“You can laugh or you can scream—either way, the train keeps movin’.”
Today started like any other—with a scream in the distance and a lukewarm cup of rainwater tea steeped with a nail I swear gives me visions. Woke up tucked inside a refrigerator box wedged between two collapsed circus tents and a pile of expired mayonnaise packets. A lesser man might’ve wept. I just saluted the sky and farted.
The world’s been feelin’ strange lately—like it’s wearing someone else’s skin. I saw a preacher arguing with a stop sign, a mime fighting his own shadow, and a raccoon funeral led by a beetle in a tiny veil. Something about today smelled like irony and overcooked despair.
I wandered down to the old mattress outlet, the one abandoned since the Great Bedbug Rebellion of ‘03. There I found a man selling “haunted objects” from a shoebox. Five bucks got me a cursed sock puppet named Linda who tells me what crimes I’ve committed in past lives and gives unsolicited romance advice. She smells faintly of tuna and bad decisions.
Linda says I’ve been a fraud psychic, a sandwich thief, and once, a moderately effective ghost. She also tells me that love is real, but only in gas station bathrooms and the occasional Waffle House parking lot. I trust her.
Further down the track, I stumbled across a funeral procession. Pallbearers were arguing over poker debts with the corpse. I leaned in and asked what the dead man had to say for himself. A voice from the casket whispered, “Check the beans. Always check the beans.” I took that as a warning, a blessing, and possibly a grocery list.
In the junkyard of life, we hobos are just the rats who found the comedy club in the sewers. Some folks fear the end—I just hope it comes with a laugh track. Death ain’t no stranger to me. He plays harmonica on Thursdays behind the Dollar Tree. Wears a trench coat made of unpaid parking tickets and smells like unslept dreams. We nod at each other. He’s polite, in a bureaucratic sort of way.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole world died twenty years ago and no one told us. Maybe this is all just purgatory with better storytelling and worse plumbing.
And yet—through it all—we laugh.
We laugh when the fire burns out but the can of beans explodes anyway. We laugh when Blaze tries to hold a séance and accidentally summons a telemarketer. We laugh because otherwise we’d turn to rust and shadows.
Final Thought of the Day:
Don’t be afraid to chuckle at the grim parts. That old reaper might be comin’—but if you meet him with a joke and a can of peaches, maybe he’ll let you ride one more line.
Til the next ghost train,
—Hobo Harry, Laugher in the Lintel of the Abyss, Duct Tape Philosopher
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