Old Cop Young Cop Day!

They’re doing the Old Cop Young Cop routine to try and get you to talk.

Young Cop: Confess, Tough Guy! I know you did it, and I’m gonna put you away. I’ll be doing this city a favor.

Old Cop: Even if we do put him away, there are ten more like him waiting in line. I’ve seen it again and again. After every bad guy, there’s a worse guy.

Young Cop: Don’t listen to him, Tough Guy. If you go to jail it’ll make a difference. It’ll make this city a better place. Confess.

Old Cop: Confess if you want. Go free if you want. It won’t matter. This city gets worse every year. I remember when I thought I could do good, clean up the streets. But blood doesn’t wash off concrete so easily.

Young Cop: Dude, shut up! Look he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Tough Guy. I got a wife and kid at home, and I want to make a better life for them by making sure you’re behind bars.

Old Cop: I could’ve had a wife and kid. I even got engaged once. But she knew I was married to the job. I thought if I didn’t marry her, I could at least do my part to make the city in which she lived a safer place.

Young Cop: See that! He chose the job because putting away scumbags like you is important. Confess!

Old Cop: She was murdered the following year. The killer was never found. If only I’d gone through with the wedding. I could have had one blissful year of love instead of impotently chasing scumbags.

Young Cop: You’re so not helping!

Old Cop: I’m too old to help. Too old to play good guys and bad guys and pretend it’s anything more than a game. No matter how hard I fought crime, they still killed her.

Young Cop: Maybe I can do better! Maybe I can make the city better for my wife and child. Maybe if I get Tough Guy to confess, I can make it so your lover’s death wasn’t for nothing.

Old Cop: It was for nothing.

Old Cop shoots himself.

Young Cop: Now do you see what you’re responsible for? Tough guys like you broke his spirit. His death is on your hands. Can you live with that?

You can’t. You know you can’t. You tell Young Cop the truth. You rigged your cable box to get Cinemax for free. You just wanted to see the hot new Amish country-set crime drama Banshee, may God have mercy on your soul.

Young Cop: Works every time!

Happy Old Cop Young Cop Day!

Get Fired Day!

Today’s the day to go into your boss’s office and get fired.

“The reason for this meeting today,” tell your boss, “is things at the company are in flux.”

“What?” your boss asks.

“It’s not that I’m not doing good work,” tell him. “It’s that there’s just less work to be done.”

“What’s going on?” he asks. He looks around the room, panicked, searching for someone to offer you a reprieve. Then he looks back at you, waiting for you to deliver the final blow.

“If it were up to you,” tell him. “I’d stay on indefinitely. Unfortunately, it’s not up to you.”

“Who’s it up to?” your boss asks. “Who’s pulling the strings?”

“The men upstairs,” tell him.

“Those bastards!” your boss says. “They don’t know how to keep up with the times. If they’d only have listened to your suggestions.”

“I can’t argue with you there,” you tell your boss. “They’re letting me go so they can hang on to their precious salaries and their archaic idea of how things should work.”

“Can’t I do something?” your boss asks. “I could go to bat for you.”

“We both know any effort on your part to save my job would fall on deaf ears,” explain to your boss.

“Seventeen years though,” your boss says. “You’ve been here seventeen years and this is how they treat you.”

“The world’s upside down, what can I say.” You try and reassure him. “Someone as talented as me though, I’m sure I’ll land on my feet.”

“At your age?” your boss asks. “Middle-aged guy going job hunting? We both know it’ll be a long time before you end up somewhere, and you’ll have to accept something way below what you deserve.”

“You need to think of this as a fresh start for me,” tell your boss.

“Yeah but I’m not the one going through it,” your boss says.

Stand up and extend your hand for him to shake. “I know it’s going to work out for me,” tell him.

Your boss reluctantly shakes your hand.

“It’s not fair,” he says.

“It never is,” you tell him. “Jeffrey here will escort me out.”

Jeffrey the security guard is at the door, holding a box of your things.

“Is this really necessary?” your boss asks.

“I’m afraid it is,” you tell him. “It’s not that they don’t trust me. It’s about liability.”

Your boss searches for something to say.

“If there’s anything I need, I’ll call you,” you assure him.

“I appreciate that,” your boss says.

Jeffrey escorts you down in the elevator, carrying your things to your car. You drive home while your boss sits in his office, wondering what in God’s name you’re going to tell your wife.

Happy Get Fired Day!

Your Poetry Kills Day!

The police are at the door.

“Open up, ma’am!” they shout. “It’s over!”

You grab your notebook and start reading:

“Here I sit
By my window
Just a bit
Of caramello”

You can hear the screams outside in the hall. They’re struggling to put on headphones. You keep reading.

“I remember our kiss
Your face in the rain
Now when I think of it
I only feel pain”

The blood is puddling on the hallway floor and seeping under your apartment door. You can still hear some rustling of limbs. Time to finish them off.

“Go west cloud!
Thunder red! Thunder loud!”

One last death rattle and they’re nothing but a pile of bodies in uniforms. You grab the bag, open the window, and climb down the fire escape to avoid ruining your shoes with cop blood. They can come for you, they can try to silence you, but your poetry must be free. It’s not your fault that it causes people to bleed from the ears and die when they hear it. If they want to press charges they can go and arrest your muse.

Happy Your Poetry Kills Day!

God In A Bong Day!

You bought a brand new bong, but you didn’t realize how special it was. When you rub it just the right way, God comes out.

“Holy crap,” you say, staring at the face of God. “How’d that happen.”

“It’s a glitch in the universe,” he says. “Bongs work in such a way that sometimes they suck me out of the heavens and onto your couch. Anyway, want to see some magic?”

“Of course!”

God claps his hands and sends the planet into a thousand years of darkness.

“Suck me back into the bong will ya’?” God says. “Take a big hit.”

You have trouble lighting the bong because fire doesn’t work anymore thanks to God’s trick.

“You mean I’m stuck down here? No way!”

God claps his hands and light and fire and warmth is returned to the world.

“Okay, light that shit and suck me out of this pit,” he says.

You take a big hit and suck God back into your bong and when you free the carb Got seeps out and soars back to heaven.

“Bye God!” you shout.

Your roommates come out of their rooms and ask you who they were talking to. You don’t say. You don’t tell them how close you all came to a world of empty darkness. You don’t want to bum anybody out.

Happy God In A Bong Day!

Call Your Mother Day!

Ask her how she is.

“Turn yourself in!” she shouts.

Tell her you don’t want to focus on you. You just want to hear about her.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Honey turn yourself in and this can all be over.”

Tell her she always does this. No matter how much you want to really know her, to really see her open up and show herself to you, she never will. She just immediately shifts focus onto you and your report cards and your job interviews and your having been implicated as the ringleader in the biggest bank heist in American history.

“What’s so awful about your life that you want to hide it away in the dark, Ma?” you say.

Your mom tells you that janitor who got burned by the shape charge explosion died yesterday.

“Oh great, now it’s lecture time!”

Happy Call Your Mother Day!