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[seat-safety-switch]

How many times have you been thrown out of the Toto toilet museum in Fukuoka? I don't mean the showroom in Tokyo, any loud-mouthed moron can get pitched out on their ass by piping off to the salesman. It takes a true artisan to annoy the Glorious History of Pooping people enough that they decide to put you on the curb.

Usually, back home, this sort of thing would be accomplished with a poorly-maintained car. I'd roll up to the parking lot, and start arguing about some part that has dual purposes while my shitbox automobile diesels away in the parking lot. We'd bitch as the car slowly fills the air with blue as it stains the store's windows with the multitude of petrochemicals that used to – and still should – line the inside of the engine block. Eventually, the pressure of the argument would get to the person, and they'd deck me, or (better yet) call their manager to come and deck me.

Not so in Japan. They're much more polite, but realistically it's because I don't have my Volare with me. Why? They don't run so well underwater, internal combustion cars, and even the nastiest farm beater in this country is still in better shape than my finest automobile. Sure, there's a couple chickens living in this Honda Acty I found half-crushed underneath a decades-old mudslide, but they're busy eating the hornet nests in the back, so it all balances out. No, I got kicked out entirely on my own accord: by asking why the American Standard Champion Four can suck down an entire bucket of golf balls, but the $15,000 Toto Neorest 750H can't offer the same shit-devouring performance.

Bench racing, in my home country, is taken as sort of a laughable, joking kind of thing. You make fun of the other dude's Mustang, he shit-talks your Camaro, you both know in your heart that if you raced it would be pretty close. Then you can make excuses afterward. The sun was in my eyes. The shifter on these models is designed for comfort, not performance.

This kind of thing has not transferred to Japanese toilet manufacturing, let me tell you that. No sooner did I complete my insult of their Lamborghini-grade ultra-luxury toilet than a dude in a suit about twice my size picked me up with one hand, and carried me out of the museum and all the way to the airport without saying a word. I hope I haven't gotten banned from re-entry. I kind of liked that little van I was driving. Named all the chickens.

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So I ask you, fair voter. Call your two-dollar whore of a congressman and tell them to meet me at Al's Car Hut for a fight for the soul of the greater New England area. This ends tonight.

When you decided that I should be the warlord of this area, I knew that I would have to tangle with the established political order. They weren't getting it done for you. That's why you trusted me with your support, in the form of muscle cars, arm-mount crossbows and an unbeatable army of fiercely loyal soldiers. I got you clean water. I figured out how to hook up a bunch of old Priuses to solar panels so that you could heat your homes. And now, I'm going to keep you safe from Uncle Sam.

Why does the federal government persist in trying to stick their noses into our perfect worker's utopia? Sure, there are flaws. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been a perfect leader. I've been hoarding most of the gasoline, and keeping all the breakfast cereal that falls out of the trucks we ram-raid on the interstate. Those shouldn't disqualify us from receiving aid, just because the neighbouring states haven't had the common sense to surrender to us yet and are busy enjoying their false pleasures of running water, ample electricity, and same-day pizza delivery.

When Congressman Phelps finally deigns to visit his constituents, believe you me that we will discuss the finer points of his position on this whole thing. In Al's Car Hut's parking lot, the debate will be short and brutal. He likes to frame it as a "rebellion," as if we were rebelling against anything other than having to go to our shitty jobs every single day. He thinks you've been brainwashed by a highly charismatic nutjob. He didn't even mention how nice my hair is looking, now that we stole all the pomade from that ship out in the harbour.

I think he's just jealous of all the factories my government – our government – has captured and converted into producing continuation examples of the 1978 Plymouth Volare, the only car that anyone could ever have wanted.

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Now that nearly every bit of human social interaction takes place on privately-owned chat platforms, all of our problems have been solved. And by "all," I mean "a negative number." Turns out that some robots have been watching us talk all this time, and started stealing the words right out of our virtual mouths.

Nobody knows who sent the robots. A lot of folks in my local group think that it was government spies, trying to scoop up all of our poor-quality jokes and puns to use them against us at a later date. Others are just waiting to see those same poor-quality jokes show up on a sitcom about Midwestern families addicted to bad cars.

