Crispy the Lion Goes to Town A Morally Heavy-Handed Tale

It was a bright sunny day on the plains where Crispy the Lion lived.

"I believe I shall journey into the big city today!" he told a bush.


"You go right ahead and do that," said a voice from inside the bush.

"What a polite and supportive bush you are!" said Crispy, delighted. "I will be sure to bring you back some nice bush food from the big city."

"I am not a bush," said the bush. "I am a wombat. Can I go with you to the big city, Crispy?" The wombat came out of the bush and looked at Crispy. "I promise I will be no trouble."

Crispy looked back at the wombat.

"So? Can I come?"

"Howdy, Wombat!" said Crispy. "I was just talking to this bush, and it was being very nice. I am going to the big city today! Do you want to come with me?"

All of the animals in the jungle liked Crispy the Lion. He was not a very good navigator, and he was not a very good waffle iron. But he had a heart three to five times bigger than all the other lions' put together.

Crispy and Wombat said goodbye to the bush and set out. Neither of them had seen the big city before. They were very excited to see it, but they did not know the way. So when they came upon a buffalo, they asked him for directions.

"Howdy, Buffalo!" said Crispy. "Wombat and I are going to the big city! I am going to bring back some bush food for my friend, that bush back there. Can you tell us how to get there?"

Most of the buffaloes in the jungle were kind and always obeyed the laws, but this one did not. He looked at Crispy the Lion. He saw that Crispy's mane was too poofy, and that he had the wrong number of claws. The buffalo decided to play a prank on Crispy.

"Yeah. You just keep going until the sun goes down, and when you wake up in the morning, you will be in the big city!" he buffaloed.

Crispy and Wombat thanked the tricky old buffalo and continued on their way. The buffalo watched them go. "That's a shitty lion," he said to himself.

After three quarters of an hour, Crispy and the wombat came upon a duck. "Wonk," said the duck.

"Howdy, Duck!" said Crispy.

"Wonk," replied the duck.

"Never mind," said Crispy, and walked away.

Much later, it began to get dark.

"It is beginning to get dark," said Wombat.

When the sun went down that night, Crispy the Lion slept in a big can while Wombat went out hunting. He was very tired and before he knew it, he was snoring. In another couple of minutes, he was fast asleep.


"Crispy! Wake up!" It was Wombat. He was poking Crispy in the mane, and he looked very excited.

"Howdy, Wombat!" said Crispy, blinking in the bright morning sun. "Did you have a good hunt last night?"

"Yes," replied Wombat. "I ate a leopard. I think you should come out and look at this."

Crispy crawled out of his can and shook all the apple cores out of his fur. He looked around and his eyes went wide. He took in the sights. He sniffed in the smells. He stomped in the stomps and chuckled in the snorkels.

"This is a magical land!" he declared.

"It's a junkyard," said Wombat. "That buffalo tricked us."

Crispy the Lion thought on the bright side. He could not believe that such a friendly looking buffalo could have told him a fib. He looked at all the rusty cars and trucks around him and was very glad he did not bonk into them in the dark.

"How do you know that this is not the big city if you have never seen the big city before?" Crispy said.

Wombat saw the logic in Crispy's statement and the smile on his face. "You are right, Crispy! I belieeeeeeve!"

Crispy winked at a bus. He was not a very good rock climber and he was not a very good classical composer. But he was definitely not silly. He knew that this place was not the big city and he had used positive thinking to turn it into something that was just as good.

"I still need to find some nice bush food. I do not want to disappoint my new friend," he told the bus. Crispy thought about all of the food he liked. Oatmeal cookies, burritos, gummi worms and doughnuts. He did not see any of those things in this place.

So he grunted. He strained. He closed both of his eyes and wished he was a walrus! When he opened them again, everything was exactly the same as before.

He bit a wheel off the bus.

"I found a giant doughnut for my friend the bush!" he declared. "We can journey home now."

Wombat smiled to himself. Crispy sure was a splendid lion.

The Shittiest Lion; A Children's Story A refresher; new story in the works!

It was a bright sunny day on the plains where the Crispy the Lion lived.

"I believe I shall go call on my friend Mole today!" he told a tree.

So he set off across the continent to visit a mole. On his way, he came upon a lake, in which there were much dolphins.

"Howdy, dolphins!" he said. The dolphins did a dance, because they liked Crispy the Lion. They liked him because he was special. They tossed him a fish.

