funny stupid stories — ten of mine, told briefly and defended

ten of mine are below. all autobiographical. all defended. one involves a fork. one involves a yoga mat. one involves dave at the bar attempting to explain the tax code to a stranger. each story carries a charge of stupid that the punchline pretends to neutralize. the punchline does not neutralize anything. it just gives you somewhere to land.

i’m at the desk. it’s a thursday, 2:47pm, and carla is upstairs in the vendor walkthrough on the third floor, which i’ve been told will run until at least four. that gives me a little more than the rest of the afternoon to put ten funny stupid stories in a row and stand by them. i’m going to use the time. carla won’t.

i don’t usually tell stories. i log them. i sit at this desk and i log them, the way a person who keeps a ledger logs receipts, except none of these add up. the difference between a log and a story is that a story has a punchline and a log has a date. i’m going to attempt the punchline, ten times in a row, and we’ll see who’s still standing.

funny stupid stories, the format the internet loves

the internet loves these because they are the cheapest possible serotonin. one tile, one image, one paragraph, one nodding stranger in the comments. you scroll, you exhale through your nose, you scroll again. the form is older than the internet. the form is two guys at a bar saying “i’ll tell you what i did last weekend,” and the second guy bracing himself.

i am not going to pretend the format is high art. it is not. it is more like a snack you eat standing up. but the snack works. the snack has worked for a very long time. mike will tell you, from his stool at the corner, that the only thing better than a stupid story is a stupid story told with timing. mike has timing. mike has a system for taxes that has not filed since 2019, but his timing is excellent.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that found people remember a stupid story longer than they remember a wise one. i can’t find the study. but i remember it. which is the joke.

TEN. STORIES. ALL MINE. ALL DEFENDED.

story one through five, with the seventh microwave somewhere inside

one — the fork. i microwaved a fork. i did not mean to microwave a fork. i meant to reheat soup with the fork already balanced inside it because the fork was the closest spoon-shaped object to my hand. the microwave saw the fork and the microwave decided. that is the seventh microwave i have killed, by the way, which puts the fork in historical context. the punchline is that i still don’t trust spoons.

two — the supermarket. i went to the supermarket hungry, again, and came back with two onions, a pomegranate, a bag of frozen mango i do not own a blender to use, and zero of the four items on the list. the list said milk, bread, eggs, paper towels. i bought a pomegranate. ice cream is breakfast — it contains milk — so technically i was thinking about the list the entire time. the punchline is that i ate the pomegranate over the sink at 11pm and went to bed sticky.

three — the haircut. i gave myself a diy haircut on a sunday because i had decided saturday me was lazy and sunday me was an artist. sunday me was not an artist. sunday me had clippers, no guard, and a bathroom mirror that had been cleaned with the wrong end of a sponge. the punchline is that i wore a hat to the office for nine working days. nobody asked. that is not a kindness. that is people minding their business.

four — the chair. i bought a chair on the internet because the photo had nice light. the chair, when assembled, leaned thirteen degrees to the left, and i sat in it, leaning, for six months before i admitted the lean was not character building. the punchline is that i kept the chair. it lives in the corner now, judged by the third yoga mat under the couch.

five — the dave. dave called at 9:08am on a tuesday to ask if i remembered our college friend who had moved to denver and become a notary. i did not. dave was insistent. dave was so insistent he eventually admitted he was not sure the person was real. the punchline is that i still think about that notary. some weeks i think about him more than i think about people i have actually met.

story six through ten, with the third yoga mat as recurring character

six — the yoga mat. i bought the third yoga mat in 2023. it is still under the couch. i have not unrolled it. unrolling a yoga mat is the part of yoga i find too physical. the punchline is that i tell people i am doing yoga the way a person who owns a guitar tells people they play. the guitar is in a closet. the mat is under a couch. the practice is the noun.

seven — the email. i wrote a long email at 9:33am on a friday and sent it to the wrong thread. the right thread was on hold. the wrong thread was a group chat from 2019 that nobody had touched in two years. three people replied to the wrong thread. one of them was a person i had not spoken to since a wedding. the punchline is that we are now back in regular contact, technically, because of a misclick.

eight — the dishwasher. i ran the dishwasher with no soap. the dishes came out wet and judgmental. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you, in this case for free. i ran it again, with soap, and then convinced myself the second cycle was the only cycle. i have re-run the dishwasher with soap so many times that the dishwasher and i now have an arrangement. the punchline is that the arrangement is one-sided.

nine — the productivity bro. i argued with a productivity bro online for forty minutes about whether 11:53am was an acceptable time to start a deep work block. i was at my desk at the time, ostensibly doing deep work. the punchline is that i won the argument and lost the afternoon. that is the trade i make most days, and i’m not even good at noticing.

ten — the mom call. mom called on a sunday and asked, casually, whether i was still at the same job. i said yes. she said good. she had not been worried. she just wanted to confirm. the punchline is that i was the one who got worried. mothers know. mothers know it before you do. it cannot be defeated.

why telling the funny stupid stories shrinks them

here is the part nobody puts on the tile. when you tell a stupid story enough times, the story stops being a wound and starts being a routine. the fork stops being the night i nearly burned the apartment down and starts being the bit i open with at parties i don’t go to. the haircut stops being a specific shame and starts being a tag on a category of behavior.

this shrinking is good and bad. good because you sleep. bad because the version you tell out loud is the version you start to remember, and the original wound — the actual sticky-pomegranate-at-11pm specifics — gets composted under it. you forget the soup. you forget the smell. you keep the joke. it’s a fair trade, mostly. it’s the trade humans have been making since the first cave painter put a deer where the deer had not, in fact, been.

watch an idiot abroad long enough and you’ll see karl pilkington do the same thing in real time — a small disaster, retold, gradually losing its edges, becoming a shape you can hold with one hand. that’s the move. that is exactly the move.

and there’s a related move, which is what happens when you cross from “stupid story” into fool territory. a fool, as a category, is someone who keeps making the same stupid choice with the calm of a person setting a table. i’ve crossed that line more than once. the haircut is a fool move. the dishwasher arrangement is a fool move. i am not above the line. i am the line, on a chair that leans thirteen degrees.

verdict, the funny stupid stories are mine, the framing is yours

i’m not going to pretend any of the ten above will change your week. they are not built for that. they are built to be read in a slow afternoon and forgotten by tuesday and remembered, faintly, the next time you microwave something that should not be microwaved.

what i will say is this. the stories are mine. the way you frame them is yours. you can read story one as a man being careless with cutlery or as a man who has been alone too long and is starting to negotiate with appliances. both readings are correct. i prefer the second one but only because i’m sitting at this desk and the third floor meeting is now in its second hour, which gives me too much time to think.