Either way, one thing had to be done first. We kicked the robots out. Sent each of 'em packing with a different disturbing profanity for their creators. Or we thought we did. See, while we all can acknowledge that some of the obvious robots are now gone, we're not sure when they started showing up. Any of the "people" I routinely talk to, like Untoward Carl or Michelle Turbo-Relational-Model 9500, could also have been robots this entire time. We've started rolling out Voight-Kampff tests, as is industry standard, but so far everyone just posts GIFs of cartoon turtles dancing before continuing the discussion of whether the Dodge Aspen is in fact superior to the Plymouth Volare (no.)

Sometimes, late at night, I start to wonder if I am one of the robots, too. Sounds preposterous, but think about it for yourself. I can't conclusively prove that any point of my existence actually happened, or if it was just the elaborate hallucination of a computer that was taught to feel pain by Silicon Valley engineers. Once in awhile, on the train, I feel the urge to tell my fellow riders about the excitement of purchasing DoritoCoins® from Taco Bell, because they're a great investment. Hold on, the train? We don't have a train in my city.

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There's lots of perks to working at the ol' Pick-and-Pull, my favourite self-service junkyard of all. They won't let me get a job there, partially because I'm technically "legally barred from entry by release conditions." And also because my attorney has worked out a long-term disability deal that will evaporate if anyone sees me thinking about employment anywhere other than Long John Silver's, but that's neither here nor there. It's a pity, too, because the benefits afforded to the junkyard elite are choice.

For starters, you get your pick of the junk left inside cars when they're scrapped. Pocket change? Trendy travel mugs? Radar detectors? Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, friend. For whatever reason, cash-strapped folks desperately attempting to unload their last semi-durable asset often leave the detritus of their life within the confines of the vehicle, and all that cool stuff can be yours. Of course, you also get things like "hissing, vicious rodents" and the occasional biohazard, but that only serves to make the highs that much sweeter.

Not convinced? You looked like you drove a hard bargain when you walked in here. I respect that. Most folks hear "free Garfield window clings" and they're totally sold, but not you. Rare these days to have such a killer in my office for a negotiation such as this. Okay, how's this sound? You get to get on a first name basis with Raul, the taco truck operator.

Yes, I know that Marcel is his real name, but the public health nurse said that we shouldn't deliberately try to tell him. It will only force him further into his shell. Speaking of shells, he makes some bomb-ass barbacoa. Perhaps you've tried it? It's the perfect thing after a day of wrenching, or, in the case of the proud employees of the Pickin' and Pullin' Patrol, a day of data entry and trying to fend off douchebags pretending that a turbocharger ($50) is actually an alternator ($35.) And Marce- Raul - will cut you a good deal on whatever fell into the fryer. You'll take home more cash, and a full belly.

All this is not to mention the health benefit of working in the fresh outdoors, whenever you want. Sure, those outdoors are full of atmospheric hydrocarbons and whatever aerosolized microplastics are coming off the seat grinder, but office workers would give anything to get a chance at a crisp December morning like you'll be enjoying while desperately tourniquetting a suburban father-of-three who made a very bad choice about which muffler to cut.

Come on down to the Pick 'N' Pull employment office, and don't tell them I sent you. Long John Silver's has spies everywhere. A simple wink, nudge, and yawn-point to me wandering the yard will be enough to get my referral bonus.

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"Ever since I was a little boy, I've been fascinated by teeth. So when the American Dental Association's scouts came to my high school and saw me doing dentistry, they couldn't help but make me an offer," rambled my dentist.

"No shit?" I mumbled around a stainless steel poking tool being repeatedly thrust into my gums.

This was uncomfortable for more than two reasons. An exact number is not available at this time. I wanted to tell him a story about going to art school. About how a chance encounter with a sculptor when I was an impressionable teenager taught me that a beautiful spark of the divine existed inside me. Also that I could make things out of clay that looked kind of like a tiger if you squinted. None of this was possible while I was stuck in the dentist's chair.

Now, you might be surprised that I would waste my time and money on a dentist. Surely, I can do my own work for cheaper, right? Not so. For specialty work, especially specialty work that you carry around in your mouth, it always makes sense to consult a professional. Their expertise is worth every penny.

"Now, let's get you hooked up to the nitrous oxide for the next part of your dental work," he said, and turned his back.

