Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. —Ambrose Bierce
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Category Archives: satire
The Blathering Idiot and the Bowl Museum
The blathering idiot was helping Xenia get her breakfast. Xenia was his on again, off again, on again girlfriend’s six-year-old daughter. Why Xenia’s name didn’t begin with a “Z,” like her mother’s – Zelda – the blathering idiot didn’t understand, but he didn’t and it was a school day, so it was a question for another time.
While helping her with breakfast, the blathering idiot thought he would impress Xenia. He found a one-serving box of her favorite cereal, and the box had perforations on one side of the outside that formed an “I.” When he opened the box using the perforations, it instantly turned the box into a bowl.
Dinosaur on the way to the Bowl Museum
Xenia looked at the box with the flaps folded back and the cereal floating in milk. Then she looked up at the blathering idiot. “So, this was what you used before they invented bowls?”
The blathering idiot was dumbfounded.
Xenia had a piece of toast for breakfast.
Later that morning, when the blathering idiot was walking Xenia to school, he told her stories about his walking to school, and he often had to do it all by himself and how it was a long walk full of wild animals and dark places and not nearly as easy as it is today.
Xenia nodded, and as they stood outside the front door of the school, she looked up at the blathering idiot and asked, “Did you see many dinosaurs back then?”
The Blathering Idiot and the Call of Nature
The blathering idiot and his girl friend, Zelda, decided that the first day of Spring was the perfect time to go out into Nature, to experience the Wilds. Except, it was not as easy as either one of them would like. As the blathering idiot found out, Zelda was allergic to rag weed, tree pollen, broad-leaf grasses, and short-leafed flowers just to name a few of the offending items. The blathering idiot, too, was finding he had allergies to many wild animals with fur or feathers or scales, as well as a strong allergic reaction to poison ivy.
They had both also heard of the smog alert creeping up even into the mountains, the need for more sunscreen due to increased global warming, and the invasion of fire ants and even killer African Bees.
At first, the blathering idiot didn’t know what to do. And after a while, it was beginning to look more and more like the trip into Mother Nature wasn’t going to happen. Then the blathering idiot had an idea. It took him a while to fashion on the pieces of the idea into one final whole, but when he was done, both he and Zelda agreed that it was the only way they could both get out into Nature.
"Honey, isn't Nature wonderful?! We really should get outside more often."
His only regret was that he drank too much water before going out into Nature and he hadn’t put a convenience zipper in the front of his.
The blathering idiot, taxes, and heaven
The blathering idiot was sitting at the kitchen table doing his taxes, when in a fit of confusion and boredom at the inane complexity of a form, he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he was in heaven. He knew this was the case because the disciple Matthew greeted him. The blathering idiot sat up and looked around. Heaven was not like anything he imaged. The primary thing that struck him about it was how rundown it appeared. The pearly gates looked rusty and slightly out of plumb. They didn’t close tightly. Some things that looked like trash tumbled from heavenly prominence to heavenly prominence, making slight rustling sounds like empty plastic shopping bags. Even the angels’ wings looked sooty and their gowns looked frayed and not quite as dazzling as whitest of whites sound be. One angel was even wearing a frayed t-shirt that read “Angels are people too.” Infrastructure neglect was everywhere.
Matthew had a sad and besmirched look on his face. “We cannot get God to pay attention to heaven. He says he is constantly fighting an endless war with Satan, and sending hurricanes to New Orleans and earthquakes to Haiti and such to punish people for their wicked ways, even if they are already long dead. He says he has no time to keep up heaven. But we have a plan and it involves you.”
The blathering idiot listened to the plan. He wasn’t sure if it would work, but if the blathering idiot succeeded, he could stay in heaven if he wanted.
“And if I don’t succeed?” the blathering idiot asked.
Matthew, the former tax collector, frowned, and then slowly shook his head.
The blathering idiot practiced over and over what he was going to say, and when he was ready, Matthew and some angels, including the one with the t-shirt, dressed him in the most scary costume they could think of, and then they sent him to see God.
"Well, Almighty, our records still show you owe back taxes for several million years."
Shortly after that, or so it felt like, the blathering idiot woke up, an IRS form stuck to the side of his face.
Once he removed it, he glanced around. The world looked like he was back exactly where he had always been, back where he was before his trip to heaven. The blathering idiot didn’t know if that was good or bad, if that meant he had succeeded or not. He once again read over the form that had been stuck to his cheek, and he continued to wonder.
The blathering idiot launders his own heart
The blathering idiot sat in the coin-operated launder mat watching his clothes dry. It had been a tough time since Valentine’s Day. He had forgotten to get his girl friend anything: no card, no flowers, no gift no matter how inexpensive, and though she was willing to forgive him, she said they needed to talk, and they would do so on the day he brought his laundry over.
The blathering idiot knew what talk meant. It meant that he, the blathering idiot, would need to make amends. He came prepared to offer everything: two-dozen flowers, three cards, an expensive dinner, an entire weekend watching “chick flicks.” Only thing she had to do was tell him what she wanted.
What she wanted from him was something he hadn’t anticipated. She simply said he wasn’t being romantic enough in the relationship and what did he intend to do about it?
The blathering idiot thought about it.
