A-to-Z Challenge 2014 - Amusement

(Warning: Containts Adult Language)

I participated in this challenge last year on the spur of the moment and had a great time. I didn't exactly have a theme and although I have one this year, it is broad in scope; I picked “HUMOR AND HUMORISTS” because I am a “pantser” in that I write by the seat of my pants, seldom edit, and just go with whatever comes into my head. This can be terrific if one has a good grasp of vocabulary and sentence structure and can write essays or mediocre short stories fairly quickly. It sucks when you write novels; believe me. I am the voice of experience in this. I have a great novel on paper and a great novel running around in my head; however, they are not the same book. I just haven't worked up the gumption to sit my happy ass down in my writing chair and put them together. I've been too busy lolling about in my gaming chair, which is the same chair, by the way, as my writing chair, playing Runescape and giving people hell, who deserve having hell given them, to do any editing, but that is neither here nor there and has nothing whatsoever to do with humor, but is one HELL of a run-on sentence, which should be avoided at all costs, which if I were teaching English grammar, I would admonish my students to avoid. But, I digress. Still. Damn! My mother, the English teacher would have been proud of the above , right there!

Just what does make us amused? By amused, I mean of course, what makes us laugh and tickles our funny bones? I think it is fair to say that a sense of humor is almost as personal as a person's concept of what faith they follow or why they vote a certain way. There is no general formula for a sure-fire laugh-getter and I find, at least in my case, the more obvious the joke, the more stale and failed the attempt becomes.

                                                                                                    courtesy: blog.pavelife.com

I think, that certain forces come into play when it comes to things that make us laugh. Universality for one. One of the reasons people like a comedian like Bill Cosby, or Jim Gaffigan are funny, although they are completely different is that we can relate to them. Bill Cosby used to do stand-up about his childhood and it resonated with every kid I knew growing up in the 60s. Jim Gaffigan and his absurdities with “Hot Pockets” is just as funny, because it is absurd, just in his voicing of it. 

                                                                                               courtesy: thrillist.com                                                                          

Some people are just bowled over by physical comedy, which more sophisticated comedians in the 30s, 40s and 50s dismissed as low-brow, but I defy anyone to not laugh at the stupidities presented on America's Home Videos. I will also sit down and watch the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, who are screamingly funny, to this day, and the physical comedy of Chevy Chase, particularly his “Fletch” series. Woody Allen's earliest movies combined sophisticated angst, Freudian dread with slapstick in a way that has never been paralleled.

courtesy: clclt.com

"Love and Death" by Woody Allen is a great movie and a huge joke on Russian Literature; from Pushkin to Gogol to Chekhov, no one got out of this movie unscathed! This is a reference to Dostoyoevsky's "The Idiot"

But what of more sophisticated comedians and humorists? George Carlin was probably the best of those, as profane as he could be. He was also taught by Jesuits, as was Bill Maher and myself; I have found that anyone with any kind of Jesuitical background, (maybe it's something in the rarefied atmosphere) leaves us with a playfulness for the language, which does take a certain flair to appreciate. Be that as it may, I appreciate a good pun, which as my long-suffering mother used to say to my father whenever he came up with some tin-eared horror, “Glenn Wallace, enough pun-ishment!” And so it goes.

Randomness and random anything cracks me up. Stuff that just pops up out of the blue will have me on the floor rolling around, holding my sides in a red-hot minute. When I was homeless, I had two roommates, and one had already gone to bed, and I was already in bed. The third was getting ready for bed, and I heard her say, “Okay, I'm going to eat this turkey now, and go to sleep!” I laughed like a hyena for 15 minutes. She finally walked into my little cubby-hole to find out what was so funny. I wiped the tears from my eyes. “You're eating a turkey? At 11 o'clock at night?” She looked at me and snorted. “A cookie, you asshole.” Off I went again. “I liked it the other way.”

Amusement is to be found in stunts in movies. I love Jackie Chan movies. I have never seen such well-timed or closely-executed stunts in moves, save “A Fish Called Wanda,” with people disappearing in the nick of time, behind doors, into closets underneath sinks, all while the unsuspecting person is kept completely in the dark as to their presence! It's a marvel to behold, while you're laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole preposterous plot.

