The Best Medicine.

I can't say that I'm in love with my job.

But, my wife reminds me from time to time that in the decade we've been together, she has never once heard me say that I was ever in love with any job I ever had, or talked about.

And that included all the acting things I used to do.

It wasn't actually the work that got me down, most times. It was usually the people I had to deal with AT work.

The best jobs, for me, included a small circle of people that made me laugh; made me think; made me feel something outside of the idea that life is boiled down into getting conscious, walking on the treadmill, and then getting unconscious. And, I was fortunate enough to find some of those people, pretty much everywhere I went; people who would actually crack the shell and look inside, not be appalled by all the crap I surround myself with on a regular basis in an attempt to CREATE the very distance that they seek to broach, and tell me joke.

And the laughter is what brings me out.

I never required compliments; the truth is, I never really knew what to DO with them. But if you could make me laugh, I was your friend for life.

Case in point: There lives in a faraway land a lovely woman that can still make me laugh with a brief description of the Seven Days War. I can't remember now if it was me or she who started it, but by the time we were done, we were literally on the ground, laughing. Nobody else would ever find that funny, really....but the Lovely Woman and I have that as an eternal bond.

There is a man of many faces out there in the wilds of the Midwest, who is the only person who has EVER made me corpse. And because of that, and his reaction to an wig malfunction during a Star Trek sketch, the man with many faces and I have an infernal bond.

I remember an episode of The West Wing (I believe it was the second season, perhaps the first; it was definitely during the Sorkin years, because the dialogue was crisp) when Barlett says to one of his daughters, "Don't you know that all you had to do to make me happy is come home at the end of the day?" I paraphrase the sentiment; All you need to do to make me happy and be my friend for life is to make me laugh.

Come on, somebody.

Make Me Laugh.