Reaching for the Bling Ring (Feat. Chris Christie)

Stanley had waited all his life for this moment and it had finally come – the Bling Ring was his. Standing atop the Washington Monument, Stanley had listened to Sly Stone songs backwards for clues that told him this was where the bling ring had been hidden, he felt like about 3 million in cash and belongings (most of them stolen from Paris Hilton).

“But Stanley!” New Jersey Governor and part time adventuring sidekick Chris Christie exclaimed “What about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Surely those are a bigger treasure than the Bling ring?”

“Worth more, maybe, but they don't contain the power of the Bling Ring! With the bling ring I could bring the Sacremento Kings, Washington Redskins, Dallas Cowboys and the New Jersey Nets under my control, Chris Christie! Who are you to argue with that, Chris Christie?!”

Stanley had a habit of saying people's full names. He felt it had more impact that way.

“Maybe you could even get Patti Stanger to stop saying terrible things that offend gay people?” Chris Christie suggested.

“No, Chris Christie, there are some things even the Bling Ring cannot do” Stanley mournfully replied while daydreaming about Patti Stanger making out with Eddie Cibrian “Hey Chris Christie, how do you pronounce Cibrian?”

But before Chris Christie could answer Stanley's question, Eddie Cibrian's ex – Brandi Glanville – finished clawing her way to the top of the monument and interrupted with “I DON'T EVEN KNOW”.

Stanley turned to look at what could be poorly described as A Brandi Glanville Picture “Whoah there Brandi Glanville, I know you're upset by how Eddie left you to sleep with Demarcus Ware of the Dallas Cowboys but...”

“It wasn't just Demarcus Ware that Eddie slept with. There was also Dez Bryant...and...well...he....he just....did Dallas”

“Eddie Cibrian slept with the entire DALLAS COWBOYS?” Chris Christie exclaimed between erotic fantasies about Patti Stanger reading the dead sea scrolls while wearing the confederate flag. They were some pretty good fantasies, if you find a confluence between modern ignorance and ancient ignorance to be erotic!

“I do! I find a combination of Patti Stanger, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Confederate flag to be erotic!” exclaimed Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain. “How the hell did you read my mind? As well as the narration?!?” exclaimed Chris Christie, who did not stop his fantasizing.

“Oh” Herman Cain replied “I discovered that if you wrap the Dead Sea Scrolls in a Godfather's pizza, then eat the whole thing, you gain telepathic powers from Jesus”

“From Jesus?” Stanley excitedly barfed, wishing he'd grabbed the Dead Sea Scrolls instead of the Bling Ring.

“Well, that's what I'm going to tell voters – you actually get telepathic powers from the secret ingredient, doritos” Herman Cain explained.

“Wait, that telepathy pizza has to have the Dead Sea Scrolls on it but the secret ingredient is DORITOS?” Brandi Glanville shouted over the high wind that had started up.

At this point Sean Avery showed up “Hey guys, check out my new Amazon tablet!”

“Okay WAIT A MINUTE NOW” Chris Christie yelled, still fantasizing “ We've got Stanley, me – Chris Christie, Brandi Glanville, telepathic Herman Cain and now Sean Avery all standing around on the tip of the Washington monument! This is kind of nuts!”

“Almost as nuts as that Amanda Knox girl, eh Chris Christie?” Stanley spurted from behind the glowing magnificence of the Bling Ring, which he was secretly using to make Sean Avery begin sexting Patti Stanger with his Amazon tablet.

“Hey, too soon Stanley” Chris Christie correctly chastised.

“Guys” Brandi Glanville verbed “I've heard everybody's full name here except Stanley's and that is strange – not unlike my ex, Eddie Cibrian, deciding to leave me so he can sleep with the entire Dallas Cowboys (including but not limited to Demarcus Ware and Dez Bryant).”

Stanley was too busy kissing the Bling Ring to answer, so telepathic Herman Cain read his mind. Herman Cain's jaw dropped.

“What?” squirted Chris Christie “What's his full name, Herman Cain?”

“It's” Herman Cain began “It's....Stanley Eric Oberton”

“Geez” Sean Avery said, having just sent twelve terabytes of premium gay sexting to Patti Stanger “SEO? That's a little on the nose, don't you think?”

