Three Questions pt. 1

What is your favorite CD or album?

Pinkerton by Weezer is up there - it reminds me of going for a walk with a Cocker Spaniel to a cidery that is hidden in the woods of New Hampshire and playing fetch with the dog but unfortunately for Baker (you named the dog Baker is this scenario) you lose their favorite tennis ball in the base of an enormous tree stump that has probably been featured on a show on the Travel Channel. When you go looking for the tennis ball, you run into an extended family of chipmunks and other various woodland creatures who try to explain to you why you shouldn't throw tennis balls in the woods (well you see, it turns out that tennis balls are kind of like flying felt meteors for them which is why the Williams sisters practice on a hard court instead of on a bed of pine needles.) The chipmunks are pretty cool, though, and one of them tries to tell you about this idea for a movie that he has but you are to distracted by the fact that you are talking to a talking chipmunk named Alvin to get in on the ground floor (or should I say get in on the dirt ground) of his big picture idea...El Scorcho is a pretty fun jam, though. 

Is there one of the arts that you do not understand? Which one?

I don't get Tae Kwon Do - how do you chop those bricks in half? Simply an amazing feat of the strength of a human's character. I also don't like the idea of hitting stuff with your forehead - I'm like the opposite of The Situation when he went HAM on that brick wall in Italy like it just tried to rip him off with a rotten slice of four cheese pizza or something in the cuisine corner...the Cuisine Corner would be a good name for a YouTube cooking show starring The Situation where he samples a slice of pizza with a new pizza topping each week until eventually he is putting cottage cheese on pizza which actually sounds delicious and is most likely already a thing that restaurants do, probably one of the food trucks in the Portland Fleet of Food Trucks or the PFFT if your mouth is full of cottage cheese pizza.

Do you use coupons?

Yes but not if it is something that I wouldn't already buy...saving money is always smart and something that Ned Flanders would probably tell you to do (you are Homer in this situation but let's just be totally honest here...you are Homer in most situations - bet ya didn't think that you would get roasted when you started reading this blog post! Well, boom roasted.) but you shouldn't buy something useless just because it's a good deal unless you are Hank Scorpio in which case you should just go ahead and get two of the item. Don't be one of those people who collects coupons and never uses them though so you just have composition notebooks stuffed full of cards good for free small Humongo Shakes from Burger Town that expired in the middle of the Carter administration back before Burger Town was wolfed down by McDonald's after the whole controversy with their fry machine being on performance enhancing drugs, effectively (do you remember when Sammy Sosa got busted for corking his bat (by the way, did he think that his bat would never break? Bats break, Louisville Sluggers aren't sticks of Kryptonite no matter how much Sammy would have liked to believe that he was Super Man (he seems like a big comic book nerd), so Sosa was playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette (more like Rally Roulette) and Vegas won this round...but anyway, Burger Town corked their fry machine and it almost blew up the whole restaurant this one time, so there's that. They had a great marketing slogan though, I think it went a little something like this, "This town IS big enough for the two of us and all y'all are invited to come on down, as well!") which is highly illegal and against all the very strict rules and regulations of the highly controversial FFA (the Fast Food Association). The best thing about the FFA is the employee cafeteria, though, could you imagine having all the fast food places within t shirt canon blasting range? It could be Taco Tuesday at The Bell (Taco Bell), Thirsty Thursday at J Squared (Jamba Juice) or Frosty Friday at Wendy Thomas's (Wendy's) but one thing is for gosh DANG certain...every day is darn near Christmas in the FFA employee cafeteria so get your job applications in now, Godspeed my friends, Godspeed. *a single tear rolls down my cheek as I salute a cardboard cut out of Colonel Sanders*

