Is It In You?

“I just don’t see what’s funny about putting somebody through a wood chipper.”

As soon as the words have left Bekah Judd’s mouth I start to snicker.

I will admit, my sense of humor is not quite right.

Last night while sitting outside Baker’s Crust with Bekah and Amy Bare; we got onto a vein of discussing dark comedies and I found myself referencing several movies that neither of them had ever seen. Death to Smoochy, Running with Scissors, The Royal Tennanbaums, etc. Some of which they (like many people I now assume) had never even heard of. At some point it occurs to me that I have come to love these ladies dearly despite the fact that they cannot recite even the First Rule of Fight Club, much less the other seven.

Believe me, this is a HUGE wormhole in my own personal dogma of the value of another human being.

I digress.

I began to think about why I like the things that I do, why I think they are funny and what makes me appreciate humor. (Don’t be surprised that I can post “I began to think” every day because usually I have some ephiphanical {yes I just made that word up} revelation about my own rabbit holes as soon as I allow myself to begin to think about them. Probably why I never did mind altering drugs. I get lost enough in my own head sober, can’t imagine if I took off the leash and went wandering.)

I digress.

So my favorite movies are those that show the problems of humanity in an exaggerated form.

The family disfucntionality of The Royals, Running with Scissors, White Oleander, Little Miss Sunshine

The need find truth outside the tangible world Fight Club, Pi

Or just the raw depravity of man: Kill Bill, The Machinist, Reservoir Dogs

Lets not just TALK about the pink elephants, lets research them, dissect them, train them, put them on parade, and write a book about “500 Hundred Ways to Cook an Elephant” That’s my thought anyway, but I don’t have boundary issues, I don’t even have boundaries.

But the more I think about it the more I find that I enjoy those things not because they reflect society in an honest affronting way but because they resonate with something inside myself. They put a thought, an event, a desire from my own life up on a screen and say see, you’re not the only freak in the world. Someone else went through this, thought this, did this.

I remember distinctly an occasion in sixth grade Sunday school where our teachers drew a “line in the sand” and asked us to cross it if we would commit not to use drugs and alcohol. I was the only one who didn’t move. I believed firmly in not “putting before God” in sixth grade a covenant that I had no idea whether or not I was going to even want to keep when I became an adult. All my peers were sure there was something wrong with me. Was a pledging to be bad?

While studying Oedipus Rex in Greek Lit my teacher asked for a show of hands if we thought we could kill our own fathers. I was the only one who did. He praised me as the only honest one in the class. I thought perhaps it was not honesty but self-awareness. Not that have ever wanted to hurt my father. Aside my husband, my dad is my favorite person in the world, but understanding my heart as it is; knowing given XYZ circumstancing having been different, had there been abuse, had I been a psychopath ...there but for Christ. I am not who I could be.

I don’t think about it often. But when I do, I have to admit, its there. The person I could have been; the person but for God that I could have become. A drug addict or a runaway. A co-dependant lover or a self-help junkie, a unitarian, a call-girl, a wicca or just a bored pampered suburban housewife.

Maybe that’s why Bekah doesn’t think using a wood chipper to dispose of a body is funny. It never would have occurred to her to do that. Perhaps being a killer isn't in her. Even naturally.

I however, might have done it. After further examination though it seems like a good way to get caught. Too much liquid evidence. No DNA containment. I would hope I would have been smarter than that. (Although, I think if he had a choice, its the kinda way Steve Buscemi would have wanted to go, we were talking about Fargo.)

If you gotta dump a body, I think a pig farm is definitely the way to go.