You Are Now Entering...The Stilton Zone

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I'd do a little change of pace and present a very short story that hopefully has an appropriate amount of fun seasonal creepiness.

About a week ago, this story just told me that it wanted to be written. I didn't feel like writing a story, nor had I done so in years. I wasn't aware of thinking about anything even vaguely related to the story's subject matter. And why bother to write a story anyway? 

Because I had to. 

A favorite saying of mine is "people become writers because they can't help it." So here's a story I couldn't help writing. The setting is small town America back in the 1950's, and the story is about...

          THE MAN WHO BOUGHT SPIDERS          

BAM! The screen door slammed behind him as Davy Thompson exploded into the house.

“Mom! Hey, Mom!” he shouted, looking around eagerly.

“Not here!” called a male voice.

“What?!”

“I said she’s not here,” Davy’s dad repeated over the sound of rushing water. He was washing his hands in the bathroom sink. “Gone to the grocery store.”

“Nooooo,” Davy moaned theatrically as he rushed into the bathroom. “I need to ask her if we’ve got any empty jars!”

“Why don’t you ask me if we have any empty jars?”

“You don’t never know that kind of stuff,” Davy argued as he handed his father a towel.

“I don’t ever know that kind of stuff,” Dad corrected. “But maybe this time I do.”

“Do we have any empty jars?” Davy asked.

“I don’t know,” Dad shrugged - then chuckled at his son’s look of dismay. “Kidding. I’ve got a few of them on my workbench to put screws and nails in.”

“Thanks!” shouted Davy, already racing for the basement steps.

“Hold on, hold on! What’s all the excitement about empty jars, anyway?”

“I’m making money,” Davy explained impatiently, “and I need empty jars with lids on ‘em!”

“Well, I guess you can’t use them for begging if they’ve got lids on,” mused Dad, “so what’s your scheme?”

“I’m selling spiders to Old Man Haberman. All the guys are! That’s why I’m in a hurry!”

Dad settled into his chair in the living room, amused and curious.

“Mr. Haberman, the henpecked guy down the street?”

“What’s ‘henpecked?’”

“Doesn’t matter. You say he’s buying spiders?”

“All he can get and a dime apiece!” Davy’s eyes glowed with the anticipation of great wealth. “And we must have a million spiders around here!”

“Quite likely,” Dad agreed. “But why would Haberman be buying spiders…?”

“Dad, I gotta get going!”

“Hold your horses, we’re having a conversation here. Why is Mr. Haberman buying spiders?”

“Heck, I don’t know. I guess he just likes ‘em!”

“Is he killing them? Putting them in his garden?” Dad prompted.

“No, he puts ‘em in his house!” The exasperation was clear in Davy’s voice. “Jar after jar. Shakes ‘em out and off they skedaddle. They’re all over the place and I’ve got to catch more spiders before he stops buying ‘em!”

Dad’s brow furrowed and he leaned in toward Davy, perplexed. 

“So he’s filling his house with spiders? Did you see this?”

“Sure did! I saw Nick running over there with a couple of jars and followed him to see what was going on. All the guys were over there on Old Man Haberman’s porch and he was passing out money to beat the band and dumping spiders inside his house!”

“Well, I can’t imagine Mrs. Haberman is going to like that. Not that she likes much of anything.”

“She ain’t there,” Davy pointed out.

“She isn’t there,” Dad corrected. “Where is she?”

“Old Man Haberman said she ran off a few days ago and won’t be coming back.”

“Ran off where?”

“I asked and he thought for a minute, then he said she ran off to join the circus.”

“What, like a clown?”

“That’s what I asked! He said she’d be more like a Ringmaster so she could stand in a spotlight with a big megaphone and tell people what to do all the time!”

Dad leaned back in his chair, genuinely puzzled.

“That would fit her personality,” he conceded, “but it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Dad!” Davy barked, “I’m gonna miss out if I don’t get going!”

“Okay, okay - help yourself to the jars and every spider you can find!”

Davy wheeled on his heels and again bolted for the basement steps.

“Davy,” Dad called.

His son’s shoulders drooped in frustration. “What now?!”

“What kind of spiders is he buying?”

“See, I asked him that too, and he said it didn’t matter!”

Davy dashed down the steps to the basement, his voice echoing up the stairwell.

“Didn’t matter at all as long as they can eat a lot of flies!”