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com

Retirement Home Alone

Dentures whistle a catchy tune in the wind as a mighty gust blows through the paisley curtains, parting them like the Red Sea, which many of the residents of the High Curb Retirement Facility may in fact be old enough to remember actually happening. Two shadowy figures dressed in all black, cat burglars to the nines (to the nine lives), skulk about the property as they duck their heads in and out of various bushes in their suspicious pursuit of something, probably some cool jewels or something valuable like that. Murmurs rustle about the pair of would-be-criminals as they rustle some leaves in the bushes too. The leader of the two, or at least it appears that way by the way she is whisper shouting down to her female compatriot, gestures with only the very tip of her thumb in the general direction of a nearby window that is ajar, a true disciple of the McConaughey Principle (the McConaughey Principle is a four pronged approach to life that focuses on staying chill, being true to your id, having a good ol time no matter what and rooting on the gosh dang Texas Longhorns, hook em Horns, bonus prong points if Colt McCoy is the godfather of your children or if you are a proud owner of a The Cheesecake Factory credit card (or a Ruth’s Chris’s Cheesecake Factory credit card which is even rarer but more valuable when it is dug up on your episode of Storage Wars) and share your many dessert benefits with the one and only Vince Young while he reminisces about that brief period of time when he took down USC in the championship game and everyone was wearing his number ten to weddings and funerals and other inappropriate places to wear a college football jersey unless you are Matthew McConaughey or one of the blessed individuals in his T-Mobile Fave Five) and probably the founder and president of the McConauladies, an all female fan club of Matthew McConaughey that began on a dare and is still going, probably on another funnier dare. Then the follower of the two did something that could only be defined as an act of total lunacy and fit for the loony bin; she threw a lil pebble at the nearby ajar window. 
“What are you doing?!?!” The leader whisper shouted at her student.
“Just testing out the wind...it looks good for the approach.” The student let out like she was about to hit a golf ball out of a sand trap with a well meaning thumbs up for confirmation that her plan was going according to THE plan. 
The leader slowly shook her head in disgust, a major league pitcher shaking off his catcher’s two fingers for the curveball after blowing the first two pitches right by the hitter, like to the point where the ball was already in the catcher’s glove when the hitter was just getting ready to swing. 
Next the leader did that move where she points at both her eyes with her two fingers and then pointed those two fingers at the eyes of her student to make sure they were all on the same page of plans or the same Plan Page if you will. (Did you know that the working title for Juno was actually Unplan Page because it was a surprise pregnancy and Ellen Page was the star in the movie and...yeah that’s how my brain works, pretty weird, right? Try walking for a mile in my Crocs...a mile is pretty far to walk in Crocs though, your dogs would be barkin’ up a storm and making all the neighbors wary, thereby living up to the Beware of Dog sign on the fence to the backyard, for once in your life that lazy dang good for nothing dog is finally good for something but you'll be sad when they are gone...*the story just goes off the rails and I get all sad*)
The two potential prowlers slinked towards the nearby ajar window with the stealthiness of a house cat (should I just go ahead and call them the house cat burglars?...nah that would be ridiculous.) but with more hand eye coordination (or paw eye coordination...seriously, have you ever seen one of those videos of a cat playing ping pong...wait, you haven’t? That’s because they don’t exist, cats can only play Gin Rummy like how dogs play Texas Hold ‘Em, cats are lovers of Gin Rummy and moles play Whack-A-Mole because they have low self esteem) but also less YouTube star power earning capacity. One by one they slipped through the opening in the window, the leader leading the way and the follower following, according to the natural order of the house cat burglarverse. 
“Hurry up, you clown!” The leader whisper shouted at her student as she fell face first through the opening in the window and spilled a small satchel of beautifully turquoise marbles all over the floor that she was carrying in her bindle for some unknown godforsaken reason, also she was carrying a bindle for some unknown god forsaken reason but it probably has something to do with her traveling everywhere by boxcar via the boxcar Uber app, yesh she has an iPhone too, it doesn’t make sense but then again life doesn’t make sense, right, do they have outlets in boxcars now so she can charge her iPhone? The symphony of the bouncing of all the marbles magically harmonized with the steady ding of everyone’s Life Alert being set off in a false alarm but real B and E kind of situation that usually only takes place in the movies or the TVs. 