"Have a fish!" the dolphins said. Then they scooted backwards on their tails across to the other side of the lake.

"I sure wish I could do that," remarked Crispy sadly. "I am not a very good hunter and I am not a very good theoretical physicist." Crispy ate his fish and continued on his way.

That night, he slept in a hole.

When the sun came up the next morning, Crispy woke up.

"Howdy, sun!" he said to the sun.

"Ultraviolet," said the sun, and proceeded to toast Crispy the Lion.

"I must find some water," he said. "I am thirsty."

So he looked around for some water. He found a faucet on the side of a house, but he could not figure out how to make the water to come out of it. He had seen men get water out of it before.

"Well, hi there, Crispy!" said a man. "You look thirsty! Would you like a glass of water?"

"Howdy, man! Yes, I would please," Crispy said with the greatest of manners. After he drank his fill, he flopped onto his side and allowed the man and his children to rub his furry belly.

"Rrrow! That tickles!" His breath smelled like fish, so the children ran away. "Goodbye, Crispy!" they said. Their voices sounded funny because they were pinching their noses.

"That right there is one special lion," the man said, shaking his head and smiling as he watched Crispy bumble off into the underbrush.

After fifteen and a half minutes, a platypus came running up to Crispy. "Please help me!" she said. "There is a mean old moose bothering my children!"

"Howdy, Platypus!" said Crispy. "Where is this mean old moose?"

"Just north of here!" said the platypus.

"Um," said Crispy.

"That way!" said the platypus.

"Oh," said Crispy.

He followed the platypus to her motorhome. A big shaggy moose was showing the platypus children naughty magazines and smoking a cigar at them.

"Eeek!" said the platypus children.

"Bwuh huh huh," the moose chuckled gunkily.

"Howdy, moose!" said Crispy. The moose turned to look at him.

"Well, if it ain't Crispy, the Shittiest Lion!" he sneered.

"Eeek!" said the platypus children.

"If you do not leave those children alone, I will bite you in two!" he said, displaying a fang.

"You could not bite a potato in two!" snorkeled the moose. "I would like to see you try it!"

For years and years, Crispy the lion had been made fun of because he was different. He was not a very good hunter, and he was not a very good astronomer. He had the wrong number of claws, and his mane was always too poofy. But he had a heart bigger than all the other lions put together.

"I will!" he roared. He gathered his will. He gathered his strength. He pulled a potato out of his pocket and bit it right in two!

The mean old moose laughed so hard he swallowed his cigar and exploded.

"Eeek!" said the platypus children.

"Thank you, Crispy!" said the overjoyed Platypus. "Have an oatmeal cookie!"

Crispy the Lion loved oatmeal cookies.

"Mmmph! Wemm, I mmfta go nowmm. Gmbye Pmmattypuff!" he said, spraying cookie crumbs all over the place.

That night, he slept in a bus.

In the morning, Crispy jogged in place for no reason for about an hour.

After a little bit of jogging in different places, he came to his friend Mole's house.

"Howdy, Mole!" he said.

Mole was in his yard, putting up a satelite dish.

"'Sup, Crispy?" he said cheerfully. He had not seen his friend since the last book!

"I wish I could swim with my tail, like the dolphins," announced Crispy.

"That's stupid," explained Mole.

"Oh," said Crispy. "Well, have a potato, Mole!" he said, handing Mole half of a potato.

"Damn, cuz! Some dude put the munch move up on this thing! Right in two!"

The Shittiest Lion smiled to himself.

Based on a true story.

Photography: A Discourse

As my good buddy and sometimes colleague Jack Regan has mentioned on his blog, I am a photographer. Not only that, I am an expert photographer. I just thought I would take this opportunity to spread a little of my knowledge peanut butter on the bread of you, the public. Hand sanitizer and paper towels will be available in the back. Just ask your usher.

I was recently out on a "gig," as we photographers say. A "gig" is what we call a "random destination that we drive to so we can stand around with a camera dangling round our necks". Sometimes we actually look through the hole (called the "squinty portal" in cameraspeak) and push the button.

On this gig, I took a picture of a beetle.

A mighty fine shot, if I do say so myself. And of course I do. I used my Canon RangeGoblin DSLR with a Dweezlebaum filter over the front element. You get a little bit of frobbing around the edges with a Dweezlebaum, but the increase in overall sphinctering is worth it.

