The Jester
Lamar Deal
My Bad
I am more than a little sick of some of the phrases that we use without thinking. Sometimes it just seems easier to use some hackneyed trope than to dig a little deeper and use truly descriptive language. The thing that most appalls me is that I use these all the time. Here are a few shopworn shibboleths that I would like to see tied up in a gunnysack and lobbed into the nearest river.
“My bad…” That’s cute coming from a child but if you’re over four years old you need to drop this from your personal lexicon right this minute. This baby talk phrase gets trotted out to cover any faux pas from spilling salt to setting off a thermonuclear bomb. “Oops, my bad!” just doesn’t cut it, Osama.
“It’s all good…” No it ain’t. This is a sorry substitute for actual thought. This is usually used to cover moral ambiguities:
“Is that legal?”
“Chill, dude, it’s all good…”
…or to stop a barroom brawl:
“I’m gone *$&^ you up, fool!”
“Hey, man, it’s all good…”
SMACK!!
“Dang, I said it was all good…”
“That affects me how?” This is one of my wife’s pet phrases, although she denies it. I’m not even sure why this bothers me. Maybe because it’s so snarky. The phrase has a built in sneer that just really gets on…(see next line)
“My last remaining nerve…” This is one of my pet phrases. I’ve been using this for at least a couple of decades. I usually preface it with “You’re tap dancing on…” and follow it up with “and you’re wearing your jackhammer shoes…” I thought that was really funny once upon a time, but now it seems as contrived as it actually was back when I first started using it. Now it’s just dumb. Stop me before I use it again. Please.
“Threw him under the bus…” The first time I heard this phrase was when Rush Limbaugh used it to attack Barack Obama for distancing himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying that Obama “threw his white grandmother under the bus”. I’m sure that the phrase goes back further than that, but just the fact that Gas Bag Boy used it pretty much ruined it for me forever.
“That bites, sucks, blows, eats it, chews it” (or other orally fixated expression) As in “That phrase just totally bites the big one.” As opposed to partially biting the big one. Or the medium one or even the small one.
“Talk to the hand…” Talk to the finger. Yeah, that finger.
“Hel-lo?” This denotes total cluelessness, as in “Hel-lo? Are you that stupid?” sometimes accompanied by a tapping on the head as in “knock wood”. If the perpetrator just pretends to “knock wood” try to ignore it. If he actually “knocks wood” on your own private, personal noggin, as far as I’m concerned you can bust him one for his own good. Someday he’ll thank you for it.
“Well, duh!” Very like “Hel-lo?”. If you are in fact as dumb as “Well, duh!” implies, odds are you won’t be offended by the use of the phrase.
“She has issues…” …only if she’s a magazine. Otherwise she has problems. Or she’s as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. A lot of people have “issues” with the word “crazy”. To me, the word is perfectly serviceable and superbly descriptive; sometimes no other word will do. Take Jeffrey Dahmer for instance. He didn’t have “food issues”. He was “crazy” or as the psychologists say, “wiggetty-wiggetty-wack”.
“Drank the Kool-aid…” Generally refers to anyone’s willing co-operation in a stupid course of action. This goes back to the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 when 918 less than stable followers of the deranged Rev. Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid in what had to be one of the worst public relations nightmares ever for the manufacturers of a children’s drink.
“You must be confusing me with someone who gives a damn…” I don’t.
“Ya think?” This belongs in the same category as “Well, duh!” and “Hel-lo?” No, I don’t think. I use trite phrases like “Ya think?” to keep from thinking. Duh.
“__________ challenged” or “________ impaired” I know this was first used with the best of intentions. The word retarded had become a pejorative; such an insult that mental health professionals coined the terms “mentally impaired” and “intellectually challenged”. Then somebody made a crack about short people being “vertically challenged” and pretty soon anybody who was different was “this challenged” or “that impaired”. Enough already. It’s no longer funny.
