An Immodest Proposal

Tiny Roommate’s favorite hobby is peeing, followed closely by drooling and spitting up on my work pants. One day, as I was changing his third diaper in an hour, I realized that he must be outputting more liquid than he consumes. And he’s not sickly or anything–he’s a perfectly healthy, happy baby. He just manages to break the law of conservation of mass on a daily basis. Thus, I created my plan for world drought prevention.

1.) Solicit volunteers to send their babies to a new, innovative form of day care system.

Since it will result on ending the world water crisis, it will be free, and people like free things.

2.) Affix water purification systems to each baby’s orifices.

They should be brightly colored and jingly to ensure the babies’ enjoyment.

3.) Put each baby into a harness.

Like the one’s you’re supposed to wear on your stomach or back. I think it’s fair to assume it’s safe to hang them from anything.

4.) Tie the harness to a bunch of balloons.

If Up has taught us anything, this will work.

5.) Suspend babies in cloud formations.

Don’t worry, babies love dangling. It’s like crack to them.

6.) With them, suspend a machine that injects powdered formula into the clouds, creating floating droplets of nutrition.

Just a few drops should be plenty.

7.) Allow babies to drink from the clouds.

This may require more sophisticated water purification systems for their mouths, but that’s a job for the hundreds of scientists that will flock to this project, not me. From what I know of babies, it would be best if they were able to lick the clouds.

8.) Enjoy the gentle rain that comes from these off-white clouds.

Don’t worry, babies love peeing as much as we love watering our lawns in the heat of the day and leaving the water on while we brush our teeth. It’s like…fuzzy blankets…to them. (Some of my sponsors have objected to my earlier simile.)

9.) So that they will be able to pop the balloons and get down when their parents come to pick them up, equip each baby with a concealable pistol.

Shotguns are just too hard for them to handle.

I see no flaws in this plan. Nobel Prize, here I come. And if anyone does complain, I’ll have an army of highly armed babies between me and them. Nothing can stop me now.

How “The Avengers” Inspired Me to Turn to a Life of Crime

Yesterday was Male Roommate’s birthday, and in celebration, we went to the midnight release of The Avengers. I picked up tickets early, and after observing that a small bag of popcorn cost six dollars, I decided to rebel. I purchased three boxes of candy from the grocery store and three twenty ounce sodas from the vending machine in the high school teacher’s lounge. While the rest of the machines in my town have risen to $1.25, and I’ve seen cokes on sale by the check out lines for upwards of $1.59, this one still costs a good, old fashioned buck. I was so excited that I purchased three in a row and slipped them into my empty lunch box, right in front of the principal. She probably thinks I’m severely addicted to caffiene now, but no matter! I had successfully bought refreshments for Male Roommate, Female Roommate and myself for less than one measly handful of popcorn. Yet, I was nervous.

You see, while some people come from a long line of soldiers or doctors or lawyers, I come from a line of people who can’t sneak food into movie theaters. My parents used to sit me down and regale me with the tails of their failure. Once, much too hungry for mere popcorn and candy, they snuck a couple of sandwiches into a movie that smelled so pungent once unwrapped that the whole theater turned to stare. Another time, they snuck in Lentil Dal, a thick, brown Indian curry. As they attempted to unwrap it in the dark, the aluminum to-go container twisted, dumping the contents onto my mother’s lap. Not knowing what else to do, they took their spoons and ate the curry off of her clothing, but there was nothing they could do about the brown stain–or the dozen acquaintances they ran into in the lobby after the credits. You’d think they would have learned after that, but years later, while on the Atkins diet, my dad decided to see a movie. Unable to eat the carbohydrate-filled concessions, he brought in a block of cheese, thinking it could easily be mistaken for a candy bar. However, right after he unwrapped it and took his first bite, a huge spotlight shone down on him from the ceiling as if God himself were condemning him for bringing cheese into this house of buttered corn.

And yet, despite this legacy, the worst thing that happened was that my empty coke bottle rolled off into the darkness when I tried to set it down beside my feet. The birthday gods have smiled on us, which settles it–I’m turning to a life of crime.

Carrot Juice: Advance in Modern Medicine or Elaborate Hoax?

Male roommate is full of tidbits of wisdom and advice. Some of them are wrong. After two days of standing outside on a playground, my allergies started acting up, and he recommended carrot juice. He said it would magically eliminate my soar throat, and that it tastes delicious. Actually, it has no apparent affect on my throat, and it tastes like carrots. Don’t get me wrong. I like carrots. It’s just that they are supposed to be crunchy, or maybe mushy–definitely not the texture of milk. I’m still determined to drink it because I bought it, and I’m sure it’s good for me, but I’m growing increasingly angry with it.

Issue 1:

It really bothers me that my drink might go well with ranch dressing.

Issue 2:

I chose to drink it while eating a bowl of organic granola. The combined forces of healthiness will probably drive me to eat something covered in cheese later. Cheese and maybe bacon. Ooh, and sour cream.

Issue 3:

The bottle brags to me that its contents are low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Of course it’s low in saturated fat and cholesterol. It’s fucking CARROTS! Carrots have never and will never contain fat or cholesterol! My soda is low in saturated fat and cholesterol, too, and I don’t see it bragging about it. Actually, I’m pretty sure I have at some point. Goodbye. I’m going to go cry into some low-in-aresenic icecream.

Today’s Lesson: Souls are Delicious

Look at this poster I found on a first grade teacher’s wall today.

