Tag Archives: randy hasper

January 29, 2014 · 11:31 am

Smoke

Once there was a girl who took a smoke and she went on a wuffle. When she got back, she took a slunk.

When she came up, she didn’t feel so good so she took another smoke and then off she went wuffling again. Wuffling changes you, and she came back changed. She knew new stuff and didn’t know old stuff.

Smoke, wuffle, slunk; smoke, wuffle, slunk — and one day she didn’t know much of anything.

So she went to her travel agent.

“You’re a wuffie,” he said rudely.

“No ticket, no ride,” she said and winked, and she decided right there to take a snizzle.

But she wasn’t done yet.

Smoke, wuffle, slunk; smoke, wuffle, slunk. Now she was absolutely distraught, so she went to see a trusted friend.

“It’s serious!” he said.

“I’m moving on now,” she said.

“Do you want some help?” he asked.

“Sure, “she said.

Then she rose from her chair, wafted across the room, smiled slyly and drifted out of the window.

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January 18, 2014 · 4:20 am

Frida

Once a beautiful young, fractured girl fell in love with powerful old man, who was famous, and twice her age. And winning him and being won by him, she picked him up and deposited him in her heart. From this vantage point, he wrapped her in ribbon and gave her as a gift to himself.

They married.

He painted the world and became famous.

She painted herself and became famously beautiful.

He had an affair.

And then, like a girl falling from a great building, she fell as if from a great height and landed in the street below.

And thus crushed, she took her famous, selfish old husband out of her heart and she put him in her head, right between her eyes, and from there he sent out his ropes and wrapped them around her neck, and she died quite completely.

He reached out to the world for praise, and received it.

She reached out to herself and touched her own face, and she gently tugged it off.

Her face in her hands, she crumbled it up into tiny pieces, added oil to it, and brushed it on a canvass.

She looked at her beautiful, dark, vibrant skin tones, her black shinning hair, her gorgeous eyebrows, and smiled. There she was, alive, lovely, bordered with deep, rich color, defiant on the canvass.

This soothed her, the removal of her face, the smearing it on canvass, the surrounding it in rich color, so she did it, again and again, removing her face, her hair, her eyes, her skin and her mighty eye brows and applying them to canvasses. She painted her feeling face, her stolid face, her thinking face, her angry face, her sad face, her dominated face, her proud face, her dead face, her being born face, her brave face and her terribly trapped and her lovely dying face too.

And so went her life; it was love and death and pain and beautiful paint.

And when she finally died at last, death was nothing at all to her, for she had died many times before. Dying was just like painting; it was just peeling off one of your faces and attaching it to a canvass so that you might put back on yet another of your many beautiful faces once again.

And what about her lovely face? Like her husband — it out lived her.

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January 14, 2014 · 12:41 am

The Hurt Thing

Once there was a girl who found a hurt thing. She picked it up and put it in her heart.

There in her heart, it hurt, like a baby bird fallen from its nest.

The police were called. They couldn’t help. One of the officers said to her, “Hopefully you can pull yourself together and put this thing behind you. ”

She did that, the best she could, but the hurt still lay within her.

So she went to church. “You’ve sinned,” the church said.  “You have to repent, and never to do  that again.” She was struck to the quick, and she did as she was told, and said what she was supposed to say.

She actually felt better, but when she left, the hurt thing still flapped a broken wing within.

She looked around desperately for more help. She went to a therapist.  “You need to talk about it,” said the therapist, “and grieve.”

She did, and it helped, but still the hurt didn’t leave her.

A friend told her to go to the doctor. She did. The doctor gave her some pills. They helped, but she could still apprehend the hurt thing, as if it was calling to her from the room next door.

She lived, and worked, and took care of herself, and survived.

Years later, she met someone who after they had gotten to know her a bit, asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing,’ she said.

“What happened to you?” they asked.

“You can tell?” she said.

“Yes,” her new friend said, “it’s in your eyes.”

“I put some hurt in my heart,” she said.

“I am so sorry,” her new friend said. “I did the same thing.”

And then, just like that the new friend climbed into her heart.

“What are you doing?” asked to he girl who had tried everything, shocked and alarmed by what was happening.

And answering from inside of her heart, her new friend said, “I’m holding your hurt.”

And then they both began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” the one in her heart sobbed, that this happened to you.”

There was some more crying, both of them were crying, and then there was a long silence.

Then the girl who had tried everything said quietly, “It’s not hurting right now.”

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January 8, 2014 · 2:48 am

The Word Factory

Once upon a time, in a deep, dark hardwood forest, far from any city, town or homestead, a word factory suddenly exploded into full-production.

With a clunk, and a hiss of steam from the engines of invention, cogs, levers, pulleys and rattling conveyors poured out a line of beautiful, freshly-honed words that absolutely covered the ground and filled the air.

