Making the World Safe(ish) for Democracy
This election year and all its exciting political discourse is forcing me to reflect on my citizenship and the ways in which I participate in this ever-(d)evolving democratic experiment we call the U.S. of A. I firmly believe All Kinds of Funny is my greatest contribution. In this space with you, my dear reader, I endeavor each week to make you smile and laugh—and forget altogether that this gosh darn world is ablaze with the fiery flames of Hell. You might call it acute laughter-induced amnesia. Or you might call it a well-needed break from apocalyptic nonsense. But I call it public service.
Before All Kinds of Funny, however, my greatest act of public service took place at a trampoline park. If you’ve never been, just know that someone took that bone-breaking, backyard, white trash pastime—which has financed any number of orthopedists’ Cessnas—and they moved it indoors. Picture a Walmart that’s filled wall-to-wall with woven nylon and galvanized steel springs, crowded with grade school kids hopped up on high fructose corn syrup and overdoses of Adderall. When I heard that these were a thing, I couldn’t give them my money fast enough.
I took my kids. My daughter was 7, and my son was 5. They were immediately drawn to an area of the park where you could play pickup dodgeball. The dodgeball “court” was enclosed with nets, and trampolines lined the floor and the 45-degree walls, creating a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome sort of aura.
My kids immediately checked into the game, but they got knocked out pretty quickly since the majority of the players were 10-year-old boys who were there for a birthday party. The boys’ experience and size made quick work of my younger progeny. But my kids loved it all the same, so they checked in for the next game.
This time, though, the birthday boy coordinated an attack on my daughter, the only girl playing. He organized his party-goers to hoard all the dodgeballs, and then they threw every one of them at my daughter simultaneously. Then they did the same to my son who was the youngest player after my daughter.
So I took a good, long look at that little bastard…uh, I mean, the birthday boy. I didn’t like his face. He had a very unlikable face. Like, if you could dream up the ideal face to fart on, it would be this kid. As I observed his face fit for a sideshow, I recounted how he organized his party-goers. Notice how I’m not calling them friends. They definitely weren’t his friends. They were in it for the free trampoline park admission and the Costco birthday cake. And the birthday boy treated them accordingly. He had that “It’s my birthday, and I’ll act like a shit heel dictator if I want to!” sort of attitude.
Side note: When I’m at my kids’ games or school events, I spend most of the time imagining which kids will end up in prison, which kids will be Patient Zero for the next breakout STD, or which kids will perpetrate some Ponzi scheme that lands a family friend in Chapter 11. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. My instincts are sharp. All of this to say, I looked at the birthday boy, and I saw his future.
A future in national politics.
A future where he spouted meaningless drivel to disguise hateful intentions.
A future where he took advantage of political loopholes to abuse decent Americans.
A future where he made people believe that his slime was an aphrodisiac.
I couldn’t let that happen, not to our wonderful country. I approached the dodgeball referee. He was emotionless with all the ennui of your typical teenager during the shift of a boring summer job. “Do parents ever play?” I asked him.
“Not really.”
“Is there an age limit?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How hard can you throw the balls?”
“As hard as you want, I guess.”
“Great, I’d like to check into the game.”
“Whatever.”
I made it my mission to get the birthday boy out first in every game I played. The first game I nailed him in the leg, a solid hit but nothing special, other than the fact that he was out first and had to wait for the next game.
I took my time knocking the other kids out. I wanted to get my mechanics down. I weighed 225 at the time, and I’m 6’2,” so once I started swiveling my hips, there was some serious sauce on those balls.
In game two, I knocked the birthday boy out with a shot to his underbelly. Really, it was just his belly, but the little turd had that reptilian quality so we’ll go with underbelly.
Game three, I whipped a ball right at his chest. It was practically a double mastectomy.
Game four, I took out his legs when he jumped and he fell back on the seam of the trampoline. It hurt him. I could tell. It felt good to hurt him, rewarding, the way you feel when you pick up someone else’s trash and throw it away, like you’ve done something selfless, something for the greater good.
In the fifth game, his face was red. I could tell that the frustration from getting knocked out first in the last four games was really rubbing him raw. I’ve heard people describe the intangible feeling they get from The Holy Spirit or from Transcendental Meditation or from an encounter with a magnificent animal in nature, say, a blue whale, and how that feeling imbues them with a crisp moment of clarity. That little bastard’s red face was my moment of clarity. I knew what I had to do.
I pointed at his face with my left hand, the rest of my fingers curled tight as if I was gripping a long bow. My right hand clenched the dodgeball and drew it back over my right shoulder. I tightened my stomach, the backs of my legs, my chest, every muscle in my body poised for warfare. I licked my teeth and enjoyed the metallic taste of adrenaline.
Finally, I swiveled my hips, and I let that mother fucker fly. I fired that dodgeball like it was a moral imperative. Because that’s exactly what it was. As the dodgeball propelled through the air like an intercontinental ballistic missile, I gazed into the birthday boy’s eyes. I could see his light fading and the doors closing on his future of privileged buffoonery and political fuckery. When the ball smashed into his little, rage-red turd of a face with a THWUMP, the doors of his future slammed shut, and a profound sense of calm and fulfillment overwhelmed me.
Immediately, the birthday boy placed both hands over his face and started crying. He left the court. Again, he was the first one out for the fifth time in a row. I had broken him. His psyche, his spirit, his will, his ten-year-old birthday party.
The rest of the game played out lighter and more fun than they had previously because, well, evil and wickedness had been squelched. Dare I say, the party-goers were now having the fun they should have been having all along.
When the game was over, I exited the court. The bored teenage referee smiled and dapped me up with a high five. “That was a wicked run, dude.” I nodded, but it somehow felt inadequate. It might have felt more appropriate had we saluted each other, like George C. Scott in that film poster of Patton. Clearly, we both felt we had participated in something bigger than ourselves, something for god and country.
My absolute favorite moment from this experience came just a few seconds later. I told my kids that it was time to leave, and without prompt, they walked over to the whiny, crying, washed-up politician-in-progress and wished wished him a happy birthday. Not surprisingly, this made his whimpering ramp back up and he buried his little weasel face into his enabling mother. Beautiful insult to glorious injury.
America, don’t say I never did anything for you.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this one, consider reading some other stories from All Kinds of Funny:
Like another story about a dictator, but a benevolent one: The Only Great Dictator.
Or this story about the time I whipped up on another guy, this time in the realm fantasy sports, which led to The Greatest Day in the History of the Internet.
Or this story about my parenting misadventure and a bad decision regarding a birthday clown: Send in the Clowns.
I was wondering, Norm, would you mind if I used the phrase, “his slime is an aphrodisiac” sometime? I have several shitbirds in mind who would fit such a thought-provoking description.
Favorite line, "Like, if you could dream up the ideal face to fart on, it would be this kid."