A Ballad of the Pacific Northwest, as Told to Me By a Possibly Eldritch Creature

In the Autumn of 2019 I found myself spending a few days far from home at a cheap, mostly empty hotel in Oregon. A few nights in and at a rather late hour, having put my children to sleep and left my husband to supervise their slumber while he watched first series reruns of The Mighty Boosh, I escaped down the uneven, slightly-too-steep stairs to the nearest snack vending machine. This is what passes for a night on the town sometimes when one is a parent.

Once I’d escaped the tyranny of my angelic, snoring offspring and my loving spouse, I found myself reluctant to return to them, so I perched myself on the humidity-damp carpet on the landing of the stairs overlooking the vending machine nook and popped open the first of two bags of Raisinettes. A few minutes and half a bag later, I heard a noise.

I was not dressed for company, despite sitting in a technically public place, so I hunkered back a little bit until I saw who was coming.

What came into view was an elderly creature roughly three-quarters my height and half my width–and I am neither tall nor wide. He had a needle-point nose on which perched a pair of wee silver-wired spectacles, his face was decorated with a confused and meandering beard, and on his long, narrow back he wore a huge and rounded knapsack. A wide assortment of objects hung off the outside of the knapsack–it shimmered and shone with a suggestion of treasure, although the only objects I could quickly identify were a frying pan and a penny whistle–clacking and clanging as he walked as if he were a particularly lazy and untalented one-man band. His movement and carriage belied any laziness, however, both being upright, easy, and bird-like. He hurried right past without giving me any notice and stood at the glass door, staring into the night.

I kept silent, wondering if my luck would hold. My pajamas weren’t particularly embarrassing, but I was wearing a pop band t-shirt and I really don’t like anyone but my husband knowing about that side of me. But the little man kept standing, staring.

“A storm is coming,” he said, cheerfully, “to test the mettle of the civilizations of humankind.”

I couldn’t tell whether or not he was speaking to me or to the benighted world in general until he turned and looked expectantly at me.

“Ah,” I said. “What kind of storm?”

He shrugged. “Prob’ly pestilence.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s too bad.”

He nodded, still cheerfully. “‘Tis,” he conceded. “I am prepared, however. I shall weather the coming crapstorm the same way I have survived all the other crapstorms.”

This piqued my interest. “What other crapstorms have you weathered?” I asked.

He put up a long finger with grey-edged fingernail. “One, that big thing that lumbered out of the woods that one time.”

“What color was it?” I interrupted.

“Brown and grey,” he said.

“Oh. That doesn’t help identification much does it?”

“No, it does not!” he said, as if he had been thinking this himself for years and was overjoyed to hear someone else voice it. “Was it bigfoot? Was it a bear? Was it a really fat wolf? I cannot say!”

I made a sympathetic face at him.

“Two,” he continued. “Hurricane Ekaterina. Three, the ocean. Four, the other ocean. Five, the other ocean. After that, I stopped going to oceans. They disagree with me. On every point.”

I nodded. “Sounds wise. I try to stay away from oceans myself.”

“Six, being left by my one true love.”

I had stopped listening so well at this point, trying to picture a creature that could be mistaken for either bigfoot or a really fat wolf, and at the mention of true love I really lost interest.

“Hey, what’s in the bag?” I asked, to redirect.

“Oh, that is my preparation for the crapstorm,” he said. “Would you like to see?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

He hefted the bag down to the floor with a truly amazing clatter and untied the top so I could peer in. I did the peering.

“There’s, like, three dozen Arby’s sandwiches in there,” I stated.

He nodded. “They have seen me through all the other crapstorms, and they shall not fail me now.”

“Hm,” I said, wondering how he’d got his hands on Arby’s sandwiches when whatever had happened with the oceans was happening.

He removed one of the sandwiches and ensconced himself with it, cross-legged on the dirty floor. I observed that his feet were living in grey-blue shoes with curled and pointed toes. Rather than looking magical, however, they just gave off the feel like maybe he was a bit too into renn faires, like he might actually have a gig juggling at one or such. I decided to look past this failing.

