KaraokeFanboy 101B
A few months ago, I celebrated 100 posts on my other blog, so I thought to begin the next hundred with “KaraokeFanboy 101,” a treatise of my general belief system. As I was writing the first two of these four perspectives, I decided to divide the diatribe in half, mostly because I was due to meet my old buddy Booth and his wife for dinner in the midst of the San Diego Comic Con, but also because the effort was an emotional drain. You try summarizing your life into four concise, meaningful maxims! It isn’t as easy as it seems.
Retrospectively, why four, I wonder? As I wrap up my twenty-eighth year of existence, the penultimate year of my twenties, perhaps my subconscious was trying to divide my life into a neat quartet of quandaries, each with its own proverbial Aesop-esque moral. Does my first point reflect my first seven years, while the second exposes the cumulative revelations of years eight through fourteen? The forthcoming #3 does reference my freshmen year of high school, and, though I was technically thirteen, who says this is a fine science, that we can’t allow for a little overlap? Seven is only the perfect number, and the best things in life come in fours (i.e. the Monkees, the Golden Girls, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles et. al.), so twenty-eight makes for the perfect age to draft one’s worldview. Again, really, you should try it.
Incidentally, this isn’t “KaraokeFanboy 202.” This is “KaraokeFanboy 101B.” I have much bigger things planned for “KaraokeFanboy 202.” It’s an advanced course. Until then, pass this:
3. Your best sense is your sixth: your sense of humor. On my first day of high school, my first period Seminar teacher Mr. Poslaiko asked a terrified room of sleepy-eyed freshmen, "If a baby is born without any of its five senses, would it still know anything?" His inquiry quickly reminded me of comedian Rick Reynolds’ eyeball joke, which had become my favorite anecdote for nearly everything:
“A man is pacing in the waiting room of a hospital. His wife is in the delivery room having a baby. This couple has already had a few children, but they’d all been terribly deformed, so naturally the man is concerned about the safety of his wife and newborn. The doctor enters with a look of consternation on his face and says, “Sir, would you still love your child if he were, say, missing an arm or a leg?”
“Of course I would!” the man replies. “Just take me to my wife and baby!”
“Well, brace yourself and follow me.”
The doctor leads the man down a long corridor and finally they enter the delivery room, where the man sees his wife in bed holding a blanketed bundle in her arms. He walks up to her, kisses her on the forehead, and moves aside the blanket to reveal (gasp) a huge, ten pound eyeball.
“Oh, my God!” the man cries. “How can this get any worse?”
The doctor replies, “He’s blind.”
That joke has it all! Most of all, it combines the cornerstones of humor -- an exploitation of what we can see and the potential ironies of what we cannot understand or control. It’s the observational comedy of Jerry Seinfeld meets the existential tomfoolery Andy Kaufman. It’s “Why did the chicken cross the road?” meets “Who’s on first?”
When I was nine or ten years old, a rather sweaty fat man jogged past our street just as we pulled out of the driveway, and my mother commented with her well practiced sarcasm, “You’re gonna have to jog a little more than that, buddy.” Yes, the poor guy was that fat, and my mom’s quip was so quick and accurate that it instantly instilled in me an appreciation for exploitation as humor. Imagine the lines a real ten pound eyeball of a kid might inspire! “I bet he’ll make a great pupil in school!” “Gross! Somebody put a lid on that thing!” “How are you gonna punish your son, by lashing him?” Yet, the eyeball itself isn’t the eyeball joke’s punch line . . .
No, the joke comes from the doctor’s sudden revelation: “He’s blind.” If you laugh at that cruelty, according to Reynolds, you’re a born asshole, but that’s beside the point. It’s funny because it’s unexpected; as a holodeck-generated Joe Piscopo explained to Data in a second season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, such unexpected, uncontrollable misdirection can be hilarious.
Mr. Poslaiko, I still don’t know if that senseless baby would know anything, but I hope that poor ten pound eyeball would be able to look at itself in the mirror and laugh. Or cry. Probably cry. What else could it do? At least a pack of Kleenex is cheaper than a box of Huggies.
4. Power to the people. Never doubt the power of “the team.” Very few successful ventures are accomplished alone; very few stories star a single protagonist, and those that do often end in tragedy. Childhood tales featuring the perils of Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood subtly teach us the dangers of going it alone, while, if you believe in the Bible, even the Son of God needed a good dozen friends to accomplish his mission. Sherlock Holmes needs his Dr. Watson to pen his cases, Vladimir need Estragon to wait for Godot, and Batman needs his Robin -- even after one grows up and another gets blown up, Batman needs his Robin.
