I’m sitting at a bar with a buddy and his girlfriend, a Bic lighter in my hand.   My buddy motions to the patrons sitting to my left and says, “Dude, show them a magic trick.”

I turn to the girl on the stool next to me and tap her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me.  I’d like to show you an illusion,”  I say, as I position the lighter in one hand and prepare to deftly make it disappear with a slight pass of the other hand.

She looks over at me, then at the lighter, and responds.

“Bones?”

It seems that the legend is growing.

. . .
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This week I made an important discovery.  A discovery of a wonderful something which should not have remained hidden from me for as long as it did.   But nevertheless, I have discovered it.  And it’s a life-changer for your old friend, Bones.

Going forward, should you need to find me, you need not look much further than right outside my neighborhood.  At Cafe Instanbul, where I’ll be.  My new hangout.

Every month or so, my old pal Dirty D. and I will meet up at Java Monkey, a wonderful coffee shop in Decatur, to discuss our respective software careers, our takes on the current state of politics, and mystic physics.  This week we decided to shake things up a bit and try something different.  We decided to meet at Cafe Istanbul, a Mediterranean restaurant located in a small, unassuming strip mall a couple miles up from downtown Decatur, and a short walk from my neighborhood.  Cafe Instanbul has become quite the popular destination for folks looking to enjoy a night of dining on fine turkish cuisine, watching belly dancers do their sexy thang, and smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs.   Dirty D. wanted to check the place out because he’s an aficionado of international menus and because he’d never smoked a hookah.  Me, I had my own reasons for wanting to give the place a visit – specifically,  that big yellow sign that the owners had recently hung from the roof that proudly proclaimed, “NOW SERVING FULL BAR.”
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Hi gang, how are you?  I’m a bit tired.  Early day at the office.  We had a code deployment scheduled for 7am this morning, and for me, like a lot of folks in software development, this was about two and a half hours earlier than my usual work day begins.  When we have these early conference calls, most of the team members roll out of bed, turn on their laptops, and call into the bridge.  You can hear people yawning, sipping coffee, babies crying in the background.   But for me, a creature of the most neurotic of habits, this meant that I had to wake up at 4:45am so I could engage in my normal daily ritual of make coffee, shower, fill up cup of coffee,  peruse my daily news sites, fill up cup of coffee, finish getting ready,  fill up to-go cup of coffee, head to the office.  I explained to my co-workers that these abnormally early work days don’t mean that my schedule is allowed to change in any way . Everything just shifts forward two and half hours.   So now I’m kind of tired.
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I was chatting with some friends at work about business ideas and past  jobs and whatnot, when I sighed, “Ahh, but nothing will compare to my former job of selling snow cones.”

The group turned to look at me.

“Snow cones?”

Maybe it was the particularly frustrating past couple of weeks in the office, or maybe I’m just a moron, but the nostalgia in my voice was unmistakable.  I wasn’t goofing around.  I really missed that job.

“Yeah man, snow cones.  I sat in this tiny dumb wooden shed – a box, really – at the end of a shopping mall parking lot.  Alone, reading books, all day long.  Every now and then a car would pull up to the window, I’d stand up, hand them a snow cone, take their cash, and then sit back down to my book.   It was the best job I’ve ever had.”
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Golden John reached over and grabbed the three sheets of printer paper off of my coffee table, briefly scanned through the lines and lines of printed text, and then began to read aloud.

“A guy walks into a bar with a set of jumper cables.  The bartender says, ‘You can come in, but don’t start anything!’”

Panther and Jamie snickered.  And then Panther asked, “Is that really a bunch of pages of ‘Guy walks into a bar’ jokes?”

Golden John replied calmly in a tone of mock nonchalance, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.  “Yep, it was right here on Bones’s coffee table, next to the whoopie cushion and the ‘Meditating with Mandalas’ book.”

Panther and Jamie shrugged and then went back to their previous conversation.   No one gave it much of a thought, presumably because they weren’t terribly surprised to discover that their weird buddy had a stack of “Guy Walks Into a Bar” jokes, a whoopie cushion, and a “Meditating with Mendalas” book on his coffee table, much in the same way a normal person might keep a book of landscape photography or a basket of remote controls.  Perhaps a bowl of decorative shells.  No one showed any particular surprise at my chosen selection of coffee table decor.  But I felt a bit of happiness about the whole thing – the way Golden John noticed the absurd trio of items and called me out on it.
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I have something important to tell you, but frankly, I really don’t know how to do it.  So, I guess I’ll just start from the beginning.