“Would you like to hear a story?” he asked, companionably.

“You know,” I said, “it’s a long time since a funny little man in some random place–no offense–“

“None taken.”

“–asked me that. Yes, as a matter of fact, I would like to hear a story. Would you like a Raisinette?”

“‘Twould!” he chirped, and received three. “Would you like a sandwich?”

“Thank you, I would not.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Hey, this story isn’t going to be about the true love thing, is it?” I asked via raisin-garbled speech. “‘Cause I gotta admit I am not as interested in that as a person might be.”

He shook his head, his mouth full of the meats, then swallowed to allow speech. “I would not dream of telling that story in a place like this. That is a tale woven of a fine silver thread against a ground of deepest night, and only beside a fire of lilac wood in the dead of a silent void would I venture to speak it.”

” ‘kay, as long as.”

“No, my story begins much differently than it ends.”

“Oh, that’s a change of pace,” I commented.

“It is the story of my first day of high school.”

I stopped chewing. “You went to high school?” I asked.

“How do you think I became so visibly learned?” he asked, pointing at the spectacles.

I considered this as I resumed chewing and, myself, did some swallowing. “It’s not that I thought you weren’t learned, it’s just that I assumed you were some kind of mythical creature or something, and I wouldn’t think either learnedness or unlearnedness really comes into it for those.”

“Yes, I do get that. But I assure you that I am flesh and blood, as mortal practically as yourself. I am, in fact, a simple professor of poetry.”

“Oooooh,” I said, the last five minutes of my life suddenly making much more sense. “Gotcha. That makes the last five minutes of my life make much more sense.”

He nodded like he thoroughly understood.

“Hey, I bet I could throw this Raisinette and get it in your mouth,” I said, realizing that as a professor of poetry he might actually be game in a way that wasn’t creepy.

“Is there another Raisinette in it for me?”

“There will be,” I promised.

“Attempt away,” he answered.

I threw the raisin-and-chocolate missile at his mouth, missed, and hit him in the spectacles.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” he commented, picking up the Raisinette off the absolutely filth-infested carpet and popping it unconcernedly into his mouth.

“Don’t I know it.”

“Do you?”

“I do.”

“Glad to hear it. Would you like to hear my story now?”

“Is it perchance a tale of woe?”

“Not particularly,” he said wadding up the paper wrapper from his sandwich.

“You said it was a story of high school, so I just assumed.”

“No, not a tale of woe. It is a tale of carnival.”

“Carnival?”

“Yes,” he said leaning forward and looking excitedly over the top of his spectacle rims. “At my high school the first day of each year terminated in a small carnival. Oh, the delight of it! The lights, the popcorn, the darts! We threw darts at anything back then, since ’twas the beforetimes when no one feared the darts properly. Mostly at balloons, but high spirits, you know.”

I did not know, having never thrown darts at anything but dart boards and balloons, but I did not say so.

“I was a very popular young man–“

“You were?”

“Oh, yes. Even then the power of my words was formidable and drew the admiration of my peers. Also, I was a star basketball player and–if I do say so myself–a brilliant prankster, which didn’t hurt.”

I tried to imagine the level of prowess one would have to possess to become a star basketball player at under five feet tall. He must have been prodigious, either at basketball then or at lying now. Or possibly both, I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

“My sophomore year, the carnival was projected to be even more spectacular than usual. The PTA was in the midst of a virulent internal feud over rock music–“

“How long ago did you say this was?”

“I did not,” he said with dignity.

I shrugged.

“As I said, a virulent internal feud over rock music. The pro-rock music contingent of the PTA–motivated by spite–hired a Guns and Roses cover band to perform at the carnival without the knowledge of the anti-rock music contingent, but the money could not be refunded and the anti- camp was outvoted, so the engagement stood. You understand,” he said, in explanatory tone, “that this was a very small town far from anything interesting, the kind of town in which I might become a star basketball player–“

“Aaaaah,” I said, the light dawning.

