Gunderstanding
A screen above my gate told me my flight from Texas to New York was ON TIME. Another screen turned to CNN alerted me to BREAKING NEWS that another lone wolf shooter had gunned down a dozen people near a small college in Vermont. The only thing about those two facts that amused me was the use of ALL CAPS for good news and bad.
Over the past few days I’d learned that making people laugh in Texas is as much fun as making people laugh in Florida or Maine or Tennessee or other states. Just two years earlier, I’ll mention since I’m catching you up on things, my brother Jake bet me $500 that I wouldn’t take a shot at doing stand-up comedy. I took him up on it not because I needed the $500, but because I love a challenge, and because I needed the $500.
My life became a series of moments when I was either collecting material or rejecting material for my stand-up routine, a pattern I’d accepted as philosophically sound. Was something funny or not funny? I tried, in every trying moment of my day, to discern things as being either the moon against the night sky or just the night sky against the night sky. The moon always reveals something.