beautiful, funny, sad & true

It’s safe to say that I have been a Monty Python fanatic for most of my life, starting when I was about thirteen years old.  My brother and I, when we used to visit Dad, had a tiny black-and-white television in the bedroom we shared.  Dad would say goodnight to us and head upstairs to bed, and he expected us to do the same.  What he didn’t know, however, was that at eleven-thirty Monty Python’s Flying Circus came on, and so did other similar British ‘programmes’ like Doctor Who and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  We watched these shows at an almost but not entirely inaudible volume level, and parked ourselves on the floor, about a foot away from the tiny monochromatic screen.

When we were at Mom’s house in Yakima, which was the majority of the time, Flying Circus wasn’t available on TV there, so we went into a kind of withdrawal.  We rented the videos about a hundred million times, and I even made audio cassettes of the movies by laboriously holding a microphone up to the TV speaker so that I could constantly listen and memorize the dialogue between our viewings of the movies.  I was obsessed.

My obsession seemed only to get stronger and stronger, and it lasted well into my college years.  I would inject Monty Python quotations into pretty much every conversation, and since their range is so broad, it’s surprisingly easy to find quotes that are apropos to a myriad of subjects.  I used to pride myself on my knowledge of their trivia, and I was just enough of an a-hole that if someone dared make the egregious mistake of misquoting the Masters, I would actually correct the person.  The most commonly misquoted line I’ve encountered is one from the Black Knight scene in that movie about the search for a grail.  The Knight gets his arms and legs chopped off by King Arthur, but his fearlessly vigilant head and torso are still attempting to stop Arthur from crossing the bridge the Knight is guarding.

Despite massive blood loss and a complete lack of appendages, the indomitable Knight continues to hurl insults at King Arthur as Arthur and his servant walk across the hilariously puny bridge and go along their merry way.  “You yellow bastards,” the Knight yells over his shoulder.  “Come back and take what’s coming to you!  I’ll bite your legs off!“  The line, “I’ll bite your legs off” has somehow found its way into the public vernacular as, “I’ll cut your head off,” which A) doesn’t make sense, and B) isn’t funny.  That kind of thing used to drive me crazy, and I never hesitated to correct the offender.

All through high school and college, I had the reputation of being the Monty Python expert in my little social circle, but after a while, that kind of thing tends to get on peoples’ nerves.  I remember a couple of friends telling me in no uncertain terms that for once they would like to have a Python-free conversation.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Sliding Doors (and you should, it’s excellent), you may remember the fast-talking, witty Scottish guy Gwyneth Paltrow falls for.   He’s an obsessive MP quoter too, and there’s one scene in which he and she are at a dinner party, which he becomes the life of by quoting a huge chunk of the entire Spanish Inquisition scene, verbatim.  I couldn’t find the Sliding Doors clip, but I think a picture of the Inquisition will be enough to jog your memory.

So the guy is sitting there at the table quoting the entire scene.   Everyone is at rapt attention, hanging on his every word, laughing uproariously at the salient points.   I’ve been That Guy, and I’m here to tell you that real life doesn’t work that way.  People start to get annoyed if all you do is quote things, or if you don’t have anything of your own to add to a conversation.  They’ll quickly tire of talking with you and go talk with other people instead.  Funny how that works. . .and how long it took me to realize it.

There was a subsequent time in my life when I went through a rigorous training program I called (in my head, anyway) How To Be A Better Human.  Many people have had similar experiences; that sort of thing is one of the rites of passage toward being an adult.  I went through and found some of the areas of my life that weren’t working; there were quite a few at the time, I can assure you.  I’ll spare you the details for another time, but one of the habits I decided to break was the constant quoting of Monty Python.  I made a pact with myself that I would never do it again, since I had spent so many years doing it.  As a corollary, if I heard someone misquote a line or two, I was prepared to let that slide.  Life’s too short for that kind of pedantry.

