Kory’s Kolumn

Writing funny things is difficult. I’m sitting here in my basement apartment, crossing quirky phrases off a list. The topic of today’s features page is “community,” and I am waffling.
This article started, as about 75 percent of my articles do, with me complaining about parking in the W lots. Parking in W lots takes almost all of my emotional energy for the school week, and most of my rough drafts start out with “Dear Parking Services: I curse you with the heat of a thousand suns. May your children all become tattoo artists and experimental medical test subjects.”
 But my parking tirades are tired, and so I stop for a second and watch a Sesame Street rerun. So help me, I love Sesame Street. I have this feeling that if we took all the world leaders, those tyrants and popes and dictators and Democrats, and placed them in a screening room and made them watch Sesame Street for a week straight, they would all come out shaking hands and singing “C is For ‘Cookie.’ ” Then, they would all call their mothers and tell them they love them.
I sit down again and try to write this article, picturing Nelson Mandela, Rush Limbaugh and Vladimir Putin with their hands around each others shoulders singing “Fuzzy and Blue,” but I jump clear and cling to the opposite wall, sweating and whimpering. Perched on the keyboard is a spider the size of Oahu. He’s staring at me in vitriolic pensiveness, frustrated that he was too slow to gnaw off one of my fingers. I swear I can see him wearing the pelt of a small mammal. He spits at me and jumps off the keys, skittering underneath the couch and cursing audibly.
Well, I’m distracted again, so I get up and rifle through the refrigerator. I reject a half-finished bottle of Diet Coke (TM) and some leftover Tater Tot Casserole (no TM) from my aunt. I settle for a yogurt, orange crème-flavored, then return to my sofa and, after checking thoroughly for any angry arachnids, I sit down again and struggle to create a variation on the community theme.
I pull up some titles of my older, rejected articles and consider un-rejecting them. Right now, I wouldn’t say no to finishing “Twilight: Edward or That Other Guy,” “The Best Cheeseburger I’ve Ever Had,” “My School Mascot Can Beat Up Your School Mascot” and “10 Tips for Buying That New Bikini.” None of these are funny enough for more than a couple jokes, and one of them might have been a blatant rip-off of a Vogue headline I saw in the supermarket check-out aisle (though what Vogue is doing writing about cheeseburgers, I don’t know).
I was thinking of doing another political article, but I’ve found out that people only like to read things with which they already agree. It’s comforting to have your own opinions reinforced, regardless of their accuracy.
Maybe an article on local sports will work. That’s community, right? I flick through the stations, and find that there’s a Utah Jazz game starting right now. My wife asks me a question about the differences between man-on-man and zone defense. This doesn’t happen very often.
An hour later, it’s halftime, and I am done explaining the subtle, beautiful intricacies of defensive schemes in professional basketball. My patient wife is asleep, and I’ve written only one sentence: “The Jazz are really great.” Man, I’m in trouble.
Community. Community … Maybe I could write about parking in the W lots.
Dear Parking Services: