Tag Archives: comical

Anger

dictionary with letter A

Anger: (n) : a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure or hostility.

I don’t think there’s anything that makes people more angry than discussing anger.

It is a bit comical that any debate on the subject of human displeasure, manifesting as spits of rage, actually produces such diametrically opposed opinions that you end up with a personification of the word you originally decided to discuss.

Anger is the most common emotion to human beings. Matter of fact, if you even consider those who claim to be “God in the flesh,” they are described as being angry more often than amiable.

But just because it’s common does not mean that we’re willing to accept it, adopt it, own it or admit that we participate. One of the great bastions of pride are those souls who insist they never get angry.

Let me give you a quick definition for anger which is a little different from Mr. Webster’s.

Very simply, anger is frustrated passion.

If it’s sexual passion and it’s not allowed to come to fruition, it can quickly become ferocious or even violent.

If it’s creative passion which is limited in resources or opportunities, it can descend into depression or even in the case of many unfulfilled artists, suicide.

If it is parental passion which is unable to communicate earth’s ways with its child, rendering the parent seemingly useless, it can quickly turn to tears and accusations.

Without passion, we basically die emotionally, causing us to produce a spiritual numbness that freezes our brain–without further illumination.

Yet when we have passion, we risk frustrating ourselves in a blandness of inactivity which can produce the anger of our undoing.

So what is the value of anger? It tells us that our passion is frustrated.

  • Don’t question the passion.
  • Don’t complain about the anger.
  • Minister to the frustration.

Maybe that’s why the Good Book says we should “be angry and sin not.” Because when the frustration that causes our anger is not addressed, every sin imaginable jumps up and volunteers to destroy us. 

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Andrew, St.

dictionary with letter A

Andrew, St.: An apostle, the brother of St. Peter. He is associated with the X-shaped cross because he is said to have been crucified on such a cross, and is the patron saint of Russia and Scotland. Feast Day, November 30.

Long before he was nailed down on a multiplication symbol and they started a special holiday in his honor, Andrew was a fisherman in a little town called Capernaum.

His prospects for being prosperous or well-known and his aptitude for upward mobility were less than promising–actually, comical.

Living in a village of less than five hundred people and a partner in a business in which his brother, with a more boisterous personality, took over the entire room, Andrew had little chance of surfacing socially, or even generating a jot and tittle in a history book.

Yet he possessed one powerful personality trait–he was curious.

While his brother probably took the time to sleep off the latest fishing jaunt, which included heavy wine drinking, Andrew was out and about, looking for possibilities. In the process, he met another unlikely earth-shaker named Jesus of Nazareth.

We don’t know why Andrew was impressed or why he was so moved by the Nazarene’s message. But we do know that he was one of Jesus’ early followers, and ends up bringing his brother to the cause.

As often is the case, there is no Peter without Andrew. There are no five loaves and two fishes for the five thousand fed without Andrew bringing the little boy’s lunch for consideration.

And even though after all the smoke cleared of the posturing and shuffling, he did not end up being one of the inner-three best friends of Jesus (positions held by Peter, James and John), we are never made aware that he is slighted or offended in the least.

He did three things that gave him personal salvation and a place for all time:

  1. He stayed interested.
  2. When he found something important, he got excited.
  3. He stuck with it to the end.

In many ways Andrew is the hero of the gospel story simply because he brought the right people at the right time … to the right person.

 

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Amber Alert

dictionary with letter A

Amber Alert: (n) an emergency response system that disseminates information about a missing person (usually a child) by media broadcasting or electronic roadway signs.

All right. Get ready to buy me the T-shirt.

I guess it should read, “I am an unfeeling, anti-American, cynical unbeliever.”

Maybe it’s because I’ve done some follow-up on the concept of Amber Alerts. Even though there are many television shows that make hay off of children being abducted by strangers who torture and murder them, most of the kidnapping of little ones in our country is done by either the mother or the father, who no longer love each other and have decided to turn the child into the hunk of meat which they steal from the barn and hustle away through the woods.

If it weren’t so sad and pathetic, it would nearly be comical. We have actually created a system of marriage in this country which at least half of the time ends up in divorce, while contending that when it comes to the realm of the children, the couple is still together–even though they’ve moved on to other relationships, and now, because of human nature, are trying to prove to the children that this person is now their enemy and how much better off they would be if they didn’t have that rotten sperm donor or womb carrier.

Did you follow that?

