Codec For Happiness (Laugh Lines)

Everybody tries to suggest a wimpy haphazard. That’s the trick of it. Bolten steam or some such tetherers tips the bonny merry. All the I dos and don’ts don’t deem us simpletons. That’s what grandma always said. She would sit there, stone and silence until that laugh would crack and we’d be in stitches for hours, whispering our humor into our bones. _______________________________________________________________

Did you hear the one about...?_________________________________________________________

That one always got us, even when we didn’t get the joke. It was dirty, and we hadn’t even hit the teens yet.__

That lump of human affairs on the couch often hides the beliefs and bafflement of a film lover who choses the banality of a landscape to the frivolity of a face.________________________________________________

That’s grandma too.____________________________________________________________________

She was blind before I knew her, so she hadn’t seen most of the movies I had. I watch old movies now and again, and think that maybe they just didn’t see as good, back then, when an idea as old as an image was still young enough to seem fresh and somehow equally dead. Like an avocado you think is ripe, and when you open it, the brown mush of inedible disappointment.____________________________________________

She continues to hone her routine, though I usually only catch it on Christmas. She’s lately taken to really inappropriate jokes about the Jews and a certain type of sausage. She likes to combine any word she can think of with the addition of -meister. Noun-meister. God-meister. Fuck-meister. __________________________

I hear my sister never goes a Thanksgiving without gravy pouring out of her nose, so much so it’s become tradition._____________________________________________________________________________

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