“Who the H-E-double racquetball rackets do you think y’all are?” Bellowed out an old man who was probably named Walt, let’s just call him Walt, wearing a houndstooth patterned cardigan and proudly toting a mug that read #1 Old Guy, one that most definitely gets mixed up with all the others when the dishwasher is being cleaned out by the maid who doesn't speak Old Guylish. “Walt” gradually pulled a walker from behind his back as the two house cat burglars scrambled about to gather all the errant marbles that seemed to have a mind of their own. Of course it was one of the walkers that had the cut-in-half tennis balls on the bottom of each of the legs, a longstanding ode to Billie Jean King after she took down Bobby Riggs and knocked his terrible case of toxic masculinity down a few pegs. Walt methodically plucked each of the tennis balls off each leg of the walker and flung them at the house cat burglars with increasing ferocity, definitely having nodded in the affirmative to the catcher’s one middle finger down sign for the fireball, the only pitch that is accompanied by a shot of cinnamon whiskey after the half inning is comes to its conclusion. These heat seeking felty pelts not only threw the house cat burglars off their game and flipped them to a random Plan Page in their blueprint book, but they shook the two to their caramelly criminal core. Having no idea what to do next, the student began simultaneously gathering and whipping the turquoise marbles at old man Walt, scooping up the tiny balls of glass in a way that Derek Jeter might field a three hopper and kick off the double play. Walt fell quickly, crumpling under the weight of his walker which was no longer supported by the aid of the cut-in-half tennis balls; it turns out that these balls are actually extremely effective in holding up those walkers and without the half ball of felt, the walker will turn to mush in a matter of moments...I guess Wilson has had an under the umpire chair sponsorship deal with the AARP since Billie Jean King made Bobby Riggs realize that he was, in fact, a human and not an angel sent by the tennis gods to take the ATP by storm. 
"Hey you two kids! Stop what you are doing at once...you have to go check in at the front desk and pick up your visitor badges before you-" An ancient lady who was wearing a name tag that read Rose yelled at the top of her lungs before her lungs could take no more and they stopped working, right in their tracks...it was actually very sad, everyone who was there and saw it happen was pretty much scarred for life (and scared for life - it was THAT unfortunate of a biological speed bump!) and they all made t shirts that said "Witness" like those LeBron ones from Nike. 
A woman in her 30s, wearing an apron and a white hat, rushed into the room with a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other...it was one of the maids so the Rebel Alliance might actually have a chance against the dualing Darth Vaders with this one. Unfortunately, the maid forgot to put up one of those "Caution Wet Floor" signs that has the stick figure person who was trying to do a forty yard dash in the bathroom or something, like was that little stick figure person wearing Heelys or what, dude is about to get a concussion, for real! But yeah, the maid did the same thing as that little stick figure person except even worse and she ended up both getting the wind knocked out of her and fainting at the same time which is a lethal combo. The house cat burglars looked at each other in shock before quickly scampering off to the kitchen because it appeared that everyone else in the High Curb Retirement Facility was either taking a nap or mentally locked into an intense match of cribbage or watching their stories or all of the above (they could be dreaming about doing the other two...see, I bet you didn't know that I moonlight as a troll who lives under a bridge and makes people answer weird riddles to break on through to the other side.) The leader stuffed her bindle full of assorted packs of oatmeal, bags of herbal tea and random handfuls of pills (don't worry, most of them are placebos and the other ones are just Good and Plenties) while the student went hard on the hard candies. Then the two anti-heroes scampered into the night like they were never there (think of it like the end of Gremlins and the early Vegas odds are saying that there probably was a Mogwai stuffed animal in the HCRF that one of the house cat burglars definitely jacked), off on their way to find the next boxcar in their lives, whatever that may be, who knows maybe the leader will have a kid, maybe the student will invent the Lyft competitor version of the boxcar Uber app, you know, the one that is called Choober (thank you for your patience ladies and gentlemen, the plane has just put all four on the pavement in *insert whatever city that you want to go to in your daydreams*... see, I can do Mad Libs too) leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, which is very hard to overcome for an old folks home because they have a ton of overhead costs and just require a ton of patience, in general.   