I have only one question: what kind of fucked up, godforsaken Popsicle is jet black? What if I’m supposed to teach the kids their colors with this chart, and one of them asks me what flavor the black one is? I’m sure one of the good teachers with the stylish tote bags and the “I Love My Students” posters on the walls would make up some shit about it being liquorish. Not me. I have never seen a liquorish Popsicle. I have never heard of a liquorish Popsicle. If I tell a bunch of first graders that liquorish Popsicles exist, it’s just setting them up for a life of disappointment, distrust and unfulfilled dreams. Instead, I will have to tell them that the black Popsicle is made of souls, tortured souls, the souls of other first graders who wouldn’t listen when I told them to get out from under the table, sit down and stop building swastikas out of the math blocks. It will scar them much less, I’m sure.

It’s My Birthday and I’ll Advertise if I Want to

Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday dear Eliiiiiise! Happy Birthday to me!

If you want to get me a present, you can buy one of my publications, like A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine that just came out in paperback today! Unless you know me and you usually get me real presents. Then you should get me something else, too, like cookies or a new car.

A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine

Today is Friday the 13th. In honor of this date, I will be cleaning my kitchen, which will be suitably scary. For the rest of you, here is this video announcing an upcoming anthology that some of my poetry will be included in.

Click Here to Watch the Video on Youtube.

If you find eyeballs anywhere as scary as I do, this ad will be almost as scary as my kitchen, so I’ll give you the details here. (It figures I can’t look at the cover of one of the first printed works I’m a part of.)

The book is called A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine. It’s a collection of some of the best pieces to appear in The Horror Zine over the past year. Some of it is by famouse people like Simon Clark, Graham Masterton, Joe R. Lansdale, Scott Nicholson, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, Joe McKinney, Susie Moloney, Tom Piccirilli, Ed Gorman, Trevor Denyer, and Jeff Strand. However, it also includes works by me, several of my former classmates, and other emerging writers.  The book will be available soon through Amazon, first as a trade paperback, and later as an ebook. The paperback will cost $16.99, and the ebook will be $4.99. I’ll let you know when each edition becomes available for purchase. Make sure to pick up a copy, so that you can tell all your friends you were reading Valdes, Laham and Hopkins before they were cool.

Dye Eggs, Dye: An Easter Tale

You can't hear it, but the white one is gibbering to itself softly. You'll learn why.

Both of my parents hate hard boiled eggs, so when I was growing up, dying Easter eggs was just not something we did. My mother tried to fill that void in my upbringing with other night-before-Easter traditions. One year, we baked Meringue cookies that were supposed to symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ. Each step of the recipe had a little explanation beside it that told part of the crucifixion story. I remember beating walnuts with a wooden spoon to symbolize how they beat Jesus. These were the most morbid cookies ever. After we were done torturing the cookies, we were supposed to leave them in the oven over night at a low temperature, then return in the morning to find them baked and hollow like Jesus’s empty tomb. This did not happen. They ended up all chewy and gross, more like Jesus’s partially decomposed body. My mom still dutifully scraped them off the cookie sheet and put them in a plastic bag for later. They sat untouched on our kitchen table for days. We didn’t make those cookies again, but we did scientifically prove that love is, indeed, an important ingredient in homemade cookies. The chemical reactions just don’t happen right if you use hatred and fear as a substitute.

Male and Female Roommates weren’t up for making Jesus cookies this year, but they were up for dying eggs. We bought a dozen and one of those little dye kits at the store. I was excited. Dying Easter eggs always feels a little rebellious to me, like eating cotton candy or Kix cereal. Last night, a few hours before Female Roommate got home from work and the dying could begin, I asked Male Roommate if he could go ahead and boil the eggs. He said he didn’t remember how. How could Male Roommate suggest this forbidden ritual without having the knowledge to see it through? He knew my history with hard boiled eggs. He knew I had never made them before. I felt like the cookie Christ, lost, betrayed, and beaten with a wooden spoon. But Easter had to go on. I typed “hard boiled egg recipe” into Google and began my quest for answers.

I was expecting to have to boil the eggs for X amount of time, but as I tried to solve for X, all I found were cautionary tales of how everyone overcooks hard boiled eggs. The recipe writing community is completely obsessed with eliminating the greenish coating on the yolks of cooked eggs, and each cook has their own trick of how to do it right. The recipes had instructions for turning the heat up, down, or off at various points in the cooking process, but many didn’t specify when to do what. One did inform me that I should place the eggs in the pan one at a time to avoid cracking them. What did that writer think I was going to do, turn the carton upside down three feet over the pot and hope for the best? I didn’t even care about the greenish coating. My goal was to die the eggs various colors anyway. I just didn’t want them to be raw, damn it!

I eventually fashioned my own recipe, Frankenstein style, out of the remains of the less-stupid online recipes. I ended up bringing the eggs to a boil, then covering them and turning off the heat, but leaving the pot on the warm burner for twelve minutes, if you care. Also, I put two of the eggs into the pot at the same time, just to prove I could. I tested one of the eggs when they were done, and it was perfect! No green coating, no rawness. As little as I thought I cared about the former, it gave me a sense of pride that I had achieved it. It almost made up for the Jesus cookies of long ago. My only worry is that it took me so long to peel the damn test egg that the rest of the eggs overcooked anyway in the warm water. But they’re pretty now, so that’s okay.

The egg dying process went fairly smoothly, except that the package came with nine drying stands. Who sells eggs in packs of nine? Six, I could understand. Twelve, I could understand. I could even understand eleven, to account for the test egg, of course. But nine? It left us with two undyed eggs, which gave Male Roommate the option of dropping one of them in a cup of vinegar in the name of science. I saved the other one, but, having seen the atrocities committed to its friend, it’s a little shell shocked. I guess I can’t get through Easter without torturing at least one food product.

It may not look festive, but this egg has become a martyr for the causes of Easter eggs everywhere, whatever those might be.