Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
Another gem from McSweeney’s: In the Likely Event of My Posthumous Fame
My birth, death, and high-school graduation should be celebrated with a feast, a day of mourning, and a Sadie Hawkins dance, respectively.
At the Sadie Hawkins dance, the women ought to feel a subtle, needling pressure to pick older brothers. Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” should be played at least twice. All kisses will be French.
Another fine piece of journalism from The Onion: I Was Under The Impression That Everyone Loved My Headlocks.
My entire life, I’ve always loved some good old-fashioned horseplay, and I assumed everyone else felt the same. So you can imagine my surprise when, out of nowhere, right in the middle of my youngest son’s baptism, my wife asks me to please stop putting everybody in headlocks because, as she claims, “No one enjoys it and no one ever did.”
Todd Holmberg, a college friend of mine, is doing stand-up comedy and pottery in the Twin Cities. (With audio and video samples! For instance, Re-Possessed.)