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

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

A Curse Upon Our Toes

Many years ago, when I was just a boy, I noticed that my father had one bad toenail, on the big toe of his right foot, and I asked him why. He then told me a dark and terrible thing.

Many generations ago, his father’s father’s father lived in a small town in Poland, herding llamas and crafting artisanal beer mugs that said ‘I Heart Poland’ which he sold to tourists. It came to pass that one day, a sorcerer came to the village, frightening the villagers with displays of magic and a poorly tuned accordion. Now, my father’s father’s father’s father, a man grown hard from years of llama tending and hewing artisanal mugs from the very earth, would have none of it. When grandfather x4 heard of the sorcerer, he strode into town, a llama on his back and an artisanal mug in each hand, and confronted the evil-doer, threatening him with a sound llaming if the sorcerer did not leave.

The sorcerer just laughed and shot a bolt of lightning at grandfather x4, which struck the llama, frying it into a delicious smelling crisp and fusing grandfather x4s hands to the mugs. Furious, grandfather x4 kicked the sorcerer in the butt, forcing him to drop the accordion, the source of his power. The rest of the village, seeing the sorcerer disarmed, jumped him and beat him with potatoes, before taking his money and throwing him out of town. They then threw his accordion after him, after first stuffing it with bad sausages.

The sorcerer, however, before he ran off, made a terrible pronouncement in Polish, which I don’t speak, but went something like: ‘I will leave this day, but upon the power of my accordion, let the limb of he who struck my backside forever wither and decay! And let this curse pass down from father to son, forever, until the chosen one, who you will know by his writing of weird blogs about Godzilla and novels called ‘Art the Wanderer’ which is available as an e-book on Amazon, can lift the curse.’

I may be paraphrasing some of that.

And so my father’s father’s father’s father’s right big toenail did develop a terrible darkness and grew thick and itchy. And as foretold by the sorcerer, his sons and his sons after him would partake of this affliction, until the coming of the chosen one, who would find the descendent of the sorcerer and wrest his accordion from him.

Long story short, I have a bad toenail on the big toe of my right foot, just like my dad and brothers. I’ve tried to have it cured, but it laughs in the face of science and pills and lasers. Thus my only option is that which was foretold by the sorcerer: I must find his descendent and defeat him before my toe can be cured.

I believe this to be absolutely true, as my father never told me anything false. This is how I know I was found at the gorilla pen at the zoo, why holding in farts will make your eyeballs shoot out, and that gnomes will eat my feet if I get out of bed in the middle of the night.

So, yeah. I guess I need to find the descendent of a sorcerer who has a magic accordion. Anybody seen one?

Cheers,

-Jason