Off The Wall At Callahan's

by Spider Robinson

  —Mike to Lady Sally

  It’s hard to strike a balance between keeping an open mind and being a sucker. But you have to try…

  —Joe

  Religions only look different if you get ’em from a retailer. If you go to a wholesaler, you’ll find they all get it from the same distributor.

  —Stephen Gaskin

  If you’re raped, don’t charge the bastard with rape. Charge him with indecent exposure. It is much easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape. The defense is not allowed to ask anything about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time. Forensic evidence is unnecessary. The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half. What’s the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, “It’s a filthy lie, Your Honor. I raped that bitch!”? In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist. And weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes—in fact, the scheme sort of incorporates the Law of Talion.

  An eye for an eye…

  —Mary

  Anger is fear with an attitude.

  —Mike

  A fantasy is not even a wish, much less an act. There is no such thing as a culpable or shameful fantasy.

  —Lady Sally

  I like my flattery plausible.

  —Arethusa

  Everything in your body is connected to everything else. If you doubt it, have ear surgery, and then wiggle your big toe.

  —Doc Webster

  Memories are the only real treasures a man has.

  —Joe

  “Straighten me, Nazz…

  ’cause I’m ready.”

  —Father Newman

  quoting Dick Buckley’s famous rap

  about the Nazz(arene)

  Every time I hear someone put the word “mere” in front of the word “semantics,” I bite my tongue hard and remind myself that I too am greatly ignorant.

  —Phillip

  There aren’t many things a man can do as noble as passing up a chance to show how smart he is.

  —Joe

  Do not waste your fear on the mighty. Cowards make the deadliest opponents—and pacifists never fight fair: they can’t—and the worst thing about terrorists is how weak they are: so weak that they have to be monstrous to accomplish anything.

  —Lady Sally

  The distance between one and a hundred is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.

  —Joe

  There’s nothing wrong with wanting wars to stop—but the moment a pacifist uses any weapon but calm speech, he’s a hypocrite. If he’s willing to kill, he’s a psychotic.

  —Lady Sally

  “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work.”

  —Mark Twain to Nikola Tesla

  The best nonprescription analgesic is laughter.

  Maybe analgesic is the wrong word. If you laugh hard when you’re post-op, you hurt like hell. You just don’t give a damn. Hard to understand how a painful experience can leave you feeling better, but there it is.

  Sharing the laughter makes it even better…

  —Josie

  You can learn as much about someone from watching them belly-laugh as you can from making love with them.

  —Joe

  Wrinkles are your combat ribbons. Wear them proudly!

  —Shorty Steinitz

  A writer’s real occupational hazard is carpal tunnel vision.

  —Jake

  When something scares you shitless, you can go back up inside your head and hide. But when the thing that scares you comes from inside your head, you…well, you go to a place that isn’t a place, erasing your footsteps behind you. And somebody’s got to come in after you…

  —Paul MacDonald

  Short of accident or hypnosis, self-abuse is logically impossible.

  —Doc Webster

  The thing to do with a silly remark is to fail to hear it.

  —Zebadiah J. Carter

  Some delusions are necessary.

  Or do you know of a rational reason for living?

  (You say you do? I won’t argue: your delusion is necessary.)

  —Jake

  Pessimism may be a realistic way of looking at life…but who can live with that much realism?

  —Jake

  The human race has few (if any) problems that couldn’t be solved by massive wealth. And we’re literally surrounded by it, like a fly in amber. Now if we only had brains…

  —Ben Bova

  The worst misunderstandings are the unspoken ones.

  —Slippery Joe Maser

  The expression “lowest common denominator,” when spoken outside the context of mathematics, is usually being misused. If used to connote contempt for something popular, it is certainly being misused. The speaker is both ignorant and elitist.

  The phrase does not imply that that the commonest denominator is always the lowest.

  —Dr. Jacob Burroughs

  Sneering at something is an admission of failure. You are claiming superior talent or insight…but declining to use it. The best way to sneer at something, if you must, is to improve or outdo it.

  —Shorty

  Erections are certainly useful in pleasing a woman, but I’ve never understood why so many people seem to think they’re essential. Sure, they’re flattering—but a man who doesn’t have an erection and still wants to make love to me, now that’s flattering.

