Dad Lesson 9 - Writing Humor When You're Goddamn Sad

me and my depression walk into a bar

Hello again!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written, and that’s for a pretty specific reason. Thank you for your patience and your understanding. As you may have seen in my last post, my beautiful companion of over fourteen years passed away. I’ve been feeling pretty heartbroken about it, and it’s made it difficult to get back to state of equilibrium. Writing! How? My brain is smooth and full of tears and snot.

Making art is hard, regardless, but one of the things that held my writing career together like a beautiful crazy glue was the fact that my dog was there for all of it. Every short story, every essay, every book. Every shitty Goodreads review. She was there for all of my (hundreds) of rejections: the grants and residencies I didn’t land, the email on Christmas Eve from a (fairly well-known) journal that asked me not to send anything to them again until I could stop being so vulgar and keep swears out of my writing. The novel drafts that went straight into the garbage can. I read everything I ever made aloud to my dog. Feels weird to write anything without her staring up at me, ready for a tiny head scratch or at the very least a bite of my snack. She was the unofficial mascot of my writing career.

No One Gave Better Side-Eye

My wife and I hosted a memorial service for Lola at our house last weekend, what we were calling a “celebration of life,” where we played music in our backyard, drank bacon-fat infused old fashioneds, and provided a selection of food that my dog would have enjoyed, which means we ate Cheez-its, baby carrots, blueberries, and chicken strips. I got up in front of everyone and said a few words about what Lola meant to me, which means that I full on sobbed in front of my friends and family. It was… hard.

I am trying to be in touch with my grief right now, which has been a genuinely trying experience. I am not a person who handles emotions well. I am more inclined to make a joke about a sad or upsetting situation. I want to make everyone feel better, to put people at ease. I cannot be at ease right now (and I don’t think anyone else it at ease, either). How could anyone be? Aside from my own sudden personal loss, things are pretty shitty all around.

A very kind person messaged me on Instagram a few weeks ago and said something that I’ve thought a lot about. They wanted to give me their phone number, so I could reach out to them in a couple of months and talk about my sadness and my grief about my dead pet. People will stop wanting to hear about it, they noted. But you can message me. I get it. You’ll want to talk about it after everyone has moved past it and expects you to be past it, too.

I’ve discovered I don’t want to move past it. At least, not yet. Fourteen years! It feels like an honor to be sad. That doesn’t mean I want to be sad forever. It just means I want to respect these feelings.

Anyway, all this to say that I’ve got a book coming out in a few weeks and it’s supposed to be funny.

I’ve never felt less funny in my life than I do right now.

So, in honor of Dad Lessons and the fact that I’m trying to learn something new, all the time, here’s what I’ve taken from this very strange situation. Lessons on how to write humor when you feel like literal shit: