My father was/is a rather laid back guy. He’s got his buttons, though. College basketball, Bill Bidwell, Ryan Braun: All guaranteed to start the man spinning like a top. But his biggest button? The two words you can say and then step back and watch him lose his fucking mind? “Mel Brooks.”  My father hates Mel Brooks the way Baptists hate twerking. Why? The fuck I know, but he does. With a passion.

I’ve made my peace with many of my “hate button” celebrities: Will Farrell. Mike Meyers. Adam Sandler. Comedy is subjective, sure, but comedy travels on frequencies. Mel Brooks and Woody Allen were “absurdist” comedians. Farrell, Meyers, and Sanders are “cringe” comedians, or what I call “dead hooker” comedians. Their comedy is rooted in finding something that makes you uncomfortable and squeezing that thing to extract the truth within it.

I didn’t think Adam Sandler’s bit about having sex with a geriatric lady was funny the first time I saw it. Somewhere around the thirtieth time he rolled out that same gag, I was… I became…

Never mind. I won’t say it’s not funny. I am not the arbiter of what is or is not funny. Let’s just say that it’s not my particular frequency of humor.

I did not dislike Joan Rivers. I just was not a huge fan. I never said, “OH! Joan Rivers is on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert tonight! Can I stay up to see that, Mom?”

I certainly took no joy at her passing. She was much beloved for a myriad of reasons and that’s great. I’ve read many moving tributes to her that make it easy to respect her as a person, even if I never laughed at her jokes and every time I heard her say “Can we taaawk???” I could feel the fillings in my teeth vibrate.

** BEEP BEEP BEEP!  TOPIC CHANGE **

I was a pretty good kid in grade school. Perhaps the beginning of middle school as well. Then the bullshit of it all caught up with me. I’m a terrible liar, to a fault, and when I’m wading through bullshit, I don’t possess the ability/class/skill to say, “How lovely! Bless your heart! I never did mind about the little things.”

Naw. I say, “This sucks! Don’t shit in my hand and tell me it’s a cupcake.”

Somewhere around eighth grade I turned into a rather insufferable prick. Certainly as a student. (There are a couple of women who will tell you that extends to my tenure as a boyfriend, and they are not wrong.) If a teacher made an effort to be real with me, things were fine. The moment a teacher put a mask on, it was on. The minute they shit in my hand and told me it was a cupcake, my “Fuck You Light” illuminated. It’s amazing that I made it to graduation without being cold-cocked by a faculty member of Hazelwood West Senior High School. There were a handful of teachers to whom I actually owed apologies, and I made an effort to deliver those apologies over the years. It’s tough now, because they have scattered to wherever tenured teachers retire. Probably kid-free condo communities in Florida.

One of those teachers to whom I successfully delivered my apology was Barry Roades, English teacher. He was tough on me. He was also so full of shit that he squeaked. He loved to tell bullshit stories about his handicapped wife and her wheelchair (not true) or his infant son (also not true). He told us a story about how he wasn’t allowing his wife to talk babytalk to the baby, because he didn’t want to clutter the child’s mind with “goo goo gah gah.”

“I’ll just wait until he’s old enough to talk, and then see what he has to say.”

It’s funny now. Heck, it was funny then to see all the girls bite on the lie and freak out.  “That’s terrible! You don’t talk to your own baby???”  Sigh. He was a troll before his time.

Mr. Roades was a handsome guy. Fit. A softball and tennis coach for the girls’ varsity team. He also had a reputation for being a perv. For all the dozens of girls I’ve heard make this claim, I can’t seem to find a single one who actually suffered something pervy done to them. It was all, “Oh I heard from so-and-so that he was pervy and he sure was.” “There was something about the way he looked at me!” Yeah. Okay. Perception becomes reality.

I went back to visit Mr. Roades a couple of times before he died. The last time I talked to him, he had just found out that he wasn’t going to get tenure and he was being pushed out. The man was a tad bitter. I’d be bitter too, I guess. I’ve mentioned that I live by the motto: “Don’t fuck with another man’s livelihood.” As you might imagine, human being Mr. Roades was much cooler than teacher Mr. Roades. One of things I mentioned to him was how he may have been the only high school teacher I knew who really prepared me for how tough college teachers could be.

“Ehn,” he said, dismissively flipping his fingers. “I wasn’t really all that tough.”

“No,” I insisted, “you were pretty hard core, Mr. Roades.”

He shook his head. “Only if you screwed with me. If you tried to take me on, you got back ten times what you dished out.”

I nodded. That sounded about right to me. I got back ten times what I dished out.

He died young, a Tennis Pro in Zephyrhills Florida. Defective ticker.

Five or six years back I found an address for the son that Mr. Roades talked about, Erin. I wrote Erin a long letter. I never heard back from Erin. Then I found out that Erin wasn’t Mr. Roades’ son. She was his daughter. His only daughter. The crusty bastard tricked me AGAIN in death!

After a moment I started laughing. Well played, Sir. Well played.

No wonder she didn’t respond.

Alas, there are lot of folks who are not as forgiving of his hijinks. On the Facebook memorial page for the guy, there is a long parade of ersatz adults who have lined up to take a shit on his grave. And you know what? I get it. I totally get it.

I’m not going to lie. There are a couple folks on that memorial page whom I absolutely delight in seeing their asshole faces and knowing they are no longer wasting space on my planet. There’s one particular teacher whom I eagerly await to see as an addition to the page. I very well may take a literal shit on Mr. Dickwad’s grave.

But what I won’t do is weigh in on Facebook with a catalog of all the ways Mr. Dickwad wronged me. Funerals and Memorials are not for the dead. They are for the living. Mr. Dickwad did nothing to earn my respect, but Mr. Dickwad will be getting his mail from the gophers. His family did nothing to me, nothing to forfeit my respect, and I’m not going to work through my issues at the expense of Mr. Dickwad’s friends and family.

Humor and humanity. The pedantic and the farcical. It’s all traveling on a frequency. How much power do you want to give a subterranean box of inert proteins over your day-to-day happiness, anyway? We’ve all got scabs to pick: Jesus didn’t hire women. Gandhi didn’t have any black friends. Somebody who went to middle school with Amy Adams thinks she the world’s biggest C U Next Tuesday.  Like Doug Mackenzie said…

“Don’t kill bugs. Because if everybody killed all that we hate, there’d be nobody left. Because, like, no matter how good a person you are, there’s always somebody who thinks you’re a hoser. So don’t kill bugs.”

The nemesis who irked me in this life shall pass. In that moment I will call it joy, but in that moment I will be shitting in your hand and telling you it’s a cupcake. It is nothing but plain ol’ hate.

And hate is the gift you give your enemies.