With Owen Wilson as some kind of Zen-Surfer-Cowboy. Can't miss.

The last are the authors and writers that have amused me, past and present. I have admired Robert Brockway at Cracked.com for years and we have struck up some sort of passing-back-and-forth-of-Tweets-and-snarky-notes-thing,-that-doesn't-really-qualify-as-a-friendship,-but-more-of-an-awareness-of-one- another-thing. I will be honoring him with a post on my letter “B” whether he likes it or not. I haven't told him yet, because, as per usual, I didn't get around to it. I am sure he won't mind. I think. He is one HELL of a writer and a very funny man and I truly, truly respect him and his craft! Have a great and fun, A-to-Z challenge, 2014 everyone!

ROW 80 POST 31 – YOU ARE WHAT YOU’RE LABELLED, ONCE AGAIN

This is a repost from October 28, 2011. 

I don't really know if most of the inhabitants at Happy Acres FSJ and my part of Nebraska Avenue are afflicted with some kind of labeled "challenge." But if we are tagged, were we all defective from the womb, or have we worn out certain parts of ourselves with high living? I suspect a combination of both, with a sprinkling of just plain awfulness of personality thrown in. And, if we are so afflicted with shitty personalities, should we join AA? That's for Assholes Anonymous; "Hi I'm S and I'm an asshole. It's been 13 minutes since my last assholery...blah blah" Heh. I actually counted down from 10 to 0 in my very best Dahlek (Peter Cushing Dr. Who era) voice and proclaimed S had achieved "epic and complete and total assholishness,"  after he performed the egregious act of throwing away his dinner, because H "talked behind his back." I did not exterminate him; I should have. There are people here who have no food.

Anyway, The labeling thing is beyond absurd. I've heard "mentally challenged," (stupid as a hammer) "altitudinally challenged," (shorter than 5 feet) or "socially challenged," (for above mentioned assholes) "hearing challenged," (eh?) and "spatially challenged," for fat people. No shit. So I guess I am "bi-ocularly challenged." Does the use of the word "challenge" mean that we will all some day, rise up, grapple with and conquer our "challenge"? Or are we doomed to be Sisyphus and push our rocks of "challenge" up a chasm, for all eternity? This is political-correctness run amok. To me a challenge is cutting up some vegetables without slicing off my fingers. A challenge is getting on and off the bus without doing a face plant in the gutter. A challenge is getting in and out of the grocery store unscathed without being run over by the oblivious ass hats who shop there. I finally broke down and got one of those canes for the blind, with the intention of beating the shit out of the next person who runs into me. Heh.

I wonder if there is a "challenge challenged" type? You know, the type who wanders from room to room and forgets every single thing they set out to do in that moment? And then, when the chore is remembered, the "challenge challenged" challengee dithers for the next four hours over whether or not this chore is worth the effort.

I believe that in the effort to de-stigmatize certain conditions, races, genders, and all other "othernesses," our society has succeeded in completely homogenizing the population. George Carlin talked about this at length in some of his routines. You can no longer say "crippled," "lame," "halt," "retarded," or "deaf and dumb." Now these terms are pejorative. We have the "fill in the blank-challenged," or "fill in the blank-deficient." Bullshit. I associate "deficient" with lack of vitamins. And God forbid, we should use "feeble-minded." Just for the pure music of that term, I love "feeble-minded." But then, I've been called "feeble-minded" for years. Just kidding.

And please, oh God, spare me from "blankety-blank years young" and "handi-capable. I cringe.Enough of this diatribe; I risk becoming "windbag challenged.

We are settling into our new place and it's so nice to have our own space, privacy and belongings again. I hope this continues. I have seen some people who had moved out of Happy Acres move back, because of lost jobs, illness and the usual situations of substance abuse and bad judgment. I would like to feel more secure. Even though I am on permanent Disability and have no (more) vices, things could change in an instant. I have to go back to the doctor next week for more tests. I guess I'll just savor this and quit being a worry wart. Wait. Is it possible to be "peaceful deficient?"

