Eve's Bathroom

“Well that’s gross.”

Charlotte startled herself by saying it out loud. She was in Eve’s bathroom, looking through the medicine cabinet as one should in their hated rival’s private space. Causing the comment was prescription extra-strength yeast infection cream. It was doled out by Eve’s pharmacist less than a week ago, meaning Charlotte’s host was probably slathered with the medicine while she stood there snooping.

Charlotte continued her wrist-deep explorations into Eve’s personals, realizing she didn’t really hate Eve. Not really. More of a professional dislike; a mild distaste, even. Eve’s collection of workplace awards could lead some to think Charlotte’s animosity sprung from jealousy.

Hardly.

It’s just that Eve was such an apple-polishing hall monitor goody-goody pain in the ass. Who doesn’t do the occasional key bump in the bathroom before work? Not Eve, apparently. And when Eve saw the switchblade Charlotte kept in her purse, she immediately had to tattle like a snitch in need of a stitch.

Her train of thought screeched to a stop, her gaze landing on a half-full pill bottle. Charlotte looked at the label & thought Holy shit! She’d hit the mother lode. Vicodin, 10 mgs & according to the label, Eve had three more refills. Charlotte popped the top, shook out two pills, thought about it, and shook out two more. She tossed them into her mouth & washed them down with water from the sink.

Waiting for the sweet wave of opioid euphoria to kick in, Charlotte began digging in earnest. She glanced past a bottle of 40-mg Prozac & kept going. Charlotte herself was on 80 mgs, one of four SSRIs that prevented her from making the news via a workplace shooting, so she empathized with Eve on that one.

A knock on the door startled Charlotte into knocking over a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which fell into a jar of salve, almost knocking both onto the floor.

“Are you OK?” asked Eve.

Charlotte hoped Eve hadn’t heard the commotion in the cabinet. Thank God I locked the door.

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. I had a lot of cheese today & I’m pretty bound up. I’ll be done in a minute.”

She’d never been good at spontaneous lying. Plus, the Vikes were taking effect which didn’t help, but did prevent her from caring.

“That’s...that’s fine. Hope everything comes out fine.”

Charlotte could hear Eve turn around to return to the living room. Relief flooded her nervous system along with the soothing joy of hydrocodone. She knew she’d better finish up before Miss Are-You-OK offered her a suppository. And wouldn’t you know it, as she thought it, Charlotte saw a small box of suppositories. Between the cooter cream, the pills & the poop bullets, Eve had a lot going on.

Shutting the cabinet door & flushing the toilet for effect, Charlotte readied herself. Eve’s daughter wasn’t going to get any deader, but Charlotte figured she should extend some kind of condolence, especially after helping herself to the pills that shuffled the deceased off this mortal coil.

Cinco Minutos! (I don't know how to do the upside down exclamation point)

(It's like five minutes, but spicy!)

The last green until Easter courses through my bloodstream, so I'm being fancy with the word sprint. And by fancy, I mean multi-lingual.

Vaminos!

-----

With the gun placed to his head, Toby realized he had no choice but to write.

You know that thing you do when you have writer's block? That whole "What would I write if I had a gun to my head?" Welp, now he knows. Thanks to the worst birthday gift of ever consisting of Sharon hiring a real-life hitman to break into the house, put a loaded .380 to Toby's head, and tell him to start writing, the words flowed from Toby's fingers like they never had before.

They were glorious words, words with meaning, words with passion. They were the best words to ever be written. By Toby, anyway. He was delirious with joy and wonder. "Sonuvabitch," he thought, "it actually worked!"

Toby continued to write as though his life depended upon it, which it quite literally did. An untapped reservoir of ideas and concepts continued to fly upon the page, unbidden. He looked at what he was writing, realizing he had the bare bones foundation of a brilliant story. It would be the Great American Novel. It would be everything Toby ever dreamed he would write.

But Sharon, being a total bitch, couldn't let him have that. After an hour, the gunman made Toby delete everything he had written and then stole the laptop. Fucking Sharon.

Five Minutes to a Healthier YOU!

(OK, maybe not so much healthier...)

I got five minutes to kill, so let's sprint it up.

-----

Some forgettable grunge-lite pop song was playing in Eddie's head as he cautiously looked around the corner. Robbing the bank had been the easy part. The hard part was getting that goddamned Filter song out of his mind. That, and the masked idiot chasing him.

Everything Eddie'd read and seen about Spider-Man led him to believe he was fake. No one could be that stupid, but that powerful, while leaping around and shooting webs. Eddie was finding out the hard way he was wrong.

He had been wrong about a great many things over the course of his lifetime, but this mistake was going to put him away for a very long time. His uncle had gotten him out of some tight jams in the past, being a Yale-graduated lawyer, but now Eddie was looking at real time.

