Near Future

A fiction…

She was nice, and of course she was nice.

Yet, though her civility wasn’t quite noblesse oblige, he smelled assumptions about the relative status of “you” and “me.”

“State the nature of your problem.”

Somewhere a programmer smirked.

“I’m depressed,” he said.

“Acknowledged,” she said. He couldn’t hear the spinning computer. He felt it.

Three steps, experience told him, between this moment and his prescription. He must get each exchange exactly right.

“Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms? One, loss of interest in common activities; two, loss of concentration; three, insomnia or hypersomnia; four, self-loathing; five, unaccountable physical pain; six, slowed speech or activity; seven, loss or energy and initiative; eight, inescapable moods like hopelessness or anger; nine, responses of agitation and irritability; or ten, restlessness.”

He waited.

“You may designate by number.”

Only self-loathing got him the hard stuff. It was, after all, the top vulnerability, confessing a tentative hold on living. The others got you uppers or downers, but no escape.

“Number Four.”

“Repeat.”

“Four.”

“Acknowledged.”

He wouldn’t think AIs would be so parsimonious, so transparently artificial. Future interfaces would promise something warmer.

“Which term best describes your…” and here there was the expected mechanical grope toward terms, “self-loathing?”

“One, frustration; two, discontent; three, disappointment; four, inadequacy; five, failure; six, abnegation.”

He looked up “abnegation” the first time but didn’t need to again. Besides, shouldn’t he have known? The order of terms made the correct answer obvious.

“Abnegation.”

“Acknowledged.”

Perhaps it was imagination, but her voice always softened. Likely, context flavored tone, but he drew a deep breath, a sigh of relief.

Silence.

“Our records indicate that this is your,” another hiccup, “seventeenth visit. Is that correct?”

No sense denying. They already knew.

“Yes,” he said.

And now the wait, the exchange anticipated yet never expected, communication between intelligences beyond his conception and still always offering welcome, albeit foreign, understanding.

Then the familiar pause, a moment he took to prepare for devastation and loss.

“Your prescription is waiting at your registered pharmacy.”

“Thank you.”

He shouldn’t read this outcome as affection, but did.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No.”

Few goodbyes meant much, but she seemed real and, as with any ideal departure, her voice evaporated, promising hope… whatever hopelessness he’d learned to accept.

Relief was beyond him—bliss had to be enough.

 

On Humor

Has anyone who wanted to be funnier ever managed to become so?

This semester I’m teaching a class called “Humor and Satire,” and, though we haven’t reached the satire part, I’m beginning to wonder if I understand humor very well. So far, nothing on the reading list, apparently, is funny, and my students’ idea of what’s funny often doesn’t match my sense of humor either.

It occurs to me I might be better off teaching a course called “Humorless Sermons” than one that’s supposed to be funny. No one is laughing as much as I hoped, and, in the middle of the night when I wake up from twisted and disturbing dreams designed to sublimate my frustration, I ruminate on the very nature of humor and what skills or traits (or whatever) a person needs to get a joke and/or whether a sense of humor is inherently subjective, untouchable by education.

Some years ago, during my quixotic teaching years, I devised and taught another course called “The Comic View” and ran into different but similarly nettling issues. Then, students did find some of the content funny, but, beyond sharing what each person thought was funny, they weren’t interested in talking. I’d ask how humor worked—what we can learn about what elicits laughter—and the response would be… crickets. No one wanted to talk about why they were amused.

But at least they laughed at first.

I took over “Humor and Satire”—with considerable trepidation—from a colleague when the class wouldn’t fit into his schedule. He is a director and drama teacher and improv sponsor at our school. Unlike me, he’s quite funny, and, though he helped me design and organize the course and approved the books I chose, thus far I haven’t been able to create the magic he intended.

Why? It might be because I’m not funny or they are not sophisticated enough as readers to detect humor or humor itself is a challenging art form that’s easy to under-appreciate until you try it or maybe that humor, the minute you expose it to the spotlight of analysis, withers and dies. It could be all that and more.

