Flash Fiction #105

PHOTO PROMPT © Janet Webb

TAKING A LEAK

Wow, where did this parking-lot puddle….uh, lake come from?? We haven’t had rain in weeks.

We had a big power failure here yesterday, caused by everybody running their air conditioners in this heat wave. Lasted for hours.

Yeah, so??

You know the big party store at the end of the mall? The one who claims he’s got tons of ice for your drinks?  After a couple of hours, his dead freezer started to leak.  He was yelling at people to take away as much ice for free, as they wanted.  Three guys with cartfuls, got that far, in the sun.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

 

The Perks of Atheism

Reblogged this on Archon’s Den. I thought it was humorous, yet serious, and needed to be said. It constitutes my masterful research, rather than merely lazy plagiarism.

True Falsehoods

A discussion group put together a list of their favorite things about being an atheist. I really liked some of their answers, and wanted to share. Responses range from funny and inappropriate to thoughtful and poignant.

View original post 883 more words

Havin’ A Ball

A young boy was playing with a ball in the street. He kicked it too hard, and it broke the window of a house and fell inside. A lady came to the window with the ball and shouted at the young boy, so he ran away, but he still wanted his ball back.

A few minutes later he returned and knocked at the door of the house, and when the lady answered it, he said, “My father’s going to come and fix your window very soon.”

After a few more minutes a man came to the door with tools in his hand, so the lady let the boy take his ball away.

When the man finished fixing the window, he said to the lady “That will cost you exactly ten dollars.”

“But aren’t you the father of that young boy?” the woman asked, looking surprised.

“No,” he answered, equally surprised. “Aren’t you his mother?”

***

It is a dark night.
A man is riding a bicycle with no lamp.
He comes to a crossroad.
He stops because he doesn’t know which way to turn.
A tall pole stands near the road with a piece of paper on it.
It is very dark and the paper is too high – he cannot read it.
He takes out his box of matches and climbs up the pole.
There, he lights a match and then reads the following words on the paper:
“Wet paint.”

***

A female asked God that she wanted her all husband’s attention, she wanted that he should only look at her, keep her with him all the time and give her utmost importance in life….God turned that female into a mobile phone.

***

The Impact of a Job Change

One day, a passenger in a cab tapped the cab driver on his shoulder to get his attention.

The cab driver screamed, lost control of the cab, went up on the sidewalk and stopped inches from a shop.

The passenger apologized and said: “I didn’t realize that a little touch would scare you so much.”

The cab driver replied “Sorry it’s not your fault, it’s my first day as a cab driver, I’ve been driving a hearse for the last 20 years.”

***

On their way to get married, a young Catholic couple is involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven. While waiting, they start to wonder: Could they get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they immediately ask him.

St. Peter replies, “I don’t know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out.” He leaves. The couple sat and waited for St. Peter to return, but he never did. 9 weeks later, and the couple were still waiting. They started to wonder, if things didn’t work out, could they get a divorce in heaven?

Another month later, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. “Yes,” he informs the couple. “You can get married in Heaven.” “Awesome!” the couple responds enthusiastically. “But we were just wondering, what if things don’t work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?”

St. Peter’s face suddenly turned red with anger. He slammed his clipboard to the ground. Frightened, the couple asked “What’s wrong?” “OH, COME ON!” St. Peter shouted. “It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have any idea how long it’ll take me to find a lawyer?”

 

Flash Fiction #104

PHOTO PROMPT- Copyright – Jan Wayne Fields

POLITICAL GAMES FOR POLITICAL GAINS

He said
She said
They both lied

Deleted emails
Mexican wall

Polarised positions
Confrontation, not co-operation

Donald hates Muslims
Hillary loves photo-ops

Gunfire in the streets
Politicians in public washrooms

Clinton’s no lady
Trump’s an egomaniac

NRA and oil pipelines
Freedom and fairness
sacrificed to political expedience

Democracy’s dilemma decision
between bad and worse
No ‘leaders’, only selfish pedagogues