I do know that some of us are "hearing challenged" here. The other night, we were getting ready for bed. O said, "okay, I'm gonna have a turkey and go to sleep now." I was all like, "what?" and had this vision of her tucking into Thanksgiving dinner before going to sleep. Turns out she was going to have a cookie. Once, I asked H who her favorite rock group is. She said, "the Harrassments." I'm like, "oh? And what did they perform?" She looked at me like the Mother ship had just made a stop and let me out. "Are you kidding? You've never heard of Aerosmith?" That's as bad as the time I asked who had written the song "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" and D told me it was Peter Cetera and it was "The Wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald." I must have missed that one.

Mr. Pimp My Ride, aka Rehab Knife-fight minister got hauled off to the slammer for, you guessed it, brandishing his knife a few days ago. I knew this was coming. He was working up to actual people. He started out with abusing lawn chairs and worked his way up to stabbing the garbage cans.

Here's a picture of him "pimping" his "ride." That's actual tin foil in the spokes. I need to borrow some to cover the chicken I baked. He thinks this will compete with the heavy 20k Chargers, stacked on Neb Ave. Just awesome, man.  

For some stupid reason, I always hum "Baby, You Can Drive My Car," when I see this pic.

Pimp My Ride's blood bro communicates in a way that swamis and linguists would find hard to decipher. B talks like this: "mumble, murmur, Pat... Phone, beedy beedy beedy. My shoes, burble burble." I have never caught more than a word or two that was intelligible. It's as if a broadcast from some far away galaxy was being received and fading in and out. There are several people at HA who ramble on and on and not one word is understandable. Or, if the words are understandable, one has no frigging clue what is being said. "Oh yea, I told her it was all through my symptom and she said she was sending me to a duodenist for a relining." Uh, okay. Good luck with that. Hope they don't have to do too much fragmenting on the ol' bean-pate.

Then, we have the ones that insist you do something that you have never done in your life, but they swear they have seen you do it a thousand times. H has never smoked; she doesn't smoke now. D badgered her for a solid week, trying to borrow a cigaret. H told him she didn't smoke and never had. D called her a liar and said he'd seen her smoke "millions of times." This is the same cat who took a whole carton of Crystal Light and dumped 12 servings into one 20-ounce bottle of water and then bitched that he was out of "pop," after he drank the swill. Yup. So, you see he was a firm grasp of what's real. He finally stopped bugging H, so the following week, she tried to bum a cigaret from him. That really confused him. "But, I NEVER seen you smoke!" There's a neighborhood woman who roams around here bumming cigarets from EVERYONE. ALL of us, smokers or not. We've all quit smoking, we tell her. "Yup, kicked the habit, Barbie. This is my second week of not smoking," I said. Total bullshit. But if I tell her I don't smoke and haven't in quite a while, she'll hound me for a butt. However, if I've just quit, she'll leave me alone. I don't understand this logic. Maybe because it's not logic. Not even close. It's not anywhere near the realm of possibles. There's another lady who will give you some of her food stamps if you'll buy her scratch off tickets. I just quit gambling, so I don't know how that's working out for her.

Anyway, the reason I haven't posted in a while is because I just spent a few frustrating weeks fighting with the OpenCloud Security virus. I absolutely refuse to reload my O/S and all the other applications. We never did it at IBM or Verizon and I'll be damned if I'll do it now. After several frustrating days of poking around in Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, Blue Screens of Death, and yadda yadda, I got rid of the bastard. The supposed "tool" that is free at various download sites doesn't work and is not free, so in the best IBM Break-Fix tradition, I killed it and preserved all my data. But what a pain in the ass. I first dealt with viruses at IBM when idiots would write "prank macros" for MS Word. Hated them then, hate them now.

November 19, 2012

End of a post that was about labeling and is going to be part of my little self-published book; I'm trying to pull together. Right now, I'm in the last stages of a marathon and I'm at the "pacing myself" stage. I slept until nearly 2 pm today. I've been feeling pretty good, but have the usual symptoms, only worse, sundowning like crazy and pain, pain, pain. EMS was here to take my vitals after a very bad chest pain with crushing feeling, during a tense phone conversation with a violinist friend about another friend, but all was well. The subject and issue at question reads this blog and I am fully aware of that. One of THOSE things. So, hanging on until March, 2013 and the "miracle" diagnosis and sinarest or requip or magic beans or juju.

