My Type Of Humor Is Me Not

You Know, I Began My Life As A Creative Person Writing True Things For Magazines And Telling Some Very Honest, Straightforward Personal Essaying For This American Life, But Until Someone Forces You, With A Deadline, To Really Observe Your Life - Unless You're Motivated To Do It Yourself - There's So Many Stories That You Miss.

For Many Years, People Would Say, "only Child? Must Have Been Terrible," And I Wanted To Say, "you Are Mentally Ill, Because It Was The Greatest." You Got All The Attention. You Never Had To Share Anything. No One Ever Ate Your Food. No One Ever Took Your Toys. But The Unintended Consequence Was That I Didn't Appreciate That Being Universally Loved Was Not Only Not Required For Happiness, But Also Not Possible.

Stories Hold Power Because They Convey The Illusion That Life Has Purpose And Direction. Where God Is Absent From The Lives Of All But The Most Blessed, The Writer, Of All People, Replaces That Ordering Principle. Stories Make Sense When So Much Around Us Is Senseless, And Perhaps What Makes Them Most Comforting Is That, While Life Goes On And Pain Goes On, Stories Do Us The Favor Of Ending.

I Realized That We're Now At A Point Of Self-reference With The Internet Culture That There's Almost No There Left, You Know? It's Important To Make New Things. It's Important To Make Culture, Rather Than Simply Reference It. I Love A Good Cultural Reference, And It's One Of The Great Joys In My Life, But It Has To All Be In Balance With The Core Job, Which Is To Make Something New. And That Sort Of Brings Me Around To Why I Started Talking About My Fondness For Marijuana.

We Have All Been Empowered By The Web: Everyone With A Keyboard Can Now Effectively Broadcast To A National Audience. In A Sense, It Puts Each Of Us On The Same Footing As The Major Media Conglomerates, Except For Aol, Who Now Apparently Own All Our Thoughts And Teeth.