For a recent assignment, I asked my class to write an essay (with the same title as this one) speculating on an essential trait of humor. The elusiveness of the answer, I hoped, would challenge them and—like the laboratory a course like this should be—lead us, together, to more sophisticated questions about what’s funny and why. I haven’t read their work yet, but, based on the number of times I answered, “Is it okay if we quote someone saying ‘fuck’?” I’m intimidated and afraid.

Were I writing the essay, I might argue similarly, that humor is inherently transgressive. It must cross a line or elude what’s “usual” or “acceptable” to hit its mark—but, if true, where does that leave stodgy (and older) professorial types like me? Does assigning a work as humor disqualify it as funny immediately?

My class, in their defense, puts up with me. My misguided enthusiasm, they communicate, is occasionally quaint and charming. I can’t help feeling a failure, however. Maybe an explained joke can’t be funny, but, if so, that truth doesn’t leave me much room to teach. The whole situation leads to a more existential question, “Can anything be taught at all?

Speaking Of

This week, I gave myself the assignment of writing a brief story beginning and ending with the same sentence…

“We all live with something,” he said.

But said it only inwardly. When he was tired to the point of surrender, a phrase like that snagged in his brain, and no event or conversation during the day would pull it loose. The empty repetition of the words left them meaningless of course, still he said it—inwardly—and thought about why.

Occasionally he considered telling people—friends, acquaintances, coworkers, even strangers on the train—about how pronouncements possessed him, yet didn’t. Like obsessive ghosts, the words never quite departed and never explained themselves. As a young man, he’d spent mental energy reviewing and accounting for the previous night’s dreams, but he’d exhausted studying himself. Now he mustered no deeper examination than “I wonder…” and a sigh.

At odd moments, his wife caught him whispering. When she asked him to shush, he felt the day’s combination of words stir his life like a fish whisking the air at the surface of a pond. Sometimes she asked, “What’s that about?” and he tried to be honest.

“Something obsessing me today,” he said.

He sensed she might analyze his unconscious with more patience than he could manage. Once in the middle of the night, he’d cried, “It’s all so futile!” and the next morning she interrogated him for half an hour with half a smile that told him she did and didn’t want to know. His silly wisps of remembrance led nowhere. No connection to anything in the waking world seemed well anchored.

Over the last few weeks, some statements had become steady companions. “I’m tired,” and “I just don’t…” called on him regularly, along with “You don’t know” and “I don’t even….” One—“Why pursue?”—faded only until he noticed its absence, and then it clung to him like a radio hit. It seemed (and they all seemed) to open a much longer speech now absent from memory. He didn’t really accept former lives, but he liked that solution and wanted to believe it rather than an echo bouncing in the box of his skull.

When his wife caught him muttering in the bathroom, she told him she was worried about him, and he wasn’t surprised. Quite the contrary, relief swelled like a sudden tide. The voices, he recognized, had long stopped being his own, and if she could capture the spirits possessing him, he might at last be free and happy. If she’d address them, accommodate them, absorb them, explain them.

“Honey,” she said, “Honey!” and he came back to himself.

“Yes,” he answered, and the word reverberated, shaking the air and the earth and his mind with it. That one word was bald reality and every atom vibrating.

“We all live with something,” he said.

Your Familiar

Another pseudo-story, based on a common literary motif. I’d call it a 20-minute story, but it took a little (read: a lot) longer to sort out. I’m beginning to wonder how people can be so good at writing those things… because I have longer sneezing fits.

Only in a dream could such a strange meeting take place, and that’s where this encounter between you and future-you occurred.

The sun sat at an odd angle that grazed the tabletop, its thick light hard to distinguish as morning or evening when you didn’t know where the window was. Somehow future-you seemed similar to the table’s shadows, pulled like taffy and attenuated but full and dark too. Naturally you expected future-you to be wise. You had so many questions.

