Mark Twain once took a pickle off my plate at a restaurant and remarked "Try as you may to explain, it is doubtful that anyone will accept what has transpired here today." And no one ever has.

I caught Monet cheating.

I had the "collector's dream" again last night; the dream in which the collector finds an incredible trove of those items that often elude him.

Greeting card no one will ever need:

I'm sorry I alphabetized your Netflix queue.

"I left you alone for five minutes, what happened?"

 "Well, I got bored and started pushing buttons."

Cutting with the dull side of the knife.

Shootout at the circus.

He was laughing, the grin on his face stretched as far as his muscles could possibly take it. But his eyes, his eyes were not the eyes of someone who was amused.

I remember the first time I took Dean to the old wooden dock at the end of Oak Street. We were seniors in High School and he had just started to call upon Ms Laurel Frank. It was the first really warm day of spring and I decided to show him how to haul the haddock nets out of the water. My brother Seymore had left two nets down near the dock when he left for Easton the previous fall.

Victorian Profanity

I did not come here for the sake of vanity.

Did he eat the Blarney Stone?

And they'll say "Hey, look at the guy with the wrinkled sweater, let's not give him any of our gold."

When I go I will leave some loose ends, some things undone. I suspect I am not in the majority for expecting this, but is this prospect so awful?

In our Western Desert, Lance Corporal Peterson was the end all, our only source of rational sanity and our only chance for survival.

Roy stood up abruptly with a hard look on his face.

"You just pissed in the soup. STOP PISSING IN THE GODDAMN SOUP!"

Food is the social currency.

So there I was in the bookstore when this guy wearing a red purse pulls a large medicine bottle and a sock out of the purse. Oh wait, that was me.

Gridley pulled a flask out of his pocket.

The chef was arthritic, with one bad eye and one really bad eye.