Random Story – Three quick stories.

These are just odd little stories from my life.

When I got my learner’s permit thirty years ago, there was a deal where if you drove for so many hours with an instructor from school, your parents would get a discount on their insurance.  I don’t know what setup they have nowadays.  Anyway, one day while I was driving with the instructor, I was going down this road with houses on one side and woods on the other.  I saw a cat jump out of the weeds right in front of me and before I could do anything, I heard a thump.  I think the instructor was making notes on a clipboard and didn’t say anything, so I kept going.

One time in college, I was walking somewhere with a girl.  I can’t remember if it was getting dark and I was just walking her back to her dorm from some event, or what.  But she talked for a while, and then said, “Tell me about yourself.” I thought for a moment, then replied, “I was born.” She laughed, but when I didn’t elaborate she started talking about something else.

This other time in college, I got a box of donut holes and a 1L Coke from the convenience store a few blocks from campus.  I can’t remember if my friends and I were playing poker, or watching movies, or what.  But I ate the entire box and drank the entire liter, and it made me feel queasy.  Just to be sure, a week or so later I repeated the experiment, and got the same results. 

Short story – “Change for the Better?”

“Change for the Better?”

“Let me get this straight, you want to preach the word of God to …”

The young man interrupted with, “Yes, it’s my purpose in life.”

“Right.  You don’t run a megachurch, do you?”

“No.”

“Have a cable show?”

“No.”

“Radio show?”

“No.”

“Website?”

“No.”

“How did you plan to reach people with your message?”

The young man smiled.  “I will walk among them.”

“Listen, I understand.  What you want to do is noble and all, but if you want to be part of the big leagues, you’ll have to put aside such rank amateur ideas.”

The young man frowned.  After a few moments he nodded.  “I understand.”

“Great.  Let’s start you off with something simple, an Instagram page.  Now, what was your name again?”

“Jesus.”

***

I first wrote this story back in 2009 and posted it on a website that is still up but the formatting is messed up.  So I figured I should repost it.  The point of the story is simple: if Jesus came back today, would he open a megachurch or would he slip on a pair of sandals and go among the people?

Random Story – Trying to explode my VCR

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Twenty-fiveish years ago, one of my guilty pleasures was reading the Weekly World News.  I didn’t believe any of the stories, and just laughed at the idea that there were people out there that probably did believe all that shit.  But I felt safe knowing those people would only be on the fringe of society and they’d never … I don’t know … be elected to Congress. 

Anyway, sometime in 1998 or 1999, there was an article about Y2K.  Now the normal fear was that going from 19-- years to 20-- years would cause computers to crash.  But this article claimed that things would be far worse and that any electronic device would explode at midnight. 

I don’t know if shortly before or after I read this article we had a power outage and I had to reset the time on my VCR.  So I performed an experiment.  I set the time on my VCR to 11:59 PM on December 31, 1999.  I then backed away and waited.  A minute later the display switched over to 12:00.  There was no smoke, or buzzing, or anything.  And when I checked the date, it was January 1, 2000.  I guess I had a “modern” VCR that replaced the explosive parts with the memory to have a four digit date. 

I was only slightly bummed.

Space Station Museum

Recently, there was news about how the International Space Station will one day be deorbited.  And this was met with cries of “Can’t it just be boosted into a higher orbit,” or, “Can’t it be turned into a museum?” and other such things.  And my knee-jerk reaction is that it should be preserved as a historic “building.” But then reality kicked in.  The station is getting old and there’s no telling how long some parts of it will stay safe.  Having a controlled reentry after all the crew and science are taken off is infinitely better than a catastrophic break up with crew – or tourists – onboard leaving a huge debris cloud that could damage satellites or other stations. 

While thinking on all of this, I realized that the ISS could live again someday as part of a museum.  This would be in orbit – as part of an even larger space station – and would start with models of everything: from spacecraft like the Vostok capsule of Yuri Gagarin, to the Space Shuttle, to the Chinese Shenzhou, as well as all the space stations from Skylab and Mir and the ISS.  And then there would be the full size versions, so the tourists could try to cram into a Mercury capsule or just float around in Mir.  These wouldn’t be a full recreation, there wouldn’t be any need for solar panels for example, just the interior space.  Any views out windows would just be video screens showing what would have been seen.  And since this would be in zero-g, you could cram things in any orientation they could fit.  Like you could have the Crew Dragon mockup squeezed in between the Tiangong and Salyut 1 mockups.  And this museum wouldn’t be the entirety of the complex.  Like you could be inside the Skylab section, and just on the other side of the bulkhead would be the linen closet for a hotel. 