No discussion, only entrenched positions
Nobody’s right, when everybody’s wrong

Aching ears from raddled rhetoric
Public apathy – or anger

Drip….drip….drip
Make it stop
Please, make it stop!

~~~~~

Does Lady Liberty look like She’s hitchhiking?? Her tablet reads “Canada – or Bust”   😳

***

You can click on ‘Nobody’s right,’ above, to hear The Buffalo Springfield, from 1967, tell you how nothing really has changed, except maybe got a little worse.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

 

Faded Fads

Fads seemed to have started in the early 20^th century, when improved manufacturing processes finally allowed payment of more than starvation wages, and enough spare time to spend it.

(One of) The first was flagpole sitting. I think it started with one nerd without a girlfriend or a date, who couldn’t sit in his mom’s basement with a Gameboy, because they hadn’t been invented yet.  He nailed a big plank to the top of a municipal flag pole, so that he could sit in a snit.

Actually, the fad was watching flagpole sitters, where entire families would get dressed up, pack a picnic lunch, and stare adoringly for hours at some jerk who raised himself above the rest of the population and did nothing constructive.  I believe the record was 33 days – until Trump came along.

Soon after, the fad among fraternity boys became swallowing live goldfish, usually washed down with copious amounts of bathtub gin. Police suspect that alcohol may have been involved. During the 40s, the only fad was saving the free world from The Axis Powers – and drawing ‘Kilroy was here’.

Fads really came into their own in the 50s, when plastic made things light and cheap. First was the Hula Hoop, a barely disguised anti-obesity and fitness program.  We all know how well that worked.  Then along came the Frisbee.  It was possible to fling garbage can lids a considerable distance, but when Wham-O made them smaller and lighter, the number of broken windows, smashed flower gardens, and homes with brightly-colored, orphaned disks on their roofs, really skyrocketed.

There was the Slinky toy, a coiled spring that was smart enough to walk down a flight of stairs all by itself. It was replaced by contestants on The Bachelor.  We had mood rings.  Mine was always black, and in a bad mood, and I think it rubbed off on me.  Rubik’s Cubes showed us how things were always twisted and turned, and presented a different face.

Etch-A-Sketch came along, and it marked the limits of my technology. I could operate one of them, where I can’t run a Smartphone.  Lava lamps showed up.  I think mine sat on a fault line.  There was an underwater avalanche, and it never rose to the occasion again.

Pet rocks were a thing for a while. Mine got lonely, and ran away from home to join a parking garage.  Here in Canada, we had Ookpiks, an excuse to take the hides off baby seals and ship them to a factory in Calgary, where they were cut up and sewn back together to look like a small owl made by an Eskimo.  Sales peaked at 2 or 3 a week and then slowed down, and the tourist industry had to find new ways to separate gullible American tourists from their money.

Tamagotchis were hot with tween girls for a while. They were supposed to show the amount of time and effort necessary to raise a child, and hopefully reduce teen pregnancies.  After a few of them died of malnutrition, most young females just went back to boyfriends, who were lower maintenance.

Many fads have no staying power, and disappear quickly. I figure that the new electronic game, Pokémon Go won’t last more than a couple of weeks, when players do things like find a dead body, or get kicked out of a Holocaust Museum or a cemetery.

Selfies seems to be a fad which could have been devised by Darwin himself.  Hundreds of self-important fools have removed themselves from the gene pool.  Government agencies have had to put up signs that read effectively, “Not Here, Idiot!” and still many are too spaced-out to notice or heed them.  Tennis elbow and golf elbow have morphed into ‘selfie elbow’, caused by holding up a huge ego cell phone at an awkward angle, to take hundreds of meaningless photos.

Sadly, one fad that doesn’t seem to disappear is, The Kardashians.  We have now come full circle.  Here’s a group that’s lightweight and cheap, made mostly of plastic, and they have raised themselves above the common folk, to be gazed at adoringly for hours, without actually doing anything constructive.  😯

There must be some (lots?) that I’ve missed. What do you remember, that I’ve forgotten?

