Herg Bleh

Bert: Bert and I

Ernie: Bert and I, we've been best friends forever, but we're also something else too!

i don't mean like absolute silence. obviously in an ideal community, there would still be sound and noise from people and music and work etc. but it haunts me that when i camp in the forest i can hear the howl of semi trucks on the interstate miles away. and the people who live beside it never know quiet. it haunts me that many people will live their whole lives never seeing the stars in the sky that were fully visible with NO electric light pollution as recently as my great-grandparents' childhoods.

so much of our lives is bright bright unnecessary noise. neon mcdonalds signs 200 feet in the air so we can see it from the road. led lights over billboards. parking lots lit up like sports stadiums at closed office buildings. advertisements playing at gasoline pumps. streets lined with led porch lights and decorative garden lights that genuinely threaten entire species of wildlife. music blaring outside pharmacies to deter homeless people. everything always shining and wailing for no purpose but profit and cruelty.

One time she was chasing me it and I asked her very nicely to stop, and she did not which left me no choice but to grab a knife and repeat my request.

I know this may sound like an extreme reaction. But there really was no other rational choice. What was I supposed to do, ask nicely a second time? Like a goddamn hippy? No. Knife time.

Unfortunately I was bluffing and Liz called my bluff by grabbing a knife of her own. Which meant I was then getting chased with a shark AND a large steak knife. I started off continuing to be more scared of the shark than the knife, but that was a mistake because Liz actually made a lunge for me with the knife (I think she mixed up her shark hand/knife hand?) and managed to lightly stab our new couch. Which Liz then had to explain to our mom. I think the conversation was something like "Mom, the good news is that I missed, and the bad news is that I tried, and the worst news is that I got the couch instead.”

My mom handled it very well. My survival to adulthood hinged entirely on this weird one weird exploit in human psychology where confusing someone enough temporarily turns off their ability to be angry.

Incredibly that wasn't even our worst dumb sibling chase incident. The worst happened when I was chasing her through the house, and she ducked into our freshly mopped kitchen. She managed to cool girl skate over the puddles and make it to the other side of the room, which led to me trying to cool boy skate in her footsteps. This failed horribly, and instead resulted in me sailing headfirst into the dishwasher.

The good news was that I was able to absorb the entire blow with my left eyebrow, which I wasn't using very much anyway. The bad news was that I actually cut most that eyebrow off as a sort of fuzzy flap, which was disgusting, not to mention painful. Fortunately, with my dad being a doctor, he was able to glue most of it back on, albeit slightly crooked, such that I spent the next two years with a Resting Confused Face. Like so.