#37. GravitArse.
I can be funny! (What are you laughing at?!)
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
~ Horace Walpole, Jean Racine, You, Me, Others?
Way before the interval we all realise that Life does not have a Hollywood Ending. Everyone dies! Even the dog!
Slammed into this reality soon after my first dozen years on earth, I was outraged. Someone young had left. It was the 80s. No grief counselling, no explanations, just a bunch of inarticulate kids, one kid down, huddled together, aware now that it could all be taken away from us. Until then, that sort of thing only happened to Other People. People in the movies! (The Champ.) People in books! (Love Story.)
It was the first and worst of all my Rude Awakenings. Life was decidedly not funny. Luckily by thirteen, I had also found that writing in my pink and peach journal made me feel better about this state of affairs. On the page, I was God. I decided who lived and who died; learned when I was true and when I lied. It was the process by which I processed Life. Writing was - is - my head-blender. Words, alchemy, transforming ThinkyPain® to MagicPotion®. Everything is illuminated! Until the next time the clouds gather, at which point the instructions are clear: rinse and repeat.
Everyone needs a good brainwashing to deal with being a person. Some of us use the great humanising myths, ancient stories, that Opiate of the Masses. Others use opiates, massively. Some of us break our own bad. Personally, I cook my own meth with alphabet soup in the cauldron of my soul. And now that I sometimes share my once-patented drug for free online (with the thrilling side-effect of occasionally calming others the fuck down as well), I often get asked if I have tried cognitive behavioural therapy, or at the very least a funny cigarette?
(CBT? CBD?)
So, a disclaimer: I am not always at Wit’s End!
But sometimes, I am. And à la the grand old Duke of York (Sisyphus?) who had ten thousand men, I march my troubles up to the top of the hill and then I march them down again. By lashing them with words. And when they are up, they are up, and when are down, they are down and when they are only halfway up, they are neither up nor down. You get the gist.
Jay: No, see this is exactly why we sweep things under the rug. So, people don’t get hurt.
Phil: Well, yeah, until you sweep too much under the rug. Then you have a lumpy rug… creates a tripping hazard… and open yourself up to lawsuits.
~ From the glorious American sitcom Modern Family.
Look, I can be funny. I know this because my husband often has to put down his fork (or axe) and laugh till he cries at a thing I have said. I have tried many times over the years to harness this skill for the page, but have, thus far, failed. In my latest attempt to be humorous in writing, I began this post. More than six months ago! In these six months, I have laughed, cried and neither laughed nor cried proabably in equal measure. But to my dismay, I found that making Funny Girl march up the hill is no joke.
All the World’s a Stage and I learned early that to write was to keep The Hecklers at bay. I scoop out the lumpy assholes with a melon baller and toss them into the soup, to double, double toil and trouble, until I am spellbound enough not to remember what was worrying me in the first place. Having ’finished’ a piece, having pushed ‘send’, the view from the top of the hill is peaceful and quiet, exhilaratingly close to… Heaven. The hex only lasts a while though, and soon it’s onward ho with the old boulder again.
While I know it is important to sweep things out from under the rug I am beginning to believe that in the same way that cultivating a gratitude practice is greater than whining like a little bitch, comedy is probably a more effective broom than melodrama. With Funny we can simultaneously face and evade the awful giant hairball called the human condition.
I generally prefer a dark roast. George Carlin over Mr. Bean! Satire over Slapstick! Robusta over Arabica! But I think perhaps it is time for a splash of bovine froth. I think it may make for a better brew. So. This is the plan. I shall eat more fibre, pop a laxative, and attempt to Welease Woger. 🤡
Time for an enema!
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
~ The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890.
Good to have you back T, Woger and all
:-)
You had me @ThinkyPain…