Oh Wait...

What’s that?  You thought I was finished?  Done?  Gone from your life forever?

Well sorry to disappoint, cause I’m back.  As you have no doubted deduced by the fact that you are reading this. 

Why am I back though?  Why would anyone wish to come back to this desolate place?  It’s not by choice, believe me.  I would much rather be kicking back, sipping SunnyD and slaying monsters on my Nintendo DS.  Sounds awesome, right?  Instead, though, I get to write you this post.  All about an incident that will be completely boring to you.  Because this is the post where I deal with an instance in which my friends and I collapse in helpless gales of laughter.  Wait, you might say, that sounds somewhat entertaining.  

Did you know that Neil Armstrong used to make lame jokes about the moon and then sigh and say “I guess you had to be there?”

The above is an example of a joke made funny through the value of pain and truth.  The pain is that no one gets the joke while the truth is that in many such cases you really do have to be there to understand.  Such, I believe, is the case for most, if not all, of such stories as the one I’m about to tell.  It is funny to me, it is funny to my friends, to you I anticipate, at most, slightly amusing.

Now, having set it up so that you are dreading the coming tale (or eagerly anticipating it, depending on how you take things) I shall begin. 

For it to make sense, I have to begin the day before the incident.  It was Thanksgiving, dinner was cooking and football was on.  My older brother vacated his spot on the couch to grab a snack and I walked in and took his place. As you can no doubt imagine, this sparked a wrestling match in which there was much grunting, head locking, and arm twisting.  This lasted for some time and was ended when the Cowboys made a touchdown.

Approximately thirty minutes after, and this is the important part, I lost my voice.  Poof gone.  That was surprising, for I was not sick in any way.  After making completely sure that I was not sick I came to the conclusion that somewhere in the wrestling match something had happened to kill my voice, at which point I simply hoped that it was not permanent (spoiler, it wasn’t). 

Anyway, after that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving and blah blah blah.  The next day is when the incident actually occurred.  As you know, the day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday.  So on Friday one of my friends—who was coming over that night—called and said he was going to Wal-Mart with some buddies because they could and wanted to know if I wanted to come.  Obviously I said yes.  The annoying part was that my voice was not nothing more than a whisper, something I had to explain to my friend, and then again to his friends (and every single person I met after that).

It’s late and we’re in Wal-Mart.  I’m with everyone and they all want to go one way while I want to go the other so I just start walking the way I wanna go.  My friend shouts after me, asking where I’m going and so I turn around and tell him.  In my whisper of a voice.  From twenty feet away.  That produced a chorus of “what did he say?” And that made me laugh, although with the rest of them.  It wasn’t a gut-wrenching, can’t breathe, about to die type of laugh.  It was a quiet chuckle that stuck around for the rest of the evening and still comes to me now as I think back on it.  It was one of those laughs that never goes away and you don’t forget, not because anything was particularly funny, simply because it happened when it happened where it happened.

That night we did plenty of other interesting things, among which was a Chinese fire drill, a three liter diet coke mixed with Mementos, and much Mountain Dew.  But it was that one incident that I will remember, retell, and laugh.

Well that and the Chinese fire drill.