Poem #125
If you wear out your jeans5/18/02010
or wear out your sole,
it's easy to notice.
Just look for the hole.
If you wear out your welcome,
how can you tell?
There's no telltale damage,
no telltale smell.
The Bell Ringer Joke Revisited
or: If I'm Destined to Get a Pulitzer Prize for 02008, This is the Line of Thought That Will Earn It For Me I'm pretty sure that it's been at least two decades since the idea of The Bell Ringer Joke started knocking around in my head. (I've mentioned the joke in a previous blog post .) There has been hope and despair, laughter and great disappointment, spread out over more than half my lifetime! On Thursday morning, out of the blue, I had a few epiphanies regarding the joke for all of these years. Epiphany #1: The first and second parts of the joke are spectacular, and if I had not been told at the time that I first heard them that there was a mysterious third part floating about in the ether, those two known parts would have been deeply satisfying. There would have been no disappointment associated with The Bell Ringer Joke whatsoever. The two parts stand together as a complete and brilliant story, riotously funny. Which is to say that the third part is only relevant
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