“I suppose you could say that Stanley getting a hold of a mystical bling ring that let's him control professional athletes is a kind of SEO optimization? Eh guys?” Chris Christie Chimed in.

Stanley, Chris Christie, Brandi Glanville, telepathic Herman Cain and Sean Avery all enjoyed a good belly laugh about that one and became friends for life.

Then they all climbed down from the Washington Monument and went for some doritos.

THE END

Plastic Swans

A swan swallows small plastic particles with each piece of the bread I'm throwing into the water near it. Each particle helps to slowly build a clear, deadly coating for the inside of the swan's stomach. The unintended cruelty that only occurs to me after I have tossed the last morsel over the guardrail. My solution being to do a painting or write about it. The swan looks happy enough, but that's just me anthropomorphizing it. I'm putting a smile on it's beak every time I look.

These small plastic particles will eventually find their way into the world's largest ocean, where they will be caught in it's strongest currents and carried deep down into it's own organs where they shall harm and even kill anything bigger than a plastic particle. They are changing the water's composition. More literal than anything Disney has ever done, that which composes 60% of our bodies is turning to plastic. We are turning into plastic.

Trying a thing

And the piano played.

He stepped out of his house into a crumbling world. Clouds rolled by and cast shadows on all our mistakes as we committed them.

We should be committed.

Birds overhead, fools below.

Every one of his actions set off complex sequences of events which all contributed to entropy, but he did them anyway.

His nerves were electric and directionless when they weren’t numb and still. Everything ran on a gradient, or so it seemed, and binary fantasies plagued him.

Heroic anger was his deepest vice. Sanitized visions of a post-apocalyptic world were his dearest fantasies, but for the odd passion play now and then.

His every step was taken in a powerful stride. Many people looked at him as he passed by. They just looked. Air passed through his nose and told him popular secrets.

The man he hated went about his own days unawares of how he would be completed.

No matter how far he walked, fury’s undertow was always strong enough to pull him under.

He wasn’t the toughest, but he was tough enough for the task at hand. He would complete the grinning, pudgy hedonist. He would purge this feeling from himself and stab it directly between the jackanapes’s every joint, then pry him apart.

Terrible and sublime and all points between, this feeling pounded down upon him and seeped into every nook and cranny. 3000 miles between them hadn’t been too little a space for it to fill. He kept his screams for nobody but himself – his jaw would surely dislocate if he tried to vocalize them.

Authors

By Devon Daniels
--------------------

"Be interesting or be gone" she said while shaking the poorly made cocktail mixer, her long fingers becoming moist with martini that slipped through a crack where the body met the cap.

Wanting to stay, he had to be interesting. So he was.

Which was impressive, given that stories had stalked through their lives and rendered so much of what could be between them into stale stereotypes and cauliflower-flavored clichés. The stories stealthy hands stole and snatched and snapped their fingers to the beat of the soundtrack.

"I do something a little dangerous I guess you might say"

"Oh?" she purred as she poured "I guess I might say, if I knew what it was"

"Well, you know I might just tell you if you hand me one of those drinks you're laying out there"

"Don't be evasive, it's tedious" she replied, running her fingers along the rim of the olive jar.

Every human being on Earth was in some way contributing towards the death of the one home they have, including these two, but you can't think about that now.

Sitting on a stool, he looked up at her in a way that struck her just right. A couple of pleasant memories were unlocked by the angle of his shoulders as he rested one hand on each knee and this bought him some time, though he didn't know it.

Smiling, she let him know that "If you tell me a little then you can drink a little".

Coy at first, he told her all about some crimes he was involved in which brought a regular income he could probably have earned at any number of mid-level office jobs. But then those jobs wouldn't have brought him the scars along his forearms, some forming long streaks and others being the result of puncture wounds. A couple of scars combined along the left arm, near his wrist, to illustrate three shooting stars. Ignoring most of what he said, she couldn't stop wondering if this was a pattern that came from chance or if it was something he'd carved himself.

"Okay shut up shut up" she said as sweetly as you can say that "And, um, here is the thing...". One hand on the stem of her martini glass, the other found it's way along his thick neck.

