Garlic makes the heart beat twice as strong.  When a vampire bites into the throat of a garlic eater, the high pressure  blood spray is too powerful and they choke to death.  This is the real reason they are repelled by it.   Incidentally, vampires are vile nocturnal creatures with teeth like rats who prey on the weak.  Don’t let vampire funded television shows and movies like True Blood, Twilight, or Vampire Diaries fool you to thinking otherwise.  We are all weak.  They are all hungry.

“You Stoped A Hart.”  These words painted 20 years ago in red on the side of an overpass . Who was the artist? Some illiterate vandal with a broken heart? I’d like to think so, but there are other theories.

I’m cornbread eating mad. I was at the fruit store looking for come jujuberries and this little girl starts looking at me pointing at the strawberry and saying “That’s you! That’s you.”

The mother said, “I’m sorry.” to me, but when the little girl asked “Mommy why is that man’s nose red with black pores like that?” the mother whispered, “He’s a drunk. Like your daddy!”

Lozaq the father lived next door to us.   He looked like a gentle child molester with light dog shit colored hair, and sadly he was the most normal of the family. The second most normal was the grandfather.  He a futuristic old man in a silver shining jacket, space boots and a cowboy hat.  He was born in 1900 and as a boy he said “I’m going into the future.” 

The mother was a screechy garble mouthed witch. The two daughters were dirty blonde.  They had actual dirty blonde hair, not the kind you’re thinking of.  There were plenty of sores on their skin to go with that.  

Someone had written FUCK in Elmer’s glue on the green concrete foundation of the house and it’s been there for more than 20 years even if they did try to cover it up with vinyl siding.

Wisely,  our father told us years later when the house was condemned, “Stay outta there. There’s AIDS crawling up the walls.” 

The Lozaq’s had a dog names Snoopy. The poor thing stayed outside all year long chained up to a doghouse of the same style as the one in the comic strip.   

Years after the house was condemned I was clearing out a section of the overgrown yard to use as a parking spot.  Snoopy’s doghouse was still there, with Snoopy inside.  A few bones and a collar.  Poor little guy had died alone and been left there all those years

I’m not sure where any of the Lozaq’s ended up, but my hope is that they met the same fate as poor Snoopy.  Just a few piles of rotting bones laying in a box somewhere forgotten.

I grew in the ghetto of my town, but I never knew it until I read it in the paper years later.  I didn’t have a ghetto blaster though,  I called mine a boom box.

When we first moved into the house, the back yard was full of empty turtle shells because the previous tenants liked turtle soup. My my sister’s bedroom had a giant treasure chest filled with sand and cigarette butts.  We kids weren’t even allowed to stay at the place for the first couple weeks because the conditions were so poor.  It took all my parent’s had to get the place up to standards, but they did it.  So well in fact that  I really never knew we were living in the ghetto.

My neighbor taught me how to electrocute yourself with the loose wires behind the tv for fun. We were switching from tv to video so we could play some Berzerk on Atari 2600. 

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I unscrewed it and drank the perfume from the unicorn’s horn. I was a little kid, but I knew better.  That’s when I learned no matter how nice they smell, unicorns are filled with poison. (Based on a true story)

Art by: Bixby

In college,  a professor asked the class why does the black community reject Michael Jackson?  (This was before MJ died and made his big comeback)  Most of the students looked puzzled. 

A lone voice spoke with authority stating, “He bleach his self.”

The professor said, “That’s right!”

I don’t remember what class that was, but I do remember the valuable lesson I learned that day. Grammar doesn’t matter once you reach 13th grade. 

My dog posed for a sketch.  I placed him on interview.  He is a French serial killer.  French is the language of tongue curling.

He said, “Everybody makes a big deal about killing hookers like it’s such an accomplishment. Where’s the challenge in that?  How about a serial killer who kills bosses.  I mean that would be impressive.  Tell me about a guy  who has been at the same job for 17 years and killed every boss he ever had. Now you’ve got my interest. 