Working quickly, I snaked the vacuum tube up the collar of my shirt and into the mask. By the end of today, I'd have saved about six dollars in nitrous-bottle-refill charges at the speed shop, and all it would cost me is approximately $900 on some other guy's credit card. Plus, I'd have a nice-looking smile as I get the hole shot, at long last, on that base-model Toyota Sienna on my commute.

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Mechanics – real mechanics – use all their senses to diagnose a problem. If you've got a weird clunking noise, that's just one bit of information. We were meant to hunt down and tire out our prey. You can solve a problem a lot faster if you corner it using all your powers. Really get in there. Hear the clunk. Shake things with your hands. Smell the clunk. Taste the clunk. Then you will see the clunk.

Hold on there, what's that about taste? A lot of mechanics I know can identify most fluids from a car entirely by taste. The absolute best ones can tell you what's wrong with the car based on how far the flavour has shifted from factory fresh. Sure, most of these chemicals are not exactly good for you to be ingesting, and certainly not on a daily basis. You know what else is not good for you? Being totally stressed about where those drips on your garage floor are coming from.

When I was in high school, I remember the shop teacher getting all frogged up on what he used to call "Spirit Oil," which he explained to the cops came from an AMC Spirit. I'm pretty sure he bought that shit from the crazy one-eyed lady at the farmer's market, but that's neither here nor there. He told us that when he imbibed, he could see beyond time itself, to manifest himself in the very board rooms and engineering bullpens that made the shitty part he was preparing to replace. And there, in the perfect clarity of 20/20, he knew how to fix it. Of course, he had to know which part to focus on. In other words, even he had to use his normal human senses for that.

The next time you're freaking out about a "simple" problem, try bringing all your talents to bear on it. I bet you'll find out that it was simpler than you thought, and you'll be able to tell all your friends what it tasted like. Just don't do it to a soldering iron. "Burning" is not a sufficient description for symptoms in a repair log.

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The Property Brothers are on the radio telling me it's too dangerous to do my own electrical, roofing, or structure. I'm done listening to those boys, these children. I'm going to drive this fucking 1996 Dodge Dakota right through my living room.

Home renovation used to be a thing that was only accomplished by your drunkest uncle, at the absolute peak of his powers. Folks would move into a house and they'd just be fine with things. New wallpaper, new paint, maybe re-do the bathroom when one of the kids leaves the tap on over the weekend. You'd have the occasional eager beaver who would really go nuts and put a shonky extension on the place, but in general houses stayed the way they were.

Then, reality TV started. It turns out one of the things all people want to do – all people – is to knock down a wall and really "open up" a living area. Throw a sledgehammer into that tile you hate in the kitchen. Rip out the bathtub and put in a soaker. Make the neighbours watch as you slowly fill up an orange rental dumpster over the course of two years with the former interior of your home. Slap in some new stuff, and repeat in ten years.

This just happened to coincide with wage deflation, and a massive increase in the popularity of financing your home reno. It's cool, just put it on the charge card. You're worth the $2500 countertops that don't match your appliances. You can throw those in the trash, too. Really rock and roll. Dream home, baby.

Now, I'm not one of those prudes who says to never do things yourself. In fact, I am doing something right now. I am picking some surprisingly sharp chunks of a once-perfectly-good Chesterfield out of the air-conditioning condenser of my Dakota. It is essential, however, that you understand my renovation was started from a place of rage, and not any kind of misplaced urge to "keep up with the Joneses." The Joneses are probably who did this to me in the first place. And now I've got lots more covered parking for motor vehicles.

Probably improve the property value too, come to think of it. I really opened up the space.

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I'm not a big honker, in general. Maybe you know someone who is. Might even be you, and that's okay. I don't judge people who do honk a lot. I assume that they live in crowded places, and they need to safely get the attention of other road users by repeatedly making a jarring noise.

Where I was raised, we were taught not to call attention to ourselves. Don't make a fuss. Suffer in silence. Wait through an extra light cycle because that guy in front of you's text message seems really important. Just being polite. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that I'm not sure if my fifty-plus-year-old horn even works, and if it will burn down my car trying to work.

My cousin, though, comes from the other side of the country. There, it's way more appropriate to honk. She's very forward in general, so it almost feels like a natural extension of her personality. If you're slow pulling out of a parking spot, she will honk your ass. Cop didn't move as soon as the light turned green? Honk honk, honkity-honk. It's embarrassing, and whenever I drive with her I have to slink in the passenger seat.

