The Germans are watching me. I am aware of it. They know I know. It is not a secret anymore. But you were unexpected. Coming into the middle of all this. We have to work this out. Maybe you can pretend nothing has happened--that there is still a quiet night where you don't see the light from their high powered cameras and microphones in a corner of your window. Maybe.
You pal, El Orangina, is disturbed. He, I, am, is, disturbed by this myspace.com. El Orangina has just found out about Friendster and it, as they say, of old hat material. Does this mean the Orangina is old hat? Is old? What are they trying to say with this space dot my dot com dot you are old Father dot Christmas?
Is it not enough I have learned the HTML tag for bold strokes of text? No? Now I am the fuddyduddy of the cyberspace? This is unholy. This is for the smackdown. Myspace dot smarty dot pants I have your number. I will crush you as soon as I have finished rubbing my biceps with the linament.
I shall be apppearing before myself and others who opt for presence at Pete's Candy Store on Feb 8th as part of the Jen Is Famous vaudeville. It is 10pm. What will you ever say to your boss when you come is so late the next the next day? www.jenisfamous.com.
man enters. uses folded napkin as prop.
[MAN as woman]i can't pay the rent.
[MAN as villian]you must pay the rent.
[MAN as woman]i can't pay the rent.
[MAN as villian]you must pay the rent.
[MAN as hero]i'll pay the rent!
[MAN as woman]my he...
[interrupted by LAWYER entering]
LAWYER Are you this woman's relative?
[MAN as hero] no, i just am saving the day.
[MAN as woman] my her..
LAWYER Then you won't mind my looking over this payment. [puts on glasses] Would this be cash, check or wire transfer
[MAN as hero] Um, a check?
[LAWYER takes check, examines it]And do you have some identification. [Hero fumbles for id] And were you planning on providing a W-2 with this? 1099? Federal gift tax statement?
[MAN shakes his head.]
[LAWYER]I thought so. [LAWYER snaps his fingers and waves over POLICEMAN who takes MAN away.]
It is time for the New Year's resolutions so I bring you mine: no more ooeja, ohiga, eeeje, weeeejew, ouahja, whatever, you get the idea, no more of that board with the triangle of touching for talking with the dead. It is the devil's work--the devil's! I, your pal, El Orangina, tries to call home once a year or so and, now that my foreparents, El Cantankerous and The Woman Who Wakes You Up Asking What You Want For Dinner have passed away, the only way for us to discourse is with this parlor game of EVIL.
In the past, El Cantankerous and The Woman Who Wakes You Up Asking What You Want For Dinner have been happy in their post-mortal-coil existense to simply respond "yes" or "no" or "maybe, the future is unclear," like happy, magic eightballish, former parents. This was to El's liking.
But recently they have taken to longer requests, such as "Be Sure to Floss Behind Your Ears" or "Did You Take Out The Garbage And Not Forget To Separate the Recylcing?" Do you know how long it takes to spell out R-E-C-Y-C-L-I-N-G with the wojah board? Do you? And these are not parents from the cell phone generation. They do not know "Luv U 2" No, they want me to see if I can get a candle lit for them in Q-U-E-X-E-L-C-H-A-T-E-R-A-C-H-O-A!
So it was at seven in the morning, trying to get my past-tense paternose and materness to cease the INFERNAL bugging of me and my poor, worn tired, fingertips of SMACKDOWN that were reduced to smush-down-not-so-much that I had enough.
The BOARD of EVIL is now in the refrigerator, where I cannot hear it or smell it.
O-L-A-!
The Pilot has given your Pal, El Orangina, a definative appreciation of text in his, my, profile. It reads thusly: Ha sido un ao puesto que el hombre que llaman "el Orangina" ha fijado el pie en mi vida. Ahora, lo deseo.
I shall provide the translation provided to me by my trusty Macintosh desktop translation widgety-thing--not because I do not speak Espaniola, but because it is my English which is not to be trusted. Thus is the wording: He has been ao since the man that calls "the Orangina" has fixed the foot to my life. Now, it desire.
Kisses Pilote. Kisses.
The water for my parched soul is $4.50, and it demands my enjoyment. Which price is too high? Or is there a deeper mystery? Not having $4.50, you will never know.
Today's posting comes to El from the notes of a friend studying at the local community college. Enjoy!