“Yes,” he nodded. “A cover band of a cover band of John Denver would have been a welcome diversion, so a one-degree-removed cover band of not John Denver was a delight the like of which we could only know if we drove two hours, and for that one needed access to a car and money for gas, and who could afford such things when there was toilet paper that had to be bought to festoon rival team members’ homes? We were a small town,” he said, as an aside, “but we had many and intense rivalries.”

“The kids gotta have something to do,” I said sagely. “Better than drugs.”

“Better than drugs,” he repeated thoughtfully, nodding. “Yes. Bitter and malicious rivalry on the basis of arbitrary divisions was, in fact, our anti-drug.”

“Work with what you got.” I took my own advice and wheedled the last Raisinette out of the bottom of the bag.

“The first day of school dawned rosy and wholesome,” he continued. “The day passed idyllically and the carnival delighted young and old, freshmen and seniors. But the great event–the cover band performance–was still to come. The stage had been set–both literally and metaphorically–all the students had convened before it, prepared to rock out. And then, it happened.”

I gasped. “What happened?”

He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “The performance, of course. ‘Twas magnificent.” He swung one of his fingers back and forth in the air and hummed a snatch of song, which I assume was a bit of a Guns and Roses song, although I wouldn’t actually know.

“Oh,” I said.

“It was held at the gingerbread house in the woods,” he beamed. “On a stage primarily of sugar cookie construction. That was another controversy, because one contingent was adamant that only snickerdoodle would do if it was to perform any weight-bearing of significance, but then the shop teacher–“

“Now, hold up a second, ’cause I coulda sworn you told me earlier that you were mortal–“

” ‘Practically as mortal as you,’ was the sense of my words, I think.”

“Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy, but I rounded down when it came to the mortality vs. immortality thing, ’cause that seemed most reasonable. But now we’re talking about using cookies to build stages.”

He unwrapped another Arby’s sandwich and demurely took a nibble off it. “People build things out of cookies,” he said.

“Well,” I commented, crumpling up my Raisinette bag, “inevitably with these conversations, in my experience, there comes a point when I have to walk away or risk actually going insane, and it seems we have arrived at that juncture.”

My companion nodded. “I can appreciate that.”

I put out my hand, and he shook it cordially.

“Lovely to meet you,” he said.

“Mutual.”

“Remember,” he leaned closer, clutching my hand to his chest, closer and longer than I preferred, and looking into my eyes with an intensity that made we wonder if this was how it was all going to end, “the coming pestilence. Get yourself some sandwiches,” he admonished.

I tried on a few responses to that, found none that was entirely honest, and settled on simply nodding.

Although, I admit I did start going to Arby’s more often.

How to Get a New Toaster

After much thought and reflection, I believe I have finally hit upon the best way to acquire a new toaster.

1)  Buy two dozen paczki. If you don’t know what a paczki is, then you’ve lived a life that is–in pastry-related terms–almost tragically impoverished. Go out and get yourself a jelly doughnut, eat it, and while you do so imagine that it tastes, like, at least four times more delicious than it actually does.  That will give you an approximate idea of what a paczki is like. We all owe a deep, doughnutty debt to the Polish. Granted this part of the plan means that you can only get a new toaster around Fat Tuesday. You’re just going to have to deal.

2) Slice the paczki in half the long way so that you have two doughnut pastry disks with a big spot of jelly/cream cheese filling/custard in the middle of each. You may lick some of the filling off either side, but try not to overdo it, or you’ll ruin the whole thing.

3) Insert both of these into toaster and push down the lever to engage the heating elements.

4) Wait approximate 45 seconds.

5) Put out fire.

6) Extract somewhat over-toasted, very gooey remnants of paczki and eat with relish while badly burning fingers, tongue, and possibly esophagus.

7) Buy new toaster.

And before you ask, no, to my credit I have not actually done this. It’s more of a thought experiment.  Or a thought disaster, however you want to look at it. But you’d get warmed paczki and a new toaster out of the deal, though.  So that’d be cool.

