Q: How much does a pool in a condo building add value to the units?

A: Our central pool is a modern infinity pool, sleek and luxurious, and offering some of the greatest views in the city. The pool maintains a temperature of 72 degrees, allowing for year-round use. Six feet at it's deepest and two feet in the shallows, our pool also features six built-in chaise lounges for tanning, relaxing or chatting with friends. Our state-of-the-art media center features inputs for iPod, iPad, PS4 and XBox One. We have a water-proof high definition projector as well as a 204" screen that rises up from the pool at the push of a button. In under three minutes our pool can become your private screening room, discotheque, or personal oasis.  A pool like this will increase the value of your unit by at least $33,000. Once we clean out all the dead bodies.

Until we clean out all the dead bodies, the value of the units will remain where they are, which is very, very low.

Cleaning out all the dead bodies won't be as easy as you might think. As you can see there are hundreds of them, in various stages of decomposition. Removing so many dead bodies, quickly and quietly, would leave us deeply in the red and thus unable to offer such amenities as wifi in the common room or breakfast tacos every Thursday. The breakfast tacos might not seem appealing now but wait until we've removed all the bodies. When not accompanied by the overpowering stench of death, they'll be rather delicious.

Once we clear out all the dead bodies the vultures will leave. At least that's what the consultants tell us. We've hired a very well-regarded, very expensive firm, and while they're can't guarantee that the vultures will leave once all the dead bodies are removed - they are consultants after all, not prophets - they made a convincing power point presentation that suggests the vultures will leave once we remove all the dead bodies. Apparently, the bodies are a prime source of food for the vultures. According to the consultants, once we remove all the bodies, the vultures will abandon the pool in search of a new food source. Unless the vultures start eating the rats.

Getting rid of the rats will be rather difficult. Even if, sorry, when, when we remove all the dead bodies the rats are unlikely to leave. The dead bodies have been here so long that the rats have, well, I don't know how else to put this, the rats have settled in. They seem to have formed a society, with laws and commerce and government. They even elected a president. I'm not sure how you feel about rats, but I have to tell you, once you get over the fact that they're living and breeding in a pile of rotting corpses sitting in a condo pool, you have to admire them. The rat presidential debate was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. They built little podiums and everything. They made them out of human ears. You should have seen it, the two of them standing behind those rotten ears, shrieking back and forth, while the thousands of rats in the audience sat in rapt attention. I guess you wouldn't find it as cute if the ear they used had belonged to a loved one. But as far as we can tell these dead bodies don't have any loved ones. That's one of the benefits of living in a condo building designed for and marketed to single people: no loved ones cramping your style. I guess the downside is that no one cares if you die. But there's a good and bad side to everything.

So, how about we go back to my office and start filling out that application?

Q: Where can you buy a Hollywood size bed frame and mattress?

A: Baby, you can't buy a Hollywood bed frame and mattress. In this town, you gotta earn it. You know what I mean?

Oh, you don't? What I mean is that you gotta be willing to get dirty, real dirty. Know what I'm saying?

Still nothing? The wink didn't help or anything? Okay, this time I'm going to say something real slow-like, and raise my eyebrows and nod suggestively and make that "tick-tick" sound out of the side of my mouth after I say it. Baby, if you want a Hollywood bed frame and mattress, you gotta do whatever it takes, and I mean what-ever it takes.

Still nothing? It's like I'm talking to a mannequin.

Shit. I am talking to a mannequin. I should probably get back on my schizophrenia meds.

Q: Why do people not believe in the greenhouse effect?

A: Because they are smart. The so-called "greenhouse effect" was conceived by a group of Berkeley drop-outs in 1967 as a way to stifle American innovation, cripple the economy, and secure life-long government employment.

You should come inside if you want to continue talking. I'm wearing SPF 175 and that only last five minutes at this time of day.

You see, these hippies hated cars. Hated them with a passion usually reserved for people who talk during movies or borrow books and never return them. The hippies rode bikes and bikes only and believed that the rest of the world should live as they live; thus cars must be outlawed.

