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Category : Photo Stories

27 Feb 2022

A GREAT KNOCKER

There used to be two. They were great knockers on the steel doors of the castle. They had to be massive for the knocking to be heard in the great halls. 

Visitors were few. The castle was built in the middle of a snake and evil teddy bear-filled swamp.  If you didn’t get bit by a snake the bears might get to you, hugging your legs and head, making travel impossible.

This was the third castle built here.  The other two had sunk into the swamp. Each time the great knockers had to be reforged by the great blacksmith, Bob.

I heard the legends and made the perilous journey to Nebraska to witness the iron rings for myself.  I brought a flame thrower and some Teddy Bear Go Away Spray to make it through the swamp.

When I got there, I found only one great iron ring, the other having been stolen by some kids. I pounded it on the door and heard the echoes inside the castle.  The great doors began to creak slowly open. Then, standing before me like a mystic image was a hooded being that beckoned me inside.

I stood in the great hall, peeling off evil teddy-bears.  The hooded figure was gone and I was alone in the dim light of wall torches.  I could feel a heavy dark presence and held my flame thrower ready. Soon a tall, massive dark figure approached me.  I could feel fear building inside me.

The figure asked if had its package. When I said no, it lifted me high and threw me out the door into swamp.  Snakes and evil teddy bears converged on me.

Before it slammed the great metal door the massive dark figure growled, “I thought you were Amazon.”

I knew I would never make it out alone and hailed an Uber.…

26 Feb 2022

WE ARE BEING GUIDED

The signs are subtle and mysterious but there is no doubt that extra-terrestrial life forms are among us.

You have to be astute to see them and insightful to be able to interpret them. They are here and are trying to communicate with us.

Some people dismiss the possibility of aliens. Have you ever seen an actual UFO or decent photo of one?  Even the US military with super high tech cameras and detailed high resolution satellites has only captured fuzzy, grainy images, but has admitted something is out there.

They are looking in the wrong place.  They should be looking here on the ground where the signs are all around us.

25 Feb 2022

FUTURE VIEW CAMERA

Everyone knows time travel is a fantasy. It makes for great books and movies but anyone who believes it is possible hasn’t studied the equations.

Totally impossible. It cannot happen. Time is too sticky. We are all stuck in the present

But that doesn’t mean you can’t see into the future. Idio’s future view camera not only sees into the future it can take a picture.

He can point it at anything, dial in the date and see the scene as it will appear at that time. So far he hasn’t figured out what to do with it.  Why would anyone want to see into the future?  What could be there that would be of interest that you won’t see eventually?

He just putters around with it taking photos now and then. I asked him how it works. He looked at me like I was a complete idiot and said you focus it and click the shutter.

I wanted to see through it and asked if I could check it out if I bought him a quad long shot grande in a venti cup half calf double cupped no sleeve salted caramel mocha latte with 2 pumps of vanilla?

He said that would work if they added 2 pumps of white chocolate mocha for mocha and substitute 2 pumps of hazelnut for toffee nut half whole milk and half breve with no whipped cream extra hot extra foam extra caramel drizzle extra salt add a scoop of vanilla bean powder with light ice well stirred.

No problem.

An hour later I brought him his drink and took a look through the camera.  As I dialed I could see the streetscape change, businesses coming and going, cars changing into hover crafts, people getting fatter and fatter. 

It was interesting. I just wish I had known about the side effects.…

24 Feb 2022

HARRY, ZIP AND RIP

They grew up watching The Wild One, Easy Rider and watching Evil Knievel break all the bones in his body. They bought Hondas and tried to become Hell Angels. The Angels just beat them up and set their bikes on fire.

That set them back but they persevered.

They saved up as much money as they could and bought mopeds to tour the country from Green Slime, NJ to LA. They planned their route, packed all their gear and set out one summer morning. They got as far as Pennsylvania where an Amish farmer ran them off the road, beat them up and set their mopeds on fire.

They were becoming true road warriors. Their mothers came to pick them up and took them home.

Undaunted and battled hardened they got tough guy jobs pumping gas so they could buy Harleys.

