The Wisest Wizard

The wizard woke up early on Wednesday morning.  He put on a freshly pressed wizard robe and his tallest and most intimidating wizard hat.  As he walked out the door of his wizard's tower, he grabbed a long, gnarled staff.  The staff was topped by a weird ram's skull.  He and the skull had lived together for the past 500 years.  The horns twisted and turned around themselves, the powerfully enchanted skull vibrating with an unpleasant aura.

The wizard ran out to his car, parked on a nearby side street.  Just as he arrived at his car, a traffic enforcement agent was applying a car immobilizer "boot" to the wizard's car.  He couldn't believe it.  All those unpaid parking tickets caught up to him.  He was going to miss his job interview.  His hopes of moving to a much more expensive and remote wizard's tower with nicer IKEA furniture were immediately dashed.

The wizard tapped his magical staff on the ground three times.  Immediately, the weird ram's skull sprung to life, twisting and undulating from dark magic.  The ram's skull began to speak in a shrill tone, "Now we'll never be able to afford a new flatscreen TV!  Do something, you twit!"

The wizard, not one to take any shit from the ram's skull, began to think.  With the speed of a man 1% of his age, he thrust his hand into his wizard robe and took out a meerschaum pipe.  The pipe was implausibly white, looking pristine for its considerable age.  It was painstakingly carved into the shape of a woman's distressed face, complete with wide screaming mouth.  The wizard shouted in a booming voice that echoed down the narrow street, "STOP RIGHT THERE! RELEASE MY VEHICLE!"

The parking enforcement agent, mostly ignoring him, muttered, "Just doing my job."

Before the parking enforcement agent could even finish his sentence, the wizard stooped down and packed the pipe full of dog excrement.  He flicked up one finger, and casted a cantrip.  Flames licked out of his finger, igniting the pipe. The wizard inhaled the smoke of the dog shit deeply into his lungs.  Stifling a cough, he pursed his lips and exhaled with great gusto towards the parking enforcement agent.

The parking enforcement agent's smug expression quickly gave way to a terrified mask of horror. From the wizard's lips came out a billowing cloud, made up of scintillating colors and shimmering patterns.  The weird ram's skull began to contort and pulsate, emitting a deep bass note.  And then, the wizard, the skull and the parking enforcement agent began to dance.  They danced together for hours while the putrid clouds of burning dog shit and dazzling colors filled the air on the untraveled side street.

The wizard eventually lost interest and walked back to his wizard's tower with the staff, remarking introspectively, "I'm high all the time, I smoke that dog shit."

Another Day at the Office

There he sat, brooding over a sad salad that was inadequate in all ways. The phone on his desk rang. He glanced at the caller ID display. He looked back at the salad, and took another lousy forkful as the call rang over to voicemail. The half-assed salad of unwashed lettuce, undoubtedly heavily laden with fecal coliform bacteria, loomed ever more ominous on his desk. He was a federal agent. A government killer with a badge and an arsenal of high-powered weapons.

The law didn't apply to him. He was the law. He was also a guy who liked to jerk off with Liquid Wrench, but he mostly did that off the clock. Back to the salad. It was really a shitty salad. He dumped the salad in his government-issued trash bin. The oily, brownish lettuce leaves cascaded down the mound of bullshit paperwork that he had discarded earlier.

He began to walk out of the office, his hulking, brutish frame making the floor shake with each step. As he reached the door to the parking lot, he unholstered his service pistol. He gripped the Sig Sauer P227 tightly in his large, hairy hand. It was an excellent weapon. This one in particular had killed plenty of people, innocent and guilty alike. "Everybody is guilty of something," he thought.

The sunlight made the matte black finish of the Sig contrast sharply with his cheap suit. He waved the gun around in the air, grimacing in the empty parking lot. The government killer walked, gun still in hand, to get an omelette at the diner down the avenue.

He opened the to-go container and mushed a handful of omelette into his mouth. Bits of egg clung to his hairy hand.

The omelette was fucking terrible.

Les Huîtres de Bélon

You've been to Bélon. I know I have. Le Bretagne. The oysters. The Mistral. The pussy.

I stayed in a small cottage on the river with no electricity and a primitive but effective wood-burning stove. It was a modest abode, the kind of place where a man could go to flee the bustling of the big city. I went to find peace. I also went to see an old friend.

Serge had called me weeks before I arrived. He had opened a sleepy bar near the river and wanted me to leave the United States for the French countryside. I gladly obliged - I owed him, after all. We had known each other for a long time, since our meeting in Laos years ago. It feels like forever ago looking back upon it.