If you look very closely, you can see the tracks in the sand the beetle left behind. I'm not sure what kind of beetle it is, because I am a photographer and not a beetlologist.

The constraints of viewing a high-res picture in a browser becomes readily apparent in this case, as some may find it hard to pick out the beetle, who I have named Hank.


You'll have to click the image to make it bigger, as the downsampling tends to add smudge and wank to the titter mask.

If you (I do, because I'm a pro) have purchased the Pixelpuss™ plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, you can achieve some stunning results. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Note the beetle's thorax and its many dots. Go on. Note them.

The original shot was framed on a quadpod with a Gravity Boom™ tracking system. This setup increases the areal density of pretty much any CMOS sensor, enabling the skilled artisan to utilize a technique called "pixel snubbing". It was worth the second mortgage.

As the image below clearly attests, the results are nothing short of pretty neat. Here is a zoomed-in crop of the original.


If Blogger's lousy Koala Image Engine hadn't stripped my images of their metadata, you could right-click them, select properties and view all the statistics. That is okay, though, as we enthusiasts love spouting meaningless (to you, the philistine) numbers attached to little bits of alphabet soup. Here are some now.

Fractal lenghth: 204 decibels.
Composure setting: Gritty (terminology may vary between camera models).
White balance setting was trimmed toward honky but the auto-crippling feature of the RangeGoblin tended towards the infra-red. Hopefully this will be addressed in future firmware releases.
RGB luminance quantifier: Knurled, but red-weighted with a high RPM trochoid setting.
Light metering: Squirrely.

The images were processed with Adobe Photoshop, which helped remove some of the lens flapping. I also employed the Imagemonkey® FrameSpackler Pro™ to fill in some of the dry spots.

Feel free to use my techniques for yourself, waste a bunch of money on high-end equipment to drop in the sand, and soon you will become an unbearable doofus in your own right!

Fighting the Write Fight

Sure, have a seat there. Oh, him? Just brush him onto the floor. Oh! Ha! I'm sorry about that. He's not declawed. We'll get you some peroxide and gauze in a few minutes.

I'm glad you were able to come by and listen to me for a bit. I've talked about it before, so I'm sure you're aware of my, uh, brain issues.

No, please! It's not contagious. You can come back. If you start feeling lightheaded, it's probably nothing more than blood loss. This can easily be reversed by a technique called "blood finding," I assure you.

It's not a disease, at least not one that I've heard about before, but it seems that instead of a brain, I've got a whiny 3-year-old. I'm sure that sounds preposterous, given the embryological impossibilities involved, but hear me out.

I like to write. I'm not entirely sure that I would become suicidal if I were ever forced to stop, but I think that has more to do with being unable to imagine someone forcing me to stop writing. I don't know how they'd do it. Snap all my pencils? Rearrange all the letters on my keyboard? Fill my Writey Room with bats?

All that would do is make me mildly sullen. In the case of bats, I wouldn't be so much discouraged from writing as I would be happy to have a very interesting situation to tell folks about.

If they really wanted to me to stop writing, they would find some way to give my brain even more control over me than it already has. It's a cantankerous little beast, my brain. Like it never gets enough naptime, and it's always hungry.

"I want to write a story!" I'll say.

Bleah, my brain will reply. Don't wanna.

"Come on. It'll be fun! I'll give you a cookie afterward." I usually try positive reinforcement before I resort to beatings. I figure if it works on real 3-year-olds, it might work on my brain too.

Can't we just go play the Xbox instead? I'm tired, and the last stuff you forced me to help you write sucked.

Kids and their video games! It's not that games are particularly bad for you, I believe, but that playing them, with a few notable exceptions, reminds you that there are a lot of stupid people out there who get paid a lot. That kind of thing can depress a fella, and make him want to go write about bats.

"Look. What if I promise that this piece will be really, really good? I can even do another Crispy the Lion post. You liked him, right?"

You're a douchepuppy.

"So now we're resorting to name-calling? Don't you make me come in there! I want to write something, and if you're not going to help, then I'm going to just leave you here for the seagulls and go do it by myself. Is that what you want?"

Want ice cream. Hmph.

"You're jolly well not going to get ice cream after the way you've behaved, mister."

It goes on like this until either my brain wins and we both just go watch TV or catch up on the chores (which don't usually involve my brain) or I win and we go write. Someday I hope the little bastard will grow up and I can really buckle down.

Usually you can tell when I've been writing without the help of my brain, can't you?

