Soren Bowie: Your Eighth Grade Boyfriend

I have some bittersweet news to share with fans of Cracked: After nearly 8 years, I will be hanging up my keyboard and leaving the site. I still love Cracked dearly and everyone who works there but I've been offered the incredible opportunity to write for the hit television comedy program American Dad.

I will forever be indebted to Cracked for giving me a home to write and make jokes about anything I want with comically little oversight. The brand puts a tremendous amount of trust in the talent and ideas of its creative team and I recognize how rare that is in any job, particularly when I tested their faith by writing about fighting turkeys outside a Bennigan's or going drunk birding in the L.A. River. It's been an honor to work with some of the smartest, most naturally funny people I've ever met and there are very few things that could tear me away from that environment, the hit television comedy program American Dad being at the top of that list. To the site that has given me so much I say this: Please tell facilities that there is some significant damage to the wall where I hung up my keyboard, it took me four tries before I found a stud.

I always loved this monologue but I think about it a lot more now as a dad. Being a new parent means constantly re-calibrating your sense of danger. Every time I see my son rush down stairs or disappear around a corner on a hike, every time I lie awake at night and wonder if he’s breathing I try to remind myself that not every shape in the darkness is death, sometimes it’s just a cow.

Goodbye, Sam Shepard. I can’t say I’ll miss you because we never knew each other but I sure do feel sorry you won’t ever write another thing.

“Anyway, we'd been driving all night and you were sound asleep in the back seat and your momma was sound asleep in the front. Then all of a sudden you woke up crying. Just busting a gut over something. I don't know what it was. A nightmare or something. Woke your momma right up. She climbed over the seat there in the back with you to try to get you settled down. But you just kept wailing. Wouldn’t shut up for hell nor high water. So I stopped the Plymouth by the side of the road, middle of nowhere. Can't even remember where it was exactly.

 Pitch-black.

 And I picked you up out of the back seat there and carried you out into this field. Thought the cold air might quiet you down. But you just kept howling.

 And all of a sudden I saw something move out there.

 Something bigger than both of us put together. And it started to move toward us, kinda slow. And then it started to get joined up by some other things just like it. Same shape and everything.

 But these things started to kind of move in on us.

 I looked back at the car to see if your mother was all right and just then these things started to moo. They all started mooing away.