Earlier today I was playfully experimenting with cold fusion and DNA splicing and … I know what everyone says – “Do NOT mix the two!”…  but I was a little bit drunk, and we all know that liquor courage can often lead to an irresponsible sense of scientific bravado, and I somehow managed to set off a chain of unexpected quantum possibilities so bizarre that it caught nature completely off-guard, and nature quickly realized it had no law to account for what was occurring, and just said, “Fuck it, whatever happens, happens.”

As you might imagine, things got awful strange for a moment there.   And when the cosmic dust eventually settled, I discovered that things had changed in a big way.

And well, um, I’m now famed British actress, Helen Mirren.

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I was just out for a night jog in my dark neighborhood, pumping loud tunes through my head phones, and focusing on  some new dumb scary idea, when I thought I felt movement next to me.  Not expecting to actually see anything, I casually glanced to my left, and spotted a big ass dog charging after me! In reality, he was probably happily running along with me, but hey, how am I supposed to know what trickery this dumb dog had in store?  I panicked, squealed “OH SHIT!!!” really loud, turned on the boosters, and hauled ass as fast as I could from that evil creation.

A couple feet down the road I glanced behind me and noticed that the dog was still back where I had began my frantic sprint. Hanging out, trotting along. He just wasn’t all that interested, it seems.

I look goofy enough when I run normally.  But running scared?  Man oh man.  I hope no one was out there to see that.

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Hey gang – long time, no see.  Apologies for that.  But not really, cause you don’t care, right?  You do?  Well, fine, then I guess we’ll just agree to disagree.  No really, let’s just…  Look…  Why do you always do this?   I can’t even talk to you anymore.  Yes.  Yes of course I love you.  It’s why I drink.  Cause I love you so much.  It’s your fault.

Anyway, so I finally finished a new short story.  It took me a while to get through this one – lack of free time and all that – but hopefully the stretched out writing time frame doesn’t detract too much from the tale  (it does).  The story fits in with my favorite themes of… chant it with me… alcoholism, nihilism, death!  Ok, not really too much on the booze part, but the narrator is a bartender, so there’s that, I guess.  This is my attempt at a ghost story, but it ended up being more of a telling of murder and claustrophobia.  Or something like that.   It’s a bit long, I admit, but if you’re bored and looking for something to read, I suggest printing out the pdf and taking it with you to the can.  Or maybe sit down with a glassful of absynthe and a pipe full of opium, and get your Poe on.  Just kidding.   Just roll around in a pile of catnip, you playful little kitten. Meow, you dirty thing.  Aren’t you cute?  I hate you.  Sorry, I’m drinking my latest batch of homebrew – my “John McClane All-American IPA” and should probably not be typing right now.

So what were we talking about?  Oh yes, the story.  Here you go -  you can read it here on the blog, or download the pdf.

I’ve got a couple more stories that I intend to kick out next.  One is about a creep at a bar, another is about auto-erotic asphyxiation.  Write what you know about, so sayeth Mark Twain.  And by “what you know about”, I mean “what YOU know about.”  Creep.  Get some help.

Ok, now I’m just getting annoying.  I’m going to bed.  Sweet dreams and sleep screams, my friends.

I stumbled across a new site the other night, omegle.com.  Heard of it?  It’s a simple site where you chat with a stranger.   That’s it.  That’s all you do.  I’ve never had any interest in online chatting, cause I’m not terribly fond of what others have to say, but there’s something strangely addictive about this site.  No registration, no usernames, no specified topics -  just a big button that says “Start a Chat.”  Click it, omegle randomly grabs a stranger from the pool, and the two of you start chatting – until one of you decides to abruptly disconnect from the discussion, no apologies or goodbyes required.  I gave it a few trial runs, and I have to assume that the strangers on the other side are all pretty girls at the bar… considering my abysmal failures in holding a conversation with a single one of them.

Below you’ll find the transcripts of my attempts to converse with strangers on omegle.com:

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Some time ago I woke up on a Saturday morning feeling a bit loopy, my brain clouded by an immense preoccupation with, um,  dice.  I don’t know what it was that had invaded my dreams the night before, but whatever it had been, it had left an imprint in my mind that I couldn’t shake.  Considering that I’ve never had much interest in gambling just made the whole thing even more random and odd.  Nevertheless, there it was, or rather, there they were, two dice, in the forefront of my thoughts.  I understood that, for whatever reason, the day would consist of a pair of dice stuffed into my jean pockets, bouncing across a bartop, or resting in my open palm, their black snake eyes staring up at me, guiding me.  But why?   As the day wore on, it slowly began to dawn on me just what role these dice were going to play.  Soon I understood.  Oh yes, yes I did.

I grabbed my phone and called my buddy, Thane.

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