I'm too evolved for your "humor".

     WARNING! POOR TASTE FOLLOWS!    
    I seriously believe that my sense of humor has evolved light years ahead of most everyone else. This is because sometimes I will say something so incredibly funny, so diabolically witty, that other people's fragile psyches just can't accept it. While I laugh hysterically, sometimes other people will just furrow their brow in an effort to keep their brains from literally exploding and oozing out of their nose. I think I was born with this enlightened sense of humor, and sometimes, it is a sorry burden that I bare.
    Let me turn your thoughts back to my youth, and I shall endeavor to relate the first time that this gift of mine became apparent.
    I was a band geek in High School. Except in my school, that made you one of the cool kids. Really, it's true. We even had groupies. I also had a mullet, so I was basically burying the needle on the awesome scale.
    I was also in Pep band. Pep band is for geeks who think that kids who take choir still drink breast milk. And if you were a madrigal, there's a good chance that a member of the Pep band slept with your mom.
    One of the songs we had to learn for Pep band was "Louie Louie". This was your basic pep band fare, and if you couldn't learn this song in one day, you had two choices: the percussionists could either practice on your face, or you could go listen to the madrigals. Most people chose the face drumming.
   The version of "Louie Louie" that we played was by the group, The Kingsmen. Remember that. It's vital to this stupid story.
   So one day I found myself in seminary, quite by accident I'm sure. We were reading about two ancient groups of people. One group wanted to elect judges as their form of  government. They called themselves the Freemen. The other group wanted to raise a king, and they called themselves the Kingsmen. I know what you're thinking! You're thinking, "Oh Grim...you didn't." Well the answer, gentle reader, is that I sure as poopy did!
   As soon as the kid reading said the words "The Kingsmen", my overactive neurons fired off an alert that an impending joke was making it's way across the peaks and valleys of my brainmeats, and would soon be exiting somewhere around my vocal cords. As you can see, I had no control over this outcome whatsoever. In a loud clear voice, I said to the rest of the class, "Hey didn't they sing Louie Louie??"

   Silence.

   Nothing. Not even crickets, like you hear in movies.
   For the next few seconds, I could barely contain myself. My brain was on a comedic high. I marveled at my own sheer genius and struggled to maintain my mortality from the transcendent comedic value! I have never guffawed before, but had I had some encouragement, I might have experienced an actual guffaw!
But no, these slope headed mutants in my class just looked at me as if I had just recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Swahili or something.
I just sorta slunk down in my chair and tried to look as un-genius and inconspicuous as possible.

There were innumerable other episodes like this to follow, but what finally drove the point home was when my wife, as a reaction to my teasing her about something, hit me in the head with a loaf of garlic bread and I told her I was going to call the cops to report an assault with a "breadly" weapon.
Breadly...weapon.
Yes I said it, and I think I squirted Coke out of my nose shortly thereafter because I laughed about it for like three weeks after that. My wife, of course, gave me this deadpan look, turned, and walked out of the room.
This is when I finally came to the conclusion that my sense of humor must be just too evolved for mere mortals.
Sad really. But I take it one day at a time, you know.