April A To Z – By way of G

I’ve gone and got to G.  What shall I gab about?   I’ve got it!

GUNS, GOD AND GRAVESTONES

Any of you who may feel that all three of the above are connected, haven’t been paying attention to the filing system inside my head.

I don’t give a shit what the Nervous-Nellie, conservative, reactionary do-gooders claim. Guns don’t kill people! Guns don’t kill people any more than hammers build houses.  People kill people when the wrong people get ahold of guns.  I know of guns that are older than I am, and the only thing they’ve ever done is put holes in pieces of paper.

The wrong people get hold of guns when gutless Gus thinks he hears a burglar, and hides a rifle under the bed, and his 4-year-old ‘pretends’ to shoot the neighbor kid – when an armed Security Guard is too lazy to store his gun in his house, or at least in his car’s trunk, and lets his girlfriend and her 6-year-old use the car, and it slides out from under the front seat – when a lady shopper leaves a loaded, cocked pistol in her purse, next to her child in a shopping cart.

We don’t need ‘Gun Control.’ We need people control! We need  background checks, waiting periods, licensing, gun handling and storage safety training, and – instead of emotional, hand-wringing histrionics – an ongoing campaign like we have for smoking in public, or drunk driving, to get people to think, (Could happen) and take their guns, and their control of them, seriously.

OH GOD

God is!….And all the rest of you are wrong.

In the beginning, God created Man – and immediately, every Man created the God which best suited his selfish needs and mistaken beliefs.

The Muslim God is different from the Jewish God.   The Jewish God is not the same as the Christian God.  The Roman Catholic God is not the same as the God of the Greek Orthodox Church – and neither is the same as the Russian Orthodox God.

The Catholic God differs from the Protestant God, and the God of each of over 42,000 Protestant sects varies widely and wildly from the Catholics’– and from each other. In every case, at least one of them must be wrong.

‘Your God’ is a mean, vicious, vengeful, violent God, who would torture me for eternity for respecting all humans and their rights, even if some of them are gay, whereas ‘my God’ is loving, forgiving and inclusive.

The God of the insecure egotists, ‘sees every sparrow fall,’ but they fail to notice that the Bible doesn’t say anything about Him actually doing anything about it. If a greater being created the universe, It is not the God of the egotists’ dreams. It regards this little ball of rock called Earth like an ant-farm, mildly interesting at times, but not worth interfering with, no matter how much they vainly pray.

None of us have enough brains to know what an infinite ‘God’ thinks and wants, but too many of us also don’t have enough brains to keep our mouth shut, and prove our ignorance.

ENGRAVED IN STONE

I’m not going to get stoned – even though it sometimes looks like I am, when I write.

My maternal grandparents lie side-by-side in a double plot, in the old section of my home-town cemetery. Someone in the family must have had some money.  A four-foot high white marble obelisk sits on a sandstone plinth at their heads, with all biographical data professionally and artistically carved in.

Ever the prepared planner, my Mother arranged and paid for all funeral details long before she and Dad died. They (which may mean she) opted for cremation.  They purchased a single plot, and had their urns buried at each of the top corners.  There’s room for four more urns – two on the sides, and two at the bottom.

In the new cemetery section, the rule is that all gravestones must be flush with the earth, for ease of groundskeeping. They put two small sandstone slabs (about 8” square) over the urns, with only their names, and the word ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, no dates of birth or death.

Not exactly welcoming the inevitable, but like Mom, knowing that it should be planned for, I recently had a conversation with my younger brother. Since there’s room at Mom and Dad’s plot, did he plan to be cremated and buried with them?

No more religious than I am, he surprised me with a vehement refusal. No cremation for him!  He plans to be buried the old-fashioned way – embalming, body in a coffin, coffin in the ground.  He’s going to buy a single plot, and have a stone about a quarter of the surface area laid over him.

