There's Feces in My News and There's Nothing I Can Do

Instead of sleeping, we just spent the last hour switching out phrases in famous songs from the last five decades with the phrase "homeless newspaper" and singing them to each other and laughing about it. 

Seriously. I don't think I could even make that up, and I'm a writer.

Poor Cow

On my way home today, I saw as sorry a sight as I've seen in some time (like that alliteration overkill, do ya?). The main road near my home is bordered by grazing fields. Usually there will be a herd of cow on one side of the street or the other. It has always struck us as odd, considering one side of fields borders the parking lot for a gas station/Mcdonald's. Anyway, today the field on the right side of my car was filled with cattle, but the field on the left side of the road only held one single solitary cow. And it was standing all the way up to the fence with its head hanging over, staring directly at all the other cows in the other field. 

The grass really is greener, isn't it?

Divorce Land

The long shiny tour tram pulled up to a curb of waiting tourists, cameras in hand and flash-ready. Most of them mulled around, making mundane chatter as they waited. A man in an elaborate plum velvet suit, complete with tails and a top hat, stepped off the front of the tram to welcome people aboard. He looked like a cross between Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders, only with a longer, curlier, whiter moustache and matching eyebrows. The only thing he missed was a monocle. His loud, sing-songy voice seemed to echo off the sunny day.

“Come on folks, welcome, step right aboard! Don’t delay, hurry hurry now, we don’t want to miss anything we could be missing out on right now!”

People crowded into the trams like cattle. The day got progressively hotter with each passing second. The tour guide took his place at the front and switched on a large microphone.

“Testing testing, tra la la.”

People squirmed themselves into place until the tram was full and not one more sweaty body could possibly fit. A few even wondered to themselves how, on such a sweltering hot day as this, the tour guide didn’t melt under his widespread facial hair and material-heavy suit.

“Here we go!”

On go, the tram’s engines came to life with a roar and they pulled away from the curb.

“Welcome welcome one and all, ladies and gentlemen, to DIVORCE LAND.” A few people stirred in their seats, but it could’ve just been because of how suddenly the tour guide’s voice boomed so forcefully loud across the little speakers.

“First a little history… All living things die—people, plants, animals, stars. Other things die too, like relationships. Trust. The soul. Hope. Lots of things die. We’re all here today to find out a little bit about what happens when our spouse leaves us to face the world all alone after promising to love and cherish us in sickness and in health until we were supposed to die—but didn’t.”

Thick blackness fell over the tram as it pulled through a long dark tunnel. People bumped and bobbed silently as the tram came through the bright light at the other end.

“Now ladies and gentle lads, if you look out the tram to your left, sprawled out in the greener grass on the other side is a giant and quite rare flock of pure breed, white DENIAL!” Several tourists scooted closer to the edge of their safety bars for a better look.

“Go ahead: wave, scream, yell, stomp your feet even—these majestic denial won’t even acknowledge you in any way that could possibly be confused for you mattering to them in the least!” A middle-aged red-haired lady halfway up from the back snapped a few pictures. The tan line on her ring finger missing its ring stood out white across the black camera it helped steady.

“And don’t look now folks! That’s rhetorical you know. You’re really supposed to look, and you’ll really want to, because we’re coming up on a dirty alley with a surprise guest. Yes, across from the pimps and crack dealers, behind that cliché trash barrel that’s required to be burning to set the atmosphere in alleys like this, it’s the rabid, frothing, cynicismally—is that a word?—diseased monster ANGER!” The tram slowed to a stop at the side of the road. The red-haired lady leaned over the elderly Asian man next to her and forced half her torso across the edge of the tram to get a photo.

“Oh ma’am? Ma’am?? Please keep all body parts inside the tram. No folks, you don’t want to get too close to the anger. It likes to bite hard and once clamped, it tears anything in its maw to tiny bits, leaving nothing but a smear of regret behind.” Oohs and aahs rose and fell through the seats. The tram pulled on. People began to fan themselves as the sun came back out from behind a cloud.

“Yes, but let’s do hurry along—we have a schedule to keep.”

The tram conductor starts to whisper, and the Asian man asks the guy in front of him what difference it makes since he has a microphone.