Well, that’s my rant for this week. Hey, it’s all good. If you’re humor impaired or have issues with my opinions, my bad. Talk to the hand. I mean hel-lo? Ya think?
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
GREETINGS FROM WORLD HEADQUARTERS
If you've stumbled onto this site you may be asking yourself, "Just who the hell is this guy and why should I care?" Okay, maybe you wouldn't ask yourself that. I would ask that, but then who am I? You begin to see where that line of questioning can go.
I'm just some schlub who has dabbled in this and that, as opposed to having had any kind of realistic goals. As child of the Space Age (that was before the MySpace Age) I wanted to be an astronaut, until I found out that actual work was involved. Then I wanted to be a cartoonist, largely because I was the best cartoonist at Byron Elementary School. Sad to relate, I spent the next 25 years pursuing art as a career only to discover that I had pretty much peaked in the third grade. Still, I managed to make some money along the way.
I jumped on the standup comedy bandwagon in the early 1980s in Atlanta and took mediocrity to a whole new level. This was at the urging of my good friend Dr. Emil Fazuil*, who was drunk at the time. So was I. I worked with a lot of pretty big names before they became famous. One or two of them might remember me vaguely, vague being a fairly accurate description of my act. I might have succeeded but for a lack of insane ambition. I had the talent, I think, but I wasn't willing to work to acquire the skills.
I was 27 when I first got the comedy bug. At the outset standup comedy looks like a pretty good deal. It's the only job I know of that allows you to drink on the job, it's a great way to meet women and, at the top, the pay is crazy good, hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour. Even on the lowest rungs you can make 20 or 30 bucks a minute. The downside is sometimes you might have a 14 hour drive to work. A few years of that and a day job starts to look not quite so horrible. See, the thing is, from out there in the audience, standup looks easy. It ain't.
*Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I don't know very many innocent people.
I'm just some schlub who has dabbled in this and that, as opposed to having had any kind of realistic goals. As child of the Space Age (that was before the MySpace Age) I wanted to be an astronaut, until I found out that actual work was involved. Then I wanted to be a cartoonist, largely because I was the best cartoonist at Byron Elementary School. Sad to relate, I spent the next 25 years pursuing art as a career only to discover that I had pretty much peaked in the third grade. Still, I managed to make some money along the way.
I jumped on the standup comedy bandwagon in the early 1980s in Atlanta and took mediocrity to a whole new level. This was at the urging of my good friend Dr. Emil Fazuil*, who was drunk at the time. So was I. I worked with a lot of pretty big names before they became famous. One or two of them might remember me vaguely, vague being a fairly accurate description of my act. I might have succeeded but for a lack of insane ambition. I had the talent, I think, but I wasn't willing to work to acquire the skills.
I was 27 when I first got the comedy bug. At the outset standup comedy looks like a pretty good deal. It's the only job I know of that allows you to drink on the job, it's a great way to meet women and, at the top, the pay is crazy good, hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour. Even on the lowest rungs you can make 20 or 30 bucks a minute. The downside is sometimes you might have a 14 hour drive to work. A few years of that and a day job starts to look not quite so horrible. See, the thing is, from out there in the audience, standup looks easy. It ain't.
*Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I don't know very many innocent people.
Monday, January 18, 2010
This is for the Jesup Press Sentinel. I'll be doing a column for them which will appear the first Saturday of each month, or until I piss someone off. I'm just saying.
Model Citizen
I haven’t always been the model citizen I appear to be today. I was talking to Ware County Sheriff Randy Royal the other day and it occurred to me that back in the day, any interaction that I might have had with law enforcement would likely have started with blue lights and a siren.
“Could you step out of the car, sir?”
“No, sir, I could not. I could prolly fall out…”
Why is it the only time anybody calls me “sir”, it means I’m in trouble?
It’s the same way with ”Mister Deal”.
“Mr. Deal, could you recite the alphabet backwards for me, please?”
