Escalation

Hey, Tom, how's it going?

Joe!  Great to see you!  How the hell are you?

Well, I'm –

No, seriously – how the bleeding Christ on the cross are you?

Uh –

Come on, how the stack of dead babies killed by Crusaders in the Thirteenth Century are you doing, man?

Gee, Tom –

Don't bullshit me, Joe!  How the wave after wave of Mongol raiders pillaging and raping their way across the lower steppe-lands are you getting on?

Tom, I don't –

It's me, Joe!  It's ME.  How the shipping container full of fifteen-to-nineteen-year old eastern European girls being sent into a short and thankless life of heroin addiction and jizz-encrusted prostitution are you doing?

Tom, I think –

Joe, come off it.  You can tell me.  Back up and start from the beginning:  How the melanine-poisoned troupe of crippled Chinese acrobats serving as the video backdrop to your twisted jerk-off session in the special room beneath your stairs are things going in your neck of the woods?

TOM, stop!

What's wrong, Joe?

I have spinal cancer.

-- Steve Kilian

Batman vs. The Taliban

The Ghost Is Dead But The Corpse Is Still Walking Around