Women are powerful beings, although many of them are unaware of their power because they’ve been subjugated by men their entire life. And why do men do this to women? Out of fear; us men know of women’s power.

Imagine Big, bad, weight-lifting, 350 pound Baba in the visiting room at prison. He’s feared through-out the prison–he’s doing life with no parole–and when he walks by, the toughest men cringe. And now, a bent over little old lady, all of 80 pounds, slaps him hard across the face, and all he does is say, “Sorry mama, I’ll try not to cuss again.” That women wields enormous power.

The writers of old tried to “keep women in their place” too. A woman was made from the rib of a man. A woman was responsible for the downfall of mankind. A woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s (Islam), the list goes on and on. Personally, I’m not afraid of women, I adore them, such awesome creatures! May they embrace their incredible power.

A single bead of sweat rolled down my back as I stood motionless, peering through the rifle scope for any sign of red. There was only one mall Santa left, and he was hiding out somewhere in the clothes racks of the men’s department. I radioed for the canine unit, and when he showed up, I waved a candy cane in front of his nose and sent him in.

In seconds, he was snarling and yanking the Santa out by his boot. There was a flurry of red and white and brown, and then, there it was: the shot. I lowered the cross-hairs on him and pulled the trigger. I plugged him right in the bowl full of jelly, and his pipe hit the floor a second before he did. The last mall Santa was down! The war on Christmas was finally over!

As a bartender, I’ve seen it all, heard it all. I’ve heard the most intimate confessions from a dizzying spectrum of drunken humans. I’ve heard their fears and deepest darkest secrets. It’s amazing what a few shots of truth serum bring out in otherwise well-guarded people. Most of them are harmless; just lonesome, or sort of lost, it seems. I don’t have a gun, but I have a hammer under the bar. I figure a couple of half-moons in someone’s forehead ought to slow them down, if need be.

Some people, you don’t know what to think of them. Like this guy last night. He sat there the whole night quietly  sipping brandy cokes, until it was almost closing time. Then, with just us two left in the place, he lifts his glass and blurts out, ” A toast! A toast for my brother Danny!”

I poured up a tapper, clinked it against his, and drained it. It was like a sauna in there, and the cold beer felt good all the way down.

“My big brother Danny,” he slurred, obviously quite intoxicated, “who died with a smile on his face and a funnel up his ass!”

Now the BS in a bar on a Saturday night can get pretty deep, but bartenders hear so much of it, it’s like we have hip-waders on, and we’re immune to it–but this one caught my attention. “A funnel…up…what?” I stammered.

“His ass,” he replied, and, finally making eye contact, ” a funnel up his ass…and I put it there.”

“Okay,” I said, “you got me. Let’s hear it.” I poured him  another drink, and pulled up a stool. “This one’s on the house.”

And there we sat drinking together til 5:00 AM. I make it a rule to not do that very thing with drunken patrons, but this guy really needed a drinking partner last night.

He told me how his big brother Danny gave him his first sip of booze at 12 years old (a scenario that would play over and over through the years), and how they’d raid the old man’s wineracks in the cellar, pouring out half the wine and filling the bottles with water and kool-aid. And getting in trouble with the police as teens, DWI’s, unplanned parenthood, and then marriage.

You would’ve thought that marriage would’ve put an end to his and his brother’s epic drinking binges, but alcohol was their real mistress (and a harsh one at that), and their marriages went the same way everything does for a drunk: away.

He and Danny moved in together in an old trailer out of town and proceeded to drink themselves into oblivion, month after month, year after year, “living” on Danny’s disability check he received for arthritis. Danny was still taking care of him. And everything was great. Until the cancer, of course.

Last year, Danny got stomach cancer and it had spread like wildfire. Last week, he was no longer able to keep any booze in his guts long enough to get drunk. And so he didn’t want to live anymore. He begged his little brother to kill him. Or find a way to get some alcohol in him. A needle, a brandy enema, ANYTHING!

At first he refused, but after some deep thought, he said, “Okay Danny, drop your shorts.” He went into the house and returned with a funnel. Danny seemed to come alive. He propped a pillow under Danny’s bare ass, and inserted the funnel. Then, he poured half the bottle in.

Danny’s body began to slump immediately, and a huge smile spread across his face. He mouthed a “thank you”, and lapsed into unconsciousness. A few minutes later, he stopped breathing, the smile still on his face.

“That’s quite a story,” I said when he finally finished, “but I gotta say you should have known that half a quart of brandy up his rear would kill him.”

He finished his drink, turned to me, and said, “I knew, mister, I knew.”

Provocative

Prolific

Passionate

Peculiar

Psychedelic

Performer

Poetic

Peerless

Perverse

Pensive

Perfect

Partier

Punk

Purple

Paisley Park

Prince

You find yourself barreling down Alcohol Avenue toward the hospital dead ahead. Its all green lights, pedal-to-the-metal, full tilt. There are cars at your sides so you can’t turn off even if you want to, and you say to yourself, how did I get here again?
You remember driving down Sobriety Lane away from the hospital. You had crossed Denial Street and even Anxiety Way successfully and with great expectations. Then you suddenly hung a left on Just One Street, and found out that it led to a left-turn-only intersection with the teeming, noisy traffic of Alcohol Avenue, and now, here you are, once again, about to turn your pleasant, afternoon cruise into an ambulance ride.

