funny funny ha ha

2005-06-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

His chuckling made her wince. Her dry delivery wasn't supposed to be taken as a dry delivery of her wit and humor. Her dry delivery was her rare attempt to be unveiled and unhappy. Could it be that he was never exposed to that well-known adage that clowns are the ones who are crying inside? Stand-up comics weren't comics simply because they knew how to creatively articulate the absurdities of life. They were comics who lived "in the raw" and faced pain more honestly and more directly than yes, "those fucking goths," she silently fumed with bitterness.

She didn't need to wear all black and think "dark" and "serious" thoughts. She could don khakis and sulk to the best of the walking dead electronic music. Looking morose didn't necessarily equate really having anything to be morose about.

"Those fucks with black lipstick probably have only to mourn the trauma of runny black eyeliner," she mentally hissed to herself.

She began to think about all the other well and poorly known funny people in the world. She wondered if people like Lucille Ball were the kind to spend their careers being the queens and kings of comedy on the big and little screens, all the while spending their nights alone popping barbiturates and gulping glasses of bourbon.

And what really was the motivation for all those balloonologists who pump and twist elongated balloons into the symbolic shapes of animals for kids?

The stark, naked, black-and-white image of Dustin Hoffman as "death-by-overdose" Lenny Bruce at the end of the movie, "Lenny," suddenly flashed in her mind.

"Not very attractive," she sadly thought.

"I'm not trying to make you laugh," she told him when she finally returned to the present. Instead, she wanted to cry. Cry because she wanted to cry and cry because she was so disappointed that he just called her "funny." She wondered if she should resort to elementary tactics of showing her feelings. She thought of drawing happy, sad and mad faces with crayons on construction paper and stringing them around her neck.

"That way," she decided, "I won't have to tell any more 'jokes' and he won't have to catch any of my 'drift.'"

But he was driving. Even if she wore a face on her chest to express her "feelings," he'd still need to keep his eyes on the road and he wouldn't notice, anyway. He'd just keep on laughing.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Significant Other

2005-05-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

They enjoyed retracing the different stages of their relationship: their awkward meeting, and sometimes disastrous early dates, a stormy courtship followed by a lengthy hiatus, their triumphant reunion. It was easier to refer to the different periods metaphorically, and without too much thought, they fell into using the tropes of European history to describe the unfolding of their friendship. The Dark Ages, the Interregnum, the Renaissance, the Inquisition all figured heavily in their coded speech.

“Which do you like more, the Renaissance or the Dark Ages?” she asked one day.

“Don’t you find these metaphors disturbingly Eurocentric?”

“Are you avoiding the question?”

“Even if I am, don’t you think we can do better than talking about our relationship only in terms of European History? Why not Chinese history? The Warring States Period, the Manchu Dynasty, the Great Leap Forward… The Great Leap Forward, now that has a nice ring to it…”

“I’m not familiar with Chinese history. But fine, if you don’t like talking about the Dark Ages, we don’t have to talk about them. I mean, why should we use historical paradigms at all? History implies a progression, always advancing, moving inexorably forward. We’re not always moving forward. Hell, sometimes it seems like we’re not getting anywhere at all…”

“We’re not?”

“We always assume that the Cretaceous Period was somehow better than the Jurassic. Was it? I bet the earth’s Cretaceous inhabitants were none too happy about the breakup of Gondwana into a bunch of lonely continents, to be separated forever more by the vast oceans. I bet they thought things were better back in Gondwana days, when they all shared one continental roof. And I’m damn well sure that they did not call it Gondwana back in the days. What kind of acid-burnout hippy geologist came up with Gondwana?”

“OK then, what about meteorological metaphors? Weather doesn’t really move forward… it sort of repeats these chaotic patterns in ever-changing loops.”

“Are you saying that we’re doomed to eternally repeat ourselves in chaotic patterns?”

“No, no, more like the butterfly effect. You know, like when a butterfly flaps its wings in Israel, and through the inter-relation of all the earth’s systems, this causes, many years later, a huge typhoon to roar through the Philippines.”

“Israel? Is this a Zionist butterfly effect?”

“Look, it’s just an example. The point is, weather is unpredictable, even sometimes circular. It might make a good metaphor.”

“Mmhhh…Yes, I can see it… you blew into my life like a hot, suffocating desert wind, like a Santa Ana roaring through the mountain passes.”

“Suffocating?”

“The cooling effects of the marine layer were pushed back by the relentless off-shore winds. The brush soon became drier than Steven Wright’s delivery. It only took one careless match to set things on fire, the whole hillside bursting suddenly into flames. Property damage was soon estimated at more than 12 million dollars.”

“The insurance companies always exaggerate property damage... Plus every acre is worth a mill up in the Malibu Hills. I think you should consider revising those figures.”

monkey~flowers

funny funny ha ha

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Significant Other