THE FOOL'S SECTION

My friend J from NYC sent me a link to a page that contains the entire Straight Outta Compton album by N.W.A., edited to include only the explicit content.

It's fucking funny.

And it made me realize that, after years of learning how to edit audio digitally, I can do something like what that link has done in a snap. In fact, I used to do things like that all the time, when I was a kid with a stereo that had two cassette players.

I had an early model that allowed both tapes to play simultaneously. Later models allowed only one tape at a time to play, but I made good use of the early model's anomaly and learned how to edit tape-to-tape.

Nowadays, programs like Wavelab make editing a breeze. I may be doing some sonic experiments of my own soon.

In the meantime, I have four original songs ready to post onto a My Space page. I mixed these songs down as part of a snail mail package that I'm sending to my latest pen pal. I suppose they are strong enough to put online but first I have to wait on hearing back from the Library of Congress regarding my copyright applications.

Lately, maybe due to being older and remembering things I'd forgotten about long ago, I've been waxing nostalgic... but not for pop cultural artifacts.

I am thinking about grade school and junior high, and the radio skits me and my friend Mike Kelly used to make up, at my house or on the school bus. I recall that our school bus route was full of fun and games, fighting with the Mexicans who sat up front, impersonating teachers and quoting Monty Python, making parody songs about girls' breasts (or lack of), writing dirty slogans on pieces of notebook paper and holding them up to the bus window for passing cars to view, sneaking people on the bus who didn't have transfer slips, singing choruses of "Bang Bang Rosie" until our throats bled, quoting from any Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie that we could, re-enacting Cheech & Chong routines, doing impressions of classmates we disliked, playing Truth or Dare, listening to taped copies of Dr. Demento's radio show, reciting the words to "Weird Al" songs, playing 2 Live Crew for my white suburban friends for the first time, and generally just acting like the dorky Magnet school kids that we were...

Those days didn't suck. Those days made me who I am. I sharpened my wit with those kids. I drew cartoons to impress them. We wrote songs not because we were musicians but because we wanted to be funny. We were trying to make each other laugh and were willing to outdo each other if we had to, and it was all fun.

I still giggle at all the in-jokes: our Biology teacher's impossible accent, the idiocy of some of our fellow students, lines from movies reappropriated as double entendres, what it would sound like if so-and-so and what's-his-face had sex... we took each joke to its illogical extreme. The sillier it was, the better.

They say that we'll never have days like that again, but I tend to disagree. If you have good friends and if they have great senses of humor, you can keep that magic alive even as your hairline recedes and you get old and go gray. Laughter is so important, especially nowadays where people have little to laugh about.

I don't care for a high school reunion, but I would love to see my friends from junior high school again. They were funny people. It was the time before my parents divorced, before I found out about Reality, before I discovered that things were not always as they seemed on the surface... the laughs were genuine.

And every attempt at laughter from those days on has been an effort on my part to get back to that point in the past, where we were delirious from the hilarity, from our collective ability to be funny and silly and absolutely retarded.

I think that's why, in high school, I strayed away from the pseudo-intellectuals and fell in with the Theater Arts crowd. They were just like those kids on my junior high school bus route: full of jokes, looking for laughs, performing for their friends, unafraid to be silly and foolish. I grew bored with the cynical kids, with their hypercritical outlook on all things cool, who could never fathom shedding their carefully crafted images for one second, lest they risk looking ridiculous.

I have no need to be around people who are too afraid of looking uncool to express their hearts. Lead me to the Fool's Section, where we can dine sumptuously and sip from the Cup of Laughter, with a feast large enough to feed a starving world...