Tiny White Box–Thoughts on Life, Death, Recovery, and Other Mundane Topics

I like rumors as much as the next person, if the next person is Truman Capote or someone else who really loves rumors. I mean, outlandish and unsubstantiated stories are entertaining even as they’re being dismissed. Since I hear rumors of rumors about me and my current life, I figured I’d spice up the plot by throwing in a dozen of my own. Hell, I’ll make it a baker’s dozen; did you hear I’ve been romantically linked with the-cute-as-hell Sarah Silverman, preparing for a wedding with a poop-shaped cake? Do spread that one, along with these:

1. I’ve gotten my old band, Pus Theory, back together and we are working on a greatest hits album. Given our first CD didn’t sell enough to make me even a hundredaire, “hits” is clearly a flexible word. Also, Pus Theory was me playing around with Audacity software 20 years ago, so getting the band back together involved group therapy in a mirror. Among songs being considered for inclusion are: “Catchy Dance Number,” “Ballad to Break Teenage Hearts” and “Heavy, Deep Pink Floyd Soundalike.”
2. While I claim to be working on a memoir, I’m actually rewriting The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, intending to claim royalties on the Howard Stove, the lightning rod and bifocals.
3. The Tiny White Box is actually a Large White Box of about 6,500 square feet and located in Malibu. I am not among its most wanted, but I have been working on my backhand with great ferocity.
4. I am in Israel, studying Gnostic texts and preparing to announce myself as the second coming of Mani. Since few people remember Mani and his philosophy, Manicheanism, this seems an odd choice, but only to you who are trapped in the body instead of free in the spirit.
5. The Keith Howard who signs this column is not me but Bandit Keith Howard from the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe. (Look it up!) Having escaped from a Japanese fictional reality, I am now learning about the three-dimensional world, food and girls.
6. While I may use the phrase “Tiny White Box,” this is a euphemism for my jail cell, where I am on house arrest on charges of conspiracy to commit conspiracy.
7. I never went to Pittsburg, but am writing this from the New Hampshire Home for the Confused, where I am being treated for anhedonia, alopecia and a bad case of hemorrhoids.
8. I’ve relocated to Sioux City, Iowa, where I’ve opened a small dry-cleaning business specializing in rodents with rabies. Dry cleaning is required because of the disease’s hydrophobia.
9. I’ve been taken hostage, locked up in a shed, and these columns are written in blood on Kleenexes and sent out by the wind. My editor at Tiny White Box Industries transcribes them, bleaches the Kleenexes and throws them out his car window.
10. I’m on the run from the Trump Administration because President Trump was annoyed by my public endorsement of John Kasich. The President sees my radical moderation as a threat to tweet-stormers everywhere. How can creamed spinach co-exist with Drano?
11. This year in a Tiny White Box in the Great North Woods has nothing to do with writing, meditating or walking. It’s really a form of penance for having embarrassed Cathy Palmer and the rest of my kindergarten classroom by dropping my pants in class. Given the length of this penance, I will be, conservatively, 107 years old by the time I’m making amends for eating a live sea minnow to, unsuccessfully, impress Carol Tillock in seventh grade. Luckily for me, I like it here, and I’m not adding to my list of crimes while I contemplate my embarrassment of others.
12. My biological mother, Sally Piper, about whom I’ve written a couple columns, was an heiress to the Piper jet fortune, and I’ve inherited four-million dollars. The future I’m plotting is that of an eccentric wealthy man instead of an eccentric writer.

At least one of these may be true for all I know.