Wednesday, 01 July 2009

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  Inappropriate Laughter

  Tonight at writer's group our exercise required us to use the words "elastic" and "thunderstorm" in our piece. I wasn't going to do it because it's been a busy week at work and I've been neglecting the blogging and work on the novel that I need to get done. But I'd had an idea that had been bumping around in my head for a few days and I decided to give it a shot.

  The idea was actually a mingling of a few story germs I'd had in my head. One was the idea of strangers living in a hotel, surviving the fallout of a nuclear war. I also wanted to deal with the guilt a man faces when he realizes that the only reason he's survived a catastrophe is because he was out of the area having an affair (this would take you back a few weeks ago to my post on why I love writing about broken people). So I wrote a piece about a man living in a hotel room after a nuclear fallout. It was definitely darker than anything I'd attempted and I think I went a bit too far in one direction.

  Unfortunately, the piece was written in such a hurry that I didn't really have time to appreciate just how far I'd gone. As I was reading it, I was a bit impressed with just how I'd captured this small section of the world that had been impacted by disaster. But then, as I read on, I realized that I had attempted to set this in the Orlando area and I made several refrences to DisneyWorld being a smoking crater in the ground. And then I also had the man not only be cheating on his wife--and slowly dying of effects from the fallout--but he was a big enough D-bag that he was actually traveling to DisneyWorld with his mistress, using money from his own family's vacation fund!

  As I read it, I kind of entered third-person mode in my brain and thought 'oh my stars. This is so bleak and this guy such a jerk that it's almost comical. People are going to think I'm seriously warped...seriously, did I just write that Mickey and his friends were obliterated?' And it was at that point that I just broke out laughing really really hard, because I could not believe what I had written. It was so over-the-top bleak (which is NOT me) that I could just imagine what everyone was thinking. And then I started thinking about what my reaction would be if someone read the same thing. And I started laughing even harder, so much so that I ended up just cutting the reading short because I knew I wouldn't be able to make it.

  I still think the idea's got its merits for a short story...I like the general germ of the story, and I think with some more time (i.e. not writing it one hour before writer's group) it could be something really good and powerful, a nice little short piece.

  But we'll leave Disney out of it.

  By the way, I should point out that I am the king of inappropriate laughter. I have absolutely no poker face and the slightest thing will set me off...and when I start laughing really hard, it's really next to impossible to get me to stop laughing, to the point where I start actually getting light-headed. I've been in church services, business meetings and even interviews where something has just struck me as incredibly funny and, I must say, it's a form of torture just to try and hold that laughter in.

  But let me tell you the worst time it happened....

  About a year or so ago I was at Subway with some of my coworkers. I was in line ordering my sandwich and, once it had been made and paid for I stepped away from the register. As I turned around, I bumped into a stroller that I didn't know was there (the stroller was, of course, carrying a young child, whose parents were also at the table.) The stroller rolled forward and the kids head smacked--pretty hard--into the edge of the table. The baby, of course, started screaming and the dad looked like he was going to punch me in the face.

  I was, of course, embarrassed, and began to say "oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry..."

  But.....

  What happened in my mind at the same time I was apologizing and feeling about 2 inches tall was that I began to replay the scene in my head as if I was watching it on Youtube. And I imagined what it would be like if some stranger turned around and knocked a stranger's baby into a table. The sheer awkwardness of the sequence would probably have me in hysterics. "That would look really funny if it happened to someone else," I thought. And suddenly...it became funny. Despite my best efforts to hold it in, I found myself laughing right in front of these parents.We got out of there really quick.

  So...just be careful of your laughter

  CDubbs

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