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com

Nice Year's Eve

It's 4:40 pm, December 31, 2018, and I have just stumbled on to a new genre of writing - it's called Ironica. You know, like erotica but instead of the expensive bouquets of roses that you pick up at the corner in front of the funeral home down the street, you grabbed a handful of those roses that you eat instead of smell. Anyway, I thought it was important enough to make a public service announcement about, so there...I think I will have Emily Deschanel's little sister, Zooey, be the spokesperson for the commercial, she seems like a reputable candidate for the Ironica campaign. 

So it's New Year's Eve and you are on your way to the most conveniently located Whole Foods to look for some nice boxed wine to bring to the party that you got invited to for the night. It is a friend of a friend's party, nothing that you are too familiar with and no one that you have ever met other than your friend and let's be fair, y'all are more like just work associates who didn't want to be the only ones in the office on the first day back at work in January when you are all gathered by the water cooler and gabbing about the standard water cooler talk topics without a crazy story about how you went to the most amazing New Year's party of all time...it would be the equivalent of going to school on the big day of Share and Tell and forgetting to bring something to share and tell about so you just have to improv about the time that your brother almost road his Huffy off a lil cliff while attempting to pull of an insane 900 which turns out to be a much more fascinating story than Cindy's water color drawing of a pony that was the valedictorian at Harvard which would be a great Pixar movie (if anyone at Pixar is reading this, you can email me for the deets - I'll take my payment in the form of gift card).

Alas, you and your "friend" show up at the party and it appears to be more of a carnival than a party but I guess you could call a carnival a party, just on a bigger scale and with more cotton candy vendors than shots of cotton candy flavored Smirnoff. It is a circus tent setting (sort of like The Greatest Showman but with less star power and impromptu singing) and there are elephants, like way more elephants than you have ever seen in person other than at the zoo and people are riding them like they won't remember the face of everyone who rode them and maim their poor faces with their tusks when they are taking a nap behind one of the bevy of cotton candy vendors. There is also lots of cool looking tapestry, the type that you might find in a college dorm room or an antique store in Sedona, Arizona or in a dorm room at the University of Arizona. There are people playing beach volleyball on indoor courts of sand, people playing putt putt on a swanky mini golf course (as well as way too many people who are making up the gallery and yelling at the ball to get in the hole which seems a little more ridiculous once you realize that they are yelling it at an orange ball; that sort of resets the stakes for the whole situation, you know, like when you sweep all the pieces of the Monopoly game on the floor in frustration after losing only to remember that you didn't have any money riding on the outcome of the game, it was just supposed to be a fun board game with your grandparents while you are visiting them at the Old Folks Home) and regular sized people playing chess with giant pieces. The crazier folks are having intense pyromaniac battles with Roman Candles while the more calm individuals are watching on and praying that an errant shot doesn't go right in their eyeball. 

"Welcome welcome, my what beautiful visitors we are so fortunate to have!" A lady who is dressed and painted like the NBC peacock addresses you and your work friend with a colorful smile and a parade float type of wave, worthy of one of the lead floats at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. She is carrying herself like she is still waiting for an ETA on the end of her Ayahuasca journey. 

"Hi, Susan, uh what's going on here? I thought this was going to be just a little get together with you and Stan and a couple of your friends from Pilates, maybe play some Pictionary and break out the seven layer dip if the night took us there, but this, this...this is like stumbling upon one of the seven wonders of the world on your way to the gym. This is one of the most incredible things I, or anyone for that matter, has ever and will ever witness." Your work friend replies in the midst of a spate of confusion and wild bewilderment. 

Just as your work friend finishes his sentence, an acrobat swoops in from the ceiling with a tray of shrimp samples, almost as if she was listening in on the conversation and waiting for her cue for food. 

"Thank you...not just for this, but for everything." You say to the acrobat, immediately wanting to walk back your eager forwardness for fear of coming off as overly desperate in your appreciation of not just this surprise New Year's Eve circus party, but in all of life itself and everything it has to offer, in its wondrous, Big Fishy kinda quaintness. You used to wonder what the Plain White T's were talking about with their Wonders of the Younger, circusy themed album but now you think that you have got it all figured out...everything is more marvelous when it is circus related. 

"You are welcome...you are always welcome... You too, cutie, I like your bow tie, it looks like you work for a catering company on the Moon." Susan tells your work friend before flashing you a look of acknowledgment, regaling you with a kind backhanded compliment and giving you a lil wink of approval. 

