Last week, Grammy Award singer, Adele, broke the single day record for most music streams with over one kabraZillion, with her new song Easy On Me.

             “We’ve never seen numbers like this… since Elvis broke the single day record for consumption of donuts, hoagies, and most rhinestones on a one piece jumpsuit,” said Spoti-Tunes executive, and rhinestone historian, Dillon Babcock.

                        In fact, Adele’s song Easy On Me was streamed so many times that a totally new numeric quantity had to be invented to quantify the running total.  KabraZillion.   Which is also a term used to count the leaves on all the trees in the Amazon Rain Forest.

                  “These numbers are staggering,” said Mr. Babcock.  “We’ve never seen numbers like this… unless of course, you tally up all of the bad movies Nicholas Cage has done in recent years.”

                  In fact, the major streaming platforms had to come up with a special algorithm to keep up with the emormous volume of Adele’s streams.  The algorithm consisted of complexed meta-computations and was also used in previous years to count the amount of boos at New York Jets home games.   It was also used to tally the total number of rats in Baltimore City.   Although the actual formula for the algorithm remains a secret, it has been rumored to involve multiplying the sound of raindrops against a tin roof, and then throwing an abacus down an abandoned mine shaft, carry the 1, and then putting it all into an Excel spreadsheet before Ground Hog’s day.  After Ground Hog’s day would involve adding 6 unneutered goats into the equation and then things become a whole lot more complicated.  Anyway, congratulations Adele!

 

                                      Last night, a mummy who goes by the name of Bezel, had himself dry cleaned, with disappointing results.

                         “I had requested the standard cleaning and pressing service, with the additional three thousand year old fabric, funk neutralizer,” said Bezel.  “I also wanted them to remove some sand that had collected up in my crotch area since wayyyyyyy back before Cleopatra declared Tuesday night as Ladies Night at all of the Great Pyramids.  Simple requests, right?  Not so much.  When the cleaners were done with me, my bandages were all in tatters, unraveling, and I looked like an outpatient in a West Baltimore Emergency Room.   And the sand that had been in my crotch area had somehow migrated into my hair, eyes, and mouth.  And you have no idea how three thousand year old mummified, crotch-seasoned sand tastes like… unless you’ve eaten a Taco Bell bean burrito.”

                       And with his bandages unraveled from his body, several scars, rotted internal organs, and questionable tattoo choices were now exposed.

                   “And those exposed tattoos on my body are the worst of my problems now,” Bezel said.  “Like… I have a tattoo of Nefertiti on my chest that is really, really awkward and pointless.   Because she and I broke up a long time ago.   I mean… right after the downfall of Ramesses II, which was right in-between 1275 BC and Woodstock.  And that tattoo is really hard to explain to my present girlfriend.  But it’s not as hard to explain as the one of King Tut that I have on my ass.”

 

                           Yesterday, a zombie named Kent, finally received his GED after his fifteenth attempt at passing the test.

                  “I… I iiiiAaaaaghhg  ahhhhghghh soooo aaaghghhapppy,” said Kent, through an interpreter, who was also a zombie, and equally as intelligible.

                         Prior till now, Kent has spent the last several years wandering the land aimlessly as most zombies do.

                       “Yeah, I felt like I was wasting my time,”  Kent said through another interpreter, Charles Barkley.  “There were things I wanted to do like…  perform  Shakespeare in the park… and perform Shakespeare on a schooner, with the aromatic scent of Davey Jones’ gym socks percolating from his locker as a backdrop.  It got to the point where I really couldn’t remember who I was, or what I was about before the zombie apocalypse.  Didn’t know if I went to college or what.  Didn’t know shit ever since the part of my brain that would know such things, was eaten away by advanced decay, and aggressive, zombie brain fog.  I just felt empty, bumbling around eating people, grunting at the sound of the wind.  And sometimes… I would waste a whole day trapped inside the revolving door in the foyer of an abandoned Sears department store, or some such pointless bullshit like that.”

                  Kent says, he now feels somewhat whole again with his newly acquired GED credentials.   Although, he readily admits that he didn’t actually take the GED test and pass.

              “So… I found these blank GED certificates while I was eating a human foot in the dumpster behind WormHole Square High School,” Kent said.   “That’s how I earned my credits.  So… I guess that makes me a fraud.  Fuck it.  That part about how I took the test fifteen times was just dramatic, empathy-bait bullshit.   Yo, I’m a zombie.  I can’t read, write, and I definitely don’t know the difference between an abacus and an abscess…. of which, I’m told, I have many.”

 

                   Yesterday, a beaver known as Ramon, was ejected from Hell for using the word “damn” too many times on a Monday.

