Facebook status updates part XXXVIII (August 2015)

“I can’t even manage word salad. Here, have these croutons. They’re … croutonites.”

Six words for seven wounds.

Jeff beamed at his teacher. “Three.”

“Pardon?”

“I get off school at least three days this years for funerals if the last two years are anything to go by. At last count, I have 28 step-grandparents; my family believe that one should practise until one is perfect at marriage. My Christmases are epic in scope.”

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t deal with having a beard.”

“But you’ve never had a beard, dear?”

“I’m sorry, but I have. For so many years.”

I said I was waiting for a dream that would not end but all I ever wanted was a nightmare once with you.

I opened the door only to find you were not on the other side.

If you had ever been there at all.

You told me we lived in a world full of mirrors, but I didn’t expect them all to bring bad luck.

No one gave Doctor Colon his due as a supervillain. Not until he performed a colonic irrigation on Hyperlord without touching him, and billed the resulting therapeutic session to the Council of Heroes at extortionate rates.

“Autocorrect keeps altering my poems, changing the words from one thing into another. It can only mean one thing: autocorrect is the god we all deserve. And Siri is the harbinger.”

“What do you think we are if not stories without happy endings?”

I apologized to you with words I never knew were mine to give away.

“I said I wanted to be immortal and you – you –.”

“I put your face on the Internet. You will live on in memes long after your name is forgotten.”

“My phone autocorrects so many words to your name now. If we broke up, I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

“I think it is a sign of privilege to have problems that can easily be summed up by hashtags.”

“Jerk.”

“Case in point.”

Hell, I'd argue it's technically EASY to be at peace with yourself. If you finish a day and don't kill yourself, it's a kind of peace. Not the BS new age kind, but at least something of acceptance, and a willingness to keep on trying.

... thoughts like this are why any self-help book I'd write would be damn weird

“There are too many bear traps for me to waste my time on dreams,” the bear said quietly, and after that was never seen again, not any either side of night.

Imagine if you could live your life as if every accident was really fate.

“I can’t do this. We don’t talk anymore, not really. Every conversation just feels like a quick time event in a video game now, one where everything we say does nothing to change the outcome.”

Why is it that when real life imitations fiction, it always chooses horror stories?

“I told the truth because I finally didn’t have any more room in my head for more lies.

“That doesn’t mean I deserve to lose the election.”

“See? I told you I was sensitive.”

“Sensitive teeth isn’t the same thing at all.”

“I can’t do this. We don’t talk anymore, not really. Every conversation just feels like a quicktime event in a video game now, one where everything we say does nothing to change the outcome.”

[This post has been censored in accordance with the sixth Geneva convention. If you thought there was a post here, you were wrong. If you persist in being wrong, agents will be sent to your home to arrange a course in stringent rehabilitation.]

When I was five, I thought all the people mom brought home were candidates, and the one I liked most would be my dad. At fourteen, I tried to win a student election but was told I didn’t smile enough. At seventeen, I was kicked out of a political studies class for saying anarchy was the only viable government. At eighteen I voted on principle, at twenty-two according to party lines and by thirty I’d stopped voting at all, unable to distinguish between the different kinds of monsters that all wore the same smile.

I turned on the predictive text for my phone and it told me so many things. So many wonderfully terrible things.

But it never mentioned us together. Not even once.

“You say you are not a computer, and yet you let me program you with mere words.”

… the world is full of facts. Littered with them, in truth, but every fact was bookended by opinions that tried to drag and pull them into new shapes.

You turned truth into semantic word games as if that could be enough to hide behind

“Excuse me? You are the kid my wife hired to walk our dog and you are trying to blackmail me?”

“I know photoshop inside and out, sir.” I smiled. “And computers. Would you like to have an Ashley Madison account for your wife to discover?”

“What?”

“You really shouldn’t have tried to get away with paying me less than minimum wage.”

“KNOW, oh meme, that between the time when Yahoo devoured Tumblr and the fall of Geocities, and the years of the rise of Facebook, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining edifices spread through the digital world like microsoft paperclips beneath loadscreens -- Myspace, WordPerfect, Netscape, Lotus with its ancient programs and baffling extensions, Google Answers with its wisdom, Ask Jeeves that bordered on the pastoral realms of xxx. But the proudest kingdom was Napster in the dreaming darkweb. Hither came the government, stereotypical, bland of character, an adjective noun who verbs, with a meme-worthy face and gigantic DCMA takedowns with which to tread the jewelled thrones of the Internet underneath digital toes.”

Once upon a time, there was a witch who made a home entirely out of candy but she died of diabetes – the type that was her own fault – long before any children could be enticed into her oven.