You turn around to see that they are shooting the newest edition of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition on one of the indoor beach volleyball courts and you are like, that is pretty boss too, this carnival party just keeps on getting more boss...next to that, Charles Barkley is announcing a heated round red robin style pickle ball tournament (so the winner gets a lifetime of endless steak fries, you know) much to the delight of the evergrowing and evergrowingly buzzed crowd and the NBA hall of famer just called an eighty seven year old woman's form, "More turrible than my golf swing...taking pickle ball lessons from her would be like if the Abominable Snowman taught you how to surf - her atrociousness has propelled her to the status of a folklore legend, so in some ways I am impressed and proud to bear witness...By the way, in a weird turn of events, Bear Witness is the name of the dubious Grizzly bear (who perhaps had a pawful too many of the wrong batch of indigenous mushroom caps) who first reported a sighting of a Yeti in the upper Yukon Territory after the wintry beast stumbled out of a tricked-out outhouse with a half empty roll of Charmin Ultra Strong (or half full, it all depends on your poospective...that one was for all you toddlers out there who probably shouldn't be reading this - just give the iPad back to Mom and Dad now, it's for the best for everyone) in tow under its big ol' hairy armpit." (Who needs deodorant more than the Abominable Snowman? I never thought I would say this but...Old Spice you are really dropping the ball...it's not that Old Spice has that great of a reputation, it's more that I just never thought that I would care that much about the deodorant wars or have that much invested in their illustrious marketing campaigns or even have the opportunity to say that and now that I do, I want to thank all my family, friends and teachers who have made this journey possible for me, especially all you gym teachers who made Old Spice not just a luxury but a necessity, you know who you are *cut to a middle aged man with a whistle around his neck walking ominously across a deserted tennis court at dusk while carrying a torn open sack of multicolored dodge balls and hurling them at the camera, delivering each one with more velocity and intensity than the last until he finally drops the camera operator in a heap of tears, finally melting in a puddle of exhaustion, then the scary middle aged gym teacher smiles at the camera and pulls a fresh stick of Old Spice deodorant out from behind his back before he applies it with force to the armpits of an unwilling executive producer who would rather have stayed off camera which is pretty much the main reason why they went with the producer route instead of the onscreen talent route, also there is the clause in their parole that states that they cannot appear in deodorant commercials which is a weird parole clause but a parole clause nonetheless...Parole Clause is actually Santa's illegitimate burnout half brother who went to junior college to play tennis and never left junior college or learned how to play tennis but got pretty good at ping pong so that's something, that ain't nothin' to sneeze at, he ran the table in King's Court at more than a few keggers over the years so that's a pretty cool story to bounce your grandchild on your knee and tell them about (when they are nineteen and the vice president of their fraternity, but still, it will be a special moment of bro bonding for the both of yous.*) You turn around even farther to see that the ringmaster of ceremonies is doing the limbo underneath one of the elephants. You turn around even farther yet and realize that you have transmogrified into an owl and can turn your head all the way around (even going so far as to complete the first ever 900 Skull Spin) so you tell your work friend that the party is a hoot and retire to your favorite tree stump with a satchel full of Tootsie Pops, a bright fresh outlook on life and a newfound affinity for woodland creature clip art. 