                  “We have rules down here,”  said Constable Perry, who works the Southside post of Hades.  “Ramon was retelling, for the one hundredth time, of how his house was destroyed in a flood.  Damnnnnnnnnn!  Ramon says.  “Then Ramon drops a bowling ball on his foot and says Dammit!    At that point, he was warned.  And then he rattled off a profane tirade that included, You damn straight! …You damn skippy!…  I’ll be damned!… And damned if I do, damned if I don’t!”   Constable Perry shook his head, continued.   “And it was all in response to being asking if the rumours were true that he had sometimes smeared peanut butter on his genitals to lower his cholesterol.”

                  Ramon was initially sent to Hell for living a life full of debauchery that included, sleeping with his wife’s sister, her cousin, and grandmother.

               “Yeah, my wife figured it out at her family reunion,” Ramon said,  “…when the unusual aroma of peanut butter, deviled eggs, and beaver filled the swamp.”

               Shortly thereafter, Ramon met his demise at the hand’s of his wife Etta.  He had been a resident of Hell for six months before being reassigned to a different section of Hell.               Westside Baltimore.

                               Last month, a twister named Curt Blow Jr., went to see a psychiatrist about difficulties in his life, which he thinks stem from living life under the shadow of his highly well known father.

                   “My father was that twister that lifted Dorothy’s farmhouse in Kansas and blew that joint all the way to the land of OZ,” Curt said.   “And so I’ve been trying to live up to his iconic status all my life, without anywhere near the same level of success.  You would think the tremendous amount of pressure that I’m under would produce an enormous amount of gusty and swirling winds.  Nope.  Some days I can barley even work up enough wind to blow dead leaves across a grave yard.   So… I’ve been dealing with serious bouts of cyclone envy, negative funnel cloud over compensation, and vortex impotence.  Initially, I sought help from different meteorologist.  But all they could tell me was what ever my chances of raining was gonna be on any given day.   So, I decided to seek help from a mental health professional, and here I am.”

                     And after several visits with Dr. Lewis, at the WormHole Square Mental Health Treatment Center, Mr. Blow’s negative emotional condition has improved.

            “Yeah, it took a lot of deep, internal self reflection and positive image rearranging,” Mr. Blow said.  “But I’m making progress.  Yesterday, I blew the roof off of a dog house.   I also made a weathervane spin five revolutions and I blew a plastic bag three blocks.  I felt a little light headed afterwards, but I was all right after a took a few hits oxygen from the first aid kit.”

                     And Mr. Blow credits his mental health improvement to Dr. Lewis, who implemented detailed psychoanalysis and prescribed a regiment that included deep breathing exercises, and watching Rudy Ray Moore’s movie The Human Tornado one hundred and fifty-five times.

 

                                Last week, Frankenstein was fired from his job as a customer service representative for a major credit card company.

                     “It just wasn’t working out,” said Janice Hall, Frankenstein’s supervisor.   “We brought him on, despite having no prior work history, zero people skills, and the inability to speak in basic intelligible sentences.  You see, we started a Reanimated Dead Corpses To Work Program about two years ago here at the company.  And in that time we’ve successfully trained numerous reanimated dead corpses and many are still with us today, including a zombie named Kent who works in the mail room.  We’re proud of that.”

                   But in the six weeks Frankenstein had been working at this company, he had racked up numerous complaints from customers and fellow employees as well.

                  “Mr. Frankenstein was never really able to establish any type of report with our customers,” Ms. Hall went on to say.   “His method of solving customer issues was to grunt loudly, stump his heavy boots, and to throw one of his co-workers out of his fifth story office window.  That’s against company policy.  And obviously, that behavior had a seriously adverse affect on our company’s employee retention rate.  Additionally, Mr. Frankenstein had previously drawn the ire of the people of a nearby town, who would often gather in our lobby with pitchforks and torches to threaten him.  And this would prompt the Fire Marshall to issue thousands of dollars of citations for violating the fire code.   It was an untenable situation.  Mr. Frankenstein had to go.”

                          Last night, a fish named Darius was faced with a choice of choosing a blue worm or a red worm as part of some Matrix-like process to determine whether or not he was the one… of the undersea world.

                             “So… he choose the red worm and… well, that was the worst decision made by fish since that shark in the movie Jaws bit into that oxygen tank,” said a lobster named Neil.