The bar was called Le Petit Chou-Fleur. It was a tiny, bistro style bar with patterned tile floors. My feet hurt. Serge was behind the bar. I greeted him and we kissed on each cheek. The bar was mostly empty, except for one old man, sitting at the very end of the bar. The old man methodically sipped cognac from a tiny snifter, giving the glass a quarter turn after each sip. He looked easily over a hundred years old. I looked down the bar at him, and he shot me a fiery look that made me quickly look back to Serge.

Serge was a stout man, proud of his belly, and the fine food with which he filled it. He was short of stature, but his personality filled a room. While I had been looking at the old man, Serge poured me a glass of anisette, shaken with ice. The milky white highball sat on the oaken bartop. I sipped it slowly. Serge drank red wine out of a juice glass.

Serge and I reminisced about the old days. The old man stared. I realized then that he wasn't glaring at me. His eyes were cataracted. They were as cloudy and pale as my drink. I wondered if he was born that way or if it had developed in the hundreds of years during which he appeared to have been alive.

Serge brought out a large platter, piled high with oysters on ice. He gave me an oyster knife and took one himself. We shucked oysters and drank, laughing and gesturing. The old man said nothing. He sipped his cognac, turning the glass.

Serge was in the middle of pouring me another anisette when the sweaty Turk arrived. His clothes were shabby and his perspiration made his white shirt translucent. The Turk was a hirsute fellow; body hair erupting in tufts from nearly all his exposed skin. His beard was a vast jungle of blackness upon his face. The Turk stumbled over to the old man and put his arms around his ancient physique in a threatening grip.

The old man was frail and I was concerned. Before I could do anything, the old man stood up and smashed the Turks head on the bar. He deftly flicked out a pocket knife and shucked the Turk's left eye completely out of its socket. The old man ate the eye, slowly, chewing with his mouth open. I walked over to make sure the old man was okay, and then he shucked out the Turk's right eye, which I only ate so as not to insult the old man. The vitreous fluid from the eyeball exploded in my mouth and tasted like an especially mucus-filled loogie mixed with ocean water.

"This happens all the time," Serge said in a calm monotone.

The old man laughed. Then he took a sip of his cognac, spinning the glass. For a second, he looked just a little younger. And in the mirror, I looked into my face, and I looked younger too.

Culinary School

Barack Obama sat in the Oval Office, brooding over a stack of papers. He took out his crayons and scribbled furiously, drawing a crude scene of a pine forest. Obama grabbed a deep brown crayon and began to draw a grizzly bear. The grizzly bear was leaning forward, holding a salmon in his gnashed teeth. Beneath the bear, Obama drew a man. The bear had the man pinned face-down beneath his poorly-drawn paws. The man was being fucked in the ass by the bear. Obama accented the scene with a few squiggly lines to show the thrusting motion that the bear was making.

Obama stood up at his desk. He held his drawing in his scaly hands. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth. He was very pleased with the drawing.

Obama's days in the Oval Office were not always so relaxing. Just a week ago he was embroiled in a vicious prank war with one of the sous-chefs in the White House kitchen. The sous-chef's name was Julio. Julio was a cantankerous alcoholic. He drank cooking wine in the kitchen all day and also all night. In spite of Julio's faults he had an excellent sense of humor.

Obama was meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister. They called the kitchen for an opulent lunch to be delivered immediately to the Oval Office. Julio had planned for this moment. He made a last minute substitution to the food cart, replacing Obama's requested seasonal pumpkin soup with an ornate gilded bowl filled with urine with chunks of human feces floating in it. Julio gagged at how disgusting the replacement soup was. Obama and the Prime Minister recoiled in horror as it was unveiled from beneath the cloche and served to them.

Without missing a beat Obama snapped his fingers and five Secret Service agents rushed into the kitchen. Four of them held down Julio, while the fifth undid his pants and jerked Julio off with high-quality gourmet olive oil. Julio struggled to get free but he could not break the grip of the four men holding him down. The workers in the kitchen were aghast, except for a few Ecuadorian line cooks that saw Julio send up the shit soup to Obama. They laughed like hyenas as the Secret Service jerked off Julio.

After about 2 minutes of being vigorously jerked off, a stale, grey load of jism exploded out of Julio's penis and the Secret Service agents reported back to Obama. The President of the United States laughed and high-fived the Japanese Prime Minister. The two men then sat and each chowed down on the urine and shit soup, stopping only to smirk and look at each other knowingly.

