No need to keep kindling the fire of your cruelty.  Unlike the phoenix, I won’t be able to rise again from these ashes.  Allow my weak embers to slowly fizzle out.  I’m already extinguished.

Dressing Up Something Ordinary in Special Wrapping

Q: What do vegetarian vampires drink?

A: Blood from a turnip.

"Do you believe everything you hear?"  Yes.  It's about as reliable as anything in print.

I dreamed of correction fluid.  Need I say more?

Then I dreamed that Michael Kinsley was advising people, "it is best not to use semicolons, as they can be thought pretentious," as he did in BOBOS IN PARADISE by David Brooks.  I woke up saying, "PRETENTIOUS?  Moi?"

Divide and Rule

My mom started going to Weight Watchers, and during the lectures there's always someone who raises a hand to ask a question that involves some sort of "cheating" on the diet plan.  You know, if the plan calls for eating all you want of a vegetable for dinner, someone will ask, "Can I eat unlimited popcorn?"  They're willing to follow the strict rules, but their minds are racing to find loopholes that will allow them "legally" to gorge thousands of calories.  It's crazy, but I know all-too-well that when you feel like you're starving your brain will come up with all sorts of notions.  Inspired by my mom's Weight Watchers stories, I made up a joke:

A housewife went to Buddhist Weight Watchers.  The lecturer said, "The Buddhist way to lose weight is to follow the famous saying: 'Chop wood and carry water.'"  The housewife raised her hand and asked, "What about cutting coupons and retaining water?"

If "aphasia" is the inability to express speech, what is the inability to remember the alphabet?  "Alphasia?"  Or perhaps "AphaZia?"  This is my favorite description of losing one's alphabet:

Divide and Conquer

SONG: A Letter to Mama
ARTIST: Josie And The Pussycats

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Savin' a dime, wastin' my time.

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

Savin' a quarter, tryin' to barter.

I hear that the stolen painting "The Scream" has been recovered.  The art world is now feeling Munch better.

I dreamed I was "semicolonial": nominally independent but actually under foreign domination.  I was Quebec.

Later that night, I dreamed that Al Franken called me "exotic punctuation," as he did in THE TRUTH (WITH JOKES).

At lunch, I noticed that the new waiter at my favorite restaurant kept looking at me and smiling.  It was a lingering look, as if he wanted to say something.  But it wasn't until I was signing the credit card receipt that he worked up his nerve:  

"Are you ever in Wilmington?" he asked hesitantly, his eyes studying my face with equal amounts of boldness and terror.  His eyes reminded me of Don Knotts; I could see the mustered-up self-confidence begin to tremble under its own weight.

"No, never been there," I replied, wondering why he asked.  

"You look just like my friend Tom.  He lives in Wilmington.  He has the same hair style, same face, same ..."  He paused, looking me up and down.  "Same everything!"

I assumed that "everything" referred to my taste in clothing.

I chuckled, muttering something about needing to meet my clone some day.  But my mind was reeling from the UNSPOKEN question that the waiter seemed to be asking: "Are you my friend?  Are you Tom?"

The waiter kept staring at me with those Don Knotts eyes, as if still suspecting I was indeed Tom from Wilmington.  Deputy sheriff Barney Fife was determined to crack this case of false identity.

I got the hell out of there.

---

Later, the cashier at the hardware store bid me farewell with these words: "Have a sparkling day," spoken in a slow monotone -- a depressed drawl.  The words and delivery were so incongruous that it was all I could do not to laugh before I left the building!  Plus, it was the very first time in my life that anyone had wished me a "sparkling" day.

Diversion

Saint Metafora
Patron of Disturbing Conclusions.

Saint Metafora taught a simple message that calmed the troubled minds of her followers: "A disturbing conclusion is simply the result of making the wrong kind of analogy."  Her collected sayings, "The Similitudes," popularized the phrase "X is like Y," which became a mantra of sorts among her disciples.  That mantra was commonly misheard as "excess likewise" by the general public, leading to the widespread misunderstanding that Saint Metafora preached a life of overindulgence.  Today, Saint Metafora is perhaps best known for her controversial sermon entitled "The Watchmaker Analogy: Who Has Time For It?"

"This is the thanks I get?"  Yes.  I thought you wanted gratitude, not a gratuity.

Leave, why don’t you?  But when you come crawling back, be careful not to trip on the pieces of my shattered life that you left in your wake.  Don’t worry—the pieces won’t cut you.  Their edges have long since been worn down.