Judgment Day

I used to throw newspapers, and one morning I'd been accosted by about three crackheads, all of 'em wanting to jump in my game, and I can tell you when it's five a.m. and crackheads are slowing you down, you gotta be fast, and I was, I'd see 'em coming up to me and time slowed down and the very instant, the 20th of a second I see their lips opening trying to snag me in the game, I'd open my mouth and start talking non-stop: "Hey, hey my man," I'm talking loud and running right over whatever they got to say, cause I know it's my only hope, "It's a fast gig, a hurry-up thing, ya gotta go, go, go, and I'm tellin' ya, it's just one damn thing after another some mornin's, ya know man, and I can't stop cause if I stop I get BEHIND, so far behind, they'll be complainin' and believe me, I got to just go go go." All this talking as fast as I possibly can and I'm walking fast while I talk and making total fixed eye-contact and I am not letting that crackhead get a single word in edgewise. Not a single word.

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I remember when my father died, I returned from the funeral out of state, tired is what I was and I was beyond tired. I had spent a week in the hospital watching him slowly die, and then returned for the funeral a few days later. I had to go to the grocery store when I got back to Charlotte.

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That other morning, in a different year, on a different day, crackhead number four for the morning started his approach, and I thought to myself each one of these guys thinks he's the only crackhead who's tried to jump in my game this morning.
So I ran out of my stuff, and I just said instead, "get out of my way, you damn crackhead," while I'm walking and makin' eye contact with him like I know I have to, and he bows up and sputters, "who the hell are you to judge me, man?"
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So, fatigued in a way I've never been before, I'm in the grocery line and when it comes time to pay I start fumbling with my money or my checkbook, and I'm aware that I'm acting like a doddering moron. And the guy behind me is getting impatient, and so is the woman behind him, and I can identifywith them cause I've been exactly in their shoes. I just can't seem to get it together, and fumble and mess up for what seems like the longest moments until finally I get the cashier paid off, and stumble off, too tired even to feel embarassed, but feeling the stares against my back and hearing the mumbled "dumbass jerk" and some other pissed off murmur from the woman.

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My nephew was enraged at some boy who lived down the mountain from them, it seemed the boy was retarded or had had his head knocked in by a now-absent father long ago, or had a brain tumor removed in infancy, or something like that, we adults didn't know all the details, but knew the boy had some reason to be not quite okay. But my nephew was fuming; he's tried to play with the kid or pal around, and now he was fulminating about the neighbor boy. "That stupid faggot!" he kept shouting, and all us uneasy adults knew enough that my nephew didn't even really know what that word meant, and that whatever faux pas the other kid had made, there was probably a forgiveable reason, and that my nephew was making a scene over something that maybe he shouldn't.
Finally my cousin-in-law Ashley lowers the hammer on my nephew. "Why don'tyou just shut up, Jason, what you don't seem to realize is that some people have problems YOU JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT!" And every adult in the room turned and looked at him and said, "That's right, Jason!"
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Not to be slowed down, I told the crackhead, "Hell yes I'm judging you, man,but I sure as hell don't expect you or anyone else to take my judgment seriously. Hell, I don't even take my OWN judgments seriously!" That left him with his mouth hanging open, just as I hoped, and I stepped around him and kept on with my paper route and finished by 6:00.

Have You Seen Me?

Have you really looked?

IN THE FUTURE...

In the future, all food will be sold one bite at a time. You will go to the grocery store and purchase however many prepackaged mouthfuls as you desire of whatever kind of food you want. Each bite of food will be slightly smaller than an actual bite you might want. It will have a cardboard cover with a photograph of the type of food on it. The actual bite of food in the package will not look like the photograph on the cardboard envelope. Inside, each bite of food will be encased in a plastic envelope made of something like Kevlar. There will be no instructions on how to open it on the package. The package will have the word "handy" printed on the cardboard. Most people will use tinsnips or garden pruning scissors to open the plastic packages. Each package will be irradiated and sterile. Each package will have an expiration date. Each package will have the nutrition information printed on it.
Each package will take approximately 10 seconds to open if several packages are laid out beforehand and assembly-line techniques used by the consumer in a food preparation area. Each unit of packaging will weigh 44.5% of the total purchased weight. Each packaged bite of purchased food will be enclosed in a single bag before leaving the grocery store. Each bag will be of gossamer thickness and will often split open in the parking lot, spilling the mouthfuls of purchased food paks on the pavement. The gossamer final bags will be difficult to open and only experienced grocery employees will be able to handle them. Each of the numerous bags will be looped on the consumer's separate fingers for transport to the parking lot.

