Perfect Moments

• In my high school writing class, in 2006 or 2007, Robbie said “I’ve got a pretty good joke. What do Saddam Hussein and a potato named Richard have in common?” There was some silence as people thought, and then C_____ answered, “They’re both brown?”
• In Palm Springs, in 2021, sitting with my mom on a bench outside a bath and body shop that happened to be next to an ice cream/frozen yogurt place. A woman is standing outside the body shop with a tray of little paper cups with lotion samples and a guy walks by, picks a cup up and eats it, thinking it’s ice cream. He freaks out.
• In a philosophy class at the University of Washington in 2008, my professor is talking about social norms. “You can’t just go around yelling at people,” he says. And then, holding up two middle fingers, he continues, “You can’t go around fingering everybody,” and he catches himself, puts his hands down and says “no” immediately, in front of a 300-person lecture hall.
• High with David at a Chikara match in 2018 or 2019, sitting immediately in front of a camera person. A heel (bad guy wrestler) is onstage being mean and the camera person is trying so hard to make everybody boo, but we keep cheering and loudly saying things to each other like, “Actually, I really like this guy.” The camera person is annoyed.
• Immediately after this, the two wrestlers on stage reconcile. They’re both rockabilly wrestlers who, in story, have been engineered by the same mad scientist to be the ultimate rockabilly wrestler. They put aside their differences to take on the scientist.
• In 2011 or 2012, after pulling a nasty all-nighter writing papers and finally turning them in the next morning, Johanna and I go to a diner called The Diner and I order their big “everything” lunch, which includes one of everything on the breakfast menu, and then we take a nap in my apartment.
• In high school English, 2004, K_____ sneezes and farts at the same time.
• Taking a MegaBus back from New York to DC with Ethan after a Future of the Left concert, 2012, and the MegaBus’ short safety and instructional video plays on a loop for at least an hour, eventually flipping upside down, until it feels like we’re in a Nam June Paik exhibit. This only ends when the bus pulls off into an empty field and we’re all forced to get off and board a different MegaBus at 2am.
• At my friend Hime’s birthday party at some point between kindergarten and third grade, where her parents ordered KFC for everybody. After lunch, we go to the backyard for an Easter egg hunt and her dad explains the rules while demolishing a chunk of corn on a stick, and then when he finishes the rules and the corn, which happens at the same time in my memory, he chucks the stick and the stripped cob behind him, without looking, into his own backyard. I find an egg and win a Keroppi sticker sheet.
• Buying comics at Jeffrey’s Toys in San Francisco on Wednesdays before my first job after college, knowing that however bad the day went, I’d have something fun to read on the train back home at the end of the day.
• Buying Acme Novelty Library 20 at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC the day it came out and reading it in Fort Reno, the weather perfect.
• Seeing The Room at midnight at the E Street Theater in DC with Allie, right before those screenings started to turn bad, and having a fistfight break out in the first five minutes.
• Staying with my grandma in the city after concerts and then taking the train home the next day after breakfast.
• Adopting Pumpkin.

An awkward moment that still makes me feel weird:

• At DisneyLand, in 2014, Johanna and I are sitting in TomorrowLand, waiting for something, and two Stormtroopers come up to us. One of them says “Hey, what are you doing, rebel scum? Do you have any identification?” Not thinking, I make the stupidest joke and ask “Is this because I’m Jewish?” There is a long pause and the other Stormtrooper says “Move along” and they both leave. As I feel bad about this not being the time or place for that, a man next to us starts laughing and then his son starts laughing to mimic his dad and then the son asks “What is Jewish?”