But that is not what I want to confess. This is what I want to confess: during my diggings, I ran across this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned:

This was part of that post, but I had written it over the summer of 2011, not yet knowing what was to come;

We have a new "housie" here at Happy Acres. I have never, ever in my whole life met anyone so dyspeptic, unpleasant and vituperative... ever. In my whole life. He is the wart on the  hog. He has systematically managed to piss off everyone in this place, which actually is not that hard to do. There are lots of folks here who are unbalanced mentally, usually for very significant reasons. When Mean Mr. first moved here, he came out on the porch without his shirt. There is a house rule regarding proper dress; shirt on at all times when outside. H tried to tell him nicely that he needed to go inside and put on a shirt. Mean Mr. acted like H had just called him a bad name and was going to soap his windows or something. Jerk.

My turn in the barrel came last week. There is a porch on the back of the house which the owners added. My room abuts this porch at the back. Every jack-leg, douchebag, blow hard, and/or babbling wino sits right on the other side of my bedroom, right where the head of my bed is situated. Last week, Mean Mr. etc, was on the porch, bellowing on his cell phone at about 6:30 am. Woken from a fairly sound sleep, I cranked my window open, and asked him to please be quiet, not once, but three times. I got very cranky at the old crank.

Mean Mr. completely ignored me and kept bellowing away. I had to get one of the "enforcers" to tell him to get the hell off the porch. Mean Mr. blah didn't take too kindly to that, but he left and went off somewhere else, to plague someone else's existence. 

I found out later he has Parkinson's Disease. (note: he was also 64 and was soon asked to leave Happy Acres, for "not playing well with others," or some shit, ed.) Now, I feel for anyone who has any type of physical affliction, but this does not give the sufferer a license to be an asshole.  I asked him the other day if he contracted asshole-osis at the same time he developed Parkinson's.  I have been singing "Mean Mr. Mustard Man" at the tops of my lungs every time he is within my vicinity. Heh. I'm pretty sure he hates me, but he already hates everyone else, too. I'm so going to Hell. 

I believe that we are not given more that we can handle, but I do certain believe that after all I had been through, I really had no right or reason to pass judgment or be so cruel to this man. Or maybe I did. Let’s call this one a draw. He was at FSJ because he was on parole. A parolee with a disease. A homeless person with a disease. Not unique and still hard to live with. This is where compassion gets tricky and I’m still in a quandary over it, a Quandarious, you might say. Or, irony much?

#ROW80 POST 19 – MA DEAREST

What a pair; Ma looks drunk and I look stoned; yes, I'm wearing opera gloves... on the viola.

It has been some time since I’ve written just a pure rant-style post, and now that I’ve finished it, this isn’t it. So, the rest of this paragraph is pure bullshit. Except for the last 11 sentences. The primary reason, is that it is harder for me to just punch it right up into rant-gear. My typing speed has slowed somewhat and I no longer type at the speed of thought. That sucks. I also use the backspace key far more often and that is a huge fucking pain in the ass, because my fingers are getting stiffer. I make more typos because my brain is in scramble mode; an example of this: “stiffer” was originally “stigger.” Time to turn on auto-correct, I guess. I’ve never used, it. Handy-capable! Shit; Carlin was right. Or This, which I can’t add to auto-correct; imagine the chaos. Maybe I’ll do it anyway; I’m getting my hate on.

This past few months have been spell-bindingly (Binders full?) full of hate. It has run the gamut from A to Z and to imaginary letters, rather like math where you plot imaginary numbers; -i , -25, and so on. But, through our political discourse, we have discovered that in the 21^st century, it is still open season on people who are “other.” Yes, you can just bully the living daylights out of anyone who is “different,” than you and get away with you. In most cases, no one knows, because the bully-ee, goes off and quietly wonders what their particular lack is and then, has a nervous breakdown. Some end up in mental institutions, some in therapy. Hopefully, these folks get the help they need.

