I Found

So I had this idea about humor. About genuine humor. Not the niggling humor that munches at the ankle of obviously flawed ideas, but the throated humor that vomits little mountains of spontaneity and thought. I was wondering if I could compose some.

I'm not going to try it here. Partially because I know that I am not intrinsically funny. And partly because I haven't forgotten that I didn't want to try it here. Humor is like singing. It's not so much about talent as much as it is about the construction of a head. Some skulls just have crappy acoustics. Most do. But some don't. The ability to hear yourself outside of what encompasses the space of your higher order functions is key to being a great singer and I think the same holds true for comedy.

Remember when I told you I was going to go look for the hissing? I think I do. I found it last night. It wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. It wasn't scarier either. It just was. It was the heart of a thing, if you can imagine it, a thing large as three story building and as wide as it was tall if not wider. The sound of my teeth grinding woke me up before I could get close enough to really make it out.

It was a strange trip. I didn't close my eyes and there it was. I had to do a ton of foot work, but I avoided the subways because I tend to get lost down there. I stayed above ground and it got darker and darker until it was dusk and I walked for a long time until I reached a great big brick thing. It could have been a wall for all I knew. The city simply stopped and there was this brick wall that could have been a building, but I didn't walk around it because it joined up with the two buildings on either side of the street and it was too dark to see if it terminated at some point above me or if it simply continued on forever.

I went in the door and inside the lights were like setting suns and I went down for several seconds, but I couldn't have gone deeper than ten or twelve feet unless there was some kind of compression happening, which I doubt. I doubt it because - I suppose I actually don't have a reason to doubt it. It's simply been my expectation. It was the feeling. There were no sutures of skips so I assumed. At any rate the staircase ended rather quickly and the floor was so immense that I could see it's curvature, but the light was too low to see anything beyond the immensity of the space. I walked on, directly away from where the stairs landed and after several dozen minutes the darkness began to turn a dull red and then this weird bronze pink and I followed the shifting gradient, keeping the brightest hues front and center, along the curving floor and there was a massive pounding that kicked through the air and thumped inside my lungs so bad that it was starting to hurt and I walked on and on and on until the intensity of the dullness, the sheer missingness of presence was making my head hurt as bad as my chest and I fought to resolve it and it came into focus and then I realized I wasn't breathing and the sound of my teeth grinding woke me up at 5 in the morning. It was awful. I learned nothing.

I'm not afraid tonight though. I guess, a huge part of what makes us fear is the not knowing. I don't need to know what exactly it is, or why it is, all I need to know is where the boundary of safety is. Where the envelope ends. And now I know.

I'll show you tomorrow. Whenever that is.


///Talvin Singh - "Soni" ...and then...