Things got so bad, that a few weeks ago that I actually fixed my car pre-emptively, so there wasn't a risk I would get to her place and then have to have her drive me in a car that "runs." That didn't work so well. Turns out that all that wiring I did over last summer to get the car to start faster also improved the performance of the horn assembly. She got impatient and leaned over to hit my horn for me, and that's why City Hall is no longer standing, Your Worship. Not my fault at all. I'm not a big honker in general.

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You might have subway trains near you. What most people don't know is that a subway train is actually a cross-bred hybrid, between a naval submarine and a train. Getting this breeding to happen is an incredibly difficult task that requires tons of specialists, which is part of why subway trains are so rare. It's also kind of gross, if you ask me, but such candid discussion of this is beyond the scope of this article.

For years, when I had a productive life in the great rat race, I would ride the subway to work every day. After awhile, the childish joy of getting into a magic tube that shoots you across the city fades, to be replaced with annoyance at every little thing. It's five minutes late. Smells kind of weird. That guy is too loud. His kid is a weird aspect ratio. Things keep flickering at the edges of my vision, and voices nobody else can hear keep whispering that I should buy a 1980 Pontiac Trans Am Turbo. That kind of thing.

Taking a vacation helps, sure, but it doesn't get rid of this feeling. The only thing that will help is changing up your routine. A lot of people buy a car at this point, and then the routine is very different every day, because driving is highly variable even when you are just doing the same drive with the same people. Today you get brake-checked merging onto the highway, because the guy in front of you with the 4Runner is having a messy divorce. Tomorrow there will be a full-blown riot outside the city centre because someone tried to add bike lanes, and you get a rock thrown at your windshield. Next week, maybe the Tim Hortons that you're lined up in the drive-thru for catches fire because of a miscreant bagel. You get a cool story for all your coworkers every day, as opposed to "I rode in a shiny metal cylinder for the better part of an hour while doing a sudoku."

For me, I don't subscribe to that kind of thing. There's no reason to involve other people, or commuting, in your daily tale of goin'-to-work woe. Most of my automobiles are perfectly capable of creating a road horror story of their very own, just driving five blocks to the pet food store. I do, however, miss having coworkers to tell it to. My parole officer doesn't seem to care. His parole officer doesn't give any larger of a shit. That's why I've started riding the subway, and giving impromptu stump speeches about how bad things are, up there, on the surface. It gives people a story to tell about the crazy dude on the train, and anyone who actually listens is a little more reassured that they took the magic tube instead of taking their chances on the roads with people like me.

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I'm in the marketplace of ideas, and some of these thoughts are coming from the bargain basement. We've all got terrible concepts rattling around in our heads, but in times long past, there were limited opportunities to disclose them. Maybe to your suffering spouse, sometimes to a beloved family dog, perhaps to your kids if you hadn't sent them out to labour in the fields yet. Once that audience was spent, it was better just to keep your mouth shut.

Now, with the internet, anyone can descend into an international network of other dingbats. No matter your dumb-assed belief, there are statistically several million people with the exact same one. This experience will reinforce your worst behaviours, and soon you'll be kidnapping a state senator to get him to stop making the government owls spy on you at night. Not the private industry owls, those are fine and are only interested in collecting pseudo-anonymized shopping data for marketing purposes. Just the government ones.

Paradoxically, all these free-minded folks are really getting into the swing of old-fashioned, no-thinky-so-much totalitarianism. It has never been a better time to be a charismatic, personable cult leader. A few catchphrases, a hand gesture or two, and an unwavering drumbeat of confidence that the people responsible for the current state of affairs will be punished. Unfortunately for me, "charisma" is not exactly compatible with cornering people in the hallway and one-on-one asking them about their gear ratio setup. Most folks just hiss and try to crawl away, or fumble for mace. What wannabe dictators need, though, is a large luxury vehicle.

Almost universally throughout history, a true leader has needed an enormous luxury sedan, often with little flags on the front fenders. It's how we know someone is important. Sure, the Dutch show up in a squadron of bicycles, and the Japanese Emperor travels in a train that converts itself into an enormous war robot at a moment's notice, but to get that real autocratic vibe, you want an impractically massive car. And that's just what I've been selling out of my yard.

