Grin and Bear It
I have a brain humour. Inoperable. There’s no cure, I’ve tried everything. Buddhism, Schindlers List, Ketamine. Nothing works. I just keep blurting stuff out. Stuff that I think is funny, that is meant to be funny but other people don’t always see it like that.
I’ve had it all my life. Came home from school one day, aged about seven. Mother put the dinner on the table….
‘What the fuck is this?’ I said
I meant it as a joke. It was supposed to be an acknowledgment of the effort that she’d put into making us a meal expressed via a declaration of ingratitude so outlandish that it couldn’t possibly be taken seriously.
She flipped. Flung a plate, frisbee style at me. I ducked
‘You cunt !’
We both said at the same time. (It was her satirical way of saying she loved me). She then grabbed a saucepan and put it on her head and started headbutting the wall.
‘Just wait til your father gets home!’
For what I wondered. A bean covered wife with concussion.
My dad was a born storyteller. Sorry. Boring. My father was a boring storyteller. He had the impulse but not the equipment so to speak. As my Grandfather said of him
‘He has no bicycle Tom and he keeps riding it’
Basically, he had nothing to say and he said it all day.
My mother had all the stories in the world but no way of organizing them or telling them one at a time . She would hop from one to the other like someone speed scrolling through different radio stations. She invented ADHD.
They both came a cropper in their own different ways. My father drank himself to life and died laughing at the news.
My mother was the news.
24 hours. Non stop. Same shit over and over again with further disasters added every few hours. She died of a Sunday in the 80’s. Nothing happened and she just stopped living.
I’m not sure how many other people in my family have it. This type of lightning. Always followed by thunder and tears.