Sheer chaos and order appeared. There were vocables escaping into the forest, rhymes dancing in the air, alliterations chasing each other through the clearing, neologisms running back up the conveyors, repurposed kennings doing high-fives on the sidelines and a whole pack of parallel structures forming a chorus line around the warehouse. In the middle of all this chaos was the master word-chef running around snatching up words and stuffing them into his lovelies — his proverbs and anti-proverbs, fables and antifables, a few dislocated-soliloquies, some expositions and bunch of hyperattentive narrativities.

Like bright candies spilled on a kitchen table to decorate gingerbread houses, the forest plant churned out its colorful linguistic astonishments. With sophisticated electronics and complex robotics, the master thrashed about in the middle of the words, running and laughing and crying and gesticulating manically. He was here and there and everywhere. He tested and retested his lovelies , arranged and rearranged them, unpacked and repacked them and frosted and candied and glazed them until they were near perfect — lightening, bon mot, dessert, the cats meow and the flicking tail too. Then with a flourish of mind, all his rhetoricals were packed, boxed, labeled and stacked in neat piles in the factory warehouse.

No one came to shop, but the factory just kept pumping out product, crazy with energy, like the broom in the sorcerers apprentice.

Then finally, one day a friend of the master word chef came to visit. Toured by the chef, she looked over the clattering conveyors. She snatched at a few of the words flying around her head. She peered in the door of the warehouse at all the high stacks. A nearby pallet of words shifted and seemed to move toward her.

“I don’t get it,” she said, stepping backwards — from what felt like a hot oven — into the open space of the yard. Even there, however, the words, phrase and sentences swarmed around her and she seemed a bit confused.

“Are you marketing these?” she asked.

“I make them for myself,” the word-man responded, “and a few friends.”

“Well, feel free to take a break,” she replied swatting at a metaphor, “especially if you notice that there are some other things you need to be doing.”

“I can’t,” he replied, and then glancing over his shoulder and seeing the newly coined words beginning to pile up at the end of a conveyor line, he rushed off laughing and gesticulating wild-a-phonically.

The friend went home, through the forest, ringing with odd vocables. She was as traumatized as Gretel, pursued as she was, for some distance by a personally relevant and particularly persistent axiomatic phrase.

“That was disconcerting,” she said to herself quietly upon arriving home and locking the door.

The word-maker looked up from his conveyors for a moment, a syllable in one hand and a word in the other, smiled softly to himself, and slamming them together said, “Va-va-voom suave-a-ka-boom!”

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December 27, 2013 · 2:55 am

A Drop

Once a drop of rejection fell on a young girl’s head.

It soaked into her skull, oozed through her brain, dripped through the roof of her mouth and fell onto her tongue.

She swallowed it.

Down her throat it ran and settling for a moment in her stomach, it soaked though the lining and slid into the lake of rejection pooled within her.

She flooded.

“It was just a drop,” said her mother. “I can’t understand why she is going on and on about it.”

“Clearly, she is overreacting,” said her father.

“She can be a drama princess,” said her friend.

She went to a therapist.

“Our psychic aquifers are made of individual drops that fall on us one at a time,” she said, “and trickling through us, find their way to all the other drops inside of us like them.”

I’m drowning,” said the girl.

“We drown,” said the therapist, “one drop at a time, and we dry one loving pat at a time too.”

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November 11, 2013 · 5:57 pm

Death Loses Again!

He ran his wheelbarrow down the center of the freeway.

It was night. Someone screamed, the barrow swerved, a body landed in it, and then the black-hooded, scythe-in-hand, fist-raised figure holding the handles laughed and disappeared, and then again was there and everywhere, on a million highways at once.

“What the hell? It was what today?”

“146,357.”

“Average, so madly average. I hate average!”

“Were on track. I’d say 50 to 60 million again this year. Heart disease is stable. Cancer is good, a real producer.”

“But we put out this week! I expected more!  Ah, we need something new, like tobacco. Love tobacco! So freakin’ effective.”

“Stop whining and get back out there! The guppies are winning!”

“Shut up!”

“Grass is winning!”

“No! Quiet!”

“Seeds are winning!”

“You better quit! I can’t take this from you!”

“Butterfly eggs — beating the crap out of you!”

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“One step ahead of the grim reaper … ever the exultant sower!”

And then all hell broke loose as the empty, dark hooded, machete wielding figures went at each other, in haste, frothing and sweating and cursing. And while they fought, seeds sprang from the soil and burst into flower, creatures from eggs sprang forth, flying and singing and praising, and babies — blushing, skin as soft as fluff — took their first triumphant breathes in a warm, watered, food-filled, life-washed world.

 

 

 

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November 6, 2013 · 3:08 pm

Better!

“I’m done,” she said, “Get rid of him!”

“I don’t think so angel,” he said, “It’s too hot out there.”

“What, are you going to wait until he destroys something here?” she replied.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said.”It involves a saw — but no small pieces.”

The next day he was out back, with a sawzall, hooked up to an eight inch blade with big teeth. There was some screaming, bit of sawing, and some digging, and some more sawing.

He came back in the house.

“What?” she said.

“Done!” he answered.

“I don’t see a body,” she said looking out back.