It wasn't long before they were upstairs and she was finding more scars along his body, writing a story in her head for each one. She briefly wondered if he was writing a story about her body, but quickly decided that if so then it was almost certainly a six foot three exclamation mark laying in the dead center of an otherwise blank page that measured the exact width and length of a queen sized bed.

She didn't get pregnant, so she'd done her part for the green movement that day.

Charlotte vs Style

Charlotte, sitting atop the bed “Indian Style”, looked about the room and thought that maybe she was being a little unfair to Clive. Every square inch of the decoration had been left to her and, as with most things left to her, it had wound up covered in Strawberry Shortcake paraphernalia – amongst other popular franchises from her childhood.

Gem and the Holograms posters (Ebay) covered the west wall while a mixture of Ms. Shortcake (Mostly Ebay, some from a car boot sale) and She-Ra (Presents from Clive) posters covered the East. The South wall had the dresser and the closet, both of which had an assortment of lunchboxes, action figures and the occasional, unusual artefact such as a My Little Pony Board Game or a Ninja Turtle. That last item often got used as evidence that not everything of Charlotte’s was explicitly feminine.

Picking her feet up with her hands, she swirled around on her bum to face the north wall. That held the only decoration that was contentious between Charlotte and Clive, a large oil painting of them making love. It had taken a good deal of marijuana to relax Clive enough to actually pose for the reference photo that her friend had used, but he’d been rather taken by the idea from the moment she’d proposed it. It was only once it actually hung on their wall that it occurred to Clive that visitors might wander in and see it. “Well the bedroom is our private space, they’ve no place to judge anything we have in here” she’d said to him “Besides, I’m sure their eyes will only be drawn to your winning smile”.

Since then, whenever Clive had talked about getting a lock on their bedroom door or maybe putting the painting away “just for a little while”, she would tease him and threatened to hang it up in the living room. “That’s where it is!” Charlotte yelled to an empty apartment. “I left the stupid thing in the living room…” she mumbled on her way down the hall and into a space which she’d let Clive define, for the most part. On the glass coffee table lay what she’d been seeking, a copy of Vogue which Devon had left behind the last time she’d been over. Clive was out with her now, no doubt making snide remarks between each other about everyone they saw over the rim of their martini glasses.

Charlotte knew Devon still hadn’t entirely approved of her being Clive’s girlfriend. Back when Clive had first introduced them to each other, Charlotte could see from the way Devon’s eyes moved up and down her body that every inch of her was being judged. Then again, the angle may have made Devon’s look seem worse than it was – Devon standing at a willowy 6’3 and Charlotte reaching 5’4 if she wore her thick soled sneakers with the Japanese cartoons along the side. The right side of the left shoe had a little boy being toilet trained, proclaiming that he wanted to be a “Pants Man!”.

Charlotte also knew that Devon had a habit of writing comments, notes and doodling along the margins of everything she read. This was her chance to see if there was anything past the mundane to discover in this “marginalia”, as Devon insisted on referring to it as. Twenty minutes later, Charlotte felt that she had only really gained a reminder of why she didn’t bother reading Vogue. Like most women, she didn’t have a frame that was suited to the latest fashions of New York, Milan and the other cities which she felt had become institutions simply by saying so enough times that everyone believed them.

The notes were mostly just catty remarks about various celebrities and models, with the occasional circling of something that Devon must have wanted to find an affordable knock off of. Some young Bulgarian woman in an ad for Clairol was dubbed “Horse Features”. A list of people Devon apparently needed to email was written in flat, robotic handwriting along the hem of a dress designed by a French man who seemed to have trouble buttoning up his shirt. Charlotte lay the magazine back on the table and sat back in the dark purple, suede beanbag chair she’d negotiated.

It was hard not to giggle a little at herself, thinking of what Clive would say about her looking for clues – though he’d probably refer to them as plot devices. It was such a gimmick with him, integrating storytelling into real life. Shrugging, Charlotte decided that she didn’t care what Devon thought anyways. If Devon was really Clive’s best friend then she’d not do anything to sabotage their relationships and, really, she’d try to get over her little prejudices.

