Books: An Abridged Existence (excerpt)

Sid responds, “I don’t really have an email address.”

“Then why give me an address that you don’t have!?!?!” Jen shouts through the phone. It is difficult to tell who she is angrier at, Sid for giving her an invalid email address which he didn’t have, or Carl for never answering his email or looking in his inbox, since all of the new messages are automatically deleted.

“Everyone else had an email address, I didn’t want to feel left out,” Sid answers sheepishly. However, Carl holds the phone a good distance away from him after the shouting tantrum from Jen moments ago. He does not like having his eardrums blown out at all.

“Jerks,” is all the response she gave to those two replies.

After a momentary pause, Sid speaks up.

“So, what are you doing later tonight? I think we should get together and bond, since we did almost all die at nearly the same time,” Sid seriously suggests.

“Well, I suppose I could stand to actually do something tonight other than sit around watching the tele. What should we do?”

“Well, uh, what do you think Carl?” Sid says.

“Uh, how about we go out and do something,” Carl responds. They are all rather indecisive, and the conversation goes from asking what should we do to where should we go back to what should we do for a while. Then Sid suggests:

“How about we throw a scarecrow convention?”

“Too much planning, and not enough time. Or is it?” Jen responds.

“I know a place where we can get hay, and we can also run around and steal a bunch of those free papers that no one really cares about anyway to stuff the scarecrows with.” Carl adds.

“We should hit up some thrift stores to find old clothes to use for the scarecrows,” Sid comments.

“Wait, what are we going to do about hair and heads? And how are we going to support them?” Jen questions.

“Leave the support and internal skeletons of the scarecrows to me. Someone else can take care of the heads and hair,” Carl responds enthusiastically. He already has an idea of what to do for the internal support of the skeletons.

“Where are we going to put them?” Sid wonders aloud.

“I know of a park nearby, we could set them up overnight and happen to wander by in the morning and see if people have noticed them. It would probably be a good idea if one of us called a newspaper, or multiple newspapers about this convention from a pay phone. See if we could get an article in the paper,” says Carl. He seems to be getting really excited at the possibility of actually pulling off this hack.