(Incidentally, those are the three examples I used in an impromptu speech to win first place in the category at Arizona's state 4A Speech & Debate competition in 1996. The topic was a fortune cookie slip that read: "The best mirror is a good friend.")
My tenure as the director of an after school program reminds me of this lesson most consistently. When I first acquired my job, the negligence of my then-boss forced me to learn many lessons on my own; further, when I was under his wing, I quickly caught the stink of abused and misused power. Pardon the pun, but it was the pits. I won’t taint this treatise with those troubling times, only to say this: no one person is God’s gift to any righteous effort. I could master every activity my after school program has to offer, from athletics to the arts, but what can that knowledge accomplish when 100 kids come barreling down the door? What can even the most capable of us do for such a diverse majority? Sure, I can play basketball with the kids, no problem, but the sport itself isn’t as important as the connection they’d see between a genuine athlete and the game. Also, what of the 70 or so kids uninterested in basketball? Enter the arts expert, the board games expert, etc. The idea is, once I’ve led my team toward a standard of general excellence in our program (the details of which I describe in another blog), my calling in sick on any given day shouldn’t effect its success . . . but if they call in sick? I’m screwed.
To be clear, I’m not talking about a mob mentality here. The quality of the people is just as important as the quantity. Consider the bumpersticker that has hung above my beloved childhood desk since I picked it up in Santa Monica almost ten years ago: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world -- Margaret Mead.” The key words are thoughtful and committed, implying intent and longevity -- quality. Another philosopher put it just as well; the great Colonel Hannibal Smith, at the end of the second season A-Team episode “Deadly Maneuvers,” in which some mutual enemies team up to take down our heroic fugitives as a proverbial anti-A-Team. Of course, the baddies fail, and Smith quips to their leader, “Now the next time you think you want to take somebody out, pal, don’t get yourself a squad. Get yourself a team.” Cue explosion. Best episode ever.
Yet “power to the people” transcends this interpretation and has attained a much more spiritual significance for me, as well. I’ve never really documented this, but when I graduated high school I moved to Southern California to become a preacher. Now, when some teenagers leave home for the first time, they experiment with drugs, or perhaps indulge in promiscuous sex, to deal with stress and homesickness. Me, I turned to something much more dangerous, based on the reactions of my private Christian college’s administration -- I developed a propensity . . . for pranks. My new friends and I pulled off some incredible capers (though nothing compares to Phoenix’s Nativity Nightmare of 1999), one of which got us arrested, and several of which almost had me expelled, and during this disciplinary process, I developed a distaste for “the religious institution.” Considering the frequently touted imperfection of Man, I struggled with how any one man could judge another, from the miniscule musings of a Bart Simpson-like prankster, to the grander schemes of sexual orientation or political affiliation. I guess I projected my sense of betrayal and victimization at the hands of those ultraconservative administrators toward anyone else that might’ve felt a similar (or probably more dire) sense of oppression. I mean, didn’t those deans experience outbursts of antiauthoritarianism when they first left home? So who cares if I put a toilet in the university pool, compared to the other things I could’ve done?
Of course, other environmental factors contributed to my denunciation of religion -- for example, living in a dorm with the same dudes that led our worship services. Try taking anyone leading an auditorium in a chorus of “Our God is an Awesome God” seriously when just the night before you dumbfoundedly watched him tenaciously try to slap his roommate’s scrotum. Because that isn’t worse than my stealing the campus Christmas tree. Also, I read DC Comics’ Vertigo title Preacher, which, among many other things, emphasizes the hypocrisy of a god addicted to love from his creation yet denies them the same chance to be as selfish. Finally, these meandering thoughts found harmony thanks to a line from the Face to Face song “Handout,” which claims, “Why won’t you believe that you’re the same as me?” I’ve since concluded that everybody has the same needs, the need for love and acceptance, for creative expression and comprehension, for establishing a legacy, and honestly religion offers that to many people. Me, while denouncing religion, I was simultaneously discovering my desire to work with kids, which epitomizes these needs in everyone and fulfills them in me just fine.
Which brings us full circle, and right up to today.
As I conclude this diatribe (which took much longer to write than it was worth, but which was also very rewarding in its retrospective introspection), I wonder if any of these relatively simple tenets are subject to change. Is twenty-eight years old too young to claim such a concise, four-fold grip on life? Or perhaps it’s just the opportune time to write down some conclusions, reserving the right to maintain an open mind for change? I mean, I hope I have plenty of life left to change my mind. I mean, who knows what starting a family might do to any of these thoughts? Who knows if one day my own child will read this blog and, whether or not I’ve changed my worldview or lifestyle, get a better idea of who their father was . . . and who they can be, too?