Lost in thought as she had been, Charlotte’s shoulders tightened when she could hear the tell tale sounds of Clive scrabbling with the keys and Devon’s laughter, snorts and all. “In you go madam” Clive remarked as he held the door for his tall friend. As her long legs passed through the doorway, Charlotte crossed her arms to cover the Care Bear Cousin which adorned her lime green t-shirt.

Nathan the Non-Descript

His teal and honeysuckle yellow spaceship cutting through the dark void of space between his home on Mars and his University on Earth, Nathan Paxton looked about the vast piece of consumer goods which sheltered his wet little human body from having all the blood boiled out of it. As spaceships go, this one was alright. The on board AI which ran everything had a few tenacious pieces of ad-ware wedged in it, but otherwise did a competent job of helping Nathan out by facilitating all sorts of functions. It did everything the catalogue had promised – such as being able to record Nathan’s thoughts directly onto the inter-trans-pan-galactic-o-net. Turning to the microphone, Nathan seemed to recall that this process had once been referred to by some offensive term known as “bogging” or maybe “lerging”….at least until the great Minutia War in which a monomaniac by the name of Oliver Brackenbury had ignited galactic conflict for the express purpose of changing terms which got on his nerves.

Brackenbury’s campaign had been a long and strange one whose pinnacle had been the herding of every individual who misused the word “theory” in their arguments through a long tube – the wrong end of which lay in a six mile deep pit filled with rampaging, thick necked, salivating Coulter-Beasts. Conventional forces were unable to stop him but eventually a brave resistance cell cobbled together an ingenious plan. Utilizing the expertise of several physicists, cyberneticists and deus ex machinists, the resistance constructed a cunning trap for First Citizen Brackenbury (As he had eventually dubbed himself). A prosti-bot that was able to change its density and weight at will, in a range from 120 lbs to the approximate weight of Iceland. After being smuggled into his private chamber, the robot had set about crushing the First Citizen's pelvis into fine, pink and white powder when the opportunity had presented itself. Recalling this historical detail, Nathan exhibited the natural reaction of his gender by instinctively shivering in horror at the image.

Yet this paled in comparison to the archival footage of the First Citizens cremation. A handful of file photos revealed that before his crusade, Oliver Brackenbury had been a slender young man – somewhat over six feet tall and a shade under two hundred pounds. But within the first week of his biblio-fascist regime he had swollen to 450 pounds and, mysteriously, grown a foot taller. When the Firemen came to douse his body in napalm, they discovered that he had swollen to approximately two metric tons in weight and was roughly the size of a modest cottage. A cell sample, taken just before the burning, revealed that his every cell membrane had become utterly saturated with a strange cocktail of brandy, vodka martinis and righteous indignation. This is suspected to be the reason that his body, lit some five hundred years ago, continues to burn to this day and has been harnessed to provide electricity for several million home entertainment systems across the Earth.

“Sometimes a man just has to do what needs to be done” he said to an empty bridge “There, that’s suitably authoritative without really saying anything”. Nathan was trying to think of what to do when his author rapidly lost interest in his current situation and decided to scrap the story. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve being tossed into literary limbo or to be the subject of such ham-fisted post-modernist tripe…but here he was, frozen in amber (and grey matter), floating somewhere between thoughts of what the author was going to cook for dinner tonight and a dormant flashback to a particularly callipygian young woman he’d seen on the tube three weeks prior. His eyes boggled at this strange fate, but only because the image amused the author as he allowed Nathan one final thought.

Clive versus Nothing In Particular

“Stop telling me” he said “Stop telling me, because I don’t want to know”

“Look” Devon replied “I just think that as we get older, our lives will seem blander and blander no matter what we do. The more we experience, the less that surprises or thrills us. With less of those high points to make us stop and stare, we’ll perceive our lives as progressing faster and faster until entire years roar by as we used to experience a fleeting half hour.” Sensing no desire from Clive to respond, Devon pressed on after a sip from her glass of wine. “That’s why High School, with all its first times and the rawest beginnings of adult hood, seems like a more exciting and story-filled time than now. I think it’s the real reason why so many people idolize those years…not because they were quantifiably better, but because they just seemed more remarkable”.