Fast forward about fifteen years, and along comes Monty Python Day.  Everyone on Facebook is quoting and having a good time, and it IS fun.  But when I chime in (and I DO chime in!), I have to admit that I have slightly mixed feelings about doing it, because it means I’m breaking my pact.  I suppose after this many years of good behavior, I can ease up a little bit and just enjoy it.  Who among us doesn’t like levity?

As proof of my love of levity, I’m embedding one of my favorite episodes:  the one with the Lifeboat/Cannibalism/Undertaker sketches in it.  My all-time favorite Python animation sequence is the ‘Cannibalism’ section in this clip, starting around the 3:40 mark.

All this being said, there will always be a special place in my heart (and probably my DNA, too, quite frankly) for the Pythons. They unwittingly played a huge part in the formation of my personality, and I owe them a great debt of gratitude. I “always look on the bright side of life” because of them.

There I go, breaking my pact.  Oh well.  No use biting my legs off about it.

I just found out that today is World Accordion Day, which means that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some pictures of my contribution to the cause.

The first part of this entry is kind of gross; I’m not gonna lie about that.  The good news is that it’s also really funny, and it’s about a joke I played on my brother when I was about fifteen years old.

We shared a big bedroom at Dad’s house.  One day, Brother was lying on his bed doing homework, and I was lying on my own bed reading a book.  He got up to take a break, or watch TV or something, and at the same time I got the urge to pass gas.  Being the older brother, it was my natural impulse to walk over and pass gas into his pillow.   I repeated that action as the need arose, and I thought it would be even funnier if I was able to really stink up his pillow as much as possible, so I took my shoes off and rubbed my smelly socks all over it, inside and out.

A few minutes later, Brother walked back into the room, and I was reading on my bed, as if nothing had changed.  He reclined on his bed, with one elbow on the offending pillow, and returned to his studies.  After a few minutes, he sniffed the air and said, “Do you smell something?  It smells weird over here.”

“Hunh,” I said, as casually as possible.  “I don’t notice anything.  Smells fine here.”  My bed was ten feet away from his.

He turned back to his books for a while, but then curiosity got the better of him again.  “No, really,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?  It’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.  “I don’t smell anything weird at all.”

He turned back, determined to find the source of the odor.  He sniffed up and down, then got a really strange look on his face as he looked toward his pillow.  That was the moment I’d been waiting for.  As he brought his nose closer and closer, the realization hit him, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Gross! What the heck did you do?” he asked, as he pulled off the pillowcase, smelled the pillow itself, and grimaced.

I was still laughing, but I finally pulled myself together enough to give him an answer.  “I might have farted on it a few times.  And I also might have slipped and accidentally rubbed my socks all over it too.  Yeah. . .I might’ve done that.”  I started laughing again.  He did too, as I recall.

A few years ago, I told a girl I was dating about The Pillow Incident, and she was slightly repulsed by it.  She saw the humor, but she also never quite believed that I wouldn’t do that sort of thing again.   I assured her that I wouldn’t, since I was thirty four years old, and she of all people had nothing to worry about.

Why am I telling that story now?  I’m not sure, exactly, but it came up in conversation with a friend the other day, so it had been bopping around in my brain lately, and I figured that I should tell it here too, under the heading of Childhood Stories.  I did learn that I shouldn’t tell that one when I’m on a date.  Not a very sexy story, as it turns out.  Ha ha.

One other funny childhood story (this one’s not gross, don’t worry) that took place in that bedroom was when my brother and I were wrestling one day, and it kept escalating and escalating, like it does sometimes between brothers.  We were joking around, pulling clothes and stuff out of each others’ dressers, and pretty soon we started pulling the blankets off of each others’ beds too.  It was all in fun, as if to say, “So, you wanna start something?  Okay, well, how about THIS?”  We kept one-upping each other, until all of our clothes, blankets, sheets, and mattress pads were strewn around the floor of the big bedroom.  We were laughing like hyenas, and my brother reached for my actual mattress and started to pull it from my bed frame.

