Sharing a Laugh

I went to the movies with my kids this weekend. We saw The Lorax. Which was fine. Cute really. It's one Dr. Seuss book I never read with my kids so I have no idea how close the story - which seemed way to culturally salient to be lifted from the pages (?) - in the movie is to that in the book. But the movie was about all the ridiculous earth destroying, profiteering absurdities in our society. The town featured in the movie (Sneedville?) has no trees. They were all cut down to make the Sneeds (a weird scarf type thingamabob) and then some other profiteer decided to sell people air. So the town has no trees (other than the plastic ones that light up) and air is sold in plastic bottles (yes they are empty bottles), much like water we buy today. Something available for free, that we choose to pay for.

Of course it ends happily - everyone votes for trees. And the normalcy is hopefully restored. My too clever oldest son said he thought the movie was a farce because they probably hurt the earth making it. Touche. Smarty pants. Subversive. Green SF native.

But the part of this whole movie going experience that affected me the most was some silly promotional ad before the movie even started. I don't even know what it was for. I've seen it a million times. Some goofy guy is dancing on one of those video game dance machine things. He is super into it, in the way that people that love those things are. He's flamboyant and makes silly faces and dances way too seriously for a video game. I giggled. I do every time. My youngest said, "Dad always laughs at that part too." Yeah, I'm sure he does.

That man infuriates me. We should not be together. But I do miss that we shared a sense of humor in a very fundamental, slightly odd and askew kind of way. We laughed together at things no one thought were funny. Dark terrible things. We were politically incorrect on matters of race, gender, religion - perhaps the result of an inter-racial, non observant household. We were mean at times. But not in the world. We just let the meanness slip with each other. We made fun of people, the world, men, women, black people, white people, all people. No one was exempt.

Too bad that's not enough. Not even close. And maybe we were just too mean. Period.