Laughter. It’s good to hear in most life situations. It can be contagious and cause people to drop their serious attitudes and see a more lighter side of things.

You need it. particularly when times get tough. And if you hang out with the type of people who laugh a lot, you might even hear some gallows humor. You’ll find it among soldiers, cops, and nurses as well as ditch diggers, new priests, and first-aid workers.

It helps to get me through the day. And it also helps when a sudden tragic incident occurs.

Like three months when I crashed my car in the side of a building—a brewery of all places — and I joked with the emergency workers who showed up at 9:45 am asking if I had been drinking or on some sort of drugs.

I got high with a little help from my friends, I thought of saying as a quip, but kept it to myself as the cop with a corporal insignia showed up at the scene. Corporal is designated with  two stripes for the non-military types reading this.  I told him that I outranked him, but quickly chose to seek silence when he ordered me to move out of the car and I focused on his pistol  . . .

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Laughter helped get me through my one and only divorce. I joke about how my first wife told me she would be leaving me one day, not realizing she was serious until I returned from working one night dying for a beer only to find she had taken the refrigerator when she packed her bags and moved out.

I joked as a news reporter, dissing politicians. And you couldn’t help but lampoon certain judges in the Philadelphia courts as a trial attorney after learning of their brand of justice or in many cases, “injustice.”

Making people laugh has always been a goal of mine. I trace it back to grade school when I fell in love with performing as a class clown. I continue that and believe that I am helping people cope with some of the shit life seems to deal them.

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But now I don’t feel like laughing. I don’t feel like sharing some stuff through excessive writing about it. All I seem to do is focus on writing whenever something happens to me. Shouldn’t some things be off limits, aren’t some things too intimate to discuss in public?

You get into a car accident and you think of nothing but writing about it.

You go to bed with a woman for the first time in eons and you want to write about it. Not in a bragging way, but as a reminder age is no impediment for things you used to do so readily when you were younger.

You want to badly hurt someone who just cut you off on the expressway and you share your plans in what lawyers might one day call a “statement against interests.”

Some people write about new recipes, a new fashion of clothing, or even about how they got a new puppy in their lives. That’s cool. I understand where they’re coming from and why they’d want to share.

But sometimes you just got to shut up. Not share how hemorrhoids appeared after eating too much hot sauce or why you haven’t cleaned the house since placing your second wife in a nursing home years ago.

You need your privacy. Living with less writing should be enough nowadays. Enough to finally bring something like this to a merciful end.

And that’s no laughing matter.

(To be continued — maybe!)