No alarms, no surprises
So on Sunday, I threw on my new Carhartt coat and made the rounds of the stores, buying all you kids Christmas presents because you’ve been such good wee folk. I first went into Walmart (what, you thought I was going to shop for you at Saks?) and as soon as I stepped through the doors, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP! Alarms sounding all over the place. Happened on the way out, too, but the bemused greeter just waved me on my way. Went into Lowe’s and just as I got through the doors, BEEP BEEP BEEP! This time, I had to actually hunt down a store worker to tell them that I had set the alarms off but that I ain’t no thief. At this point, a smarter person would have looked into the source of all these alarms, but as we all know, I’m not that smarter person. It was at home, my ears still ringing from all the alarms, when I noticed that the Carhartt still had one of those anti-theft tags attached. And it wasn’t even all that hidden, I just never noticed it. Seriously, my lack of intelligence is sometimes alarming.

RIP Mike LaFlamme
Last week, I referred to myself thusly in a column, and a whole bunch of you wrote to ask why and how I had managed to misspell my own name. I AM dumb enough to do that, sure, but there’s an explanation. Years ago, I wrote about some people claiming to be “big fans” of mine but who then go on to call me Mike. It’s a hoot, and I’ve been referring to myself thusly ever since. But everybody who once appreciated that joke is apparently dead so I’m cutting that wicked funny gag from the lineup. Please try not to be sad.

You get what you pay for
Had an experience on Sunday where we paid for a meal through a certain Auburn fast food joint’s mobile service and then arrived at said food joint to discover that there wasn’t any food, they were closing early due to a staff shortage and there was big fat nothing they could do about a refund. How’s that for life in clown world? Had to go begging some faceless corporate entity to get that money back, and I never did get any of that tasty chicken. This is why I’m so skinny.

Ghoul-plagued beauty
This. This paragraph from “The Whisperer in the Dark” is why I love Lovecraft: “That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain — that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.” I need to start using more adjectives. And gore-dripping-hyphens.

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