Ten Toes in the Game

Late last night I was watching Food Network. Mario Batali was doing a special, traveling the world and savoring the fine wines that the different regions have to offer. Batali's corpulent jowls undulated as he spoke of the terroir, a French term in wine used to denote the special characteristics that local geography bestowed upon particular varieties.

Batali spoke at length, his entire body vibrating and jiggling like Jell-O.

"Château Latour. Perhaps France's finest wine. This bottle is from 1996, an excellent year for Château Latour Pauillac. A red Bordeaux from the Bordeaux region of France, wine connoisseurs the world around have come to know Château Latour as the name in fine drinking."

Batali uncorked the bottle. He inhaled deeply from the cork. His face furrowing into deep, gelatinous thought.

He poured a massive glass of wine, rotating the deep red liquid around the expensive, stemless wine glass. Batali leaned in close toward the camera. His beard was unevenly shaven and his entire face seemed to be made of butter. Then he threw the wine in his face.

Screaming into the camera now, Batali repeated over and over, "CHATEAU LATOUR! CHATEAU LATOUR!"

His purplish-red wine stained visage was horrific. The wine made his face expand and contort. Batali pressed his terrible purple face into the camera's lens, occupying the whole shot and mushing his already porcine features into a muddled grimace. Wine stained the camera lens and Batali grappled with the cameraman.

The wine drenched man continued chanting, "CHATEAU LATOUR! CHATEAU LATOUR!"

Batali was in a frenzy, now pouring the remnants of the magnum bottle of wine over his unusually large head.

"CHATEAU LATOUR! CHATEAU LATOUR!"

Batali's screams were getting louder and louder from the television.

I was unable to cope with Batali's vulgar display. I took a huge swill of overproof peppermint schnapps and put on the extreme motorcycle building channel.

Shrimp Ceviche

"Fucking hot today," Tareq muttered to himself as he walked down the sun-scorched streets of Cancun. He wore a garish Hawaiian shirt, open toed sandals and tan cargo shorts. Only gringos and burros walk around in the noonday sun. Tareq knew that, but he had an entire duffle bag full of envelopes to bring to the post office. Over the past 3 days, Tareq had been preparing to mail his letters, containing a short, but pointless message and photographs of his short, deformed penis to the North Pole. 500 letters in total, the photos in each taken using a time-lapse camera in front of which Tareq danced a vulgar nude dance for nearly the entire 3 days.

Tareq's thirst grew as he trudged down the blocks to the post office. Sweat dripping from his brow, Tareq adjusted the strap of the duffle. There was a cantina nearby. The cantina wasn't air-conditioned, but they did have an attractive waitress that Tareq had seen before, and a large selection of tequila. Tareq entered the cantina and ordered a mescal, con gusano. The silvery liquor shimmered in the bottle, and the attractive waitress fished out the worm and dropped it in the drink. There was an satisfying plop as the worm hit the spirits in the glass.

Tareq eyed the drink, and then the waitress, and then the drink again. He gripped the lowball glass in his unsteady hand and slammed down the several ounces of liquor in one gulp, including the worm.

What Tareq didn't know was that the worm was an alien symbiote, and the resultant parasitic infection permanently turned him into a homosexual. While ordinarily that might have upset Tareq, the worm also robbed him of the ability to realize anything had changed. He did have to suck a lot of cocks throughout Mexico and the rest of the world, though.

The Highest Level of Government

The Manticore and Barack Obama sat in the Oval Office, playing Candyland like they did every morning. Obama passed the Manticore a bottle of whiskey and they each drank deeply from the bottle, taking breaks only to draw cards and advance their Candyland pieces. After 20 or so minutes, the Manticore had amassed a big lead on Obama. Obama's forked tongue flicked in and out, and he stroked his scaly chin, planning his next move.

The Manticore was unwavering. The Manticore took a huge swill of whiskey and advanced his piece on the final point on the Candyland board. Obama jumped to his feet, shouting at the top of his lizardman lungs, "YOU DIRTY JEW MOTHERFUCKER! PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING FAG JEW MANTICORE! BULLSHIT!"

The Manticore shrugged his shoulders, put his yarmulke down on President Barack Obama's desk and walked out of the Oval Office without saying a word.

The next morning, Obama and the Manticore met in the Oval Office and played Candyland and drank whiskey, like they always did.