Category: anti-humor

Joey at the Bat

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“Joey! C’mon, it’s just a game,” Regina shouted out, as Joey Dunning took a bat to a Gatorade water cooler. It obviously wasn’t to Joey. To Joey, it was an existential crisis to strike out three times in a company sponsored slow-pitch softball game. Companies organize these company functions, so we stupid people can have fun, and we were having fun until Joey took a bat to one of those insulated Gatorade coolers with a beverage dispenser. If Joey hits it once or twice, it’s a thing that draws attention. If he hits it as hard as he can, eight to nine times, it’s a human being imploding, and we watch with our mouths open, like this,” Barry said mimicking the expression. “We pretty much know life isn’t going the way Joey planned, and that this might be one of the worst days of Joey’s otherwise miserable life. What do we do? Do we laugh ourselves to tears? Not at the time. At the time, it’s shocking, kind of sad, and a little pathetic. We’re in tears later, replaying every second of it, every swear word he used, and replaying our reactions to it. One of my buddies actually took a picture of the Gatorade cooler after the it was all over, and he saved it. He didn’t know why he saved it, but the next time something bad happened to me, he texted that picture to me with a caption, “It could be worse.”

“Nothing excites the coward more than seeing a hero fall,” Dave Chapelle once said, “because it justifies their cowardly existence.” That doesn’t quite nail this scenario, because Joey wasn’t anyone’s hero. He was a good-looking guy, though, and a body-builder, who had none of the problems we did attracting women. So, did we kind of relish seeing the worst moment of such a man’s life? We did. All of us did.

The Germans have a term for laughing at another person’s pain. Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to develop a term for laughing at the destruction of another person. And for any offended Germans out there, I’m part German, so I can say that. We laugh when someone trips and falls in the hall and leaves makeup on that carpeted wall. It’s funny, and we all know it. Even when we fall, we know it’s funny, no matter how painful and tragic it is. We know someone, somewhere will develop some material about it that they will share with their friends for years.

I laugh at other people’s pain, and I expect them to laugh at mine. Without knowing the exact definition of yin and yang, we all understand how nature balances itself out through opposite but interconnected forces. As long as it doesn’t involve something debilitating, we all enjoy seeing someone else fall. The bigger the better, and the level of emotional and physical pain one incurs corresponds to the comedic value of the situation. Some say it’s karma, and as a person who laughs at other people’s pain, I know I’m going to get mine, and you know you’re going to get yours. We know karma is going to reach around and bite us in some very tender areas.

We’ve all experienced some levels of karma, but something tells us that ain’t it. That’s just the tip. We’ve done a whole lot of laughing at others, and we know that there’s more to come. We know we’ll get ours. We know there will come a day when we’re old and decrepit, hooked up to some machine that sustains life, and some intern will come into our room, see us gasping for air, and he’ll find it hilarious.

We might expect a little sympathy from a hospital employee, but all institutions have good employees and poor ones. As death creeps up on us, the emotional hysteria will probably lead us to yell something like, “What are you laughing at? I’m dying here, for Cripes sakes!” When we cool down and recognize that we don’t have the strength to fight death anymore, we’ll either acknowledge that we deserve it for laughing so hard at so many others on the worst days of their life, or we might see the humor in it too. Seriously, are you so sick that you’ll probably be laughing with the orderly who’s laughing at your death mask?

“You should’ve seen your face,” that orderly will say, “You were all like …” Barry mimicked the orderly’s imitation of his desperate gasp for breath. 

‘I know,’ we say, chuckling, ‘but you gotta remember I am dying here. No, I’m not saying it’s not funny. I’m just saying that when you’re taking your last breath, it’s probably going to hurt, and if you’re wondering if it is your last breath, you’re probably going to make some embarrassing faces too.’

When that day comes, we might regret laughing so hard at a grown man beating a Gatorade cooler with such intense frustration, or we might not, depending on sadistic we are.