The air quality is rather terrible today. You should put on this gas mask if you wish to remain conscious for the rest of this conversation.

As I was saying, they hated cars, and wanted them gone, but it's not so easy to turn public opinion against cars. People like cars. Faster than walking. Safer than catapults. Cleaner than rickshaws.

Don't feel obligated to keep you coat on. Or your shirt. Or your pants. It's stifling today. Supposed to go as high as 140. Feel free to strip down to your boxers, as I have. We might as well be comfortable/

Turning people against cars would be no easy task. You can't frame a car for murder. You can't get a car drunk, fill it with naked children, and take pictures. Even telling them Hitler designed the car didn't work.

Please don't touch those books. It's been rather humid lately,  for the past twelve years, and the books have grown  moldy. Some kind of toxic mold, I've been told. At least that's what I think the man said. They were his dying words after all. He wasn't exactly enunciating.

So, how do you make people hate cars? The hippies thought and thought for years, until one day, probably in one of their drug-induced hazes, they stumbled on the perfect idea. Emissions. Tell people that the emissions from cars rise up to the atmosphere where they magically create an invisible shield that traps in all the heat and turns the Earth into a kind of giant greenhouse. Have you ever heard anything so foolish?

I'd offer you something to eat, but it's impossible to find food these days. The Kelly's down the street used to be a good source,  but I ate the last of them two weeks ago.

A greenhouse effect? The Earth growing hotter and hotter by the year, melting the polar ice caps, raising the oceans, causing incredible storms and heatwaves? That's what they came up with? That was their story?

You should move over to that other chair. You're getting a little overcooked on your left side.

Funny thing was, people bought it. People started to believe this whole greenhouse effect nonsense. In retrospect I shouldn't have been so surprised. People believe in all sorts of silly things. Evolution. Love. Memory. Gravity. But the real funny part? It didn't work. Cars stayed. Cars became more prevalent than ever. They made bigger cars, faster cars, cars that burned more fuel and created more dangerous emissions than ever before. So, yes, in a way, a small way, the hippies won. But in a real way, in a big way, we won. All eight of us who remain.

Say, before dinner, would you like to take a look at garden? It was washed away in the mudslides of 2019, but if you close your eyes and tie this rope around your wrists and pour this marinade over your back, you can still picture it.

Q: Why do people want to be an astronaut?

A: To test the limits of the human body, for one.  To see the world from a new perspective. To fly above the birds and the trees and clouds and the planes and everything we call Earth. To enter the eternal emptiness that is space. To feel closer to God, to feel like God must feel, to feel supreme.

I guess that's what drives most people. For me, it's a little different. You see, I was a lonely child; dad drank and mom wandered. I wasn't one of those kids who  "made friends easily." I wasn't "cute," or "pleasant," or "precocious," or "likable," or "happy," or "good at sports," or "able to escape into the fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons," or "book smart." I was kinda just weird.

I spent most of my time hanging around the movie theater, reading the posters. Money was hard to come by in those days. Watching a movie was out of the question. But reading the posters, that I could do all day. At least until the assistant manager chased me off with a rolled up newspaper or a hot cup of coffee. But that was rare; he was slow and fat. I could hear his labored breaths from 40 feet away. With the right combination of hiding, ducking, blending into crowds and fleeing, I was able to stare at posters for three or four hours a day.

Most of the posters have faded from my mind, Dim memories of the faces of long dead actors or blue light washing over boats or well-dressed men holding guns, draped in beautiful women. I remember the posters did their job. They entertained. They enticed. But I saw them for what they were: Lies. Fantasies to lure in the squares and get them spending that popcorn money. To some they were the promise of a better world. To me they were false promises in two dimensions. I could look at posters all day and still feel empty inside.