Like my Mother, I am not a believer in physical resurrection. I also want to be cremated.  The whole process, from beginning to end (actually, from my ending, to the delivery of the urn by Amazon drone) is about $2000/$2500.

I see no reason to rob my heirs of what little I can leave them, by purchasing a plot of land I don’t need, and a chunk of stone that, eventually, no-one will visit. I will be given, probably to my daughter, as a bagful of bonemeal fertilizer that she can sprinkle in her garden, and I will be resurrected as a rosebush, or a lilac tree. (Although, with my luck, I’ll come back as crabgrass.)  That’s the true ‘Circle of Life!’

Flash Fiction #103

PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook

INSOMNIA CURE

Late again, Johnson??!!  You’ve been warned.  You’d better have a good reason, or you’ll be collecting severance papers from HR.

Well, Sir, you know I live outside the city. I even left early this morning, but old man Morton was herding his sheep from one pasture to another, and I had to pull over so I didn’t hit any.

His flock seems to have grown, and I wondered how much, so I started counting them, 287, 288, 289, 290…. I was dreaming of a Simmons mattress – and suddenly it was 9:15.

True story or not, that one lets you stay.   😆

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

 

Flash Fiction #102

PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook

BE A LAMB

I can hardly wait to try that new restaurant, Shear Heaven, the one that specializes in lamb. I love lamb, lamb chops, lamb cutlets, lamb stew.  I’m confused though; why would the country’s greatest vegan chef open a lamb restaurant?

It’s called aversion therapy.

What??!

Have you ever been to a seafood restaurant where they let you pick your own lobster? It’s the same here.  If you can look at little Bambi….

Bambi was a deer.

Fine! If you can look at little Baa-baa, and still say, “I want that leg of lamb….??”  Everybody ends up ordering curried chick peas.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

 

Poetry In Motion

I am a Philistine. I don’t know what great art is, but I know what I like.  The same applies to poetry.  I have been exposed to some of the ‘Great Poetry’, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, The Twa Sisters O’ Binorrie, La Belle Dame sans Merci, William Blake’s, The Tyger, and many of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I still like the poems that begin, “There was a young man from Kent.”

I express myself on this site though prose. When I check to ‘see what others are writing about,’ I find an interesting number of bloggers who express themselves in – poetry(?).  Some of the poems are actually quite good.  Others….are more a pretentious stream of unconsciousness.

Song lyrics, written out, should make sense. I feel the same should apply to poetry, even if it’s only published on WordPress.  Here’s an example.  See if you agree with me.  The first is how it would look/sound, if it were simply written as prose.

writing

The morning adrenaline in class essay exam detailing the ways to restore lost dynamic to man. Caffeine fumes, school bus, Drive, write your heart out!  With speed, with force, believe, you were born for this thrill of academics.

Speaking scholars and students inspired. This is my arena, my work, brain on display.  Bare, stuttering, but speaking again.  Grasping at straws, texts, engaging in every aspect.

The parkway was packed by 4:30 and given recent attacks, at night, plus rush hour fears from the kid who sped into my lane last year as evident by 3 bulging cervical discs. Thought it best, surely, safer to wait out traffic elsewhere.

***

The following is how it was actually published. Does it make any more sense?  Is it significant?  Artistic?

***

writing

The morning adrenaline
in class essay exam
detailing the ways
to restore lost dynamic to man.

Caffeine fumes, school bus,
Drive, write your heart out!
With speed, with force,
believe, you were born for this
thrill of academics.

Speaking scholars
and students inspired.
This is my arena, my work,
brain on display.
Bare, stuttering, but
speaking again.
Grasping at straws,
texts, engaging
in every aspect.

The parkway was packed by 4:30
and given recent attacks, at night,
plus rush hour fears
from the kid who sped into my lane
last year
as evident by 3 bulging cervical discs.

Thought it best, surely, safer
to wait
out
traffic elsewhere..

When ‘an artist’ throws paint-soaked sponges at a sheet of plywood, the resulting mess on the wood is not the Art.  The action, the process, is the art – performance art – like 12 clowns getting out of a tiny car at the circus.

