I am comforted by Mozart's ridiculous laugh.

If we've ever met you know I have what's been always referred to as "the laugh". There's no way you didn't notice it and you probably asked someone who knows me better about it, or even had the courage or diplomacy or tactlessness to ask me directly. I probably said that I wasn't sure, the laugh was just something I did, and I sighed or showed some discomfort or ire at being reminded to get you to stop asking.

And though it's been there as far back as anyone can recall, the laugh has managed to defy too much scrutiny or explanation. After the first couple decades of my life I just accepted it and tried not to think too much about it.

It just is.

But recently someone classified the laugh as "a powerful force".

Given the past, I'd never considered it as such. For all the teasing, imitations, belittlement, and mockery throughout the years to this night from an attribute I don't even hear. When I speak it slips in undetected, slithering into the space after sentences to become my aural earmark and verbal signature.

Teachers accused me of speech impediment, sympathetic classmates wrote it off as a "nervous" laugh, but those conclusions were never right.

And since I'm unaware of it perhaps there's a cognitive reason, a loop or neural detour whereby to finish certain statements it must process with the laugh as its punctuation.

Many times the laugh's been a social litmus test with the immature, unintelligent, bullying, shallow, and asinine who cannot see past such an eccentricity, quickly weeding themselves out of my social circle. Others have even liked me all the more for it, that the oddity is charming in the way you like a six-toed cat or a dog with one folded ear, an irregularity to be accepted as part of the whole -- a thing winning but aberrant, and somehow still seeming wrong.

I had to hear myself on tape when I was 12 to finally catch the laugh, and when I did at the time I found it no wonder some thought me a freak.

There are far worse burdens in this world than an involuntary laugh. In the other direction, many ladies have said that it should be recorded and sold as a foley at great profit.

Yet to come to know my laughter a force, this subconscious exhalation of breath that I gift those about me with, there's a mystery inside that, and yes, a power within that is solely mine to own. It accents near everything I say, colouring my meanings with humour or joy or irony or celebration, an amplification of statement that no one else I've ever met possesses.

Myriads everyday pay for piercings or tattoos to make themselves feel special. I have my laugh, unremovable and uncoverable. It is a force I'll fucking bludgeon you with, the truncheon that'll grind salted injury into the insult. Or better, I can touch you with it, a caress after words that will be all the more significant because they were delivered with laughter.

I am Guillermo, the laughing boy, and that laugh you hear is mine.

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Addenda from 10/17/2013 at 2:10am:

... and then Lil' Miss actually said, "Oh Mr. G, your miraculous laugh alone could cure HIV, restart the Federal Government, and end world hunger, all at the same time!"

Yes, really. So blushworthy, so measurelessly sweet, it makes me want to make out with her forever.



While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

thank you, shoes.

In 1993, I spotted you in a Brit catalogue and you became the lust object of my footwear dreams. A month later I stayed up all night just to giddily order you by phone and enjoy hearing some shopgal's sweet London accent while blowing all my Yule money. It wasn't until you arrived that I realized just how wonderfully odd you were: Shelly's uppers sewn to Docs lasts & soles, the whorled punch patterns wingtipped over steeltoes, and still somehow you were a dress oxford. I would never see your like, no matter how far I traveled.



Together we danced the night away with the ladies, postured & owned in doorways & on streetcorners; you saved my toes nigh countless times, guarded my heels from zealous power walkers, outlasted your retailer's last corporate handoff that eliminated men's shoes altogether, lost a lung to nail that gave you a characteristic wheeze, endured the oven beeswax because you so knew it was for your own good, got minked, polished, scuffed, and polished again until you were parade worthy. I look at you and see the path of the last 20 years of my life, and I see the one set of footprints, and I know it was you that carried me across the desert sands, and that when I shoegazed it was your style that lent me reassurance to look up again and take another step forward.



And you've given me all your steps. Cracked, creased, split, irreparably fissured, and worn through. Even five years ago the cobbler's daughter I dated said that was it, but I wasn't ready to hear it and just bought thicker socks. Thought about plotting you in the backyard, or setting you alight into the pond like a viking at sea for having heroically fallen in the warmarch of time and distance. Instead, together, we'll go to the park on Tuesday with your laces tied, and I'll launch you as hard & as high into the heavens as I can. At the top of your last graceful arc, you'll poetically bolo around a tree branch, and birds will wonder at their luck at being able to nest in you, and squirrels can safely store acorns in your protective toes during your well earned view of the world from on high. Such an ascension is the best I can think of to give you, my handsome pair of Shelly's. Thank you for everything.



While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.