Living with the Ultraterrestrial Goon Squad — Meet Steve. He lives a normal life. For several hours a day he works at a bank downtown. Look at his hands — they’re soft because his work is soft. He handles the money, and the paper that comes with the money. He locks it all in a big safe…

Dangle your wormy words to hook the reader — I have a small penis. The size of my penis isn’t relevant to the rest of this piece, but it got your eyes to this word. And this one. Hopefully, it’ll carry you all the way to the end. That’s the power of a first line. A vacuum cleaner sucking…

The simple life — The phone rings, the old kind with the cord that runs behind the couch. I’m always getting phone calls and I don’t know why. The voice on the other end is nothing but locusts. This town is a ghost town. The Barber Surgeon is tall and beardless and pale. His…

Heartfelt missive, retrieved from the Internet Archives — The following letter was retrieved from the Wiki of Alexandria before it’s servers burned in a fire. Composed at the height of the War on Christmas, when Starbucks changed their cups from ‘Merry Christmas’ to ‘Happy Holidays.’ My Darling Wife, I sit down to write these lines, hoping they will…

All you need is a tiny bit of confidence and even less skill — We’ve all been there. Your grandmother passes away and you’re tasked with painting a picture of Cherubs for the funeral. You’re confident in your Cherub painting ability, so you put brush to canvas without an ounce of fear or foreboding. Only, you paint something dumb like this:

The best gift to leave your loved ones is the gift of leaving your loved ones — My parents got divorced when I was a kid. I remember the day I found out. Dad came down to the basement, where my brother and I were playing. If I recall correctly, we were acting out our favorite scene from The Thing. Anyway, Dad called us over to him…

A short piece on meeting the real Santa when I was a kid — There was a time when I lost faith in Santa. Me and my buddy Ned were 10, and one day at school a boy in our class blurted, “Santa ain’t real. It’s your parents that leave presents under the tree.” Ned and I called him a liar. The derisive laughter…

One from England, one from Germany; but both are from Earth — We have a lot of names for the personification of evil: Satan, Lucifer, Old Nick, Old Scratch — but most of us call him “The Devil.” An angel exiled from Heaven for rebelling against God. Ruler of Hell, tempter of mortals to sin, yada yada yada. Most of us think…

FYI, a psychopomp is a being that escorts souls to the afterlife — I used to be a regular guy. I loved my family, I paid my taxes — I used my penis to pee and masturbate and procreate. Mostly. That changed when I got appendicitis. One moment I was fine, the next I felt stabbed in the guts. My wife drove me…