I don’t know how women would handle this situation, but when a guy strikes out three times at a slow-pitch company outing, in front of everyone he works with every day, forty hours a week, it’s our version of a Promethean hell. The story of Prometheus is that the gods wanted to find a creative way to punish him for introducing humans to fire. The gods decided to bind him to a rock and have an eagle eat the liver out of his body for the rest of eternity. Have you ever seen a bird eat? It’s not clean. Even a large eagle has a relatively small mouth, and they don’t have teeth. So, if they’re going to eat your liver out, they have to stick a talon in you to balance you, while they rip it out bit by tiny bit. Yeah, the gods knew how to bring the pain. As the tale of Prometheus tale goes, once this eagle is finally done carrying out that torturous punishment, Prometheus’ liver grows back the next day, and the eagle rips it out again, and again, for the rest of eternity. 

As horrific as that punishment is to picture, I’m willing to bet that most men in the audience here tonight would prefer that torturous afterlife, for the rest of eternity, to striking out three times in slow-pitch softball, in front of all of your friends and drinking buddies. Why, well, as with the repetitive torture Prometheus experienced, we will relive that moment over and over for the next thirty years. You might think it’s over, and you might finally reach a point where you’re no longer staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, reliving it over and over, seeing all of the faces, hearing the silence that followed, and remembering that little kid giggling when you went Al Capone on the Gatorade cooler. If you have mean, sadistic friends like I do, you know they’re going to bring it up, and force you to go through your own version of Promethean hell.

What’s worse, physical pain or mentally reliving your worst day at-bat for the rest of your life. Now, if you’re a regular softball player, like I was, you’re going to mess up a lot. You’re going to make horrendous, humiliating errors, but you can try to erase it next week by making some good plays. Joey, to my knowledge, never played softball, or any other sports, after this game. My bet is that he remembers that moment from 10pm until 1AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to his wife snore, for the rest of his life, and then when he mercifully finds sleep, it invades his nightmares.

Joey was a big body builder type. Most of us go to the gym about two times a week. I’m betting Joey was a five-to-six-day-a-weeker, so we naturally thought the man was built for athletic domination. We could tell that Joey thought that too. He was on my team, and I was behind him in the batting order. I wanted him to do well, of course, because I wanted our team to win, but I didn’t want him to do so well that my little blooper singles would be an afterthought. The ropey muscles on this guy’s forearms made me think I was in trouble. The outfielders backed up for him. We all thought Joey was going to put on a clinic. He had brand new batting gloves that it looked like he purchased just for this company outing. He even had wrist bands. Who wears wrist bands to a company outing? Between pitches, he adjusted the fit of his gloves and fiddled with his wrist bands, just like Major Leaguers. It was so shocking to see him strike out on three pitches that first time that when the other team even ribbed him a little, in a good-natured way, we all kind of giggled. It was all polite and fun.

So, what’s the best resolution we might develop for the inability to hit a huge softball coming at you incredibly slow? Whenever we substitute a good solution with the best, most perfect solution, we often end up choosing the worst. Joey’s solution was to swing faster and harder? In his second at-bat, Joey swung so hard he fell down. Yikes! We could almost hear the nails going into the intangible walls of his nightmares, building a permanent fixture in there.

Seeing as how we were at a company function, and the sense of competition between our teams was fun more than anything else, the pitcher lofted the last two pitches up of Joey’s second at-bat, with the greatest of ease,” Barry said mimicking the soft toss. “The way we might pitch to a five-year-old who is having trouble hitting the ball, and in a scene that will probably play in Joey’s nightmares for the rest of his life, he missed both of them. Would you laugh at this man self-destructing right in front of you?” Barry paused for all the laughing yesses in the audience. “You would? While witnessing the worst moment in someone’s life?”

We all say yes at a comedy club, three to four drinks in, but when it’s someone you know, someone you see at work every day, forty hours a week?” Barry paused to survey the crowd. “We all would. We all do, because we have grievances, petty personal and impersonal grievances. We have grievances against mother nature, God, and the world and everyone in it. If you don’t find failure funny, let me add this. After Joey’s second strikeout, there were groans all over the field on our team and the opposing one. Even the men who envied how easily Joey picked up women, dropped that grievance and began rooting for him. We were all cheering for him. Even though he fell on his ass after the third strike of his second at-bat, someone yelled out, “That’s all-right Joey! Get ‘em next time!” The other team was even saying stuff to cheer him on, being good sports and all. 