Prof. Ludwig Von Vonerheisterdunnnnnnn
Intermediate Logic I206
Class 7
A Comedy Proof
As we had previously remarked there is the most basic of all jokes: the setup and punch. The simplest of these would be a pure setup, an object that is both funny and alive, i.e. that comedy standby, the man (nee “everyman” cf. Chaucer, Wordsworth, et. al.). And a punch, a verb, something again funny, such as a fall, which is always hilarious, and an object such as something from everyday life—remembering, that the heart of comedy is a true situation (“Ha!” guffaws the audience, and elbows each other in the side, “That is so true!”) the joke in abstract form would go thusly:
The man falls on the banana peel.
Your mind realizes the comedy of the situation and is involuntarily brought to spasmodic reactivity: a laugh issues from your mouth uncontrolled. This is the idea and the abstract, but the reality is less Platonic. You have heard this one before.
Thus our discourse moves to analysis. That which is more specific is funnier. The more unique, the greater the identification of “everyman” with the situation which is not his own.
The fat man falls on the slippery banana peel.
Thus humor grows in our bellies. But, alas, alack, and alderman and the community pig roast forcing a hand into yours while you’re just trying to have a little bit off off-diet pork, not that your doctor would know, unless that’s him in the corner, the bastard, following you to the pig roast and now the alderman is backing you into the corner with hopes of reelection that forces you RIGHT NEXT TO THE PHYSICIAN dripping bit of meat dangling from your lips that you then suck in so quickly to your gullet that you choke, collapse, and efforts to contrary failing, YOU DIE—all because you have heard this one too.
For the jaded comic audience, those in the late teen years and collegial organizations, the inversion is the solution. The upending of the expected into the unexpected. You know a = b in a strict sense, and yet b = a is so shocking, so unnerving to what you believed to be your fixed knowledge of everything, that you reel back in glad distress at the news that yes your inner child says there is more to the world than what I have witnessed thus.
The banana peel falls on the fat man.
It
is madness. Simply madness. Once the mind accepts that bananas are capable of
walking (cf. Family Circus and the short-lived Brady Bunch Saturday morning
cartoon, et. al.) and thus slipping and falling, wait, wait, yes, this is an
opportunity for the powerful addition of that comedic element: the tag.
The banana peel falls on the fat man—and can’t get up!
The exclamation point indicates the rising tension in our voices and hearts as we realize, not only has the situation been turned on our head, but that we have heard this one before and that is what is brining joy to our plexuses. Why, it is from that TV commercial that we have shared, if we are of a certain age, in which the old woman hilariously falls to the floor only to discover, she can’t get up! Oh to be reminded of that at such an unexpected time when our minds are filled with considerations of banana locomotion and would such a banana have feet? Is it a normal banana size? Or is it much larger than a man, say the size of a normal man in relation to a normal banana? A monster tropical fruit terrorizing the town—good God man, it’s accidental slip on a man is the least of our problems. This thing has gone amok! We must summon aid, wait…wait…it can’t get up. It is down, thrashing, crying, wailing at the pain of existence itself, and it cannot get…
Our hearts are glad and then sad. We know that we have heard this we will not know where to turn next time it is told. We will cry a little. Turn our heads to hide the tears. I know the giant, slippery banana can’t get up. Stop reminding me! So we turn to the last bend of the comedy equation. The way in which all remains new despite its age: the double inversion with a twist. By upending our expectations of the inversion (so common in our life until we turned twenty one and had to get a real job and Dad threw us out of the house for smoking a little weed, such a little bit of weed, like he never did anything wrong himself, the hypocrite. As if he knew better. And yet, we find a little bit more of him in ourselves everyday, don’t we? Who is the hypocrite? Where is the weed?) the joke turns in on itself like some tattoo of snakes eating their own tails that we could imagine Zena, the well known warrior princess, having on her arm all Gothic and shit.
And so the double inversion, the trick of knowing that you know that I know that we know you know.
The fat man slips on the banana peel…
And the twist!
and everyone reveals their genitals!
And thus, dear reader, we have proven why Jimmy Kimmel is on TV.
Dear Mr. Man in the Elevator in my building. You got on at the 28th floor. The floor where all the elevators stop because that is the floor where you may "switch over" as it were from the express to the local and so the versa of this.
For those of us, such as I, your pal El Orangina, Champion of Chalupa, on the floors above 28, it is thus: the 28th floor. The floor where the elevator always stops going down because those who live there feel free to push the express and the local button and then, at their mere whim (whim!) take the one that comes first.
