I have been writing humor ever since I tried to write something serious. In fact, with my talent, it is often hard to tell the difference. The best indicator is that if you smile, it was meant it to be funny.

When I was a kid a teacher took away one of my first jokes because she was afraid it would cause an international incident. I'm not kidding. She actually scolded: "We can't send that to Russia!" After a brief debate in which I expressed my disagreement, we let the matter sit. 


After I finished crying, I began to realize that the teacher whose tires I slashed helped me learn a valuable lesson. Wear gloves. Also, that there is a place for humor and there is a place for more serious explorations of the human condition. Two decades later, that lesson is starting to take hold. I have successfully avoided prison three out of four times. And I have made writing a significant part of my everyday life. 


Still, it has been the little humorous endeavors which kept me going; through high school, through college, through high school a second time when the college found out I hadn't graduated yet, and then through a much worse college. These amusements for my friends not only kept the violent crime rate down among my peers, it gave me the structure that I lacked from the regimented schedules and routine assesssments of a formal education. I just spelled assessments wrong again. 

I do write with far greater quality and spell-checking elsewhere. This space, however, provides a break from the discipline needed for actual fiction. It is a place for my less appropriate observations and imaginative nonsense; less-serious writing to be taken less than seriously. 


Therefore, please adjust your temperaments and perspective accordingly. We are, after all, perched on a rock hurtling around a nuclear explosion together for another few billion years. So you may as well relax.