It took about 40 years but they finally got them and set out to tour the country. Unfortunately, each of them has a health condition and they are afraid to ride anymore than an hour from home in case something flares up.

Never ones to give up on a dream they cruise every weekend looking for America.

23 Feb 2022

EAGLE DAVE

Dave Berkoflavin was feeling bored and directionless. Being a cube dweller for over twelve years was getting to him.

He’d had his job at the Xerozatis Factory Corporation for over 12 years and really wasn’t getting anywhere. XFC had promoted hime to manager but that didn’t really change anything. The work still sucked and he wasted more time scrolling Twitter and texting friends than working as the Manager of Inbound Exports QRC Monitoring.

One, clammy, rainy day as he completed his quarterly output assessment projection report he nodded off and had a dream he was flying. He was a human drone, flying low over houses checking out women sunbathing topless in their backyards.

Then he was an eagle soaring over a mountain watching the small mammals in the forest scurrying in fear as his shadow passed over them. He felt powerful. He felt regal. He felt someone kick his chair.

His boss scowled and asked for the projections which weren’t done.

“You stay here until you are finished now that you’ve had a nice nap.”

And Dave stayed late into the night finishing the report. As he walked to his car in the rainy night the eagle dream came back to him almost as a hallucination. He was that eagle.

He stopped going into work. He carefully carved a giant eagle head out of pine and began wearing it, eating raw fish and dancing around his apartment flapping his arms. During the day, he’d run put on the mask and run around the neighborhood terrorizing squirrels.

After a couple of months somebody noticed and called the police. When they arrived, he quickly climbed up a tree as high as he could and perched there.

The police did not know what to do so they started shooting at him, blasting chips of wood off his mask.…

22 Feb 2022

FIRST RURAL MAILBOX

This is a historic site, Mailbox Zero and receives about 11 visitors a year (plus the local mailman).

We didn’t always have these dome-shaped boxes. Before that you had to go pick up your mail or have it delivered in return for sex, a chicken, some preserves or another nice, homey gift.

In some parts of the country you still have to pick up your mail unless the mail delivery person is into you and you are ok with that.

With the advent of junk mail the postoffice was overflowing with crap mostly because people couldn’t pick up their mail all the time. When they did, they threw out most of it and the post offices started becoming junk paper warehouses.

The post masters were getting really annoy and started a campaign to pressure the Postmaster General to change things. It was the legendary “Fuck This” campaign of 1949.

Things were going well for the US, having helped wipe out Europe and Japan and the president was feeling flush. He came up with the idea of getting a bunch of weird little trucks and have mail delivered. I think Ford, GM and Chrysler were part of the task force that came up with this.

He got few billion, bought the trucks and everything was all set up. Mail delivery people drove around and dropped off people’s mail in their driveways or on their stairs. Most of it blew away or got soaked in the rain.

It took a while but after a few months someone came up with the idea of a metal mailbox. I think it was by someone at a steel company. Millions were manufactured and distributed. People were educated on how to put it on a post and write the street number on it.

There was a huge ceremony and the president drove up to the very first mailbox, Mailbox Zero in Circleback, Maryland and delivered about 80 pieces of junk mail, a few bills and a card.…

21 Feb 2022

THE BOARD

Nothing gets decided without the “board’s” approval.

We don’t know they are. We only know their shapes. One of them has a huge gut. It could be almost anyone.

They could be the Illuminati but I did not see any pyramids with floating eyes.

Overall I think they are doing a terrible job. Things are a mess. You would think with centuries of secret knowledge they would have gotten better at picking presidents, controlling the market and preserving earth. Dumbfucks.

Maybe that’s their plan, totally screw things up, then swoop in and save us.

They’ve gotten the first part right. Now what are they waiting for? What idiot appointed them, anyway? The “appointer” should be dropped into the middle of a forest fire or waterboarded by a melting glacier.

But hey, I’m not the type to be critical.


20 Feb 2022

LOOKING FOR SPONSORS

The Worthlebees from Busted Fir, Montana decided it’s time to revive chemically-aided enhanced consciousness.

