I pulled over early on the way home from work to record that the last song I added to my playlist is wrecking me again. This happens. The playlist is a playlist I made of songs that wreck me.
There are art works I experience on a level that breaks my own heart a little, if I think: “I may die without ever having expressed my own feelings this clearly”—this beautifully. Tonight it’s “The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds” by John Mark McMillan.
The cliché is “I always wanted to make people laugh,” but you’re supposed to say it on the flip side of a long and storied successful career as a humorist, and I’m just an unemployed former technical writer with a Substack. It also doesn’t help when the cliché is sort of true. Have you ever been part of an emotional parting and genuinely had something in your eye? Who believes you.
I don’t know what it is about humor, I just find it funny. I have at least since I was perhaps 13 or 14 and holed up in the tool shed at the childhood home (one of them; we moved a number of times) in Texas, scouring through my brother’s old copies of AOPA magazines for Rod Machado columns. I remember thinking then: how is he making me laugh? How does this work? When the family would play a game we imaginatively called “Dictionary”, in which, with a real physical dictionary, slips of paper, and pens, we tried to come up with plausible fake definitions for whichever obscure word the leading player picked, I figured it was more fun to make an incredibly obviously fake definition than to try to fool the other players, and focused on making people laugh with my absurdities.
Absurdity. That’s another thing. At some point—not quite in childhood—I discovered Lewis Carroll, then much later Monty Python. I found that I was drawn not only to absurd or surreal humor but to literary humor, the kind of refined and crafted stuff that you hardly find anywhere nowadays in an age where cheap and repetitive insults at political figures we don’t agree with count as “comedy”. I had always wanted to be a writer, and not being an experienced practitioner compelled to get my expertise on anything out into the world, the craft of writing was part of what drew me, not so much the simple saying of things.
I think I always figured that the truly hilarious people, the Dave Barry and Eric Metaxas types, were simply born with a genetic predisposition toward humor and were always going to just naturally make me near fall out of my chair with their sentences. It was much later that I discovered that even comedians have to learn and work and study and try, and then the whole thing struck me as an education that I wanted, and not having access to the resources or the people who could give me such an education, I started to dig into it on my own. This may partly explain why people I know are out watching Mr. Robot or reading Dostoevsky and I’m over here with my stupid Substack and my iPhone Notes app accumulating “writing ideas”, overdosing on Wodehouse and working tentatively through the 9 or 12 so-called “clean” episodes of Seinfeld.
I have a longtime habit: when I come across someone with a blog or newsletter or etc. that I enjoy and they’ve mostly let it drop, I bug them to start it up again; when I realize that someone I know is a sharp or interesting thinker, I try to coax them to start creating things. I spent large chunks of my life believing that I didn’t have anything interesting to create, myself, and even now I haven’t proven that I do. But as part of my nagging, bugging, coaxing habit, I’ve started handing out this video containing a quote by Ira Glass, because it hits me strongly and I want it seen by others who do have something to say. It’s on my mind again lately so here you go.
Blog Of My Sojourn 