dumb dumber jim carrey — and the sunday call that referenced him twice

dumb dumber jim carrey came up twice during a single mom call, once because mom thought he was somebody else, and once because i corrected her badly. dave was on the line by mistake. the third yoga mat listened. ice cream melted on the counter, slowly, hot-take-style, to nobody’s surprise.

this is, properly, a sunday post written on a tuesday, which is the only honest way to handle a sunday. the call happened, the ice cream melted, and the sentence “jim carrey, the rubber-faced one, you know who i mean” got said out loud in my own apartment, by my own mother, twice, with a twelve-second pause between attempts. i wrote nothing down at the time. i have, since then, written everything down.

writing this from the desk on a tuesday at 9:47am. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, which buys me the rest of the morning if the projector behaves.

so. dumb dumber jim carrey. that exact string, in that exact order, is how the call got filed in my head, because that is how mom phrased the search she would have done if she had been the type to do a search. she wasn’t. she just kept saying the words and waited for the brain to catch. it did not catch. that is the post.

on the desk: a photocopy of the all-hands agenda, an airpod, and a sticky note that just says “carrey, twice.” the other airpod is, almost certainly, back at my place.

dumb dumber jim carrey, the genealogy of the bit

the bit, in our family, goes like this. mom calls on sunday. mom asks how i am. i say fine. mom asks who i saw on the weekend. i say nobody. mom moves on. and then, somewhere between the laundry update and the second cousin’s news, mom tries to remember the title of a film and gets it almost right, in a way that is its own genre.

this sunday’s attempt was the 1994 road movie. the one with the bowl cuts and the snow and the sheepdog van and the open-mouthed driving. for the broader category — what dumb actually is, as a word, as a posture, as a position in the group — see the pillar i wrote at this same desk on the meaning of dumb, which is the trunk this whole branch hangs off. the cluster has its own gravity. mom does not know about the cluster. mom knows about the film, in pieces.

she said: “the dumb one. the dumber one. the rubber-faced one. jim carrey.” then a pause. then: “with the other one. the tall one with the hair.” that’s jeff daniels. she did not get to jeff daniels. she got to “the tall one with the hair.” that is, in the genealogy of this bit, where the call usually lands. close enough. nobody loses.

the title in the actual world is dumb and dumber. the title in mom’s head, on a sunday at 4:38pm her time, is dumb dumber jim carrey, in that order, like a shopping list. i prefer mom’s title. mom’s title is, frankly, more accurate to the experience of watching the film as a teenager in the late nineties on a wednesday afternoon when you should have been doing homework.

dave called sunday, he quoted the wrong scene

here is the part where dave got involved, by accident, on a different line, because mom likes to put me on hold for thirty seconds to take “another quick call” and the another quick call this sunday was, somehow, dave. dave does not know my mother. mom does not know dave. they are not, on paper, in the same address book. that is, evidently, an outdated assumption.

dave came on. dave said “what did you do.” i said nothing, dave, mom’s on the other line. dave said “your mother is on the other line and you are answering my call?” i said dave, you called me. dave said “i did. i did call. and you should be on with me, not her.” this is the order in which dave processes information. i admire it, on tuesdays, from the desk. i tolerate it, on sundays, from the kitchen.

dave laughed for nine straight minutes about quoting the wrong film into a sunday call he had not been invited to. mom came back on the line and asked, with the precise tone she has always used for non-emergencies, “is that dave.” it was. she said “tell dave hello.” i told dave hello. dave said “tell her hello back.” they have, between them, exchanged exactly nine words across my entire adult life, and four of them were on this sunday. dave remains, in our family, the only friend with a name. he also remains, in our private ledger, the friend who says i owe him three hundred dollars, which we are not, today, going to discuss.

mom was on the other line, she also misquoted

mom came back. mom said, picking up the thread mid-air, “the rubber-faced one was also in the mask. with the green face.” i said yes, that’s the mask, also 1994, also him. mom said “they made three good ones that year.” they did not. they made about that many. i did not correct her. i corrected her, instead, on a different point, which is the point of every sunday call: you cannot correct everything, so you correct the one thing that, on balance, won’t ruin the call. you cannot get this calculus wrong. nobody has ever gotten this calculus wrong without consequences.

i corrected the title. i said “mom, it’s dumb and dumber, with an ‘and.’” mom said “well that’s what i said.” mom had not said that. mom had said dumb dumber jim carrey, which is its own thing, and which i have, in retrospect, decided is the correct file name for the film when it lives in your mother’s head. you get one correction per call. i used it on the wrong thing. the rest of the call was, accordingly, slightly off. that is on me.

she said “remember the supermarket scene.” there is no supermarket scene in dumb and dumber. there is a scene in a diner, a scene in a gas station, a scene in a hotel suite the size of a small country, and a long scene in a snowy town where they buy a parrot. there is no supermarket. but mom remembers a supermarket. and the more she described the supermarket, the more i thought she was describing my own supermarket trip from the previous tuesday, the one where i went in for milk and came home with a frying pan i did not need and a yoga mat (the third one). mothers know. she may have, in some sideways way, been narrating my own week back at me, dressed up as a film. it would not be the first time.

