then there are days I think I must be living on the fringes of a Flannery O'Connor short story

The following items are from the police blotter in the current issue of our local arts and entertainment weekly tabloid:

An officer found the man they call Christ and his Disciple along the road. Christ carried a burden: a large bag of aluminum cans he’d taken from a man’s yard. (Also, the sins of all mankind.) And the Disciple said: Judge not, for Christ had permission to take these cans. But He did not. Verily, He returned the cans.

The man by the highway with the still-warm shotgun didn’t understand what the problem was. He was only trying to shoot his own dog. It’s a free country. And so what if he’d had a couple drinks?

I swear, I did not make these up. I could not have thought them up if I'd sat up all night trying. In fact, as the paper does have a prohibition on using their material without permission in their fine print, I fully expect the deputies to come around tomorrow morning to talk to me about this post.

This is all too surreal for me. I think I'll go find an abandoned roadside mattress and have a little lie-down.