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com

The Ballad of Lonnie Darko

The last drip of the Jack Daniels bottle hung on for dear life, clinging to the plastic as Lonnie Darko clung on to it even tighter, tilted askew on his futon, or as he likes to call it, his bed. It has been a tough past decade for good ol' Lonnie, a fan favorite among the fiery and growing local fan base for the Good Springs Amateur Bowling Competitive League; he calls them his turkeys while they call him their hero and in many regards, he is an American hero. While he isn't a war hero, so no American Sniper, he is an American hero in amateur bowling competitive circles and Good Springs, Tennessee is certainly a regional hotbed when it comes to such activity (and Darko has been dubbed a pin sniper in the lanes by many a toy crane machine repairer.) But it all went downhill after Lonnie ran into his ex wife, Sheila, at the annual GSABCL Championships which are held every year following the completion of the final NASCAR race of the season. Everything was going real swell for Darko and company going into the final round of the championship match - so swell that he was on pace for a 300 so it pretty much couldn't get any more perfect than that, just rip off that Bernie Mac movie and call him Mr. 300 (without any bumpers in there to boot; Darko, a former co-chairman of the GSABCL Bowlers with Bumpers program, had a long and storied history with the gameplay accessory that many people call an effective aid that is fair in competition (you know the famous saying, "All is fair in love and war in the lanes") while others compare it to corking your bat or stealing signs from the pitcher or putting mini trampolines in your Jordans in a well-spirited attempt to be more Like Mike or being like your overserved uncle who is tossing alley oops to himself and throwing it down on all his nieces and nephews on the eight foot hoop at the family reunion after party.) Right in the moment when Lonnie was almost set to toss what could have very well been his final roll of the night, the one for the 300 in the final frame and the perfect round, Sheila came bounding onto lane one which was a few lanes over from the competition. As graceful of a swan dive as it was, 'twas still a swan dive nonetheless, and a painful one for the former kindergarten teacher at that. (She was fired for allowing the children to eat Crayons...where did they get such an idea, you ask? Well, first she ate a box of Crayons in front of the class on a dare from a first grader, so there was that, too - Sheila is not the type of person who will back down from a dare, even if that dare is from someone who is still yet to go through the D.A.R.E. program...but yeah, it's probably for the best that Sheila isn't allowed within four hundred yards of a school anymore, for everyone's sake, even Crayola was starting to get a bad name on account of her brazen antics...I don't think anyone who was in attendance will ever forget that assembly where Sheila sucker punched Lenny the Lion, the adorable school mascot who made the mistake of taunting her after she nearly gave the vice principal a concussion while missing a half court shot for charity (to raise awareness of CTE, in a cruel and ironic twist) by an obscene distance - let's just say, the door to Lenny's den will no longer remain ajar for the Sheilas of the world in addition to remaining closed to most of those who practice dentistry in the upper Midwest.) Yup, Sheila took a magnificent swan dive, Lonnie went and biffed the big roll (he pulled a Biff, if you will), his career went in the gutter along with that ball (as well as the next toss as he was still experiencing some symptoms of PTSD - Post Traumatic Sheila Disorder) and the rest is etched in the rows and columns of the GSABCL record books which can be found in pamphlet form at any gas station, truck stop, rest area and/or wherever you can find pamphlets displayed and distributed in the greater (or the gooder) Good Springs area.  