That’s when Dad walked in.  He heard the commotion and came over to see what was going on.  His jaw dropped.  “What the hell are you guys doing?” he yelled.  “Clean this crap up now!”  His tone of voice broke the spell of our laughter, and we looked up, somewhat mortified, to see that we had completely destroyed the room.  Our beds were in a gigantic heap in the middle of the floor, and it looked as if a tornado had touched down in our room, but had spared the rest of the house.  He stood and watched us incredulously as we put everything back together.

That house was really great.  It was owned by family friends who went to our church.  Their aging mother lived in the house for decades, and our friends lived in the house up the hill.  She was in her eighties, and was starting to be unable to live alone anymore.  They wanted someone to live in her house, but they wanted it to be someone they knew.  It was a perfect situation.  They kept the rent low for us, and we happily moved in.

The house is over a hundred years old now, and it used to be the only house on the street.  It’s situated on the old Evergreen Highway in Vancouver, which runs right along the Columbia river.  We used to be able to walk down to the waterfront and play down there.  These days, all of the roads are private, and gated, and so far I’ve been unable to find a way down past the railroad tracks to the river.   Our old house is now surrounded by a group of newly built houses, and the wild, wooded hillside is now a sleepy cul-de-sac like a million others.

Such is the way in America, I suppose.  Open spaces don’t last long, particularly in Portland, where the Urban Growth Boundary is strictly enforced, and space is at a premium.  Vancouver doesn’t have a law like that, so urban sprawl is the order of the day, but this house is in a long-developed residential neighborhood, and we felt lucky to have had the opportunity to live there.

It’s probably worth mentioning that our bedroom at the time of these stories was in the bedroom on the back of the house, on the far left side of the picture.  The layout of the house changed sometimes, too, because at another point, we lived in the upstairs room and could look out over the river and the airport.  We even bought an airport radio and would sit up there for hours with binoculars and a notepad, writing down the names and flight numbers of the planes as they landed and took off.

If you’d told me when I started this entry that it would morph from a disgusting tale of pillow desecration into a nostalgic musing, I might not have believed you.  Yet here we are, and I stand by my choices.  For the record, I solemnly swear not to soil any more pillows, and I won’t tell that story on any more dates.  In fact, if I’m on a date, and you hear me start to launch into it, I hereby give you permission to step in and save me from myself.

In the interest of creating more levity, I’d like to share a little joke with you.

McCartney: Knock, knock.

Lennon: Who’s there?

McCartney: Fuck.

Lennon: Fuck who?

McCartney: No. . .fuck WHOM.

Ha ha. I should, of course, mention that I didn’t invent that particular joke. I did, however, choose the names of the characters involved, and I chose the picture and the following interesting video for this blog entry.

After all the heaviness lately, it’s time to get BFS&T back on track, and get some levity around here again.  Who among us doesn’t like levity?

I had a dream the other day in which I was having dinner with my Chinese-American girlfriend and her family.  She and her teenaged sister were both very Americanized, but her parents were not, and they spoke very little English.  We were spending the evening at an upscale Chinese restaurant in downtown Seattle, and a waitress was placing some miniature bowls on the table and making a rather elaborate show of gracefully spooning tiny ladels of seafood stew into each one.  We watched her closely, fascinated, and we each took turns sniffing the delicious stew and commenting on it as our respective bowls would appear at our places.

Somehow the subject of dopamine came up (you know, like it does), and I was trying to explain to my girlfriend’s dad about the various functionalities it has on the brain.  He was having a tough time understanding me, and I was having a tough time simplifying the terminology enough to get the ideas across, but we were both engaged in the conversation, and we were trying to communicate with each other as best we could.  At one point, I attempted to use the seafood stew as a visual aide, but even that was unsuccessful, so we finally agreed to just drop the subject of dopamine altogether and move on to something else.  “It’s really interesting, though,” I finished, a bit disappointed at having to give up on such a good topic.

Given the conversational choice between dopamine, politics, and religion, I’m gonna choose dopamine every time, even (and I daresay especially) on a dinner date with my girlfriend’s family, their tenuous grasp on the English language notwithstanding.