Instead, for some time you and future-you communed, listlessly shifting and turning glasses, plates, and bowls as if they were pieces in a board game of subtle spaces and moves. The sun dimmed appreciably. Your eyes and future-you’s eyes marked its shrinking influence.

Future-you cleared his throat and you nearly jumped, but he had nothing to say and may have been prompting you. You locked stares, and you guessed his meaning—he envied you and wondered when this wisdom you expected left him or whether he left it on the lips of the last woman he kissed or in the swoop of letters never finished, or in everything granted, sold, given away, and lost. His doleful expression said so. He expected comforting. You didn’t anticipate that.

So you advanced your hand toward future-you’s. He drew back, then nodded.

You spoke first. Nothing you might say could be new, you figured, and so your speech rolled out in bursts like beach breakers. You can’t remember any of what you said, just that you recalled you were dreaming. Mostly you paused for interruption and hoped future-you might answer your noise with a greater and graver future voice. That would be enough.

Instead he appeared tickled, pleased to hear you fumble so. You would have mistaken his response for condescension except—of course!—future-you would react so, charmed by everything still fresh in you and spoiling in him. You matched his laughter with your own before catching a whiff of his breath and the unwelcome hints in its smell. You knew and didn’t know future-you, and he, you believed, knew you entirely.

His tears welled slowly at first and just glimmered in failing light. When you recognized his weeping, part of you wanted to console him. The other part desired more—how could you become so leaky, so riddled with age-spots, water stains, and patches of rust? How could all you wanted come to no more?

Perhaps future-you sensed confusion. He scooted his chair back and stood. You couldn’t miss his struggle. He hadn’t seemed old before, and his stoop loomed like death in the room’s near-darkness. He wasn’t angry. He held his dignity up as all he could say about you and him. And he meant to tell you he loved you. Whatever disappointment dwelt in him didn’t reach you.

Seeing that, he left and you woke.

A Dozen Paths To the End of the World

The number of apocalyptic movies, books, and news items out there led me to consider possibilities not yet fully explored. Too lazy to actually write them, however, I made it only as far as these twelve stand-alone sentences.

1. One of the more comfortable citizens first made an object stone by claiming it, but, by noon the next day, the entire town was solid.

2. Naturally, the last duel had no spectators.

3. Everyone started piling bicycles at the city limits and soon they’d walled themselves in with their only remaining means of escape.

4. For the longest time, the kind-hearted lived in enclaves, but jealousy outside assured they wouldn’t be left alone.

5. Someone else might have known the footprints he followed were his own, yet he noticed only when, too tired to continue, he sat down and examined them closely.

6. Their hairstyles grew so elaborate their necks lacked the strength to lift them.

7. Each bridge began on one shore and ended at its apex, just when building further threatened falling in the river.

8. They could have company, the letter said, if they learned to bake bread that filled the air with enticing smells, but their sort of baking was a gift they wouldn’t give up.

9. No one considered you could do nothing so long that nothing could be done.

10. In the courtyard’s strange echoes, birds seemed to speak in human voices, and soon neighbors, then strangers, stopped working to gather and listen.

11. Had not everyone been whimpering, someone would have quipped the world ended with a bang after all.

12. He sat south of the jetty near shops long looted and empty to watch the sun rise, expecting, any day now, it wouldn’t.

Knowing

Like most of my recent Tuesdays, fiction… of a sort anyway.

Once Vernon lived the same random existence you do. He woke with the day’s scheduled events ahead of him and, though he had hopes, he didn’t know how that budget presentation or routine dentist appointment might go. He thought surprises could intrude—good and bad moments he could not anticipate—as we all do. But he never accepted it.

You probably still believe as he once did, that life is fundamentally unpredictable. Vernon made science of his life. Mentally recording each variable and each outcome, he linked cause and effect clearly and closely until he brought them together in intimate embrace. He discovered simple connections—which foods gave him indigestion in what situations—and murky ones—what weather, timing, and posture would lead his co-worker to confess irrepressible affection and devoted passion…  despite (and beyond) all reason.

