You don’t know what irony is. Huh.
That makes sense. You’re five. And your brother’s three, so we won’t even ask him. Is he asleep? That’s fine. Is his hood up? Good. Remind me to explain irony later. Maybe when you’re seven. I think that’s when I learned about it. Yeah. Seven sounds about right.
There is a kind of smile only contented elderly men can master, untightened by self-consciousness or significant regret, grown from a life lived as well as circumstances would allow. Pleasant, drowsy, almost beatific, the smile slid onto Mr. Tompkins’ face right after the birth of his first grandchild and had never left, even while sleeping, except for the occasional stubbed toe. The smile didn’t waver as Mr. Tompkins said to the man in black, “You’re the devil, aren’t you?”
The man in black sighed as he folded up the newspaper and slapped it on the table. “Spoilsport,” he said.
To start, you should determine if you are “invisibility material.” The following quiz will help:
Are you physically average or nondescript?
Do you have a trench coat? A wide-brimmed hat? A lot of Ace bandages? A fake nose? Goggles? (Swim goggles are acceptable.)
Have you ever addressed a person audibly, while standing right in front of them, and received no response, no response at all… as if you were invisible? (You were probably not really invisible.)
I know I said I wouldn’t talk about myself, or I said that I would only talk about myself in an obscure and fictionalized way, and for all you know, my dear four readers*, what I’m about to write is a bulky knot of lies and embellishments (although if you are one of my four […]
… and my lunch break is never long enough, but I swore on the lives of my nonexistent children that I would not lapse any further than I already have, move or no move, so here’s some tidbits I feel compelled to share. If you want to know if you value a material possession, ask […]
First, a word of probably-unnecessary warning: any essay claiming to help you start the new year is at least a little facetious. Technically, you don’t need to do anything. The year will start on its own. Most modern years include a simple push-button or touch screen interface in case of accidents, but you might need to turn the crank on the front, or push it for a few feet. Even if you don’t do either of those things, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that the year will have started by the time you wake up tomorrow, if you live in the continental United States. (If you live elsewhere, your results may vary.) Also, sometimes there’s no crank and it’s not a push-starter, so you have to find the pull cord, or the ignition key, or on truly vintage models, the jackknife switch, though why you’d be starting a year that old, I have no idea.
I know all about our mechanical and magical pop stars. I mean, I’m rapidly fleeing that most beloved of demographics, the 18-34 set, but I still know, I am still “hep” enough to recognize the faces and auto-tuned voices that run our society. Zum Beispiel: • Taylor Swift, the porcelain kewpie-doll golem who threw a […]
With ghosts? Oh no. They tell where the treasure is, or who is the murderer, or the terrible secret that everyone should know.
With monsters? Sometimes, but only sometimes. At the window at night, with wide and empty eyes. The seeing-them is scarier than the dealing-with-them, since the dealing-with-them boils down to “getting eaten”, nine times out of ten, since they are monsters and that is what monsters do. Also: monsters are highly unlikely.
Grandpa is sitting at the table every time we come to visit, in the corner of the kitchen by the window. That’s his seat and no one else sits there. He’s never said we couldn’t, but we never try. Sitting there seems like cheating. So we don’t and that’s the right way to do things. […]
You know what I like? The sun. The sun on a cold day, like today, through a window, like the one I’m sitting next to. The sun, all yellow and warm and low in the sky but still too bright to look at, thanks to the tilt of the earth this time of year. When […]