As a writer, I am always thinking in transitions. I spend a lot of time on getting jokes to flow from one to the next, and making it look like I didn’t spend any time on it at all. When novel writing, I work hard to come up with hooks I can drop at the end of one chapter to ensure readers will start the next. It’s about the flow — linking words and sentences and paragraphs into bigger, cohesive movements. <\/p>\n

Before my friend Howard passed away this past weekend, I was working on a blog post about a Twinkie the Kid Twinkie holder I just bought at a flea market for $3. How in all that is cream-filled do you segue between those two topics?<\/p>\n

I dumped ol’ Twinkie the Kid into my draft folder. I knew there would be a time in the near future when I felt like writing again, but Monday wasn’t it. <\/p>\n

Wednesday afternoon, Emily and I emptied out Howard’s cubicle. Digging through a friend’s personal belongings is awkward and awful and a little cathartic. We quickly formed multiple piles: one for Howard’s personal belongings, one for work-related items, one for office supplies, and a trash can for everything else. Souvenir sand dollar? Personal. Book on managing firewalls? Work-related. Tape dispenser? Office supplies. Mostly used tube of chapstick? Trash.<\/p>\n

And then there was this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Along with my dad and my uncle Joe, Howard was one of the biggest Three Stooges fans I knew. He loved all those old shorts, and could match me quote-for-quote when it came to reciting classic Stooge one-liners. One of Howard’s ringtones was of the Stooges smacking each other around, and he was totally jealous last year when I visited the Stoogeum in Pennsylvania last year. The other day at work I asked Howard if he had change for a five. “No, but I’ll give ya two,” he said while impersonating Moe and pointing two fingers at me as if he were going to give me a classic eye-poke. <\/p>\n

I used to have those Stooge magnets on my home refrigerator, but when we purchased a new stainless steel (and magnet-proof) fridge, I brought them to work and stuck them on Howard’s mini-fridge. Occasionally he would move them around in different poses. We laughed about them a lot.<\/p>\n

And when I saw them today, I thought Howard would have appreciated the humor in a Twinkie the Kid-shaped Twinkie carrier that was designed to carry a single Twinkie. What’s the point of it? He would have loved how ridiculousness it is. I would have bought a Twinkie from the Dollar General and brought it to work in Twinkie the Kid, and Howard would have called me a knucklehead. <\/p>\n

And we would have laughed our heads off.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a writer, I am always thinking in transitions. I spend a lot of time on getting jokes to flow from one to the next, and making it look like I didn’t spend any time on it at all. When novel writing, I work hard to come up with hooks I can drop at the end of one chapter to ensure readers will start the next. It’s about the flow — linking words and sentences and paragraphs into bigger, cohesive movements. Before my friend Howard passed away this past weekend, I was working on a blog post about a Twinkie… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10386"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10393,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10386\/revisions\/10393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}