  —Arethusa

  “Na mai kharundi, kai chi khal tut,”

  or, translated from the Romany,

  “Do not scratch where it does not itch.”

  —Gypsy proverb

  To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can.

  —Jake

  Never carry a grapefruit.

  —Lazarus Long

  Why do we build refrigerators that spill money on the floor? And ovens that spill money on the ceiling? And sit them side by side, a heat-maker and a heat-loser, unconnected?

  —Jim/Paul MacDonald

  The customer need not always come first. Enjoy yourself: it’s contagious.

  —standard advice of Lady Sally

  to apprentice artists at her brothel

  I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

  —Tom Waits

  A classic vicious circle: you don’t love yourself enough, so you treat yourself so badly that it’s hard for you to love yourself…

  Be good to yourself. Maybe the idea will catch on…

  —Les Glueham and Merry Moore

  (“The Cheerful Charlies”)

  Triads have a very short shelf life—unless all three members are ambisexual. For a heterosexual species with two sexes, odd numbers are unstable. If a commodity is scarce, competition for it will ensue.

  Triads are interesting as hell—while they last. But so is a chimney fire…

  —Lady Sally

  Kindness beats honesty, every time.

  But think it through—and make sure you’re being honest with yourself…

  —Mike

  You got it, buddy: the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away…

  —Tom Waits

  “Man alone cannot know himself. The container cannot contain itself.”

  “I do not understand what you mean. Do not all containers contain themselves? If not, what does contain them?”

  —exchange between Long-Drink and Mickey

  Antiabortionists fail to carry their philosophy to its logical culmination: Stamp Out Menstruation! End the Slaughter of Millions! (And try to ensure that the ratio of females to males runs several trillion to one, so that every sperm can fulfill God’s Plan for it as well.)

  —Mike

  Have you ever wondered how those missionaries communicated the idea of the so-called missionary position to the Indians? How did they come to have the vocabulary? It had to be show and tell, right? “Now, never do this…o
r this…and especially not this…”

  —Jake

  Among the most common thoughts that ever passed through a human brain:

  “That doesn’t apply to me.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Not again.”

  “I wasn’t ready.”

  “I might have known.”

  “Make it not have happened.”

  “This can’t be happening.”

  “I have a right.” (Or, “I know my rights.”)

  Note that they are all incorrect or semantically null.

  —Doc Webster

  God damn it, you didn’t write it on a “word processor”! Or even a “computer.” What it is, is a goddam typewriter—a machine for turning fingerstrokes on a keyboard into ink symbols on a piece of paper. (Okay, yours can also be used as a computer when you’re not writing—my old Royal manual can be used as a nutcracker, or a paperweight, or a murder weapon.) The silicon revolution did not change that process—from the user’s point of view—much more than did the electric typewriter, it merely streamlined the error-correction process. When it’s being used to make words appear on a page, it’s a typewriter.

  To speak of your “word processor” is like referring to your car as an “exothermically powered, myocontrolled matter transporter.” The only purpose of the term is to cue your listeners that you can afford to use a computer as a typewriter, and all it really tells them is that you’re insecure enough to worry that people might think you still use one of those old-fashioned things to type on.

  —Mike

  And “electronic typewriter” is silly in the other direction: what it means is a computer so stupid that all you can do with it is type…

  —Susan Maser

  Love is an active verb. It’s not an abstraction or a conceptual idea. You have to perform an action to show that it’s really real.

  Enlightenment is not so much making it to Never-Never Land through the secret passageway. It’s more like getting off your tail and doing something…

  —Stephen Gaskin

  Concerning whores: anyone who thinks it immoral or exploitive or dishonest to “pay a person to pretend to care about you” has obviously never flown first-class…or gone to a psychiatrist, or a hairdresser, or eaten in a restaurant…or talked to a bartender they don’t know.

  —Mike

  Politically-correct euphemisms are for the differently-brained.

  —Tanya Latimer

  Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.

  —Jake

  Glad; sad; mad. What else is there?

  —Long-Drink

  Think of some miraculous thing. Any wonderful object, okay? The moment there are two of them, one is second-rate. Once there are three, one is mediocre and one is the worst.

  Comparison sometimes kills wonder…

  —Jake

  Prostitutes function rather like priests for people who feel more comfortable confessing their sins while naked.