Sure, I don't like selling my New Yorkers and Mark Vs, but I don't really drive them all that often. You have to pay too much attention to where you're pointing the car in today's crowded city streets. They don't even fit in the Tim Hortons drive-thru anymore. Every tinpot internet fascist has a thick stack of banknotes to place in my lap in exchange for some rusty shit they can trick their followers into restoring. And, most importantly, those suddenly-desirable cars are taking up room in my backyard that I could use to store more shitty old cars.

So if you're planning to get into an internet cult this weekend, tell whoever's in charge to come on down to my place, once they've reached a critical mass of acolytes. Only my shitboxes can provide the curb appeal required to add true legitimacy to your insane conspiracy theories.

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When people come to my town, they seem to assume that the Great Magnet is a metaphor, or a tourist trap at worst. I can assure you, dear reader, that it is neither. For reasons unknown to me, our town forefathers – and one foremother who tried to pull out of the project when she figured out which way the wind was blowing – built a really big electromagnet in the centre of town. And then they realized that there was no way to power it on.

For hundreds of years, it has sat immobile as Town Hall was built around it, just daring someone to devise a power supply stronger than those they had available in 1802. Sure, a lot of fancy-pants industrial designers tried to get the eight-storey-tall electromagnet removed. It clashed with their vision for the productive space. Thing is, the town's founding laws say "no touchy the magnet," so they couldn't do much about the magnet. The magnet, that is, and its massive copper lugs sticking out the back, begging for a little bit of hot sauce.

Now, even without electricity, a chunk of ferrous material this large has some strange effects. The weather around it is really cold, and occasionally seagulls will loop infinitely around it until they drop from exhaustion, their internal sense of navigation disrupted by some passing force that has coupled into the magnet and gently charged its field. During the town Egg Festival, you could occasionally hear the AM radio Community Events Cruiser's broadcast through its surface, until Shopkeeper Ted drunkenly touched the surface of the Great Magnet and was instantly reduced to ash.

We'll switch it on one day, we tell each other. Big nuclear plant just opened a few towns over, that's got enough beef to spin it up. And then we look around at all the cool shit we own that's made out of metal, more than there ever was over 200 years ago. We think about all the things we have to lose.

Sometimes, on the Magnet's annual anniversary night speech, The Mayor will sometimes try to scare us with the size of the power bill, the magnitude of our tax dollars, that it would take to let 'er rip, just this once, as if the spectre of a few bucks a month extra would discourage us further from turning on a machine that would cleave the world in half.

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Have you been to a teppanyaki restaurant lately? It's a fancy Japanese word that means, essentially, "fried on a metal plate." You go in there, you pay your money, and some dude does a bunch of corny jokes while frying your food right in front of you. Whole thing is a lot of fun, and you leave smelling like a barbecue just happened in your lap.

This sort of interaction between worker and customer is missing from many of our Western businesses. Things are just not fun. Nobody at McDonalds will flip a shrimp into her hat while cracking a joke about the stock market. When you get your car fixed, the team of mechanics doesn't build a flaming PB Blaster volcano to loosen the busted lower ball joint for your entertainment. And when you get someone to do your taxes, the lady they have working there takes one look at your box full of greasy parts-store receipts and just cries a whole lot, over and over, until the manager comes out and asks you to leave.

I figured it was time to change things up. Rather than ask already-overworked and heavily-underpaid workers to add an additional piece of unnecessary and annoying customer interaction to their plate, I wisely decided it would be best to ease everyone into it. Luckily for me, my general geographic area contains a very popular clown college. Thanks to recent maybe-errors in immigration policy, this school has over three thousand students at the moment, all learning the ins and outs of clownery and begging for a job, any job. And – unlike actual comedians – they don't get all froggy if you throw two dozen of them into a car and go driving around town, dropping them off at every business who won't pay our very reasonable "dismissal fee."

Friends, I'll be the first to admit that I fucked this one up, big time. I had absolutely no idea that clown makeup was flammable, or that their extensive bozo education did not include knowledge on safe food prep. That's just what happened at the A&W, which would have been bad enough if not for all the other stuff that happened. You've heard the rest of the defence from my team of attorneys, but I wanted you to hear it from me personally. If anyone has learned his lesson about employing clowns to blow up and then pop a balloon animal for laughs while standing next to the police bomb squad, it's me.

