“I probably didn’t give this one the attention it deserves.
I found this thing out with The Onion. You know, that newspaper that used to be funny and then it mostly just started saying things that really happened because that’s easier than making up jokes.
Oh, my favorite Onion headlin? “God Answers Little Boy’s Prayers: ‘No,’ says God.” Classic.
Anyway, because I lived in a small town, you couldn’t just pick up the Onion when you were out and about the way you could in the city. You’d have to go somewhere like Denver, get one, then look through the entire stack to see if there were a couple older ones underneath, maybe last month’s issue wasn’t all that hot.
So what we got instead were those books that collected the Onion in bound form. And the thing is, you’d get Onion Fatigue. The first couple are hilarious, then you start skimming, then you barely get a chuckle. It’s why most stand-up sets are like an hour. After an hour, you’d have to be so funny to keep making it worthwhile.
What you gotta do is pick up that book, read a couple, then put it down. Pick it up the next day, read a couple, rinse, repeat.
I think a lot of poetry collections are like that, and I didn’t give this one that kind of attention. I plowed through it. It’s fun, and at times it’s great. It just didn’t blow my balls off. “
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