Don’t scratch you head, fool. Don’t even try. What you lookin at? Keep walking. I don’t even get to face the voice before a…
Sudden push in my lower back – doesn’t feel violent at all, more like being hit by a pillow – jars my head towards the sky. A cloud [...]
Frank Tomelli always talked sweetly and with great patience to the elderly patrons of the store. If a customer became impatient, he matched their irritability with even more patience.
Other stock clerks in the grocery department confused this with kissing ass and teased Frank for it.
“She’ll be thinking about that ass-kissing later, I guarantee it,” [...]
A few times a year I have a dream that I loose teeth. Sometimes it happens by me cross-biting myself and bending my pearly-whites out of place. Other times it’s decay. A couple times I have been so annoyed by a jiggling tooth that I forcibly extract it and I feel pissed [...]
“Fuck ‘em up, Ren!”
“Kick his ass right now!”
My friends cheered me on, not knowing that I could only project the attitude that I could handle myself in a fight. That I could do professionally. In truth, I lose my wits in the midst of battle. What was more scary, I had to [...]
After working eight hours at Chester’s Chicken Shack for a handful of peanuts (people call then dollars nowadays), I paid a visit to my buddy, Tim, who fancies himself something of an amateur pharmacist. “Take two of these and call me later,” he said. I took a Zanax. He said it would help [...]
[ Production note: The following is the first in the series encompassing many of the ideas already present on Pathetic Rhetoric. Part 1 introduces the key players and forms the basic conflict. Admittedly, I wrote it in under the spell of the creative moment. I apologize for not considering your perspective, but I [...]
People say that a picture is worth a thousand words and that talk is cheap. These days, it’s also worth billions of dollars in endorsement contracts.
For just a dollar a day, says the white man in the African village, you can provide food, medicine and an education to one of these children. [...]
Actually, they aren’t your sponsors. The advertisers don’t give you any money. They work on behalf who want to take your money. Therefore, they or the companies they represent have nothing to do with me or the content here at Pathetic Rhetoric. I don’t want anything from you.
At no point should any reader assume that [...]
I’ve just posted several thousand words. Please, if you’ve liked anything you’ve read here, scroll down a bit to see everything I’ve just posted. Plans are in the works to make it easier for you. I’ve nothing against the Torah, but the scroll doesn’t cut it at [...]
Ain’t winter some bullshit? Not even the warm kind that fertilizes your flowers and reminds you of your home town. No, this is some cold, hostile shit like Israeli-Arab relations. This shit will kill you.
Ever since I was a little boy, I knew it. I heard my mother say, “Boys, you better [...]
