It started off like any other grocery store excursion, but I had spent the week leading up to this trip in preparation. Long, sleepless nights spent staring intently at a blank notepad, a pencil resting uselessly by its side. Frustration builds up quickly when you’re in a creative rut. I suppose I was no different from my writing forefathers: Hemingway, Wilde, even Danielle Steele got their creative wheels stuck in the mud now and again. But I knew inspiration would come. And it did. Oh, did it...

For years scientists have disputed the possibility of time travel: matter can't travel faster than the speed of light, Zefram Cochrane won’t be born until the next century, yada yada. Other scientists just dodge the question entirely with things like, "I'm more than a little busy looking at these glass slides and shuffling these papers around" ...and, "How did you get passed the retinal scan to get in here, anyway?"

Ask anyone who works, or has ever worked retail at a shopping mall during the holidays, what’s the most depressingly degrading job one could apply for, or have thrust upon them during the Christmas season, and here's how it will go down. Oh, I should add, the following yule time tale actually happened…sadly.

Criminals and evildoers the world over: beware! Law abiding citizens: sleep soundly tonight knowing that in your neck-of-the-woods, local criminals (mostly the petty variety like vandals, jaywalkers, and internet pirates) will be taking a healthy dose of justice—justice served with a side-order of spit-talkin’ Dirty Harry style ‘plum mad dog mean’ true grit...I have absolutely no idea what that is even supposed to mean.

What would YOU do with a million dollars? It's an oft asked question, right up there with "Are you a cop? Y'know you have to tell me if you are, right?" or "Dude, how much for those 99 cent potato chips?" If you asked me what I would do with a cool million before today, my answer would have been "a Branch-Davidian style compound, where I had multiple wives and would subject my followers to all-night prog-rock jam-sessions, featuring me on all instruments." After all, I'm a one-man band and I don't like sharing credit. But today the idea hit me, "What could I buy with 325 million?" and the answer became all too apparent...a planet.

I have recently become extremely obsessed with the ever-expanding glut of TV shows about storage unit auctions, people taking one of a kind items into pawn shops and negotiating high-dollar bargains, and/or people rummaging around in dilapidated barns & garages for treasures that, I'm told, are high-dollar items. An antique vibrator?! $300. Thomas Jefferson's own personal butt-plug, hewn from Mount Rushmore? $4,000 all-day. A rare acetate demo of John Lennon fisting Yoko Ono with brass-knuckles? Actually, that could be ANY Lennon/Ono composition. But I'd still pay at least $2,000 for the chance to own it. This is my fault. I'm addicted to junk…thus my interest in joining Team Discord.