Clive took a deep sip from his thermos, standing out on the edge of the lake in silent mortification. Turning around to face Devon, he couldn’t help but feel like an army general, talking to a scientist out of an old B-film, as he blurted out “So what on Earth are we supposed to do?”. Devon shrugged her narrow shoulders, causing her to have to re-adjust a shoulder strap that slid down. Putting her now empty glass down on the dock made the left strap fall again and this time she left it there, indifferent. “Well I suppose we could desperately cling to the trappings of our youth?”.

Clive glared and said nothing. He knew this was a dig at a large group of society in general, but also at Charlotte – who had recently purchased a collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls identical to those she’d had as a little girl. Luckily she was with Devon’s new boyfriend Tony, about a quarter-mile inland at the cottage they were all sharing for the weekend. Probably rolling her eyes at all the shark hunting anecdotes Tony liked to repeat ad nauseum.

“You never have been able to totally accept my girlfriends” Clive said over the rim of the Thermos. Devon thrust her arms out wildly before bursting into the truly Californian exasperation which had made her stand out from all the other intelligent women Clive could have befriended during those “story-filled” years of High School. “Jesus Christ Clive, could you ever be more boring? Speaking of running gags between us, I always love it when you ignore my big points about mortality”.

Standing at 6’3, Devon wasn’t built like an Amazon but she sure could carry herself like one. Striding towards Clive with an overdone swagger, she mixed humour with her anger so Clive knew he hadn’t hit that raw a nerve. Besides, they both knew he was just trying to redirect the conversation because Devon’s lectures on the brief nature of life terrified him – her calm acceptance of her fatalistic theories being the most frightening component of all.

Gesturing grandly with every other word, her voice boomed as she continued from less than a foot in front of Clive. “Do you want us to be those kinds of people, Clive? Do you want us to be the bored intellectual do-nothings who just obsess over minutia with their inter-personal relationships to avoid the really big thoughts? The really big problems? What are we, Woody Allen characters?”. Grinning, Clive made as to reel back under her volume and then snapped himself upright – throwing the thermos up and over into the woods. Now it was his turn in this little game they’d played so many times before.

“Well Dev-onnnn, maybe we should be characters from an Ingmar Bergman film? Maybe we should sink all of our rapidly fleeting time and energy and life and love into the unanswerable? What! Do you think of that?!” Clive had been mimicking her body language all the while until, punctuating the end of his sentence, he made an absurd crotch thrust as if to say “See what I have and you don’t?”. Calculated nonsense, meant to try and make Devon lose the tight grip she had on her point.

But he quickly pulled his hips away as she made to backhand his crotch. Chasing after him, she yelled “Maybe we don’t have to be characters from some other asshole’s film? Maybe we could be our own people, whatever those may be? Like, maybe you could stop being the worlds biggest cock while having the worlds tiniest?”

Between giggles, Clive kept backing away from Devon until he was at the edge of the dock. Then both of them really started to grin as it became obvious that the new objective of the game was to see if Clive would fall back into the water while fully dressed. Stopping in her tracks, his old friend began to move her eyes rapidly over his body as if trying to find a pressure point.

“Maybe” Devon said “We could live our lives in such a manner as to encourage the kind of high drama that makes for interesting stories? We could go out of our way to set up cathartic moments, climactic arguments and pseudo-ironic happenstances. It’s not like we haven’t watched enough tv and film to know all the right things to say!”.

"Haha, I'll be the promiscuous gay guy who is more stereotype than man and you can be the woman who eats chocolate instead of having sex, because apparently it's empowering to gain weight instead of meaningful human interaction" Clive lost a bit of his own focus while blurting this out and Devon, deciding that she had found a weak point in his defences, lunged forward with the cry of "Sooo tiny!". Clive leapt back off the dock and as he went towards the water exclaimed "It is so tiny!".

Much later that evening Clive found himself sharing a beer with Tony during a moment where the latter had, oddly, fallen quiet. But it wasn’t to last and Tony surprised him by asking “Hey Clive, you know I keep going on and on about what I do – but what do you do, buddy?”. Thinking about it for a moment, Clive then replied “I argue, mostly with women it seems, resolving little or nothing at all...”.