“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Before and After – Recycled bathroom fixtures.

I have been feeling in a deep hopeless rut lately, and I’m sure a lot of you have too. After writing another Sunday Snippet I decided to set an ambitious goal for myself. I’ll write a short piece of fiction every day and put it up here. Obviously, quality will vary – you get what you get. Length too – I’ll have to write something short on busy days. They will be raw first drafts and full of errors.

I’m not sure how long I can keep it up… I do write quickly, but coming up with an idea every day will be a difficult challenge. So far so good. Maybe a hundred in a row might be a good, achievable, and tough goal.

Here’s another one for today (#47). What do you think? Any comments, criticism, insults, ideas, prompts, abuse … anything is welcome. Feel free to comment or contact me.

Thanks for reading.

Let Me Eat Cake

I knew my girlfriend was mad at me when she brought me a birthday urinal cake.

It only had one candle instead of the sixteen it should have had. I’m not sure you can get sixteen candles on a urinal cake.

That one candle was the kind that doesn’t blow out. Pretty funny haha.

Do you get a wish if you blow out the candles on a urinal birthday cake? It shouldn’t matter… but I don’t know how these things work. Nobody sang the happy birthday song. Does the song make the wish come true?

It doesn’t matter because I couldn’t blow the candle out. I already told you, it was one of those trick candles. Another indication my girfriend was mad at me.

Now that I think about it I wonder if you pee on a birthday urinal cake burning candle and put it out does your wish come true? My wish would be that I had a real birthday cake and a girlfriend that isn’t mad at me. But that’s sort of a bootstrap paradox thing (if I had a real cake I couldn’t pee on a urinal birthday cake candle…) so I guess that’s not possible. Or sanitary. It’s pretty damn hard to pee on a urinal cake if you don’t have a urinal to put it in.

The cake stunk. It was new and didn’t smell like pee. It smelled like mothballs. I have seen and smelled a few mothballs in my day, but I don’t know what they are used for and have no idea why they are called mothballs.

There is an old joke:

“Do you know how mothballs smell?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get those little legs that far apart?”

Not a very funny joke, but the only mothball joke I have heard.

The only uninal cake joke I have heard is one that Conan O’Brian told in 2013:

A company has developed urinal cakes that will tell you if you’re drunk. Basically, if you can hit the urinal cake, you’re not drunk.

I was too young in 2013 to watch Conan O’Brian and would not have understood that joke at nine years old, but now, with the internet, everything lasts forever. Even jokes about urinal cakes.

The urinal birthday cake was plain… except for the one candle. I guess I should be glad she didn’t put frosting on it; I might have tried to eat it. Does that mean she is mad at me, but not too mad? If she was really, really mad she could have frosted it and tried to get me to take a bite.

She could have frosted it and, in tiny letters, wrote something like:

Urine Trouble
or
Don’t Piss Me Off
or
Go Back to School, Get a Pee HD
or
You Think Urine Love?
or
You Take the Cake

Or something nasty like that.