I do stand up. I do stand up at open mike nights and I’m feeling frisky/bored. I do stand up for our brand spankin’ new peer education program entitled “Laugh It Off.” This is an incredibly cool education program I’ve been developing for the past year or so, and it’ll have it’s own STC article later this week.

In any case, not everything on STC (Steve’s Thoughtcrimes… easier to type, impossible to remember like all acronyms) is commentary, yarns, anecdotes, shaggy dogs, or analogies. Although, this article is kind of a commentary, yarn, anecdote, and shaggy dog with fleas and ticks. Four out of five is good enough for dental school!

Okay, so here on STC, sometimes I’m going to post the random stray thought because this is a quick place for me to archive potential yuk yuks for inclusion in future comedy sets.

Here is an example from today:

$10,000 a plate charity fundraiser at the Cincinnati Zoo where patrons feast upon a tender cut of Harambe.
All monies raised go to purchasing a new gorilla.

Messed up, yes? This is an excellent opportunity to address one goofy misconception I’ve had to endure since being diagnosed with bipolar. I’m vocal, I tell jokes at meetings and online and in public, and sometimes these jokes are incorrectly tagged as “Dude, that guy’s bipolar is acting up. That was a messed up joke. He must be off his meds.”

NO! WRONG! Don’t be lazy. I’ve had an off-center sense of humor my entire life, many moons prior to manifesting bipolar symptoms.

Proof?

Here’s a shaggy-anec-yarn-commentary for you.

I happened to be in California a few years back, in my home County of Orange, and I was there to visit my folks as well as to take in a concert at the House of Blues in Anaheim.

The band playing at the HOB was the English Beat, and two years earlier in Albuquerque I interviewed Dave Wakeling, lead guitar, lead vocals, and music/wordmsmith for the band. That interview was so cool. Dave is a childhood hero of mine because, like so many misdirected youth, it’s easier to make a pop star a hero than do the homework and choose Benjamin Disraeli for a hero instead.

As guests of Dave and with backstage passes at the fore, we were free range fans (my kid, Scott; high school chum, Tracy; et moi) that allowed us to visit Dave in the green room (red room… redrum), and also to stand to the side of the stage rather than lathering up in Crisco so we could squeeze into the octahedral close-packed serfs in front of the stage.

It was totally rad, dude. The stage manager let my kid open and close the curtains for the show, and I got to pretend I was on stage performing with a childhood hero. A childhood hero with a stash of Red Bull in his green room fridge, a childhood hero who offered my kid to help himself, and before I realized it my too young for Red Bull kid had downed two cans of Red Bull. I didn’t even bother telling Scott to sit still and not shave the feral cats running around backstage. Naughty childhood hero of mine.

So, being up there to the side of the stage makes fans like us visible to the serf-fans below. We were stage left, and folks in the serf-pit who were stage center to stage right had a great view of us. How do I know? Because the next morning I awoke to find a good three or four thousand friend requests from folks who I hadn’t talked to or fantasized about since high school graduation in 1928.

Did I mention that weekend was also the weekend of my 50th high school reunion? I didn’t know this (and for the most part I had very little care dedicated to a reunion I heard about via Facebook), and suddenly I’m getting friend requests on Facebook from folks I haven’t seen or fantasized about very often since 1888. I popped open a few of the request messages and there was invariably only one pair of questions asked of me:

“Was that you up on stage at the English Beat concert last night? How do you know the band?”

By the by… requesting to be someone’s friend? Will you be my friend? What an odd way to reach out to folks on social media. Will you be my friend? It appears the last real friend Mark Zuckerberg made was on the playground in first grade.

So, yeah, I got a bunch of friend requests on Facebook asking me if I was up on the stage at the House of Blues last night. Since it was the weekend of my 200th high school reunion, high school classmates were already congregating and congealing into group-chat (newspeak for “gossip”), and apparently I became a topic of conversation at the tricentennial high school reunion happening that weekend.

Most of these friend requests were coming from people who I was aware of only tangentially in my high school life. Maybe Gerald sat three rows behind me in micro-econ. Perhaps Natalie who I pined over for four years and we spent so much time together and were best friends and I was always hoping for more blew me off shortly after high school graduation and it broke my heart but it is somewhat satisfying that I used to talk about my family in Tahiti all the time with her and it happens that she went to Tahiti on her honeymoon. And it could be that the one person who I actually wanted to talk to was the girl who gave me my first kiss in the second grade, and that was in the year 1978 B.C.

Jenny Foster. She and I went to school from kindergarten to senior year together. I remember her rockin’ a styling Dorthy Hammil coif in second grade, and dude, that got my prepubescent man-fluids boiling over. That kiss was magical. Of course I’ll accept her friend request!

Now friends again because Facebook has deemed us to be friends again and it’s not official until it’s published to Facebook that we are friends again, she was able to see the crap I posted to Facebook, someplace I once used to archive the random goofy thoughts I will now post here to STC instead (that’s the point of this entire article). This included this gem of a random thought:

People accuse me of not being able to love anyone or anything, but they forget legless sheep that can’t run away.

It was our 120th high school reunion, we’ve only reconnected because a clan of old classmates saw me at a concert, I hadn’t talked her for a heaping handful of four scores, and the very first comment she posted to my Facebook page was:

“You still have the same fucked up sense of humor you’ve had since I first met you.”

You see? And seeing as we met in our kindergarten class in 775 A.D., and seeing as I didn’t start manifesting bipolar symptoms until our junior year of high school in 2004, it is intellectually lazy to say, “Dude, Steve is saying some really bizarre things that are only moderately funny. He must be off his meds.”

NO! I have a messed up sense of humor, I’ve always had a messed up sense of humor, and I will always have a messed up sense of humor. If you read this blog with any regularity, you’ll be able to see the pattern of behavior that often is attributed to bipolar and an absence of meds. NO! WRONG!

I’ll be posting random, weird, and perhaps funny only to me thoughts here at STC from time to time, and it’s meant to archive these most hilarious thoughts for potential yuk yuks in a future comedy set.

I’ve got bipolar. I’ve got a messed sense of humor. This is one of those rare instances in the universe of true mutually exclusive coincidence. The universe is infrequently lazy enough for coincidence, so revel in this revelation and be thankful that even chaos is predictable in the first few picoseconds.

Dead gorilla charity fundraiser barbecue. Too soon? Never!