Now with the third and final strikeout, let me ask you what do you think would be the worst possible reaction you can think of following a third strikeout in slow-pitch softball? Try to put yourself in Joey’s shoes, and think what reaction might haunt you for the rest of your life?” Barry asked the audience. A few people shouted some reactions out. “More teasing? Laughter? Wrong. How about silence? If you asked me, prior to this display, I probably would’ve said more teasing and more laughter too, but that day taught me that silence, claustrophobic silence is the worst possible reaction you can give to someone striking out in slow-pitch softball. Why? Every other reaction gives us some direction for our anger. If Billy laughs, we can say, “How dare you laugh at me Billy, I was trying so hard, and that was so embarrassing, and you laugh? What is wrong with you? You cold-heartless bastard?” If someone tries to soften the blow, by encouraging us in some way, we can say, “Aw, shut it!” to their condescending sympathy, but silence? Silence causes you to eat the moment whole without lubricants or anything to aid in the digestion process, and it festers in some black hole in our innards for the rest of eternity, and the only outlet we can find is an inanimate object that can be used to retain the temperature of drink products.

As cold and sadistic as we are, we’re not even close to as cold and sadistic as children can be, because they don’t understand how to apply sympathy, and they haven’t experienced enough failure in life to be empathetic. They just think a guy going ballistic on a water cooler is hysterical. “Is he joking dad?” No, now look away.

We try to cover their eyes, but they fight it. This isn’t something they see every day, so they fight to watch it. “Why is he so mad, dad?” they ask far too loud. “Was he mad because he struck out?”

Yes, now for God’s sakes quit staring and join the rest of us, pretending this isn’t happening. The other parents in the audience don’t even laugh at our boy’s innocent, loud questions. They maintain the silence.

Kid won’t let stuff like this go either. “Why did Joey do that?” they ask on the car ride home.

“Joey had no idea he was common. He thought he was special. He thought he’d be a contender, a somebody, some kind of prodigy. Some part of him thought he might be Major League baseball material. He thought that when he was your age, we all did, but he doesn’t play recreational sports the way some of us do, so he never learned that he wasn’t special. He had no idea that by the time he was thirty, the only thing anyone would pay him for was data entry. Missing those slow-pitch softballs, told him that he’s no better than the rest of us, and that was quite shocking to him. 

“Some of us played sports when we were kids, and we played softball in recreational leagues when we aged out of most sports, and we all made horrible errors everyone enjoyed. Sweet little, old ladies laughed at us, “Idiot!” they’d say. Joey, obviously, never went through all that. We made errors that were so awful they were met with silence, and trust me nothing is worse than silence. They don’t even try to cheer us up after a while, because we’re so awful. They allow us to go back to the dugout in silent shame. After that, we realize that we aren’t half as good as we thought we were. Everyone who plays any sport goes through that, but Joey never did. Joey preferred sitting in the stands, laughing at us losers, thinking about his potential for greatness. That company softball game was his big chance, the moment he thought he’d realize all his hopes and dreams of being a prodigy that no one ever heard of before. Joey believed the mythology of Joey that Joey built, and he thought he had potential to be great at something, anything, but he didn’t really do anything about it. He believed something would come along, something would happen, and when it didn’t, when he realized that he was no better than those of us he laughed at for working so hard at stuff that came naturally to him, he took it out on a Gatorade cooler.”