“Ooh, hush hush now, be very quiet. We’re coming upon the shyest member of our natural community: BARGAINING. Watch closely now, folks. Apparently bargaining wants to keep the heirloom china her grandmother left her and she’s willing to give up the car, yes, the family car, but she won’t let him have the kids on the weekends, no, not if that slut’s gonna be there! It’s so exciting folks! Tears and sweat won’t stop her! Look at her go!” The red-haired woman’s face turned a darker shade than her hair and she put the lens cap back on her camera.

“Now I really must insist you keep all sharp metal objects well-hidden and use caution. Right up ahead is that ruthless and miserable animal DEPRESSION. Don’t be alarmed folks; depression always howls in desperate anguish like that. But please, whatever you do, don’t feed it. It tends to overeat to excess rivaled only by black holes. Again, don’t be alarmed, folks; you knew it would come to this.” A tear slipped down the Asian man’s cheek.

“And that is the end of the tour! I thank you kindly for stopping by this afternoon. Please step off to your left and exit through those red gates ahead. Have a nice day!” With that, he flipped off his microphone switch and was about to step off the tram when he noticed the red-haired lady still seated, rubbing at the lens on her camera absently with a cloth. He came over to see if she needed help off the tram.

“Yes, can I help you?” She didn’t turn to look at him when she answered.

“Well, it’s just that… I thought this tour went all the way to acceptance.”

“ACCEPTANCE? Why no ma’am! Acceptance is truly rare, almost extinct. We’ve yet to capture one. In fact, most of us here have only read about acceptance in books or seen it in movies. Of course if you can always check back…” The lady sighed deeply, then put her camera back in its case and stood up slowly.

“Okay then, buh-bye now. Step down please. Step down.”

Good News - A Short Play

Jalopy Englebert, an intelligent young albino man in his 20s also known as ‘The Inflammable Iridescent Bob,’ because he is a flame retardant vertically challenged entertainer (in layman’s term’s, he’s a circus midget who doesn’t catch fire) & Malkovich Jr., a full-time pothead in his late teens with negative brain cells, even less common sense, and no other friends or life outside of past issues of Victoria’s Secret catalogs, noontime showings of “The People’s Court,” and his little friend Jalopy, meet in an undisclosed location to discuss very very very very important top secret undisclosed things.

They are standing in the middle of a large room in said undisclosed location.

The lights come on and they begin to speak.


Jalopy:
Why won’t you LISTEN TO ME??? I have to tell you my good news.

Malkovich Jr:
I thought I was... wait, did you speak before now? I thought that was just the buzzing of the hungry fleas living in my ear hair. I’ve named them all.
Hey, did you know that if you eat peaches with Lysol, it makes you fart like a rhino?

Jalopy:
No. But, before tonight, I was also unaware that you owned a key to Martha Stewart’s Basement. Man this place is huge! And so unbelievably clean and neat and smelling of elderberries…
What’s that over there, in the back? What?
No way, an ascot store?? A store dedicated to selling only ascots? ROCK ON!!!
Oh wait, it’s closed.
Bummer.
At least there’s a slip ‘n slide in the corner...

Malkovich Jr:
Yeah. I got the key when I won some sweepstakes on the inside of a cheetos package. Of course, cheetos are good enough on their own with all their orangey goodness, even without special sweepstakes that have prizes including keys to Martha Stewart’s Basement.

Jalopy:
Man, I should really switch to cheetos... the good old days are gone bro. I mean, when did cracker jacks stop giving good prizes?
Malkovich Jr:
Hey dude, don’t diss the Jacks, YO!
I got my driver’s license out of one of those boxes.

Jalopy:
So did I, but I still had to wait in line at the DMV and let that perv with the clipboard and rank halitosis ride around in the van with me all afternoon anyway before he’d give me that box of cracker jacks.

Malkovich Jr:
Awww, MAN! At least YOU got to take the test! I mean, every time a DMV examination dude would get in the car with me, I’d just look at him and say, “Hi. This is my Wednesday face. Wanna dance?” And he’d DIE. Apparently it’s an ancient voodoo curse involving authority figures or rank halitosis or something.

Jalopy:
Oh yeah man, that’s too bad. I think I saw something about that on the Discovery Channel.

*a short silence is spent looking around at the utter gloriousness of Martha Stewart’s Basement.*

Malkovich Jr:
So, dude, why did you want me to come here. I’m missing “People’s Court” and today’s case is some guy who is suing because he bought some dandruff shampoo from a small company based in some old chick’s bathroom and it appears his hair has melted off and it’s caused his scalp to be an unsightly shade of neon clear.

Jalopy:
Well, I wrote a letter about my good news to the President.

