Bbbrrraaappp…shit, my damn cellphone. It’s three-in-the-morning, can’t be good news. I roll over to pick it up, zap, blinding lights flash from it, my body receives a violent jolt that crashes through my body, hundreds of old-fashioned photographic flash bulbs explode in my brain. “What the hell!” I cry, my arms and legs twitching uncontrollably. Never…

Two words that caught my ear when I was five or six years old were stereotype and Styrofoam. While I didn’t understand the meaning to either, I was bent on trying my damnest to fit one or both words into my vocabulary via a sentence. During a church social one afternoon I, at long last,…

Xavier slipped the cage, as it was known over his head. He adjusted the device so that the electrodes sat on his temples with the third touching the back of his head where his neck began. Less than a second after voice-activating the unit, he felt the rush of the virtual reality arch rushing towards…

Originally, I wanted to title this, “Sergeant Murray and the Invincible Goat-Ropers,” but that would have made as much sense as what follows.  Jus’ nod your head slowly in agreement and go with the flow. There’s a Soccer-mom, Grammar and Thread-Nazi, and the bald Italian guy up the street, whom for the life of me, I…

Archie has a bunch of problems, all self-made – booze, money, women, but Archie also has the solution.  A universal carnival mirror that’ll let him go back in time, with enough duration to fix any future mistakes after they occur. Recently, Archie acquired another problem – all those other Archie’s.  They appear after each use…

It’s exhausting, dragging my pet Anaconda around the hallways of this little box. Every few minutes I find my inner man-child having to wipe off the dust-bunnies from its ‘shroom-shaped head. But finally I grow smart and decide to turn the beast into a neck-tie, keeping it off the cold linoleum. I toss it around…

Going to the grocery store’s not my idea of fun, but it’s the only place I can pick up my most coveted man-child survival supplies — beef jerky and coffee. I must restock my secret stash before returning to my box and the all-important daily filing of the meta-data. The teenager handed me my change and…

It seems like I has jus’ reconnected with him through Facebook, and now he’s gone. Though only a couple of years older than me, Dan Gilliland passed away in Sacramento, California on September 15, 2017. Sharing the same birth date, Dan was born on July 20, 1958 in Grand Island, Nebraska, two-years before me. Known…

Holed-up all night in my proverbial box, I’ve been wrestling with my pet ‘Anaconda’ and we’ve been losing. Suddenly the key turns in the door and there stands Nurse Wratchet, screaming, “What are you doing?!” After explaining that I’m wresting with my pet ‘Anaconda,’ she responds, “That’s no snake, that’s a friggin’ worm!” Not one…

“Damned dogs,” I shout as I continue sweeping, “Go away – go!” Play is all they want to do as I try to clean up the dried mud falling from their paws. Yes, it’s been raining heavily, off and on, the last four days, but seeing this much mud throughout the living room and hallway’s maddening. The…