What's that? Yes, you're right. It is getting quite late, but I'm afraid I'll have to decline your invitation to "shoot that thing," as you've so delicately put it. He eats bugs, you see, which is an invaluable service I'd as soon not lose.

Please give my regards to the tetanus shot man, won't you?

Coffee Goes Off-Roading

Gravel pinged off the car's sides as the rear end swung out and it plowed a dark arc in the dusty switchback. I punched the clutch in and gave the throttle a tap. The tach needle jumped, and I downshifted to third, dropping the clutch and planting my foot hard on the accelerator. The four-wheel-drive dug in and I exited the turn, leaving behind a rolling cloud of dust and gummi bears.

"Whee!" said Coffee. "Go back and do that again!"

"No," I said. I squinted through the dirty windshield, scanning the road for holes. "And quit throwing all our gummi bears out the window. We need those for stamina."

Coffee hit me with his clipboard. "Look. It says right here in the official rally rules that if you are spanky-dope, you have to go back and do the fun turns twice," he said. "Besides, you're way ahead of those other guys."

"Doesn't matter. We're being timed. Keep an eye on the road, willya? What's coming up next?"

"I sincerely doubt that." Coffee consulted his map and pacenotes. He scanned the roadside. "Looks like we're entering hippo country," he said in an exaggerated Texas drawl.

I tapped the brakes to put the car into a slide, and we drifted effortlessly around a shallow bend. "Hippo country? The hell?" I tried to steal a glance at the clipboard, but Coffee hunched over it, obscuring it with his shoulder.

"Yep. Better watch out for the ones with little birds on them. Those are the mean ones."

"If you don't tell me what turns to expect, we're going to lose the race," I said, nervously eying the narrowing road ahead. It was lined with little bent trees.

"Oh, boo hoo! Whatever will you do if the nice man in the suit doesn't give you a pretty little wreath made out of flowers? You'll have to grow your own and maybe have to touch an earwig!"

"There's also the money and the semi truck full of Oatmeal Creme Pies," I reminded him. Coffee was a sucker for OCPs.

"You know," he said, "That might just be a good enough excuse for being lame that I'll let you off this time. One hundred meters, left kink, severity three."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

The course straightened out in front of me, and I upshifted and flogged all four hundred horses. The car picked up speed, the trees whooshing by in a green blur, surprised squirrels bouncing off the windshield. The engine's scream was punctuated by thumps and clatters as the car's suspension tracked the pitted road surface. Coffee sat rigidly, arms at his sides, staring grimly ahead, totally focused. The relative silence unnerved me.

"Severity three?" I asked.

"Moose!" Coffee screamed, pointing.

I planted the brake, and the car slewed off the road. We ended up sliding sideways down a steep embankment, crunching through bushes and throwing up plumes of sand.

"No. Wait. I'm sorry. That wasn't a moose," Coffee said, after the car came to rest and the dust settled. "I'm pretty sure that was a yak."

I willed my redlining heart to slow, and loosened my death grip on the wheel. "Dammit. I should have known. That's, what, the third moose you've seen in the last twenty minutes?"

"It was a yak, you doofus. Gummi bear?"

"No thanks." I looked around. I couldn't see the track from here. As far as I could tell, the car was a tiny dot on an endless expanse of scrubland. "Where the hell are we?"

"How the putz should I know? This looks like a good place to get out and run around in circles, though. You up for that?" He poked me jovially with a box wrench.

"What do your notes say?" I prodded.

"Watch out for hippos," Coffee read off the clipboard. "And we haven't hit one yet! You're lucky I came with you on your sweaty little road trip. Can you imagine all the hippos and giraffes and stuff you would have bonked into if I wasn't here? Can I have some pop?"

"I didn't bring any pop," I said, wearily scrubbing the grit from my eyes with the back of a hand. "We came from that way, judging by the path of destruction and skidmarks. Which direction were we supposed to go after that last straight?"

"Don't be a weenie. I put some pop in the trunk before we left. You had an extra wheel in there, which was stupid, so I threw it away." He swung the trunk open. "I brought Mr. Piddle and some Grumpy Cola in case you wanted pop too. Want one?"

"Sure," I sighed. "Eeew. It's all warm."

Coffee released a belch that left the air full of the patter of fleeing small animals and a distinctly cherry odor. "Duh. This is the desert and all my ice probably melted a long time ago. Come on. Let's get out of here. There's no skunks here, and none of these bushes have any suspicious berries in 'em. It's boring."

