This Week's Laughter #28
An archive in miscellany and muster
I’ve uncovered recently that I can tell I am panicked, even if moderately, about the state of the world, this crisis of being, because I am turning to scholarship in order to make sense of the senseless. That when it feels most likely that the actions taken by this oppressive government are chaos, I must remind myself that there is a reason for even seemingly chaotic decision-making.
Much of my time these days are spent in essays and literature, in emails and research, in organizing and coordinating. My therapist asks me towards the end of our appointments if a vent session would help, and I take her up on the ask, though truth be told I’m not sure if it does help. I enjoy releasing the gas so to speak of the pressurized bottle of my being; I also am confident any number of my friends would receive this same energy gratefully. I simply don’t wish to expend the precious little time I have cumulatively with any of my loves repeatedly fixated on horrifying, real, negative realities. Not that they’re ignorable, but that we have to be able to live.
So, I dream up and concoct essays and projects of all kinds to try and look for ways out. Enough rope to bind together something of a net that may catch all of us should we be threatened with a fall to some form of abyssal treatment. Reasoning or sense or distraction or potential. Mary Douglas wrote in “Jokes,” the following, “A joke is a play upon form. [… It] affords opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity.” And what are we if not guarded threateningly by form and pattern? After all normalcy is a form, complacency is a form, and fear is a form.
So here’s a joke of a scenario for you: in all my activity and connectivity, I think I’ve gone more antisocial than ever. I rarely text anybody though I think about it often. I host an event series, I am a known regular at soccer where other known regulars can comment on things they expect me to say or do, and yet the most conversation I attend to somewhat regularly was a slew of letters I drafted and sent some weeks ago now. I don’t mean this depressingly, and I try to respond to whomever will text me when I can, but what a funny thing to come to terms with.
Music has brought me a tremendous amount of joy lately. And in my antisocialness I think I’ve shorn off the bondage that made me embarrassed to chuckle lightly to myself in public. Some of these that came up for me recently include: in rap the new Mike Dimes song “Lamb Talk,” and Busta Rhymes + Toby Nwigwe’s “Fathers of Civilization;” in more funk and jazz arrangements the Vulfpeck song “New Beastly,” the Colin Stetson song “The righteous wrath of an honorable man, Hiromi and Sonicwonder’s song, “Balloon Pop;” I also liked the LISA album Alter Ego quite a bit although I have very little insightful opinion on Blackpink or her solo versus group performances. Carly Rae Jepsen has been posting about being in the studio again, which following her well enough for some years now, seems to mean that we might expect a new album from her in the next year or so of which we can all be so lucky. Which also makes me laugh — that I can say with relative confidence the release schedule of my favorite artist’s next album based solely on how frequently she posts instagram stories about being in the studio.
I laugh at my hypocrisies. That I advocate for my friends to dismantle the walls of traditional conservatism that relinquish one’s obligation to ask for help and care when they are ailing and then cannot communicate my own needs to be cared for. I laugh at them in frustration - I do wish I were better at asking for support - but nevertheless. I’ve been fairly obliterated the last few weeks from a body’s standpoint. Minimal energy, extremely strict diet, bouts of lethargy, and near constant pain and discomfort. I believe I’m mending, slowly but surely, but can’t get in to see a doctor until next week at the earliest. So what’s there to do but laugh? I mean it took me almost a week and a half to acknowledge I should take some medicine. I’m not always like this, but when I am I am painfully stubborn. And yet we continue toward marriage doggedly.
I got the below notification earlier today and found it so funny I immediately had to share it in here. Do I know and love The Cheesecake Factory? Can The Cheesecake Factory truly be known? With its infinite menu, its grandiosity, so much choice that you are in fact restricted to the contentious affair with your own mind, to wrestle with indecision until you settle on some pasta alfredo and a chocolate cheesecake. I have never really cared for pasta alfredo, and I don’t even really know what it is. If any of you reads this and takes this as a challenge to teach me what pasta alfredo I will pummel you with random bits of trivia at the oddest of hours until I die.
A few smaller scale things that made me laugh in no short fashion.
Birthdays! We were out celebrating dearest Piscean N’s birthday. They are a lovely light, and I got to spawn something of a joke when I interrupted his partner Cora, explaining the day’s events or something or another to the table, with a “that’s nice but this isn’t your day.” And since repetition is key, of course Cora’s endless enthusiasm for her partner’s joy would be routinely checked with a “Sorry is this your day?” I love having a joke take off. It feels like affirmation.
Monster Hunter Wilds has come out and it is a video game I’ve been anticipating greatly, although, it drastically threatens the performance capacities of my laptop which has, otherwise, been quite steadfast and capable these last few years. What I love about Monster Hunter games is how ingrained to the system it is to find yourself running into various strangers who are playing alongside. When I found myself getting through enough of the tutorial to be graced with the various dozens of other players at the game’s base camp, the first player I saw was named “CaptainBigBooty.” Unfortunately there isn’t a tremendous capacity for chat in the game aside from local voice-chat during hunts, so this blessed angel left and I likely won’t run into them again. But rest assured, Captain Big Booty, you will be heroicized and your legend continued. There once was a hunter capable of tackling immense monsters, beings that threaten all of society, with a booty so big it would drop the jaws of even the most tense pessimist.
Softly I demanded or perhaps asked but more likely demanded to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy again this weekend and so we did. Each time we find some new thing to laugh at, some new observation, some new thing that locks us in to the cool artifact that is Elijah Wood and Sean Astin and Viggo Mortensen and Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen and Billy Boyd and Andy Serkis and Sean Bean and Liv Tyler. This time was my scrawling through the actor listings to see just how many, and there are many, people in the film series had moderate-to-multiple-times-onscreen roles and simply left it as that — that their entire filmography is Lord of the Rings and their wikipedia pages list nothing else. I was grateful that none of these one-and-done individuals went on to make podcasts talking about their time and attachment to the characters. Or perhaps relieved - it always seems a little sad to me.
And so we arrive at something like the end.
I wish I had more fortunate and delightful news for you all; more laughs to share; it has been in truth a rather discomforting previous week and so my laughs are few because the laugh comes from the gut and the gut is the source of my discomfort.
In lieu of these, please share with me your delights. Or if you (You) reading this have the capacity to reach out to me, please do. I’m wanting.
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