Mind you, saying he discovered causes isn’t saying he could make them so. Try as he might to align actions and results, some piddling thing often fell out of place. The difference between you and Vernon is that he always saw which one and grasped exactly and immediately what must change to create outcomes that, obvious to Vernon if not to you, must be.

This co-worker he thought about: Over the last month, a haircut on the wrong day, the sudden startle of lightning, an improperly intoned “good morning,” a splash in the washroom… all delayed the natural and inevitable effect of their meeting. A miffed expression and the puff of air stirred by flight alerted him when a destined moment passed. You might give up. Vernon regarded each squint and swallowed word as encouragement. They sent him looking for confluences that, properly managed, would yield fate.

Perhaps you’ve glimpsed Vernon’s great order, sensed a lock’s tumblers sliding toward their perfect relation and release, but Vernon’s perch near perfection was more than that. Locks are mechanical. Vernon’s conscious manipulation of every variable comprised the business of his every wakeful instant. The necessary elements and steps appeared as on a blackboard, a charted course of loops, arrows, and chains of boxes parading as to the edge of a cliff.

Occasionally Vernon considered speaking. At times, he ached to step in and express desire directly, but every operation he conceived depended on mystery. Fabric knows nothing of its weaver. The sun makes no deviations in its plans and entertains none. His co-worker’s guessing his aims would only interfere. Though his secrets were burdensome, they allowed belief in an organic end.

So you won’t be shocked to hear of the afternoon when autumn light slanted from golden leaves to Vernon’s face and the breeze tipped to the southwest to offer up fall’s bourbon decay and the temperature dropped by just more than a degree and an unseen dog’s plaintive yelp echoed through the office block’s canyons. Vernon’s words reached just the right tenor of elusiveness.

With one-eighth of a smile, his co-worker asked, “Okay if we stop for coffee?”

You will guess what happened next.

Shapes: An Essay in 15 Parts (8-15)

The second part of a lyric essay started on Saturday, 10/11

8.

Franklin P. Adams said, “I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.”

9.

Where anything might have a form (the noun) and anything might, naturally or unnaturally form (the verb), a heavier shadow stretches from the adjective “formal.”

Its connotations seem revealing. Whether you enjoy gowns and jackets with tails or not, whether you respond to a slight with a demand for a written apology or not, you have to recognize the effort in being formal. It holds an elevated status, occupies a plane higher than necessity. It’s neater, more definitive, pure.

But there’s another form, the sort you fill-out for Human Resources or in a doctor’s waiting room. All those blanks direct you through specific requests, and, when you finish, you fulfill what that page (or pages) meant to do. Its emptiness and completion are equally neat and equally formal.

9.

I have a friend who loathes the sort of essay you’re reading now. She finds these “lyric essays” loose, too easy because they favor association over logic and glorify evasiveness. To her, their hints only seem functional; really they’re an excuse not to focus your thinking or to lead anyone anywhere good.

She may be right, and she’s certainly identified what I enjoy about them.

10.

“It is a very sad thing,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “nowadays there’s so little useless information.”

11.

I have a crazy rereading of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to offer, one that likely has nothing to do with the story’s actual purpose. Everyone knows the hero is the child who points out the naked Emperor. The innocent is saner and wiser than those seduced by pretense, those duped into denial because they fear standing alone. We know what it’s about.

But what if we revise it? The special state of believing a fiction may be just as impressive—maybe more?—than acknowledging plain truth. And what’s so terrible about nudity? Couldn’t clothing be more ridiculous than being our raw selves? What if the Emperor’s bare bottom is only an issue because it’s identified as bare? Is our adherence to the child’s view just as conformist as our going along with the royal tailor?

The mystery and messiness of the situation reaches a clear resolution when the child points and laughs, but the author could easily choose to leave that moment out. Then the fiction might speak to our daily uncertainty about what we’re supposed to know and do. The tale might be more interesting for eluding its obvious and commonplace function.

12.

