I have a very vivid memory of walking into a gas station at 2am with friends, high on mushrooms. We all went our separate ways to grab drinks and snacks, and then stood in a surprisingly long line with a few strangers to purchase them. I was in another dimension. All of us were. None of us were communicating with each other whatsoever. Just standing there in line with huge pupils and snacks in our arms. Then someone started snickering quietly. Then another. Then another. Soon it was psychedelic fucking pandemonium beneath those florescent gas station lights. I think even the strangers may have been having a good time. I’m not even sure how we managed to pay. Great memory, though.

Try to find that cool looking Beavis and Butthead site I saw my brother browsing in the earliest days of our internet access. I had asked him where he found it and he couldn’t remember, so I searched and searched and searched to no avail. I never found that Beavis and Butthead site. I just remember there was a lot of yellow.

When I first started visiting Canada years back, I would buy cases of Coors Light and attend gatherings. Three beers in would be absolutely fucked. And I mean fucked…

BOZO AIN’T EVEN S’POSED TA BE HERE

“This!”

“Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!”

Why do they have to say the things? People don’t say the things here.

This was a problem when my daughter was in a private dayhome, but a licensed dayhome has been a much better experience. Seems like they actually prioritize hand-washing and other hygiene practices. My kid gets sick at about a tenth of the previous rate.

Ernie is the coziest of bottoms.

Thank you! Genuinely, that means a lot to hear. I’ve never heard anyone compliment my prose, but it’s something I value a lot in other literature, and have a hard time getting into novels that are lacking it.

I’ve been wanting/trying to write a fiction book for years, but I have a horrible habit of knocking out a few pages and then getting into my own head and picking apart my work. I’ll end up reworking it sentence by sentence until I hate whatever’s left. Your nice comment makes me want to try again. All the best to you!

My kid is the only one in the cul-de-sac with Minecraft. We have quite the popular couch this month.

While I no longer have the responsibility of collecting carts, I still work in the grocery industry and I appreciate your courtesy. I’ll never forget the agony of rounding up and pushing dozens of them through the snow and slush of a Kmart parking lot. I can’t believe I didn’t do more damage to my body then. Now it’s just the cement floors that are slowly doing me in.

They’ll just cook it on the same nasty spot they cook all the meat. It’s what all the restaurants get wrong with their Beyond/Impossible options. My wife loves Beyond Burgers at home, but she won’t order them from any restaurant because they cook them on the same grill that’s been used to fry up greasy beef all day. She doesn’t care if the grill has been cleaned. She just can’t do it, and I get it.

I worked customer service at Kmart for a few years and encountered a lot of old classmates. Fortunately I had lost a bunch of weight since I had last seen them, and all of my hair fell out, so nobody knew who I was. I could tell some people thought I was maybe familiar, but I was never identified outright. I felt like a secret agent.

It’s a shitty class to play.

Thanks! Very kind of you to say.

Ah, the old Coon Hill Rd. special. Grew up near a wooded country road that was full of trash like this. People apparently came from all around the township to dump their trash and furniture up and down this road, and the county never bothered to clean it up. My family was never down with that, but my dad used to catch possums in his livetraps and relocate them on this exact road. I guess he didn’t know how beneficial it was to have possums around. Coon Hill may have been lined with trash, but it was likely 100% tick free.

I had to do a school project once where we took disposal cameras and snapped photos of things that we found beautiful, and things we found ugly. I knocked out almost all of the ugly ones just on Coon Hill, but I did snap a few beautiful ones off the beaten path a bit. It was in the dead of winter and mostly snow and rotting vegetation, but beautiful enough at the right time of day. There was a duality down Coon Hill.

I swear I wasn’t a redneck, but it sure sounds like it.

My nephew is one of the worst I’ve ever smelled. Just the overwhelming scent of damp, reused football socks and armpit. How he can’t smell his own smog is beyond my comprehension. I can’t imagine the smell of a classroom.

Da Baer’s aere gonna win it this yeahr, boys.

Fuck 'em up!

I have cracks on the corners of my fingers, beside the nail. They run deep and I have to put Polysporin with lidocaine on them to reduce the throbbing sting. It’s due to a combination of biting my nails and working a job that requires constant antibacterial hand-washing. I hate it.