Penis.

A cow so fat from grass,
her milk will last a while.

A cow who’s now a side of beef.
A cow who’s hung by her legs on a hook.

She swings from side to side.
She's skinned. She's veined.

She's white as gauze, with red
on her nubs. A tube of ribs.

Her flesh is set, her blood is dry,
but her milk still flows, still fresh.

A deleted scene.

I'm re-writing my thesis script.

It's a buddy comedy between God and a skeptic.

The twist is that God's a dumb guy who happens to be omnipotent. He realizes what a shitty job he's done, creating an uncertain universe and whatnot, and he wants to commit suicide.

Unfortunately, if God commits suicide, the Universe will die with him. So Harry the skeptic must convince him that there's a Meaning of Life.

Here's a scene from the first draft. I love it, but it won't be in the new draft.

Where we are in the story: the roles have changed. Harry the skeptic is now suicidal, and God wants to keep his buddy alive.

One of my jobs is burying roadkill.

Today I found an armadillo.


It didn't look like an armadillo at first. More like a gray football that had been deflated. I only realized that it wasn't a football when I lifted it, and felt its weight.

While this was unsanitary, it wasn't gruesome. The armadillo was packed neatly inside its cracked taco of a shell. It didn't twitch, leak, or even squish.

As I laid it in its grave, I couldn't help but think, "What remarkable manners!"

Is that so much to ask for?

I just want a girl who'll keep re-watching Hannah and Her Sisters, Company, and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice while daydreaming about the girls I love with me.

(Maybe I should wait to make an eHarmony profile.)

Thanks to the internet...

...we can communicate constantly.

For example, I'm typing this blog post in real time!

Why, you're even reading it in real time!

So this is being written and read simultaneously!

The future, my friends, is now.

I wrote a joke yesterday.

The premise is okay, but the execution needs work. It goes:

I'm gonna put an assortment of my personal essays into one book, and call them a manual biography.

The punchline relies upon the audience associating a manual biography with an autobiography.

Unfortunately, the phrasing does a lousy job of leading the audience to the punchline. This was confirmed by my test audience. My mother was part of the test audience.

Meanwhile.

I've written a lot of poems. I hadn't read 'em for a while, but I remember they were publishable-ish. My ego could use a boost...and I guess I could deign to be published...so I looked back over the ol' oeuvre.

The good news: my poems are pretty good.

The bad news: my poems are all about male insecurity and masturbation.

There's not much of a market for that.

I presented this problem to my mother. "Should I widen the scope of my subject matter," I asked, "or should I publish a book of poems about male insecurity and masturbation?"

Mom thought hard for a moment, and then her eyes lit up.

"If you did the latter," she said, "it would definitely be a manual biography!"

The greatest human achievement of the twentieth century.

When I was in Los Angeles, I took a standardized test that would certify me to teach high school. The test had three sections: Reading Comprehension, Math, and Writing.

One of the prompts in the Writing section was, "What is the greatest human achievement of the twentieth century?"

I was a little paralyzed by the scope of the question, but by the end, I was proud of my essay. So proud, in fact, that I've re-written it here.

Humankind had an especially productive twentieth century. When comparing feats like the isolation of penicillin, Apollo 11's moon landing, and the creation of the internet, it is difficult to exalt one above the others. Fortunately, these paltry successes are dwarfed by an achievement that will no doubt be remembered as our legacy to nature, itself. This triumph is the Rainier cherry, and it is the most perfect fruit on Earth.

Sometimes my dad sends me inspirational text messages.

Today's text was, "Dr. Seuss' first book was rejected thirty times before it was published."

"That's encouraging," I replied," but Dr. Seuss' books are, like, ten pages long. How many times can you re-write a ten page book before it becomes a new book?"

"That was his niche," he explained, nonplussed.

I wonder how many times I'll have to re-write my joke for him to understand it.