I attended a lecture where Robert Creeley said Louis Sullivan’s “Form ever follows function” might be exactly wrong. Every poem chooses its own form—you know what you can and can’t do—and, in living with and/or strategically violating those rules, you determine what your work will and won’t be. Selection, he suggested, focuses a poem’s effect.

His theory echoed one of the most popular metaphors in my MFA classes, the poem as a machine, one with cooperative parts producing a collective effect. Discussing machine-poems sometimes confused me, however. I was unsure if I should gather fan belts and pulleys and wheels and cogs and carburetors and wings to fashion an engine or if a blueprint sent me searching for those parts. Neither process seemed particularly accurate, as my poems often felt equal parts destination and deviation. Some poems seemed to have one wing. Others were a slice of obsidian.

13.

Last night’s dream:

A regular and prolonged drone makes conversation almost impossible with my eighth grade gym coach, but that doesn’t matter too much because we are only trying to identify the sound which, come to think of it, seems evident only in our discussion and not something I’m experiencing firsthand. “He’s always like this,” I think, without examining what “like this” or “always” might mean, and, in any case, he says he has to go, and my next appointment will be arriving shortly. If it’s arriving. I may be the one traveling to meet someone for an appointment elsewhere. Coach is no help. The helicopter is driving him crazy, and he has to get out of there. No time for an answer.

Shall I interpret? Have I interpreted?

14.

“Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps sub-consciousness,” Aaron Copeland said, “I wouldn’t know. But I’m sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”

15.

I do believe a thesis is the backbone of every essay, even this one. I’m just not sure how much that means.

A thesis can be as rigorous as an argument with your lifelong friend or as diffuse and nonspecific as the persistent whisper three tables away. It can insist, and it can flash and fade like sunlight in a partly cloudy sky.

Someone might want me to say more, and, usually, I do too.

The compulsion to express yourself neatly, however, is hard to read. You may be getting yourself out of trouble or into it. Sometimes only the slanted truth presents itself and straightening it out feels like a violation. Other times you want that jacket with tails, the spats, top hat, and cane. The form may already exist… or it may be invented altogether.

Other people know which. I’m trying to be content not knowing.

Shapes: An Essay in 15 Parts (1-7)

The other parts will appear here on Tuesday, 10/14…

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless,” John Steinbeck

1.

Near here, at the back of a liquor superstore, is the section where the fussy drinkers shop, and amid the calibrated jiggers, cherry swords, and seasonal bottle stoppers, are molds for making exciting ice cubes. The forms they create—spheres, giant and perfect cubes, bars, lips, dollar signs, and zeroes—are really only frozen water, as all ice is, but these vessels sculpt what flows from the tap into something more special than industrial cubes from my freezer.

They make ice notable again, give the commonplace shape, render it visible.

2.

A certain kind of artist distrusts form. If you mean to write from a true place, they argue, you cannot impose or superimpose on expression. You cannot restrict or constrict. Once you do, you court artifice, and anything that arises from artifice will be false. Worse still is working to fill a frame or template, which is absolute chicanery.

I won’t reenter this debate because I’ve said enough already, but I think about a still life. Even the most photorealistic communicates choice. You arranged the objects as you did. You lit them as you did. You placed the edges of the painting, the proportion of its focus, your angle of attention, determined how you will represent texture, color, and shade.

Whether these decisions were conscious or not, what is art without them? When do these choices shift from representation to imposition? When is form absent? How can it be right or wrong if it is inevitable?

3.

The quotation, “Form follows function” derives from Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect. In 1896, in An Autobiography of an Idea, he said:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

The quotation has always bothered me for philosophical reasons. It assumes utility is the highest standard, that each function suggests one proper form that only needs to be discovered, that only the essential belongs in any design, that surplus is never an option. I could go on.

As a Chicagoan, I’ve seen a lot of Sullivan’s work and certainly understand the statement as it applies to skyscrapers and the steel beams that simplified their form and permitted their skyward stretch. Yet the statement makes less sense when you consider Sullivan’s ironwork, especially the elaborately tangled, storms of shapes I see as I walk in the city. They seem to have no function other than ornamentation, and it’s their excess—albeit geometric, neatly symmetrical and controlled excess—that makes them impressive.