What victims of bullying REALLY need is affirmation that the bully-er is a giant suckhole of mean, cruelty and bag of dicks, and the victims also need to know that they are NOT alone. There is someone who will hold their hand and talk to them and assure them, that yes, they are fine, decent people. They are people who enrich the souls around them and who really mean something to the people in their lives, even if those people are a half a world away.

People are bullied for all sorts of reasons. If you haven’t seen this video by the anchor woman Jennifer Livingston, you should. She handles a very cruel email from a viewer beautifully and answers some questions that have been raised regarding how cruel bullying is and what can be done. You can view it here.  

Bullying has been around for a long time. When I was a kid, I was fresh meat for bullies. I have red hair. I wore glasses and carried a violin case. Bully trifecta, right there. I wore my hair in braids. Every day, I came home from school, glasses scratched or busted, ribbons yanked out of my hair, bloody nose and bloody knuckles. I usually had skinned knees and was filthy from rolling around in the playground.

My father, ever the corny historian, must have been reading some medieval text on monarchies, or something. He said to me once, after some spectacular battle I’d had, “I dub thee, Red Knees Wallace,” an appellation I wore for years. One teacher, in exasperation, yanked one of the ribbons from my hair, when I punched a boy in the nose. She yelled in my face, “Your mother put this in your hair, so you’d act like a girl! Be one!” I was probably thinking, “Bullshit, this is camouflage.” I punched her in the nose.

I can’t remember her name; she was my 3^rd grade teacher; she had one of those blond complicated braided bee-hive hairdos that looked so fake and it looked the same every day, so you knew it was fake. She wore tight, 2-piece suits, had long painted, red fingernails and lipstick to match. Me, and another kid drove her crazy. His name was Dale Binix. The only reason I remember this cat’s name is because my father thought “Binix” was the funniest thing he ever heard. Him thinking that was the funniest thing he ever heard, is the funniest thing I ever heard. The Wallaces are truly batshit insane.

Our stupid teacher had given us an assignment that must have been genuinely asinine, because he wrote his answers in Sanskrit or Elvish or something and I signed mine “Louise.” No first or last name. I guess I was running undercover that day. Up until then, I had forgotten the second part of my name. Not a middle name, per se. I’m MaryLouise. A couple of other kids in the class performed some kind of Civil Disobedience, but I forget what they did, in the hurly-burly of our transgressions, Binix and I. I think she put us in equivalent of the schoolyard square stocks and let the 4^th-graders throw rocks at us. Yes, I went to school in the Middle Ages.

Anyway, Teach didn’t appreciate Sanskrit Boy and she didn’t like my undercover gig. I hated her, and pretty much let her know in any way possible. When I hit her, She backed off. She did not tell my parents, because, when I would go home after the school boxing matches, we all put on this dumb show: Ma would patch me up and say loudly, “Mary, I’ve told you a million times, not to fight. Oh, and also, not to exaggerate.” Then she’d whisper, “Did you start it?” I’d shake my head. “No, Ma.” It’s the one time I wouldn’t lie to her. “Good. Did you win?” “Yeah, Ma, I did.” She congratulated me. Shook my hand. Then, we went through the same routine with Daddy. My parents taught me that if provoked, you fought back, and you made them pay. If they came back for the refresher course, it was worse. 

So, maybe I’m well suited to be an advocate in the here and now for people who are bullied. It’s stunning to me that people bully. Part of me was a sad thing for a long time. The same person who taught me to fight if I was attacked verbally or physically, was herself verbally abused as a girl and in turn, heaped tons of scorn and capricious cruelties on me. She thought I needed protecting and tried to guide me in a way I did not want to go. I knew what I wanted, but it made for a very bitter household for a number of years. I understand that know and the fact that we were so very close when she died we can both count as a triumph. She never really understood me until the last years of her life and when she did, then she knew who I was and loved me for me; not as some construct, she had made in her head. The sad fact is, my father always knew who I was and love me for me. 

She sensed it and was jealous and thought I loved him better. I didn't. I just knew in my child-like way, that he understood me and she didn't.  I can truly look past all that and thank God I could when she was alive. She so deserved to be loved for herself. Gallant and brave, caring and passionate; she lost that jealousy and I saw person I always knew my mother to be. Mommy issues? No, not at all. She was just the best.