In other words, like we always do in this country, we think we can establish a family, destroy it, pretend that it still exists, and then act alarmed when one of the parents steals the child, which sends out an Amber Alert and makes everyone concerned about their own offspring, when it really is just a Hatfield and McCoy feud.

There are exceptions, and for that reason, the Amber Alert should not be removed from our everyday lives.

But keep in mind–most of these are people who are fighting with each other, who once made love and produced a child, who has become at times little more than a bargaining chip.

Here’s the real Amber Alert, and may it sound out over the airwaves and be flashed on the freeways:

If you’re going to have children, try to keep your marriage together, and if you don’t stay together, please remember–and Solomon was wise enough to know this:

You can’t cut a kid in two.

Alight

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alight: (v) descend from the air and settle: e.g. a lovely blue swallow alighted on the branch

It’s really outdated. Matter of fact, if you used the term today it would have to be a comical retro reference to a former time.

“Heavy.”

I don’t know why we considered that word cool. I guess we thought it communicated that some concept was deep, containing a weight of wisdom.

It certainly would not go over in this day and age, where we think profundities are achieved by explaining on Facebook or in a Tweet how we plan to go to the grocery store to pick up a can of pimentos. (LOL)

And honestly, even in the era when “heavy” was considered to be contemporary, many of the ideas being passed along were purposely obtuse, in order to appear to be intellectual.

Here’s what I know: really great ideas and powerful words of encouragement and joyful exhortation … alight.

  • They land on the soul effortlessly, with a bit of jubilation and simplicity.
  • They encourage us to exhale as we appear to be holding our breath in anxiety.
  • They suggest the possibility of a solution in what seems to be a terminally dismal cave.
  • They cause us to giggle instead of sitting around envisioning scenarios of doom

Wisdom is brief, it is easy, it is non-burdensome and it is evidence that we are not alone.

Some people feel extraordinarily astute by complicating living situations, offering a climate of ferocious debate which establishes them as brilliant and insightful, but I have found that true spirituality, divine emotion, ordained intelligence and great movement is best when it alights in our being, weightless but worthy.

Heavy just makes us sag at the shoulders under the oppression.

We need a generation of intelligent people who can have the wisdom of the serpent … but alight as harmless as doves.

 

Alfredo

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alfredo: (n) a sauce for pasta incorporating butter, cream garlic and Parmesan cheese.

There are very few surprises.

Well, I guess the fact that avocados are high in calories is a little alarming, considering how little taste they offer for the load. But generally speaking, you can taste–or really just look–at a dish of food and know that it is killer with everything that produces the fat and sugars which make us bounce out of the room in our “rotundness.”

Such is alfredo sauce.

It’s almost comical, isn’t it? It seems to me that the times in my life that I’ve eaten fettuccine alfredo, I have found myself screaming at the world around me, “What the hell! Leave me alone! I’m gonna go out with a fork in my hand and a smile on my face!”

  • Butter. Come on. Can anything be more symbolic of excess?
  • Cream.
  • Parmesan cheese.
  • And then, on top of that, to create a noodle that is larger and wider than spaghetti–a four-lane carb–to make sure you don’t lose one single drop of this exorbitantly-caloried sauce, is a proclamation of insanity portrayed as a declaration of eating independence.

I once walked by a plate of fettuccine alfredo–without consuming it, merely viewing it–and went to the scale, having gained three pounds. My eyeballs had absorbed the richness through visual osmosis.

It’s much like America. Watching a little piece of Dr. Oz the other day as they were discussing how to take kale and turn it into chips by baking it in the oven, a commercial came on afterwards advertising the new Wendy’s double-bacon, avocado, guacamole cheddar cheese burger.

I love this country. We talk such a good game–and then we decide never to play it.

We think putting on public service announcements about childhood obesity will cover the problem as we continue to dangle saturated fats and sugary confections in front of our children like Christmas ornaments lit up by tiny little bulbs.

They tell me people in Italy eat lots of pasta, and don’t have heart trouble. All I know is, if they’re eating fettuccine alfredo, they should be prepared … well, they should be prepared … to die.

Ageless

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Ageless: (adj) never growing or appearing to grow old e.g.: the town retained its ageless charm.

What is ageless?

To me there is one idea that is ageless, accompanied by other things that are spawned because of the value of that golden truth: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Once we decide to call that ageless, we therefore come up with the notion that “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

And if THAT’S true, we can relax and stop trying to appear superior to others.

Not needing to be superior to others, we don’t have to evangelize the world with our particular rendition of truth.

Given that extra time free from evangelizing, we can become creative–pursuing art, science and solutions.