Plan B

Back when I left the doors open, I would handle wasps with my badminton racket. No mere flyswatter would do. The badminton racket took down the wasps and made sure they'd stay down.
One day a hornet got in. A big fat hornet that lived in an archetypal gray glob-sphere hanging from a nearby tree. An angry armored high-speed danger-pellet from Hell.
Knowing I was underarmed I nevertheless gave him a hearty swak with the badminton racket and he was propelled into the wall at a speed that would terminally cripple any of his weaker cousins but which served only to enrage this particular insect demon. With an audible smack he hit the wall, rebounded, and he came right at me making twice as loud the ominous low thrum as he had before. I fled the room.
Down the hall I saw my grandfather's ceremonial cavalry sword, and I wrested it from the wall where I displayed it, snatched the blade out of its sheath, and returned to the living room ready to do battle. Just in time. The hornet had just passed the doorway as I entered, and as he swung back to attack me, I was able to set up the swing like a baseball pitch coming towards me, and I swung the sword and cut that mother clean in two.

The Awful Transmogrification of Luther Gunther

It is curious that the night it started, I had awakened in the middle of the darkest hours for no reason I can readily discern. A sheen of sweat was on my forehead, my sheets damp, although the night was cool and the window open. My dog chose that moment to howl forlornly in the yard. It was a new moon, giving no dim light through the window, and I got out of bed and wandered to the kitchen in search of a soporific cookie and a glass of milk.

Refreshed and not yet ready to return to my bed, I wandered into my office and saw the red light on my answering machine blinking. I activated my computer by nudging the mouse and as the screen lit enough to give me some light, I noticed the time was 4:14 as I punched my answering machine. It was Luther.

For some reason his voice was hushed on the thin tape, unlike him. "You've got to know about this, man," he murmured. "I've found it... the Grail." I distinctly heard a hiccup. "The wassabe margarita, man... it works." I heard a weird whine in the background, something odd and out of place. An eldrich, keening wind. I felt a coldness in my room, and a shiver passed through me as I sat in the dark room. "I'm going to drink the whole thing," his voice on the machine whispered, "right now."

I heard him breathing, an uneven gasping for air not like him, and I heard him unmistakably drinking something in audible gulps. Now Luther himself had begun making a noise into my answering machine I cannot describe. A whimpering vocal whine of something like pain, yet in it was also an exaltation, a strangely triumphant squeal of... completion.
And then a dial tone, and the tape stopped, and then began to rewind.

. . .

We chopped a hole in his front door at almost 6:00 a.m., his swarthy, untrustworthy landlord and I, who had roused the man with several telephone calls, imploring and relentlessly browbeating him until the man had shown up in front of Luther's apartment down in the chemical zone, angry, but fearing the worst, like me.

Inside we found no one. There was a strange smell in the apartment, like coffee kept hot far too long, or ozone, or a feverish sickroom for cats. A wrong smell. Luther was gone. On his kitchen counter was the recipe, written on a scrap of notebook paper, next to the now-empty blender containing mere drops of the potion which had led to his uncanny transmogrification and preternatural removal from our universe.

I include it here merely as a precaution. Do not do this, I implore you. The unholy recipe included a large amount of wassabi, and horseradish as well as strong Chinese mustard, in combination with a quite large amount of simple citrus ice, and he had blended the icy, frozen concoction such that he experienced brain-freeze at the exact moment the wassabe / horseradish had put Chinese fire into his sinuses!

It's no wonder he is gone. He has left this world, and I am convinced he succeeded in his Faustian quest, and that his atoms dissolved and joined the Microsphere and the Macrosphere in the same fearsome instant. And sometimes I wonder what might I experience if I were to pursue the dangerous course he did: The instant of brain-freeze, as from a margarita or slushee, at the exact moment the Chinese nasal-fire commenced, sent him to his doom, from our view, yet what about from his?????