It was a meaningless slow-pitch softball game, at a company outing, and I’m sure that the twenty-something people who were there that day don’t even remember the day, the game, or the fact that we even had an outing. The joke here is that Joey remembers, or that he’ll never be able to forget it. The joke is that in some small way, this meaningless game ruined his life in some meaningful way. I’m almost positive it didn’t. I didn’t talk to Joey before this company outing, and I didn’t after it, so I don’t know the if, when, or how he worked through it. I don’t even know if Joey had to work through it, or if he’s the type to obsesses over such matters. Joey might have moved on as if nothing happened that day, but if he’s anything like me he dreads quiet moments, because they remind him of the silence, he heard that day after the third strike of his third at-bat. If he’s anything like me, those intermittent quiet moments have a tendency of popping up at the oddest times, and I’m sure Joey doesn’t even know why he now has a preference for some kind of noise, music, TV, or anything that makes noise in his background, because of what happened after that third and final strikeout at that company function. You’ve no doubt heard the cliché deafening silence. Yeah, that’s the type of silence that puts an exclamation point on top of one of the top ten worst moments of his life. It’s the type of silence that almost allows you to hear the facial muscles of the players, on both sides, twitch into a cringe.

It strains credulity to me to think that Joey doesn’t remember this day. If I ever asked him about it, and he said, “Huh, I don’t remember that we even had a company outing.” I’d immediately think he was lying. How could he forget falling on his keister the way he did, the way that pitcher lofted him pitches the way we would a five-year-old, the deafening silence that followed his third strikeout, and, of course, destroying a water cooler in frustration? (Even though he hit it eight, nine times, Joey didn’t damage the container, which either speaks to Gatorade’s sound construction of it, or Joey’s ineptitude as a batter, but Joey did offer the owner compensation for the cooler if there was any damage to it. The owner said it worked fine, and no compensation was necessary). If Joey is able to forget all that, because he is blessed with such a short-term memory that he only thinks about today and tomorrow, then all the power to him. It was such a meaningless game, as I wrote, that I don’t doubt that most of the players, and the people watching, have long forgotten about it.  If Joey was able to forget the specifics of his failure that day, or the day in general, it probably speaks to the sound construction of the brain, and its ability to just forget that which could, even in small, insignificant ways, plague us and diminish our quality of life. 

“It’s Hell Getting Old”

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“It’s hell getting old,” was my dad’s answer to questions about how he was doing. “How you doing Hank?” they would ask. “It’s hell getting old.” He wasn’t trying to be funny, and he wasn’t changing the subject. He believed this was the answer to questions about his well-being. If age is a state of mind, my dad was old his whole life, or at least as long as I knew him. He was old in his eighties, but I remember him saying, “It’s hell getting old,” in his forties. We believed him too, because we were kids, and anyone who is older is old when you’re a kid. This response was the end of the discussion for him. It was his ‘learn it, live it, love it’ meaning of life. If he wrote an autobiography, he would’ve titled it It’s Hell Getting Old. 

I met a person his age, later, and she was quick, fiery, and alive. She was the type you just knew wouldn’t be put down for eons. When we broke down the borders of our co-worker relationship and became friends, I violated the rules of social decorum and asked her how old she was. When she told me that she was the same age as my dad, I was stunned. How could she act so young? When I gained a different perspective, as I neared my fifties, I realized the forties aren’t hell or even old, and I asked him about it. “Well it’s hell now,” he said, in his eighties.

Friends and family were sympathetic to my dad’s “It’s hell getting old!” rants … in his eighties. They would nod, sympathize, and back up and give him the room necessary to develop his rant. I write the word develop, because he talked about his advanced age so often that it almost seemed like he was working out material for an act. He’d repeat lines and phrases so often that I could say them with him, as he delivered them to friends and relatives. I heard him provide different emphasis and strategic subtlety to his pleas, over the years, and I heard him employ different ways and means of convincing them of his plight. I don’t think there was anything artificial about my dad’s pitch, as I know he believed every word of it, but he did get better at it after practicing this presentation over the course of forty years.

When I told he might be able to defy the aging process, by some measure, with physical exercise, he dismissed me before I could finish the sentence. “I own a weight set,” he would say.

“I know you own it, Dad, but you have to use it.”

“Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants.” He often switched between Mr. Smarty Pants and wise guy to anyone stating the obvious, but no matter what he called us, he always concluded his argument with something about his age. “Old people aren’t supposed to work out with weights.”