  —Father Newman

  One of the silliest preoccupations of man is the notion that it makes some kind of sense to divide whole categories of people up into one winner and a whole bunch of losers or also-rans. What poor sick compulsive first infected us all with that virus? And how?

  —Doc Webster

  “If I let them live rent-free in my head, they’ll tear it up.”

  —black man on CBS Nightwatch,

  on his reaction to black women

  who bitterly criticize him

  for having married a white woman.

  You can’t eat half a piece of shit.

  —Mike

  I think that there is only one church, and your membership button in it is your belly button.

  —Stephen Gaskin

  It sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do:

  To laugh when the joke’s on you…

  —tagline for an uncompleted song by Jake

  People who hang up on your answering machine without leaving any message—not even an apology for wasting your attention—are the most cowardly of pickpockets.

  —Long-Drink

  Fellow movie fans, I’m very sorry, but there is nothing you can do with a normal car to make it blow up. At most, you might start it burning. Falling off a cliff won’t make a car blow up. Only a dissatisfied business rival or a stunt coordinator can do that. Pity the hundreds of spinal cases every year who were pulled from non-burning wrecks by movie fans afraid of the “inevitable” explosion.

  —Noah Gonzalez

  bomb-disposal technician

  The pessimist sees only the darkness of the tunnel.

  The optimist sees only the tiny point of light in the distance.

  The realist knows that light is probably an oncoming train…

  —Long-Drink

  You are the people.

  You are this season’s people—There are no other people this season.

  If you blow it, it’s blown.

  —Stephen Gaskin

  Meyer’s Law: In any emotional dilemma, the thing you should do is the one that’s hardest.

  —John D. MacDonald

  Looked at a certain way, people are essentially wish-generators, with no “off” switch, and they’re dangerous when armed. We can’t help brimming with wishes…and most of them would kill us or worse if they ever came true.

  —Mike

  Ask the next question. Keep on asking questions and don’t stop, and sooner or later you’ll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough.

  —Theodore Sturgeon

  When I think of how different, how bleak and desolate my life could have been if I hadn’t happened to pay attention, a decade and a half ago, to the drunken ramblings of a broken-down fellow folksinger named Jake, lab-quality freon drips into my veins.

  —Spider Robinson, from the

  Foreword, CALLAHAN AND COMPANY

  In some ways, it’s nice that memory is so plastic and transient. You play differently when you know there’s tape rolling.

  —Jake

  Please consider yourself, now and henceforth, and no matter what anyone else ever asks of you, free to do any damned thing you want that doesn’t hurt someone else unnecessarily.

  —Lady Sally McGee

  Puns (I)

  Set Pieces from

  Punday Nights…

  WARNING: the following pages contain material that may be deemed objectionable by more sensitive readers. Reader discretion is advised. Responsibility for any and all physical or psychological damage resulting from continued reading is hereby specifically repudiated. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK; do not read further while driving, riding in any conveyance, or operating heavy machinery. “Here be stynkers…”

  One day a planet is discovered out Antares way whose sole inhabitant is an enormous humanoid, three miles high and made of granite. At first it is mistaken for an immense statue left by some vanished race of giants, for it squats motionless on a yellow plain, exhibiting no outward sign of life. It has legs, but it never rises to walk on them. It has a mouth, but never eats or speaks. It has what appears to be a perfectly functional brain, the size of a condominium, but the organ lies dormant, electrochemical activity at a standstill. Yet it lives.

  This puzzles the hell out of the scientists, who try everything they can think of to get some sign of life from the behemoth—in vain. It just squats, motionless and seemingly thoughtless, until one day a xenobiologist, frustrated beyond endurance, screams, “How could evolution give legs, mouth and brain to a creature that doesn’t use them?”

  It happens that he’s the first one to ask a direct question in the thing’s presence. It rises with a thunderous rumble to its full height, scattering the clouds, thinks for a second, booms, “IT COULDN’T,” and squats down again.

  “Migod,” exclaims the xenobiologist, “of course! It only stands to reason!”

  —Long-Drink McGonnigle

  Did you boys ever hear of
the planet where the inhabitants were mobile flowers? Remarkably similar to Earthly blossoms, but they had feet and human intelligence. The whole planet was ruled by a king called Richard the Artichoke-Heart, and one day at a court orgy his eye was caught by Fuchsia, a pale-eyed perennial. Her beauty was so great that it almost made up for her stupidity.