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With forest fire season approaching, I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. Last year, I was trapped inside, wondering why everything tasted like I was eating it at a mid-tier barbecue joint. This year, my plan was to invent some kind of machine that absorbs the forest fire smoke and turns it back into trees. I succeeded.

You might not think that such a thing is possible. Doing so is a waste of time that you could be spending inventing your own Teletreeporter. A couple cups of coffee later, and I was driving around an old International truck (watch your feet, the floors are gone) with a prototype stuck to the back of it.

As a test, I chose to start in the smokiest part of town, the old fan factory. Someone left the place running and then locked themselves out years ago, and now the autonomous assembly algorithms are tearing the building apart in order to have enough material to keep manufacturing fans. Nobody has told the robots to stop quality-testing those fans, either, so every single one they build goes out in the parking lot, and runs until destruction. It's a big draw on the local power station, and also kind of ruins the air quality in the area. I flipped the switch, and the Teletreeporter leapt to life, popping out a perfect, not even blackened, elm tree.

And then the switch jammed. In my defence, it was not my fault that I used a junky old switch I found in a cookie tin full of old switches that I got from some dude's estate sale. Sure, I could have tested it more, but who knows if it would have broken just the same? Either way, I was now driving around town, shitting out a constant, unbroken stream of tree sausage.

"Take cover," I shrieked as I drove recklessly past a public park, reforesting it the whole way. "I can't turn it off!" As I got on the throttle and headed towards Main Street, I noticed that the sky was beginning to get brighter and brighter. The damn thing had absorbed all the forest fire smoke and was getting a start on the atmospheric carbon. If I didn't do something soon, it was going to reverse climate change, and start pooping out bricks of solidified gasoline.

"Goddammit! Stop fixing the climate," shrieked a cop, fumbling for his gun. His threat came too late. He got creamed by a thick stream of authentic ground Brontosaurus meat, brought back to "life" by the reversion of the Jurassic period's extinction event.

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Don't you hate it in science fiction when the protagonist knows exactly how something works, right down to the theory and components? That pulls me right out of the story. I don't know how a garage door opener works, you probably don't either, so I wouldn't spend four paragraphs explaining it to a hot alien chick I just met. I'd be too busy asking her if she has Craigslist on her phone.

I can absolutely understand why authors want to do this, though. When you're writing a novel, the blank page is terrifying. You fill it with what you know, and if you've been studying "cool spaceships," it turns out that will be top of mind for a little while until you discover a Wikipedia article about a new kind of gravity. The same thing happens at parties. If you ask me about the weather, the conversation will inevitably degenerate into a discussion of exactly when you need to start looking for oversized crankshaft bearings and what kinds of semi-truck batteries are the right size to steal for use in a car. It's detail you don't need, in other words, but that I have in large quantities.

What's the solution for this? Knowing nothing at all. Studies have shown that the less you know, the happier you are. Doing these studies made the scientists involved sadder, which is basically a peer-review if you ask me. The less you know about a subject, the more easily you can let the plot take over. For instance, I don't have a really solid idea of where on the map Egypt is, but if you asked me to throw together a novel about it, it would probably be a pretty good banger until the halfway mark where they find an old Jeep that doesn't run and the next two hundred pages are a regurgitation of the Haynes manual's wiring diagram section. Come to think of it, that would be an amazing book.

So in conclusion, try to know less tomorrow than you know today. Go out there and forget a whole bunch of stuff. Head to your local public library and rub your face on the books until the ideas come back out of your brain and embed themselves inside the pages, where they belong. And then get back home, grab your 1977 Royal Sahara typewriter, which is really a rebadged Triumph-Adler, and re-lube the strike hammer elbow to get rid of that weird little squeak in the spaceb – oh no, it's happening again. I gotta get to the library.

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When I visit folks in the palliative care home (to see if their cars are running up a big parking ticket that I can "take care of,") they have a lot of regrets. You have but one life to live, unless you're Sonic the Hedgehog, but then you'll fall down holes or get impaled on spikes a lot. I digress: near the end, everyone knows that they are missing a big part of their life.

