Subtlety is lost on the clueless

Jeremy stopped inside the McDonald’s front door, scratched his ear and returned to the sidewalk. “Let’s try again,” he told himself, then carefully stuck his head through a crack in the door. The store was open, the lights on, but empty. No one. As though every employee had been absorbed into the blob, or taken by the Rapture.

Just like his mother always warned him. “Everyone good will vanish, and you’ll be left behind. Better think about that, Buster.” Not like he believed that crap any more than he believed Jesus would rapture a forty-year-old alcoholic like his mother. …

Politics are only as honest as…Who are we kidding? There’s nothing honest about them.

When Corey agreed to be Paul’s campaign manager, he swore he would run a no-holds-barred campaign. Paul didn’t give it a second thought. How hard core could you get in an election for sophomore class president? Sure, he was bothered by Corey’s Photoshopped posters of his opponent Amy sacrificing a goat to Satan. And maybe writing Amy’s phone number after the message “for a good time call” in every bathroom stall. Perhaps slightly more concerned when Corey wrote the message in all the girl’s restrooms.

But when Corey started the rumor that Amy was pregnant with Ms. Lovechile’s artificially inseminated…

Never deviate from your plans, unless you like the newer option better, or the one after that

Daniel’s best friend Jordan ushered him into his living room, where four other couples from their church waited along with a guy in a suit that Daniel had never seen before. Jordan’s wife Cherry offered him a cup of coffee just as he spotted the black sample case behind the lazy boy. “Who’s the salesman?”

Cherry leaned into his ear. “I thought you were bringing Karen.”

He raised his coffee cup, a cheap china knockoff Cherry bought from Karen’s garage sale two summers before. “She thinks it’s an Amway pitch. Couldn’t convince her otherwise.”

When he added that he’d prefer…

Even hell is worse if you start the day without coffee

Background image by Wirestock

None of Jared’s office mates believed they were in hell, no matter the evidence to the contrary. “It’s a job, just like all our other jobs,” they’d say when he pointed out the telltale signs. The stacks of files in their in-boxes that doubled in size with each file they put in the out-box. The inability to finish a task because supervisor emails popped up every five seconds demanding their immediate attention, the motivational posters that left readers with a sense of dread, posters that multiplied daily:

• “Hard work and industry are their own rewards. …

Can you be a hypochondriac if the germs are really out to infect you?

Wall-to-wall souls, packed shoulder to shoulder, walking in lockstep and not one of them wearing a mask. Not one of them except for Prufrock. The only soul with any sense to wear a mask in a crowd during a pandemic, and there’d been a lot of them lately, so many he could no longer keep track. COVID-19, COVID-19a, COVID-19b, COVID-19d, COVID-20, COVID-20a, H1N1, H1N2, H1N3, 3.5 …

If you don’t enjoy self-reflection, stay away from mirrors

Irene, who clocked in at 4’ 10” and weighed 330 pounds passed Montgomery Ward and Spells’ “Plus-sized” racks, the “Curvy Women” rack, sizes 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2 before wedging an opening between the thousands of women surrounding the 0 rack and ripping clothes from their hangers with no concern whether the seams, or fabric, remained intact.

She felt as though someone had wrung her body through a depression era laundry wringer; the hand-cranked kind that jerked, fought back and still left folds and wet spots on your towels and sheets, which she knew…

DemYou are what you wish to eat

If there was any cartoon character George admired, it was J. Wellington Wimpy, the fat guy in the Popeye cartoons he watched as a kid. The one with a head so small he must have pissed off a witch doctor, with a nose even bigger, no neck, nothing for a body but a balloon-shaped belly, and an appetite for hamburgers. Boy could that man eat hamburgers, which George would give his life for now, if he had a life to give, but the Powers That Be stuck him in this food court to search for anything to eat.

Anything but…

Be careful of the daily grind lest it remove your nose

Five pounds to go, only five pounds, five measly pounds easily removed by a few more miles of walking, or so Calista[1] believes, although she loads her fitness app on her fitness watch to run the numbers again and holds the watch a few inches from her eyes to read the numbers, and it says ‘2.3 kg=500 laps.’

“Kg?” Calista pounded the tiny watch toggle to switch from metric to real because there was no way she would need to walk 500 laps to lose 5 pounds. It had to be wrong. If two-and-a-half kg was 500 laps, then 5…