I admit, I'm astounded.

Why assume that any decline in literacy is a cultural disaster? Most people were just reading crap. Here’s a heaping dollop of pulp fiction, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, September 1930:  “Now Sarka could see plainly the dome of his laboratory, and from the depths of him welled up that strange glow which Earthlings recognize as the joy of returning home, than which there is none, save for the love of a woman, greater.” I’d like to dig this writer up and sock him in the nose. Every word in that sentence, even the tiniest preposition, is screaming “let me die.”

Boo

If you were planning on doing the ever-popular William Howard Taft this Halloween, your time is running short. You can always paste on a fake mustache, but gaining 200 pounds can take several weeks.  As to scary spooks, listen: A lot of times, when you’re spending the night in a vacant old house, a talking parrot will get inside a human skull and poke its wings out the earholes. So you get a flying skull making ghostly sounds. Relax. It’s nothing to be afraid of. However, any time flames start shooting from the eye sockets, then you have a situation.

PTSD

Did you ever have a sort of accident or disaster or other adrenaline bomb go off in your life and you’re lucky enough to walk away and you think you’re okay but maybe minutes later you notice your sock is full of blood or the next morning you’re so stiff you can’t move or months later you have bad dreams that wake you up? I think that’s what America’s legacy of slavery keeps doing to us. Now we are being told, as I understand it, that it’s only acceptable for black men to kneel when white men tell them to.

Credo

I marvel that after millennia of human development nobody has ever invented anything to effectively replace the shoelace. I wonder if some Asian people are smug about their fork skills. I usually accept that I should live in the moment, but that can change from moment to moment. I worry that if we repeal any constitutional amendments it will renumber the rest, thereby rendering a lot of legal precedent dangerously opaque. I hope there’s an afterlife, but only for bad people. I think a really good cantaloupe tastes like a baby might if your wife would let you eat them.

no joke

Oh for fuck’s sake. Look, here’s a great idea: If you’re considering shooting into a crowd of strangers and then shooting yourself, just reverse the order. Simple. About two thirds of U.S. gun deaths (about 60 out of the daily 90) are suicides, so you’ll be in good company. That’s all I got. I’ll go back to wringing my hands now, be funny next week. Oh yeah. One more thing; this can’t be just me. When I hear about terrible crimes and they don’t know who did it yet, I say to myself, “Please let it be a white guy.”