“How about a walk then?” we said, and he silently gave us some points here, but what does a person do on a walk? My dad walked when he had a specific destination in mind. The idea of walking just to walk seemed dumb to him. What if someone saw him doing it? “Where you heading Hank?” 

“Nowhere. Just walking for the exercise.” My dad would never subject himself to such a revealing and vulnerable Q&A. 

Some cherish their youth, and the telltale signs that it’s slipping away freak them out. Some of us look forward to getting old, because while we know that while the physical side will falter, greater levels of clarity, sanity, and stability await us on the other side. I suspect my dad couldn’t wait to get old for all of those reasons, but he also knew that getting old grants one the freedom to talk about their “gross” and “funny” bodily functions without being called out for violating societal norms. When my dad would attempt to enjoy his newfound freedom, over the course of forty years, with our friends and family, we would try to rein him in. “No one wants to hear about your bodily functions.”

“Oh, grow up!” he’d say.

***

“What comes out of the rectum can be used an indicator of health, but it’s not the indicator,” I said when he provided me a particularly detailed update on the state of his health. “It shouldn’t be used in place of a handheld pulse oximeter, an ECG monitor, or a glucose monitoring device.” Unless his daughter-in-law, a nurse, administered these in-home tests, the devices his doctor sent home with him were never used. My dad thought that what came out of the rectum was a better indicator of health than all of those medical devices combined. Either that or he just enjoyed talking about them.

Knowing that his diet consisted of baked beans, Oscar Mayer Bologna, butter brickle ice cream, and Swanson’s Mexican TV dinners, it was no surprise to us that he began to face gastrointestinal issues, but knowing inevitability doesn’t make hearing about it any easier. 

“How you doing today Dad?”

“It was like pounding concrete today.” That was his favorite analogy. He’d replace the word “concrete” with “bricks” at times, just to keep it fresh. I don’t know where he picked it up, or what it meant, but I didn’t waste any calories trying to uncover the true meaning of his analogy. I understood what I needed, and more than I wanted.

My dad was a former military man who spent most of his life in a factory. I write that to note that he didn’t waste his time or effort in life on creative pursuits. Creative descriptions of his daily doody, to my knowledge, were his only forays into artistic expression, and he displayed such a rich, provocative vocabulary in this arena that the imagery was almost impossible to block. I write almost impossible, because my mind has chosen to forget the trauma of many of his vivid descriptions, but the “pounding of concrete” stubbornly clings to a place to my soft tissue. I thought of jackhammers destroying concrete.

When we hear people talk about jackhammers destroying concrete, or bricks, in an analogy to what happened that day in their alimentary canal, we might say, “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” We say such things, some of the times, because we hear others use it to describe their uncomfortable moments of confusion. There are moments when we mean it. I saw this on the faces of those who heard Dad’s prognosis of the day. Few cried, of course, though I suspect that some of the third parties he and I sat with in diners may have considered it to try to get him to stop. I stepped in to solve their dilemma by saying, “Dad, that’s gross.” I’m quite sure he wanted to tell me to grow up, but whatever he saw on our third party’s face told him they agreed. Our third party companions didn’t know him like I did, of course, so they’d laugh uncomfortably. I suspect that they laughed, because they enjoyed our father-son interplay, and they might have falsely believed that he was tweaking me in some way for their entertainment. 

He tried his hand at more conventional ways of entertaining people, and it didn’t go well, but those of us who struggle in this arena learned a lot about what not to do from him. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t entertaining, because he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, unintentionally and in his natural state. Friends and family found him just as entertaining as we did, and we flirted with taking our show on the road, but we knew it would be impossible for him to maintain a natural state. Anytime he thought he was funny or entertaining, he put forth effort, and he subsequently lost his audience. Smiles turned to confusion and confusion turned to polite laughter when they saw how hard he was trying.