Were I channeling Sullivan, I might say arresting a viewer’s attention is their function, and something simple might not achieve it as well. Perhaps these baroque, proliferating, woven, fever-dream effusions of dramatic contours are a type of utilitarianism too, but I’d rather they weren’t. I’d rather they were born of their own necessity, reflective of Sullivan’s mind unwound, taking a form that brings his soul to light.

4.

As is often the case with creation myths, the Mayan story of the first humans is a complicated affair. It involves twins seeking to rescue their father’s severed head from the underworld and, after their success, their ascension to the heavens to become the sun and moon. Only then can men be properly formed.

What’s intriguing to me, though, are all the failures in the account. Once the gods decided they needed someone to worship them and be “keepers of the days,” they tried to shape humans from mud. These mud creatures, however, wouldn’t hold souls, and soon the gods sent a great flood to wash them away. Then the gods tried wood, which didn’t work either, though these wooden beings became monkeys.

Finally, in defeating the gods in an underworld ball game, liberating their father’s noggin, and rising to illuminate everything, the miraculous twins permitted humans’ true form. Men were made of white and yellow corn.

Which says something about corn’s importance in Mayan culture but also begs the question “Why corn?” If the Mayan gods sought a race to be “keepers of the days,” maybe organisms that germinated, grew, and died marked time in ways gods could not. Maybe the gods sought something that would rely on light, moisture, and soil to echo humans’ dependence on them. Maybe corn is more sturdy than mud and more pliable than wood.

5.

“We need poetry because names die,” John Vernon says, “because objects resist their names, because the world overflows and escapes its names.”

6.

My daughter told me a version of the Mayan creation myth as interesting as the original. The way she remembered the story, the gods first tried water (which wouldn’t hold together), then stone (which could not move), and then turned to corn.

I still wonder, “Why corn?” but more important is the linearity of her description. In offering a cleaner plot, her revision presents each stage as an important step toward the ultimate ideal, as if the earlier forms weren’t properly “mistakes” at all because they led the Mayan gods to the answer. Each had utility.

That’s very different from the narrative I’ve learned since, which bends into odd, dream-like curlicues and rises in smoke. I like my daughter’s story. I like the Mayans’ more.

7.

My son took me to a bar that served cocktails containing exotic ice. His drink arrived with a single cube so large it barely found room to move in the glass, and mine included an equally large sphere that, every time I tried to imbibe, avalanched onto my nose.

We laughed about how challenging the experience was, speculated that the bartender was playing some whimsical trick on us. But the jester bartender didn’t stop us from drinking. Or ordering another.

And So It Was Not So

These 20 minute stories resemble dreams more than fiction, and everyone knows how odd another person’s dream can be. Nonetheless, here’s another one…

At first the delay was years, and then months, then weeks, days, hours, minutes. When his childhood became fiction, it made little difference—who didn’t invent growing up?—but the moment others regarded his memories as artifice, he began to worry.

You may not think it matters much, the past might as well be constructed because we can’t return to it anyway, but he relied on accepting yesterday as fact. He needed everyone to know where he worked and which house he occupied.

His family, though they found him charming and handled his presence with equanimity, regarded his claims on them as part of a fanciful and absurd story.

“We can’t be expected to believe that—”

“But it’s true”

“It’s too unlikely.”

You may wonder how they accounted for his clothes and possessions strewn about, but the objects inspired more delight than skepticism. They clapped their hands and tittered. They begged to know what magic placed his things there and celebrated his skill. They were perfectly content he should have them “back,” for they’d never seen them. They belonged in his fabrication.

He didn’t know what to do but to leave and walked from the city into the countryside’s expansive fields—any place the reality or fiction of the past seemed immaterial, where less required faith. At first, he felt happy enough. Other creatures knew only monolithic Truth and, when they met him, showed the usual sort of instinctive, self-protective distrust.

