Acceptable Times to Free-Associate

When you are a keynote speaker at a deconstructionist’s convention. During a psychotherapy session. This includes de facto sessions such as when you mindlessly prattle on to the person in the next cubical. When you are caught by a loved one in a big lie. If free-associating doesn’t confuse them, they might assume you […]

Uses For a Sharpie You’ve Never Heard of

Permanent eye-liner so that one might look like the guy from the Cure… or Jack Sparrow… or Amy Winehouse. The list goes on and on… and then it stops kind of abruptly. Drawing melanoma on your body. Why? Dermatologist waiting rooms chock full of Southern Living magazines. Drawing mustaches on women’s faces in ads. […]

Things Guaranteed to Turn Out Badly

A fat guy, a bicycle and a ramp. Borrowing money from a guy named “No-nose Morelli”. Gift baskets of fugu. Children’s toys shaped like exposed high voltage electrical wiring. Cherry-flavored hard candy with a soft center made of sugar, gelatin and chicken pox. A “1-900” suicide hot-line number. Rattlesnake roundups for the blind. Buying […]

Killing Time Between Birth and the Sweet Sweet Embrace of Death

Tape a situation comedy that you’ve never watched. Fast-forward through everything but the commercials. Write a review in IMDB… Arrange your socks alphabetically. Start an argument with a tortoise. Go through all of your old Conan the Barbarian paperbacks and, wherever the word “knife” is used, cross it out and substitute “cutlery”… Learn to […]

How to Keep the Population Down in a Bored and Horny World

Create a 75 mph speed limit everywhere, even parking lots; make it mandatory. Elect an anti-vaxer for president. Remove any limitations on how much mercury there can be in Go-gurts. Impose a death penalty for things that currently aren’t capital crimes… like sweating, for example… Allow people to return disappointing children to the hospital […]