The Truth Is In the Whale-Bones

A few years ago I happened to stop in at a cafe late one morning.  I was in my mid-twenties, unemployed and without a driver’s license–let alone a car–and, as frequently happens to one when one is young and transportation-dependent, I had ended up stranded in a part of the city that I didn’t know very well.  It wasn’t exactly the “wrong” side of town, but it definitely wasn’t the right one, either, and I had no idea what direction to walk in to get back to my normal stomping grounds and the basement that I called home.  I was just beginning to wonder if they’d stop me if I went into a gas station and unfolded one of their city maps to get my bearings, when I spotted the cafe.

I should note that I hadn’t eaten since the night before, as circumstances had it, and even then it had just been a corn tortilla and cheddar quesadilla in the toaster oven with a couple of slightly shriveled clementines on the side.  And it had been years since I’d eaten at a proper cafe, with the slightly sticky tables and the brightly lit pie stand and the perfect, malodorous bouquet of decades’ worth of bad coffee, griddle grease, and cigarette smoke. So when I turned the corner of Pete & Gloucester and saw the diner sitting there like a surprising truth, I knew I had to go in.  It was the real deal, you could tell, a perfect monument to the American way of life. Legions of potential chickens had perished on its griddles–fried to solid-whites-and-liquid-golden-yolked perfection on toast–armies of bacon pigs and hectare after hectare of wheat field had passed through its doors and into the intestines of future heart patients.  You could feel the energy.

So I went in and grabbed a stool at the counter.  On the street I had just been some wayward, possibly down-and-out young person with almost no buying power and, therefore, no meaningful place in society.  On the diner stool, the six bucks and forty I had in my pocket was enough to eat if not like a king, then at least like one of the king’s more vulgar relatives.  I read the $4.50 specials menu with sweet anticipation.

As luck would have it, just as I was ordering my Belgian waffle with strawberries and a side of hash browns from the gray-blonde woman behind the counter, a funny little man walked in.  He was four-foot-nothing and about half that wide, giving him a peculiarly rectangular appearance.  I was reminded, inaccurately, of pictures I’d seen in art appreciation of the golden rectangle.  His scruffly beard was dark.  I really can’t emphasize how scruffled it was. He wore an eldritch and filthy baseball cap with the emblem of a team that had never existed, quite possibly purchased from the Dollar Tree.  He smelled of mechanical grease and man-sweat and something else that I couldn’t quite identify but which reminded me of the ocean.

He swung himself up, defying the laws of physics since he was essentially a human brick and the stool was high, onto the seat next to mine.  He coughed a mighty and phlegmy cough and turned to look at me.

“Hey, there, lassie,” he said.

“Hey,” I said in return.

“How’s the brew this morn’?” he asked.

I took a sip of my recently delivered coffee. “Foul,” I said.  “Gravelly, even.”

“Aaah!” he said and rubbed his grimed and calloused hands together. “A good day, then.”

I shrugged.

“Chloris!” he shouted. “Brew!”

The aged beauty who was our waitress gave him a resigned and indulgent half-smile and dropped a cup on the table in front of him.  He sucked it up with relish, like a vampire that had spent the last six months feeding on vegans and had finally found someone who had recently eaten a Philly cheese steak sandwich with extra provolone and mayonnaise.

It was a sight to behold. Without waiting to be shouted at, Chloris refilled the mug and walked away.

“Since you advised me on the brew, lassie, I’m going to tell you a story,” the little man said.  “Would you like to hear a story?”

I shrugged again. “Why not?” I said.

“Why not, indeed,” he said, in a tone that suggested this was to him a familiar call-and-response sort of thing. “Do you know what I do for a living, lassie?” he asked.

“Couldn’t say I do,” I said out of politeness and in spite of the eau de axle grease.

“I’m a whaler,” he said.

I’d been in the middle of raising my coffee mug to my mouth, but this statement gave me pause.

“A whaler?” I repeated. “What, like you kill whales?”

