storytime

So I've got all these fancy blog posts planned. But it's also been a busy couple of months, so nothing's really ready yet.

To make my schedule even worse, I kind of sort of got myself a little bit addicted to the writings of this one blogger. Normally I can't frigging stand blogs, including my own. Everyone always asks me what blogs I read, and I reply: "Um... do books count?" Which of course is greeted with blank stares, since nobody seems to read books anymore these days. Such a shame.

Anyway, recently I tried another fling with reddit. I'm always getting addicted to reddit for a little while, and then coming off it cold-turkey for a month or two while I reassess whether I want to be spending my life reading pun threads and upmodded lolcat pictures and conspiracy theories.

Not to mention the comments, which can individually sometimes be quite cool, but in aggregate only make sense when you read them aloud with the voice of the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons: "I upvoted you for the appropriate uses of 'its' and 'their' in the link title, but downvoted you because your link actually appeared on a little-known German social networking site several hours ago. I feel it is important that you understand that this is not a zero-vote of abstention, but rather a single upvote and a single downvote cancelling one another out." If you read the comments with CBG's voice, a lot of them make a whole lot more sense.

No matter how many times I quit, in the end I always wind up sneaking a peek at the reddit home page in a moment of weakness, and before long I'm hooked again, following the adventures of memes about narwhals and how is babby formed and all this other stuff I have zero context for, but occasionally it's hysterically funny. I'm guessing this is more or less what heroin is like. Some days I don't even shower.

In any case, my latest reddit flirtation ultimately led to a secondary and more severe addiction to the writings of some dude who goes by the name "davesecretary". Yeah, him. He's a fucking genius. I started reading his old re-posted stories, got hooked and basically blacked out and lost about three days where nobody knew where the hell I was. Eventually I made my way to his stories about his trip to China. At that point I became actively envious of someone for I think the second or maybe third time in my adult life. I'm just not the jealous type normally, but damn that guy can write. He has a real gift.

So now I'm flat-out jealous. I'm not going to make a secret of it, either, and pretend he's started some trend and I'm just a bigger light jumping on the bandwagon or some lame shit like that. No, he writes way better than I do, and I'm just going to copy him blatantly, like Terry Brooks rewriting Lord of the Rings line-by-line badly as Shitstorm of Shannara.

I had actually already been thinking of publishing some true stories. In fact before I stumbled on davesecretary's tales, I had written down the story below about my brother Dave taking out the garbage, and I had been planning more. But Dave Secretary's stories were like the Great Pyramids next to the mud pueblo of my own ambition. He's like a force of nature; stories just surround the guy like gnats, and he spews out the funniest, most interesting possible versions of them imaginable.

So while I work on my more technically ambitious blogs-in-progress, I thought I'd kick off a series of light reading. It's all true stories. None of it is anywhere near as cool as trying to find a box bigger than Kyle's goddamn cereal box, and nothing in them is anywhere near as funny as the line "Iodine, Dave." But at least these are my own stories, and they're kinda fun to write down once you get going on them. I probably have about a hundred stories like the ones here. I'll start with nine random stories that managed to get themselves written first, in no particular order.

I hope you like at least one or two of them.