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| User: | lenken (32988) Ooga Booga
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| Name: | Len Kennedy, Esq. | |||||||||
| Website: | Humor for Adults Who Can Handle Adult Humor | |||||||||
| Location: | Grundy Center, Iowa, United States | |||||||||
| Bio: |  A Brief History of MeOn December 19, 1972, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I was ejected from my mother’s cockpit. I went places, I did things—yada, yada, yada . . . blah, blah, blah . . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . . . And after high school, I made the mistake of joining the Army, but shortly after completing Basic Training, my knee serendipitously snapped backwards, and after surgery—and some excruciatingly painful physical therapy—I got a medical (honorable) discharge. And since I was in the military for over six months when all was said and done, I’m now technically a disabled veteran. Ain’t that some shit? I then attended college, majoring in social psychology, and I dropped out a little over a year later for pragmatic reasons (i.e., money)—but I may just drop back in someday. I subsequently worked for about three years in a plastics factory, a year or so in data entry, and a couple years as a customer service representative. I’m currently a freelance writer—which, of course, is merely a euphemistic way of saying I’m unemployed. But that isn’t to say I’m not working tirelessly: In addition to dashing off my usual drivel and slipslop, I’ve been working assiduously on some short articles on long topics—“serious” disquisitions on important subjects, such as cognitive dissonance theory, Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy, and death. Well, in truth, I’m not entirely unemployed: I do work part-time—twenty-five to thirty hours a week—as an assistant manager at the local Pizza Hut, where I worked when I first came home from the Army about thirteen years ago. I was a bit hesitant about working there again, because that kind of job seems a bit infra dig for someone my age, and it pays a lot less than what I’m used to making, but I lost my license a couple years ago due to a DUI, and right now there aren’t any better jobs available in this dinky little town (I tried my hand at freelance gynecology for a while, but there aren’t a lot of openings around here). Fortunately, this is merely a temporary inconvenience—something I only have to put up with for a few months . . . till I finally get my driver’s license back. I’m a Gimp! In 1995, due to a genetic abnormality (something else I can blame on my parents), I suffered what’s called a spontaneous pneumothorax, in which my left lung collapsed because a bleb—a blister on the surface of the lung—burst, causing air to seep into the pleural space between the lung and the chest cavity. That first time my lung collapsed, all the doctor had to do was insert a tube into my chest cavity and suck the air out of it, thereby reinflating the lung. But in 1999, in the middle of March, my lung collapsed again, necessitating surgery to prevent it from happening yet again. And this second collapsed lung was far more serious than the first—it was what’s called a tension pneumothorax: The pressure from my chest cavity filling up with air was forcing my heart up into my rib cage, and if I hadn’t gotten to the emergency room as quickly as I did, I undoubtedly would have died. Shortly after my lung surgery, my father—whom I never knew, since he left when I was just a little munchkin of one and a half years old—died of bone cancer. (We Kennedys aren’t exactly known for our longevity.) On the day I was notified of my dad’s death, I still went to work (after all, there is no “my dad just died of bone cancer” in team). But since I have the sometimes-annoying habit of dealing with stress with humor—and the more intense the stress, the more vicious the humor—I sent hundreds of hilarious e-mails, one of which implied that a certain adulterous middle-aged woman in upper management was an old whore. Too many people found the e-mail funny and forwarded it to friends of theirs, who in turn forwarded it to friends of theirs—and it eventually got forwarded to the woman in management who was the butt of the joke (and she apparently didn’t share my sense of humor). So I wound up getting fired the next day. So within the span of a few short months, I almost died of a collapsed lung, my father died of bone cancer before I ever even got a chance to meet him, and—the very next day!—I got fired from one of the few jobs I could actually tolerate. But life’s full of inconveniences—one learns to adapt. And, speaking of inconveniences, in 2004, once again in the middle of March, my right lung collapsed. And yes, goddammit, I then had to have surgery on that lung. But, fortunately, the surgery is fairly permanent—and I only have two lungs—so, although it’s possible that one of my lungs could collapse again sometime in the future, it’s highly unlikely, Haile Selassie. After my first lung surgery, I quit smoking and started walking, biking, and lifting weights like a madman. And now, after my second lung surgery, I’m once again exercising assiduously. And, in many ways, I’m already in better shape than I was when I was in the Army: I can even do thirty push-ups in thirty seconds now—and I can curl a 100-pound barbell seven times—without cheating—which is something I couldn’t do back then. And I suppose life would be awfully boring if there weren’t continually new obstacles to overcome. And vaginas. Life would be dreadfully boring without vaginas.
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| Interests: | 150: 23672, albert ellis, amazonwomenonthemoon, aphex twin, aristotle, atheism, bach, bastology, beef jerky, beethoven, bertrand russell, books, butthole surfers, camp, cats, celtic music, charles darwin, chemical brothers, church of virus, classical music, coffee, cognitive dissonance theory, cognitive neuroscience, creativity, critical thinking, dada, daniel dennett, darwinism, david bowie, david hume, dead can dance, deee-lite, dionysus, dj cheb i sabbah, doubting thomas, egyptology, english, enigma, epictetus, epicurus, español, evolution, evolutionary psychology, existentialism, fatboy slim, fish karma, floccinaucinihilipilification, flow, franz kafka, freethinking, fried chicken, fsol, g.g. allin, george bernard shaw, grammar, h.l. mencken, heraclitus, humor, indian ragas, intelligence, j.s. bach, jahoobies, joe frank, john dewey, joie de vivre, jungle, jägermeister, keoki, king missile, kraftwerk, kunoichi, labia, led zeppelin, leoš janáček, lesbians, lifting weights, lisa germano, lisa gerrard, living, loki, macgyver, marcus aurelius, marilyn manson, mark leyner, mazzy star, memes, memetics, moby, music, my penis, mythology, naked women, neo-dada, neo-nietzschean quasi-existentialism, nicomachean ethics, nietzsche, nine inch nails, ninjutsu, nude sunbathing, ol' dirty bastard, originality, philosophy, pink floyd, pragmatism, psychology, ravi shankar, reading, rebt, red red groovy, red red wine, rhetoric, richard dawkins, robert plant, rockers hi-fi, roger waters, s.j. perelman, sarcasm, schadenfreude, secular humanism, sesquipedalians, shurikens, skepticism, social psychology, sociobiology, socrates, spiders, squirrel nut zippers, stephen hawking, steven pinker, surrealism, susan blackmore, sven väth, swiss army knives, techno, the doors, the eighties, the f-word, the onion, the orb, thoth, tori amos, trance, underworld, vaginas, voltaire, wine, wit, writing, yiddish, your mom | |||||||||
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| Account type: | Free Patient | |||||||||