“Aye, lassie,” he said, gravely. “But not any whale you’ve ever seen in your education school books.” He narrowed his eyes and leaned his gnarled face closer to mine. “These be the most immense, the most cruel, the most cunning and festive whales even the most unfettered imagination could conjure.”

I thought about this. “Festive?” I asked, at length.

“Aye,” he said, widening his eyes. “Festive!”

What does one say to that?  Nothing.  So that’s what I said.

“These whales,” the little man continued, “don’t live in any of the Seven Seas you know.  They don’t live in your oceans, your Pacific, your Atlantic, your Pumpernickel Pie.” He paused.  I watched him, beginning to fear he was insane.

“Do you ever see, lassie,” he began again, apparently changing the subject, “those huuuge trucks on the freeway that carry those long white blades?”

“The what?” I asked, then caught myself and nodded eagerly, glad to be back on familiar ground, metaphorically at any rate. “Oh, yeah!  You mean the wind turbine blades.  Those?”

The little man matched my nods, but gravely.  “Aye, for the wind turbines.”  He pronounced ‘wind turbines’ carefully, like someone trying out an unfamiliar word in a foreign language. “Do you know what the blades be made of?”

“My guess would be some kind of high tech composite.”

“And where do they make them out of this high tech composite?”

“Very large fabrication facilities?”

“Wrong!” the little man shouted. “No man of this world may harness the wind, may reap of its power. Nay, to yoke the very beasts of the sky one need travel to another place: another world, another time.”

He leaned back into the stool and began quietly to drink his coffee and peruse the specials menu.  He looked suddenly so humdrum and self-contained, like any of the other sundry working men sitting in booths around us drinking the same coffee from similar mugs, that I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t the one who was insane and had imagined the entire exchange.  And if I had imagined it, why a whaler?  Why wind turbines?  What could this mean?

I had just resolved to pick up a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams from the library at the earliest opportunity, when the little man slammed down the menu–an accomplishment considering it was just a single laminated sheet of card stock–and shouted, “Chloris! Pigs in a blanket!”

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Now where were we, lassie?” he asked.

“I was just deciding that I’m probably going mad.”

The old dwarf chuckled. “Ah, yes.  I have that effect on people.  No, to steal the vital energies of Aeolus one needs must travel to another place: another world, another–”

“Yes, you said that bit already,” I offered, the jangle in my nerves affecting my civility.

The little man ignored me. “The whales of that place are long and wide, deep and high, heavy and thick, and other assorted adjectives evocative of bigness. I am from that place, of a long line of whalers who ply the pink and purple, yea, even the orange waves that froth the silken margins of those shores.  We are taught from a young age to stand in the bows, to soak the spear point deep in the poisonous soup, to thrust with all the power of our bones and sink the weapon deep into the eyes of those great beasts, through the retinal walls and into the brain-heart of the massive creatures of the deep, the luminous blood pouring from the wounds like something that pours a very great deal.”

“Ugh,” I muttered. “That is truly disgusting.”

“As soon as we can walk we assist our kin in the dragging of those great corpses, floating as the birds land upon them as you might on a vast island of buoyant cheese, could you fly, and feast thereon. At land, we cut the corpses.  We harvest what we will.  We slash and hack and pick and saw and–”

He began to make jabbing and slashing motions with the little napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware left sitting demurely by Chloris on his paper place mat.  He scowled with ferocity as he did so. I began to feel rather sick.  I’m not a great one for meat eating at the best of times, hence the waffle and hash browns.

“–tear,” he finished.  “And when we have taken what we desire, we detach the vast jaw bones.” He sat back and looked at me, a satisfied look on his face.

“Ah,” I said, since some response was obviously expected of me.  “Um . . . Wow.”

“Wind turbine blades!” he shouted back.  I was once again horribly startled. “THAT’S where they come from, lassie.  All this–” he gestured about us, “–all this wind ‘lecticity is thanks to us–men from another world, killing transdimensional whales and trading their jaw bones to this world in return for pigs in a blanket!”

