On internet creepers and Jason Good

So, there's a guy on the internet that I've been following for a month or two. Basically since I started blogging, although I can't remember exactly how I found him. His name is Jason Good, and he's hella funny. He's a dad and a comedian. A real comedian, I mean. I saw a picture somewhere with him and Joel McHale schmoozing.

He's got a great web site, and I like to check it out now and then to get a laugh and to get my own brain juices cooking. Is that a phrase? Anyway, it's not a drug reference . . . it's just what I imagine happening when things start coming together up there in my noggin.


So when I read blogs, particularly funny ones, my brain just sort of automatically starts coming up with scenarios that respond to whatever's on the site. I'd call it "riffing" if it didn't sound just a little too cool for me, since "riffing" is what I imagine happens when really talented people get together and just happen to have pianos and trumpets and an overturned trashcan laying around, and then maybe a spoken-word poet drops by, and then probably Bobby McFerrin and Carlos Santana. What I do is more like . . . drawing a rocket ship into the background of a Winslow Homer painting. My thoughts might go like this: "Wow, that's one sweet seascape, all those waves and everything, the sun hitting the water just right, and there's that one lonely dude in the rowboat. He looks tired. He needs something to lift his spirits. What if he suddenly saw a space ship erupt out of the water? Man, that would be AWESOME. I know it would make me feel better." And I start imagining this detailed scenario where some dude in 1899 in a rowboat in the gulf stream encounters that thing in the final scenes of The Abyss.

What I'm getting at is that bizarre little thoughts start growing up in my head, and it comes to a point where they're just too freakin' old to still be living in my head-house and I push them out the door to make their own way in the world, and I click the "post a comment" button. I don't usually think a lot about it, I just do it fast, because sometimes things start getting crowded up in the attic, and I wouldn't want to lose the memories of my daughter's birth to a meandering thought about when it would be appropriate to start training my daughter in hand-to-hand combat (thanks for being the final resting place for that comment, Ninja Mom).

It's not like this is a recent development. In middle school we were required to write journal responses for our English class. I'd finish my response, and then drop in a story I'd been thinking about that involved homicidal vegetables, tragedies leading to unbearable sensitivity to odors, and of course, frequent Frankensteining of inanimate objects. I look back at these stories, and they're mostly awesomely cringe-inducing, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They weren't even for grades. It's like all these bizarre stories were accumulating in my head and I just had to get them out. One of the things my wife loves most about me is how eager I am to offer up an impossible scenario and then continue exploring it with no end in sight, with no regard for appropriate stopping points or for the waning interest of my associates (meaning, basically, my wife).

Anyway, this brings us back to Jason Good. I've commented a little on his site, and once or twice he's commented back. You know, the good-natured politeness you'd expect of any dude who puts stuff out there for other people to read.

But yesterday, I started musing about his very funny post on the reality television show, The Bachelorette, and this is the stuff that came out, and just kept coming:

I think I'd intended just the first paragraph, but then once I got going, the downhill got steeper and I started really picking up steam. Jason responded in a gentlemanly manner that validated a few of the out-there things I was saying, and that qualified a few others. It would have been a good time for me to shake hands and head home, enough excitement for one night. Oh, if only I hadn't checked back to see follow-up comments, because apparently my subconscious still hadn't hit the bottom of that slope. I learned that Jason's wife's name is Lindsay, the same as my wife, and my mind took that idea and continued plummeting. So, apparently Jason's wife Lindsay was looking over his shoulder and telling him to be nice to the sort of eccentric "neal call," and my wife Lindsay was looking over my shoulder and telling me to put the keyboard away, I'd already done enough damage:

I know from looking at Jason's Facebook page that his only rule was "please don't be weird."

And I broke that rule. Maybe even somewhere in the middle of that first comment . . .

So what's the moral to this story? Probably it's that I should end my comments after the first paragraph, no matter where my mind wants to go next. Two paragraphs, absolute tops. Also, that my daughter might have to get herself used to the idea that I'm going to be one of those embarrassing dads, and there's going to be a lot of "Okay, dad, that's interesting about the potato uprising and all, but we're gonna head to the dance now. Bye!"

P.S. Jason's post about The Bachelorette itself was quite funny, and you can check it out here.