Edward J. Pluchar - The Blogsplitter

There were those of you on the edge of your seat.  The suspense was titillating.

Oh, what’s that?  I was the only one on the edge of his seat?

Poppycock.  I won’t believe it.

Alas, an offer has been made, and thus a decision.  This wasn’t entirely about the offer, of course.

The decision - Marcy and I, along with Amelia and Danny and several of my stuffed animals, are moving back to Chicago.

I know what you’re saying - stuffed animals?  Amelia can’t really appreciate them yet, so someone needs to play with them.

Anyway, I’ll have to start work as Maintenance Supervisor at Giant Steps Illinois, Inc., a school for children with autism, in the very near future (mid-August).  Marcy will be looking for a job at Children’s Memorial, or anywhere else suitable for working with children.

Whereas babysitters are scatted a little bit in our area, we may have to start a queue for babysitters in Chicago.  Drug tests all around!

Truthfully, the layers of support in Chicago will be wonderful, as much for our health and sanity as for the opportunity for Amelia to know her family well.  Danny won’t have a veritable field to call his own; there are, however, many trails to walk.

There’s no denying the sadness we feel, leaving our home.  We have great friends here.  It’s almost a betrayal to ever leave them.

Skyscrapers and other human endeavors are impressive, but there is nothing to evoke the majesty of a mountain in Chicago.  I take that back - there is Lake Michigan - but we’re not going to live on Lake Michigan.

There is plenty to evoke the madness known as road rage, or the neurosis known as claustrophobia, or the illnesses caused by pollution of all kinds.

Ah, but there’s opportunity.  There’s the offer of a job fitting of my skills and close to my heart.  There may even be opportunities for writing, more writing, with varying themes and audiences.

Sure.  But we’re keeping our home in the mountains.

I’m on a job search, and a friend asked whether I would consider teaching again.  She followed up, “Do you have your ed degree?  (that’s funny because your name is Ed).”

That’s when I responded with the title to this post.

By far the stupidest joke made about my name is any reference to Mr. Ed.  Fortunately, it’s also the rarest “Ed” joke.

Let’s be honest, though - any occasion of a “Mr. Ed” joke is no laughing matter.  It’s gotta stop, and it starts with you.

Many of the others are derivations of Education, or other words beginning with “ed.”

Luke, our neighbor and so-called friend, is fond of “Special Ed.”

Oh, you should see faces light up when the tiny brain inside stumbles upon “Special Ed.”  You get a sense of what intellectual accomplishment means for a person based on that response.  (Luke, to his credit, never laughed unless he thought he was getting my goat).

I was once asked, if I were a wrestler, what my stage name would be.  I was teaching at the time, so after a moment or two I said, “The ED-ucator.”

Now that’s funny.

I’m a little surprised at a lack of puns based on “ed” as used in the past tense.

Go to the mob and order a hit on me - “Delete-Ed”

But that doesn’t make adequate use of the past tense…let’s see…

Well, it’s tricky, because the word will be past tense, but using it as a command, either to me or about me, changes it to present tense.  You have to be in two places at once, or I do.  Someone does.

Finally, at the risk of my undoing, I’m also surprised at the lack of erectile dysfunction jokes.  It’s possible that, with a child born, certain (correct) assumptions dilute the potential humor of the joke.  It would be funnier if I wasn’t able to procreate.

It’s also possible that an E.D. joke is lower than the lowest common denominator, and almost everyone knows what a stupid joke that would be.

Then again, people really do laugh about “Mr. Ed.”

I was first introduced to GK Chesterton in college - we read an excerpt from “Orthodoxy” for an introductory theology course.

I found him riveting, towering; and in a way that I had not previously encountered.

He said that “Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared that it was in a conflict:  the collision of two passions apparently opposite.”

So Chesterton examined courage.  “No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.  Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

And finally, the demonstrations.  “A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.  He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

“A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.  He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”

I’m not the first one to find him quotable, though.  Here are some of a list of Chesterton quotes you might enjoy…

“We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right.  What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.”

“An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.”

“It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor.  If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us.”

“Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

“The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your feelings; it is making too much of them.”

“When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.”