what i was going to post on the cbox

[Deleted]

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe,
assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know
the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter
winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already
dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him.

He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a
tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know
the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes
in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the
look of terror right off your face.

On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a
spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking
for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your
ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the
broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand new handle for your
ax.

The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the next spring when, on
one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.

Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that slayed me!”

Is he right?

John Dies at the End

[|| allie]

no, because the guy bought new parts for it...?
D:

i don't get it. ;-;

[glowlynose]

No, it is not. The ax head and handle were replaced, so it technically is not the same ax.
... right?

[Deleted]

and then there's this...

I had been walking toward the entrance of one of the four McDonald’s franchises
in Undisclosed when I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let
out a scream. Just a little scream, but I still frightened one little girl on
the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too. One middle-aged man in a baseball
cap who had been strolling toward the entrance behind me very discreetly turned
on his heels and walked the other way. I felt like a jackass.

But I couldn’t help it. I stood there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant
for several minutes, gawking at the thing. It was one of those clear plastic
static signs, pressed to the inside of the glass with the cartoon image filling
most of that pane. The cloud of red hair, the size 60 red shoes, the yellow
suit, and the, well...

I reached out and brushed my fingers over the glass.

The image is so perfectly drawn, I thought. So vivid.

Other late-night customers brushed past me and cast quick, stealthy glances my
way, looking at the crazy man with the beard stubble and the ruffled dark hair,
wearing the faded charcoal jacket over a black button-up shirt with a row of
crimson Chinese characters down the front (the outfit wasn’t as gay as it
sounds). Look at the nut, staring into the four foot-tall corporate logo like
it holds the meaning of life. Don’t get too close to him, honey.

But they didn’t see what I saw, I was sure of that. They weren’t looking or
screaming or puking. No, they saw the happy clown with his arms spread wide,
one leg cocked at a 45-degree angle with one red floppy clown shoe tipped up
into the air, big smile spread across his red and white face, welcoming paying
customers into his burger factory. I remembered it from the last 100 times I
had been here.

What I saw at the moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly
open, as if cut with a dull utility razor. He was—how can I put this
delicately? In this perfectly-rendered and shaded cartoon he was using his own
white-gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth.

Detailed. Yes. It was very, very detailed.

But it was those eyes that got me. His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a
terror about to boil over into madness. Tears streaked his face, sweat beaded
his forehead. Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed for
mercy. Begged to be put out of his misery. Those eyes told a story I didn’t
want to hear. It was a perfect cartoon rendering, not just of a man eating
himself, but of a man being forced to eat himself.

And only I saw it. The messed-up logo was not an act of vandalism, the work of
some artistic vegan defacing the hated burger chain. No manager rushed out to
cover it. This image existed only to my eyes. This type of thing had been
happening more and more.

I closed my eyes, looked again. Still there. And yeah, it was there. So
totally and completely there, not shimmering like a mirage in the desert or some
blur out the corner of your eye. It just clung to the window in it’s brazen
thereness, real right down to the little plastic corners peeling up from the
glass.

Look at his face, man. The blood stained around his lips. And what’s that
caked around his cheeks? Gotta be bits of-