Still, standing around at looking at the posters was better than hiding in the woods or building a fort in the living room out of cases of Old Grandad or trying to find mom. So I kept coming back and I kept looking at the posters. That was my life, day in and day out, winter, summer, spring and fall. I expected it to be like that forever. I'd accepted my lot, made peace with myself. Nothing was ever going to happen to me, and that was okay. This was how it would be, and I could live with it.

Until the day it happened. Until the day I saw the poster that changed my everything. It was a simple poster. Black, with some kind of demonic egg hovering in the center. The egg cracking, leaking some green goo. And beneath the cracked egg, those words, those wonderful words. "In space, no one can hear you scream."

In space, no one can hear you scream.

They were the most beautiful words I had ever read. It was the most beautiful idea I could imagine. A place so large and bleak and empty that your very existence, your very terror, would go unnoticed.

My mind raced.. If no one could hear you scream, then no one could hear you beg. No one could hear you apologize. No one could hear you shout for help. No one could hear you whimper. No one could hear you stumble for basic conversational phrases. And that's when it really hit me.

In space, no one could hear you cry.

From that day, I knew what I had to do. I had to get to space.  I hit the books, did some studying, built some catapults, bought those shoes that made you jump higher. I even had my bones removed and replaced with the bones of a condor. Anything to reduce drag and increase my chances of flight.

I don't have to tell you that everything failed. You've read the press clippings. You've watched the documentaries. You know what I've been through. So here I am, at the end of the line. My last chance to get to space. I'm here to be an astronaut.

The past 35 years have been full of disappointment, shame, broken bones and public humiliation. Through it all I held my head high and went about my business. I never gave up on my dream. But it was a lot of disappointment. More than any one man should have to take.

I look around this room and I see men and women more qualified than me. Men and women with advanced degrees in mathematics and physics and engineering. Men and women with thousands of flight hours under their belt. Men and women who can look a stranger in the eye and have a casual conversation without collapsing into a blubbering mess. Men and women with strong coping skills and no history of mental disorders. But I don't see anyone who wants it more than me. I don't seen anyone who needs it more than me. I don't see anyone who deserves it more than me.

If possible, I'd really like to get to space today. There's 35 years of tears buried in here and I don't think I can hold out much longer.

Q: Is grandma an adverb?

A: For the fifth and final time, your grandmother is a noun. A noun with feelings. A living, breathing, dying, decaying, wilting, judgmental, evil noun. A noun who sacrificed her life to make my dreams come true. When those dreams turned out to be little more than standing on the street corner yelling at cars with out-of-state plates and whistling at the girls from the girl's school as they walked home, she sacrificed her life to make your dreams come true. When your dreams turned out to be little more than throwing empty beer cans at cars with out-of-state-plates and exposing yourself to the mannequins at Kohls, she switched gears and began sacrificing chickens and goats and stray cats and mail-order brides and rare plants she grew in her garden in the alley in the hope that she might summon some long-forgotten god who would punish us for our wicked ways.

Your grandmother is a noun. And it's about time you started showing her a little respect.

No, not right now. I didn't mean drop everything and start paying her respect this instant. She's edgy today and any attempt at respect will be misinterpreted as an attack. Then it's pepper spray and throwing stars and the bolo with the wire dipped in broken glass. I just hosed down the deck this morning. I'm not doing the same work twice in one day. No, we can pay our respects later, once she's been bound and  sedated and put back in her cage.

Oh. Boy. She must have been listening. She's perking up now and it looks like she's talking to some of her rats. That's never good. Those conversations never result in a a rat pyramid or an all-rat reenactment of the famous Stanford-Cal kick return. Those conversations always end in murder by rat. One time I'd like to see them try something new. The rats are so creative and she's really holding them back.

They're coming now. And grandma's shouting, "Murder!" Damn, she even made a sign.

I guess this is it. One of us should create a diversion and the other one should run down the block and finish the Mad-Lib. At least one of us should be mildly entertained. We'll shoot for it. Paper. Rock. Scissors.

Ready? One. Two. Three. Shoo-

And you're running away.
And here come the rats.
They are so well organized.