The difference between an occasionally humorous person and an entertaining person is complicated and multi-faceted. One way to achieve short-term laughs is to repeat a joke. Achieving the vaunted title “entertaining”, requires the subject to know what everyone else knows so well that it challenges our understanding, our foundation, and everything we believe in. It requires us to examine ourselves, others, and others’ views of us so well that we briefly imagine an alternative universe if just for the moment it takes us to find laughter. We could even say that attempting to be entertaining asks us to be a little phony for as long as it takes to get a laugh. We might have certain beliefs, certain hard-core, concretized beliefs, but it’s considered entertaining to let our hair down and analyze from a partially fictitious, self-deprecating angle to challenge those beliefs.  

My dad was many things, but he was not phony. I’m not sure if he had that code in his DNA necessary to be a little phony even on those rare occasions when he probably should’ve been. If he did have the code the rest of the human population does, he didn’t use it often enough to hone its capabilities. I called him many awful, mean, and regrettable things in my tumultuous teens, but phony was not one of them. If one of my friends suggested that I might want to try the name out on him, I would’ve rejected them. He was a man of simple truths that he developed in life, and he could not waver on them, even to poke holes in them for comedic effect. 

He spent his whole life believing he was inferior, and he might have done some things in life to prove that he was not, but my definition of phony involves someone who acts in an artificial manner to convince others that he is superior. To those who stubbornly insist that the term phony refers to someone who tries to be something they’re not, then perhaps he acted in artificial ways in some instances, but my dad did everything he could to fit in so he didn’t stand out. 

When he got older and sicker, I suggested I interview him to provide his legacy a transcript. I suggested that his young nephews might never know who he was otherwise. He rejected me saying, “When I die, I want to be forgotten.” It’s illustrative, a little funny, and very frustrating to those of us who wanted others to remember him, but it’s not phony. Try to dissect that sentence for a trace of phoniness. To me, that sounds like a genuinely strange character who felt he was not fit for our world. 

He was a fundamentally flawed human being, stubborn, and one of the weirdest human beings I’ve ever met, but he did not put on airs to impress anyone. Anyone who suggests otherwise need only look to the shoes and socks he wore in life. They were not what a man, built to impress, wears.

*** 

“I don’t understand how you and your brother view the world so clearly,” he once said. “It’s always been so cloudy to me.” He was skeptical to the point of denigrating, regarding his abilities in life. Driving, for example, was such an “awful responsibility” to him. In many instances, Dad talked about the difficulties of life, the “horrible responsibilities” the “accountabilities” and the “misery of life” that he said we’d fully understand once we became responsible adults who were responsible for others. Some of it involved lessons he used to lift our eyebrows and prepare us for the “awful responsibilities” that awaited us, but the anxiety he experienced while driving was very real to him. 

We couldn’t play turn on his car stereo, for example, because that would’ve distracted him from his concentration on the road before him. We could talk and stuff, on most trips, but we didn’t have to “get so carried away” with it. If we laughed too hard, he put the kybosh on that, because it diverted his attention from the road too much. He didn’t care for uproarious laughter, in general, because he thought it made the laugher look foolish. 

Whenever we tried to divert him from 90-degree angled driving, my dad rejected that outright, as he feared he wouldn’t make it to our proposed destination. “You could take A street to 130th and take a right, but if you take Stonybrook, it cuts straight through.” Dad did not care for bisecting an angle. He was a tried and true 90-degree man. 

“We could get lost,” he said with tones that asked us to appreciate his predilection. We didn’t. “We could get so lost that we don’t know where we are,” he added in a fearful tone that suggested there is a point of getting lost that could lead a traveler to never being able to return to the existence they once knew. We didn’t understand the severity of our dad’s anxiety, until someone relayed a story to us of Dad being so lost one time that one of his commanders informed him that his actions could’ve started World War III.  

He was in charge of the map for a tank battalion. We all suspect that one of the great attributes of a military’s boot camp is to determine a soldier’s strengths and weaknesses. Why else would the military put a person through six weeks of intense physical and mental challenges. They want to see what we’re made of, and they want to how they can use our natural talents and gifts. How the military could put a man who lived his whole life in one city and didn’t know his way around it, in charge of leading a tank battalion with a map challenges my perception of the men in charge of the military at the time. Whatever the case, they obviously didn’t know my dad’s preference for neat and tidy 90-degree turns, because they put him in a position to fail, and fail he did. He led the tank battalion into enemy space, Russian enemy space, and he could’ve, in the words of his sergeant, started WWIII. 

