It was silly of me. Really, it was. It’s just so hard sometimes, to come off as serious. As serious as they’d have me at least. I don’t mean to joke, but when did everything get so serious?
I remember laughing at pain, a bonk on the head for a poke in the eye, maybe a tug on the nose. I remember watching crotch shots, and falling on the ground holding my stomach like I’d been hit. And I was, with a bowling ball of laughter.
Don’t get me wrong, seriousness has its place. I once heard of a hospital with a surgeon team who’d taken to the tradition of getting high on their own supply, to dull the nerves of holding life in their hands. For a while it worked wonders, they’d go in when no one else would! But too much of anything will kill you, isn’t that what a wise man said? No, it was a wise woman for sure. And of course, the team did, kill them, that is. Who? Someone important no doubt, they’d gotten quite the reputation for having a masterful record despite the odds of their surgeries and had taken to working exclusively for celebrities. They were the best, until they weren’t. I suppose a little professionalism was lacking when the lead surgeon dropped his face into the patient’s open chest. That’s no joke!
But this, this was silly. Why can our imagination be so vibrantly wonderful and deafeningly cruel all within a matter of moments? What sort of survival mechanism is that? It’s a curious thing, thinking about thinking. No other creature does it, or do they? Some do, some do.
The situation called for a hilarity, that, or it would have been as bleak as a gravediggers funeral. Can you imagine: Here lies the man who dug his own grave, for a living, for all the living. Now that’s morbid! Opposite of hilarity.
Suppose you wake up in your bed, typical morning. A sharp stretch of your arm lands on an unexpected guest. You went to sleep alone. Who’s this? Who’s that also? Then, the instinct to jump up, point and scream and yell What are those!? at the two of the most grotesquely hideous faces you’ve ever seen forms like a gas bubble at the bottom of your trachea. Oh no, here it comes. No!
It was silly of me, it really, really was. But when the instant urge to vomit passed it was just as quickly replaced by a bubbling from my belly. The laugh hissed out of me as if at an audition for a snake. role. Then like a sunrise rooster I crowed and dived back into the bed. It was silly of me, but I’m not a gravedigger. And I haven’t died yet.