"So you know which way to go?"

"Of course. You just try not to run into any hippos, and I'll do the rest. Can I listen to the radio?"

"There is no radio."

"This car sucks."

We were off. I didn't hold out a lot of hope that we would be able to put in the fastest time, but we might be able to place in the top five, and I could live with that. Even fifth place won you your weight in Oatmeal Creme Pies.

"Shallow left here. Two hundred; switchback. Bridge. Ducks. No, seriously! Ducks. Sharp right." Coffee's directions came fast and accurate. Before long we were back on a dirt road. Then pavement took over. Soon, I was passing houses.

"Are you sure we're still on course?" I asked Coffee.

He reached over and turned on the wipers. "Trust me. Have I ever gotten you in trouble before?"

"Did you see that? We just went through a red light. There are other cars on this road! That last one was a minivan full of kids!"

"Don't worry so much. They were just little kids, and you have a helmet. Slow down. Square right."

I sighed. We'd pretty much blown the race, so I might as well make the turn. I pulled into the parking lot and stopped.

"Waffle House. You happy?"

Coffee tittered. "Yes! You know what this means, right?"

"Enlighten me."

"It means that we can eat bacon and make fun of men with hats. It means we're winners!" I pulled the door open and Coffee pranced inside.

"You paying?" I asked him.

"Hell no. You still owe me for that pop I gave you."

Literary-Based Geological Relocation (Recycled)

A friend of mine recently told me that in order to "move mountains with my words," I would have to address "larger" subjects in my writing.

Naturally, I was under the impression that I already was moving them. Twice daily. Like a tectonic game of checkers, I was chucking mountains all over the place, stacking them, putting them in rows and generally having myself a grand old time.

Unfortunately, it seems one's lack of navigation prowess (which makes the mountain-moving a little random, but that is neither here nor there) is not considered a "big" idea. "People actually have to be paying attention to your words as well," my brain reminded me. I wept silently and not a little bitterly.

I scanned the Blog archives and found that of my roster of characters, only The Hardass would move mountains. He would do it with his fists and jaw. Since that is more akin to "strip mining" than moving mountains in the metaphorical sense, which is what I'm sure my friend meant, even he is out of the running.

Then came the soul-searching. What subjects should I tackle? Which ones could I, given the limited space inside my head, even including my sinuses? And by "big" did my friend mean "exhibiting strong human relativity" or "sailing deep and uncharted philosophical waters"?

Farts are 100% relative.

Deities are uncharted. (Those who claim to have charted them are later discovered to be insane).

Hmmm...

Perhaps she meant I should express an opinion on things that exert a greater emotional pull on the general populace. Tort reform or abortion rights?

Now I see the problem: Discussing things like that endanger the delicate stupid plants we have carefully nurtured in putz pots here on the Blog. In other words, it would do irreparable harm to the Ambient Moronics (shameful plug, I know), in much the same way that CFCs munch up the ozone layer.

I find people who take themselves very seriously to be somewhat worrisome. I am concerned for their blood pressure, and I am concerned for whomever they're planning to bomb. Ecoterrorists and false prophets are the logical extreme.

More importantly, they are not funny.

So rest assured, wasters of time, you will not load up your (surely bookmarked) link to the Blog of Stupid and find The Hardass discussing Gnosticism or Paul the CrimeFighter wrestling internally with the question of where to draw the line between "nice" and "euphemistic," and whether or not they overlap with "obscurantist".

If you want to know my stance on these things, meet me at Bob Evans, and we shall discuss them over a plate of sausages.

"I Sawr Me a Toad!"

As it does once every seven days, the weekend had woken me like an overenthusiastic golden retriever. It knocked my bedroom door open with its big head, jumped up on the bed and started pawing my covers.

"Alright, alright! I'm up!" I told it, shooing the weekend away before it could lick my face again. It bounced happily down the hallway ahead of me as I trudged to the bathroom. I couldn't sleep in forever. I knew I had things to do today that I normally couldn't do during the work week. I knew further that this was a lie--I just didn't want to do them during the work week.

