“Go outside and play, but be home for supper,” Mom said as she dismissed us to go do what children do.

We went into the woods, played games we invented, climbed trees, enjoyed hide-and-seek and kick-the-can. We disputed, negotiated, settled.

Always, and way too soon, the street lights popped, buzzed and brightened that dreaded dusking hour. Then it was time to get home, wash up, eat, watch some TV, then to bed.

We hopped on our bikes, disbanding with the promise to be back in the tomorrow. Adulting would come too soon for us, who peddled away from the nighttime.

My friend said he didn’t understand cloning and I told him, “That makes two of us.”

My wife is shopping. She sent me a picture of her in a pair of nice dress pants.

She asked if I thought they made her behind look big. I returned her message saying, “Noo!”

Autocorrect changed it to, “Moo!” Send help, quick!

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they  gathered. One of them, an expert in the law, tested Jesus by asking, “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?”

Jesus answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Then another Pharisee asked, “Even if they have tattoos?”

“Even when they ask stupid questions,” Jesus smiled.

We were playing in the woods, where Adam claimed to have a tree fort. I wanted to see it, but he refused to show me.

So, once Adam left, I searched until I found his well-camouflaged platform. I finally found my way up and sat down.

When Adam returned, he cried, “Get out of my fort! There’s ain’t enough room for both of us!”

“Sure there is,” I smirked, sliding back, leaning against the OD green wool blanket that belonged to Dad, and which served as a wall.

Out I fell, slamming hard to the ground. It took a minute or so, but egged on by Adam’s unceasing and mocking laughter I got up, limped away and never returned to his tiny fort.

Grit is getting up, dusting off and being prepared to get rolled in the dirt again.

Video may have killed the radio star, but reality TV killed the video star.

Less than four days following the attack on innocent lives and the murder of 22 people and the wounding of another 24, I found myself walking into our local Walmart before 5 am. On my hip, as usual, I sported my pistol.

Soon I was approached by a young man who asked me to please leave the store, because I had a pistol. He explained that in response to the deaths in El Paso, Texas, ‘they’ve’ decided to stop allowing open-carry in ‘their’ store.

Surprised, I asked, “Really? I’ve been here lots of times while open carrying.”

“That maybe, but things have changed,” he answered, as two male employees walked up, joining him.

The four of us began heading towards the front of the store and the only door open at that time of the morning. As we approached the exit I asked: “Can you guarantee my safety if I come in here unarmed?”

“Yes, we can,” he smiled, “We have a uniformed officer at the front door.”

Looking to where he was pointing, I saw an older woman, sitting on a stool facing the interior of the store and completely unarmed. I had walk right by this person when I entered the store and she said nothing to me.

“What, her?!” I exclaimed, fully shocked, “Not only is she unarmed, she’s facing away from where the threat will come. Basically, she’s nothing more than live-bait for an armed predator and she’ll be the first person in this store who gets shot.”

“She’ll be able to call radio in any threat that comes her way, long before any ‘threat,’ steps inside the store,” the so-called ‘manager’ stated.

He made air-quotes when he said the word, ‘threat.’ I couldn’t tell if he actually believed what he was saying or if he was that well rehearsed at regurgitating a ‘company line.’

“Good to know,” I replied, while shaking my head and I left the store without offering further argument.

Tragedies will happen with firearms and genocide without them.

Some three millennia before, rose along the Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo,  the Sy’u-gi’ Ckulp’c in the R’um-ja’ of Mo’Bu-Ju’, with its odd gray and misshapen stones and its queer looking peoples. Translucent red, with loose and heavy skin, elongated noses, flabby lips and protuberant eyes, the peoples of Ckulp’c were considered a horror to behold.

However, their civilization had survived and adapted to the half-dead planet on which it was forced to reside. The peoples of  Ckulp’c found pleasure in dancing under the gibbous moon to their ill formed half-lizard, half-rat God, Zaa-q’ran and once they rediscovered fire, the celebration rose to nightly performances of hideous shapes casting shadows across the open expanse of the dust-fill vastness that lay all about them.

Then from the west came travelers, who upon discovering the Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo decided to settle their remaining numbers along it’s tangled banks. And there they established, along the coming trade route, the Sy’u-gi’ of Lo’meh, a place that soon prospered.

The one-time travelers looked down of the people of Ckulp’c and their awful ceremonies, their ugly god and their unnatural forms and decided to make war on their peaceable neighbors. At once they set upon the older community and slaughtered the inhabitants, leaving none alive.

After they disposed of their enemies corporal fleshiness, having rolled the festering dead bodies into Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo, they set about dismantling  Ckulp’c, destroying their center of worship and all carvings, drawings and likenesses of gods, including the one they hailed as Zaa-q’ran, shattering it before tossing the pieces into Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo as well. Satisfied, they opened the razed buildings to the ever-expanding population of Lo’meh for resettlement.

Life was grand for the next one-thousand-years and it was during the kyr-annum celebration of that Great Conquest of Ckulp’c, that the people of  Lo’meh laughed, ate and danced with the knowledge that they had in one night and one day laid waste to a grotesque and evil society, once known as the Ckulp’c. And as the grand celebration drew nearer, Kings and vagabonds tossed up tents inside and out of the city’s high stone walls in anticipation.

Feasts, with great long tables were offered to visitors, noble and slave, and each were bid to take more than their share and enjoy. Among these wondrous foods, spices and drink was the prized G’lea’g, large and speckled in many colors that were drawn from Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo by the bushel for those gathered to feast on.

Served on silver platters, bedecked with fiery opals, throughout the Palace and high in the Priest Towers, the official revelers made merry with delight in their feasting. It is said, too, that G’lea’g was served outside the walls to those lesser Priests and Princes as well, so that no man, woman or child was exonerated from the joyous occasion.

Not one votary noted the hellish red mist that fell from the gibbous essence cast by that nights moon glow onto the embankments of Ly’u-bol Glas-p’oo. Nor was attention paid when that same mistiness dipped beneath the waters surface only to reemerge moments later, rejoining with the gibbous face of the single sky being above.

Lost in their own reveling, celebrants failed to see the odd cast of shadows that fell against the walls, that moved along the floors of the many public buildings and crept deep into the darkened places, between the private dwellings and the visitant-laden streets of fated Lo’meh. It was slightly ahead of midnight, that the gold-plated gates burst open and all the half-million within those massive walls, poured forth in a blackened throng out onto the desolate plains of the R’um-ja’ of Mo’Bu-Ju’, in all directions.

Those that fled, not understanding why but with fear written in their faces and quickly convexing eyes, muttered strange and repelling words that none would understand. Mad men, crazed and ever-changing, cast bulging eyes back upon the Priests Towers and the open-framed windows of the Palace only to witness to their alarm the vision the hideous dancing of a people translucent red, loose and heavy skinned, elongated noses, flabby lips and protuberant eyes.

No more do men regularly travel to that which was once Lo’meh, and those hearty beings that do, do so with only an idle curiosity. When they do, they find no splendor withing the remainder of a city, rather a slimy residue and creatures best described as half-rat and half-lizard over-populating the once vast dwellings and public sites that beheld the once victorious sy’u-gi’, Lo’meh.