I stared at him, mouth slightly gaping, because I didn’t know what to say to that.  ‘Thank you’ definitely wasn’t quite right, but something along this line seemed expected.  I was caught between a social rock and a large and confusing chasm of language’s inadequacy.  This was definitely at least the second strangest thing that had happened to me in a diner.

It was at that moment that my Belgian waffle–topped with dainty ruffles of whipped cream and bloated strawberries, frozen until the recent past–and fried potatoes arrived.  The funny little man was still watching me, apparently quite pleased with himself.

I leaned in toward Chloris and said, quietly, “Do you think I could get this to go?”

Snow, Agony, Squirrels

It’s been snowing a lot lately, which reminds me of a story.

Many years ago, when I was new to the frozen wilds, I went for a walk in the woods one day.  It was the dead of winter, but I didn’t mind.  I still had a thin layer of baby fat and a fully functioning endocrine system that effectively maintained homeostasis.  Sigh, those were the days.

Anyway, I was walking around in the snow and ice and freaking out sleeping trees whenever I bumped into one hard enough to wake it up, when I saw a funny little man sitting on a rock next to a snow drift.  He was smoking and glaring at me.

“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” I said.  “It’s bad for your health, glaring at strangers in the woods with no one else around. I might have a gun, for all you know.”

“No you don’t,” he said. “Besides, I’ve faced worse than you.”

I shrugged.  From the state of his hat and gloves, I guessed it was the truth.  They looked like he’d been wrestling rabid squirrels, which would have been the equivalent of me wrestling rabid raccoons, as far as relative size went.  But he was in better shape than the gloves, so I guess he’d won.

“Mind if I bum one off you?” I asked.

“I’m smoking a pipe,” he said.

“Yeah, well.”

He pulled out an extra pipe and offered it to me.  It was about the size of a baby spoon, but I took it anyway and did my best to light up.  I’d never actually smoked anything before, let alone a pipe, but I’d seen actors light them on the BBC and it was a tiny one, so I managed after a few tries.

I took a seat on an old stump crusted with ice a few feet away from the little man’s rock.  I was thankful for my overcoat.

“So, you do this a lot?” I asked.  “Sit on a rock in the snow and glare at strangers?”

“None your business,” he answered.  Then he said, “Hey, let me tell you a story.  It’s a tale of woe.  You ever hear one of those?”

“Oh, I’m in high school,” I said.  “That’s all I ever hear.”

The little man nodded sagely.

“It began,” he began, “in a far away land, over hills and dales–”

“Hey, what is a dale?” I interrupted.  “You always hear about them, but–”

“Shut up,” the little man said.

I shut up, ’cause when you’re sitting on a stump in the woods next to a strange little man who fights rabid squirrels and loans you a pipe and tells you to shut up, that’s what you do.

“Over hills and dales,” he continued, “across oceans and through valleys and over mountains.  Sometimes under mountains.  It begins, with cheese.  Just as it begins, so does it ends: with cheese.  Do you understand what I’m saying to you, lassie?”

I took the pipe out of my mouth–looking probably much less cool than I hoped, considering the diminutive size of the pipe–and said, “No, not a bit.”

The little man sighed.  “No, they never do.”

“Is the cheese going to be a metaphor, or is it literal cheese?” I asked. ”  ‘Cause either way, I think I’ll catch on.”

“I kept goats in those days,” the little man continued, ignoring me. “Many, many stinking goats.  But I loved them, those goats.  I fed them three times a day–”

“Is that how often you’re supposed to feed goats?” I asked and was ignored.

“Milked them twice, every evening and again every morning.  They were my pride and my job.  My raison d’etre.  Do you know what that means, lassie?”

I nodded. “Reason for being.”

The little man nodded approvingly.  “In French. Very good.”

“It was a vocabulary word last month,” I explained.

“I hate the French,”the little man said. “One day, one deceptively bright and beautiful day, my prize goat disappeared.”

“Oh, no!”

“Sadly, oh, yes. She was carried off in the night by werewolves.  Do you know what werewolves are, lassie?”

