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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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The newspaper in my town of smallish size and stature reported today that a police officer was summoned to a home to save its inhabitants from a 25-pound bat. The officer, it said in the newspaper, wrestled the bat to the ground. However, this was a lie. The bat was a normal-sized, teeny-tiny bat. No wrestling took place whatsoever. Police officers do this sort of thing all the time, and the newspaper will print it to alleviate everyone's boredom. Deer never die of natural causes. Deer get killed. It's a widely-known fact that deer are immortal creatures unless humans intervene. When I was young I was told that our friends "had a deer." This was thrilling. I was also told that the deer was "in the garage," and that was even more thrilling, because I imagined myself playing with their pet deer in the garage. I raced over to their garage and ran face first into a deer carcass, suspended from the ceiling on a hook or a rope or a chain. My friend Kathleen kept killing deer with her car. Everywhere she went, she killed a deer. If she went to the store to buy milk, a deer would die. Kathleen was upset. Kathleen has since moved far away. That reminds me of this one day when a moose fell off a highway overpass. This is the kind of place where, as everybody likes to say, everybody knows your name. They also know where you live, what car you drive, what you eat for breakfast, what brand of soap you use, and so forth, and so on. It's comforting to know that if I ever get hit in the head and develop amnesia, people will be able to help me out. Electricity is nice, but electricity is also overrated. Same with pavement. A fun thing to do is to sit in the middle of Main Street in the evening. Just sit there, right in the street. Nothing bad will happen to you. You can lie back and look at the stars and nothing will happen to you. When you want something around here, you usually can't get it. Unless you happen to want crawlers or farm implements or tasteful watercolors of wildflowers. Sometimes, though, those are precisely the things you want. The people in the woods just outside of town paint apocalyptic predictions on pieces of old wood and fasten these pieces of wood to the trees. The signs predict smiting and hellfire for various groups, the usual suspects: Catholics, Jews, foreigners, sinners, "all them that go against God." Once, inexplicably, it was Presbyterians. The headline in today's newspaper read, "Town Managers Meet, Decide to Buy Printer for Town Office." I do not know what will happen next.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
Five Drinking Games (increasing in difficulty) By Tim Carvell Fifteen-Second Theater Presents, Proudly, "Quiniela" By Paul Heltzel Dear Mr. Colorful Radio Personality By S. Aulenback Preview of Summer Camps: Camp Previews Three and Four (in a series of ten) By Jeff Johnson I Write Short Books About the Popular Bands of the Day. Here Is My Story. By Catherine Zymet |
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