Pickle Fork is done.
This is long overdue.
Medium and I used to be tight. We were pals. But things have changed a lot since I launched Pickle Fork. We’ve grown apart and our tastes have changed. I said some things, Medium said some things, there were a few broken bones, a light stabbing. The usual.
TLDR: Medium just isn’t for me anymore.
I’ve only stuck around this long because I felt a lingering guilt over letting Pickle Fork die. I didn’t build it alone and I feel I owe something to all the wonderful writers who have contributed their work. Ironically this has lead me to do something even worse: ignore all the submissions and new writer requests. Speaking as someone who has been on the waiting end of a submission, I know that’s not cool and I apologize. …
I was minding my own business
When this woman made this
Remark about toxic masculinity.
I am not a special snowflake
I take critique with no bellyache
But found her words toxic with salinity.
So I did what all good men must
And fussed it was unjust
To paint me with the brush of misogyny.
It’s not about you she dismissed
Don’t enlist straw men in this
You are showing your male fragility.
I could see that she was confused
She used words that accused
I said she was speaking emotionally.
She blocked me then and it was plain
The pains I took to explain
Were lost on her mental inferiority.
Seeing now that I was oppressed,
Depressed I expressed
With a Guy Fawkes mask, my nonconformity.
Originally published at https://erellsworth.com.
In the end, the lies peeled away like cheap, desiccated paint, flaking away to reveal the ugly truth. No one loved the Love Bug for his own sake. The truth was that people only loved him because he was a winner. Technology advanced too far for even his indomitable spirit to overcome and with every race he lost the facade cracked and fell away that much more.
Disgusted with his failures his final owner stripped him for parts and left him to rust in a field, where he rots to this day, a shell of his former self, an old broken husk, immobilized and riddled with bullet holes, but unable to die. …
In April 2016 a weasel chewed into one of the electrical transformers of the Large Hadron Collider, causing a short circuit and shutting the machine down.
What the Fake News won’t tell you is that the weasel incident caused a rift throughout the multiverse. The walls that separated each reality haven’t been right ever since.
Some people say this is when we entered what they call the Darkest Timeline.
I call it the Weasel Timeline.
In the Weasel Timeline, an alarming number of people seem to be divorced from reality. While it can be frustrating to encounter these people, try to remember that it’s not their fault. They just belong to a different universe.
Originally published at erellsworth.com.
Clap if you miss a shared reality.
A free verse poem
Meet me in the kingdom of absurdity
where we can laugh at the facts as they splatter
against the walls of our mania.
We will bathe in the entrails of reason as it is eviscerated
by the golems of our fear.
Meet me at the altar of outrage
where we can smash the babies
of our enemies upon the rocks.
Should they object we’ll dance a jolly jig in the infant viscera
while we admonish them to keep a civil tone.
Meet me at the circle of logic
where we can laugh at the petitioners
who chase our crazy pinwheels of thought round and round. …
The world grew fuzzy as the walls of reality thinned and buckled.
“Are you ok?” Mark asked.
The language was unfamiliar yet Rhea understood the words.
“Yes. I just got a little dizzy,” the response came unbidden.
“Probably allergies,” her husband said. Except she didn’t have a husband. She was a husband.
“Yeah, the air quality is awful today,” she said.
How did she speak this language? Why was she saying these things? What was she looking at?
Before her rested a grotesque sculpture — several life-size bodies contorted into various positions on the floor, their features indistinct but decidedly unpleasant. …
Probably pretty bad.
Throughout most of the Bush administration I remember news media reporting on how good the economy was doing. The Bush tax cuts were working! So they said. I never really believed it. As a child of the 90s, my baseline for what a decent economy “feels” like is probably skewed. However, near the end of Bush’s term the house of cards came crashing down. Turned out my biased intuition was right. The whole boom was built on bullshit.
Obama won by offering hope in the face of troubling times. You might think that hope was bullshit, but that was his message and it worked for him. His critics spent his entire Presidency trying to paint him as a tyrant who used a crisis to seize power. …
Something something, pickle pun.
Highway Patrol
Scofflaws. Criminals. Lawbreakers.
Call them what you want; I call them scum.
A Co-dependent’s Guide: 5 for sure ways to get that guy/girl of your dreams to notice you (like I did with Tom Hanks)
by Haute Mess
Happy Forking Friday!
Necromancers’ Guild Condemns DHS Kidnapping Policies
by Frankie G.
Today, the Necromancers’ Guild Of The Hellbound (NGOTH) held a press conference in a refurbished cave beneath the intersection of two leylines in Washington, D.C., to criticize the “recent & horrifying revelations” that the US government has lost nearly 1500 migrant children.
Emergency Affirmations I Launched Into While Dancing At The Club At 4 AM
Slice up these dills for your Memorial Day bbq
Another Boozer From The Juicer
by Phil Rossi
Driving a cab for Atlas Taxi when the dispatcher sent me to Regional. I fired up the ride and headed over.
Growing up, Regional served as the local loony bin. It’s where they brought the kids who threatened to kill their parents and blow up the high school. It still houses the disturbed, but nowadays doubles as a detox center.
#SponCon: Dove Will Kill Your Neighbor
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