sense of humor

Anecdotal research of online dating sites says 89.7% of all women seeking male companionship, friendship, relationship, dreamboat, or knight in slightly tarnished armour want said person to make them laugh, have a sense of humor. Sense of humor. It is a recurring theme. Now, why is that? Because they are sad and need a clown? Clowns are not funny. Because laughter is the best medicine, as Reader's Digest would put it? Medicine to cure what? Existential angst? Talk about giving men performance anxiety! Granted, laughter is salubrious. And, true, it is hard to make yourself laugh, just as it is hard to tickle yourself. But this obsession, this assumption, this given, that the man must have a sense of humor, must make her laugh? C'mon. I'm a funny guy, so they say. On paper and in person. I've even had pieces of my humor (or humour in the Commonwealth) published. Alas, those humor-inducing qualities have not saved me from 1.73 divorces. Oh, sure, you will argue that it wasn't the humor that did me in, but the lack of it at the right time or the wrong kind of humor at the wrong time. Whatever. And if you look a little closer, research likely indicates that comedians as a class are not privately the happiest of people. When you come to think of it, much humor, maybe almost all humor, has an undercurrent of tragedy. We laugh at the person slipping on a banana peel. We laugh at the crotch injuries and bodies flying off trampolines on "America's Funniest Videos." Sense of humor? Really? Be careful what y'all ask for. Yuck, yuck. (Now that was not funny.)

hunger games, the questions

• What do I hunger for?
• Why?
• What appetites drive my hunger?
• What satisfies my hunger?
• Do I know what makes me so hungry?
• Am I more hungry tha others are? Or less? Or about the same?
• Why are you, dear reader, reading these 'hunger games' questions?
• And how would you answer them?
• Are they not challenging queries?
• And, like me, does a taste of 'speaker's remorse' tempt you to erase all these questions, to dodge them, dislodge them, evade them, eviscerate them, escape them, divert the conversation away from them, and on and on?

titular

I like to start with titles.
They are seeds.
Or germs.
A minimalism.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a book review of a book that did not exist. How's that for minimalism?
It's not quite titular but sort of.
So you might say I'm a titular man.
Go ahead, you could say it.
Titular.
The word is replete with the ring of ecclesiastical hierarchy, or else suggestive of anatomical allurements.

creating coincidence

You walk the path you trod, the air colder and the sky brighter. You go to this or that music, food, or lecture venue, this time alone. You tell yourself timing is critical. You picture the "coincidental" rendezvous, its texture, complexion, the reactions, the heartbeats. But you discover you cannot create coincidence, can you. It's not so shocking or surprising a revelation. The bigger and more cogent epiphany, however, is that you are content with the absence of so-called coincidence as you traverse your world, step by vigilant step.

turning points

How many turning points do we get in this life? I do not know. You may say that every moment is one. Understood. But how often do we dare to disturb our own universe, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot? I concede there are the obvious turning points, the walking-down-the-wedding aisle moments, or the deciding not to do so. For all we know, there are even greater turning points, and we did not recognize them. Or perhaps we did. Firsts, as in kisses, cigarettes, drinks, drugs, days on the job, words exchanged, or silences. Lasts, of the same. And more. As well as less.

Life is a mysterious journey, is it not? Especially when we are in the thrall of turning points we may be blind to.

O Wisdom, O Wisdom, grant us wisdom.

hero

Today I was several feet away from my boyhood hereo, Willie Mays.

I suppose I could have even shouted out a question, a compliment, a hello, a thank you.

Couldn't.

It was like a reverent aura surrounded him.

Yeah, he is, you might say, a mere mortal, a baseball player. One of us.

Then, again.

But such elan!

And it is still there.

"Did you ever know you were my hero?" says the song.

When I was 9 years old or so, I tried to call Willie Mays in San Francisco across the country from me, on our Princess phone. I did not get through.

What would I have said?

an infinity of the unnameable

"In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?" 

-- Harold Pinter

Ah, who else but Harold Pinter, the renowned master of the white spaces of silence in conversation (or lack thereof)?  

To answer the question, an Infinity of the Unnameable.