Handbill Handout

Into the lobby through the revolving door he went and he headed toward the elevator. Odd, Glen thought, there were security gates here last time and I had to swipe a company-issued ID card. Now they’re gone. The thought stuck in his head roughly as long as it took Glen to board the elevator and punch the “39” button. The doors closed and Glen was suspended in that timeless time that we all must spend in elevators sooner or later. That dead time where there isn’t quite enough time to have a full conversation with anyone you might be acquainted with or read a page of a book or do much of anything. Elevator time is like time spent at traffic lights, a totally unproductive time that we should all get a reimbursement for at the end of our lives. As Glen (or what it Glen’s narrator?) reflected on this true to form the doors slid open again and interrupted the thought. Glen turned right off the elevator and noticed an attractive receptionist at the front desk. Was there a receptionist...

It was a dark and stormy night. Wait, no it wasn’t. It was a dull and rainy morning, not a dark and stormy night. Sorry, I always wanted to start a story with that little Snoopy tribute line there. And now I have. And now I will remove myself so that the story can begin. It was a dull and rainy morning and Glen was annoyed that he had been called in to the office unexpectedly. He’d only been doing consulting work for this company for a couple of weeks and other than an initial meet and greet he had never had to darken the door of the office. All of his work was done from home, or had been done from home until today. So there Glen was ambling from the park and ride lot toward route 13 when he noticed the red hand that replaced “Don’t Walk” on the traffic lights of his youth start to blink. “Shit” he muttered and started hustling to make the light. Route 13 was a six-lane highway with intermittent pedestrian crossings and if you missed the light you were waiting for a while, a “wh...

A friend e-mailed me about blogging and where this friend could find mine. I gave the friend the URL and some advice. Here it is, with some additions. Said friend may read this. Said friend may not. Either future is fine. "Blogging is so 2006. Nobody does it anymore. And mine is crap, but it's here (with the URL) You can also subscribe to my twitter feed at that site should you want to be a little contemporary. Oh yeah, and accept my goddamn Facebook friend request already. Nobody is your friend in real life if they're not your friend on Facebook . Didn't you get the memo? Oh yeah, you should know that there are five good entries on my blog. Unfortunately, there are 410 total entries. Good luck finding the five good ones. What you don't think I'm gonna tell you, do you?" Notice the terrible, terrible lies I told this friend. There are now four hundred and eleven entries on this blog, or will be as soon as I hit "publish post" on this...

This is the first paragraph of today’s post. Normally I would put something here that either establishes the premise or is a complete non sequitur. However, I don’t have anything to write about today so pretend this is blank. Go ahead. Pretend it’s BLANK! STOP READING! I’M SERIOUS! There, now that we got rid of that literal crowd, we can continue. Continue with today’s topic. What is today’s topic, you’re wondering, and why did you get rid of the literal crowd given that you (I) have few readers to begin with. You should be focused on maximizing the amount of people that read this. Why? Why? Because….well there is no reason, other than ego I suppose. So maybe I shouldn’t bother with maximizing my audience. I don’t serve ads so I’m not making money from this anyway. Oh, and at this point I should really be beginning to discuss the first main point of the story or essay or whatever it is I’m writing here but instead I’m distracted by an internal discussion. However let me as...

Today is my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Or rather today is the 60th anniversary of the day they got married, because legally I think they are no longer married since they are both dead. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure once you’re dead you’re single though I don’t know who came up with that rule. I mean sure, it makes sense when one partner is gone and the other is still here, but when you’re both dead are you both still single? And if you aren’t, is your “new anniversary” the death of the second partner assuming you both didn’t die on the same day? Bah, it’s all too complicated. For the purposes of this essay, let’s just assume that my parents, though dead, are still married, and that their anniversary is today, though that’s only based on hearsay since I wasn’t present at the occasion. Really all I have is their word for it. Which I hope was correct, seeing as how we have what they said was their wedding date on their headstone and boy howdy would I be embarrassed if we w...

I like to drown cookies. Of course you can’t drown a cookie. Cookies aren’t alive (right?) But I think I’m drowning them when I hold them under the milk or the coffee and I see the bubbles come up, one two three four five up to maybe a dozen before they stop and you know the cookie is soft and filled with milk or coffee and ready to eat. This, my friends, is something you think of while standing on a bus stop. Although in this case I didn’t think of it while standing on a bus stop, I thought of it while actually drowning a cookie and thinking I should get to writing my post about things that occur to one on a bus stop. So, here we are. I am writing, you are reading. Only you are not reading while I am writing, you are reading this sometime later. Hours, days, weeks, months, you’ll never know and neither will I. Does it matter? No. So why mention it? I was standing on the bus stop tonight reading. Reading what? Doesn’t matter for the purposes of this exercise. Just know that I was stand...

Carl felt badly for Pat’s family. Did Pat even have a family? Carl had no idea. Pat never talked about one. No way to find out now, Carl figured, unless somebody showed up to claim the store. But who would? The newsstand stayed closed for about a week after Pat died and Carl figured this was it, the place would be sold and converted into yet another chain drugstore or a bank branch. Carl wondered how they could open a bank branch in a place that small that lacked a vault. They always found a way though, whoever “they” were. Meanwhile Carl spent the time he had spent at the newsstand at home, still reading the papers (he picked them up at a deli around the corner). After a week Carl walked past the stand and saw the gate up and the door opened. He stuck his head inside and saw that the place had been gutted to the bare walls. Everything was gone. No more coffee machine, no more paneling, no more stool. Carl was hit with a wave of nausea as he looked around the place. Desp...

The robbing bastards never did turn up, at least not in the remainder of Pat’s lifetime which, as it turns out didn’t have a whole lot left when he showed Carl the gun. One fine Tuesday morning Carl was getting more than his usual allotment of entertainment from old Pat. Seems the kids had the day off from school, one of those clerical days that they have from time to time and they were infesting the store in large quantities buying junk food, comic books and sugary beverages. Pat was in full force barking “C’mon, hurry up!” at one kid who was having a particularly difficult time excavating sufficient coin for his candy from the various pockets on his pants and jacket and almost simultaneously charging from behind the counter to confiscate a comic book from a kid who had the temerity to look at it for more than 30 seconds without reporting to the register to pay up. “I ain’t running a library in here!” echoed off the walls of the shop for the 463,283rd time as Pat snatched the book...

The newsstand had been sitting on the square for as long as anyone could remember, which isn’t really saying much since in these brave early days of the new century “as long as anyone could remember” usually means a month. So let’s try a different way to communicate the age of the place. The newsstand had been sitting on the square since 1923. To complicate matters further, it had been decades since it was just a newsstand. Within a decade or so after it opened the owners had built on a lunch counter, then sometime in the 1950’s they began running a car service out of the back parking lot. That was the heyday of the place: the bland and optimistic mid 20th century. By the time Carl took up residence on the end stool at the lunch counter with his back resting against the faux-pine paneled wall next to a tied stack of last Sunday’s papers the lunch counter had stopped serving lunch and instead sold pre-wrapped cakes and middling-quality coffee poured into paper cups from a Bunn-o-m...

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