The Small Things

     If you were to die today, how many people do you think would notice and or care? Can you count them on one hand?
     Are you sure about that?
     For the past several years, a man named Tom has walked past my desk at work and stopped to chat. He is usually smiling and does his best to come up with a funny story to tell me. These stories are some times of his past, some times of things that have happened recently. The humor is not in the subject matter so much, but in their telling, of which only a middle aged black man from the south would be capable.
     I learned of his cat, "Boris-Anne", so named because Tom thought that Boris was a great name for a male cat until the vet informed him that Boris was female.
     I was told of the time he decided that the tires of his truck were low. He pulled into a gas station and up to the air hose. After putting air in one tire, he used a tire gauge to check the psi. This is what confused him. He saw "psi" and wondered what that meant.
"So ah thought to mahsef, hmmmm. Oh ah know! Put. Some. In!"
Sometime later he was informed that psi stood for pounds per square inch, at this he looked at me with his eyes wide, put both hands flat on my desk, bent his knees and said, "Ah dint know!!"
   These stories were usually prefaced by his usual greeting of, "Ah think you should jus' go ahead and go home. Ain't nobody gonna know you left. Jus' put yo stuff on the des' with a note that says 'Use it if ya need it'."
Sometimes after that he would look at the picture of the director, hanging on the wall (her name was Debbie and he wasn't fond of her) and say, "Ah still think we should play 'Hide Debbie'! Ah'd jus' hide her picture in someone's cubicle and they'd siddown and see her picture and go 'AHHHHHHHH!!!'" Again, with his eyes wide and knees bent. He also might, once again, invite me to go with him to Draper the following Saturday to visit his "friend" in prison. This friend was convicted of double homicide. I would always turn down Tom on this offer, and he would always try to argue reasons why it would be fun.
   Occasionally he would have to talk to customer support from some company or another, and after getting frustrated with the person to whom he was talking (he'd tell me) he'd "Tell that witch that if she dint hep me, I'd drive down there and pull out her hair weave!" This while making grasping motions with one hand.
   At one point, he made sure to teach me the "I Don't Care Song", which consisted of one verse, sung over and over while bobbing up and down and from side to side: "I don't care. I don't care. Zoom zoom zoom. Bing Bing Bing." This was the song to sing when dealing with people who usually needed their hair weaves pulled out.
   When he saw that he either needed to go home or get back to work, whichever the case, he would wave to me and say, "Well, ah guess ah'd betta go before they catch me. See yaaa!"
   I started dating my wife in August of 2003. I was just beginning to get to know Tom then and he would ask how things were going with us, on occasion. Sarah and I were later engaged and I gave Tom an invitation to the reception. I remember being at the reception and seeing his bald, bespectacled head come down the walk to the reception center. He was impeccably dressed, as he was a man with class. He came in, expressed his congratulations to my wife and I, and sat down at a table next to my 86-ish year old grandmother.
   My grandmother was raised in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho and still had the mentality of a depression -era survivor. She had not a single prejudiced bone in her body. However, when and where she was raised, people of different ethnicity did not mingle.
   And here was Tom sitting next to her, giving the place some needed color (and I don't mean just his skin) to all of us stiff white folk. I think Tom sensed that my Grandmother was a little uncomfortable, because (as I later found out from both of them) he very politely looked at her and said, "And how are you?" My Grandmother replied, "I'm very good, thank you."
To which, Tom replied, "Would you like to dance?" while pointing at the dance floor. My Grandmother didn't know what to think until Tom gave just a slight smirk. My grandmother then burst out laughing and continued until she was in tears. Later on, at work, Tom told me "She was a lovely woman, and ah was jus' bein' polite."
Tom gave my wife and I an 85 dollar rotisserie as a wedding gift.

Tom died of heart complications two days after Christmas. He'd had a heart valve replacement and had come back to work for half days, after three months recovery, and appeared to be his normal self, along with some new stories about how he had given the nurses a difficult time.
The following is what pains me: Tom had no family. Apparently, for reasons that are not important, his family had disowned him and he moved to Utah, never speaking to them again. This was roughly 30 years ago. He was alone every Christmas and Thanksgiving. When he died, no relative could be found to claim his body and the mortuary had to take responsibility. His next door neighbor had to be named executor for his estate, and his emergency contact information was his work address and phone. His friends, his coworkers, cleaned out his desk with tears streaming down their faces.
It could, of course, be said that Tom's family was us. But the tragedy is that I don't know if he knew that. I think, because of his reluctance to get really personal with anybody, that for some, he is a case of 'don't know what you got till it's gone.' And I find that to be almost unbearable.
Everybody matters, to somebody. Even if it's the person at whom you smile when you walk in to work. It is the small things, that make you memorable.

I'll miss you, my friend. Thank you, and go ahead and go, before they catch you.

http://obitsutah.com/show_obit.php?id=4278

"Ja Gitcher Deer??"

