“I asked for a hot dog
With everything on it,
And that was my big mistake,
‘Cause it came with a parrot,
A bee in a bonnet,
A wristwatch, a wrench, and a rake.”
                -Shel Silverstein, from “Everything On It”

                The hardest I ever laughed over an uproar post was because of a typo. Or because of a friend. Or both, I suppose? I don’t remember which post it was, but I ended up writing “shifting me weight” and a friend, reading, started laughing and repeating “shifting me weight!” in a funny accent while bouncing side to side. That would’ve been fall 2020. I still think about the way she grinned, the way the line became a bit we went back to.
                Somehow as a kid I picked up (like so many of us pick up, maybe, and for me it wasn’t from my parents) this fear of making a mistake. It’s nice to remember that something as simple as a typo (and simply complex as a friend) brought me all sorts of laughter that my regular careful revisions often don’t. I believe in the serious revisions. I like them. But I’d also like to seriously pursue hilarity and chaos a little more, and I think we can. When I coached improv comedy I watched people throw themselves into stupid chance and ridiculous choice again and again, like kids practicing belly flops, like poets stacking wristwatches and wrenches on a hot dog. And it worked. The improv came alive. And then we were laughing about barrels of basalt and no one really knew why, or how we got there, but it didn’t matter because here we are.