Whose plants these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To grab some bud and do some blow.

My little horse must think I’m queer

To sit here staring at his rear,

Between the blow and tender bud,

The stonedest evening of the year.

He gives his hairy balls a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of smoking weed and snorting flake.

It’s lovely here beside the patch,

But I have all these buds to stash,

And miles to go before I crash,

And miles to go before I crash.

…ah, just sitting around with my son listening to Star Talk. Neil’s going on about the consequences of flatulence in space. It’s a slow Friday night, but I picked up a new book from the library today, which, along with the Sunday Paper Supercrossword, should see me through the weekend.

Also, I’m looking foreword to taking a little hike up to the top of a nearby mine dump, where I recently discovered soft, brightly-colored iron ore rocks that can be easily crushed to a fine powder. The colors range from brilliant yellow to orange to bright red. I’m going to bring some baggies and try to get a substantial amount of maybe four distinct colors (which could be mixed to make different hues). Then, I’m going to mix them up with egg-whites the way the early artists did, and try to paint a mining scene. Maybe.

I’m also making some willow wands. I wish I still had my drill so I could put a feather inside them. Maybe I’ll try to make one with a skull carved into the handle. That diamond willow (it’s everywhere around here) can really look nice sanded like glass and polyurethaned.

–by Michael Jordahl

PROLOGUE

There’s a chance I’ll be murdered before I can finish this and spill my guts. I know Nasa will do what they must to keep the secret–the secret I am about to divulge to you. After certain recent events, I feel I must.

I first learned of the Aravi back in 1980 when I was in the Air Force. I was passing a bottle of home-made moonshine back and forth with some red-neck Marine one night when he told me all about the Aravi, and the Oort Cloud Empire. He did seem too stupid to make this stuff up, but it was so far-fetched, I blew it off as drunken babbling–until I watched it unfold before me!

You see, its not Earth that’s the prime real estate around our star, it’s the Oort Cloud. Of course we humans are a little biased toward Mother Earth, but the Oort Cloud inhabitants are not human. To them, The Cloud is where its happening; the inner solar system is boring, not to mention lethal. (That’s the other reason they live in The Cloud: the solar wind is deadly to them.) They don’t have a body made out of meat like you and I, but some kind of energy that can be “dissipated” by the intense solar wind of the inner solar system. Other than that little problem, they are practically immortal.

There are literally billions of little icy homes for the Aravi in an almost endless sea of teeming metropolitan centers across vast expanses of space. According to what this Marine had eavesdropped on, Nasa knew about the Aravi for many decades, and co-existed around the same star without incident.

But there was a problem. A big, bad problem, and they called him Kor. He was a criminal of the highest order, some say the most evil entity there ever was, and for a city of untold billions, that’s bad. He was captured and he and the icy snowball he called home were cast into the inner solar system where his home would become his prison. He would be imprisoned inside the diamagnetic cavity trailing the comet known as 81P/Wild, or Wild 2, to circle the solar system for eons, before the comet’s orbit would decay enough for it to finally fall into the sun, and Kor’s energy would be annihilated; he would have plenty of time to think about his crimes.

Now, like I said, Nasa knew about the Aravi, the Oort Cloud, and even the fact that Kor, the most dangerous criminal in the solar system, was circling the sun in their “back yard”, and it was all tolerated until September, 1974, when Wild 2, and its silent passenger came within a million miles of Jupiter, altering its orbit, and sending it reeling into the innermost solar system, changing its orbital period from 43 years to just 6 years.

This was just too close for Nasa, and a meeting of their top brass was convened and they came up with a bold plan to get rid of Kor once and for all: they would send the space capsule Stardust on a rendezvous mission with Wild 2 under the guise of collecting comet dust for the public. In reality, they would carefully extricate Kor from the comet’s coma, and in a special container, the aerogel Stardust Sample Container (SSC), bring him to Earth, only to be put aboard the New Horizons Spacecraft heading out of the solar system, under the guise of exploring Pluto (and beyond).

This has all been accomplished and you can Google Nasa Missions to fact-check. On Feb. 7, 1999, the spacecraft Stardust was launched, flew into the coma of Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004, and, after collecting its “sample”, successfully deposited the canister in the desert sands of Utah on Jan 15, 2006. The canister was immediately transported to the Cape Canaveral AF Station in Florida, where it was put aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, and destined to leave the Earth 4 days later, Jan 19, 2006.

Well, you got to remember that this was all under Military control, and so you might not be surprised to find out that when Nasa ran its first test after launching, Kor was not to be found. He was out, walking free upon the earth, under the protective dome of Mother Earth’s geomagnetic field. This was all a closely-guarded secret, of course, and only recently did I discover that Kor was not only free on Earth, but…oh no, someone’s banging,,oh noo h e lp

–Anonymous letter found inside a typewriter