I didn’t know any of that as a kid, of course, but I knew that the only time I saw my parents’ fights devolve to screaming matches occurred soon after the map was unfolded. Thanks to GPS apps, I no longer experience the deep seated anxiety I used to when someone pulled a map out. 

The first time I saw Shrek I enjoyed it with a strange sense of familiarity that I couldn’t put my finger on. Shrek was a lovable loser with huge ears, a large belly, and he could be unintentionally and habitually gross in ways he didn’t understand, because he spent too much time in solitude. Shrek also had a strange yet simple philosophy of life that could prove humorously wise at times. I couldn’t shake the sense of familiarity during the movie, and I couldn’t pinpoint it for many years, until someone said, “Shrek’s your dad.” I didn’t laugh, and I found it a little insulting at the time, but when I watched the movie again, in that frame, I realized that the writers of Shrek might owe my dad a  royalty for at least some tangential influence.

Think: Useless and Trivial

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@) If we could talk to the animals, my guess is that we’d find that, among others things, we’re the only being that finds flatulence and bowel movements funny.

“Why do you find them funny?” Dabbi the deer might ask.

“Because we find them disgusting,” we’d answer.

“What?”

“It’s complicated, but it’s further complicated by the fact that you don’t have a sense of humor.”

“I don’t have a sense of humor?” she asked. “I don’t? I’ll have you know that I share the same sense of humor with the rest of the human population. Our sense of humor generates ratings, box office sales, and album sales. You’re the freak of nature.”

&) We never call out dystopian productions from their all-too-near future predictions for being wrong. Young up-and-coming lyricists are forever in search of meaningful and important lyrics. They can’t write about Lord of the Rings anymore. Led Zeppelin been there done that. Silly Love Songs were Paul McCartney’s domain, and we can no longer write ‘baby’ lyrics, because the 70’s and 80’s bands drained that vestibule. The only avenue left is war, anti-war, and anti-military, but there hasn’t been a real war by first world countries in about 50 years. So, while all of the lyrics written in the interim are meaningful and important lyric, they’ve also been false, so far. “True, but they weren’t talking about today, they were talking the all-too-near future.” So, when do we say they’re wrong. “You don’t!”

$) So, how do young, inexperienced artists craft “meaningful and important” lyrics and dialogue when they know nothing about the real world? Is it more important to be meaningful and idealistic or knowledgeable and realistic?

#) If you’ve ever met a truly tough guy, you know they’ve already done it. They wear a “nothing left to prove” garb for the rest of their lives. We know how tough they are, when we meet the other guys, those who talk tough to show it.

*) If we ever catch up to Alien technology, will medical professionals finally learn that the key to physical and mental health lies in the anus?

^) Too much sports knowledge is trivial and useless. Watching sports on TV is supposed to be fun, but some of us get so tied up in good guys vs. bad guys that we forget this is basically a reality show. It’s the best one we’ve ever invented, but it’s still just a show. The next time we meet that guy who knows so much about sports that we’re slightly intimidated by his fact-based opinions, we should liberate him by saying, “Who cares?”

!) You’ll know you’re one of these guys if a lighthearted disagreement over useless and trivial information boils over into you deciding that you’re never speak to the other ever again. At that point, someone needs to step in and say, “Clark, no one cares. You think you’re right, and she thinks you’re wrong, but no one here really cares. We just want to go back to eating our turkey, watching football, and talking about Mary’s Jell-O. That’s all we want to do today.

?) What if she says that your favorite sports star is actually a pretty awful human being? We defend him, because we’re nerds who sit in an audience of millions, and he’s the good-looking, athlete who wouldn’t talk to us in high school. If we pick the right one (he who wins) we want everyone to know our vicarious association. “I’ve followed that guy since he was a five-star recruit. I know his high school stats and college stats by heart.”

“No one cares, Clark!”

