I always feel bad and guilty and so end up sticking around after most people have left and I help clean the animals or sweep up and just help put things right. Why should the host have to bear the burden alone? They've spent their energy measuring out portions and wiping necks all night. I feel bad because we probably shouldn't have come over in the first place. We should've declined the invitation, or better, claim it never arrived in the first place. Suggest it was mislabeled or bore offensive postage that led it to drown in the sewer. Pictures of tyrants, that sort of thing. We definitely should not have had a good time. We should've avoided the mutual back-patting and the theatrical hand shaking. No one should've taken out a bag of glass eyes and told fortunes. No...
“Jim, come on, we used to rodeo together.” “That was another life. It's over. I'm changed.” “Jim…” “Why did I survive? I'm old, I've had my time. Those men, those- they were all young men. Healthy, strong, had their whole lives stretching out in front of them. Gone. Gone for nothing. And here I am. A husk.” “You chose to–“ “Why wasn't I covered in snakes and set on fire?! Why wasn't I changed into a giant graham cracker? Can't you learn something from filing down my ankles and dumping me in the sewer?! What makes me special?” “Jim, you can't control what the Massachuesetts Institute of Technology does with its research money. Nobody can. It's beyond us.”...
The challenge, then, is to make the following funny:
The reality is that we are involved in a class war every single second of our lives. That it is a war of the rich and the powerful against the poor and the weak and nothing more. Everything else is irrelevant to this struggle. All other concerns and worries and questions are secondary and most of these concerns are distractions created by the rich and the powerful and the corporations they control to blind you to this ultimate reality.
My first instinct is to have it spoken by a talking hot dog. An anthropomorphic hot dog with arms and legs and a face. Wearing shoes and gloves. Probably a puppet.
Then maybe he'd fall through a trap door.
What do we as citizens value? What do we heroes of American History cherish? Up until recently, it was all-day holiday tv show marathons but the Internet has taken that from us, too. Now we value objects that are easily cut through by discount knives and family members willing to purposely misspell their last names to distance their ugliness from our writing career. We value ferris wheels despite their anticlimactic nature. We value pop/country cross over music and the denial it helps to perpetuate. We value hitting things. We assign special value to backyard rocketry. But above and beyond and outside this and through and through we value heating up two nickels with a butane lighter and placing them on our exposed thighs again and again as a form of penance for taking all of this –...
We had another burning today. They finally got Old Boxcar Henry. This town’s never had a tolerance for a man who’s good with apples. Of course the state doesn’t step in. It’s unofficial policy at this point. We keep sending them buckets of these fancy stones and they leave us alone. He screamed like a goddamned pie being baked. One of them pies that bursts open with snakes streaming forth, each one blind and unable to taste. This is what is called justice here. Here on the shores of the greatest of lakes. That’s not what we’re here to talk about. It’s time we reevaluated our goals as a people. A good third of us is hell bent on using science to breed men with zebras. To bring forth a generation of folks invisible to conventional radar but still...
What child doesn't dream of a pet elephant? Probably the kind that grew up on a one way street and wasn't allowed to touch balloons until later in life. We all try to make the best choices. Renaming all the crayon colors to either “Red” or “Not Red” had the intended effect: A generation allergic to compromise. Letting them watch you kick the dog has given us a nation of people immune to raccoon bites. And now that we need them, now that we are weak, now that the empire is crumbling and the sewers won't respond – these creatures have gotten their collective arm stuck in the cigarette machine, desperate for just one more thrill, preoccupied with someday getting their or their motorcycle's picture on a stamp. Nothing is more worthless than a...