My Cousin Elmo says, “I’ve decided to give up ‘people’ for lent.”

My Cousin Elmo says, “Jeep should rename the ‘Cherokee’ ‘Elizabeth Warren’ out of respect for the tribe.”

Found this on a sticky-note inside a pile of loose papers in a box labeled ‘1995’ with no other annotations. I cannot recall if I wrote it myself or copied it.

if it stays,
it is love,
if it ends,
it is a story,
if it never was,
it is a dream
and
if never begun,
it is poetry.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I tried to get my shit together, but it was simply too runny.”

The newsroom fell silent as the heated exchange grew louder. The two men were practically nose-to-nose arguing over a single word.

“I’m tired of the use of the word ‘workers’ when it ought to be ‘employees,’” Bob stated.

Rich, the news director, returned, “I don’t care what you think it should be. The guide says ‘worker,’ and therefore it’s ‘worker.’”

That was the end of the argument.

Bob returned to his work-station and continued with the business at hand; writing and editing. Rich had a report to file.

The following day as Bob was on the air and in the middle of presenting the news, he was arrested and charged with seditious behavior.

My Cousin Elmo says, “I love humanity. It’s people that I can’t stand.”

He had always been the wrong kind-of-citizen, so Tony was not surprised when they arrested and held him for deportation. What did surprise Tony was the number of good citizens the police had rounded up in their recent city-wide sweep.

Many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when picked up, often found to be without their mandatory papers on their person. But it did not matter as the police had a quota to fill.

That was more important.

Loaded into moving trucks in the middle of the night, destination unknown, those that survived the trip would never survive the ordeal. Of the ten-thousand sent, only a third would live to tell the tale, but none would ever be allowed to speak of it.

The play for survival began the moment the rolling doors on the large vans closed. Criminals pushed their way around the darkness, assaulting women, murdering any man that offered resistance, and taking what valuables anyone had in their possession.

By the time the two-day journey ended, few men were alive, and even fewer women wanted to be alive. Tony was one of those men still living, having played dead to keep from being strangled or suffocated.

Authorities, not wanting such undesirable people near their town, decided that it would be best if they loaded them onto barges and off-loaded them onto the nearby island in the middle of the river. While they knew the island had few resources for so many people, they believed the deportees would figure out how to make a living from the isolated land.

Once the boat landed, and with no guards present, Tony quickly walked into the Poplars and disappeared. Here, he would stay until the crisis had passed or until he could figure a way off the island.

Day-in and day-out, Tony heard the screams of people, mostly women, and children as they were tied limb from limb between two trees and filet while alive. Men of the most inhumane kind stripped away the choice parts for eating.

Slowly the screams died away, leaving an eerie silence in their place, and death over-ran the camp.

Tony did not witness what happened next. He was killed by a sniper from the other side of the river while riding a raft of three logs towards freedom.

“This is how I know what’s happening over there,” Bryant explained to the town’s Mayor, laying the still-damp note’s on the desk before him. “I read these papers I found in his jacket pocket, where his makeshift raft and body washed ashore.”

Bryant would be labeled ‘undesirable’ the following week and would not survive the following 13-weeks.

My Cousin Elmo says, “If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes journalism.”

He’d been warned not to go into the old mansion, but Daryl didn’t listen. He was itching to confront whatever the thing was that left people scared.

Armed with a thick bible and a wooden crucifix, he entered, intent on learning the secrets of the dilapidated house. Soon Daryl found himself cornered in a hallway designed to confuse the spirits, but it wasn’t working.

Instead, Daryl was the one confused, unable to find the door he entered, and now the dark mass had him trapped in the exitless hall. In his attempt to escape, he threw his bible at it, then his crucifix.

The demon simply absorbed both without effect.

Helpless and panicked, Daryl resorted to defending himself with all he had left. He pulled off his right shoe and chucked it at the demonic being.

Suddenly, the creature began to wobble and appear weak, so Daryl yanked off his left shoe and heaved it at the thing. That did it, as the shadow broke apart and disappeared like so many atoms in a vacuum.

His odor-eaters did the trick.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford wants a judge to throw out a lawsuit filed after the November election that claims voter rolls contain ineligible names and that illegal aliens cast ballots.

The state attorney general also said in the motion that the lawsuit wrongly identifies Nevada’s secretary of state as the official in charge of voter registration. Deputy State Solicitor General Gregory Zunino wrote in the motion to dismiss the case that the role Barbara Cegavske plays in maintaining voter records is only “supervisory,” and that the clerks in Nevada’s 17 counties are responsible for maintaining voter registration and lists of eligible voters.

The lawsuit, filed in December, came after state and federal courts in Nevada and other states rejected election challenges by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, including its claims of widespread voter fraud. While the suit doesn’t seek to undo the 2020 election, it does cite DMV records of applications for driver authorization cards and claims that nearly 4,000 illegal aliens voted.

While the plaintiffs allege those ineligible votes “diluted” their legally cast ballots, the state’s filing to dismiss calls any allegations of harm “hypothetical” and compares it with the injury that honest taxpayers suffer when someone evades paying taxes.

In 2018, a newspaper report revealed that Ford owed more than $185,000 in unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties. The article came out two years after paying back those delinquent taxes.

The request to dismiss the lawsuit does acknowledge that there are errors within the voter rolls.

“Immigrants who conduct business with the DMV have ended up on Nevada’s voter rolls,” it says, adding, but “immigrants rarely vote,” and to prosecute, the state needs to prove that the person who voted knew it was a crime and intended to break the law. The attorney general’s filing further claims that inaccurate voter information “generally consists of the names of deceased persons and the addresses of persons who have moved.”