Chuck Miller		being a story teller being a story teller you think sometimes how they are put together as you grow older you can only remember the last 3 or 4 good ones and some of the best from years ago yesterday you began to laugh while you were swimming laps one came back to you the difference between the circus and a chorus line circus was a cunning bunch of stunts... whereas but about a third of the time when you told this one, people would remember a related one the difference between a school for midgets and a women’s track team the educated midgets were a cunning bunch of runts the trouble was that to avoid the disassociative slippage of one joke blurring into the other— perhaps there was a way to amalgamate both to make one big joke though with four things to define, still you couldn’t really avoid the binary pairing of opposites as soon as the unspoken one of the pair came to consciousness the other opposite became too clear and obvious and lost some of its surprise wallop you had to admit that a stunning bunch of cunts had more panache than a running bunch of same, so the brilliance of the first joke diminished the second if only there were some way to decouple the opposites and force the listener to concentrate each pun phrase alone and separately this might be possible but as soon as one unspoken opposite flashed on them the four-way circuit collapsed like a house of cards off and on through the day, you rethought the problem but couldn’t come up with a solution at night just before sleep the critical part of your mind ebbed from weariness and all that was left was a hypnagogic irrational mulling the words and phrases of the jokes stumbled through your mind as if having a will of their own, mutating and permuting and almost embodying themselves but purely verbal beings made of words yet with a paradoxical koan like existence that only lasted nanoseconds like particles in an accelerator running groups of runts – cunning bunch of stunts stunning bunch of cunts leaping hedges as in a steeplechase their great long beautiful legs like our elusive happiness a funning bunch of lunks even half-rhyme a gunning bunch of skunks a groaning bunch of grunts a punning bunch of bunts, alliteratively but finally of course didn’t after all a chorus line consist of just that except we couldn’t face it straight on, the women had to be covered up, sometime years ago, something like it must have existed where they kicked it straight at you, and there was no psychic shock because this was what life was made of now we couldn’t really admit what among other things really stunned us, and so our civilization became this prevaricating over the truth of our most primal lives but what’s new in this one reaches this conclusion 10,000 times in a lifetime so the next day, we go back to our grotesque joking one way among others to undermine this farcical way of living they had forced upon us, or else just a way to pass the time while waiting for the end— but if you’re a storyteller, you come to believe in these stories somehow they bind us together, the good, the bad, the grotesque the absurd, and the ugly, we are all of these