New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest: February Fun Fun Fun Funky Fun Times Edition, Volume F

A grand Hilbert Heckler tradition! The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest wherein I submit to you my joyless captions for joyless cartoons in a contest I will never compete in!

I ordered this thing for my wife but it didn't come with any mustard. 

You don't even respect that we're alive and swimming, man!

It's all organic, baby. Their shit tastes like grass. Their meat tastes like shit. Whole Foods is interested. 

Getting a haircut

Getting a haircut is the most awkward time of social interaction for me. Normally, I can shoot the shit about anything and feel fine about knowing that I am a master of vapidity and meaningless bullshit.

Not when someone's cutting my hair, though.

Barber: What kind of cut you want?

Me: Uh, you know, I brush it to the side so just a cut so I can do it.

B: What size?

M: What? I don't know.

B: Okay. You use product?

M: Product?

B: Gel, hairspray... product.

M: Uh, no.

B: What do you do?

M: Uh... I'm a writer.

B: You voting for Bernie Sanders?

The end.

Lucky Dark's A Sordid Valentine's Anthology

Howdy, folks!

I plan on doing a lot more shows and events in the ramp up to the BANGFACE AND THE GLORY HOLE novella release and, hot damn, I've got a show coming up.

Lucky Dark (like 'em if you're on Facebook) is having a release party at the Badlands for their A Sordid Valentines anthology. My story, The Bedcage, is in it and it's about a guy who can't get out of bed to go to work.

There's a bunch of good work in there including stories by Owen Egerton, Dale Bridges, M. Burger, S.R. Bond, Johnny Holden, and Ed Kurtz. I'm honored to be included among them.

Did I say there's a new novella being released soon?

You heard it.

Bangface and the Glory Hole is being released in April 2016 by Weekly Weird Monthly. I'll have more details later.

A post dedicated to our new mailman

New mailman/mailwoman/mailperson/post office employee who walks and delivers,

You have delivered mail to the wrong house every Friday. I have walked that mail over to the intended recipient because I believe people should get their mail. Whoever's getting my mail has so far declined to do the same courtesy for me.

Listen, motherfucker, that package is not mine and if you drop it off here, this family fucking dies. 

You did not deliver mail yesterday. It was not a federal holiday. What the fuck are you doing with my goddamned mail?

I tried to call to complain but the Post Office automaton was really insistent I heard the entire privacy statement. The robot gave a small spiel and then asked, "If you'd like to hear more, press 1." Up until that point, the machine was asking me to speak. Impatiently, I just said, "No," before the instruction to press 1. That was a mistake. 

Then again: "If you'd like to hear more, press 1."

Listen, you little shit, I don't care that you can fit into your daddy's uniform. You can't fucking read and that's obvious because those letters in your goddamned hand that you're delivering to me are not for me. Put them back in your bag before I tell you Santa Claus isn't real but that's a damn shame because only a mythical creature that stupid little kids believe in can deliver the mail accurately in this fucking town. 

I tried to call to complain but the Post Office automaton was really insistent I heard the entire privacy statement. The robot gave a small spiel and then asked, "If you'd like to hear more, press 1." Up until that point, the machine was asking me to speak. Impatiently, I just said, "No," before the instruction to press 1. That was a mistake. 

Then again: "If you'd like to hear more, press 1."

What kind of manipulative behavioral science went into that? Where's option 2? The option that doesn't care about the privacy statement or how this call is used or any of that? I just want my mail. 

Mailman, male man, don't think I don't have the stubbornness of a goat donkey to wait outside for you all goddamn day just so I can confront you about what the fuck you're doing. I will because I can't wait for an hour thirteen minutes to an hour eighteen minutes on the phone listening to music that sounds like it was inspired by music inspired by Final Fantasy 6 music.

And now, I will say USPS over and over again in hopes some bureaucratic algorithm picks it up in between long sessions of being hacked by the Russians and Chinese.

I give up. I give up. This isn't even a picture of a mailman. It's a picture of a male man. 

Good night.

USPS USPS USPS USPS

United States Postal Service

Wiener or Weiner? #AmericaVotes2016

Dungeons & Dragons

I just finished up my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

I'm thirty years old.

My body is not riddled in acne.

A lot of people were surprised to hear that it was my first go round on the old nerd mobile but the truth is that I had never even heard of D&D until I was well into puberty. You see, I grew up in this little church called the Worldwide Church of God, founded by Herbert Armstrong. You can look him up and see all the paranoid delusions the man spoke as literal gospel. Something like D&D was probably seen as satanic witchcraft.

When I told my dad I was in the middle of a D&D campaign, he revealed to me that he was a player when he was growing up. Of course, I asked why we weren't introduced to it by him.

"Probably thought it was satanic."

Look, my folks are good folks but they were very young when they had kids and a little direction in the form of apocalypse cult was probably pretty good for them. I'm not ashamed. It meant I grew up around a wide swath of humanity but mostly working class folks of all types. 

Now, my whole family is done with that brand of weirdo-Christianity and have moved on to a more acceptable, less crazy form of Christianity. As for me, not really into the whole thing. After several bouts of deep Bible study and all that, I thought myself out of religion. 

I was invited to be a player in a new campaign hosted by my good friend, Luke (the founding member of the If Onlys, whose album you can buy here - it's great). I decided to be a half elf who didn't discover he was half elf until the tail end of puberty when his nose started elongating and his ears started pointing. This was especially unfortunate since he was a low level thug in the human supremacist Human Ancestry Preservation Society (the HAPS, naturally). Once his non-purity was discovered, he was driven out of town to adventure alone as a rogue assassin.

Naturally, I named him Elvis Thurgood.

D&D is a blast for storytelling. Everyone plays the way they want to play and we all get into shit we think we can't get out of until we eventually do. I really think it should be done as a team building exercise for kids in schools to flex their creative muscles collaboratively but that could just be the deepening nerd in me talking.