Malkovich Jr:
You did WHAT to the President? You haven’t even told ME your good news yet!!

Jalopy:
I’m afraid to now. I mean, after those burly secret service men wrestled me and a nearby chicken to the ground and intercepted my well thought out letter and burned it in a ritualistic fashion, complete with costumes and campfire songs, and I—

Malkovich Jr:
Man, I’m horny.

Jalopy:
Did you hear anything I just said?

Malkovich Jr:
Yeah. It was all like, “Malkovich, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich. Tonguing a platypus, Malkovich.”

Jalopy:
Fine, be that way, see if I really care!!! It was more traumatic than you’ll ever know, you MEAT SNEEZE!

*Jalopy crosses his little arms, stomps his little foot and turns away, miffed. More silence ensues. Finally Malkovich speaks again as if the outburst never happened.*

Malkovich Jr:
Every time I go swimming, kids laugh, LAUGH at my giant pink bunny suit and high heels. Don’t they know that sunscreen doesn’t always prevent the everlasting damage done by harmful UV rays penetrating the earth’s atmosphere? Don’t they watch Schoolhouse Rock and infomercials about clearing up zits and dehydrating meat?
Man I’m deep.

Jalopy:
Oh yeah? Beat this. I knew a lady once. She had rubies on her lips and when she spoke they drooled down her chin like the tears we all shed in the war. And I can say that too because I had two uncles that died in the war and
THIS IS AMERICA DAMMIT!

Malkovich Jr:
What??

Jalopy:
*sighs*

Oh nothin’.

Malkovich Jr:
(out of nowhere) I can’t take this space-filling witty banter anymore!
I have to KNOW what your good news is!! TELL ME! TELL ME NOW!!!

Jalopy:
I just don’t know if you can handle it… if your fragile psyche is truly ready… Are you suuuuure you wanna know?

Malkovich Jr:
We’re in Martha Stewart’s Basement aren’t we? What is it huh? The answer to a conundrum? The secret files of Bea Arthur and Brittney Spears shemale porn? The meaning of life according to Dr. Phil’s psychiatrist? A shave and a haircut, two bits??
WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?

*holds breath during a moment of dramatic pause just as someone would during a moment of dramatic pause *

Jalopy:
No, none of those things. It’s bet-ter.

*More overuse of dramatic pauses until the Dramatic Pause Company, Inc. starts to complain of abuse and threatens litigation. Finally, Jalopy says what he came to say.*

Jalopy:
I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.

*more silence. The crickets off of Bugs Bunny cartoons begin to chirp in the background. Time passes.*

Malkovich Jr:
Dude...
I’m still horny.
Turn over, dammit!

Jalopy:
ARRRGGGGGHHHH!
Down baby, good boy, take a treat.


Lights dim.
Canned Laughter and Clapping.
Curtain.

Walking It Off.

We were watching on those televangelist shows in the middle of the other night and some lady was on there talking about how bad her cancer is. She stood up and walked around a bit (though presumably the cancer wasn't in her legs) and the preacher man goes, "Gooooood has heeeealed her cancer, ladies and gentlemen!"

Seth said, "Nuh uh, she's just walked it off."

What He Said.

"Yum!" I chirped as I drained the bottle of Drano. "Tastes like chicken...chicken that cleans a clogged toilet." Then I died all like 'bleh.' 

The End.

An Old Rant.

(I thought it time to pull this bad boy off the virtual shelf from '03 considering we're about to maybe move to the boonies...)

DO YOU KNOW HOW FRUSTRATING IT IS when you are sick, lying in bed with cramps and a headache that had to be caused by getting hit with a very large and heavy brick when you weren’t looking and someone offers to go to the store and get something for you? You feel like one of the few members living on a remote island and one man is making a journey to the mainland in his makeshift coconut shell boat that may or may not make it for supplies that your tribe desperately needs so you must tell him everything you personally have been um, desperately needing before he leaves and you will never get the chance ever EVER again (until tomorrow or Tuesday.)

