Tug Dumbly # 61 - Tulips

Tulips

People say ‘wozup? You look a bit down. A bit tired, a bit sad, a bit blue …’

Well, if I wasn’t those things before, I am now. Thanks a mil.

Look, it’s just the way my face sits. My resting face. My private face. My room-service-sign face saying PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB THE FACE.  

My face is happy to look sad. Sometimes. Doesn’t mean I am. But even if I am, please don’t bum my sadness out. I’m happy to enjoy my sadness. Undisturbed. Just me and my sad face.

No, I’m not consistent. I’ll take compliments. Say I look great – skinny, youthful, vital. I’ll lick you like a puppy.

Still it irks me. People try and read you like an emoji – ‘there there, chin up, never mind, might never happen …’

‘Wozup?’

I’m so glad you asked, Mr Sandwich Hand. You saved me from a moment of quiet reflection. Maybe tinged with a bit of nostalgia. Hard to put my finger on really. Shall we say a wistful whisper of regret, with a delicate filigree of yearning? Something ever-so-slightly rueful? Not really maudlin. More a light dip into melancholy. A plangent little shiver. A slight frisson of some lost past gently goose-pimpling the skin of the soul?

Know what I mean?

A little pebble plopped in the millpond of my being, sending tiny ripples spreading out to gently kiss and lap at the soft mossy verge of the human condition.

I dunno, how would you say?

A sort of softly swelling glow. Like sliding into a warm bath of mare’s milk coco. Or settling into the mantric hum of an ancient fridge in the dawn kitchen of an old beachside weekender

or trancing to a wood fire, dying with the gentle crackle of a Noel Coward 78 in the grate of a little log cabin by a lake in a wood, with you a sweetly bruised plum in the palm of evening, and just the chit-chitting of a lone cricket in the knotty pine floor boards.

Know what I’m saying?

A bit Whitman. A bit Thoreau. A bit Disney too, to be honest … actually, now I think of it, these are someone else’s fantasies. These pictures are just composite archetypes from the collective unconscious, ethereal vapours from the Lost Property Office of the soul …

… but anyway, that’s what I was thinking when you said ‘why the sad face?’

But look, if you’re really worried about my ‘wellness’, I’ll get into my clown gear. I’ll ride a tiny novelty unicycle on a highwire over a pit of flaming meth junkies while pulling a bunch of Gerberas from my bum and singing the best of James Brown …

No, no, please don’t go! I want to reassure of my emotional equilibrium. I won’t feel truly happy until I’ve convinced you that on the inside I am actually feeling delinquently overjoyed, just internally bursting with mirth and yuckety-yuk good cheer. So I’ll give you a joke:

This woman makes jam. All kinds of jam. Strawberry jam, blackberry jam, dandelion jam … All her life she makes jam. But one day she says I’m sick of all these old jams. I want to make a new jam. So she gets her hamster, sticks it in a blender and turns it into jam. And it tastes … disgusting. So she tips all this hamster jam on the garden. A week later all these tulips spring up in the place she tipped the jam.

Anyway, this guy’s walking past her yard. She says to him ‘look! Just look at all these tulips! Where did they come from?’ The guy says ‘oh yeah, didn’t you know? You get tulips from hamster jam ……………………………!!!’

GEDDIT!!

TULIPS FROM HAMPSTER JAM!!!?

… Ya see, the reason that joke’s hilarious is because there’s this old Max Bygrave’s song called Tulips From Amsterdam. (No one remembers it though). And what I did, see, how I engineered the joke, was I replaced the word AMSTERDAM with HAMSTER JAM. (Of course you shouldn’t explain a joke. Take it apart, expose its delicate mechanisms, it’s like killing a watch).

… Hey wait! Where are you going? I haven’t finished. Come back! You’ve got something on your face … It’s called a nose! (Yeah, I do dad jokes too). Hey, wozup? You look a bit down? Cheer up, smile. Might never happen!