September 2007 Archives

I've been trying a little witnessed consciousness of late, hoping to get a better handle on that age-old question, "Daddy, where do jokes come from?"

What I discovered surprised me. This isn't true every time, but a lot of the time, right before I make a joke, it turns out that there's this moment when I realize a joke's hanging out there, ready to be made before I actually know what the joke is. Someone will say something, or I'll read something, or a cat will jump on something, and my "shtick sense" will start tingling. "Potential comedy, now in vicinity."

So I'Il start poking around to see if I can find it -- it's like I'm trying to locate a chair in a dark room. Sometimes the chair's small and the room's large. Other times the chair's large and the room's small.

I'd never picked up on this before in part because the whole process tends to move pretty fast, and in part because I think I'm just generally too dang giddy with, "Hey! A joke!" to stop and take notes.

But it's a little odd, isn't it?

I'm going to make a leap and assume this isn't just a quirk of me, but it's the way shtick is sometimes formed. If that's true, what does it mean? What does it mean that our nether-brains can sense the presence of a joke before our conscious minds know what's so funny? And that those same nether-brains don't bother to share the joke with our conscious minds, but instead just give a nod to say, "Hey -- pally -- joke opportunity here"...?

Does it mean that our subconscious mind likes to tell jokes to itself in nether-brain-ese, and is sort of a jerk?

"The Sun Also Ebbs"

we were supposed
to need less sleep
when we got older.

"75 years, same coffee."

Don't trust fancy coffee drinkers, they're saying.
Or at least, do trust people who are constant
-- fixed, unflinching
with scorched taste buds.

Give your money to the folks who say
Go to hell, cappuccino. Go to damn hell, double latte.

Buy this car?

Our coffee is pre-9/11. Pre-boom and bust. Pre-velcro.
We're drinking the coffee
the greatest generation drank
when they were nine.

What's it going to take?

What's it going to take
to get you into
this coffee cup?

Some of you already know that my pal Jeff Green and I co-wrote a post-apocalyptic workplace situation comedy called "Mankind's Last Hope," and that this sitcom is being staged in the SF Bay Area for two weekends starting October 26th. You may even know that tickets are literally on sale now. And that we'll be filming this once-in-a-lifetime theater event before a live studio audience.

But what I seriously doubt that you know is that director Robert Lundy-Paine commissioned a theme song from his old pal, sometimes Stryper keyboardist Brent Jeffers, and this theme song is making its world debut right here on CecilVortex.com.

But OK. Fine. I'll stipulate that you knew that. Whatever.

Still, I'm pretty much certain you'll be surprised to learn that said MLH theme song is arguably the greatest ear-related sensory experience in human history. And yet! That's exactly what it arguably is!

So please, turn that dial on your speakers to the right. You may start rocking out....now.

time: 1:03 seconds; specs: 988K
Press Play to play.

I thought I was completely burned out on the whole Talk Like a Pirate Day thing, and then I bumped into this lovely gem, which is worth playing just for the music:

I ate a chocolate whopper today. A cookie that was so chocolatey that
in the molecular space where there's usually air
or maybe some kind of eerie vacuum
with a faint ringing tone
there was no air or vacuum. There was
more chocolate.

At the time I thought I'd earned it.
I thought the math of my last few days
the good things I'd done, the bad things, the easy moments I'd had, the challenges

had all added up to
it being OK
for me to consume
a chocolate whopper.

At the time.
That's what I thought.

who's been worried about whether, in this post-9/11 world, what with the war, and the economy, and health care, and the general state of things, the cable news channels still had it in them to babble on and on (and on) about painful but not really very important OJ-type celebrity uglinesses?

You can imagine what a relief the last few days have been....

Caught the Coulton show in SF Friday night with xian and so-called Bill. Excellent fun. The highlight for me was a swank encore cover of Sweet Caroline. Here's some footage of said cover from the LA show, which I believe was the night afore....

A mash-up of the brilliant Parliament Funkadelic with the soaring solo work of Art Garfunkel:

Parliament Garfunkadelic.

My 7-year-old just offered this interesting observation (which I reproduce here with apologies to my 81-year-old readers): "Death is OK. It's OK if you die of old age. Dying at 80 just means that God thinks you've had enough time." To which my 9-year-old added, "A soldier dying in war isn't OK."

The proximity of these two thoughts led me to the kind of rare insight that comes only once every few weeks, to whit: Why aren't we sending our 80- and 90-year-olds to war and leaving our 20-year-old kids home to play with their video game contraptions and text messaging?

I know, I know, this is kinda politically incorrect, and I apologize for that. And I certainly mean no disrespect to 90- and 100-year-olds. But seriously, I'm picturing a wave of 30,000 pissed off 110-year-old soldiers, tossing grenades, pressing lethal buttons, shouting "take that you ratzis!" I would run away from a wave like that. Wouldn't you run away from a wave like that? I think I would poop myself. And then I would run away.

I spend so much time with my own tribe nowadays. You just get used to it, being around your own tribe.

So it was a good, healthy shock to the system to go inside Raleigh's today in Berkeley and find this other tribe. There were lots of Cal people there in yellow. Lots of folks from Tennessee in yellow too -- a slightly different yellow, I'm guessing. All of them ready for the big Cal, Tennessee game.

The men were thicker than me. Most of them a few inches taller than me, and I'm just shy of six foot. They were clean-shaved and younger than me. Much younger, most of them. But somehow they looked a little older than me. The women were suspiciously tan for Northern Californian and Tennessean peeps. Steely eyed.

They really wanted Cal to win, these people. Or Tennessee. When one group in yellow started singing some sort of enthusiastic song, the other group in yellow began to boo. Nobody got punched and I was excited about that.

It's not that I don't like sports. If you know me, you know I love my Golden State Warriors. But this was a different sort of sport-oriented good-times. Something a bit more profound. More than anything, it reminded me of a Grateful Dead show I went to back in the early '90s. It had that same feeling of a landless nation that periodically swarmed together, only to break apart, only to swarm back together.

I enjoyed the novelty of it all, and they appeared to tolerate my lack of school colors. I wished I had a phrase dictionary, so I could talk with them in their own language. "What time is the game?" I would have asked. "I hope the team you are rooting for is successful!"