While it will be a sad day when the ISS is deorbited, hopefully it will be replaced with bigger and better stations.  And while these replacements will primarily be used for science, they will one day be replaced with even bigger, even better stations that will still do science but will also hold tourists.  And as more and more humans live and work in space, hopefully someone will eventually build a space station museum so that future generations can marvel at how “small” the ISS was.

Short story – “The Gift of Vomit”

“The Gift of Vomit”

I turn off my phone and set it back on the dresser.  Just as I snuggle back under the covers, I hear my upstairs neighbor’s alarm going off.  The muffled blare goes on for several seconds before blissfully stopping.  For a minute or so I hear the vague sounds of him moving around before quiet returns.

I take a deep breath, and hope to go back to the dream I was having about my ex-girlfriend’s sister. 

My poor neighbor will be trudging through the rain on his morning commute, while under my warm blankets things are so peaceful.  I’ll have a nice relaxing day, all because I told my boss I threw up breakfast.

***

This was originally published in 2014 on a now defunct website.  Of course, back then if you did call in sick it probably wasn’t that big of a deal.  Now you’d probably get bombarded with an endless stream of “Nobody wants to work anymore” BS. 

***

I started reposting these stories on the third Thursday, and that the day this goes up happens to be St. Patrick’s Day is a complete coincidence.  The story isn’t titled “The Gift of Green Vomit” after all.

Random Story – New computer problems

This is just an odd little story from my life.

My first three or four computers were secondhand.  One that belonged to a friend’s boyfriend worked fine for writing stories, but it didn’t have the set up to get online.  So around 2005 I decided I’d buy a new computer for myself.  There was a kiosk in the local mall where you could pick out what you wanted in a computer and they’d ship it to you.  I should have had them ship it to where I worked, but I didn’t think of that.

At the time, I lived five minutes from work, so I’d go home for lunch.  I went home one day to find a note from UPS that they had three packages for me and that they’d try to deliver again the next day.  The complex where I lived had six or seven apartment buildings and the next day when I went home for lunch, I saw a UPS truck parked in front of the third one from mine, so I pulled in next to it.  I waited for a couple of minutes, and when the guy came back out from delivering something I asked if he had anything for me.  He did, but only one package.  So I took it to my apartment and was really happy to have new … speakers.

I had to go to their pickup center or whatever to get the rest of my computer.  It was drizzling that day, and the one box that I think just had the monitor in it easily fit in my car.  But the other box with everything else didn’t want to go in the passenger seat.  No matter how I turned it, it didn’t want to fit.  I think I had to cut it open, take the keyboard and some other small things out, and crush the top of the box down before it would fit in my car.

Back in my apartment, I got everything set up.  I had my new, fancy computer on the left side of my desk, and my old, clunky computer on the right side.  All I had to do was transfer all of my stories.  For the previous ten or so years, I had used 3.5 inch disks.  When I was picking what I wanted for my new computer, I didn’t even think of adding a 3.5 inch disk drive because I just thought of them as standard.  So how could I transfer all of my stories from a computer not hooked up to the internet with only a 3.5 inch drive, to a computer hooked up to the internet with USB drives?

I took three or four disks and crammed them with as many stories as I could fit.  I then got in my car and drove the ten or so minutes to my local library which had a couple computers with 3.5 inch drives hooked up to the internet.  I emailed my stories to myself.  I then drove back to my apartment, and downloaded them to my new computer.  So it took over half-an-hour to move my files a foot.

I had a lot of individual stories, but for some I kept multiple versions of them as I revised them.  So it took me five or six trips to move everything.  I usually went to the library after work, but on Saturday I made two or three trips just to be done with the damn thing. 

That computer died five or six years ago, but I’ll always remember the pain I had setting it up.

My Putin Prediction

My prediction is that one of these days, a group of Russian oligarchs and maybe some of the Russian military, will go to “arrest” Putin.  There will be a struggle and he will, regretfully, be shot … in the back of the head.  They will declare a ceasefire, and start pulling their troops back from Ukraine.  They will then release all these documents showing that they tried to stop Putin from these criminal acts but HE ACTED ENTIRELY ON HIS OWN.  They will then say, “Since the one responsible for all of this is dead, can you call of the sanctions, return our yachts, and just let bygones be bygones?”