Cosmic Humor

My friend E.M. gave me a book to read—The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It's lovely, Lovely. There is a moment when the main character Charlie is sitting around with all of his friends and everyone is just sitting there, getting it, and he says, "I feel infinite." That's good, that's a truth—and here, in Austin, I can feel slivers, shivers of that. Usually it's looking up at stars that does it for me. If I ever actually look I feel very small, and the world and space and the universe feels very big, and I feel like an ant on top of the Himalayas. The thing is, the world is big, and it used to scare me so much I didn't think about it. Now, I think about it in small sips. Let my brain open up to infinity in little bursts, and the bursts are so bright and so good that that scares me a little too, but it's so big and so grand that I have to love it, and I do, and I'm working to get to a place where I can taste it all the time always without shutting any of it out and I'm getting there and it's exciting and whew.

Which makes me think about people with Cosmic Humor. I like those people.

Three nights ago I slid down a piss slide. What I mean is—it was a piss slide. Someone had pissed on it. I was at the park with E.M. and her friends T.M. and S.P. We were howling at the moon, which is what you do at night in a park with friends. There was a twisty slide I had to go down, and I did, and I said, Damn that slide was wet! And it was. And I said, Hey E.M. come see—isn't my butt wet? So E.M., in her infinite generosity, came and patted down my butt. That's a wet butt, she said.

Meanwhile our howls had attracted a pack of prowling high school boys. I knew they were in high school because one time one of their voices cracked, and all the other times they were being Asshole Youths. Later, my friends told me that one of the Asshole Youths said, Don't slide on that slide, we pissed on it. I did not hear this, but I heard the word piss and I heard the word slide, and I then knew that my jeans were connected to the inside of one—or all—of these boys' bladders in a way I had not anticipated. In short—their territory had been marked.

But you know? I had to laugh. T.M., bless his soul, was livid for me. He is very soft spoken and only threw comments over his shoulder as we retreated to the parking lot, but he kept saying, I can't believe it, I can't believe it. I don't remember what S.P. said but I think she was trying to judge my reaction. I didn't know either of them well, but I think they were surprised that I laughed.

E.M. was laughing too because she has a Cosmic Sense of Humor. That's the whole deal—you look at yourself from far enough away, from a star in the milky way, from the edge of the universe, everything is Pretty Funny. Relationship shit. Family shit. School shit. Piss on my pants shit. I'm no damn saint and I get as rattled as the next person, but I'm thankful for those moments where my brain is in the right place and I can just laugh.

Then E.M. said a Thing, which was—I don't care if I slide down it, or you, and it's funny. But that's fucked up that they would piss on a slide that my little sister might go down.

And then it wasn't so funny anymore, because she was right. And that was a pretty fucked up thing they did. Because the park was at an elementary school. And if my ass hadn't slid that slide clean, hundreds of elementary-school students would have piss jeans—and there's nothing funny about that.

Well, maybe a little funny, but only if you're feeling a little Sadistic and a little Dark. And sometimes that's an okay thing, too. Those are the limits. Sometimes my stepbrother D.S. accidentally makes a joke about my dead mom and somehow, some way, we laugh. And I mean hard. And if I ever try to explain it to someone else it sounds sick. And we sound sick. And they don't get it. And I guess not many people really could. But it's funny because he's my brother and I love him and my mom died and he accidentally made a your-mother's-a-whore joke and I still love him and it didn't hurt my feelings so, pretty soon, the only option is to laugh hysterically because what else can you do?

And maybe we are a little Sick. But if that's Sick, Lord my Lord, I do not want to be Well.