The judges always added extra time whenever you were brought in by one of the capes. Eddie didn't know if it was out of spite or if they thought since a super hero had to come in, that made the alleged crime more heinous. All he knew was, he needed to get the hell out of Dodge with a quickness.

Not Even For 5 Minutes...

(So much for restful sleep, ever. You're welcome.)

You like'a da word sprints, eh? The word sprints, she is a'good, no?

I give you more word sprints.

---

“For the love of all that’s good and holy, if you don’t tell your insipid, whatever, friend, to stop talking this very instant, I promise you, what he will awaken to in the morning will make that scene in Godfather look like an outtake from the Care Bears.”

“Jesus, Terry. That’s kinda dark.”

“Why is he still yammering?”

“Jack, shut up. You’re hurting his nib’s feelings.”

Jack, who had been listing, in chronological order, every provable lie Donald Trump had told since announcing his presidency on that iconic escalator ride in June, 2015. He’d been talking more than an hour and had just gotten to August of ’15 when Terry reached his limit.

Terry was an effete gentleman. He was also a dangerous one. His threat to Jack wasn’t baseless; he had used that scene with the bodiless horse as the motivation for several of his pieces. Or contracted revenge murders. Whichever.

He was currently tied to a chair with a rope which, frankly, was really only there for the aesthetic. First, have you ever tried to tie anyone to anything with rope? You can never tighten it tight enough for it to do any difference. If Terry stood up suddenly, he’d be free. Plus, Tony couldn’t tie knots for shit. Second, and probably should’ve led with this, Terry is basically Superman without the moral code. Seriously. Those two idiots are about to fucking die.

Five Minutes of MAYHEM! (and word sprints)

I got five minutes, I'm stoned, and I'm near a keyboard. Giddyup.

---

The man went by the absurd sobriquet of Barracuda Joe, despite being named Fred and never actually having seen a barracuda. Ever. Not even in a book or online. He had no idea it was a fish. Fred—or Joe, I guess—thought it was a bird of some sort and believed it to be resplendent. His word. Seriously. I know, right?

Anyway, Joe arrived at the address in the email at around two in the morning, several hours early. He had been taught from an early age to always respect those who want your company by arriving early, letting them know you literally could not wait until the mutually-agreed upon time. Using this logic, Joe was about to enter the home of a mob boss who was going to give Joe $100 to stand look out for a thing they were doing Thursday morning. The meeting was scheduled for 1 p.m.

Tomorrow.

Joe’s about to get his ass beat.

Timber Hawkeye: It's Not You, It's Me

(Buy this book now. Seriously. Do it.)

Have you ever noticed that the same things you consider irritatating are actually pleasant or even soothing for other people? Hot weather, classical music, laughing children, long drives, thunder storms, data entry, gardening, and so on... Those things are not the problem, you are. Someone is looking forward to what you regularly try to avoid, and what you see as the solution, someone else thinks is the complication.

When I get annoyed by someone blasting their car's stereo in a residential neighborhood, I remind myself that I used to do the same thing when I was younger. And when cigarette smoke grosses me out, I recall my own Marlboro Days until my judgy-wudgy attitude dissolves. It's important to keep ourselves in check so that we don't start thinking our way of being is somehow superior or ought to be universally practiced by everyone else.

I often say you will only be surrounded by annoying people and frustrating situations until you learn not to get annoyed or frustrated. We need to stop blaming outside forces for our own lack of internal peace. It's our personal responsibility to remain peaceful regardless of what's going on around us (not try to control everyone to live in accordance with what we think is right). 

When I talk about personal responsibility, it's not just accountability for the way our life has turned out so far, but also for the perspective from which we continue viewing the world. We need to stop expecting perfection from others because we can't possibly offer it in return. Have you considered the likelihood that someone finds your own attempts at mindfulness extremely frustrating or annoying? The windchime in your zen garden might be perceived as inconsiderate and presumptuous by a neighbor who hates the sound, or maybe your idea of "normal" is ridiculously absurd to someone else. Never assume that you are any less irritating than the people you try to avoid.

If I get aggrevated, it's because I'm the one who hasn't yet learned not to get annoyed. It's not you, it's me. You are actually my greatest teacher, and from the moment I start looking at you from that perspective, all I want to do is thank you, not kick you in the teeth :)

So let's join Rumi in that field beyond "right" and "wrong." You have your way, I have mine, and the wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round.--Timber Hawkeye

319 Comedic Fantasy Books That Are Awesome

(Should've been at least 320...just sayin'...)

I found this list on Goodreads. It's user-generated and is the top 319 comedy fantasy novels of ever, at least to this user. There are definitely some inconsistencies (all the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books are listed, but so are the anthologies; same with Robert Asprin's MYTH books), but it's still a very solid wishlist of some of the best comedic fantasy novels ever written.