I was at my recovery club recently talking to one of the many hellaciously impressive people you meet there.
Many a war hero dies because he cannot survive his addictions. I can personally testify that the death rate “in the program” is so high it makes combat seem safe.
I was talking with a hell of a guy, and I laughed in the wrong place. This gentleman had gone through ROTC, been an officer in Nam, got wounded, and, from a grateful country, he had been been sent, all expenses paid, through med school.
Not just everybody gets their MD, much less their residencies. He did.
But the addiction took all that away from him, so now he is living on disability.
How could a sane person find anything humorous in this?
But those of us IN the program have had to laugh a LOT.
If you have been through something yourself, sometimes hearing it seems funny.
So this gentleman described to me the last wound he got in combat.
I spent several hours convinced that I was deaf for life.
Worse, I once spent a period of time I cannot measure convinced that I was a quadraplegic like the Superman guy. These are very personal things. But heroes who have been through all that regularly die of addiction.
We talk about how unspeakable we made life for ourselves, and we laugh about it. We HAVE to.
But since the Greatest generation began its sixty year whine session, the idea of laughing about anything on a battlefield is verboten.
So this guy said to me, “I got hit in the gut and it ripped me open, but what REALLY hurt was….”
I started laughing. I couldn’t stop.
What he was explaining was that shrapnel had hit him in the JOINT of his arm, and that really HURTS. It hurts on and on and on. It hurts him today.
I understand that.
But I immediately thought of how this conversation would sound from the OUTSIDE, which makes my sense of humor so WEIRD. I was thinking of the average person listening to someone say his guts had been ripped open, but that wasn’t the problem.
This is not a concept that translates easily if you happen to hear someone saying it and you are not in on the talk.
Just LISTEN to it:
“I got hit in the gut and it ripped me open, but what REALLY hurt was….”
Can you understand why this was so funny to me?
I am sure no normal person could.
But I am not dealing with normal people here.
The scary thing is that I am dealing with commenters to whom what I just said would make perfect sense.
What is a nice guy like me doing in a place like this?
#1 by heh on 06/10/2006 - 2:38 am
He got ripped a new one, for sure… :/
#2 by PeterGene Budarick on 06/10/2006 - 7:59 am
Good friends arn’t pretty.
Who ever said you were a “nice guy” Bob?
If you ever try to be “nice guy” in your place [“place like this”] then i won’t come to your place any more.
Don’t get me wrong, i am not a sadist. I do actually like a “nice” Bob.
And i believe you are not a sadist either.
And you do like your troops to feel encouraged for obvious functional reasons. But not encouraged to the point of complacency.
There are lots of “things” in my life which i suppose would make others cry or go insane [if they learned of them] but i actually laugh about “those” things. I have only so many years left to me and i am going to get THE JOB done which i promised Pamila Emmerich i would get done before she died, AND, if a sense of humour will help get THE JOB done, then this otherwise humorless Germanic Aryan will embrace humour.
Some weeks ago a Jew at work said to me real lound, so that everyone else could overhear, “You just want to nail all the Jews onto crosses and burn them alive.” I laughed and laughed. It was so silly and funny really. I answered: “why would anyone want to waste so much good wood.”
I could have caved in. I could have been a wimp and said: “Oh that is terrible, i would never even think of such a thing, why do you say such horrible things to me?”. I knew he was dishing it out under the cover of humour which is standard practice for these low life forms. But i can dish it out too.
I can be a Jew too!
I think that is very funny!
OK.
I don’t know what makes “perfect sense”.
There is not a race problem in the world.
There is a Jewish problem in the world.
But don’t let my mantra distract you Bob.
I am actually not obsessed with the Jews at all, if i were, they would have me were they want to have their enemies.
The fact is, if not for at least a billion “Christian” and atheist jewphiles, Jews would have no power over us.
So we could transform the set of equations of OUR war to save OUR White Race from genocide:
There is not a race problem in the world.
There is a Jew problem.
There is not a Jew problem in the world.
There is a Jewphilia problem.
This leads us naturally to the “Holocaust” and Hitler and the National Socialist movement in Germany during the 1930’s and early 40’s.
Bob sees how the racial/immigration issues Americans face [BTW in Australia too] have a direct connection to the “Holocaust”!
No “Holocaust” – No genocide of the White Race today!
Me saying that would make most “decent” “normal” “moral” people spew up!
I am not a “nice guy”
#3 by Shari on 06/10/2006 - 2:17 pm
NOT SPAM
I read about Auberon Waugh, son of Englishman Evelyn Waugh, who was pretty funny himself. Anyway Auberon Waugh was machine gunned accidentally and lived to describe the whole thing, but with life long diminished health. He was described as a man who was “always joking and always serious.” I can see why you laughed. A sense of humor is,well, a sense of humor.
#4 by Dave on 06/10/2006 - 4:12 pm
Men in this day and age are in serious need of getting a sense of humor. They live in the world that men have always lived in but they whine far too much. I want to live in a world were whiners get shot! Oh, if only we could get that world, it would tickle me pink.