This Week's Laughter #25

An archive of head-shaking laughter.

This week I yearn to write about another side of laughter for you all: the laughs that fail out of your mouth when there’s nothing left to do but laugh. As we really envelop ourselves in this Trump-era world in which every day is some devastation of varying magnitudes and in varying communities, I find myself reading headlines and laughing because fucking really?

The cool-cringe push frustrates me to no end.

A survey in notes and headlines and attempts that made me laugh from sheer ridiculousness are as follows:

Musk and whatever all is going on with his cronies jumping in and stealing hundreds of millions of individuals personal data. I don’t mean whatever as though I am uninformed but that it seems both entirely within character for America to celebrate and hand over the reins of fiscal governance and well-being to oligarchical nepo-baby assholes who think of the world purely as a number to optimize when they forget that humans were who made up numbers to begin with. Every new heading that mentions him makes me sigh loud enough to rattle the state of Missouri.

The whole fiasco of the super bowl. I rebel against the constraints of conservative-traditional upbringing each time it’s around like a frothing beast in a cage. I find myself growing insane when people come out of the woodwork to offer their cultural criticisms or their excited support of a team when previously they’ve made no mention of being sport people. It’s baffling to me. Not that people have unaddressed passions, but that the super bowl continues to be this imperial icon of ridiculous capitalist-enforced behavior control. That so long as they have the super bowl all of the revolutionary and radical thought leaders of the nation won’t do quite enough to usurp the everydayness of society such that it becomes jeopardized. Meanwhile Sunday nights during Football season still have nearly 400% more domestic violence calls than any other weeknight. Meanwhile players like the Miami Dolphin’s Tua Tagovailoa have incurred so many concussions that concerned teammates and friends talk about how each season is a new person. Meanwhile the halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar is still arguing for Black joy and Black resistance both within and against American empire like some several dozen performances dating back half a century or more before him. Meanwhile I still found myself opinionated that the Buffalo Bills deserve their super bowl opportunity, that the Chiefs are a ridiculously infuriating franchise. It’s a maddening dilemma. And what do the mad do? Laugh.

The Occupied West Bank continues to be assaulted, bombed, and colonized. In fact, it’s gotten substantially worse since the ceasefire for Gaza. I see videos of Palestinians in Gaza who I sent e-sims showing them cooking a warm meal in a makeshift fire between slabs of rubble-concrete and a large pot. I see their joys in having made it back to this point. And I see so much ongoing terror for the West Bank as Israel does not stop or stall its efforts, but shifts targets, as it has done for some 80 years. What I have seen from this genocide is impossible to laugh at. But I can’t help but laugh at how I see so many Americans clapping themselves on the back assuming that violence is over. So terrible, so terribly uninformed.

What even is a country without education as one of its principled interests? I cannot think of a successful civilization in history that has not cherished education and lauded intellectual pursuits as a necessary good for the evolution of its peoples. The world endangers itself on exponential magnitudes year-after-passing-year and there are no, have never been, solutions at a scale capable of addressing the grandiosity of toxicity we must combat, and now is when education is being devalued. What do the rich think is going to happen when we haven’t colonized another planet and Earth becomes uninhabitable? Where do they think they can go? I try not to think about 50+ year futures often because of the sheer level of panic I feel about the destruction and devastation that is near guaranteed to unfold. So, who needs a department of education? I guess I won’t need to continue paying my student loans that way.

I think of Judith Butler who wrote an afterword (“After Loss, What Then?”) for a collection titled Loss: The Politics of Mourning. In it, the following quote arrives:

This seems sometimes to verge on slapstick when, for instance, Benjamin writes: “Comedy—or more precisely: the pure joke—is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt” Like the lining of a dress at the hem or the lapel—mourning is thus likened to the material of clothing, the material that is mostly hidden, that is suddenly, even unexpectedly, felt against the flesh, the leg or the neck, and so mourning is staged here as a certain encounter between a commodified material and the limb that knows it only on occasion. Mourning is likened to an “interior” region of clothing that is suddenly, and perhaps with some embarrassment, exposed, not to the public eye, but to the flesh itself. This is a presence, a proximity, that undoes what appears, that is counter to the effect of appearance, but is also part of the realm of appearance itself: mourning emerges as the lining of the dress, where the dress is, as it were, laughing.

If we take the sentence — mourning is staged here as a certain encounter between a commodified material and the limb that knows it only on occasion — and apply it to these situations: we, non-empowered, non-billionaires, non-oligarchical nepo-baby assholes are the commodified material and the limb that knows us only on occasion is what seeks to keep us in mourning.

In non-abysmal laughter related writings, allow me to tickle your noggins something.

I went to a poetry reading and conversation between Naomi Shihab Nye and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha through the Seattle Arts and Lecture series. Nye is so inspirational. Full with life and energy, and so purposeful with her intent to find and witness and share goodness. I found myself laughing throughout the reading as she regaled the audience with a profound joy of her experiences and observations. As someone who makes a profession out of overthinking, I must confess that seeing a condensation of thought and idea and happiness into such bare essentials to conveying meaning is incredibly special to me. Sometimes things are simply funny.

Lena and Naomi speaking such brilliance.

I saw a post by Arabelle Raphael, an adult content creator, who shared a time when Drake tried to slide into her DMs. He had absolutely no game. His first message to her was three emojis including the flag of a country that she has no association with. That’s the whole story. But I laughed pretty hard. I love the collective bullying of Drake. I wish more people who sucked got collectively bullied. I wish this was effective at making people want to suck less.

Apparently yesterday, February 9th, was Meat Day, as celebrated by the animated show Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in a beautiful depiction of shared male intimacy. I don’t have any steak in the game here, I haven’t eaten meat in almost a decade, but I love the concept of Meat Day. It made me belly-laugh. And then smaller consecutive laughs as I walked away continuing to think about it.

MEAT DAY.

My latest yapping & gabbing adventure in the queer soccer league I play in was: my team was off for a round of games. As I was watching another team play, I saw someone who had a striking resemblance to a young Ed Sheeran except more blonde than redheaded. I boldly asked what was assuredly on everyone’s mind. Except it wasn’t on everyone’s mind. But they were ready to accept this individual to be known as Ed Sheeran moving forward. Which I realized I was fine with until people who knew him outside of soccer and spent time with him often chimed in saying about how they couldn’t wait to tell him this. For the next hour, maybe even ninety minutes I got some forty or fifty queers to acknowledge this person purely as Ed or Mister Sheeran. I fear I’ve radically altered his life directory. I fear he has made me a nemesis to him. I’m not particularly afraid. I think if it came down to it I could take Ed Sheeran in a fight.

Thank you for reading as always lovelies.

I apologize but I don’t.

Ally and I have another Other People’s Poems this reading (follow @seattlepoetry) on instagram!

My dungeons and dragons group is attempting to reduce the risk of attacking an entire corrupted Duergar city in the underdark.

I continue looking for literary agents interested in queer, coming-of-age fantasy novel series, and/or poetry.

Wishing you all such tremendous love.

Give me money to continue writing and organizing if you are of a wallet-burdened status, and otherwise enjoy, like, comment, share.