Back in France killing people is easy. It’s the same as with cats. You don’t really think about it, you just do the killing. I’m working my way through the crowd.  That’s how you do it. Slow and steady.

Did you hear about the puppy serial killer?  A little dachshund and he’s been through 65 foster families in less than a year.  I don’t know how he’s getting away with it, but that little guy impresses me.”

I think my dog is a liar, otherwise I’m not sure how I’ve survived this long. 

Instead of saying sweet dreams, I say "Good night. I hope you don’t have too many nightmares."

Instead of saying drive safe, she says, "Good night. Don’t die driving home."

Back then you could buy a tankful of feeder guppies for just a few cents.  You could pick up an old fish tank out of the garbage, fill it with some gravel, throw a couple plastic army men in there, and have yourself  a genuine aquarium.  

Dad will tell you that if you breed them you can get fancy guppies. Guppies give birth to live babies.  Hundreds of them.  You may find one golden guppy that is your favorite.  He might grow up to have a fancy tail.

Don’t listen to your Dad.    You’ll believe it, when he tells you that adding two small drops of Clorox bleach will be good for the tank.  The chlorine will clear up the water, but when every fish comes up dead, it’s going to be your fault.  He’ll just tell you that you must have used too much bleach and it’s your fault they’re dead.

Klaus described in great detail how he was going to engineer a car that ran solely on blood, human blood.  He said he wanted to go to college just so he could create this car and make it so people would have to go to the filling station and ask the attendant to fill it with the RH negative.

“It’s going to blow people’s minds, maybe they will all stop driving and start walking everywhere.

A modern day translation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants

Hill related Ebrol long valley and white. No, there was no shadow, hanging between two lines of rails in the sun next to the station and train station nearby trees, in the shadow of the building on this side of the curtain strings of beads and not warm bamboo flights, Bar open Saturday, he and the girl in the shade outside the United States and construction of the table. It has a very popular, 40 minutes express train from Barcelona. About two minutes later, Madrid, I stopped
at the intersection down.

“How can we do this? Nomo” said the girl. If you have a hat that is on the table.
The man said: ” It’s very hot. “Whoever will drink beer.”  and in Munmak “servezas.”
Doors, women? “Large”.
“Yes, two giant”
Woman I have two feelings and two glasses of beer. I think in a beer glass on the table, she saw a man and a girl.

The girl on the mountain line. His country brown and drying in the sun, it was white.

“They look like white maggots,” she said.

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“Never get between a man and his coffee this early in the morning,” said the man to his daughter. A valuable lesson was learned.

There’s a new movie out called We Bought a Zoo. You may think it could never happen, but it already did.

Back in ‘86 my mom and a group of her friends had become oddly interested in the cookies called Animal Crackers. They would have Animal Cracker parties and trade the different animals with each other like little kids playing with trading cards.

It didn’t stop there though. Mom’s interest in animal cracker related things grew and eventually she convinced my Dad to spend every penny they had on a small zoo in another city. One that we would live in. She dreamed the place would be called Animal Crackers with a big shiny red and yellow sign out front and all the zoo animals she and her friends had been crunching on including lions, zebras, elephants, tigers, monkeys, hippos, and giraffes.

I’ll never forget the feeling of excitement I felt when we first drove up to our new home, Animal Crackers zoo. I will also never recover from the the devastation I felt when I realized that my parents has bought a broken down and abandoned puppy mill, and I had to live in it.

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Tonight at the mall pet store I overheard a woman saying, “Rabbit, your nails are like hypodermic needles.  My arm!”

I’ve seen “Night of the Lepus” and “Monty Python and the The Holy Grail” so I know how deadly rabbits can be.  I got out of there while I still had my life.  The one thing the 70’s said to me was “You don’t fuck with rabbit, natures cutest killer.”

