There's a reason why “Easy, happy” stories don't get written. “Tom had to get a biopsy done as the Dr's noticed a spot on his pancreas. They successfully got the sample and sent it out. After a week, Tom got his results. The test was benign with no hint of cancer.”
The End.
Ok, now what? Where do you go from there? He celebrated for a few days? Ok, that wears off fast...No story there.
That's why you have to have a problem in a story. Conflict, grief, doom and gloom. OK, I'm being facetious but it's true. It can't be all puppies and ice cream because life isn't like that. More often, there is no resolution to more than one of life's problems or at best, an forever updating sloppy fix to it. These stories don't have to be novels and can be short. In fact, here's the world's shortest, saddest story.
Hemingway was challenged along with a few other writers to come up with the shortest, most miserable story they could create. When they all met again to show what they had done, everyone thought Hemingway instantly won. Here's the story he wrote.
“FOR SALE: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”
Immediately your own imagination fills in that tiny sentence, doesn't it? It's supposed to. You were led there to fill in the ugliness.
How interesting would be: “FOR SALE: Baby Shoes. $20 Bucks.” No real human drama to pull you in.
Even something like Twain's “Tom Sawyer,” is like this. Yes, it was turned into a family-friendly, sugary Disney flick but Sawyer's world included: Murder, child abuse, hinted at child sexual abuse, serious and medically damaging alcoholism, dragging a river looking for bodies, racism and a great argument negating the Protestant Work Ethic.
However, the story ends with Huckleberry and Tom surviving and finding the gold. Bad Injun Joe gets “his” from slipping off a ledge and dying. There's a hint that Becky and Tom may get married one day. Finally, the town widow manages to get Huckleberrie's first bath in eons as the boy felt bathing was pointless.
The point being, they had to go through a ton of shit to get to that ending. Otherwise it would've been boring as hell just to hear about two boys rafting on the Mississippi, occasionally picking their noses and telling one another how bored they were.
And...that's why I write some of the shit you see here. I could write Disney stories but they'd be five sentences long. Where do you go with them? Believe me, I have far more interesting things to show you but they include humanity's usual messiness and some stories I have look messier than a Harley crash on 95. If and when I upload those...well, we'll see. But they would be guaranteed to keep your interest and you'd forward them to people you know.
That last piece I wrote about, Gia, gave me second thoughts. Some will know who I was really talking about as there were enough clues. The part about disparaging her name bugged me but everyone who knew her then was aware of what was going on. That was no secret. Add to that, it's been 25 years and the past is dust, except for guys like me who keep digging it up as it were an Egyptian crypt. I could've written about how Gia was somewhat instrumental in my meeting that girl where I felt, “Ahhhhhh...my God..Look at HER! She's sooo pretty!” It was one of those reactions where I, the male, the GUY...remembered, for years, every single thing she was wearing that night and what we spoke about when we first met. But no, that story I had written about already. So I got over my initial hesitancy and spoke of Gia.
So a quick story with conflict and consternation where I looked like the asshole to someone. There, I satisfied the First Rule in Telling Stories.
**
My brother, and I, both understood black humor. To put ourselves in with great company, so did Mark Twain who once remarked, “...I haven't heard of anything funnier since the orphanage burned down.” You'd have to understand black humor to get it. Hint? If you ever had to live with complete absurdity, there is only one way do deal with it, you laugh as there is no other answer that will work. Think I'm nuts? Read up on Albert Camus then get back to me. My brother and I had major thinker-ers from the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Heidelburg backing us up and we didn't even know it! Our black humor was a universal reaction and it was quite common.
We both had a great respect for the truth and both honed our bull shit detectors. As kids, we both saw the incredible garbage grown adults would toss us and then demand “respect” only because they were adults. That will not do. Dark humor is great for ferreting out horse crap and holding up the truth as we saw it, to the light. If it deflated adult egos, too bad. And IF it deflated your adult ego, by the words said by a kid, then you have MUCH work to do on yourself buddy!
It's also why I can come off as politically incorrect. There are heaps of BS on both sides of the political spectrum and don't try to install a particular belief in me I know to be horseshit. I have a piece on women's liberation that I've been tweaking a while and the working title? “Is It True Women Can Do No Wrong?”
I can hear the seething now. If I upload that and I will have my balls sliced off. My point, political correctness can be a gag order on free speech if taken too far.
Anyways, back to dark humor.
My brother was older so he came up with most of the comedy. He eventually ended up writing comedy for a local Providence magazine and he spared no one from his barbs. Why? Well, in order to be seen as “fair” and that you are not attacking a particular group, profession or whatever, you attack EVERYONE and mercilessly too. Everyone including orphans, the ill, whitey, the Irish, Girl Scouts and anyone else for that matter that seems to enjoy a protected status.
At 15, my brother took a bunch of my Dennis the Menace cartoons and re-wrote the captions with the most politically WRONG, bizarre, twisted yet highly honest interpretations of life. He used Dennis because of the action that was drawn in them. Peanuts cartoons are kids just standing there, Dennis actually moved around and that lent itself to many jokes. They were begging to be written!
So, one night and due to the fact I had bunch of those old cartoons in the trunk of my car, I was telling a girl I know about them and how funny there were. Well, you'd think you'd know someone well enough when you decided to open the good wine to share with them...
“What? What's the matter? You don't like Sangiovese wines? You just spit it on the floor!”
I get the cartoons out of my car, go back into the bar and plop them down before her. I had done this countless times with others in the years past and I was expecting her to laugh so hard she'd start tearing. It has in the long past with countless others!
But...
She's just flipping the pages, not saying a word.
I'm waiting and am getting curious about the silence.
Finally, she stops on one and bellows out, so the whole bar can hear.
“What the FUCK is this!?? YOU think that's FUNNY?!! This is the SICKEST shit I've EVER seen!!”
To be honest, I was really taken aback. Not anyone, in the past 30 years, had ever reacted so strongly and sooo negatively to them. Add to that a bunch of heads in the bar were turning to us to find out just what it was I had done.
So I quickly start back peddling, explaining and trying to put into context just what they were. Well, what was the point now, she was so damn emotional that 1 + 1 equaling 2 wouldn't have tallied in her head. It's impossible when some women get like that. Think that's cruel and untrue? Ask any guy...and other women how some can roll a snowball down a hill till it grows and flattens a ski village at the bottom of it.
It's called, “Blowing Things Out of Proportion.” I heard my Dad yell that at my own Mom more than a few times in the past.
So relying on my de escalation training I had from another job, I cooled the situation down. How do you do that? One very helpful thing is NOT to add to it. You don't toss gas on a fire. For a good week after when I saw her, she looked at me like I was something she'd scrape off the bottom of her shoe.
**
For a while I wondered about that reaction as it came out of nowhere. I finally talked to another in the bar about her reaction and decided to show him, privately out by the car, the cartoons. He was laughing his ass off when he read them. When we got back in, he had mentioned that “Did I know her Dad was a Pentecostal minister?”
“Uh..no...really?” I say.
“Yep... from deepest Arkansas, the entire family were Holy Rollers, well some were. She goes from absolutely loving her family or hating their guts, it depends on the day.” I'm told.
I think...”O-Kaaaaaay...that explains a lot.”
I had caught her on her “religious” night I think when I showed that stuff to her.
So, for your entertainment, I've scanned and uploaded what my brother did in his off time. I give you two options you can pick from as you read the cartoons. One day I'll tell the story of how he pissed off the Bruce Sundlund administration when he published a comedic piece on the Governor.
If you are offended, I apologize.
Or if you are offended, go fuck yourself.
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