RIP George Carlin

This is a big one.

George Carlin died Sunday, as you probably have heard.

He was astonishingly brilliant and funny, and even when I disagreed with him, he made terrific, insightful points with his jokes. Some people see the world with such profound clarity that they seem to be wholly removed from our thought process in some way. Carlin was one of them.

I grew up listening to him. When my parents were away I'd pull out their LP of An Evening with Wally Londo. I still quote jokes from it:

I wanna get a tattoo on my back that says, "Let's never tell this guy all the crap we wrote on his back. He thinks it's a pirate ship."

He talked about how he wanted to get in the background of some TV news shot, but not actually SAY anything for fear of being cut out. No, his plan was just to mouth the phrase "I hope all you stupid @#$% lip readers are watching."

Funny, offensive, creative... I love how he took the steam out of words, how he belittled the idea that some words (or body parts) are inherently BAD.

If I am funny at all, I owe it to George Carlin (and Bill Cosby, a comic from the opposite end of the spectrum).

***

I'm glad to be getting back in shape. I've started mixing in some good bag workouts with my jogs. Twice over the weekend I did five rounds of three minutes each, interspersed with pushups and ab exercises. I'm coming around.

***

Yesterday morning was glorious. I felt great, the weather was nice, and THEGIRL was outside, watering plants. I read the paper on the porch.

The squirrels were behaving rather strangely. At one point a male got within about six feet of my daughter, barking at her. I told her to back off. I figured he's got little ones up the tree or something.

Up in the tree there was a lot of movement. I couldn't really see it because I was under the overhang. Suddenly BOOM! A squirrel fell about 25 feet out of the tree. He landed hard on the grass, and with an awful sound.

He got up and zipped right back up the tree.

So I sipped my coffee and read the paper. THEGIRL sat down with me, showing me her dirty feet. From a different tree there was more noise, and again, a squirrel fell from maybe 25 feet up, landing not far from our feet. It narrowly missed hitting a little concrete ledge, which surely would have killed it. Again, it jumped right up and climbed the tree.

I figure that's about the equivalent of me falling at least 75 feet.

So I'd gone nearly 40 years without seeing a squirrel fall out of a tree, only to see two do it in 10 minutes. Odd.

***

Happy Monday, ya'll.