So the guy heads out the door and you hear it click shut like the boom of thunder in your mind and you think you’ve told him every single even minutely essential thing possible that you could even maybe sort of possibly need but then it dawns on you like DOOM laughing and you remember one last actually important thing last minute like super absorbent Tampax that you might get low on even though you already have a box and a half sitting under the bathroom sink or a thing of Crangrape juice or something and so you run a mad dash like a banshee out of hell down a flight of stairs and through the entire house (which feels like traipsing leisurely through the state of Rhode Island because of the hurry you are in to catch him before he leaves) to the back door only to find them just getting in the car so you do everything you can to get his attention including jumping up and down like an angry Chihuahua in heat and screaming “HEY” at the top of your lungs like an American Idol reject while waiving your arms up and down so fast you are surprised you haven’t taken off like a damn dodo bird or Superman and just flown your sorry ass to the store but you keep trying, even throwing a trash can lid turned frisbee at the vehicle HARD, probably denting it, to NO AVAIL, the whole time NOT realizing you are in your UNDERWEAR because, well, you have been sick but the dude STILL doesn’t recognize your presence and so he goes to the store without the one thing you needed like ONE POSTAGE STAMP or a small bottle of bottled water because it really DOES taste better than the tap and as they round the corner away from your house they leave you standing on the porch stomping your feet like a five year old throwing a temper tantrum over Captain Crunch cereal while the neighbors look on in wonder and enjoyment, laughing, putrid VULTURES they ARE, eating popcorn and sitting their fat asses in lawn chairs so droopy in the middle from BUTT that you can’t believe they don’t just fall through to the pavement looking like a fat sloppy human turd being flushed down the toilet...

Anyway, so you quickly run your half dressed booty back inside and go back up the stairs to call the supermarket and some middle aged whiny CLOVEN OF HOOF guy with an anxiety complex on the other end of the line acts as if simply by the tone of your voice you’ve called in a bomb threat on the freakin’ GROCERY STORE, and you are completely INSANE and should be straight-jacketed that very instant but he says he’ll relay the message if he can find the guy which shouldn’t be hard unless he is BLIND since the OBVIOUSLY DEAF guy in question will be the only one coming into the store wearing flame patterned orange and black pajama pants in JULY and when the phone does finally ring you run to pick it up and your guy barely has time to wearily utter “hello” in a barely audible and frightened whisper because the phone jack is broken and the little cord that hooks to the wall has fallen out because you have a cheap piece of SH*T Wal-Mart five dollar NOT cordless phone upstairs because you decided to put the good expensive ($15) cordless HELPFUL phone downstairs which is stupid because you aren’t ever even down there for anything anyway except when Head Start daycare does a house visit and you have to sit and offer them tea somewhere...

So you just usually hang out upstairs which is what caused this problem in the first place and so you hang up on him accidentally because FATE that stupid HO find this all VERY amusing and by the time your guy does call back, you pick up the phone and have to hold it speshul so all the pieces don’t fall out of the bottom, so you are standing in this awkward position looking quite SPESHUL yourself and you are so farking frustrated that you don’t even say hello when you pick up the extension but instead you just let out a demonic Satan possessed shriek of DEATH into the phone so ear-splitting that you might as well buy the guy a hearing aid now to avoid the messy civil suit he will no doubt be bringing against you in the near future when he realizes that just because you couldn’t LIVE WITHOUT some Dannon FRUIT ON THE F-CKING BOTTOM STRAWBERRY BANANA YOGURT you are now having a full scale “adjective for being cheese-grated over a cactus naked” mental breakdown on the other end of the line causing him to lose 90% of his hearing ability for the rest of his life which wouldn’t have been very long had he been there with you at that exact moment anyway.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens??

Yeah. I thought so.

Murder in a Gray Room.

(This is the first ever exercise I did in the first ever creative writing class I ever took in college. Something about how a setting can be a character, if I recall correctly, which I probably don't. Came across the file and thought I'd toss it up here. You know. For guffaws.)

Murder in a Gray Room

Truth is, one can only be the "giver" for so long anyway before feeling they are only being taken.

The room felt smaller by the second. It was as if each moment ticked and fell away from the flat little clock while the walls moved inward, forcing the focus of everything into the center of the room, where we now stood. Light trickled in through a single window, smoldering enough to illuminate our faces but shadowing everything else in shades of pale gray. We could still see each other. Sometime during five minutes of silence that felt like a few lifetimes, even the oxygen in the space began to weigh more. It took a struggle to breath it in, causing lungs to feel overworked and chests to get tight with force and effort.

There were enough chairs, but no one sat. The pressure of the room kept us upright.

