Giadasil

Last night I woke up, as I so often do, swimming in salt. A cold New Jersey wind had blown in during the two hours since I had been bagged by Herr Sandman (for sleep is, to me, as are all things puzzling and inescapable, a moustachioed German carrying a burlap sack) , and a chill wind was riffling through the pages of the many age-inappropriate books that make up my windowsill library.

Outside and two floors down, the anxious, heavy clanking of hollow metal against hollow metal suggested some sort of robot heart attack. Then I heard the slurred, thirty-decibels-too-loud voice of woman at the end of her tether: “Hon, you’re embarassing yourself.” The man – let’s call him Helmut – seemed at first to respond to this criticism positively, apologizing repeatedly and letting go of the trashcan he had for some reason picked up, but was nonetheless incapable of not knocking over a third trashcan on his way back out into the street. Are all human relationships fraught with this sort of miscommunication between head (it is wrong to tackle other people’s trashcans in the dead of night, and clearly I am upsetting Ulrike with my antics) and heart (why do you never hug back when I hug you, trashcans?!!! The thick, rusty truth is that in this respect you are very similar to my parents!!!)? In any case, the disturbance quickly moved off, hand in hand, a misfated balloon of drunkenness broken free from Smith Street’s helium bouquet of watering holes, caught upon the dead-end branch of my residential street.

Farther in the distance, beyond my sight and my hearing, it is possible that Grey’s Anatomy’s Kate Walsh and Friday Night Light’s Connie Britton were sitting in postures that mimicked mine, serpentine sheets atwixt beneath their nighties or what have you. The three of us had been enjoying a picnic when I had so jarringly fled the safe precincts of my dreamworld for the comparatively unsure nightscape of gentrified Brooklyn.

What had cruelly roused me just as I wast taking my first bite of Connie’s delicious potato-salad? The wind knocking over my copy of Phantom Tollbooth? Yonder trashcans? No, it was something far more immediate – something that was happening inside my brain. That something?:

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Now I understand, in much the same way that blind people understand the concept of sight, that most people go months, if not years without being woken up by amusing genital wart medication jokes. It is my hope that, much in the way the sighted can use blindfolds and well-behaved dogs to at least attempt to understand strange habits dictated by the sightless world, y’all can try to wrap your minds around the obligation I felt to wrestle onto paper the enormous comic potential of this idea.

And so, transformed by my own creativity into a boxer-brief clad jaguar, I sprung up into a wary crouch, placing myself and my air mattress in considerable peril, then pranced resolutely toward my desk, crushing several discarded Poland Spring bottles in the process. Having braved the most literal representation imaginable of my disastrous personal life, I set to work, and in the feeble light of my laptop’s LCD screen, sketched out a nine panel comic strip with seven separate punchlines.

Usually when I do this, I am very easily able to pare the jokes I’ve written down into one semi-coherent comic strip the next day.

But somehow, with this particular idea, my refining processes had met their match. Several hours and half a pot of coffee later, under the harsh, usually unforgiving light of day, I discovered that more than one of the jokes I had written under the rough theme of “Giadasil” were not only funny, but funny enough to warrant me spending upwards of forty minutes of my valuable time drafting, inking, and scanning them in.

In other words, I had struck comedy platinum.

But even then I did not allow myself to believe what I knew in my hear to be true. Possessed with the same loathsome hubris that inspired Meryl Streep’s character in Sophie’s Choice, I thought I could choose between these joke strands, could separate the worthy vaccine-that-immunizes-not-against-genital-warts-and-some-associated-flavors-of-

cervical-cancer-but instead-against-the-siren-song-of-Giada-DeLaurentiis joke from a crowded field of pretenders So I drew up a handful draft templates, planning to draw several versions of the Giadasil strip and then pick one to gussy up for the publishable installment.

Above is the first of those drafts. Having completed it, I realized that there was going to be enough material in the Giadasil joke to fill several strips that I, for one, would find amusing. For example, these guys:

 

 

 

So I decided to publish all the drafts, even the ones that are a little rough, as well as the eventual megajoke. Stay tuned.

Until then: