That’s Not Funny
The Lay Psychiatrist treats a neurotic comedian
I could see the problem in his carriage, not that he arrived in one, it was how he held himself, cramped up inside his body like he was being spirited out of town in a trunk. He was pulsing with nervous tension. “Calm the fuck down,” I said, reaching out and giving him three little taps on the cheek with my fingers.
This is an induction technique which paralyzes the response. How do you respond to that? It’s not a slap in the face but it is an incursion. He was alert, now, and wary.
“How long have you been running along thought to thought, like a bullet train?”
“A bullet train?” He made it a question. “You think I should just go off the rails? I’m a pattern, and we patterns are tired of being called trains. It’s too obvious. We’re circuits in an architecture.”
“I hear the pattern of little feet,” I quipped, and on his face was stamped an exquisite puzzlement, posing as if for a portrait.
“What do you mean by that?” he finally asked.
“You said on the phone you’re a comedian, so I thought you might be able to make a series of associative steps without having to stop at every station, it happens in the background and takes no time at all if you can bring yourself to trust it.”
That didn’t ease his puzzlement. He had come for answers and so far he wasn’t hearing any, because he hadn’t asked any questions. He was complaining because he thought complaints are funny.
He said: “We’re back to the train running along the tracks being like thinking in a logical way. What does that even mean? A series of steps taken at the same time makes no sense.”
I said: “It does to a computer. The calculations run in the background and feed up the information instantly. You don’t have to face backward into the past. You can turn around and face forward.”
“Wouldn’t that mean facing toward death?”
“Yes. Look where you’re going.”
This comedian was always “on.”
He sat straight up in the chair, leaning slightly forward, his legs aggressively spread. An aggressive posture, and vaguely anti feminine, as if his inner woman was lacking modesty and refinement.
When I closed my eyes to check with direct knowledge I saw a large bird taking flight, wings rowing the air in large, slow, strokes, headed up to where it can relax on an updraft. In it’s beak it held a small fish.
“You need to be grounded,” I said. “Lean back into the chair and imagine there is a taproot at the base of your spine, growing down into the earth, and as you open and become receptive, you receive the nutrients, the most central of which is a vibration from the creative source of life itself.”
He wasn’t having it. He was following thoughts that came to his mind like a cat playing with a laser light. I could watch it. He was holding his breath and had a stupid grin on his face. He was trying to create comedy material with a blunt instrument. “A taproot growing out of my ass or up my ass,” he said, “depending on how my day is going. Just what I wanted for Valentine’s Day, a taproot.”
“That’s you flying above it all,” I said. “When you let your thoughts just run along connecting to other thoughts, leaving the body out of the loop, you get neurotic, and fast. You have to take the thought into the body and get a psychological taste to know if it’s nutritive or predatory.”
The comedian looked at his watch. “I have a lunch.” he said.