I’m sure that many of these blog-poets are serious, and are struggling, as I do, to get their feelings out. When I come across something like the above, I just get the feeling that I’ve missed the real performance, and my only reaction is, “Huh!”  How about you?  😕

 

Flat Earth – Flat Out Foolish

Recently, a rapper with so much artistic creativity, that he named himself B.o.B., claimed that the Earth is flat, and went head to head with Neil DeGrasse Tyson about it. In a battle of wits, he was soon out of ammo.  It’s like bringing a knife to a – tank battle.

Soon after, I found a post titled ‘Flat Earth – the Truth. Why it doesn’t matter’ at this site.

Click on over if you enjoy incomplete thoughts, rambling construction, mis-spelling and –punctuation, reverse logic, no stated truth, conspiracy theories, or, just see below..

He had one (almost)good idea. He felt we shouldn’t worry about arguing whether the Earth is flat or not, because, “it’s not worth discussing until we sort the important stuff out such as not being ruled by psychopaths and switching to sustainable energy before we all die.”

Sadly though, short of revolution, there’s no way these can be accomplished without involving politicians, and discussing this stuff is how we judge which ones are capable. If the stand-up comedian from Nome female Governor of Alaska intentionally uses the non-word ‘squirmishes’ as a talking point, the word doesn’t matter, but the fact that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, does.  If not, here, on a small thing, where else, on a large scale, where it counts??

To elect a Flat-Earth believer, would be like electing Joey from ‘Friends’, who regularly said ‘supposably’, instead of ‘supposedly.’ George W. was ‘misunderestimated’ by voters, and elected, and then led around by his WMDs.

The ‘belief’ in a flat Earth is as strong as any religious tenet.  Like any religion, it is fractured into many sects, each one believing some theory more bizarre than the last.  Since they deny that Earth is a sphere, gravity can’t attract toward the center.  Somehow it just pulls ‘down.’

When interviewed, the leader of one group was asked why the Earth then doesn’t fall ‘down.’ He answered that the plate-shaped planet rests on the back of a giant tortoise.  “But then, the tortoise would fall ‘down’ also.”  Nope, he replied, it’s tortoises all the way down.

To explain gravity, another Flat-Earth group claims that the world is constantly rising, like an elevator, pushing things toward the surface. We’ve all felt that pressure as an elevator moves upward, but it doesn’t take long till it and we are moving at the same speed, and the pressure disappears.

For gravity to persist, the planet must not only be ‘rising,’ but constantly accelerating, moving faster and faster. It would take about three days before it reached the unreachable speed-of-light limit.  But if you don’t believe that Earth is ball-shaped, or that gravity exists, then you probably don’t believe in Newton’s, or Einstein’s daydreams either.  They do believe in some strange things though.

Warning – Here Be Dragons   😳

FLAT EARTH – the TRUTH. WHY IT DOESN’T MATTER

First – why I think it’s a psy-op. (but the psy-op is not the truth, that’s just my opinion.) The bottom line, on two angles, is “who does it benefit?” If the Earth really is flat, who did it benefit to lie about it? Nobody as far as I can tell, it’s a pointless lie. But if it’s the flat earth theory that’s a lie, who does it benefit? The government, cos now anyone that says, “I don’t trust the government” sounds like some nutcase who believes the Earth is flat. Next time we say “I think 911 was an inside job” some bell-end is gonna reply, “yeah, you probably think the Earth is flat as well. The other point is, give the theory the benefit of the doubt again – even if the Earth is flat – so what? That would be a massive lie, and have literally astronomical implications (yeah, I’m proud of that!) but it’s still just a harmless lie compared to hiding abusers in government positions and false flag attacks to justify amoral wars to install central banks and steal resources. So forger about it, it’s not worth discussing until we sort the important stuff out such as not being ruled by psychopaths and switching to sustainable energy before we all die.

The truth is – it doesn’t actually matter.

A few like this, and Trump could start looking good. And I didn’t even say a word about the shit that some Christians believe.