Super Silly Us

A moment of seriousness, if you please.


Okay, that’s enough.


Really! Don’t you ever just get tired of being serious? (Someone actually asked me that!) But, I’m asking you… don’t you ever just get tired of being serious? Don’t you ever just need to get silly… get your crazies out… be nonsensical? I’m not talking about finding humor in a given situation. I’m talking about getting down with the ludicrous and absurd just for the sake of goofiness.


And yes, I do get tired of being serious. A l l   t h e   t i m e. I am a serious person and more so, and more often, than most might guess given my sense of humor. But, I constantly find myself in the deep end of my mind for all sorts of reasons and purposes. It takes a fairly dark and twisted look at things to come up with the humor that I do. I promise you, the funniest people on the planet are the most heartbroken ones.


One of the things I most appreciate about Steve is his ability to get silly. Just plain old silly. The man has an engineer’s mind and is one of the most logical people I‘ve ever met, but he knows how to get in touch with some fairly sublime lunacy. He’s also very good at sensing when it’s needed, and is utterly unafraid of looking like a madman. There have been a couple of times I desperately wanted to be pissed off at him, but found myself laughing so hard that I couldn’t even utter the words, “I’m pissed!” And then I found myself wondering why I was so annoyed in the first place. Usually, in the other sense of the word, I was just being “silly,” or, if you rather, I was being too serious.


Yesterday was kind of a funky day. I was feeling the usual full moon mania (y’know… my restless, feral thing). I was working on a project that I felt wasn’t going fast enough, and I have other projects I need to get to. I probably needed a little more sleep than I’d been getting. Steve’s project wasn’t going well either, his phone was acting up, and the clouds were threatening storms - all of which was making him (understandably) “a little too serious.” Besides all that, there was no chocolate anywhere in the house. It wasn’t a bad day, just a disgruntling day.


I needed silly and I needed it badly, before disgruntled turned into crabby. I never use crayons in my artwork. I don’t know why. I just don’t. But the urge hit me. I needed to smell that scent that brings back everyone’s childhood. I needed to feel that waxy wonderfulness, to read the fun descriptive names. “Burnt Umber” always sounded like something delicious to me. “Periwinkle” made me think of old tittering ladies at a tea party. Anyway, I grabbed a big sketch pad - no tiny card-sized paper for me, I needed room to scribble! I pulled my box of Crayolas out of the dresser - all 96 flavors, I needed color insanity! And I went to town. I didn’t even try to make anything that looked like something. I simply scribbled (Jackson Pollack's got nothin' on me!). And at first I did it while making raspberry noises. Nothing like a good ol’ bilabial fricative to get your sillies going.


And there it was. There was the thing that’s been missing in all my recent artistic growth and happiness, and even in my sense of humor. I felt… I felt… joyful. I felt the thing that looks like a giddy, giggly child. So, I’ve decided to make a silly date with myself at least once a week. If I find I need more intensive silly therapy, I may just up my dosage to once a day. Yeah. I think I’ll just do that anyway.


Y’know what? I challenge you to blow a great big raspberry. Do it right now while you‘re still reading this. Do it. Don‘t worry about who‘s in the room with you. You may just start a silly epidemic. There, don’t you feel better?


This world could do with some outright, out of bounds, out of sight, outlandish silliness. Seriously.