I Feel Kind of Funny up Here

     Wherever there are people, you'll find a laboratory of human behavior.  Any office setting, a comedy club, the set of an in-production film, to name just a few.  The players are engaged in alliances, grudges, and power struggles within the pecking order.  ( If you don't believe me, Google Louis CK, Dane Cook, Steve Byrne.)

     One night at an open mike, a first-time stand-up, who had brought his cute girlfriend along, was bombing pretty badly.  No one was buying it, except for the girlfriend, who was busy ordering a full 13-episode season of his act.  She was  showing every tooth in her head.

     Another time there was a guy who was careful to point out that he usually plays in a band.  "I feel kind of funny up here without my guitar.  I'm really more of a musician than a comic."

     What?  Come on, man.  There are people with jokes waiting to go up.  More of a musician than a comic?  That'd be like me going down to the local strip club, hopping up on stage and saying, "Bear with me folks: I'm more of a dude than a chick.  I feel kind of funny up here without my boobs."

WHYY

    Tired of hearing the letter "w" spoken three times in a row?  "Lemme give you my address:  It's www... wait.  That's not it.  It's www..."

     "We know about the fucking w's!  Just give me the rest of it."

     How ugly are people who do this?  Uglier than the Wicked Witch of the West.

     It's more annoying than, "Call 1-800; that number once again is 1-800...  That's..."

     There is only one letter in the entire alphabet that has more than one syllable.  Right:  DUH.  Bull.  You.  Would it be so hard to say something like, "Triple-dub?"  Now, I was not blessed with  a great imagination, but even I could come up with something like that.

     And if the address is for World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc?  Or a radio station that's east of the Mississippi?  Jesus Christ.  Or the web site for 1-800 Flowers?

     When you're  holding on the phone, and they keep saying, "Did you know you can go to www..."  If I wanted to use the computer for this, I wouldn't be calling, would I?

     Why couldn't internet pioneers have used a different letter?  Like, oh, maybe the letter "Y."  You want my address?  "Why, Why, Why?"

Coney Crimes

    So we’re going to ban 32-oz sodas but continue allowing 52 hot dogs in 10 minutes? 

    It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Mayor Bloomberg.  He seems like a very smart, effective leader who genuinely cares about people.  I happen to agree that restaurant patrons do have the right to know what’s in their food.  But you can’t legislate what people do to themselves.  There are people with hot dog carts in their house, next to the chocolate fountain and the funnel cake maker.   Indeed, some people are orchestrating the food equivalent of Nick Cage’s alcohol suicide in Leaving Las Vegas. 

    That said, publicly glorifying overeating at Coney Island every summer is a crime against the planet.  It’s why  animals hate us, and when I say animals, I’m naturally including most other humans.

    In an old Washington Post article titled Local Resident Claws Way to Lobster-Eating Championship, we learn that Sonya Thomas, known as “The Black Widow,” has eaten 38 lobsters in 12 minutes.  Another tasty tid bit:  "Thomas was coming off a baked bean victory days before in Indiana, where she ate 8.4 pounds  of beans with pork in 2 minutes 47 seconds."

    I would imagine she was also just coming off the toilet. 

   

Gee, Thanks

    Diane, a woman from my "teaching days," once told me how she was describing me to another friend of hers:  "He doesn't really have a career.  He's usually unattached."  And  then she said something that rubbed me the wrong way.  "He just kind of exists."  Just kind of exists. 

    Recently, the wonderful Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org  tweeted a link to a fascinating science article.  Her tweet headline reads, "Newly found buried microbes may live for thousands of years at the limit between life and death."   

    Why didn't Diane just tell her friend that I live like a buried microbe?  In spite of the fact that, apparently, little is known about their lifestyle, their feeding habits, how they reproduce, etc., she could have had the decency to tell her friend I live like a buried microbe:  He lives at the limit between life and death!  At least that sounds kind of cool and dangerous, like Houdini or James Dean.  But no.  Diane said that I just kind of exist.  Well, still puts me one up on the gods.

