His site uplifted my Monday morning.
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This morning when I was checking my email at work I received a wonderful surprise. My first message was from a man named Keith Basilio. Here is the first line of his message:
it’s a bird it’s a plane no it is your humungous cockFirst of all Keith, I’d just like to thank you for confusing my penis with a massive steel object capable of ferrying hundreds of people and several tons of luggage across the ocean. And thank you for doing this at 8 in the morning. I wasn’t even angry when I found out that it was just an ad for Viagra. Your words meant a lot.
As soon as I read the message I decided that it was going to be a good day. I think I even whispered “It’s gonna be a good day.” Then, probably thinking that I was in the closing scenes of a movie where the protagonist has successfully made it through a series of grueling challenges to finally discover who he really is, I tilted my head back and took a swig of coffee from my thermos. God damn that thermos and its broken seal. I have to twist the cap on just right to make sure that the seal doesn’t leak. I guess that’s why someone abandoned it in my apartment laundry room beside the sad Monopoly board in the first place.
I’d forgotten to check the seal after filling the thermos up at the shop beside my school, and the unhappy result was that coffee dribbled out in a line directly down my front. It collected in the reservoir created where the vertical drop of my chest is rudely interrupted by the horizontal projection of my belly. I stood up and it looked like an arrow made out of coffee. Pissed me off is what it did.
The bell rang and I walked into the classroom, basically fuming. I felt/looked like crap, and this was not the first time it had happened.
“Good morning sir,” said the boy in the front row.
“Not good morning,” I said. “It’s only a morning.”
I stood up perfectly straight and extended my arms out from my sides.
“Can anyone guess why it might not be a good Monday morning?”
“Sweat under the arms,” said the Korean boy.
“You are sick,” said the girl from Turkey.
A third student piped up: “Your hair is pressed down. From the fog.”
“No. NO!” I said, and slammed my hands down on the desk. “Forget it.”
Then, for the next hour, I taught them a lesson on jokes. Each student was given a sheet of paper – the joke questions were on the left side, and the punch lines were on the right side. The object was for the students to match up the questions with the punch lines.
Nobody got any of the jokes, and I had to spend about 15 minutes explaining each one. There was not a single bit of laughter, but one Chinese girl nearly cried when I was explaining the final “joke” of the lesson:
“Come on guys,” I said, “think about it for a second: a woman is born in America, raised in France, and she dies in China. What is she? Think about it. It’s like a riddle.”
Silence.
“The answers are right there on your sheet. Think about it. It’s not that hard.”
More silence.
“GOD guys, the answer is she’s dead. DEAD!!! It’s written right there on your sheets!!!”
The Chinese girl’s eyes filled with tears and she bowed her head. A single tear dropped onto her sheet of jokes. I felt like a regular horse’s ass. It’s not often that I lose my temper in the classroom. The bell rang, and everyone silently gathered up their books and left.
-Text derived from
Derek.
