Well, you guys, I feel like a seagull because of my inbox.  See, my inbox has a folder that all the (properly addressed) submissions go into due to computer magic.  See, seagulls, if you have never lived in or near a temperate coastal area, are like semi-vicious winged rats that congregate anywhere they can find a place where sea and land meet, and hold languid symposiums about how to spread poop.  One thing you can do with them – one thing I’ve never done with them, but it’s commonly believed by slightly angry people who sometimes need a mental image to vent with such as myself that you can do with seagulls – is feed them alka-seltzer.  Like rats, they eat anything they can stuff in their greedy little avian gullets (for the purpose of making poop), such as plastic rings from six-packs (that’s tragic), or fizzy white medicinal tablets (if you’re a sick bastard unlike me, I’m just bad to old people).  When they eat alka-seltzer, it reacts with their inherently disagreeable seagull nature, and they explode.  I don’t want you to hurt any seagulls, but I do want you to understand that my inbox is exploding.  On behalf of all seagulls I say thank you, and give me a couple days, I really am getting back to you very soon.  I also want you to be nice to your grandparents.

In the meantime, I’m making up for not having shared more lately by sharing something very good.  I love short fiction – short short fiction, preferably when it’s funny but also sort of tragically insightful, as long as it makes me laugh.  Some people call it flash fiction.  I generally don’t care for that name because it makes it sound like the author just wrote something very quick and shot it off.  If you’re a genius, this is a great way to write, and you should send me your so-called ‘flash fiction’ – otherwise this is a very terrible method for doing anything, and please don’t send it to me by the way.  How do you know if you’re a genius?  Are you better than Bob Powers?  Bob Powers writes probably the best short stuff I’ve read on the interwebs.  Some time ago his Girls Are Pretty blog came back.  Nobody told me.  Man you cannot imagine how angry I am about that.  It puts me way above the level of slightly angry that I claimed in the last paragraph.  But if you don’t know about GAP, then you can go here and be told what to do.

The reason I even checked up on Mr. Powers was because someone linked me to this other great thing, Tom Oatmeal.  If you write this well without even looking, then please do send something to us.  Actually if you have to look that’s OK too.  If you don’t write that well (either with or without looking), then you can join my club.  It’s called the Not Geniuses, Not Hilarious, but We Read GAP-and-TO club.  Joining is hard at the moment, but there might be stickers later.