Gumption

Thus ends another April Fools Day, one of the many holidays so insignificant that I flat out forget it's a holiday at all. I suppose that works to most people's advantage should they still be in the mode to play tricks on people. It makes that fly in the ice cube all the better when the individual has forgotten what day it is.

Do people even pull tricks anymore? The most I ever see is someone saying something so ridiculous that you wouldn't believe them anyway, but even less so upon realization of the significance of the date.

"The Pope died."

"Michael Jackson commited suicide."

"Hey, look, there's a dinosaur behind you."

"I'm not fat nor ugly, and I am able to hold a decent conversation."

April fucking fools.

Did the Pope die? I don't really trust anything anybody tells me today, because everyone thinks they're the fucking clown prince of clever that they can shoot a gun with a "Bang!" flag in it and have me extend some sort of verifcation of their wit. What, peanut brittle? Why, absolutely, I'd love some! But you know what I wouldn't love is some spring snakes to pounce forth at me! That'd be a surprise, and boy would I feel quite the fool! Thank god that's not going to happen and only delicious peanut brittle will come forth from this unsuspicious extension of good will!

Eh, Paul F. Tompkins already covered the peanut brittle debacle pretty well.

I like the word "gumption".

Nobody does that stuff anymore, but I'm tempted to not use the word "anymore", as I don't seem to recall when anyone ever did that stuff. I was tricked by the existance of "gag shops" that people actually took this day very seriously and plan to put fake poo in people's food very far in advance. Does anyone care? No one really cares when the prank is pulled on them. "Oh, your hand didn't really get severed and you didn't actually drop it on the ground just now? Boy, I feel the fool, I do. You pulled that proverbial wool over my eyes, yes indeed." I haven't seen anyone try a prank in... Well, ever frankly. No one gives two shits about April Fools Day. And why should they? It's just another bullshit holiday like Valentine's Day or Kwanzaa (if only you could hear my tone. I'm joking, folks! Ha ha, chuckle chuckle? Come on now). So, no pranks pulled by or on me, or anyone else that I've seen. April Fool's is dead.

But what a fucking bizarre day it was anyway. The absence of juvenile mischief and applied knick-knackery deterred not from the strangeness of the day itself. So many bizarre little things happened to me today; nothing too huge or notable, like a dead clown raising to life and preaching to me the evils of electric toothbrushes, but rather several little things that if pieced together like some morbid jigsaw puzzle could easily have been equivilant to just such an act. Most are too mundane to even bother telling you, but I assure you, the overall aura (yeah, I said it) of the day bewildered me and caused perplexity to eminate from my previously unperplexed persona. No full moon this time; hell, even if there were it'd be overcast. Perhaps just an overall sense of foolishness. Potentially the concept of the day seeped into everyone's soul and proceeded to excrete itself not in the shits of pranks, but in the more subtle farts of a general feeling of odd. Odd, odd, odd. You know how you can sense a day? Like when you know some sort of event you were unaware of is taking place? That's what it felt like: Like everyone was affected by something, though none of them knew what. Or maybe it's all in my head and everyone else was going about their regular life, not picking up on anything I was. Maybe there was fake vomit strewn around in a foolish manner and everyone was getting a good chortle out of the fact that they're so damn clever to spend $18.99 on a cheap, unsatisfying laugh. Maybe there were suckers who didn't realize the cap wasn't screwed on tight enough and would have to shamefully get another meal because of their gross miscalculation. And maybe everyone else but I is holed away in a world where these things are kept sacred, where this is a day people not only look forward to but cherish when it's here and remember it when it's gone, where all is well because, jeez, it was just a joke, dude. It's April Fools Day, lighten up. Where someone's banal actions are metamorphisized into "the funniest thing ever" and "you shoulda been there", eventually becoming "oh man, remeber that time when...". Maybe I missed out on all that am hereby stuck in my own world of bizarre attitude. Or maybe they're the same world, and I just look at it differently. Maybe what happened today wasn't weird at all. After all, now that I am thinking about it, I can't come up with one thing that I could write hre and have everyone go "Yeah, that's weird!". Instead, looking back, the odd disappears and I'm left with... what? At the time I said to myself "What a weird day..."; now nothing. Normal. Routine. Commonplace. Happens every day.

You shoulda been there, I guess.