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“Yo metten!  You haven’t posted anything original in two weeks – what gives?” – Some Dude

Thanks for asking, Some Dude.  I am on high-dose steroids to try to shrink the granulomas in my chest.   I’ve gained 16 pounds and I want to stab everyone all the time.  So basically, being around me is kind of like hanging out with Lucas Garber.  Couple that with the requirements of school, work, the fam, my crippling dependency on barbiturates and my major-league love of complaining – let’s just say that I’ve had little room for making fun of random strangers.  So anyway, sorry for bitching so much and thanks for your continued understanding and patience.  To tide us over until tomorrow, and to keep me from feeling like a complete failure, here’s something that I wrote a few years ago that never really got published anywhere good:

Angeline bolted upright in the old kitchen chair as the sensation shot through her like lightning. She wouldn’t notice until the current crisis had past that she had smacked the back of her skull on the old chair pretty hard. The peak of the ancient slab of wood had lodged for a split second into the soft tissue between the bottom of her head and the top of her neck and would no doubt be blue tomorrow. Of course, no one would see this discoloration as the area in question is covered by strawberry blond, terribly stringy hair. A little further north from the soon-to-bruise area lay the current crisis. It was a small, hard entity, moving frantically within the part of Angeline’s hair.

Angeline is terrified of spiders. She experiences an uncomfortable tinge with the mere mention of anything that has more than four legs. The manner in which this particular crawly beast was thrashing about made Angeline feel as though the creature had a thousand legs. After escaping the chair, the teenage girl made every effort to remove the small creature from the top of her head. Unfortunately, the fact that her hooded sweatshirt and brassiere had recently been pulled up to the top of her chest effectively prevented her from raising her arms above her shoulders.

And there she stood. Trapped. A demon-possessed arachnid was now surely drilling into her skull. Her entire torso was exposed. This was an emergency situation that called for drastic measures. There would be no calm pulling down of the shirt and then reaching up for the bug. This situation called for flailing…and lots of it. What happened next could only be described as something similar to a seizure. Angeline threw her head back and forth in an effort to catapult the insect from her hair. She tried to scare it away by screaming. Somewhere deep in her subconscious, Angeline wondered if the animal could hear her as tarantulas did not, according to her recollection, have ears.

Finally, she attempted to help the catapult process along by bending back and forth at the waist in a violent motion. Throughout this entire process, three things remained constant: first, Angeline’s arms appeared to be frozen in the helpless position of elevated to shoulder height and bent slightly at the elbow; second, whatever was in her hair was not leaving; and finally, the poor unfortunate girl’s exposed breasts attempted to defy gravity by rolling and shaking in tandem with her insect-removal efforts.

Somewhere near the point where one couldn’t feel any worse for poor Angeline, large footsteps rushing to her aid become audible. A large figure appears in the background and heads toward Angeline at about the same time that her efforts to remove the potential parasite are immediately and violently halted by her mother’s portable microwave stand that had been recently purchased at Home Depot for $129.00. With impressive speed, Angeline’s body becomes lifeless and collapses to the ground. Angeline’s father arrives on the scene in response to his little girl’s screams thinking she had been bitten by the neighbor’s rabid dog or something equally violent.

As he looks down and sees his unconscious daughter on the linoleum floor – a small amount of blood running from her nose, her sweatshirt up around her head and about a quarter of a saltine cracker stuck in the part of her hair, he can do nothing but shake his head and shut off the webcam. After a few minutes of head shaking, he gingerly pulls Angeline’s sweatshirt down, picks her up and throws her over his shoulder to begin the trip upstairs to her room, cursing his mother and the goddamned nosy librarian that taught her how to use a computer, and wondering what was going to come of all this…