Banned

http://www.lssu.edu/banished/archive/2004.php

http://www.lssu.edu/banished/archive/2005.php

http://www.lssu.edu/banished/archive/2006.php

http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php

In contrast with the last post, the people who have the chutzpah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah

http://www.haruth.com/YSyiddishinLaw.html

to declare words "banished" are a different breed of bold.

Protologisms

A prototype word without even the status of a neologism. Set forth for your perusal. In fact I was struck by the overall modesty of the proposals.

I stumbled on this corner of Wiktionary (and stumbling on odd corners of Wiktionary, and Wikipedia, too, is often a useful way to understand the sites), for my first time. A suprprisingly high percentage of these are either hilarious, very clever, and erudite.

"The term "protologism" is considered a neologism based on standardizedWiktionary criteria."Neologisms are newly acknowledged terms. They typically have not been incirculation long enough or widely enough for their social status to bedetermined. Neologisms can be nonces, slang terms, or even illiteracies."The citation of "protologism" may be restricted to certain other contextsthat have not been fully investigated, such as industry jargon or regionaluse. The term may not generally be understood even within those contexts." -Wiktionary
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:List_of_protologisms

I found serious proposals for new words here, such as
sphone: noun [Garrett Jones] - A shape formed by spinning a cone intotetraspace, around its symmetry axis. Can also be formed by connected allthe points on the surface of a sphere to a point some distance away from thesphere in tetraspace, with the point being upsilon or delta from the centerof the sphere. It is the analog of the cone in realmspace. (sphone = sphere+ cone).

And some very good ones:
thanatolotry: Worship of death, a trait attributable to suicide bombers and devil worshippers.

One can sort it all out by topic, too. In searching by topic, I found allsorts of true gems:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:List_of_protologisms_by_topic#Overuse_terms
faux-mo: When a generation lacking any clear, unique identity attempts (in inconsistant, questionably sincere and argueably futile ways) to label and define itself and/or it's cultural elements. This is generally characterized by a sort of quiet desperation, thinly veiled hostility and confusion.

Some people think oddly:
Thursdaily: Every Thursday

Sideslappers
lockblocker: A person who prevents the unlocking of a his or her cardoor by pulling the door handle at the same time the driver presses theunlock buttona.
lesbosexual: n. [Note: Coined by Mark Simpson in Sex Terror: EroticMisadventures in Pop Culture (Harrington Park Press, 2002).] A non-stylishgay man.

I coined the next one long ago. Now it has a home.
masochismo: n. [Masochism + Machismo] The idea that ones masculinity is tied to the capacity to endure self-inflicted pain.

Humpy's Children

My old tomcat Humpy was chasing some rabbits. I thought it was to eat the rabbits. I was wrong. Now Humpy's children are all over the place. Sqirlz morph

The "Each" Symbol

Annoying Mushroom

This is growing out of my woodpile. I'm pretty sure this is off the sweetgum tree. I'm also pretty sure it's a sort of chanterelle.

It's been there a week or so. I sure wish I knew. It looks tasty, even now. But of course I'm not that big a fool, to eat it knowing nothing.

Links

http://www.puppyfind.com/
http://www.nextdaypets.com/



http://www.puppyfind.com/view_listing/?list_id=58nl4j519c&sid=6bfafc8b0353ba1043f523afbd8167e3&back=%2Ffor_sale%2F%3Fbreed_id%3D20%26country%3D%26state%3D%26page%3D1%26order_by%3Drand%26back%3D%252Fbreed%252F%253Fbreed_id%253D20%2526back%253D

Similar from the region:
http://www.news-leader.com/assets/pdf/DO143030922.PDF
http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909230408

a phrase for Google

"state lines" federal "puppy mill"

and see this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_and_Plant_Health_Inspection_Service

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act

Then I Googled

fake OR phony animal rescue

and got a story about a fake vet, but the article pointed out the IRS has ways you can check on non-profit status. If they are claiming non-profit status, they can get in HUGE trouble. If you are interested to read it it is:

http://www.examiner.com/x-669-Pet-Rescue-Examiner~y2009m2d4-Fake-veterinarian-operated-animal-rescue

Tom Paine said:

"Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man."