HUMOR? I PREFER MINE BLACK

Not long ago, I sent this meme to a group of people I thought would enjoy it (and get it.) All but one of the recipients thought it was absolutely hilarious. The exception thought it was "sick" and did not like it at all.

Now, I am the kind of person who recoils from the very thought of having a human being in my freezer. UGH, how disgusting! But, in the context at left, it does strike me as uproariously funny.

It takes a special kind of depraved mind to appreciate sick jokes. Depraved but intelligent and witty as all hell. And who on earth would take a joke like this seriously anyway? Someone who's too serious for their own good, that's who.

As a kid, I was a big fan of Charles Addams, loved Alfred Hitchcock's demented but brilliant mind, and never failed to gravitate toward irreverent people. My father and maternal grandfather may have had something to do with that, given their eccentric and wickedly funny sense of humor. And I know both Grandpa and Dad would have thought the above screwball meme was hysterical.

My grandfather was the King of Practical Jokes...placing a garishly-painted coconut head in my mother's bed, and lighting a cigarette in its mouth as soon as he heard her at the front door, returning home from a date. Or, knowing how afraid she was of certain things, asking her to "please get something from my room." And when she opened the door, Grandpa had let ALL his pet birds out of their cages, one of her worst fears come true. Now that may seem 'cruel' to some people, but not me! I still crack up whenever I think of it.

My father was another character, coming up with answers that no one else could ever think of. When I first noticed Les Paul and Mary Ford's 'overdubbing' (multiple voices on a recording) I asked my father "How do they do that?"

He replied, "Well, they line up a whole bunch of microphones in the studio and then Mary Ford RUNS back and forth as she's singing..." In an attempt at conversation, he once asked my first boyfriend "So, do you like feetsball?" Poor guy didn't have a clue that he meant football until I told him.

So, with these two influences (genetic and otherwise) my own sometimes macabre way of viewing life may have come into being. And growing up in a screwball neighborhood, Little Italy in the Bronx, circa-1950s, certainly contributed something too. Wise cracks were a way of life. The quick comeback was essential if you wanted to be accepted (and in some cases, stay alive!) We were all irreverent kids, and some of us never grew up.

Getting back to the present, my one extremely brief experience with marriage does give me a special appreciation for having "more space on the sofa."

MWAAHAHAHAAAAAHAHHAAHA.....

MOM, YOU CAN REST EASY NOW...

...your worst critic is dead. I called the nursing home yesterday and was told "Oh, she's long gone" but nobody would tell me the date she joined you in the hereafter ~ in a decidedly different location, I'm sure.

Your beloved younger brother went through hell on earth after he married this woman (I can still hear a faint shotgun echo...) and then she gave birth to two children, first a daughter and then a son ~ my first cousins, older than I was but always adored and loved by me. I became extremely close with the boy cousin, who left us too early in 1993.

And given the family history of Alzheimer's Disease ~ grandmother, all of her aunts, and mother ~ who knows how long the daughter has until she, too, descends into that terrifying netherworld we cannot possibly comprehend? Last I heard, she was living in a permanent state of panic that she, in all likelihood, will be next in line.

Karma is a very mysterious thing.

It wasn't until we moved into your brother and his wife's building in the early 90s that I came to know some very unpleasant things about your brother's family. Disgustingly racist, utterly ignorant if not downright stupid, vicious gossips, and disrespectful to the MAX, they came and went, eating their mother's meals (and YOUR home-baked cakes) giving her every conceivable job to do, be it sewing, cooking, whatever, and never really appreciating anything at all. Very classy, treating your own parents like that. Not to mention how they "forgot," year after year, their parents' birthdays.

Why I expected anything more from them toward you remains a mystery, but after your brother died in 1995, their true colors really came flying out, and they were UGLY. I'm glad you caught on and went your own way after years of insults and disrespectful behavior.

It was only after you were gone that I discovered something I had never known before, and remembering how ultra-sensitive you were about your looks, I too left them in the dust...but not before telling them what a truly despicable group of people they are.

When I heard that Girl Cousin and her cockeyed husband had been mocking your looks for as long as they were married (told to me, and tolerated by, your first-born daughter for her own selfish reasons) my brain froze with white-hot anger. I sent them a blistering message, accompanied by this beautiful picture of you from 1944, and told them to slap it up against their own mothers' pictures and then get back to me.

Of course, they never did. How could they? Their own late son (lots of death in that family...) once told me he had "never seen an uglier family than his maternal grandmother's."

Daddy always told us "Don't make fun of nature, people cannot help the way they're born" and so it pains me to even repeat words like "ugly" when describing another human being. I don't judge people by their "looks" ~ I look into their hearts, their souls, and then decide what kind of person they are.

And now that their Matriarch is finally gone, I can honestly say that looking into this family's 'heart' was like a glimpse into hell itself. As for their soul, they don't have one.

WHO THE HELL DESIGNS THESE THINGS?

This is a quickie, because when I'm cranky or particularly annoyed by something, I like to complain.

Lately, every time I go shopping, I am reluctantly drawn into an infuriating game of Dominoes...touch one item, and everything else on the shelf behind and around it falls down, like little tin soldiers all in a line.

That is because the geniuses currently designing containers have apparently decided that the "sleek" look is the in thing...never mind that it's the consumer who keeps the company in business.

I currently use a hair gel that is bottled in the ridiculous way represented by the left two illustrations. And even at home, these unbalanced bottles/containers have to be stored against a wall or propped up in some way so they don't fall over since they are so top-heavy and cumbersome.

Hair gel isn't the only victim of this stupidity. Shampoo, dish detergent, body wash ~ you name it, they're all in sleek (and unbalance-able) containers that constantly fall over at the most inconvenient time (while you're trying to actually USE them) often spilling some of the contents, which only increases the annoyance factor.

Hey, I'm a senior citizen living on Social Security ONLY, I can't afford to lose 1/4 of an OUNCE because something I've purchased is ill-designed (but SLEEK!)

Whatever happened to common sense? I believe I last saw it around 1959...