Don't Knock

One of the benefits of the internet/computer  age is that when you’re home at two on a Monday  afternoon and someone—the meter man, a sales rep, etc—comes knocking, you don’t have to make up some fake job to hide the fact that you’re slacking.  “Yeah, I work nights.” 

“Oh?  Where?”

“Uh, up at the plant.”

“The plant?”

“Yeah, Hi-Speed.  Hi-Speed  Chicken Wire.”

Now you can just say that you work from home via the Web.

On a radio call in show people were discussing the different ways in which various jobs are portrayed in the movies.  One woman was going on in the vein that most jobs are humiliating.  People endure the indignities of commuting, taking shit from bosses, customers, etc.  These, she pointed out, are all indignities.

Then you hear politicians talking about the dignity of work.  "All people deserve to have the dignity that comes with a job."


In any case, don’t knock on my  door if you are any of the following.  (I know what you’re thinking:  He’s going to attack Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Actually, they don’t come around.  Maybe all this freethinking, non-believing and questioning that's going around is having some positive effect.)

No, here are the real pests.  Don’t knock if you are…

·         A neighbor who wants to know if I’m missing a cat.  (I will never be missing a cat.)

·         A Cop with a bad attitude.  (Cops with a good attitude are okay.)

·         A contractor  working with your young son on the vacant house next door and want to know if you can plug your extension into the outlet on the side of my house.  I don’t have time to go look through the hedges every hour to make sure you’re not running a TV, air conditioner,  battery charger, game boy, hot plate and mini fridge off a power strip.

·         Any realtors, developers or boy scouts.  Fuck boy scouts.  That is, fuck THE Boy Scouts.

·         A landscaper—there  is a big, rotten stump out in the front yard—who wants to do yard work and grind the stump. 

(If it is your first day as a door-to-door call girl and you want to grind my stump, the door is open.)

The Day Pat Decided To Be a Preacher

  When he was quite young, Pat  had a loose tooth.  (Turns out the tooth wasn't the only thing loose in little Pat's head.)  He figured he'd go ahead and yank it, so as to collect from the tooth fairy.  So when he went to bed that night, little Pat put his bicuspid under the pillow, and dreamed of a remunerative visit.

   When he awoke, there was a coin and a misspelled note.  The note said, "Change for your Bicupid."

   Little Pat thought to himself, Bi Cupid? Change for my Bi Cupid?  Never! You'll have to pry my next loose tooth from my cold, deadened gum!  So that's how all these gay people are getting together... They're not born gay; it's a slippery slope set in motion by the evil handiwork of Bi Cupid.  So that's why he's called the tooth fairy.

   Now, Pat is nothing if not non-curious, so he never checked out the spelling of that note.  To this day he blames Bi Cupid, a sort of moral decay villain and teammate of Bi-Curious, for the decline of civilization.


Speaking of teeth...

   I recently had an upper wisdom tooth pulled.  I don't know if you've had this happen, but it can leave a space, a passage, between your mouth and your sinuses, and you get backwash up in there, and it stinks.  But the thing that worries me is I'm gonna get like a hunk of hot dog stuck up in the socket.  Then the gum's gonna heal over and I'm gonna have a hot dog socket.  This thing's gonna go bad, gonna come back to haunt me like something from a Poe story.  I'll be bent over in madness.  "The pulsing!  The throbbing!"

    Is that gay?  A throbbing hot dog in my mouth?

What Doesn't Happen

      About 12  years ago I was lying in this woman's bed.  (When someone else is in bed with me, I don't really sleep.  I also don't really have sex.)  At around 4:00 AM, while she's asleep and I'm maybe half asleep, I had a startling, profound, vivid realization that I'm going to die.  One day I will die and all my thoughts will cease; everything I'm working on (or should be working on) will stop.  It's hard to describe.  Just a startling revelation that the curtain will fall and my little show, such as it is, will fade to black.

    One would think that after such a jarring wake-up call I'd have resolved to buckle down, to reach  some goals; but alas, life since then has continued to be what might be best described by paraphrasing Lennon: what doesn't happen to you while you're not busy making other plans.

   Someone recently said  that "nothing happens after you die."  Pity, since in my case nothing much happens before, either.