Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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The wind that comes sweeping down the plain has brought rain with it, which I am sure will be a relief to the sweet-smelling wheat and more to the still-drought-reduced rivers, lakes, streams, and ponds in the area. They had been doing better, but the summer heat has told upon them, and it is good to have a bit of respite from the grinding glare of Helios (although at least one metaphor that comes to mind is a bit...icky). (Why I always have to make that kind of joke...) I am glad, then, that I do not have to walk to work today; one shower is enough for a morning, and I already had mine.

I suppose that it is one of many marks against me that my sense of humor runs to the ribald, the bawdy, the lewd, and the outright obscene, and that it sprints to them in such a way that would make Bolt look less like lightning and more like a fastener rusted into place. I have long been adept at doing so, and it is a human tendency to do often the things done well, but it is not always (or necessarily even often) well received. I persist nonetheless, in part because it is not until after I have heard the comment made that I realize it was not amusing in context. Yet to wait is to miss the moment when it could be funny; the potentiality of being funny and thus of being liked is a powerful draw and prompts the risk that collapses the potential into actuality--funny or not.

Yet the same could be said for any humor. And it is not only the obscene that falls upon its face in my utterance; I am an incorrigible punster, and even my non-lewd puns are met with groans and rolled eyes in most cases. I am an old hand at the dad-joke (in part because my own father is a past master of the form, something I am given to understand obtains in the American Midwest), but I am also an old hand at having those jokes fail to lighten the mood--or succeed. Still, they demonstrate, at least anecdotally and in my experience, that it is not only the obscene that suffers from the timing and moment. They suggest to me that I need to search further for the source of my salaciousness in speech.

The easy answer is, of course, that I have a dirty mind. Yet "easy" does not seem to be "best" to me; to say I have a dirty mind provokes the questions of whence and why I do, just as to say I am a pedantic ass provokes the questions. Certainly I am interested in sex and I have had it more than once, but the same is true of many people whose senses of humor are better received than mine, whose jokes do not always drip of genital juices and who do not seem so much to obsess about alliteration. So I suppose I have more to consider as I get up in the morning...

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