Wilfred Worthlebee has a PhD from Stanford in American cube theory and his wife, Cherry, has her PhD from Brown in cake mix design. They have co-authored and published several peer-review papers on the intersection of instant food and consumer corruption.

Last summer they found a big plastic bag of LSD tabs down in the subway below Port Authority in NY.

They did not know what the tabs were when they found them so they analyzed they by holding them up to a black light and seeing if they dissolved in coffee. Coffee was a bad choice because you couldn’t tell if the tabs were dissolving unless you drank the coffee.

The black light analisis was totally meaningless but the coffee test appeared to be statistically positive. They did not run any statistics, they just went on a mental magical mystery tour for a few hours after drinking the coffee, which appeared to confirm their hypothesis.

They were enlightened and spend the next several weeks drinking spiked coffee and designing a campaign to promote chemically-aided enhanced consciousness. They planned to travel the country turning people on like the Merry Pranksters did. They bought a bus to fix up and sought sponsors such as acid labs, mushroom growers, peyote farmers and snack food manufacturers.

They are selling ad space on the bus and will use it to visit every kind of rally, meeting, festival, conference they can find. They will have consciousness parties and recruit people to join their movement for a better America.

They are a little behind schedule.

They are about half way through the bag of tabs they found which keeps them motivated and in an almost permanent altered state. So far they did a half ass job painting the bus and found a rusty old, steel chimney to stick out one of the windows.…

19 Feb 2022

KEEPING AN EYE ON THINGS

The town council of Happy Pleasant Hills, Indiana was getting increasingly worried about how the town seemed to be losing its wholesomeness, its purity, its inner beauty. Young people and some old weird ex-hippy types were trying to make changes.

They’d congregate in the town parks and talk to each other. What could they be saying? Old people and young people don’t talk to each other in Happy Pleasant Hills. Young people ride their skateboards and try to knock over the old people and the senior citizens, feeling under attack try to run them over with their cars.

But something was changing and the council decided it was important to keep an eye on things.

The town had a multi million dollar grant from the US military for some of its surplus equipment. Happy Pleasant Hills already picked up a couple of nice tanks, an armored car and 40 assault rifles and a grenade launcher for its 8 man police force but it knew it needed to be more proactive, to know what was coming and shut it down before any of their police got hurt.

It decided to pick up a massive, bionic eye with artificial intelligence and mount it on the water tower where it could see the whole town. The eye, called HORUS-1 also has hearing capabilities and can pick up a whisper from across town, filter out any traffic or wind and record exactly what is being said and identify the speaker.

It’s been a huge success. Ever person in the region has been observed and all their biometrics recorded. Every single conversation in town has been recorder and audited for about 12,000 keywords that indicate grumpiness. Grumpy people are usually not very happy.

Naturally this has made everyone in Happy Pleasant Hills feel much more secure and even happier.…

18 Feb 2022

SPIRIT FOGGER

I found it the attic one night. It was in a sealed metal box that was welded shut.

It had a bright orange biohazard warning on it. On the top was a another warning: “DO NOT OPEN THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES – HIGHLY DANGEROUS.”

I thought wow, this is really something and ran downstairs to get my torch. It took about an hour to cut through the thick metal box. Inside was another metal box with a skull and crossbones on it so I cut that one open, too.

Immediately, a thick fog started coming out. I could also hear what sounded like screams and moaning. The fog had a musky odor and started filling the attic. It clung to me. I felt I was being enveloped by some strange energy. I could hear voices in my head and I started feeling woozy.

I stood up, reached inside and pulled out a small machine with mysterious arcane symbols. I could feel the fog seeping into my lungs and my blood creating a sense of dread and panic.

I took it down to my living room and let it run while I watched a couple of movies on Netflix. I must have dozed off and when I woke up, all the lights and the TV were off, but I could see the fog which was glowing..

I also could see things swimming around in it. The dread and panic I felt earlier had increased and morphed into a kind of bizarre, evil feeling. I felt powerful and wicked. I went into the darkened bathroom and could see my fiery eyes in the mirror. I was hoping the comedies I watched on Netflix would help, but they weren’t very good.

So I put on my PJs and crawled into bed.

Demon-like beings came to me in my sleep drawing me to them.…