It's hard to be funny when I'm all
worried and depressed. I still say funny shit, I guess. Just not as
often and whatever joke I make is probably morbid and/or cynical and
bitter. Sometimes my ideas and opinions just sound funny to me the
way I happen to word them and inflect them as I babble them out. What
can I say? I crack me up. Still, I haven't exactly been a goddam
barrel of monkeys for the past while. Whatever the hell that means...
How the fuck did “a barrel of
monkeys” come to be synonymous with “fun”. A barrel of monkeys
doesn't sound like a good time. It sounds awful! At best the poor
things would be getting lice from one another, shitting all over each
other and who knows what all else kind of implied terribleness. And
there's a good chance that it'll just be a total bloodbath. From what
little I've seen on Youtube, a lot of monkeys don't fuck around. If you jam no
fewer than five pissed-off monkeys into a barrel and seal the top
tight so they can't get out, they're gonna gouge each others' eyes
out and pretty much tear one another into little pieces.
Everybody knows that.
Sometimes I think of different funny
shit that's gotten said over the years and it'll make me giggle. I
keep stupid little jokes. I don't know if everybody does that or if
not, how many people do it. It's a nice thing to do, I guess. A
little sad, but nice. I know I'm not alone in rehashing little
impromptu skits and quick-witted one-liners that I've shared with my
friends in my head that you might've had to have been there for. But
I consider myself lucky to have been there cos some of that stuff was
fuckin funny. These are treasures that would otherwise be lost
forever, like a poem that you write and throw away or like the best
goddam cheeseburger you ever had that you won't remember for much
longer than a day or two.
Like the time we were waiting in the
train yard and my buddy peeked up to see whether the vehicle driving
around across the yard was a railroad worker or a cop. I asked him if
it was a bull and he replied that no, it was just a beat-up pickup.
So I sang “beat-up pickup” to the tune of “Get Up, Stand Up”
by Bob Marley. Without missing a beat my friend finished it up with
“beat-up pickup truck”. Holy shit that was funny. Maybe it helped
that we were a little giddy from exhaustion and from having full
bellies for the first time in days, but it still cracks me up when I
think about it.
Or the time when me and all my fellow
squatmates excused ourselves from one of our friends' place who payed
rent so we could go back and work on our house. Our friend told us
he'd stop by later. When we got home somebody had a couple of cans of
spray paint and next thing I know we're all sitting in a pile of
garbage in somebody's room and huffing paint. Our friend showed up
after a while, as promised, and looked at us like we were a major
disappointment. “Jesus”, he said, shaking his head. “I thought
you guys were gonna work on the house?” My buddy gestured to the
trashed-out room around him and said “We ARE working on the house,
that's why it looks like this!”
Or the time I picked up a banana and
answered it, talked into it for a second, and handed to my friend,
whereupon he took the call and made a bunch of arrangements with
whoever we were suddenly talking to on the banana, keeping a
perfectly straight face the entire time. Or the time somebody asked
me to call the cats and I got out my phone and started talking to
Stripes on the phone, asking him when he and mittens thought they
might be home.
Yeah, I guess you probably had to be
there but I'm glad I was.
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