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yuk it up, junkies!
I have a friend who is trying to kick a nasty H habit. I think "nasty" is just about the kindest word one can use for such a thing. It's a device: comic understatement. I hope you're writing this down. There will be a quiz later.
Anyway, this friend and I joke about her seedy past; she tells me about the blood splatters on the ceiling of her old apartment, and I tease her about the rewired reward circuitry in her brain. "Am I hungry or do I want heroin? Probably I want heroin."
In my aforementioned memoir class, my peers' subject matters range from sexual abuse to heroin addiction to raising an autistic child. Humor seems necessary to describing all of these problems in a human way...but when the writer makes a joke, the class is reluctant to laugh. Suffering people - especially women, as every single person in my class happens to be - are supposed to be untouchable, somber on a pedestal.
But that just sucks, dude.
You gotta laugh about stuff, or else They win. And by They I obviously mean the terrorists. And by the terrorists I obviously mean Bush, heroin, illness, death, anorexia, whatever your cross to bear for the moment might be. Also, remember to laugh at your friends' crosses, too. Laughing all alone while everyone else is trying to austerely pity you from a distance makes you start to feel a bit crazy.
And feeling crazy never helped anyone kick the monkey.
Posted by erinjudge at March 1, 2005 01:54 PM
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