Monday fun
For official, New Yorker-approved humor, go here.
“The silent treatment, huh? Fine. I charge double for the silent treatment.”
“You feel like a shadow of your former self. You feel you have no depth. You feel that if you turned sideways you’d be invisible. You feel that you’re two-dimensional. Don’t you see, Bob? There’s a pattern to these metaphors. It isn’t random at all.”
“Yeah, some of my patients have called it the couch of lost souls, but I’m damned if I know why.”
“Don’t hold your breath to try to make me turn around, Bob. We’ve been down this road before, and it always ends the same way.”
“But if you were really a T-1000, Bob, why would you need a shrink? I mean, it doesn’t compute.”
“Bob, if I were a T-1000, I wouldn’t be sitting here listening to you spill your guts for $150 an hour. I would just kill you. I wouldn’t have to lull your suspicions. I’d be fucking invulnerable. You wouldn’t have a chance. Frankly, Bob, you’re just not thinking this one through.”
“Okay, at our last session you said you felt as though the wrath of God was moving towards you like an avenging flame. How have you been since then?”
“The ‘dæmon meridianus’?* That’s a new one to me. I guess you’d better fill me in. Who is this dæmon meridianus guy, and why is he bugging you?”
“So you didn’t like the dexies, huh? Well, they aren’t for everyone. But a lot of people swear by them.”
“Yes, Bob, if it turned out that you took advantage of my Freudian methods throughout this session to color both yourself and my couch a dark maroon with magic marker, I would be upset. I would be very upset. But I would still be your therapist.”
*Okay, Latin with a ligature (the “æ”). How obscure can you get? The “midday demon” was supposed to attack fourth-century monks laboring in the fields, suggesting to them that maybe this Christianity thing was a waste of time. Instead of mortifying the flesh, they could be sitting in the shade, enjoying a beer, and maybe even getting laid. Later, the dæmon meridianus was reinterpreted, in rather more glamorous fashion, as “acedia,” slothful despair over the pointlessness of any course of action. So, right about now, you should be chuckling, or at least realizing that, had you known the definition of “dæmon meridianus,” you would have been chuckling earlier.
