Tuesday, February 27, 2018

A Curse Upon Our Toes: Part 2



This is a continuation of the blog post, A Curse Upon Our Toes (click the link to read it). Otherwise, this post might not make any sense. Well, in all honesty, I can’t guarantee it’ll make sense anyway, as it’s about a sorcerer with a magic accordion who cursed someone with generational toe-funk. So, yeah . . .

I needed to find the descendent of the sorcerer and defeat him if I ever wanted to cure my toenail and thus be able to wear sandals in public without causing a panic. I had no idea where to start.

First, I tried the internet, where searching for ‘sorcerer with accordion’ didn’t get me any hints. Yes, I did this. I then decided to try a music store, assuming that the sorcerer would need to get his accordion oiled occasionally.

NOTE: I have no knowledge of accordions. I don’t know if you oil them, tune them, set them on fire, or put them in a warmth bath with a glass of wine while playing smooth jazz. In all honesty, I keep spelling it ‘accordian’ and only fix it because Word has trained me to react when the little red line appears under things.

I strode into the music store, potato in hand, and made a bee-line to the kempt young man at the counter.

He glanced up. “Hi, how can I help you?”

“I’m looking for the descendent of a sorcerer in possession of a magic accordion. Do you know anything?”

“Huh?”

I leaned against the counter, placing my potato between us. “Long story short, a sorcerer put a curse on my family and I have to break it. His descendent has his accordion and I need to wrest it from him. What do you know?”

The young man seemed confused. He kept looking from me to my potato and back again.

“Ignore the potato.” His name-tag said ‘Jeff.’ I wasn’t sure if that was the name of his name-tag or his name, so I let it slide.

“I don’t really-“

I leaned in and slid the potato a few inches towards him. “Don’t play games, kid, I wasn’t born yesterday. Though if I was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Sir, I think you’re going to need-“

“What’s your name?”

He pointed at his name tag. “Jeff.” It made sense.

“Okay, Jeff. You’re playing hard ball. I can respect that.” I stuck my hand in my pocket. “I gotta fistful of Abraham Lincolns here. You tell me what you know, they’re yours. What do you say?”

“Abraham Lincolns?”

“Yeah. Sixteenth President of the US. About seven-feet tall, if you count the hat.”

Jeff glanced around. “So, if I tell you what I know, you’ll give them to me?”

“That’s the deal.” I spun the potato around.

Leaning over the counter, Jeff dropped his voice. “Well, you see . . . “

“Yeah?”

Jeff pointed at the sign behind him. “This is Guitar Land. We don’t deal in accordions.”

I frowned. “Good point.” I picked up my potato. “I guess I’ll be going.”

“Wait,” Jeff held out his hand. “I told you what I know.”

With a sigh, I pulled my hand out of my pocket. “I guess you did, Jeff. I guess you did.” I dropped seven pennies into his palm. Jeff stared at the pennies. I stared at Jeff. I don’t know what the potato stared at.

“These are pennies,” Jeff said.

“And they’ve got Abraham Lincoln on them.” I shrugged. “I spent all my money on the potato.”

Look for the continuation in a couple weeks.

Cheers,
-Jason

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Checking for Stickers



Whilst eating lunch the other day, a dish I call ‘Hobo Stir Fry,’ I felt something odd in my mouth, like when you find a bone in your cereal. After checking to make sure my fork had all the tines, I got the offending chunk of something onto my tongue and picked it off.

It turned out to be half of a sticker, the kind with a number that they put on vegetables in the grocery store. At least, I assume they put them on at the grocery store. They could be a natural evolution and the plants just grow with them on. Nature is sneaky like that.

Anyway, I found half of a sticker, specifically for a green pepper. Now, some of you may be aghast to learn that I’ve voluntarily eaten a vegetable, but it does happen. I don’t like it, the vegetables don’t like it, but my doctor says that if I don’t eat them with some regularity, I’ll end up, medically speaking, ‘not alive.’ 

So, like I said, I found half a sticker (for those of you curious, no, I never did find the other half). This suggested several things: one, knowing me, this may be a pattern. And two, I have no idea how many of these I’ve actually eaten.

Considering I’ve been making my lunches for a couple years now and have been making basically the same thing (the aforementioned Hobo Stir Fry) all that time, and Hobo Stir Fry uses two green peppers, an onion, carrots, and mushrooms, which is at least three stickers. Now, obviously, if I were to see a sticker whilst chopping up the veggies, I would remove it. However, I don’t ever really recall noticing one. 

To sum up: I have been, potentially, eating like three stickers a week for the last several years.
Comments on my intelligence aside, because of this, I fully expect to have sticker-related superpowers within the next couple of months. Honestly, I’m a little excited.

I’m not sure what kind of powers stickers would grant. I could have a general ‘adhesion’ motif where I could stick bad guys to walls and floors and each other, kind of like Spiderman. Or maybe I could shoot stickers at people. I could be Stickerman. Or Adhesor. Or That Guy With the Stickers.

Honestly, with my luck – remember, this all started because I may be eating stickers on a regular basis – my superpower will consist of sweating adhesives and then, when I exercise, I’ll just end up gluing my arms to my sides and my shorts to my . . . er . . . bits.

Maybe I should start checking for stickers before I actually make my lunches.

Cheers,
-Jason

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Frosty the Dead Moose



I have heard rumor that some people, when they go to bed at night, actually fall asleep in a few minutes and then awake refreshed in the morning. I am not one of those people. It takes, on average, about thirty-minutes for me to fall asleep and I wake up a lot. However, one flip-side to insomnia is that I get a lot of thinking done.

Weird thinking.

Last night, as I lay awake in the darkness, the song Frosty the Snowman started running through my head. I have no idea why. As the song kept going, I then began to wonder: how does it work, exactly?
Frosty, if you don’t remember the song or the animated short, is a snowman. A girl places a magic silk top hat on him and he comes to life, then goes on a rampage, destroying civilizat-.

Whoops, wrong version.

Frosty comes to life and has adventures with the girl and her friends and eventually goes to live with Santa Claus at the North Pole, promising to come back next winter.

Which begs the question: what if the girl had placed the hat on something else? It’s a magic hat, so unless it has weirdly specific ‘snowman only’ properties, shouldn’t it work on . . . well . . . anything?
We could have had Frosty the Camaro or Frosty the Mannequin or even Frosty the Dead Moose. 

Think about it, you’re running around the woods and find a dead moose. You’ve got a hat and the moose isn’t going anywhere, so, why not put two-and-two together, so to speak?

If a magic silk top hat can make a snowman come to life and dance and play, then a moose is even better. For example, it could talk and impart ancient moose wisdom. Second, you could ride him like a horse. Third, it’s a friggin’ moose. Doors, small cars, people, trailer homes, the post office, it’s gonna go through all of those like a hot moose through a large building made of butter. In fact, since it’s a magical undead moose, I don’t think anything short of an Abrams is going to even tickle it.

Plus, if it’s dead enough, you could crawl inside him and take a nap. Or keep a sandwich in there, just in case you get hungry.

Oooh, you could get some undead squirrels and fill him with those. Then when he attacked, he would smash through whatever was in front of him and then the squirrels would leap out and start biting. He’d be an undead Armored Fighting Vehicle.

You’d need a lot of magic hats for that, though.

And people think insomnia is a bad thing . . .

Cheers,
-Jason