SHE. WAS. NOT. WATCHING. THE. FILM.

she was watching, somewhere in the back of her mind, the surveillance footage of my own life. that is what mothers do. they take a film you mention, they slide it sideways, and they hand you back your own week with subtitles. she knew. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. i have tried.

the third yoga mat, witness to all misquotes

the third yoga mat was, that sunday, in its usual position: under the couch, in my own apartment, possibly evolving, definitely not being used. it was, however, fully present. it heard the call. it heard dave. it heard mom. it heard “rubber-faced one.” it heard “snowball scene.” it heard, at one point, my own voice say “no mom, the toilet scene is the same film, dave was just confused,” and it absorbed the misinformation without judgment, the way a yoga mat does.

i bought the third yoga mat in early 2023 with the intention of becoming, finally, a person who does yoga in the morning. i used it once, on a wednesday, for about eleven minutes, and then i pushed it under the couch on a tuesday afternoon during a phone call i was trying to hide from. it has lived under the couch since. for the longer investigation on misuse of objects in this apartment, see the notes from the desk on the dumb diary i keep about my own week; the third mat features in three separate weekday entries, none of them flattering.

the mat is also, as i note here, the only object back at my place that has heard every sunday call of the past two years end to end. it knows more about my mother than any human currently alive, including me. if i ever lose the mat, i lose the archive. that is, at this point, a real consideration.

the ice cream take, briefly, on what jim would order

somewhere between mom’s snowball confusion and dave’s toilet correction, i opened the freezer. there was, on the top shelf, half a tub of vanilla. i took it out. i set it on the counter. i did not put it back. by the time the call ended, twenty-three minutes later, the tub was, by visual estimation, soft on top and structurally compromised at the edges. i ate it anyway. it was, at that hour on a sunday, breakfast.

ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. that is a take i have defended in this apartment, at the bar with mike, and on this newsletter at least twice in the past three months. it is not the take of this post. but it is the take that powered the back end of this sunday call, because the longer the call went, the softer the tub got, and the softer the tub got, the more committed i became to finishing it. it was, by the third minute of the dave-overlap, no longer optional.

jim carrey, in the film mom was half-remembering, would have absolutely ordered ice cream for breakfast. lloyd christmas in particular. there is, somewhere in the 1994 road movie, a moment where lloyd is at a diner, ordering with the confidence of a man who has not read a menu, and i am, on principle, on his side. dumber would have asked for syrup on it. mom, when i described this hypothetical, said “that sounds like jim carrey.” that, eventually, became the second time he came up on the call. so yes. dumb dumber jim carrey, twice, in one call, by two different routes, with one tub of vanilla as collateral. i feel okay about that.

i should also note, with the small caution of a man whose own family receives weekly evidence of his judgement, that this post is not about the kind of mild reality-rearrangement my mother does on a sunday — that’s its own investigation, and i covered the broader pattern, including the version that gets uglier in the wrong relationships, in the long piece i drafted at this same desk on the rewriting of your own week by other people. mom is not gaslighting anyone. mom is just calling the film by the wrong name. the territory is adjacent, not the same. i wanted to mark it before the closing.

verdict, the sunday is the cinema

here is where the post lands. the sunday call is, more than any other room i sit in, the room where films get re-released in my head. the supermarket nightmare from last thursday came back to me as a scene from dumb and dumber. dave’s confusion came back as home alone. the ice cream came back as, frankly, breakfast. jim carrey, the rubber-faced one, the man with the eight-figure paycheck for that role, was the through-line of a twenty-three minute call he had no idea he was starring in.

i did, in passing, also catch myself thinking about my own electronics. the seventh microwave is, as i write this, sitting on the counter back at my place, still unboxed in spirit if not in fact, and i thought, watching the ice cream go, that lloyd christmas would have already plugged it in wrong. there is a scene that does not exist, in my head, where lloyd faces a microwave and the microwave faces him, and one of them does not survive. that scene runs in my head every sunday. it is, technically, not in the film. but it is, structurally, in the film. you understand the difference.

carla just walked past the desk on a printer run. i tabbed to the spreadsheet. the printer is, audibly, jammed. she is, audibly, talking to it.

the new microwave is coming thursday. that is unrelated to the call, except in the way that everything in this apartment is, eventually, related to everything else, which is the only working theory i have left.

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