Angst and Humor

I'm kind of angst ridden again. My mother has to go in for a colonoscopy; the doctor thinks she might have colon cancer. I've just been reading all the websites on colon cancer I can find and wondering if I could conceivably sue her doctor for not sending her in for tests a month ago. Keep your fingers crossed, hold her in the light and all that good stuff, okay? It's possible that this isn't cancer but something far more easily treated, so let's all hope.

Meanwhile, in other news, I am angst ridden and I haven't even got a coherent reason for it. Yesterday I went to therapy and felt like I was getting nowhere, which may be because I was all embarrassed with myself for getting choked up in my last therapy session so this time I was determined to be cool and not whimper. I have a feeling that this is the wrong approach, you know, but what can one do? We talked at length about this dream I had a couple of days ago in which I had returned to 8th grade. It was a pretty cool dream, actually: I was sitting in an 8th grade classroom and explaining "Yeah, I'm 40, and I went through high school and college already, but I needed to just do 8th grade again." and everyone in the class was like, "Yeah, that makes sense." I love the logic of dreams. It's much better than the humor of dreams, which, as you know if you have ever tried to tell a dream world joke in waking life, is not translateable. You are laughing away, saying "And then, the bathtub cat and xlioermopismn! Ha ha ha ha!" to your friends who are looking at you with that mixture of pity and contempt that says they're calling the men in the white coats soon and suddenly you realize that hey, your joke from the other dimension has not travelled well. At that point of social doom there is little you can do, short of breaking out the drugs, to save yourself. So you might as well tell another joke quickly.

I know one joke. Everyone who knows me has heard this joke 10,000 times, because I learned it at age 19 and for some reason I have never forgotten it, unlike all the other myriad jokes I have heard in my life. My friends have all also heard the follow up to this joke, which is that once I told it at a party and was told, fairly nastily I thought, by a man that it was "okay for a girl joke." I have never figured out why it's a girl joke and so I've been bugging my friends and relatives about that for ages as well.

Here is my joke. Two aliens land their flying saucer in a remote and deserted part of rural America. (Actually, I usually say, in the desert, but this is writing and what is writing without adjectives? Clear, you say? Succinct? Cutting diamond edged prose? Shut UP.) There is nothing there but a gas station. The aliens walk up to the pumps and the first alien says to the gas pump: "Take us to your leader." (Does anyone else remember those Girl Scout TV ads where the alien comes up to the girl scouts sitting sadly on the stoop and says, Take us to your leader and the girl scouts say, We have no leader? No? Well, then.)
The gas pump doesn't say anything and the first alien turns to the second alien and says, "This guy is rude."
Then he says to the gas pump, a little more loudly, "Take us to your leader!" The gas pump doesn't say anything, so he turns to his friend again and says, "This guy is an asshole and I'm going to blow him away."
His friend says, "I wouldn't do that if I were you. He looks like a bad dude to me. I wouldn't mess with him."
The first alien, machismo threatened (I don't say that out loud either) says, "Well, the hell with him. I'm going to ask him politely one more time and if he doesn't answer I'm going to blow him away." So he looks at the gas pump and says "Take. Us. To. Your. Leader." and the gas pump doesn't say anything and so he pulls out his laser gun and zaps the pump.

200 yards away, they're picking themselves up out of the rubble and he asks his friend, "Damn. How did you know he was such a bad dude?"
And his friend says, "Anyone who can wrap his dick around him three times and stick it in his ear has got to be a pretty bad dude."

Commence now with the hearty laughter.