Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0) (5 page)

      
"Make it not have happened."

      
"This can’t be happening."

      
"I have a right"
 
(or, "I know my rights.")

Note that they are all incorrect or semantically null.

—Doc Webster

God damn it, you
didn’t
write it on a "word processor"!
 
Or even a "computer."
 
What it is, is a goddam
typewriter
—a machine for turning fingerstrokes on a keyboard into ink symbols on a piece of paper.
 
(Okay, yours can also be used as a computer when you’re not writing—my old Royal manual can be used as a nutcracker, or a paperweight, or a murder weapon.)
 
The silicon revolution did not change that process—from the user’s point of view—much more than did the electric typewriter, merely streamlined the error-correction process.
 
When it’s being used to make words appear on a page, it’s a typewriter.
 

    
To speak of your "word processor" is like referring to your car as an "exothermically powered, myocontrolled matter transporter."
 
The only purpose of the term is to cue your listeners that you can afford to use a computer as a typewriter, and all it really tells them is that you’re insecure enough to worry that people might think you still use one of those old-fashioned things to type on.

—Mike

And "electronic typewriter" is silly in the other direction: what it means is a computer so stupid that all you can do
 
with it is type…
 

—Susan Maser

Love is an active verb.
 
It’s not an abstraction or a conceptual idea.
 
You have to perform an action to show that it’s really real.

    
Enlightenment is not so much making it to Never-Never Land through the secret passageway.
 
It’s more like getting off your tail and doing something…
 

—Stephen Gaskin

Concerning whores: anyone who thinks it immoral or exploitive or dishonest to "pay a person to pretend to care about you" has obviously never flown first-class… or gone to a psychiatrist, or a hairdresser, or eaten in a restaurant… or talked to a bartender they don’t know.

—Mike

Glad; sad; mad.
 
What else
is
there?

—Long-Drink

Think of some miraculous thing.
 

Any wonderful object, okay?
 

      
Now think of two of them.
 

Wups, one is second rate.
 

      
Now think of three.
 

Gee, one is mediocre and one is the worst.
 

    
Comparison sometimes kills wonder...

—Jake

Prostitutes function rather like priests for people who feel more comfortable confessing their sins while naked.

—Father Newman

One of the silliest preoccupations of man is the notion that it makes some kind of sense to divide whole categories of people up into one winner and a whole bunch of losers or also-rans.
 
What poor sick compulsive infected us all with that virus?
 
And
how
?

—Doc Webster

"—If I let
them
live rent-free in my head, they’ll tear it up."

—black man on CBS Nightwatch, on his reaction to black women who bitterly criticize him for having married a white woman.

You can’t eat half a piece of shit.

—Mike

I think that there is only one church, and your membership button in it is your belly button.

—Stephen Gaskin

People who hang up on your answering machine without leaving any message—not even an apology for wasting your attention—are the most cowardly of pickpockets.

—Long-Drink

Fellow movie fans, I’m very sorry, but there is nothing you can do with a car to make it blow up.
 
At most, you might start it burning.
 
Falling off a
cliff
won’t make a car blow up.
 
Only an enemy or a stunt coordinator can do that.
 
Pity the hundreds of spinal cases every year who were pulled from non-burning wrecks, by movie fans afraid of the "inevitable" explosion.

—Noah Gonzalez

Anger is fear with an attitude.

–Mike

The pessimist sees only the darkness of the tunnel.

    
The optimist sees only the tiny point of light
 

in the distance.

    
The realist knows that light is probably

 
an oncoming train…
 

—Long-Drink

You are the people.

You are this season’s people—

There are no other people this season.

If you blow it, it’s blown.

—Stephen Gaskin

Meyer’s Law: In any emotional dilemma, the thing you should do is the one that’s hardest.

—John D. MacDonald

Ask the
next
question.
 
Keep on asking questions and don’t stop, and sooner or later you’ll be asking intelligent ones.
 
If you live long enough.

—Ted Sturgeon

It is usually better to not pull a gun than to screw it up. 

—Mike  

When I think of how different, how bleak and desolate my life could have been if I hadn’t happened to pay attention, a decade and a half ago, to the drunken ramblings of a broken-down fellow folksinger named Jake, lab-quality freon drips into my veins.

—Spider Robinson,

Foreword,
Callahan and Company

Please consider yourself, now and henceforth, and no matter what anyone else ever asks of you, free to do any damned thing you want that doesn’t hurt someone else unnecessarily.

