A prose poem — Gather up the Do or Dies, the thinkers, the muscle. The ones from downstairs and the ones with boot marks on their faces; bid them bring their hammers. We’ll rustle up our own — dig through basement boxes. Search beneath kitchen sinks. Get ourselves to the hardware store and empty…

Once more unto the beach, dear friends — My childhood had an abundance of family vacations. We’d climb into our wood-paneled, gas-guzzling station wagon and hit the road for days. My father would be totally silent the entire time, face growing redder by measurable degrees as us kids argued for hours. …

The power of Christ cumpels you — “Keep doing good deeds and read the Bible. I think that’s what the Bible says.” — Michael Burg, MD (Satire Sommelier) Name one thing that’s sexier than Christianity. Especially early Christianity with all those Byzantine structures to the nature of God — gets me wetter than an apocalyptic flood. I…

Do Androids Dream of Electric Feet? — In early 2021, Mike Welmer started a t-shirt company, 2Thunder2Thread, in Miami, Iowa. Its aim was to make meme-based t-shirts for internet savvy males, aged 18–45. When it struggled to get off the ground, Welmer looked into renting an artificial intelligence to help the business get off the ground. “We…

The end of the world doesn’t mean the end of good planning — Americans have always known we’d eat each other when our country fell apart. We expected our end to come via nuclear war, a super volcano, a solar flare. Perhaps one of those Godzilla creatures would crawl out of the ocean for a romp around Los Angeles. …

For garbage to come out, garbage has to go in — Pretend, for a minute, you’re John F. Kennedy in Dallas at 12:29 p.m. (CST) on Friday, November 22, 1963. Why? Your mind is about to be blown.

Hack and slash heaven if you can get over fixed camera angles — PlayStation 2 represented the peak of gaming. This author says so, anyway. Upon its release, most of us weren’t old enough to be cynical about everything. 1Gbps internet connections didn’t exist to snake their way into the subconscious of the young. That open-mindedness to media is important. A solid gaming…

Arguably the 4th best thing that’s ever come out of New Zealand — In a recent fiction story (whoa, what a convenient place to plug it), I make mention of a movie whose name you probably saw in the title and featured image. It occurred to me later that its classification as a “cult science-fiction classic” would limit the number of people who’d…

Yum yum for your lexical tummy tum — Like most pseudo-intellectuals, I like having big books lying around. I like leaving those books in the open for people to see — tastefully askew to imply I’ve read them. The largest book I own is the Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. It has…