I Need Heroin to Be More Funny...Or Just to Relax

...essayists and memoirists i greatly admire typically use humor to describe their otherwise shitty lives...my favorite humorist (is that a dig? i totally don't ever give anyone the moniker of "humorist"...especially a fucking genius...but that word worked here, so i'm going with it) is david sedaris...my love affair with him began not long after his first piece appeared on NPR...yes, i realize he's gay...and that he has a partner...and that i don't KNOW him...and so for all of these reasons i can't have an affair with him...and that i'd probably not be his type, even if i had a penis, because i'm totally boring and don't speak french...

...thanks for the reminders...

...i also greatly admire joan didion, who writes sentences that cut so close to the bone my joints ache after i finish an essay...some of her writing is so blatantly dry in its humor, i wonder sometimes if i'm the only one laughing...

...i probably am...since i'm crazy enough to think that i'm having an affair with david sedaris...

...i've often wondered if my writing is missing humor...so many of my unpublished essays are serious in tone...the ones that tend to "make it" are those where the audience is tempted to laugh at me and my own idiocy...

...i've been thinking about this A LOT...to the point where i haven't posted anything here in nearly two months...

...and i've made a decision...

...some things just aren't funny:

• the fact that my father is in prison for rape = not funny...anyone who wants to make rape/rapists into a punchline should just be punched...
  
• the fact that my maternal grandmother was xenophobic and probably bi-polar = not funny...mental illness should never be trivialized...sure, we can poke fun at our phobias, but at the end of the day serious mental conditions don't exist just so we can have a good laugh...

...other things are funny, but for some reason i'm struggling trying to compose coherent essays and/or blog posts about them:

• the fact that i seem to be the only person in the world who mishears song lyrics = funny... seriously, i thought a line in Prince's "7" was "with your intellect and your side warfare"...you know, as in the wars we have on the side...
  
• the fact that, until i was thirty five, i didn't know the location of the caribbean = funny...(my husband set me straight on this one, and couldn't fathom how i'd never just, i don't know, looked at a map...when i explained to him that i didn't need a map because my favorite ride at disneyland is "The Pirates of the Caribbean," he squinted at me as if he'd suddenly become superman and could see right into my skull with his x-ray eyes and was not surprised that i lacked a brain)...since my frame of reference for all things geographic is disney, i should defend myself...the ride begins with a short boat tour through a swamp-like area...for some reason, i always mistook that swamp for somewhere in louisiana...probably because i'd actually been to a louisiana swamp...and then there's a huge drop and the boat is delivered to a hot underground area where everyone's speaking with british accents, the soldiers are wearing british uniforms, the prostitues tempt us with their british sorcery...so we must be somewhere on the coast of britain or perhaps north africa, right?...it's not the case, actually...apparently, the british somehow managed to move their entire culture of waste and debauchery to a set of tiny islands a wee bit south of florida...who knew?
  
• the fact that when i'm left alone for an extended period of time i begin to wonder if things i was told misunderstood in my childhood were actually true = funny...i have thoughts like do toilets flush in the opposite direction in australia? are all ice-cream trucks just enticing cover vehicles for child molesters? can you really choke on pixie-stick sugar? is the caribbean really just a wee bit south of florida? but i never actually google these things...i just wonder...
  
• the fact that my twins and my oldest daughter tempt me on a daily basis to take up drinking, smoking (again) and/or heroin use...not that they're actually holding up the wine/packs of smokes/heroin needles, but that their general "kidness" sometimes requires me to react the way i do right before a tube of pillsbury  biscuits pops...i hold it at arm's length and try to cover my ears at the same time and eventually just drop dough everywhere and yell at my husband to handle it...i would think that shooting heroin might help calm my nerves...i could be wrong...