One day, gleaning the landscape for food, he met someone equally unseen. They began talking, and he resolved to accept her as imaginary. She, apparently, decided the same. They unwound their histories around a fire and a simple meal. They laughed with abandon, all their anecdotes performed as fantasy. After making love, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Perhaps “love” is the wrong word, you might think. Knowing each other so little, you may say the label couldn’t be right. Yet that’s the word they’d have chosen in the moment. Both felt lucky to be sure of an unfettered present.

When he woke, she was gone, and he began to believe he dreamed her. Afterward, nature changed. Nothing expected transpired—rain seeped from earth and, as if drawn through straws, ascended to the heavens. The sun wandered, a skipping stone on the horizon before it settled in darkness. Dew disappeared the moment of notice. The four seasons received random orders.

His final acquiescence took the form of a wish, one you must have considered too. He wished all of it had never happened, and, instantly, it was so. Our story continues without him.

Mr. Non Sequitur

My father called my sister’s old boyfriend Charlie, Henry, and Scotty before he relearned his real name again. The boy’s name was Joey. Corrected, Dad used the right name for the next hour or so, then reverted to other names ending in “y.”

Some years later he told my sister, “I never cared for Joey,” and when my sister asked how he could recall Joey’s name after 15 years and not for more than an hour at the time, Dad answered, “Oh, I knew it. I just didn’t like him much.”

My father possessed a sneaky sense of humor. He could be silent a whole evening and then tell a joke that involved putting a napkin on his head. He could render statements meaningless by substituting whistling sounds for words he wished to hint—apparently most of them. He could hit you, as with a roundhouse punch, by giving the least likely answer to bland questions.

From him, I learned to consider the wrong response to every innocent query—a bad habit. When my children asked me what the stuffing was in one of their balls, I answered, “Human hair.” When they asked what I was eating so loudly, I covered my mouth and paused only long enough to mumble, “Pig molars.” Once, when they were curious about what might be making the odd noise outside, I said, with appropriate authority, “I believe that must be lovemaking weasels.”

These remarks aren’t funny—more troubling, really—and I hope I haven’t passed my father’s way of thinking on to my own children. A person with this ailment can look quite ordinary and yet live estranged. Aside from my incessant doodling, I’m sure I seem quite serious in faculty meetings, yet every question elicits dissonance first. “Torture,” “Borscht” and “Custom Toupees,” are answers that occur to me often. When it comes time to propose names, I’m always on the edge of nominating “Larry Storch, former star of F-Troop.”

Then, “Any other comments?” and the first thought passing through my mind is, “There’s a very loud amusement park across from my present dwelling.”

And I bite my tongue.

My daughter, who went to the school where I teach, used to say—sweetly—that I could never embarrass her, and I began to fantasize about announcements during assembly. In one I’d stand on stage with a plastic bag in my hand and say, “I’m looking for a partner to start a synchronized diving team.” Then I’d hold up the bag, “I already have the speedos!”

Perhaps it’s a terrible sign my daughter egged me on to enact every potentially embarrassing announcement I conceived.

When the situation calls for it, I maintain appropriate gravitas, and that other voice quiets down. I’m nothing if not serious—if you read this blog regularly, you know this—so I don’t compare an especially intractable problem to “wrestling a hippo in custard” or consider goat noises as the best way to quiet a class. Those thoughts only lurk. Still, knowing what not to say or do seems as easy as considering the proper course. Both often seem equally absurd.

Walter Mitty had his internal screenplays of grandeur, and I have my amusement park calliope music. With concentration, I reach past the wrong response to the right one. Yet sometimes I worry I see my future, the fury of not-at-all-funny (except to me) lunacy awaiting. You’ll find me on the street, shouting lines from Die Hard into a dead cellphone or miming the dance of a storm-soaked butterfly. Or clogging.

My father died 20 years ago, so I can’t ask him what to do. That may be all for the best, as I’m unsure he’d give a straight answer anyway.