%) To counter those who say, “Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” I would like to introduce you to the noise coming out of Britain. black midi (lower case for whatever reason), Black Country, New Road (one band), Squid, and a band named Famous. These bands are genuinely creative and innovative souls coming out with music that might be as brilliant as the music of past decades, and my guess is they’re only going to get better. Other bands that are also making great noise are Thee Oh Osees (or Osees), and just about everything Ty Segall puts his name on. As with all innovative music, we shouldn’t expect the noise to grab in one blow, and we shouldn’t expect one song to deliver the knockout blow either. Although I think the music from black midi’s Welcome to Hell (not the 23-year-old’s definition of meaningful and important lyrics) might change your interiority by about the tenth listen.

Pitchfork has a few nuggets from black midi’s lead singer Gordie Greep to dispel the notion we have that he wants us to view him as deep, meaningful, and important.

“It’s just fun man,” Greep said. “We’re doing this this stupid thing and somehow making the semblance of a living.” This might be false modesty, as we can be sure he hopes we take his stupid stuff seriously.

Greep also drops a fascinating description of his writing style. “When you want to do something original…use something as a model or inspiration that you know you definitely can’t do,” Greep has said. “Your failure will be interesting.” He talks about Clint Eastwood’s failure to act like Marilyn Monroe, and Tom Waits attempt at the blues. He says they both failed by relative measures, but he says we found their attempts interesting. I found a similar attempt to write like James Joyce interesting.

So, he writes what he doesn’t know, just to see what falls out? What an interesting and perplexing method of writing. My guess, and I have a pretty decent track record in this regard, is that Gordie Greep (whether with black midi or not) is a craftsman who has a relatively bright future.

() I got off on Queen when I was younger. Queen almost single-handedly introduced me to the concept that different can be so beautiful in the right hands, and then I discovered David Bowie. Once I got passed Bowie’s pop songs, I thought he was the most experimental artist in the mainstream, until I discovered Mike Patton. Mike Patton did things I never heard before, and I thought he was the most adventurous artist I ever heard, and I still think that in many ways, but Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is just as adventurous in different ways.

Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is one of the most gifted artists and musicians on the scene today, and he has played some role, most often leading it in some creative manner, in over fifty albums. I purchased an At the Drive-In album, and I purchased a couple of Mars Volta albums, but for some reason they never appealed to me. If it hadn’t been for Ipecac Records releasing his solo recordings, I never would’ve discovered the genius (and I do not use that term lightly) behind the music of those previously mentioned bands.

AllMusic.com tries to succinctly capture this genius writing, “His multivalent body of work derives inspiration from punk rock, prog, metal, funk, traditional Latin music, blues, jazz, film music, and avant-garde composition.”

As with any mercurial genius, much of ORL’s solo albums will not appeal to most palettes, but the true music fan will probably go nuts over about twenty-four of the fifty albums. When I approached Omar Rodríguez-López music, I had no idea what to expect, but he violated those expectations in the most obscene manner possible. Such violations are not immediate, as they rarely are. My first love was Roman Lips. Anytime a friend invites me to listen to complicated, difficult music, I suggest he do so by starting their most accessible album. Roman Lips is probably the most accessible ORL album, followed by Blind Worms, Pious Swine. Beyond that, the ORL solo albums are impossible to categorize, list, or breakdown by category. Suffice it to say that I was wary that the genius behind At the Drive-In and Mars Volta would appeal to me. I was also wary of the Ipecac Recordings, as they release a lot of material that major recording studios won’t, and a number of their albums don’t appeal to me, but ORL.

As with all of the artists listed above, it’s difficult to believe that these individual artists, and Queen, are capable of such wide-ranging music. I love some of the more major, mainstream pop acts, but there is a comfortable thread that runs through most of them. Their fifth album might sound more advanced than their first in production value and matured writing, but we all know what kind of music they prefer. Listening to the albums put out by Bowie, Patton, and Omar Rodríguez-López, it’s hard to believe the same artist created all these incredible albums. ORL is definitely the most prolific of the three, and he’s not even fifty-years-old at the time of this article.