Someone yesterday set off triggers. Triggers, man. I don’t know where this comes from but the fear of being in solitary confinement has been with me seemingly since birth. Being conscripted, suddenly stuffed into a small room or a chamber with no way out, no way to knkow when I might be released.
Long time back I read the Terry Anderson book about his kidnapping and detention. I remember coming away from it thinking it was all so unnecessary. But in this moment I do not remember details. I recently purchased “Solitary” by Albert Woodfox, imagining I’d end up being something like him in his situation. I’d turn my prison cell into a university, a palce for thought and learning, because what else is there to look forward to save for thought. He taught people to read. It’s an overpowering story on so many levels. I’m not that far into it, though, so I’m just repeating reviews I choose to believe.
I have not uploaded YouTube videos of late because upload speeds to YT have suddenly become hopelessly slow. I’ve changed nothing about anything. Format of the videos is the same, bandwidth is phat, I even tried uploading a video from before this slowness started and it was slow as butt too. It would have taken about a week to upload a single 9gb video.
Video upload fine to TikTok and Archive.org, so there’s no way it’s my bandwidth. I know YT is finally making a serious attempt to quash TikTok with shortsshortsshorts. Maybe the slow speeds for larger uplaods are punsihment, or YT’s way of saying we don’t want your longer pieces. GIve us your shortsshortsshorts.
A girlfriend used to shout “SHORTS!” when I changed out of my pants and into shorts. She got excited because shorts meant the sex was about to begin. When it did, the shorts didn’t stay in place long. It was our fun code word. “SHORTS!” One or the other of us would blurt i t out every once in a random. with knkowing giggles to follow.
She was a fun girlfriend. She knew how to laugh. I feel I’ll never make this point as clearly as I want, or rather I’ll never stress its importance enough to amek an impression on anybody. But some people don’t laugh. They chuckle or smirk but full-throat laughter is rare.
Now that I enter into this I realize I’m skidding off the path because I’m not fully introducing the matter. I think I arrived at this insight courtesy of a college friend. He’d graduated and went on to post graduate study at a small buttfuck college somewhere else in Ohio. He came back to visit and remarked, after we all caught up on each others’ activities since this person graduated, that “It’s good to be around people who can laugh. People where I am now don’t laugh.”
He’d opened that gray world of humorless people who probably represent a strong majority. People who don’t get jokes, don’t understand wordplay, don’t get juxtapositions and surrealism.
I’ve known women who can laugh but it’s usually for something cynical, or mean. Laughter is, after all, not a demonstration of happiness but a sign of nerves. Someone says something that touches a nerve in you, maybe not a nerve you wanted touched, and what do you do? You laugh. That’s is the joke is good. If it’s no good you might punch the person who said it.
Conversely, as someone who laughs a good amount, I occasionally notice people’s look of being disarmed, or surprised that I laughed at their little joke. Makes me seem like a live one, because most people are surrounded by people who don’t laugh. Lives spent in silence.