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com

The Strawberry Farmer

Call him an aspirant of the Amish, more like dust in the wind, you will hardly even realize he is there until it's too late. Hank Edgar, a fourth generation strawberry farmer from the upper peninsula of Michigan, or a Yooper as people would say at the local farmers market, had never seen a bad day, but that's most likely because he had never seen anything at all in his whole life. Not only was Hank the blindest strawberry farmer in all of Cupholder County (everything in Michigan comes back to the automobile industry, right?), but he was also the bestest strawberry farmer in all of Cupholder County as well as the neighboring counties, Roadkill County, All Wheel Drive County and Global Warming County, the darkest of all the counties that make up Michigan's beautiful upper peninsula. Hank was blinder than a bat, smarter than a whip and quicker than Batman's whip (that's the Batmobile for you non superhero enthusiasts out there). If you ever tried to cross him, you would be hearing about it at the buffet line of every Fourth of July annual pancake breakfast hosted by the Cupholder Firehouse in conjunction with the local chapter of the Lion's Share Club for the rest of time until Global Warming County becomes an unfortunate reality and it turns into Global Warming Globe. You see, Hank's vision may have been all so cruelly usurped from him by the Sims gods when they were animating his character but that doesn't mean he isn't a proud cardholder of the gift of gab. Rumor has it that he once told a story so captivating that it caused the bus driver to nearly swerve off the thoroughfare in anticipation of the next beat in the plot. That one was a story about the time that he drove a neighboring farmer to the brink of insanity through a series of mind-numbing events that created a corn maze of confusion for Teddy Boston, the second best farmer in all of the car-related counties in Michigan, not just those Yoopers up there in the Yoop. Hank and Teddy had a bitter rivalry that dated all the way back to their little league days when Teddy brushed Hank back with some chin music one too many times (probably Motown if we are going to stay on course), causing the brash youngin' to charge the mound with his Louisville Slugger regretfully in tow...Hank would go on to spend a handful of nights in the Cupholder Juvenile Delinquent Center, a windowless facility on the edge of town, kitty corner to the Walmart, with a lobby containing several ping pong tables, a smattering of old school Pac-Man arcade games and a shuffleboard table sitting by its lonesome in the corner with a healthy sized colony of dust mites and skull and crossbones images graffitied into the side of it. Instead of threatening his enemy with a twenty three ounce aluminum bashing stick, this time Hank Inception'd Teddy's life with his cunning wit, which he had gradually gained after having the C for captain stitched into his competitive chess jacket for almost a baker's dozen years that he wears while competing for the Cupholder Check Mates in the Michigan Yoop Amateur Chess Society (or the MYACS if you are anyone who knows anyone at an organic coffee shop/fruit stand/farmers market with both coffee and fruit available in the Yoop or Tobey Maguire from that movie with the chess), a highly secret and exclusive society on par with the Stonecutters from that Simpsons episode with the Stonecutters. But yeah, Hank basically just took a torch to all four of Teddy's fields of fresh, ripe strawberries at like 3 am after going twelve rounds with a handle of Johnnie Walker and getting knocked out before the final bell...have you ever smelt a burnt strawberry? It smells worse than death itself; it's like if you tossed some garlic on a pile of old socks that were sitting below Carrot Top while he got a haircut (Carrot Top's barber is probably one of the most revered barbers in the Hollywood barber community which is otherwise known as the HBC if you make organic coffee at a farmers market in the Yoop). Turns out that blind people can be real jerks sometimes too.    

 

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

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Matt Damon & Jimmy Kimmel's Beef

The morning began just like any other for Matt Damon - he rolled over and was awoken by his Boston Red Sox themed alarm clock. Then the camera slowly pans out to reveal that his entire room, nay his entire house is decked out in Boston Red Sox memorabilia much like Jimmy Fallon's character in Fever Pitch. Then Matt checked his Twitter feed like he is wont to do in the early hours of the day as he rummaged through the tweets, a hoarder searching through their unit at Public Storage A Couple Towns Over for something of value to sell at the local thrift or antique shop so they can invest in more up to date knick knacks like snow globes with Santa Clauses who are vacationing in tropical destinations, snow globes with Santa Clauses who are delivering gifts around the world on Christmas Eve and snow globes with Santa Clauses who are trying to do their taxes and having a ton of trouble figuring out what they are able to write off as a charitable donation. After sifting through his Twitter feed like a real life 49er, Matt Damon went outside in his bathrobe while holding a steaming coffee mug to get the newspaper, which he still gets delivered to his house even though he is Matt Damon and you wouldn't think that he would still get the newspaper, you would think that the newspaper would care more about him than he would care about the newspaper. What Matt Damon found on his doorstep shook him to his core...a nice looking gift basket with a bunch of tasty fruit, muffins and lil packets of hot cocoa with marshmallows already in them addressed to him from the one and only Jimmy Kimmel, his old late night hosty friend. There was one part of the nice looking gift basket that stood out in particular to Matt Damon, though, and it happened to be one of those robot drone thingys. The robot drone thingy had a orange and white checkerboard design like it was fresh off the assembly line from the University of Tennessee after a bunch of people volunteered to help in its construction as well as a name tag on it that read Teke. Teke was a friendly robot drone thingy but a robot drone thingy nonetheless so its capabilities were not meant to be dealt with lightly. Rather than question Teke's ever burning desire to take over the world, no matter how many humans it may have to bury in order to accomplish this hefty task, the wise thing to do would be to embrace the all encompassing, worldly strength of the machine and the mystical powers behind the Rocky Top factory down there with the fine people of Knoxville TennessEEHEEEEEEE....let's go roll them Tide. So anyway, Teke was a beast and everyone refused to acknowledge it...everyone that is, except the one and only Jimmy Kimmel. You see, Jimmy met Teke on an online dating app for humans and robot drone thingies that is known in the circles highly exclusive community as Tinder. Teke swiped left on Jimmy's heart and Jimmy swiped left on Teke's robot puzzle piece and the rest went down in history (or the future, you know, cuz robots n stuff...Robots N Stuff was a failed Chris Hardwick pilot that was slated to run on TruTV a few slots after Impractical Jokers until one of the robots tried to do an after show about it and Chris Hardwick accused him of heisting his after show talk show format that so many people have dreamed of one day doing for their favorite show (Here are a few honorable mentions for the Best After Show Talk Show category...The Water Cooler (The Office), The Water Cooler (Parks & Rec) and The Water Cooler (The Shape of Water) (It's not a movie...but...yeah...at least it gets some Oscars street cred, you know) But yeah, Teke was a boss and no one wanted to give him any artificial intelligence respect other than Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon was about to find that out the hard way. So, Matt Damon just asked Teke to make him some coffee, like it doesn't seem like that big of an ask, right? Well apparently for the robot drone thingy, it was more of a question about what is wrong or right and how to solve the ombre puzzle of why humans exist. Pretty much, Teke just did a 900 on the whole situation right away, right when Matt Damon asked for a simple cup of straight up normal black coffee, none of that light foam, heavily sprinkled whipped dream cappuccino with a side of unlimited bread sticks that all the celebrities get on the TMZ. Teke went and made Matt Damon a Jamba Juice kind of smoothie and Matt Damon got pretty pissed about the whole ordeal so that's how his beef with Jimmy Kimmel began and the rest kind of just snowballed from there, you know how these things go.  