With this blessed time provided, we also discover powerful ways to make our lives better and enrich the surrounding atmosphere.

And now that the world is convinced we are out to contribute instead of sucking the life out of everything, nature itself becomes more generous.

Because we’ve honored Mother Nature, Father God feels quite able to embrace us as His children.

No longer orphaned or feeling rebellious to a universe that was once our enemy, we calm down.

As we calm down, we feel less need to compete and more desire to congeal.

As we congeal, race, nationality, religion and physical differences become unimportant–almost comical.

Laughing at ourselves, we welcome a world of joy.

Joy increases our strength.

Stronger, we go out to use our energy to build instead of destroy.

No longer needing to destroy, we start thinking of ways to take the weaker among us and make them valuable.

Because everyone is considered valuable, we find it much easier to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

What is ageless is the power to believe in the idea of equality BEFORE it makes complete sense.

When we do so, some of the wrinkles in our society–and maybe even on our faces–disappear.

Adenoids

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Adenoids: (n.) a mass of enlarged lymphatic tissue between the back of the nose and the throat, often hindering speaking and breathing in young children.

I was only ten years old so the significance completely evaded me.

Our family physician was named Dr. Livingston. To me it was just another name, not a literary setup, so when Dr. Livingston looked over his silver spectacles and told my mother and father that I needed to have my tonsils removed–otherwise I would have tonsillitis any time it was rumored to be in the area–they agreed.

They were further delighted when he told them that while he was in there yanking out the little boogers, that he might as well take my adenoids, too. It was common at the time. Tonsils were apparently so emotionally linked to adenoids that it was a given in the medical field that if you took one you had better remove the other, too, or fussiness would ensue.

Dr. Livingston? Tonsils and adenoids, I presume?

My father, being raised in a miserly German home, was excited because he felt he was getting two operations for the price of one.

So I was sent to a clinic in the big city twenty miles from our little burg, and was prepped for surgery. This was long before anethesia was perfected. It was actually barely beyond the phase of a shot of whiskey and a punch in the jaw.

What they used to put you under was ether. Now, let me explain what ether smells like. It has a distinctive odor. Imagine if a bottle of alcohol let off a big, stinky fart.

There you go.

So after they had removed my co-dependent organs, I awoke to the smell of this nasty “stinky” in the air, to spend the next hour-and-a-half doing nothing but trying to regurgitate all of my insides for public view.

About two hours later my stomach finally calmed down and they told me I could have some nice, cool Jello. (I had heard rumors that ice cream was the normal gift given to a patient, but apparently I ended up at K-Mart Presbyterian Municipal Hospital, where budget cuts were inserted to extract all pleasures.)

Unfortunately, the flavor they chose for my Jello was cherry.

When my mother and father wanted to go out and catch a bite to eat, they left my older brother in charge. The cherry jello by then had landed in my stomach, was introduced to the raging ether, and was immediately evicted. So when I threw up my cherry jello, my brother was convinced that I was bleeding to death. He ran through the halls screaming for nurses to come and save me.

The comical part (as if it isn’t already) was that it took the nurses at least ten minutes to figure out that what was in my bed pan had the unmistakable fragrance of Kool-aid.

Things went back to normal–if you call being ten years old, in a hospital, losing your tonsils and adenoids, vomiting profusely, with a maniac for a brother, only room for Jello and without the benefit of an ice cream confection … anywhere near normalcy.

Abbacy

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter AAbbacy: (n.) the office or period of office of an abbot or abbess.

There are so many words there I don’t understand that I don’t know where to begin. So instead of beginning, let me do what most politicians do and just talk about stuff that comes to my mind that I really don’t understand.

My vision of an abbot is someone who wears robes and works in a church. That other word sounds an awful lot like Abyss, which was a really cool movie about a huge water snake coming in, staring at a girl and morphing into her face. (It’s too difficult to explain unless you’ve seen the movie.)

The other Abbot I’m aware of is Bud Abbot. He joined with Lou Costello to form, of course, Abbot and Costello.

I am dating myself to put these names into the article. Most people today would be completely unfamiliar with Abbot and Costello, so to focus in on Bud Abbot would be to double the potential for obscure and confusing knowledge. But for the record–he was the straight man–which I guess, WOULD describe an abbot,right?  Is there such a thing as a comical abbot? I suppose if YOU had to walk around all day in woolen robes, with a funny haircut, consume large portions of porridge and say prayers all day, you might feel like you were IN an abyss.

Which brings us back to where we started.

I don’t know what I’m talking about.