Take the Dandelion: You Think I'd Promise a Rose Garden?

Yes, an image found in my "permanent record." See?

"Why don't you just be funny?" I've heard that so often I'm almost flattered...until I remember that Woody Allen married his adopted daughter, not that there's anything wrong with that, but those glasses. He started that trend. Him. I never bagged (I mean, had a brief encounter with) one of those Woody Allen gals, the type who (still!) wear the big plastic eyeglasses that probably don't even contain corrective lenses, a signal to the kind of facetious "intellectual" who'd appeal to such a person. I am flattered to have failed that mission given what succeeding entailed: wearing those glasses, for starters.

To the point, my oft-scolded "angry" posts usually appear when I'm at relative peace with myself (never more than a ceasefire), while my "happy" or "funny" posts usually appear when I'm in the process of literally falling to pieces (on certain days, you could sweep me up quite easily, no Swifter necessary -- and why is "Swifter" in spell check?). While it's true I may be a masochist and text-based sadomasochist, it's more true that when at peace, I can waste my time catching up on the latest wars and loss of Constitutional rights (at this point, tear it up and simply refer to Mein Kampf). Otherwise, I eschew the news, and I used to despise people who did the same. I can't figure out my block, much less the world. Besides, no one ever died thinking, "If only I'd read the newspaper more often; what glorious wonders I've missed."

I can't always be funny. More accurately, I can never be funny on purpose, whether for social occasions or to avoid the occasional flying kitchen utensil (women should play catch with their fathers; that might have a substantial if negative effect on domestic violence statistics). My kind of funny, and you may not find it funny, requires my being caught off guard. It's a lot like sex in that way. This time, I caught myself off guard with the above paragraph, written on the fly and copied verbatim from that website most of us visit to pretend we're socializing or farming.

Another reason is that I'm a born hypocrite. It's not that I violate my stated ethics; I haven't stated them because I don't have any. It's that whatever I believe, and the more I believe it, the more it will betray me. Like newspapers. And, sorry, God, but no take backs; you could have sunk my birth-putt, but you just had to use a 3 wood and send me into the swamp.

Even dictators disappoint me. You try to give Hitler a little impenetrable evil mystique that renders him incomprehensible as a human being and then find out he watched Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Communism. What was I thinking? Let's say it could work and produce utopia: I'm out. I'm the reason utopia can't exist and proud of it. "Share what? Chores? In the shared housing unit? What do I look like, a Communist?"

As to "democracy," I long ago sent that "idea" to the place where the Jehovah's Witness pamphlets go. "Democracy" requires the kind of belief Jehovah's Witnesses propose: We're supposed to know it's bullshit based on the following use of quotation marks:

Throw all your anxieties upon Jehovah in prayer, confident that "he cares for you."

That's pretty much how I see God myself. No need to knock on my door this Sunday.

As you can see, comedy and anger are for me the two masks of drama. I'm not worthy of tragedy. I've got fatal flaws but lack the other stuff. On the other hand -- stop the self-denigration! -- I am, as Walter Kaufmann claims tragic heroes must be -- radically alienated. I'm so radically alienated that I can't stand radicals and avoid radical surgery at all costs.

So there you have it: I can no more decide to be funny than I can decide to be angry. It just happens. If I could do those two things on cue, I'd get a face transplant and become an actor. I don't act. I'll never even give (make that "suggest you attend out of pity") another reading. I'm all about WYSIWIG. And if you still don't get it, then RTFM.