—Lady Sally McGee

Long-Drink McGonnigle’s Tip for Masturbators
:

Sit on your hand first, until it goes numb.

Then it'll feel like someone
else
's hand.

It’s damned odd: the fight-or-flight adrenal rush is supposed to be the evolutionary heritage of millions of years of success in surviving crisis…and just about every time it’s ever happened to me, it ruined my judgment or my coordination or both.  

—Jake

Librarians are the secret masters of the world.  They control information.  Don’t ever piss one off. 

—Jake 

Usually if you’ve got the guilts, it’s because you did a disservice to someone or something you care about.  So what you want to do is, go and do a service for someone or something you care about. 

—Jake 

(It doesn’t have to be the
same
someone.  It’s best, but sometimes the guilt is nonspecific and it can’t be.  And sometimes it’s too late.  That doesn’t matter so much.  The point is just to release the pressure—equal and opposite reaction.  Slow and steady, ideally.  What I’m aiming for myself is to achieve balance, equilibrium, about half an hour before I die. —
Merry Moore’s codicil
)

Be a rapturist—the backwards of a terrorist.  Commit random acts of senseless kindness, whenever possible. 

—Jake

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot.  A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me… only he’s an imbecile. 

—Jake

Politically-correct euphemisms are for the differently-brained. 

—Tanya Latimer

Tyranny has its place.  Universal freedom would deny my right to restrict Jeffrey Dahmer’s recreational and dietary habits.   

—Doc Webster 

One can dismiss out of hand any so-called religion that puts out death threats on satirists.  It is self-evident that God enjoys rough humour. 

—Gentleman John Kilian

Death to anyone wearing a turbine. 

—racist graffitto spotted in 1993 in Surrey, British Columbia, by Mickey Finn…the only person on Earth who fits the description

A truce between the sexes? 
Are you out of your goddam mind
?  What else
is
there to distract us all from onrushing death?  Television? 

—Jake

It sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do:

To laugh when the joke’s on you… 

—tagline for an uncompleted song by Jake

The film generally agreed to be the greatest ever made—certainly the most studied and analyzed movie of all time—has a hole in its plot you could drive a freight-train through, in the first minute.  The entire premise of the film is logically impossible…and almost everyone misses it.

      Charles Foster Kane dies completely alone.  So how do we know that his last word was “Rosebud”?

      You like to think you belong to an intelligent species, and then something like this comes along…

—Naggeneen

Have you ever wondered how those missionaries
communicated
the idea of the so-called missionary position to the Indians?  How did they come to have the vocabulary?  It had to be show and tell, right?  “Now,
never
do this…or this…and
especially
not
this
…” 

—Jake

Over the years, I have come to learn that if you get a chance to turn anger into laughter, that will be a good thing to do. 

—Jake

Looked at a certain way, people are essentially wish-generators, with no off-switch, and they’re dangerous when armed.  We can’t help brimming with wishes… and most of them would kill us or worse if they ever came true.   

—Mike Callahan

In some ways, it’s
nice
that memory is so plastic and transient.  You play differently when you know there’s tape rolling. 

—Jake

A writer’s real occupational hazard is carpal-tunnel-vision. 

—Jake

Puns (I)

-

Set Pieces from
 

Punday Nights…
 

(Warning: the following pages contain material which may be deemed objectionable by more sensitive readers.  Reader discretion is advised.  Responsibility for any and all physical or psychological damage resulting from continued reading is hereby specifically repudiated.  Proceed at your own risk; do not read further while driving, riding in any conveyance, or operating heavy machinery.  “Here be stynkers…”)

      
One day, a planet is discovered out Antares way whose sole inhabitant is an enormous humanoid, three miles high and made of granite.  At first it is mistaken for an immense statue left by some vanished race of giants, for it squats motionless on a yellow plain, exhibiting no outward sign of life.  It has legs, but it never rises to walk on them.  It has a mouth, but never eats or speaks.  It has what appears to be a perfectly functional brain, the size of a condominium, but the organ lies dormant, electrochemical activity at a standstill.  Yet it lives.

      
This puzzles the hell out of the scientists, who try everything they can think of to get some sign of life from the behemoth—in vain.  It just squats, motionless and seemingly thoughtless, until one day a xenobiologist, frustrated beyond endurance, screams, “How could evolution give legs, mouth and brain to a creature that doesn’t
use
them?”