Factual Tales from my Fictional Life, Part 1 — shf happens TM
Permit me to introduce myself.
My name is shf and I’m the Mocker-in-chief at FASTLAUGH.
I’ve recently started using my initials — shf — because basically no one can pronounce my last name correctly anyhow.
It is evidently a terribly difficult name for non-family members to pronounce, owing to the fact that it has way too many consecutive consonants for the average human brain to process and then correctly articulate.
Before moving on, I can hear some of you thinking, “…uh, yeah, shf… but your initials have no vowels, and without vowels there is anarchy! How will I know how to correctly pronounce shf in my head when I’m reading your stuff on FASTLAUGH so I can mutter under my breath what an ass you are? It seems like you’ve traded in one consonant problem for another, no?”
Very simple… just remember that shf rhymes with shit , with f in place of t, and the missing i is silent.
Skipping ahead a couple of decades to when the comedy bug infected me in the mid-80s when I was a twenty-something living in Phoenix and working twenty-three hours a day as a partner in a fledgling, two-coach limousine company…
To build visibility and traffic for the company, and to fill in some of the empty hours when the limos were idle anyway, I was struck with the idea of offering the services of our limos in the form of The Official Limo Service of… to Finney Bones, the hands-down best comedy club in Phoenix (and quite possibly the entire Southwest U.S.) at that time, co-owned by the fastidious showman, Paul Hopp.
I went to The Bone for a dose of laughter therapy every chance I got during the one hour of each day that was not allotted to working as a partner in the aforementioned fledgling, two-coach limousine company.
Those comedic respites at Paul’s club were an oasis of sanity for me in the otherwise insanely ridiculous world of operating livery vehicles (that means chauffeured limousines and taxis, for you guys that don’t give a crap about looking up what livery means on Wikipedia, and/or don’t give two craps that I know what livery means).
Ahh… the days of being paid handsomely so that highly disturbed and dysfunctional people might have the privilege of doing highly disturbed and dysfunctional things in a plush upholstered rectangle speeding along at 60 mph.
I suspect that many of those folks have since spent considerable amounts of time in other plush upholstered rectangles, but these now come with restraints and mandatory heavy medication under the supervision of Nurse Helga, or are mercifully six-feet under.
To be continued soon…
(updated 01.21.10)
shf
Mocker-in-chief
