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I Was Not Amused
true friendship: blue suede shoes and Chaucer Sometimes I just really want to shoot people. Case in point: my husband and I had finally completed furnishing our house with the proud purchase of a Queen Anne writing desk - a delicate piece of art ...
Preparing For a Widespread Disaster
There are at least seven global or widespread disasters that seem likely to occur at sometime in the future. A large asteroid hitting the earth is one of those seven. It is generally accepted by scientists that asteroids have struck the earth in the past ...
Visiting Grandma
If the creek was up, we had to park the car next to the gravel country road, then take our shoes off and walk the long stretch to the barn (wading through the water, as water covered the road up past the barn). The water was knee high ... if you were the ...
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In one of the numerous and astonishingly tedious lectures I received as a boy, my father said, “stop making jokes, son, life is very serious,” and he meant it. Well, he wasn’t wrong but then I had trouble taking him seriously. I tend to forget even now that he went through the depression and was raised a Victorian. Those events were apparently enough to suck the laughter out of the most cheerful of men.
I’ll tell you the genesis of this little essay. I am supposed to be writing a serious tome about the Lemon law for the public market. Instead I have written several entries to the Bulwer Lytton Contest. This is a contest where the writer must create the worst possible opening paragraph for a novel. As I was writing I was feeling guilty and laughing at the same time. Here is my entry; it won’t win; there are worse…sigh.
Franny Portly slithered down Elm (of the species Ulmus) Street as sleek as a Python after dining on goat, yet certainly there was an element of awkward, gawky, stumbling child to her winsome gait, as winsome as one can be when one has hips like a Peterbilt and wears a 46 D cup, I noticed this from the two corners of my steel hard eyes as I crept from my Lamborghini Muira 6.5 Litre 8 cylinder bordello red roadster. I muttered chattily to myself, a Chevie Caprice would have been more sensible.
Catchy, huh? Unquestionably a Best Seller I will get back to serious writing any moment as it is a fine assignment and the client is great.
This business of being serious and lighthearted didn’t end there as you might guess. I can’t remember the number of times I have come to work at various jobs only to be met by Mister or Missus Sour. They ask, “What are you smiling about? It isn’t even nine o’clock?” An echo of,
“Life is very serious,” can be heard faintly. Or, “I have heard that people who smile all the time aren’t very bright.” If this is true, I probably have an IQ of 12 and shouldn’t be allowed to tie my shoes without help.
The New England work ethic at war with laughter. It’s a terrible dichotomy: The awful disease of laughter. Squadrons of misanthropes have been looking for the cure for centuries without success.
Humor is a mental health thing; far better than drugs or electric shock, which proves conclusively that mental health “professionals” don’t have much in the way of a sense of humor. I have been waiting for those fellas to name humor as a syndrome, assign all manner of mind destroying behaviors to it, thus allowing them to “treat” (read that as drug or shock insensible) those suffering from this heinous malady.
I am convinced that I would have been dead years ago if I didn’t still find things that make me laugh aloud. Okay, I am getting more focused now.
“It was a grim, terrifying, soft rainy evening lit by the occasional shaft of sunlight searing the forest floor like a nuclear furnace, but not sufficiently to cause any permanent damage, although damage to one might be an ecological imperative to another: who knows? Jaanne Eyre, who did not think of herself as a damsel in distress, screamed with inappropriate dread...”
All right, I think I have it out of my system for the moment. "No more guilt, please," he said for no good reason whatsoever.
About the Author
Mr. Ladew has traveled and worked all over the world. He spent many years as an aerospace engineer. He works as a technical writer and trainer. Mr. Ladew is also a novelist (2 books published), writes articles, essays, short stories and Haiku. he has also written a best selling business book for mid-level supervisors.
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