You might think that this is a loss of a relationship, or an opportunity, or even not seeing that awesome movie in theatres. And you'd be totally wrong. Most people miss their favourite coffee mug from times long past.

Coffee mugs are fragile, and so are our lives. Just like human beings, they're made of dirt and some kind of external force we don't understand. Each one is unique, and when you find your ideal mug, it is gutting to be torn away from it. Clumsy maids. Cabinet door malfunctions. Earthquakes. Swarms of ceramic-devouring wasps. There are so many threats, and we will all part with our favourite coffee mugs before their times.

If only there were something we could do. There is something we could do. To be more correct, there is something I could do. I was extremely fortunate that the palliative care home also contained many dying mad scientists (who did not practice appropriate workplace safety, just saying.) After reading their journals very, very closely, I was able to devise a new machine. This machine, which we are now calling the Mugmembrer, reaches into the farthest depths of the human mind and 3D-prints up an exact replica of that mug you smashed so long ago. Life is brought full circle, with a truly fulfilling sense of closure at long last.

Just don't hook this fucking thing up to a dog. They don't know what mugs even are, but that doesn't stop the machine, oh no. Real bad shit happens really fast, trust me.

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Couple weeks ago, I was watching the evening news when a commercial came on. Usually, I skip those suckers. Change channels. Couldn't do that this time, though, because the television I was watching was in my neighbour's living room. And although the binoculars I was using to look into said living room are exceptionally high-tech, they do not contain a television remote. Always leaving something on the table for the 2.0 version, those fucking scam artists.

Here's what the commercial was: a prayer line. You could dial in and pay nine cents a minute to have a group of folks working in a call centre pray for you. The handsome-yet-celibate dude wearing an insanely expensive suit droned on about something I couldn't hear, but the message was obvious. If I got them to get their god to do my bidding, then maybe I'd be able to win at a salvage auction for once.

The only higher power I believe in is the universe's ability to put its thumb directly on me as soon as I start to get a little smug, almost as if my hubris leads inevitably to a moderately funny downfall. Couldn't hurt to bring in another guy and make them fight.

Thing is, I don't have a phone. Sure, I have a smartphone, everyone does, but it can't make phone calls. Or send data. Or light up more than about half the screen. So I had to help myself to one of the public-use phones at the police station, pretending that I was calling home to my wife to come bring my insurance card. I think the precinct desk clerk was starting to get suspicious around hour two, but she went on break shortly after that and was replaced by someone who I could repeat the same bullshit story to. Four hours in total of god-bothering, I figured, would at least score me a low-mileage Intrepid with subframe damage.

Friends, it did not work. Well, it kind of worked. I ended up with a recent Mercedes luxobarge that was running perfectly well, had low kilometres on the clock, and was immaculate inside and out. Exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. Repulsed, I immediately put it back up for auction and got several thousand worthless dollars of profit, instead of a cool shitbox. That's what you get for trying to mess with the fates.

[seat-safety-switch]

My favourite Chinese restaurant has one hell of an aquarium out front. I've been in a lot of Chinese restaurants over the years, and it seems to be one consistent part of the decor. Bill (his real name) has gone above and beyond, because it seems to have turned into his weird hobby.

The last time I was in there, five minutes before closing, trying to scam them into giving me a couple trays of free about-to-expire dim sum, there were a bunch of photographers in the lobby. Those photogs were from some kind of fish magazine, a big one. To hear it from them, some of these species are real rare even in fancy-pants fish zoos, and much more unlikely to see in a place that serves a scallion pancake that frankly kicks ass.

Now, I have to caution you, and not just because the FCC has been climbing up my ass about "unsolicited endorsements." Just because he has cool fish, and he has good food, doesn't mean that all restaurants with cool fish will have good food, or vice versa. Use your best judgment, by which I mean being nice enough to rapidly eat without question the slightly-singed dried-out leftovers they drop on your plate like you're some kind of human Garburator. Get out of there quick, so they don't have to wait on your rapidly-inflating waistline instead of going home to visit their friends/family/pets, or heading to eBay to buy more fish.

And don't, above all else, try to curry favour with the proprietor by jumping into the tank and helping him clean it from the inside as an "odd job." Not only is Rotella T5 20W50 not great for the fish, but your dripping-wet work clothes won't endear Bill into letting you test drive his minty '81 Sapporo, either. Such incredible taste.