots of it. High quality puppetry. Stuff with wires and two guys working the thing, one wearing the costume, the other seated across the studio doing the voice. You just convince yourself of these things. Your brain outsmarts itself. Same thing with math.
I thought this endeavor would be a great opportunity. A great résumé builder. A showcase for my animal taming skills, at the least. I never expected to spend so many hours standing inches from a blank wall, staring at the brush strokes. I never anticipated purchasing my own bird costume or continuing to wear it on weekends when no one was looking.
The brochure said the hot potato cart would pay for itself.
And I believed it.

When I signed up to be sat on by this giant prehistoric bird I assumed there would be canisters of beef jerky within reach at all times.
When I signed up to model wigs for the Kaiser, I never imagined I'd have to draw pictures of tug boats up and down his arms in a vain attempt to explain animation to him.
When I signed up for delivery of smoked meat platters I never imagined I was really a mannequin without a mouth or digestive tract and have metal stand poles instead of feet.
When I signed up to count roller skates for the army, I thought every third pair would be a sliced bagel with no battlefield application.
When I woke up a lizard man and not a human being, I assumed they were wrong, that the vaccines really do work.

Cement dinosaurs. Cement bears and geese. Ornamental concrete has its place in our society. It has a place in my home. Several places, in fact. All of the end table drawers in this room contain cement recreations of sliced onion and kidney beans. There is a cement opossum I sit next to each morning while I have my lemons. Over time, I've used different names on this creature. Sal, Sally, Little Bip-Bip, Blessed Lee. None of them seem right. The pink painted belly has chipped away due to my rubbing. But the black marble eyes still glisten. Its face says, “I know, I know, I know, it's too late, it's too late.” When I die I want it kept very far away from my grave. Heavy concrete recreations of the living and the dead alike speak to our need as humans to experience...