By Alex Lemon

Fear mongering. Monster burgers. Mongrel dogs that chew apart school girls on reservations. Little old ladies at the grocery store with cartoon pictures of heaven. Please don’t hurry. A blue jay cracking into the picture window. Days when everything breaks. American Idol. Big Brother. Anytime: loud chewing & slurping. Chomping of chewing gum. The cottage cheese-like paint on the wall. Why the cat stares at it. The right answer, without questioning it. Sweating like Billy Graham. Sweating like Paul Bunyan. Bagels on a bike ride through the desert. Unstoppable bleeding. Firestorms. Storm windows in the attic to someone else’s house. Testicles hanging from truck bumpers. A gift of these truck nuts.  The edge of a sticky seat. The smell of whatever was sticky and is now on your hand. Tailless foxes. Foxes born without sight. Dripping faucets. Television news. How very cute.  Cow yards. First I sprained my ankle, then my nutsack ripped open. Non-intuitive plumbing. Newspaper photos of Rick Perry, Dick Cheney & the obese with black rectangles over their eyes. Hornworms. Unicorn horns. Where all my powdered rhinoceros horn vanished to. The need for significance. Clitorectomies. Poor drainage without signage. Parasites, vanishing ozone, unhinged shower handles & drought. Factoids. Hemorrhoids.  Bad metaphors, extended through the night. Poorly rendered maps. Use of the word “compass” when not referring to navigation. Sheep, who through evolution have outsourced their care to the shepherd.  Outsourced everything. Firefighters paid to protect only what an insurance company tells them to. Advertisements camouflaged as news articles. News articles pretending to be objective. Being interrupted by, That’s just Satan talking. Palpitations. Itchy ankles. Without knowing what they are doing, almost everyone. The time between once in a lifetime & might cause irritable bowels. A finger stuck in the net of a basketball hoop. Complex problems addressed by simplicity. Tim McCarver. The average person claiming they have no power. The powerful person who pretends. Biting into a used condom hidden in the refried beans of a burrito. Soggy-bottomed lettuce. Diagrams comparing noses to lassos. A mouth unburdened by brain. Peer to peer. Old money communities that don’t allow people to take still-usable items from their trash. Continuing overpopulation without any thought of cannibalism. Metallica & Beastie Boys mashups. The absence of a one-armed pitcher in major league baseball. Suction-cupped car window signs. Mattresses that somersault out of pickups. Babies on ladders. Stubbed toes. Toe jam. Jimmy Jam not sending me a birthday gift. Paralyzation resulting from the thought of change. Baseball players that can’t lay down a bunt.  The unimaginative; who can’t picture themselves with wings or an entire city inside them. Those who say reading is boring. Static electricity generated from shag carpet. Yucca Mountain. What might have happened to my first girlfriend, whose mother was a Vegas show girl. Humans in gopher suits wearing derbies without wielding a cane. The unfeeling.  Powerpoint presentations that last more than five minutes. Walk-in cigar humidors in private homes.  Not the regrettable behavior, but not admitting to it. Singing dolphins & squeaky people. A flying squirrel in a slow motion film about sexually transmitted infections. Whatever’s fucking with the mulch pile. The seven hundred habits of highly successful & people. The “informed” citizen who refuses to vote. The successful person who does not realize they’re an asshole. Falling down. Felt sombreros. Fast melting popsicles, especially banana.