Tom Oatmeal

If some dummy is standing out in the yard blowing bubbles and you walk up talking about maple syrup and the moron’s like, “What’s maple syrup?” the best thing you can do is to yank that bubble wand out of his hand and dip it into the jar of maple syrup you carry around. 

Coat the wand generously and then blow a huge bubble. Watch as it floats across the street, faster and faster until it collides with some geek who is crossing the street with a gigantic stack of books.   The maple syrup bubble explodes against the geek and the books are transformed into an electric guitar!!!

Hand the bubble wand back. 

“THAT is maple syrup.”

Exit.

Is there anything worse than getting punched out in a way that spins you around so you land against one of those goofy, static-electricity balls that makes your hair stick out all funny?  Then the machine, sensing human activity, snaps a picture of it and melds the photo to a souvenir button that reads:

“FUN-TASTIC TIMES AT THE SAMUEL OSCHIN PLANETARIUM!”

Whenever they decide to punch up The Bible, they should think about adding a story where Jesus miraculously saves a thief from being stoned. 

The goons are all throwing rocks at a human-shaped mass covered by a blanket, but when blood fails to seep through the fabric, the Emperor holds his hand up like, “WAIT!”

The goons cease throwing and the Emperor slowly approaches.  He grabs the sheet and tears it off the figure to reveal: A WOODEN LOG!

Then we cut to a scene where Jesus and the thief are galloping through the desert on horseback.  It’s windy and after a while, the thief complains about the way the sand keeps blowing against his skin.

“It’s all scratchy!”

“Well if you’d rather have the rocks the Emperor’s goons were throwing at you, I’d be happy to turn this horse around,” says Jesus.

The thief is confused.  “I didn’t say anything about rocks.”

“Yeah, but sand is little rocks so technically you did.”

“No, sand is sand,” says the thief.  “If it were rocks, we’d just call it little rocks.”

“Oh yeah?” asks Jesus, pointing to his sandals.  “Then you’re telling me if I took a whole bunch of sandals and stacked them up, they wouldn’t be sandals anymore?”

“No,” says the thief.  “We would call them sandals because there’s no word for a big stack of sandals.”

“Well…yeah,” says Jesus, his face turning red.  “But if we did have a word for it, we’d call it that word, you know?  But my point is that they’d still be sandals.”

The look on the thief’s face is like, “wait, what?” but he’s like, “I guess.”

Embarrassed that he botched the example, Jesus uses magic to return the thief to the site of the stoning.  When you turn the page, the thief’s graphic murder is told through the use of silly, pull-tab illustrations so readers can distance themselves from the reality of how bad Jesus totally screwed the guy.

There’s also something later about gluing cotton balls to a drawing of a bare sheep, but that’s a different idea for a different story.

Out of everyone, I was the one who won the big contest.  I was the 2013 champion of the Scott Paper Towels: Most Regular Guy competition.  I couldn’t believe it.

“In your face!” I screamed, still not entirely sure what I’d won or how I’d entered or to whose face I was demanding that something be either thrown or shoved into.

“What do I win?” I asked the representative.

“Free paper towels for a year.”

I was so happy I could cry.

“Plus you get to be in a commercial.”

The way it worked was that the winner of the contest was determined to be the most statistically average man in the entire world.  The data took everything into account; things like age, height, weight, marital status, and even Internet search history.  I was smack dab in the middle.

“Like ALL of my search history?”

“ALL of it,” the representative replied.

“Even though I went back and…”

“Yes.”

“But I thought if I went into ‘Settings’…”

“Nope.”

“What happened to last year’s winner?”

“He shot himself,” said the representative.  “But here.  We need a signature for the paper towels.”

That year, I lived like a king.  At least, when it came to paper towel usage, I lived like a king.  In every other facet of my life, I lived about the same.  Okay, so maybe a little less than the same.  In a moment of weakness, I’d quit my job thinking that I could somehow use the unlimited paper towels as currency.  No dice.  It was a foolish mistake financially, but far worse was the emotional toll that the days spent sitting in an apartment filled with paper towels took on me.

Every waking hour only seemed to drag me cruelly towards the end of my eligibility for free paper towels.  Any moment not spent thinking about how to use more felt like wasted time.  Nothing else got done.

One night, my wife Diane came home to find that I’d wrapped the mattress in several layers of paper towels.

“So when one layer gets dirty, bam!  We just peel it away and there’s a new layer.”

Diane stared at it for a while then said, “I just don’t see what’s stopping multiple layers from getting dirty all at once.  Paper towels are pretty thin.”

I sighed and closed my eyes.  “I need a friend here, Diane.  Okay?”

“But do you really think it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s an idea.  And I’m proud that I did it.”

“Proud?”

“I can acknowledge that I did it.”

If you don’t mind my asking, what on earth did that dog say that was so controversial?

If the bus is stopped at a gas station and the driver is outside, how hard is it really to sneak on board and sit in the driver’s seat?   Not hard at all!  Then you honk the horn and when the bus driver looks up, you say something amazing like, “Hey!  I’m Rosa Parks!”  Then you pretend to drive the bus using large, theatrical motions until it becomes time for you to engage the driver in hand to hand combat.  Good luck!

They said that the deep lines in the old woman’s face told a story, but what kind of a story?  It’s not as simple as pressing a piece of paper against her face and then rubbing a crayon against it to reveal the answer.  If it were, then everybody would do it. 

So I disguised myself as an orderly and kidnapped the old woman in a stolen van.  We zipped through traffic, crashing through trashcans until we reached the home of the only blind man I had ever seen.  We skidded to a halt in the middle of his front lawn.

I led the old woman to the porch where the blind man was standing with his head tilted up, as if trying to make sense of the commotion.  I took his arm by the wrist and pressed his palm against the old lady’s face.

“Read this to me,” I demanded.

“But braille is little dots,” said the blind man.  “Not wrinkles.  Sorry.”

“What was I thinking of, then?” I asked

“You’re probably just a moron.”

“Hmmm….”

I was so embarrassed that I hid the blind man’s lunch behind foliage before driving over to the payphone that I would use to anonymously report both the stolen van and the stolen old lady.

It was late by the time I got home.  My wife, Diane had already eaten dinner and was sitting on the couch watching television.

“How did the job hunt go?” she asked.

“Great!”

I unclipped my tie and hung it over a chair, real neat-like.  It had to look good again tomorrow.

“But these things take time.”