Day 1:  I woke up this morning to the sound of birds pecking inside of my walls, which was creepy, then a few hours later I heard them in the crawl space, that was creepier. It sounds like I have wall chickens.

Day 2: It’s 3:15 a.m. I got about a whole hour of sleep then something started yodeling outside and woke me up and something fell on the roof, now all I hear is a faint tapping coming from the bedroom walls, I’m going to pretend its not satan or some demonic presence, and that there really is such a thing as wall chickens, that peck in their sleep. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t lie to kids or withhold the truth from them. Most little kids are smarter than you give them credit for, mostly because their skulls are still pretty soft and they have more blood flow to their brains. Yeah there are some stupid kids, some kids are just born that way just like assholes, anyway lets get to the point.

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i had a dream about satan and some cave that had an outcropping in it that was carved to look like the top of the devils head like from the top of his horns down to his top teeth and you could stand under it and put your head inside of it and satan came and he was black not red, then i woke up with the phrase of your convicted of being an asshole in my head.  it was weird

photo credit: riptheskull

Comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to decide. Alligator or crocodile? Which will I be? I am a crocodile, and I’ve done terrible things.

In 1978 my mother told me I couldn’t eat cereal and watch TV.  I was eating Sugar Corn Pops and watching a Corn Pops commercial at the same time. My five year old self was impressed that the yellow hatted cowboy was talking about the same thing I was eating. Then here comes Mom with the rules. I ignored her.

“If you won’t go in the kitchen, then go to your room,” she screamed.

Now an alligator would have listened. An alligator would have gone to the kitchen with his delicious Sugar Pops, but the Croc came out early.

“Go to your grave!” I shouted while pushing her down the apartment stairs. She lay at the bottom of the stairs whimpering well after I finished my third bowl of cereal.  She survived with nothing more than a sprained elbow Read the rest of this entry »

These were the final miles of a summer journey.  The four passengers consisted of the driver, the girlfriend,  the sister, and the groundhog eater.  As they slowly and angrily moved through the highway traffic, returning from another coal town wedding, a hamburger was spotted.  It was just sitting on the hood of the car next to them.

The groundhog eater asked, “How did it get there? Why doesn’t it fall off?”

The driver hatefully replied to him, “That hamburger’s your brother.  I saw it come out of your mother. ”

They all laughed because they knew it was true.

photo credit: stu_spivack

I’m 97 years old, and I never heard of cancer until I was 12 years old.  My neighbor fell down the stairs and broke his leg.  He went to the hospital and did you know he never came out ‘cause they said he had cancer? I never heard  of cancer before.  I think they gave it to him. Who goes to the hospital with a broken leg and ends up with cancer?

Doctors invented cancer to get your money and keep you in the hospital. When they open you up and let the air get at it, it spreads everywhere.

Look at me.  I got popcorn shrimp swimming around in my veins.  I ain’t going to the hospital for that.  I’ll get cancer.  That’s how they get you.

I took my love to a gazebo.  We drove past the gazebo. There were no giraffes by this gazebo. Read the rest of this entry »

My son has a corn tooth.  That boy loves to eat it right off the cob like a little typewriter. Chick Chick Ding. Looking at him chew.  That’s some good corn.  Nubbley.

Ever taken a psychology class?  I took one as a night class at a community college years ago.    The professor was some gentle ex-hippie with a gray beard.   I had developed an extreme dislike for him, simply because I had seen him talking to my girlfriend on campus.  She had taken his class a semester before so they were friendly.

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I emerged this morning from the frost covered cardboard refrigerator box that I now call home. With my first steps I noticed the legs of my pants felt like petrified wood and I soon realized the frigid weather has turned my nightly involuntary bladder release into an icy layer of shame.  Much to my chagrin, each movement had caused shards of frozen piss to  rain down upon the last  precious morsels of hamburger that I had been rationing for the past week.  As I looked through my pockets trying to find some cookie crumbs I noticed something was nibbling on my big grey toe.

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