His girl friend waited.
“If I wore my heart on my sleeve, would you launder it?”
He stared at his pile of dirty laundry, hoping for inspiration.
Finally, he remembered that she’d often told him that while she wore her heart on her sleeve, he seemed to keep his tucked away somewhere, so he said something he thought was witty, something he thought would break the tension, something that might make her laugh and then they would forget about the question.
He said, “If I wore my heart on my sleeve, would you launder it?”
For the foreseeable future, the blathering idiot was laundering his own heart at a coin-operated place of his choosing.
He found no inspiration as he watched his shirts tumble dry.
Filed under blathering idiot, Cartoon, humor, observation, satire, story, words, writing
The blathering idiot’s dream
The blathering idiot was visiting his shrink one day and started talking about his attempts to write and why he wasn’t successful. The shrink asked why he, the blathering idiot, thought he wasn’t yet published in a magazine like The New Yorker?
The blathering idiot said, “I asked myself that question almost every morning when I looked in the mirror. ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ I said, ‘will The New Yorker come my way?’
Doc, I asked myself that question every morning when I looked in the mirror.
“And one day a New Yorker was delivered to my house by mistake, and from then on, I quit asking. I don’t even look in that mirror any more, for fear it might read my thoughts and make something else come true in its twisted way.
“But I fear it may have already happened, for I once asked it to make me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams … and from then on I didn’t dream any more.”
The Org Over Easy
The blathering idiot sat in the diner trying to figure out the organization of the company that had hired him and where he fit into things. He had the organizational chart “Org chart” of the company and the menu of the diner out on his table. He also had a glass of water that he had already spilled once and was still wiping up when the waitress approached.
She asked the blathering idiot what he wanted for breakfast.
“Org Over Easy,” the blathering idiot said.
She stared over the top of her glasses at him and canted her hip slightly. “Sir, that’s not on the menu.”
“Yes, it is. Over Easy or Sunny Side Up.”
“Org?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed. “That won’t be available until 8 o’clock.”
The Org Over Easy
“Eight o’clock. That’s outlandish.”
“And they’ll be a Sir charge.”
“A surcharge?!” The blathering idiot felt the heat rising to his ears. That always happened when he got embarrassed or angry. He felt a little of both now.
“Yes, sir, a charge on top of our normal Over Easy price.”
“Why?”
“Because orgs are always hard to get over easy.”
Filed under blathering idiot, Cartoon, humor, Random Access Thoughts, satire, words, writing
And you know something…
There were things the blathering idiot understood and there were things he didn’t. Sometimes, he tried to understand the things he didn’t. One day, he tried to understand why man was here. What was human kinds purpose on this earth? Were we here to glorify a god or gods? Were we here to glorify gold? Were we here to learn all we could learn and then leave it behind when we die? Were we here to love and laugh, or suffer and cry?
"And you know something else. I not only don't know why we're here, I'm sure I don't want to know."
The blathering idiot tried and tried to tease an answer out of the question. Finally, after having written for an hour on bar napkins and then thrown away all the answers he’d come up with, he picked up his root beer, took a swig, and proclaimed to the bartender while tapping on the bar, “And you know something else. I not only don’t know why we’re here, I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
He wasn’t sure, but the blathering idiot thought the bartender was happy with that answer.
Filed under blathering idiot, Cartoon, humor, Random Access Thoughts, satire, words, writing
Reform, it’s not what you think
It was a cold day and the wind was blowing. The Blathering Idiot and his friend, Gary, were walking to take place in a protest against some change they knew little about but felt had to be protest because somebody on the radio had told them so.
The Blathering Idiot turned to his friend and said, “You know, Gary, the biggest problem with reform is that it requires you to think.”
Gary paused for a minute, then said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”
"You know, Gary, the biggest problem with reform is that it requries you to think."
They stopped and looked at each other. First one minute passed. Then another, and another, each looking at the other.
“I think we’ve discovered something profound,” Gary said.
Finally, they decided to turn around and go back home, where at least they could think in a warm place.
The Job Application
A new year had begun, and the blathering idiot resolved to find a job.
The blathering idiot applies for a job
He saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of a building and went inside to apply.
He sat at the table with the form and did his best to fill it out. The first line said: Name.
He wrote: I have one.
Sex.
He wrote: Yes
Place of birth.
He wrote: A hospital, though I don’t remember the exact event. This is what I have been told.
Put your hometown here:
It won’t fit.
References:
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Gregg’s Reference Manual, Chicago Manual of Style.
What attracted you to this position?
The sign in the window.
Salary expectations:
To get paid regularly.
What sort of challenges are you looking for?
I am not looking for challenges. I am looking for a job.
When he was finished, the blathering idiot looked over the questionnaire one last time. There was one question he had skipped, and he still did not have an answer for it. He looked at it again, first staring at it and then looking away. He felt he should write something, but what?
The blathering idiot was about to give up and return the form incomplete, when it struck him what he should write. He had seen this exact wording on similar pages in other documents. He had never fully understood what it meant until now.
The question was: Use the blank side of this form to provide any additional information.
To which the blathering idiot wrote: This side intentionally left blank.
Filed under blathering idiot, Job Hunting, satire, word play, words, writing
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