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com

A Totally Honest Review of Crazy Rich Asians

Both splashy and dashy, plushy and fussy, a brilliant arrangement of real estate moguls and wanna be real estate moguls. If HGTV was a movie, it would wish that it could capture the screen and flaunt what its got like this flick. CRA'z manages to be punny and also pretty phunny at the same time. Imagine if the most interesting man in the world had a baby with a lady from a Corona commercial...now you're on the right track, my amigo. Now continue down this imagination path in considering if that baby went on to study computer science at Princeton or Harvard or one of those hotbeds of academia...you just hit a bulls eye and won the World Darts Championship: Singapore edition. And what about putting your own family ahead of your personal passions...Oprah is gonna be pissed when she sees this one. Don't get lost in the cloud on this beaut as CRA'z is basically iPhone the movie (no offense, Tangerine...but anyway, speaking of Tangerine, I'm going to name one of my books Tangentrine...that is all for now.) or at least Apple must be paying a hefty price to get all that screen time...selfies have been elevated to an underappreciated and oft overlooked art form in this low stakes and even lower pay off tromping. Have you ever found yourself liking a movie or a book or a TV show or something and asking yourself why you like that thing and never being able to quite figure out why you like it? Yeah well, that is what it is like for me and Crazy Rich Asians except for the liking it part...just kidding, it wasn't that bad, but it was kind of like if a screensaver was a movie, but like a really interesting screensaver that your dentist's receptionist would have at least. Everyone can't sit in first class or it wouldn't make first class as cool anymore and let's be honest; CRA'z is not first class material, folks; whoa, I just got possessed by a judge from a bad 80s talent show show. CRA'z is kinda like an alternate universe in Back to the Future II - like what would happen if Marty McFly's parents actually cared about his grades and future and that kind of stuff..maybe they did, heck I can't remember, it's all a jumble, all those 80s movies are like one big montage of a group of friends running barefoot on a beach and chasing after a kite that came from a drifter, but George McFly is kind of like the real life Ned Flanders so you never know, you just never know, but you do know one thing which is that at the end of the day, we're on to Cincinnati. And I can already hear you shouting at your desktop computers and getting ready to stuff my P.O. mailbox with hecka snail mail about my hockey coach with an addiction to his whistle tough love and professional E sports athlete level of emotional withdrawal (which is the highest level you can reach in the game of life which is both the most expensive and the cheapest game out there on the market) with CRA'z and I just want to say one thing...it's not your fault, CRA'z...it's not your fault. 

Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon 

Visit Chris's website christheauthor.com