So we stood there, air heavy and burning with stale breath and heated tension, like a thousand pounds of callous air hung around our necks from a short thick string. Troy said nothing, head bowed in a coagulated silence, staring intently at the carpet until his eyes must have hurt to be in his head. He was rubbing a groove into the floor, smooth and flat underneath his dark boot. A small sense of dark irony tapped me as I realized the carpet and my heart were both being crushed in much the same manner at the very same moment.

“Honestly, it’s not you, it’s me. I know that sounds so cliché but...” Troy trailed off, still refusing to look up at my face.

I had heard that sentence before, but only as the butt of a joke on some poorly written sitcom. These are not things real people say to one another in real life when one purposely breaks the other’s heart like so many other everyday detached actions.

I glared at him, into him, trying hard to find those sweet things about him that made me invite him into my life and my bed in the first place. I had snuggled into a warm fuzzy blanket of the words he said, covering myself up, wanting desperately to believe he meant all that was whispered softly into my ear so many lovely nights before this one. He worked a slight of hand, a magic trick of making the world sound so good, simply to snatch those dreams away before I had a chance to really grasp them in my shaky, wanting hands.

When I could find nothing there except a film of cold selfishness squirming and writhing in the face I once adored, my tears stopped falling. I knew he did not love me, could not protect me. I stopped wanting to be with him. I stopped needing him to stay.

Instead, in this microscopic lifeless room, I began thinking of all the ways I could kill Troy.

I closed my eyes and shut out the threatening darkness of the room to the welcoming darkness of my mind. Behind my fiercely clenched eyelids, I longed for a nuclear weapon, scaled down to size, a tiny piece of mass destruction complete with a little red button to turn him into a pile of ash and dust easily scattered to the wind and forgotten. I wished hard for a knife, a crossbow, a hammer, a large rock, a small petry dish with the tiniest drop of Bubonic plague, a rabid tiger who hadn’t eaten for several days, a virus-infected mosquito, a Satan-possessed twelve-year-old with a temper disorder, a noose, a gun, a really big high-powered automatic gun, a stick, a straw; even a KFC spork would’ve easily sufficed at that moment.

I thought of all the ways to make his heart ache as mine did, to wash him in pain and agony, to burn out his eyes with the misery of having happiness dangled just out of reach in front of one’s craving body like so many shining silver trinkets.

Troy lifted his eyes from the enthralling sight that was the floor and stared at me, still wanting something of me, not done with his special brand of torment yet. He clearly had no idea of the thoughts flashing in my mind; I was purely hoping he’d drop dead at that very moment. What else do I have that you have not taken? At once it hit me, slapping me hard – he wanted my permission to treat me like trash, to use me up, to keep me here in this little gray room and be his emotionless toy.

“Can I still come by some night? You might get lonely.” Even in the dark, the smirk forming at the corners of his mouth was unmistakably confident. Somehow the sound of his voice managed an echo, resonant even in this small vacuum of a room.

Troy and his smile oozed slime and pestilence equally. The air temperature continued to heat, seemingly causing slick sweat to form on the surface of everything. At any moment the grayness would start to wash off of the walls and furniture and mix with the dripping sweat, flooding at our feet in puddles, submerging us until we drowned in it.

It was then I realized the only way I could genuinely murder Troy, to slaughter and have any true sense of justice done.

I turned around, taking away from him the sight of my face, the place where my smile for him had been. I stole myself back. I left him in the dark place where the love in my eyes would no longer shine to light the world as I gazed upon him. I shut Troy out, left him behind and standing in that gloom-filled place, letting him drown in shades of sadness and the sickly sweat of death and decay that reside in the stifling heat of a little gray room.

I walked out. I left him there. And I shut the door hard behind me.

I'm Ageist but You're Old.

So, Trojan is trying to sell these finger vibrators on TV like that's just a normal thing to do. It's at least slightly better than those nasty Girls Gone Wild videos, but wow if that's not saying much. Here's what I'm talking about:

What really bothers me though is the commercial, not the product. See that old lady with the red hair and comical overacting via her continuous sighing and cartoony disapproving facial expressions? Every time I see this commercial, which is eighty billion times a night because I watch Comedy Central after midnight, I just want ninjas to jump onscreen and drop her for ruining something that's supposed to make me happy, dammit.

Or maybe at some point, one of those two girls could just turn and uppercut her out of the chair for being a nosy bitch.

But more than anything and though I know it is completely ageist, when she tells the girls where to get the vibrator online, I just want so badly for them to go, "EW! You're OLD!!!" and then run away.

Screaming.

Because that lady is scary, dude. Scary.