I'd read a few things that were like Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide by the time I was acquainted with this work. The rebroadcast of the BBC radio adaptation was played on Hutchinson Public Radio which was my classical music station when the wind was just right.
Art Buckwald had a few fantastic pieces of absurdity which I'd read (the article about the Russian BatFox ..aka FoxBat ... was hilarious to me when the defense against this all-weather B-52 destroyer was in fact the Wright Flyer) . Patrick McManus had the closing article in Field and Stream in those days and I found some of his stuff spectacularly absurd as well ("iggles carrying off half-growed cows")
I was a boy. I loved to fish and hunt and was encouraged to work hard, keep my nose cleaner than it had been, and get smarter fast. Things that were funny were seen with a general air of distrust in my world. Remember, this was Western Kansas where the good are praised at the funeral as being "hard workers."
So, I discovered I liked the absurd. I liked the reflection in the mirror of absurdity of those things which strangled me. No, I saw a single Mad magazine in those days. My buddy Mike Day had one which featured Star Wars, a movie I didn't see for seven or eight years.
I miss Douglas Adams. My absurdity is not quite as developed, but then whose is? I'm trying. I'm trying.
I've done the satire and the cliche, the pastiche and the homage.
Now, it is the absurd twist that comes from my grubby little pen.
I once saw a play Dada Dada Dada. It's stuck with me.
I've spent a great deal of time watching the world in my life. People, events, politics, institutions, behaviors. It occurs to me that should humans have a motto, it might well be "The logic doesn't follow."
I'm going to try the trick of absurdity in the most extreme of situations in this next story. We'll see how it goes. Might be shit. I think, however, Douglas might applaud the effort. It isn't based on convention.
I miss Douglas Adams. I'm going to write now.
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