Jeffrey Ellinger

Do the Wal-Mart chant before a shift of work at Wal-Mart

I don’t mean to denigrate or embellish. These are just facts, the ways to know if you’ve met someone who has 200 Twitter followers. They are lonely, narcissistic, sad, unemployed, foul-smelling, incompetent, and contagious like herpes.

Do I deserve a wife? Or a house perhaps, and a good-sized dog who hardly ever barks.

All kale has become pizza.

Birds – “Not all birds,” God said, “but most birds, their job is to get up every morning and yell, I’m a bird! Can you hear me? I’m a bird right now!”

Now it’s over. She pats your chest and walks to her car. Growing smaller, she is drifting like an ocean tide, and you find yourself suffocating with fondness. Your only oxygen is knowing you will see her again. Your sweatshirt too.

“Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.”

It was strange, yes, but I liked that the main character would do all that if it meant saving the one he loved. It reinforced the hopeful idea I had that there are no boundaries for a person whose heart is willing.

But even if Garrison Keillor wasn’t her sexy photographer, that ass, I was so glad to see it when I opened my sexy flip phone. For a time, her butt was my very own prairie home companion.

I miss you, Aubz. I hate saying it but I do. I miss the way you would laugh at one of your own jokes then croon about a girl who dumped you in the third grade then hold me as you told us where you started from again. I want to tell you that never gets old.

Writers are now either Ivy League Iowa Workshop heels or self-promoting mushroom-taking, internet addicts who write about a pretend drug problem so they can write about something other than using their parent’s money to live.

Is monogamy just outdated and puritanical and we need a new young generation to reject for it to come into the mainstream? Is it simply jealousy keeping us from getting to know other people? Do I sound like Carrie Bradshaw right now?