His crime was that he would find people having drinks with those little umbrellas in them and he would close them.

Then he’d run away laughing.

Donate to my GoFundMe to ban drum sets because hand percussion is far superior

I decided to run for some position
on the junior high school student council.

Treasurer, maybe.
No idea.
I think we all kind of knew
it was performative power anyway.
You don’t get to decree
school is cancelled
but you can promise whatever.

I wasn’t a popular kid
and I knew this
and I knew this was really
a popularity contest
more than anything.

I had to give a speech.
I prepared nothing.
I stood up in the gym,
“Vote for me, because you should.”

When they tallied the votes
it was such a blowout
that they didn’t tell me the actual results.
Probably because they thought
it would hurt my feelings.

As a kid, for a while I was into model rockets.

Kind of.

There are different model rocket engine sizes and I think engines like “D” were the big ones.

Designed for big rockets. But in my mind, for fun rockets.

I became interested in trying to shove D engines into tiny A rocket bodies. This took duct tape and an acceptance of the fact that you will never see the rocket again after you launch it.

But this was the only way. The fun way.

I knocked on heaven’s door, but only before I saw the “No Soliciting” sign. My bad.

Continuing your travels across the plains, you will come to the city of Juro. The architects of Juro took advantage of the local resources and sculpted a city made of donkeys. Passing beneath the ornately designed gate of donkeys, stepping carefully on the backs of donkeys below you, you will come to a wide plaza where a central fountain of donkeys commands your attention in the center. At night, you enter your house of donkeys where the walls are made of donkeys standing on the back of other donkeys. You find yourself mesmerized by the twitch of their ears and the slow swish of their tails.

Your donkey bed is soft. It brays once, gently, and you drift to sleep.

Look, I cancelled Xbox Game Pass only because it was the thing to do.

Point at things and command me: “cancel”. My cancellation fingers are ready.

They said they’d give me a hundred dollars when I reached the horizon and I took them up on it.

Yesterday I was trying to eat some ice cream, but the kid I stole it from wouldn’t stop crying.

I went to a fancy dinner that had multiple sets of silverware and I panicked because I didn’t know what course the little fork was for. I shouldn’t have worried though, I got arrested for trespassing before anything was served.

One time I was bitten by a vampire. It gagged and ran away screaming.

One day I almost had sex. She took off her hair and put it on the nightstand. I was wearing some of those underwear that make your butt really big and I couldn’t get my pants off. She put her hair back on and left.

Maybe love is a farce.

Maybe it’s
the thing we say
to convince ourselves
we’re different.

But forget that.
Let’s call it love.

It can only be more than that,
but love
is the least
that it is.

I've got a dad body. That's why you shouldn't go down to the basement.

Of all the things I’ve read this year, the Dr. Suk slap sequence in Dictionary of the Khazars might be the thing I admire the most. I wouldn’t have thought of it and there’s certainly no way in a million years I could have ever written it.

Dog Judge: The court hereby finds you the most amazing and best person that ever lived!

Today I changed my mind. The new one isn’t very good either.

What do I have more of, concerns or money? Concerns.

If doing things was as easy as undoing things, I’d be way more productive.

I walked down a hill
got to the bottom
and realized—
this was the best walk I’ve ever had.

Most of that was because
it was all downhill.
I don’t like to exert myself.
I decided to live forever
at the bottom of that hill
and enjoy that good memory
for the rest of my life.

Now when it rains
I get a little boat
and let the water
take me where it will.
When the sun sets
behind the hills
it never existed for me.

You speak of birds.
I do not know what they are.
They may exist above my view
which never deviates
from keeping
the earth
in focus.

Eventually
I forget what it was like
to know of higher elevations—
that moment passes by,
unmarked.

Last night I dreamed
of a mushroom cloud in the distance.

I wasn’t sad.
Not even scared.

Just—
incredulous
that this
was someone’s idea of a solution.