“I cut off his legs,” he said.

“Hum,” she wondered, “Do you think that will do it?”

“Next week,” he said, ” I hired a guy to take off his head.”

“Who do you think you are, God?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, “and anyway, he’ll still have a trunk.”

“Freakin’ Ficus!” she said.

“Like men,” he mused, “better pruned!”

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October 23, 2013 · 8:27 pm

Click-a-Clique

Once upon a time there was a fin-a-kin. People joined. It wealthified. It shotted high into the sky-a-thon.

But, as things went along, the onlookers, the friends and the families of the devotathons developed concernifications, and eventually, as people are wank to do, they got together to mussify about it.

“What is this bunk-a-bank,” the concernicated asked each other.

“It’s a cult-a-bolt,” wanked one concernicant.

“No, it’s a clan-a-fan?” wuzzled another.

“I’ve seen this before,” another wombatted, “It’s a sect-a-fek.”

“Stuff-enough-unlike-us,” glocked another.

“What do we do?” someone funked.

A loud voice yezzled from the back, “Let’s get all the clique-a-miks to join it!”

“How will that help?” someone wonkered.

A fuzzle in the back yonked, “They’ll ruin it!”

“Holy shebang!’ snoozled the whole grock, “Click-a-clique!”

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October 14, 2013 · 8:37 pm

The Boy Who Ate a Bus

When he was only four years old he ate a box, and then went around sorting everything. His mother didn’t like it, and told him to eat his vegetables.

When he was ten, he ate a bicycle. It tasted good. At night he had dreams of going fast.

When he was fourteen, his mother took him into her bedroom and made him eat an improvised explosive device. She swore him to tell no one. He told no one.

When he was sixteen he ate a school bus. It was empty; it took a while. Afterward he thought about a career helping people.

When he was twenty-one his father made him eat a squirrel. After that he was prone to spite, very much like his father.

Then both of his parents died, of cancer. He inherited money, and a house.

When he was twenty-eight, he completed a Masters degree in sociology.

At thirty he was engaged to be married. It fell apart; he broke it off. Then he made several bad financial decisions and lost all of the money he had inherited from his father.

At thirty-two, with not prospects in sight for family or career, he concluded that he was a failure. He was angry, lost, alone.

He struggle along doing this and that, and then at thirty-five, unexpectedly, he found a bight star in the morning sky, and ate it.

After that, he immediately started a nonprofit for children. The vision, the theme, the driver — it was children helping children. He was good at this, at establishing vision, at setting up the infrastructure of the nonprofit, at putting the pieces in place, not at relationships, but he was smart enough to hire people for that. It went well. Children were helped.

Then at forty-one, stuggling with lonliness, he went to therapy and tried to make sense of everything that had happened to him.

He wasn’t able to actually figure it out, but one thing stood out, one moment with the therapist. It was just after he told her about his mom, about the IED, and his dad, about the squirrel, when she looked at him incredulously and said, “Amazing. You are amazing.”

“Why,” he asked.

“Because you” she said looking him intensely in the eyes, “You ate a bus!”

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October 10, 2013 · 4:45 pm

Good

Once there was a man who wanted everyone to be good.

He himself grew up in a good family. He went to good schools, and was a good student, and when he set out on his career, he founded an non-profit organization based on helping people to become good. He spoke publically about the value of good, wrote widely about the benefits of being good, and modeled with his life the way of the good.

He supported good laws, he teamed with good organizations, he  promoted the campaigns of good leaders and he gave away lots of money to fund good causes.

One day, after he had given an impassioned speech about “The Power of Good,” someone asked, “How do you help someone who wants to be bad?”

“There is no one way,” he said wisely, “to make someone who wants to be bad, good. We must fight the bad with multiple weapons. We must put in place good laws to show them what good and bad really are, we must discipline and punish them when they don’t do what is good, we must teach and train them in the process of becoming good and we must always be good ourselves, so that people can see that true goodness is possible.”

Upon hearing this, the listening crowd cheered.

A week later, when this good man was led away to prison for the embezzlement of his investors money he was asked by a reporter, “How is it that a good man like yourself could possibly have cheated the very people who trusted him?”

He responded confidently, “I did nothing wrong. I took the money so that I could do more good in a way that no one would know about.”

“Really?”  said the reporter, “It looks like from the evidence that you spent most of that money on homes, cars, trips and entertainments for yourself.”

“I only did that,” said the good man, “so that I could model the intrinsic benefits that come from being truly good.”

When the court case was over and the good man was sentenced to many years in prison, one of the investors who lost her life savings to his swindle, was given a chance to confront him.”

“You harmed me,’ she said, “You took my life savings! Now I don’t have enough to live on and nothing to leave to my children. And the worse thing about you,  is what you won’t admit and don’t know.”

“And what doesn’t he know?” asked the judge for everyone in front of the packed courtroom, sitting on the edges of their seats and listening intently.

“He doesn’t know,” said the woman, “That none of us, including him, are good. At best, we are just honest, and perhaps forgiven.”

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