   Before I get into the meat of this offering (pun intended), I need to preface it by stating that I'm fine with other people hunting. I subscribe to Ted Nugent's opinions on the matter, but I do not, myself, hunt.
   When I was younger, I spied a little birdie perched atop a tall pine tree and figured I might be able to shoot it with the  .22 pump I had in my hands.
    I was right. The bird landed in front of me, and only then did I notice how pretty it was, or had been. Meanwhile my friend, who was over by the beaver pond, had discovered the wonders of shooting little tweety birds with a 12 gauge shotgun. Later on, another person in our group was successful in his attempt to shoot, but unsuccessful in his attempt to kill, a chipmunk.
   And years of therapy later, I don't hunt...but I don't have a problem with those that do.
   This is Utah, after all. Kids are actually let out of school early and given days off to go hunt. It's under the guise of "Fall Break", but we all know what it's for.

   I don't understand why non hunting kids can't get their own semi holiday. It would have been nice to get days off of school for Playstation practice, girl oogling, or even mullet grooming. (Remember, I went to High School during the mid nineties. 'Nuff said.)
   So anyway, I was at work and had woke up long enough to go the men's room. As I opened the door, I heard this from the nearby break room: "My son got his deer! He's been gone for weeks! We're so excited!"
   If you don't live in Utah and you decide you want to visit, but are worried about being spotted as an outsider, and you are visiting during the fall, all you have to do is greet most of the residents with the traditional Utah salutation: "Ja gitcher deer?"
   "Oh fine, thank you! Nice to meet you too!"
   That's right! In Utah, you get your very own deer! It's reserved just for you! You have to hunt him down, shoot him and gut him, but he's yours! YAY!
   On very bad days, people will say, "Tom is so sad, he didn't get his deer this year." This is followed by a collective sigh and shaking of heads and the passing of the Jell-O salad.
   Now because I don't hunt, I don't quite know how this works. I think it's a sort of secret they don't tell you until you pass the required hunter's safety class, but I'm guessing that you probably get into a lot of trouble if you shoot a deer that isn't yours. Yes, I see where the difficulty lies. How do they know to whom the deer belongs? The fact that this has remained a secret has done nothing more than leave ample room for my brainmeats to run and play. (I've been told that this is not always a wise move on my part.) Is the person's name shaved into the animal's fur or something? Well, based on things I've discovered but mostly made up, I think it is, and in big block letters.
   The man doing the shaving lives in a small shack on top of Mount Ogden and goes by the name of Randy Barbasol, or "Uncle Shavey" to his friends. He used to teach Hunter's Safety, until he received the Calling. Once a year, a secret dispatch of names is sent to him, and after he receives them, he stealthily shaves the names into the fur of sleeping deer. He's like a ninja, like that, only he doesn't bathe very often.

   Now, this is why hunter's spend so much money on rifle scopes: they have to make sure that they get THEIR deer! If they shoot a deer that doesn't have their name shaved into it, then they have to go to court and appear before Ted Nugent, where his band plays "Cat Scratch Fever" as he pronounces sentence. If you are pronounced guilty, you are locked in a room with Justin Bieber, and the Jonas Brothers bring you rice cakes and Kentucky Fried Spam for lunch.
   This also explains why hunters are sometimes gone for long periods of time. They are most likely doing time for shooting other people's deer, and being forced to listen to Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers in a "jam" session.
   Except for the brave few souls that were kicked out of Hunter's Safety class, but broke into the teacher's secret vault of secrets and then came forward with this information, we would have no insight into this intricate and deadly world of the hunter. We applaud them. Both of us.
   Also, so as not to offend any serious hunters out there who may find themselves  bored out of their skulls one night and might happen to stumble across this post, or any that were sent here on dare, I offer the following video, in hopes that it may restore the respect and solemnity they feel in living at one with nature, which they might feel has been somehow mocked in this most serious and thought provoking look into their world:




   

Second Week Of Deer Camp - Da Yoopers