I
My sister got a
taser, and my mother got
a gun for Christmas.
II
We shot mom’s pistol
into the embankment out
back behind the house.
III
Next we measured the
striking range of my sister’s
new taser: six feet.
IV
Mom couldn’t bring her
pistol to the grammar school
where she taught fractions.
V
And my sister, she
couldn’t bring her new taser
to college with her.
VI
So they left them home
where I watched them both and I
protected myself.
I recognize my faults; I am always conscious of my sins. I have sinned and done what I consider evil, which is make a joke about kale. So you are right in judging me; you are justified in condemning me. Anyway here is my kale joke in The Haven.
It may be interesting to you to know that I wrote it when I was alone in a cabin in the woods enduring several days of primordial animal terror. I kept a fire going, held tightly onto a metal fire poker, awaited my demise, read a copy of the New York Times I picked up before heading into the woods, and wrote this kale joke.
I got all my personal data as a CSV so I could understand my grief.
I developed a sensible grief metric and submitted the metric to a variety of innovative but well-established statistical analysis and data visualization techniques.
The file containing my personal grief data was too large to be stored locally and so I configured a remote database to store my grief data using new and affordable cloud-based technologies.
I visualized my grief for my parents and siblings in a series of charts that I embedded in an e-mail.
can’t get last one to load, my dad replied.
I sent it again but at a lower resolution so the file size would be reduced. I felt that this chart contained important information pertaining to my personal grief which is why I’d saved it at such a high resolution at first. I was happy to re-send the smaller file, even though I really wanted my dad to have the high resolution version as well.
I put them all in the family’s directory on the cloud computer technology I had learned to use and set a reminder on my calendar to print them all out at the library before we all met at my parents’ house for lunch the following Sunday.
I made enough copies for everyone and passed them out, after church but before the ballgames started.
Alex B. Fine 