Do any of you there, on 28, or those such as you Mr. Man even know that only two of the express elevators are even working? And often just one? So that we, on the high floors, are cramped and stuffed witht the sweaty people coming down from the gym on the 50th floor on their way to their little dinners of broccoli and chards and their firm muscles all glistening while we must smell their sweat because somehow (somehow!) they don't seem to have to work for a living in some little workspace where people keep taking their pens when there are plenty (plenty!) of pens in the closet if they would just walk a few feet and not take my pen that I got from the supply closet myself to replace the last one they took?
Do you know that Mr. Man?
You got on the 28th floor. You wanted to go up.
In sheer confusion at stopping on the way up I got out on 28. I had to turn around, but so what, you and your very large bag that smacked me in the hip were just fine.
And then.
Then.
then
Pushed 29.
And when you go off, one floor later you said to me (your pal, el, yada yada) and the woman with the heavy box of flowers, you said, "Thanks guys."
What was that all about?
Thank you?
As if we had some choice to stop you from pushing that button on the 28th floor in the midst of our furious rise to our express served floors in due relief from a long day of holding off going to the bathroom because we are waiting to catch the fellow (or fellows) taking our pens. Clutching them. Waiting. Then finally at home, stalled on 28, walking out, confused, walking back, stopping on 29, getting thanked.
Well. Sir. I will tell you now what I have wanted to say from that moment of inequity till now--saved in my heart and in my mind for the moment I could blog you, Mr. Man, and your backpack and your I'm not going to walk up one flight of stairs in my life, ever, attitude, dude:
No thanks.
Aha!
Technology. I love the way the word rolls off the tongue, and, as well, I can think of nothing more important to the standard of living that we—luchador and non-luchador—experience in today’s trickle-down existence than technology. Is it not, I ask you, the advanced chemistry of petrochemicals that provides me, El Orangina, my mascara (my green and yellow mask, not some eyeliner, learn some Espanola people)? Is it not the Internet that gives me free access to java-based Galaga and Mrs. Pac-Man? The answer to both questions? An awesome affirmative!
So I do not know about you, but I await each new gizmo, chatckie, whizbangness, from the nerd boys with expectant expectation—my fist solidly beneath my chin and my head cocked in what can only be called a quizzical manner.
Thus positioned I open my mail (using my free hand and my teeth) and discover the news from my good friends at Verizon—a camera phone. A Camera Phone! What a wondrous object! Imagine! A camera and a phone. Two thoughts so disparate in my normal mind that I can barely squeeze the words together in my brain without having to wedge something, like a loaf of rye bread, in both ears, nostrils, mouth, and one eye so as to stop the word “camera” falling out of my head while jamming the word “phone” in my lone uncovered sensory input orifice. Honestly, it is a gymnastic effort.
Think about it!
How many times have you or I been faced with the painful choice: take the telephone or the camera for my daily day or vacation excursion? And how many times have I paid the terrible price when—later in the day—I am confronted with a major celebrity, like Bob Saggett, at my local coffee establishment, but I have only my phone! I slap it against Bob Saggett hoping for some meaningful impression in the metal-like plastic skin of the device, but it only gets some smeary Saggett skin juice. NO! I MUST HAVE THE CAMERA PHONE! Only $69.99 to upgrade?!? I cannot be made to wait!
I run out onto the street beneath my small rented room in Washington Heights and scan the horizon for a Verizon store. I must have it! I must now, this second, be able to take, with my phone, photos…too grainy to print, but too big to e-mail from the phone, one inch by one inch fixed-focus photos of my puppy at play with a chew toy, how cute! The undersides of tables covered with gum in fancy dining establishments. I will expose them! Unsuspecting men in the locker room, I do not care to see it, but someone will! Could I do the same with an actual camera, yes, but that is a ridiculously simpleminded thought. Would such a camera be a phone? No!
And what else may I photo? What? Where? Women’s underwear! What do these women expect with technology advancing so fast that when I look like I am waving my phone under their skirts I am secretly photoing their panda bear undies!
…
I disgust myself.
…
I apologize. The technology has taken me. It has dragged me into its hellish maw. Let me return, with decorum to my friends at Verizon. I will have to e-mail them. Tell them they have wandered from the path of righteousness. That…what is this? A video phone? Only $179.99 a month to take twelve seconds of tiny video? Only? So as to enable me to record babies drooling in my lap while discussing the weather with Madagascar? I MUST HAVE IT!