One of the things I had to do was go shopping. As I'm sure I have mentioned before, I'm not really wild about shopping. Shopping takes you out into The Public where one runs the risk of being asked for directions by strangers. Even if, miraculously, I know exactly where the place is and how to get there, my brain always picks that exact moment to sabotage me by playing a game of Mad Libs:

"If you want to get to Dirty Larry's cabbage patch, keep heading downwind on Wonkville Terrace, and turn sideways 'til your doors turn blue. Then when you see Bigfoot shouting 'howdy, squirrels!' on the corner, make a quick squeak and fall down. It'll be on the mashed potatoes with gravy."

I was at the local superstore, making my surgical shopping strike and I had almost gotten out of it unscathed, when I felt the presence of a weirdo.

I was standing in line at the express checkout, eyeing the gum and wondering what the store did with all of those stupid checkout magazines they never sell, when I heard footsteps behind me. Normally this would be of no concern, even to an agoraphobe like myself. This time it gave me pause. Were those...slippers I heard?

I had to find out. I didn't want to just twist 'round and look down at the person's feet and say "oh! I see! That settles it, then!" and then go back to staring at the gum. That would be awkward. So naturally, it's exactly what I did.

"It shore do!" said the man behind me as I turned back around and got the gum in focus again.

Dammit. Now I had to turn around again and explain myself or have a conversation or something equally unpleasant. Mentally berating myself for displaying wanton curiosity, I took a deep breath and faced the stranger. I noticed that in addition to the slippers, he was wearing a bathrobe and a cowboy hat.

"Merp!" he said.

I quickly spun again and stared straight ahead. Merp? This guy was definitely a weirdo. Maybe if I held real still and breathed real shallow, he would go away. I felt a finger jab me in the shoulderblade. I somehow knew that that finger was dusted with day-glo orange Cheetos powders.

"Um. Hi," I said.

"Wunst, I sawr me a toad at work!" the stranger ejaculated. He pulled a single Cheeto out of his bag and looked very closely at it.

"Where do you work?" my traitorous mouth asked. It was evidently dead-set on me continuing this conversation whether I liked it or not. The stranger put his Cheeto back in the bag and frowned at me.

"Hurh?" he said.

Dammit. I probably offended him. I quickly scanned the area for someone in a white coat pushing an empty wheelchair or holding a straitjacket. Alas, this fellow seemed to be on his own.

"I mean, uh," I began.

"Oh! Phooey. I works down yonder, you git me? At that place whut makes them little nubbins whut keeps yer cabbnit doors frum bangin' when they clap shet. Soggy donkey balloons." He pulled another cheesy specimen from his bag and gave it the scrutiny.

This line was possibly the slowest-moving I had ever stood in. I craned forward to get a look at the person currently at the register. She had a shopping cart full of children and toys; clearly more than the 10 items or less, not including the kids. I fired a full barrage of hate-rays at the back of her head. I again wondered how people with such lousy math skills managed to stay employed long enough to afford to go shopping.

"Hey, mister," said the stranger behind me. When I turned, he tucked the Cheeto into my breast pocket. "That 'un's fer you."

"Thanks," I said.

"So that toad? Lil' faller was on the blacktop and I suz to m'self, I suz 'you shouldn't be on the blacktop ya crazy toad!' I went ta pick 'im up, and he squirted right out my grip, like so." The stranger held his arms out straight, his hands cupped one over the other, and squeezed a Cheeto out from between them. "Thurrrrbth! Just like that."

The command from the Broca's area of my motor cortex instructed my mouth to make a dismissive noise so I could go back to staring at the gum and hating the other shoppers, but it got distorted somewhere along the way.

"Did you ever manage to catch him?" I said instead.

"Honk jiggly!"

There were many ways to construe that phrase, none of them accompanied by an attractive mental image. I was going to resign myself to the conversation trap I was in and ask for clarification, but it was forthcoming.

"I sho did. I picks him right up, see, and I chunked him in the weeds. Toads b'long in the weeds, see, so that's whur I pit him."

"Good," I said. I was proud of myself for that one. It was a good reply.

The stranger rooted around in his Cheetos bag. It appeared empty. He pulled his hand out, stared at his palm for a good five seconds, then looked up at me.

"Hey, mister. I might jes wanna git that one Cheeto back frum ya."

I obliged. He crammed it into his mouth without opening it first. A fine dust of Cheeto shrapnel caught in his beard and glowed there majestically. He seemed content, so I turned around yet again to face the front of the line. The woman with the full cart was digging in her purse. Probably looking for her checkbook. I felt the finger in my back again.

"Did I tell you I sawr a toad at work yestaday?" the stranger asked.