                          Apparently, according to maritime reports, after Darius bit into the red worm, he was pulled from the water onto a boat, where he was immediately tossed into a large ice cooler, which was loaded with other unlucky sea life including, crabs, oysters, tuna, and one of Captain Crunch’s crew members who had just gotten a unsatisfactory employee evaluation.  Darius was then transported to an unsavoury fish market on the south side of Baltimore, where he was rejected for having too much algae under his armpits and being too sarcastic towards the fish mongers.  Darius then sat at a local bus stop for six hours, waiting for the number 13 to take him uptown.

                     “Hell no, I didn’t let him on my bus,” said bus driver Sandy Davenport, 33.  “He didn’t smell right, nor did he have exact change.”

                After three days of wandering the streets of Baltimore, which is only a few blocks from WormHole Square, Darius was finally picked up by a homeless man, who promptly scaled and gutted him.   Darius was then placed on a makeshift grill which consisted of the undercarriage of an old shopping cart placed over a burning fifty-five gallon metal trash can.

                        When Darius failed to rise from the flaming grill, doubt began to mount as to whether he was, indeed, the one of the undersea world.

 

                         Yesterday, Eddie Robertson, 55, was attacked in the 2800 block of Riggs Avenue by an assailant with a bottle.   And despite having eyes in the back of his head, Mr. Robertson was unable to describe his attacker to police.

                     “Yeah, the eyes in the back of my head don’t see too good no more,” said Mr. Robertson.   “All them years of sleeping on my back on the beach has really done a lot of damage to my vision.  Not to mention the astigmatisms and cataracts I developed from playing long hours with toy trains.   Not to mention the really, really large amount of cannabis that I smoked to counteract the cataracts.  So… that all considered, there’s no chance in hell that I would have been able to describe my dealer, who hit me in the goddamn head over a five dollar bag of weed and the remnants of a vintage Lionel train set.”

                    But according to witnesses, there was another unknown attacker who became hostile when he didn’t like the way Mr. Robertson was looking at him.

                                “Maybe.  I get that a lot,” said Mr. Robertson.  “People think I’m looking at them when I’m simply walking away across a room or out the front door.  Or… if I’m simply trying to figure out whether or not I’m being followed.   But that usually happens after an interaction with the cannabis.”

 

                                Yesterday, the Wolfman, who has secretly been suffering from hair loss for years, finally went to see a doctor about his condition.

                             “I believe his hair loss is due to stress,” said Dr. Lance Bigelow.  “You know, with all that lack of sleep because he’s constantly staying out late, howling at the moon, and mutilating innocent people.  That kind of lifestyle would be very stressful for anybody.”

                     “I must confess… I’ve been employing one hell of a combover for the last several years,” said the Wolfman.   “But after I migrated north and began attacking victims in the Chicago area… man, that wind coming off the Hudson really played havoc with my hairstyle.  I mean, some days I’d come home after a long day’s work of attacking random victims, looking like Al Sharpton marching through a category 5 hurricane.  My hair was constantly jacked-up, so I just started wearing a toupee.”

                   Dr. Bigelow has prescribed Rogaine for the Mr. Wolfman.  Hopefully, this will restore the Wolfman’s mane to its former glory.

                     “I hope this stuff works,” said the Wolfman.  “Some nights it’s really, really hard to motivate myself to venture out into the woods and mutilate hikers and campers when I’m looking like Danny DeVito.  You know what I mean?  People just don’t take my howling seriously when the my dome is shinning in the moonlight like a Turtle-waxed polish melon.”

                        Yesterday, Kegan Taylor, 33, was injured when he attempted to retrieve a hamburger that had been placed on a trap by an unknown perpetrator.

                       “Nobody would have suspected in a thousand years… that this burger was part of an elaborately disguised ambush,” said a mouse known to the locals as Sniff.   “Like… my main concern was that it wasn’t a legit burger.  I mean, they’ve got all these new plant based imitation meat patties coming out now.  You just can’t be sure what you’re getting when you go into a store, a restaurant, or when you attempt to lift one off of a cleverly camouflaged booby trap.”

                      Mr. Taylor suffered a flattened hand and a giant knot on the side of his head when the trap was triggered.

                     “The pain was awful,” Mr. Taylor said.  “But the worst part is that now none of my gloves fit right… and all my hats lean to the side, all pimp-like.”

                         An orthopedic hand specialist was brought in to weigh different options to   unflattened Taylor’s hands.

                                “A basketball pump with a dual hose inserted into the palms of the hands was unsuccessful,” said Doctor Sidney Yee.   “Yes, the hands did regain some volume when air from the pump was inserted.  However, Mr. Taylor’s hands went flat a short time after, when the inserted air did not hold.  Instead, the inserted air exited through his nose, left ear and anus, producing an odd aroma somewhat akin to rubbing a Viking’s armpit repeatedly up against a leather saddle.”