I loathe you for all the right reasons.

“So, how many kids do you have?” I asked.

(I knew the answer, but asked anyway. It’s one of the unwritten rules that one has to ask parents about their children.)

“We have three,” Wanda replied, then proceeded to tell me their names (which I promptly forgot).

“And how many do you want eventually?” I continued lamely.

“Two,” Joel said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I awkwardly changed the subject.

I saw an advertisement in a tavern bathroom that stated matter-of-factly, as an aside, that a jiffy is one hundredth of a second.

My parents admonished me not to believe everything I read on bathroom walls, and so I asked the Internet for a second opinion.

I found an Internet site that verified that a jiffy is, in fact, a hundredth of a second. The site also mentioned, “during your lifetime you will grow two meters of nose hair.”

Now, just hold everything.

My life is, by any rational estimate, over half over, and I don’t have even a centimeter of nose hair. (Or could it have grown up my sinuses and down my throat? That might explain my persistent cough.)

In any case, I’ve never seen nose hairs poking out of anyone’s nostrils, except a few ancient professors. And, since I spend so much time in cities filled with every manner of freak, if nose hairs really grew that long I would have seen them braided and tied to a corset or genital implant by now.

Or perhaps the nose hair statistic is based on kajillions of microscopic hairs growing a millimeter or two before falling out, with a cumulative, collective length of two meters.

Or maybe, just maybe, some clever person concocted the stories about the jiffy and the nose hair, and neither are true.

The Internet is not the fount of scientific knowledge it used to be, if it ever was.

Today, I shall escape the tyranny of reality and write nothing.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“You don’t know?” Stephan replied. “It’s the latest thing.”

I was tempted to remark that I thought people stopped using the phrase, “the latest thing,” decades ago, but decided not to say anything. That rare diplomatic move allowed Stephan to tell me about Taser shots.

It seems a couple of months ago, Florida police caught a nude man breaking windows and accosting woman. When Jeremy J. Miljour tried to flee from the cops, one of the deputies shot the twenty-six year old with an electronic shock gun. The hooked electrodes from the Taser landed in the suspect’s reproductive organs, then zap! Fifty-thousand volts in the genitals!

The seems like an undesirable experience, but the patrons of Priscilla’s Palace of Pain evidently disagree.

“Dead people are so hot!” Andrew exclaimed.

“Actually,” I replied, “I think they’re just warm from decomposition.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Andrew asked rhetorically.

“Evidently not,” I agreed.

It’s like René Morel said, “Thank God we don’t all have the same taste or we’d all be married to the same woman.”