When boiled to the bone, traditional folk songs skew toward the dark side. Below are loglines that summarize the plots of a representative selection of actual folk songs whose lyrics would harsh anyone’s mellow.

Clark had me at “Please don’t be too sketchy”. There were no pictures of the place, which should have alarmed me, but did not. We texted for a little while. He finally sent pictures. Not the Ritz, but cute and economical. I asked to add him on Facebook to ensure he was not a serial killer. In retrospect, I bet Ted Bundy would have had a very endearing internet presence.

An odd thing happened to me last night. I was lying in bed about to fall asleep, when a thought occurred to me.

I thought that, out of all the billions of people in the world, there must be at least one person out there who was, at that very moment, falling in love for the first time. Or, maybe there was more than one person. I couldn’t know for sure.

Members of the Faith Inspired Cloning Group, (FICG) have long been vexed by the persistent popular belief that Lincoln and Darwin were humanists. FICG leadership is confident that young Lincoln and Darwin clones raised in a sequestered faith-based community will climb to even greater heights than the originals and repudiate their irreligious views. To wit, Lincoln was likely a deist and the adult Darwin gave up Christianity. But for all the care and research FICG has thus far expended on its corrective cloning project, the teenaged versions of Lincoln and Darwin disappoint.

Store-bought? Blasphemy. The wheat, I harvested it, in the old ways, scythe razor sharp and back firm. The cheese, from cows I first midwifed and nurtured, and once grown, gently milked, and the milk I curdled in my own hands. These tortellini I was first to name, for before me they crossed our lips as spaghetti, or still prior, as sketty, all noodles of the pasta variety subsumed thusly.