Oh, MIRTH, Where Art Thou?

That’s a question I’ve been asking, even if you haven’t.

Mind you, it’s not that I’m not mired in MIRTH material. But in this world of woe it sometimes seems to me that silliness is a frivolous waste of time and energy. Surely, if God isn’t going to bother fixing chronic problems like starvation and disease and cruelty and prejudice and war and greed and evil and stupidity and the rampant spread of emoticons, then it’s up to me to do so. I should be building latrines in Liberia. I should be teaching English in Somalia. I should be championing equal rights in Pakistan. I should be protecting albinos in Malawi. I should be fighting righteous ignorance in the US.

And I should be striving to stop people from inserting stupid smiley faces into everything they write as a substitute for actually trying to express themselves.

(Guess which of these is the hardest?)

Instead, I live my modest comfortable life plagued with guilt about letting the noble quest for world peace go by the wayside. To punish myself (have I mentioned a Catholic upbringing?), I read the world news (and the country’s news, and my county’s news) and become paralyzed. How can I crack jokes and live with myself when people are living with such despair and hopelessness? How can I go on living at all when my fellow citizens are ready to elect various village idiots to our highest office? – itself a joke, but not a funny one.

Yet there’s this:

America’s 71 million dogs produce 29,000 tons of waste each day.

A company called Flush Doggy is out there ready to provide you with 400 flushable dog poop bags for only $79.99 (free shipping within the US) – a year’s supply. They claim that you will save the planet by using their product. Not help to save the planet, mind you – their website unequivocally states that you will in fact be saving it.

Done! All I have to do is get a big dog, encourage him to take big dumps, buy Flush Doggy bags, and stop with the save-the-earth guilt, already.

But there’s this:

Do we really need to add another daily 29,000 tons of excrement to our already-struggling municipal water purification systems? Wouldn’t dog turd be better off outside — as long as it’s not in my backyard?

There’s even a trendy emoticon for a pile of dung. It’s smiling, so it’s shit that must not stink. My father used to point out various folks who thought theirs didn’t – and here’s proof positive! The old man is much smarter than I ever gave him credit for. I gave him lots of credit, mind you – just not enough.

Emojis are plaguing me professionally as well as personally – they’ve been chosen as the departmental Halloween costume at work (you know I live for Halloween). We’re all to pick our favorite expressions and cut them from felt and sew them onto bright yellow shirts and conduct a day’s worth of business so attired. Antennae headgear with bobbing hearts is optional.

It won’t be as bad as the year I worked at a bank and we were obliged to turn the big downtown lobby in to an ocean-scape and dress as mermaids. The bank manager – the only male – got to be King Neptune and stride around wielding a trident. HE didn’t have to wear big fake shells over his boobs. He didn’t even have to wear a codpiece, although that would have suited the fish motif perfectly.

So I’ve made progress in life. Instead of shells, I’ll have a big round eyeball glued to each breast. Where else to put them on the front of a T-shirt? Methinks I’ll deliberately choose some that look like nipples. If life gives you lemons, cut them in half and use them as pasties.

Local news was fun today for once, though. My city made headlines on USA Today: “Colorado Town Says Women Can’t Go Topless!”

This really cramps my style.

Despite being busted, I am relieved to live in a place where potential peeks at naked nipples are the peak of our social problems. City council has nothing more pressing up against it. Activists have nothing more rousing to seize upon. Citizens have nothing more tempting to embrace. In recent mammary, nothing more pointed has so served to lift and separate this community.

And now I must get this off my chest: making MIRTH is much more fun than brooding in udder despair about things I can’t change (like my bustline, despite all those exercises I did as a teenager – I must! I must! I must increase my bust!). I promise to stop neglecting it — and you. I will stuff my Weltschmerz into a Flush Doggy bag and then go down and flash city hall.