“Yep,” I said, trying and utterly failing to blow a tiny smoke ring. “They’re wolves that can take human form.”

“Totally wrong,” the little man said.  “They’re wolves that you don’t know where they are.” He laughed explosively, with spittle and everything.  “It’s a joke, see.”

“I think werewolves are supposed to be rather sexy these days,” I said, not paying much attention to what the little man had said.  I was too busy thinking of werewolves with amazing abs.  I was single at the time, I might note.  I recalled myself.

The little man was staring at me, puffing on his pipe.

I blushed.

“Aaaanyway,” the little man continued. “I searched high and low for my fine Nubian goat, the pride of my heart, the producer of the milk of my greatest cheeses, highly sought after by even the royalty of the land, and the source of my fortune, fame, and renown.

“One day, after many long months of searching, during which my other goats had run away and my cheese sheds had begun to fall into mild disrepair, I found her, my dearest precious milk goat.  But, alas, she was dead.”

“Oh, that is sad,” I said.  “That definitely counts as woe.”

“Aye,” said the little man.  “I vowed to find her killer.  After many weeks of investigation and trolling the internet, I learned that she had been killed by a rogue assassin with ties to the CIA and MI-5.”

I dropped the pipe.  “Wait, what?” I asked.

“He’d last been spotted at a folk music festival in Minnesota, so I chartered the first jet I could, and flew out here.”

“I think I’m done with this,” I said, rising. “What are we smoking, anyway?”

“I’ve been seeking him ever since,” the little man continued, heedless.  “And when I find him, I will send an army of rabid attack squirrels into his domicile.  They obey my every command, for I am their commander and have proved myself in single combat against them.  And on that day, the assassin who killed my goat will end his life in agony and squirrels, begging for death.”

“Okay, you had me with the goat, but now you’re just making crap up,” I said.  I brushed the snow off the pipe and handed it back to him.  “I’m out of here.  Plus, that story neither began nor ended with cheese. You need help, dude. I don’t care if you ARE a mythical creature of the forest, you need help.”

And that’s how I learned that drugs are bad. Also, don’t talk to strange little men in the woods because they are lying jerks, even if they do let you borrow a pipe.

New Years Resolve

I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to eat pudding anymore. I mean, you hear about how bad the stuff is for you, how so many people have died because of it, but you never do anything because it’s so HARD, you know?  Pudding is freakin’ everywhere.  But I watched a documentary on it and finally I was like, “You know what?  I gotta stop eating pudding.  This is my life that’s at stake here.”

So I stopped eating pudding. Turns out it is really hard to not eat pudding.  You start trying to avoid it, and pretty soon you find out the stuff’s in everything.  After three weeks I was living on nothing but steamed mung beans, triple distilled water, and acorn meal.  But I was really committed, and when I wasn’t puking up mung bean and acorn patties or hallucinating about foods that had bright colors in them, I felt better than I had in my entire life.  I was sleeping like an angel. I could run twice as far as I could before. (I made it all the way to the mail box one day!) I found myself recalling things I’d completely forgotten.

For instance, one day while I was driving I passed out and had a vision from my past.  It turns out that in 1975 I was abducted by aliens.  They gave me the formula–entrusted would be a better word, really–for the soda to end all sodas.  They told me that the future depended on this formula.  I had to keep it from getting into the wrong hands, and at the right time, I had to deliver it to someone.  I would know who when the time came.

‘How could all this happen?’, you ask.  ‘You weren’t even born until the mid eighties.’  Time travel, duh.  Like I said, ALIENS.

Then I woke up in the hospital, and they said I was on the stupidest diet they’d ever heard of, and one of those nurses had even done the Upper Class New England in the 1920’s Diet.  I wouldn’t give up on the diet entirely–because of the commitment I had, see, to not eating pudding–but on their advice I did add spinach and boiled pineapple to my daily menu.

I had pudding for breakfast this morning.  It was SO delicious.  I’m thinking about quitting vegetables next so maybe they’ll taste that good.  2014 is going to be the best year ever.  And that’s counting 1975.