Boston Baked Beings

By now, it's pretty safe to say that anyone who doesn't believe that the Covid virus came straight out of the poorly run, unmonitored, US taxpayer-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology is a godforsaken idiot. A towering icon of ignorance. A person whose IQ is expressed in negative numbers because other people get dumber just standing near them.  But remarkably, they are not the stupidest people on Earth.

No, that would be the researchers at Boston University who playfully wondered what would happen if they took the original Covid virus and the more recent, more communicable variants and combined them in a laboratory. It turns out you get a peachy new virus with an 80% kill rate, as opposed to the approximately 3% kill rate that the unmodified virus had.

The researchers did not inform authorities of their Frankensteinian experiments because they "didn't think they had to." They also pointed out that their enhancement of bat virus to bat-out-of-hell virus wasn't actually forbidden "gain of function" research because hey look over there a squirrel! No, no - they said it wasn't gain of function because it was just a combination of functions which, more or less coincidentally, are unfathomably lethal.

To discourage future attempts by researchers to poke Armageddon with a sharp stick, it would seem prudent to visit a disciplinary action on Boston University. Which we're thinking should be several kilotons at the very least. 

Not that we're suggesting America nuke one of its own universities! We're just suggesting that somebody put the bug in Putin's ear that Boston University has huge strategic value and a surprise multiple warhead strike would certainly prove to the world that Vlad needs to be taken seriously.

But for now, nobody seems to be doing diddly squat to stop this existential madness and life goes on as usual. Which in Boston means going to the University wet market to buy used lab rats with which to make chowder.

It's funny because it's true

STAND-UP KIND OF GUY

I reported a few weeks ago that I've enrolled in an online course (via Zoom) in stand-up comedy, and Monday marked my first two-minute performance for the class. And I think they likely see me as the next Rodney Dangerfield because they gave me no respect...no respect at all. Or laughs.

To be fair, both my material and delivery were on the eccentric side: "Introverts like me only attend the Introverts Anonymous meetings because it feels so good when we can finally go home."

Plus, if you're doing comedy what you want is an audience of relaxed people who are already having fun and are likely intoxicated. For our class, what each of us had was an audience of about five people on Zoom, all of whom were tasting stomach acid while nervously anticipating their own two-minute set.

And they were nervous for good reason, as it turns out that their material was even sketchier than mine. But hey, that's why we're all taking the class - so we can have our dreams dashed now without years of hecklers throwing beer bottles at us.

Fortunately, I have no desire to pursue a career (or even a hobby) in stand-up. But as a lifelong humorist,  I'm academically interested in the inner workings of stand-up as an art form. So I'm genuinely enjoying the class and, for the sake of verisimilitude, instituting a two-drink minimum at my house for future performances.

MEAT AND GREET

Amazon, in its infinite algorithmic wisdom, frequently suggests things it thinks I should buy based on my taste, discernment, and overall sense of elegance. And they may have nailed it with this recommendation:

Oh yeah, baby! That's me all over! Or maybe just meat all over!

When I see products like this I always have the same scenario run through my head; somewhere in the world, in a darkened bedroom, a man suddenly sits bolt upright and shouts "Eureka!"
"Wha...?" his wife, Eureka, will yawn. "Is everything okay?"
"Better than okay, baby! The future is ours! We're about to have it all! Unlimited wealth and a life of extravagance and joy!"
"Oh," the sleepy wife mumbles. "Another idea...?"
"THE idea, honey! THE idea!"
"What is it...?"
"A SUMMER HAT THAT LOOKS LIKE RAGGED CHUNKS OF RAW MEAT! I'll start production tomorrow with our life savings and the kids' college money!"

But say this for the dreamer, he got his hat made. I honestly have no idea what this would be good for, other than gifting it to some a**hole in your life along with a season pass to this place:

Nature Trivia: These guys never prosper

Goodbye Columbus Day

I had planned to wish everyone a Happy Columbus Day today, but then I remembered that only a privileged, genocidal, imperialistic a**hole would celebrate such a historical calamity. So instead, I'm wishing you a politically correct but not-so-happy Indigenous Peoples Day. You can buy greeting cards at any Hallmark display under the category "White Guilt."

On Indigenous Peoples Day, we celebrate those who lived on this land before we did and honor them by observing traditional native customs such as not delivering mail and snacking on holiday foods like free-range gluten-free pemmican. 

And this year, more than ever, it might be good for us to take some time to seriously consider the simple, basic, hand-to-mouth, back-to-Earth lifestyles of our North American progenitors. Because with Joe "I'm a member of the Puerto Rico tribe" Biden as point man in our current game of nuclear chicken with Russia, we might all be living at a subsistence level soon...