“Okay, you go first…” Seriously, how fair is that? “Recite the alphabet backwards…” What if you’re dyslexic? I’ll tell you what the officer won’t like: turning your back and singing, “A, B, C, D…” I cannot emphasize enough just how much the officer won’t like it.
The fact is I just can’t believe that I’m a grownup. I don’t mean that the same way my wife can’t believe it, like when I watch Spongebob Squarepants. I mean in the sense of “Hey, Baby Boomer, you’re in charge now! That’s right Mr. Big Talk; you! What’s that? How does the economy work? You knew when you were 16, didn’t you?!? You knew everything back then, didn’t you, Smart Guy?”
And I did. Mark Twain once allegedly said (and if he didn’t say it, he should have), “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I am not as quick to learn as Mr. Clemens, but more and more I see the point. A lot of what I used to know, I only thought I knew. A lot of the rest, I can’t remember.
As to why I can’t remember? Let me put it this way: I don’t worry much about microwaves from my cell phone burning out brain cells. Any brain cells that I didn’t kill off back in the seventies are natural born survivors. After I’m dead those brain cells will climb out of the grave, like roaches. Zombie brain cells…
I’m amazed that my g-g-g-generation is allowed to drive cars without supervision, much less vote in Presidential elections, perform surgery and fly airplanes. I have a lot more faith in Gen-Xers than I do in my own age group. They can’t possibly be more dangerous to themselves or to the world at large than we were.
I’m sure some of you may be thinking, “Not me! I never did that kind of stuff! Humph!”
Humph, indeed. Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but if I were a betting man (and I am) I’d bet that 80% of the male population born between 1946 and 1965 has something in their past that they don’t want their kids or grandkids to know about. Any takers?
Model Citizen
I haven’t always been the model citizen I appear to be today. I was talking to Ware County Sheriff Randy Royal the other day and it occurred to me that back in the day, any interaction that I might have had with law enforcement would likely have started with blue lights and a siren.
“Could you step out of the car, sir?”
“No, sir, I could not. I could prolly fall out…”
Why is it the only time anybody calls me “sir”, it means I’m in trouble?
It’s the same way with ”Mister Deal”.
“Mr. Deal, could you recite the alphabet backwards for me, please?”
“Okay, you go first…” Seriously, how fair is that? “Recite the alphabet backwards…” What if you’re dyslexic? I’ll tell you what the officer won’t like: turning your back and singing, “A, B, C, D…” I cannot emphasize enough just how much the officer won’t like it.
The fact is I just can’t believe that I’m a grownup. I don’t mean that the same way my wife can’t believe it, like when I watch Spongebob Squarepants. I mean in the sense of “Hey, Baby Boomer, you’re in charge now! That’s right Mr. Big Talk; you! What’s that? How does the economy work? You knew when you were 16, didn’t you?!? You knew everything back then, didn’t you, Smart Guy?”
And I did. Mark Twain once allegedly said (and if he didn’t say it, he should have), “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I am not as quick to learn as Mr. Clemens, but more and more I see the point. A lot of what I used to know, I only thought I knew. A lot of the rest, I can’t remember.
As to why I can’t remember? Let me put it this way: I don’t worry much about microwaves from my cell phone burning out brain cells. Any brain cells that I didn’t kill off back in the seventies are natural born survivors. After I’m dead those brain cells will climb out of the grave, like roaches. Zombie brain cells…
I’m amazed that my g-g-g-generation is allowed to drive cars without supervision, much less vote in Presidential elections, perform surgery and fly airplanes. I have a lot more faith in Gen-Xers than I do in my own age group. They can’t possibly be more dangerous to themselves or to the world at large than we were.
I’m sure some of you may be thinking, “Not me! I never did that kind of stuff! Humph!”
Humph, indeed. Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but if I were a betting man (and I am) I’d bet that 80% of the male population born between 1946 and 1965 has something in their past that they don’t want their kids or grandkids to know about. Any takers?
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