Well, all right, I’ll put up one more entry before I slink out the back door. I just wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who’s stuck by me as a reader over the years, and I especially wanted to say thanks for the kind comments you guys left after the last entry. I was really touched by them. Thank you all, very much.

As for what’s to become of the deadpan.net world… After thinking about it for a couple of days, I don’t know if I’m going to take it all down after all or not. I’m still leaning that way, but procrastination is a powerful tool and I want to archive it all offline first as html and I’m having issues configuring the software to work with my server and, well, procrastination. So, yeah.

In the meantime, how about one last anecdote so I can go out with some twisted kind of style?

I woke up this morning in the oddest way ever. I was dreaming — and you know how dreams are. In the dream, I had walked up to some friends who were standing on an apartment balcony and I started talking to them, and I was sort of hanging off the outside of the balcony as I talked. Hanging there like that reminded me of a joke, so I started telling it to them. In the dream, this joke was so funny that I was laughing as I told it, so in my sleep I started smiling and laughing. And that’s how I woke myself up: smiling and chuckling.

Now, in my dream I felt that this joke was a little edgy for a straight-laced crowd, so you wouldn’t tell it to just anyone, but it was totally the kind of joke you’d tell your “cool” friends. And when I woke up the joke still seemed socially acceptable because the dream attitude was bleeding over into the waking world. You know how dreams are.

Well. A few minutes later I told Beth about waking myself up and started telling her the joke, and it wasn’t until I started actually speaking the words that I realized how horrifically inappropriate it was for ANY setting. I almost even offended myself, a little. It was a HORRIBLE joke, hugely offensive, and it was shocking to me how it had seemed perfectly fine until I actually started telling it.

Don’t worry, of course I’m going to tell it here. Because, what, you thought maybe I wouldn’t? Please.

So this priest is up on the pulpit, giving his Sunday sermon to a crowded church, when an aborted fetus crawls up the side of the lectern. It climbs up and over the edge and surprises him face to face. The priest flies into a rage and punches the fetus in the face as hard as he can, knocking it off the lectern. It flies through the air and off the altar and lands in the church aisle. He chases after it and kicks it down the aisle toward the back of the church, kicking it repeatedly with huge, wild field goal style kicks, cursing it as he goes and yelling “Damn you to hell! Damn you to Satan! Go back to hell, evil spawn!” Stuff like that. And as he winds up to give the aborted fetus one last giant kick that will send it flying out the rear doors of the church, the baby says–

And that’s when I woke up.

Wow. Just… wow. I can’t believe my subconscious came up with that joke. Or that it thought it was a joke. Or that it thought the “joke” was only just a little bit edgy. Or that that attitude seeped over into my conscious, waking mind. Or that any part of me thought it was funny. It’s mind-boggling.

And the worst part? I blew the punchline.

Thank you, and goodnight.